Beneath the Cross is a collection of essays from DeWard Publishing concerning almost every aspect of the Lord's Supper. One is hard-pressed to come up with an angle that is not presented in this book. The scope is truly breath-taking, with essays historical, expository, devotional, instructional, parabolic - all focusing on the sacrifice of Jesus.

The book is broken into four sections:

1. Approaching the Lord's Table - Essays concerning attitude and manner of taking the communion. Surprisingly, this was the weakest of the sections, as some of the essays imply that the Lord's Supper is a New Testament version of the Passover; while there are parallels, Scripture explicitly states that Jesus, not the Supper proper, is the Christian's Passover.
2. Seeing Jesus Through the Bible - Mostly expository essays around Jesus as a suffering servant, this was both the longest and the strongest section. Of particular note is Jason Hardin's"Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross," which focuses on those present at the crucifixion.
3. Meditating on the Cross - Essays on the meaning and events of Christ's crucifixion. The shortest section, but with several powerful topics that can be quickly and easily read while taking the Supper.
4. Singing with Understanding - Essays based around songs commonly sung before the Lord's Supper. Especially informative and moving is John D. Trimble's rumination on "Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed?"

All in all, this is an informative and thought-provoking anthology and deserves a place on the shelf of any Christian wishing to reflect further on the meaning of the Lord's Supper memorial.

This past quarter, I used this book (one of the Bible Text Book Series from Truth Magazine, written by Mike Willis) in our high school class. Let me be blunt: Do not buy this workbook. Aside from the questions, it is a complete waste of money. You will be better off using the Bible text itself in conjunction with questions you yourself develop than paying for copies of this book. Not only is there little of value in this workbook, there are some things presented in such a way that may shake a newer Christian's faith.

Granted, I & II Chronicles is not the most scintillating study for any modern audience, particularly a high school class. The first nine chapters are genealogies. The book is given to rote lists of people, accomplishments, and even construction materials that perhaps aren't as conducive to study and meditation as other parts of the Bible; modern audiences, in my experience, grasp narrative better than names and events presented without context. There's also the fact that most of the material is also covered in I & II Kings.

Even given those caveats, however, I found this book to be a poor treatment of the material. It consists largely of restating the Bible text in different words, providing almost no additional insight into the text. Very little background material or expository aid will be found in its pages, even where such would seem to be required. For example, weights and measures are simply stated verbatim without translation to more modern units; how many teenagers know what a "cor," a "bath," or a "cubit" is? Or you can take the temple, a case where a picture is worth 1,000 words; the workbook restates the dimensions and utensils of the temple in detail, but does not provide a diagram. For almost $7 each, one would think the writer could have provided some additional value.

For another example, take Joash's parable from II Chronicles 25:17-19. The writer again simply restates the Bible text in other words. It attempts no explanation and thus adds nothing to the reader's understanding of the meaning of this difficult passage.

On occasion, however, the workbook does attempt to add some additional information. Usually, this is done in the form of a footnote. However, these footnotes often do more harm than good; many of them note apparent discrepancies between the books of Chronicles and Kings with no attempt to explain these difficulties. While a diligent teacher can account for this issue, finding answers to the problems raised can literally take hours, and I generally believe a Bible class teacher shouldn't have to work around the workbook. Presenting an obstacle to one's faith without even trying to reconcile it strikes me as unwise in the extreme.

The questions do provide some value, but that is limited. A friend of mine often says the problem with fill-in-the-blank questions is that they too often leave the student blank and unfilled. That seems to be the case here, as the answers typically will consist of reciting back the Biblical text (with the applicable verse helpfully cited in the question itself, no less!). The writer seems to try to make up for the shallowness of the questions by providing a large number of them. Perhaps I'm strange, but I