Losing the Shut-Ins: A Call for a Revival of the "Sunshine" Ministries

GT Ng - General Conference Exec. Secretary

The Adventist Church as reached 18.1 million members, making it the fifth largest Christian denominantion in the world, after the Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Catholics, Anglicans and Assemblies of God. In making that announcement, Executive Secretary of the world SDA church, G.T. Ng lamented that we were losing large numbers of members at the same time.

I think, from my own experience, I can tell you why.

The Baby Boom Generation, both here and abroad is aging out of the church. This shouldn't be happening. People like me are supposed to be free now to give of their time to the church and to the nuture and mentor the next generation.

Instead, too many of us are living on fixed incomes that may or may not last as the economy is steadily decimated by government over-spending, taxation and unbridled entitlements. As we age, a particular problem is the loss of mobility that comes with aging. In my own home state, in East Texas where my family is, one in five adult East Texans can't drive. One in four are over the age of 65 and that number is increasing dramatically as boomers like me careen into old age on a wing and a prayer and without a good survival plan.

We are the generation that chose causes we cared about and dedicated our lives to them. Most genuine causes don't have very good retirement plans for volunteers. Sustentation keeps our church pastors in decent cars and vegetarian food throughout retirement. Not so much for teachers of my era or the volunteers who have held up the church over the decades.

Sadly, now that so many of us are beginning to lose the ability to drive and the extra cash to pay for our church activities, we're being forgotten. And it does cost to "volunteer" for the church. Local churches have notoriously tight budgets. One of the most expensive volunteer jobs you can take on in the local church, for instance, is "Pathfinder Director". Pathfinders are one of the lower tier items on the church budget. They only get money if all the other bills in front of them get paid, so if you want to be a good Pathfinder Director, you need to either be able to foot the bills yourself or be a very good fund-raiser.

Our seniors are disappearing from the church and with them the people with the most time and skill at working with church ministries and mentoring new members. I know from experience, that if you get without transportation and stop showing up for church, you can get forgotten very quickly. Six months after my wife and I lost our ride to church, the word got round that we'd gone back to Texas, even though I'd contacted the pastor by email and have several friends in the church who follow me by email.

It's pretty quickly out of sight out of mind with many of our churches. People are busy. We have other concerns and we just don't notice when people stop coming. Older people tend to be a bit proud too. We don't want to be a burden on people and we don't want to be asking for a ride all the time. We can watch Doug Batchelor online on Sabbath morning so we do that. We can pay our tithe online or give it to 3ABN so we do that. 3ABN thrives as a ministry almost entirely on gifts from elderly shut-in church members.

I never imagined myself as a shut-in, but suddenly I am. We are part of an invisible church congregation within the church and we have been forgotten.  Let me suggest a couple of things you can do to reclaim some of these lost members. These programs should also apply to new members young and old.

1. Track who comes to church and who is absent. Make a church mugshot book (there's a ministry for someone with a digital camera and desktop publishing software right there).  Develop a printed checklist and make a deacon with a mugshot book responsible to record who shows up and to log the visitors list as well. It does not have to be an intrusive process. Just tagging faces to names on a checklist. After a while you'll have several deacons who know everybody by face and name.
2. Find out who goes missing by entering church attendance records in a database that tells you who has missed more than a week or two. The database can be done by entering the attendance record or you may be able to do the whole attendance recording on a computer tablet. This is not expensive and can help you keep from losing track of members.
3. Have the deacons follow up. Deacons are supposed to help by visiting the sick and comforting the grieving. They can also help by following up on missing members. Assign each deacon and elder a few names to call or visit.
4. Have the church secretary develop a big map of where every church member lives on a big cork board, and not just the active members. If a church member doesn't have a ride to church, tack a flag on the board. Ask in church for volunteers to call those transportation impaired members and offer them a ride to services. Volunteers can look at the map and identify stranded members they drive right past on the way to church and pick them up. Don't wait for members to ask for a ride. Offer them one and keep on offering them a ride. Get them to church! If they are too sick to attend, offer to bring them lesson study books and books from the church library or DVDs and CDs of the weekly sermons.
5. Check to make sure everyone is being offered a ride and visit them. Ask the visitation committee to visit every shut-in member on the list at least once a quarter.
6. Provide recordings or videos of services to shut-ins.  It's relatively inexpensive to make DVDs and there are lots of Internet streaming services that allow you to stream Sabbath services in the Internet. Many older shut-ins depend on the Internet for keeping in contact with the church and their friends. Use that to keep them connected with the local church. 

For relatively little money and by distributing jobs among church officers and volunteers, you can use this system to identify lost members and shut-ins and rebuild your weekly attendance. Members should not be leaking out of the church because of our sheer neglect.Here's a place where you can offer leadership in your church. As Christians we take care of our own - at least we're supposed to. Instead of complaining about losing members, how about we just stop losing them.

Tom King

Debunking SDA Myths: The Truth Will Set You Free

Pope Frances & Shimon Peres discuss creating a "United Religions" organization. Notice this did not happen
in secret. The author of this sign of the end is quite happy to have his work displayed on the nightly news.

An article by Loren Siebold appeared in Spectrum Magazine back in 2011 that, I think every Adventist should read. It concerns the false stories that over the years have been spread in the back rooms of Adventist churches and in the more dogmatic sorts of SDA study groups. The author claims this sort of Adventist "mythology" is harmful and Siebold is dead on in that assessment I believe.

This is a sermon topic that should be preached in every SDA church. As the article says, the trouble with these conspiracy theories is that they assume Satan is far less subtle than he is. We are seeing the Great Controversy coming to its end every day in the news. The Threefold Union from Revelation is being formed on the front pages of the newspaper and in Youtube videos released by the major players themselves. The devil is kind of proud of the great deception he's working. He's not being secret about it. Just listen to the great players in their own words. They are telling us what they intend to do to us.

Anyone who grew up SDA and watched the video from the Pope to the charismatic envangelicals declaring an end to "Luther's protest" and inviting them back into the fold, had chills running up their spines. Anyone who read the news story about Shimon Peres inviting the pope to become the leader of a United Religions organization designed to parallel the United Nations, sat back and went "Whoa!"

We need not hurry the end of time along. It will come and as Sister White said, the final movements will be rapid ones. We do not need to depend on people who claim to be "in" on secret plots for information. Satan is working his will out in the open on the news and in the media.When Jesus said he would come as a "thief in the night" he wasn't talking about burglers. Thieves in the night in Jesus day were more like home invaders. You knew they were there all right, even though their coming might have been a surprise.

We especially do not need to make things up to prove our point. Too often we fall for invented stories and trumped up controversies because they offer us an opportunity to be in on the big secrets that make us holier than the rest of the rabble. We need only spread the Gospel and the big ending will happen inevitably. Too often, I fear, Christians of all stripes, believe that God needs better public relations and that somehow making stuff up to make God look better is helping him out.

They should remember the scene before the judgement seat and the self-proclaimed holy men who tell God, "See what I did for you." God tells them, "I never knew you." That should definitely give us pause when we even consider stretching the truth or repeating unsubstantiated gossip, no matter how spectacular it might be.

If we are to be the sons and daughters of God, we ought to tell the strict truth. Period. There is no excuse to do otherwise. God does not need that kind of help!

As leaders of families and leaders of churches, it is our duty to speak out against these kinds of efforts to create excitement among our members through deception. We must demand proof before we allow such people into our pulpits. Examine every messenger who comes with "special secret information" for the church - especially if he takes up a collection to help his "work". We do not need the "secrets" brought to us by the likes of John Todd, Ron Wyatt, Colin Standish and Alberto Riviera to proclaim the message of the soon-coming Saviour. We need the Word of God alone.

The signs of the end, Christ told us, would be as obvious as the leaves changing color in the autumn. We've already been told that if someone comes to say that Christ can be found in some secret place, not to go there. I think the same principle applies to those who try to "sell" salvation through secrets, fear and lies.

Let's not go there!


© 2015 by Tom King

Camping Genius: The Shovel Grill

If you're a Pathfinder counselor or director, you're always looking for new woodsy stuff to teach the kids.  Here's one camping genius trick that will not only impress your kids, but also doesn't take just a whole lot of effort to pull off.

It's the old shovel-grilling technique.  If you've got a metal snow shovel or flat shovel, you've got the most amazing portable grill ever at your disposal. Trust me, this is NOT a new idea. Someone with food to fry and no skillet has already done this somewhere at some time.

You can clean up an old shovel to use as your grill, but for a nonstick surface, it's best to spend the $15 and buy a short-handled flat shovel and reserve it for camp cooking. A new one won't have a lot of scratches and pits that cause food to stick.

The technique is easy. You just build a fire, oil the pan of the shovel and cook whatever you need to cook over an open fire. Hold the shovel close to the fire, but not actually in the flames. The technique is demonstrated in the video at the end of this article.

The nifty part of this is not what you can do with a shovel grill, but how you work it into what you are already doing on the typical campout. Here are a couple of ideas:

1. Grilled onions for roasted vege-dogs. While the kids are roasting their weiners, you get out your shovel and grill some onions. Put some oil in your shovel, add onions and saute them over the open fire - not to close, though. You want to carmelize the onions to make them taste sweeter and you need to work for a little longer and at low heat. When you are done, the kids can spoon out onions for the hot dogs with a spatula. Open fore grilled onions are fantastic. You may even sell a couple of kids who dislike onions on trying them simply for the novelty of scooping onions out of a shovel.
2. Flapjacks. Ever wanted to flip pancakes the lumberjack way?  Here's your chance. You can easily cook pancakes on a shovel in the same way you do with an iron skillet. Once you've cooked it on one side, make sure the flapjack is loose and then toss it in the air so that it rotates. Catching it is the trick and you may go through a lot of pancake batter on your way to mastering the technique. But if you get good at it, you will be a camp cookery rockstar. Even more fun, if they have one of those pancake flipping contests at Camporee, you can cause all sorts of excitement if your team shows up with their pancake flipping shovels!
3. Vege-Burgers.  Use your shovel like a big old skillet and fry up a bunch of those bad boys for supper.  You just have to watch your distance from the fire so they don't burn.
4. Fried Taters.  What camp breakfast is complete without shovel-fried potatoes? I mean how convenient is it to have that 3 foot long handle on your frying pan when you're passing out the breakfast spuds?
5. Eggs. Scrambled or fried, eggs are perfect for shovel frying. You might want a partner with a spatula to work the eggs while you hold the shovel in just the right place.
6. Stripples.  Let us also not forget ersatz bacon as a candidate for shovel cookery (should we make this an MV Honor?  Stripples and its soy-based cousins deserve a place on the shovel grill. If they can do it with the porcine variety, we can do it with the healthier alternative!

Virtually anything you can think of, that can be fried or grilled, can be fried or grilled with your handy dandy grillin' shovel. You might even try making some really fancy treats, just to hike up the fun factor or to treat the grownups in the group after you've sent the hot dog hounds off to bed. Imagine making omelets, crapes or maybe some version of barbecued Tenderbits over an open fire, under the stars. Life, my friend is good if you have the right tools. 

Below, Brett McKay of "The Art of Manliness" weblog, shows us the correct shovel-grill handling technique with a steak. Note, the same technique works with choplets, steaklets, Fri-chick and a wide range of gluten and soy based products (just so you know).

© 2014 by Tom King

Camping Genius: Splicing Ropes

The best way to join two ropes is NOT a square knot. So, recognizing that Pathfinders are headed for Oshkosh for the Big Camporee, let me give you a nice knot to learn - the splice. It's really not as difficult as you think.

Check out the procedure at this weblog page complete with pictures.

When you're done, your rope will be neatly connected and without the problem of jammed knots or joints that fall apart under stress. You're splice will look like this. Follow the step by step instructions on the linked page. I've included lots of pictures.

© 2014 by Tom King

An Invitation to Adventist Writers

If you would like to be a guest blogger on The Journal of Hairy Chested Adventism, please contact me through this website's comment section or message me through my Facebook Account. I'd love to get some input from other Adventist men with suggestions.

The point of The Journal is to help Adventist men, particularly those new to the church, discover what it is exactly an Adventist man can do as a fully participating member of his local congregation and his church at large.




Subjects can include things like:

1. Deacon duties
2. Supporting women's activities with practical things like carpentry, plumbing, electrical and technical expertise.
3. Teaching duties
4. Youth Ministries
5. Pathfinders - particularly our "Camping Genius" series on great tips for managing youth campouts.
6. Mentoring
7. Raising sons
8. Raising daughters
9. Lay ministry ideas

I'd really love to put up more stuff and improve the site, but with everything else I'm doing now, I could really use some help. I am the sole editor. I am not associated with the GC or local conference or even a local church in any official capacity. The content of JHCA is my sole responsibility and does not reflect the official position of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In other words, our opinions here are our own. If you have a good idea or an article I can use and that I think is consistent with Adventist philosophy, I'd love to publish it.  Click on the Facebook link above and message me through my Facebook page. I don't dare put my email on here. The robots would steal it and smack me with spam.

I look forward to hearing from Adventist writers, men and women, who have something to say on the subject of Hairy-Chested Adventism.

Thanks,

Tom King, Texan
Puyallup, WA

Christian Manhood: Women are Lovely Creatures

Women are beautiful. I'm not talking physically, although there is that. I'm talking about their very nature, their instincts and drives. It's not politically correct to talk about the differences between men and women these days, unless, of course, you are a comedian. A lot of comedians make a good solid living pointing out that men and women are fundamentally different. They get laughs because people recognize the truth of what they are saying about our differences.

Women are not men and thank God for that. I was reading today in Matthew 8, starting with verse 14, the story of Simon Peter's mother-in-law. Jesus came by Peter's house to visit and found the poor woman in a terrible state. She was running a high fever and couldn't get out of bed.

It's interesting the words that Jesus used next. He didn't wave his hand and say "Be healed." He didn't mix up any mud or say "Your sins be forgiven thee." Matthew says he "rebuked" the fever. I can see that in my head. Jesus seeing this lovely elderly woman in distress, he tells the fever "Shame on you for bothering this lovely woman. Get out of here and don't come back!"

He rebuked a sickness.

I remember when my daughter was in about 8th grade, a young man approached her in the hallway of her school and began talking trashy to her. My daughter, who has all the self-confidence of a bull rhino, brushed him off, turned and stalked away in a huff. When the young man turned around, he came face to chest with Meghan's older brother, then a senior in the high school which shared the building with the junior high and elementary.

I say face to chest because Micah was about 6'3" or so at the time and weighed around 250 pounds, played basketball and ran track and had been recruited by several high school football coaches who wanted him rather badly. 

The young man looked up into Micah's face and his grin faded. Micah caught him by the front of his shirt and with one hand lifted him off the floor and brought his face level with Micah's own.

Then he rebuked him.

"You do NOT talk to my sister that way," Micah said in an eerily calm, albeit deadly serious voice. "Do you understand?"

The young man nodded. He was sweating bullets.

Micah lowered him to the ground. His feet were moving before they touched the floor.

One would hope he had learned his lesson.

That is how men should treat women. It's not because they are weak or helpless. Far from it. My daughter is one of the most capable young women I know. It is because women are capable and talented and capable of thinking in ways that we men are not that we should be protective of them. We are, after all, bigger than they are and I've always believed that if you are given the gift of great strength, you should use it to protect those weaker than yourself. I think that was the lesson God was trying to teach Samson, Saul and David.

The best part of the story of Peter's mother-in-law is what happened after Jesus healed her. A man would have thanked Jesus profusely and spent the next hour telling everyone about the experience he'd just had. Not Peter's mother-in-law. The first thing she does is get up and run off to the kitchen to fix some food and feed Jesus and everyone else who was a guest in her home.

Women do that kind of thing. Men would let you starve before the thought would occur to them to fix supper. We just don't think like that. Women bring an essential skill and a unique viewpoint to any enterprise we undertake. It is they who worry whether we're dressed warmly, have enough to eat or our bed is comfortable.

I'm like Jesus. If anyone or anything troubles a woman, my first instinct is to rebuke it. I think that's one of the instincts God put into us males.  Women take care of the children, the family, guests, the poor, the widows and the orphans. Men? We take care of our women. If we don't, who will?

Tom King
© 2014

Star Honor Series: Part 6 - Building a Reflector Telescope

John Dobson introduced his wonderful homemade low-cost, non-equatorial plywood telescope mount for large homemade reflector telescopes in the 1950s.  Telescope mounts can be as expensive as the telescopes themselves, if not more so. The simple Dobsonian mount was able to handle even relatively large telescopes is wonderfully cheap and works really well.

Having a cheap mount allows amateur astronomers to spend their money on larger, more expensive, high-quality scopes rather than on the mount. The design below is for a 10 inch “Dob” that will fit on the mount described in part 1 of this series. You can collect the parts for the scope on eBay and other online sites if you are patient. This can be a long term project for your Pathfinder club.

Here's what you need:

Materials:

Painted sonotubes.

• 12-inch tube about eight feet long. You can get a sonotube at a concrete supply store. They are used as forms for making concrete pillars.
• 10-inch telescope mirror
• 10-inch mirror mounting cell
• 10-inch Spider mount for the secondary mirror
• Secondary mirror
• 2 inch focuser
• Eyepiece
• 4 by 8 foot sheet of half inch plywood
• 1-inch screws, 1 box
• 2 old phonograph records
• 1 half inch carriage bolt, 3 inches long with nut and flat washer
• Felt strips

Tools:

• Drill and bits
• 2 inch drill hole saw bit
• Saber Saw
• Screwdrivers
• Scissors
• Wood glue

The Scope:

This will be a quick run-through of the process. You can find a more detailed description of the project with pictures and dimensions of things at this link to a blog of mine on another site. Here's a quick description of how to do this so you can get an idea of what all is involved.

Step 1

Cross section of mirror mount

Mount the telescope mirror first. It should come with a mirror-mounting cell that allows you to fix the mirror at the lower end of the you to adjust the angle of the mirror to line it up with the secondary mirror and eyepiece.  Follow the instructions that came with the cell.  Drill holes in the lower end of the Sonotube to match the mounting screws and screw the mount into the end of the tube.  Here's a more detailed description of the process. 

Step 2

Figure out the focal length of the mirror.  It will be in the specifications that come with your mirror.  Subtract 6 inches and the length of the focuser from the total focal length of the mirror. Measure from the center of the mirror up the side of the Sonotube.  Mark the side of the tube at the distance you computed above. Measure four more inches up the tube and cut off the rest of the Sonotube.  Hold the tube upside down while cutting so that the dust falls away from the mirror. 

Step 3

Mirror spider mount

Drill a 2-inch hole in the side of the tube at the mark you made on the side of the tube (the adjusted focal length).  Screw the spider mount for the secondary mirror so that the mounted mirror is directly below the 2-inch hole you just drilled.

Step 4

Screw the focuser assembly directly over the 2-inch hole in the tube. You will have to collimate (align) the optics so that the focuser lines up with the center of the secondary mirror. There should be detailed instructions that come with your optics for collimating the focuser. Once you've screwed down the focuser, put a low power eyepiece in the end of the focuser. Point the tube at something distinctive during the daylight and make sure you can focus on the object to make a sharp image. You may have to adjust the primary mirror a bit, but if you got the measurements right, it shouldn't take much. You also may have to adjust the angle of the main mirror to make sure the image is projected directly off the secondary mirror and through the secondary.

Step 5

Focuser

Next mount the finder scope a quarter of the way around the tube from where you mounted the focuser. You'll need to calibrate the finder scope during daylight so that the finder points at the same place in the sky that the telescope does. You can do this by pointing the scope at a small object a few hundred yards away and then lining up the finder scope to point it's crosshairs at the same object.  Your finder scope probably comes with instructions.

Now that you're done, the next thing we'll do is mount the tube in the Dobsonian Mount you built in Part 5 of this series. 

References:

Refracting finder scope

Here are some cool links to some other telescope building resources.

1. Mother Earth News: A Homemade Telescope 
2. Larry Brown: Homemade Astronomy
3. Scopemaking:  Plans for a Homemade Dobsonian Telescope
4. Howdy Ya Dewit:  A Homemade Telescope: A Quick Run-Through

© 2014 by Tom King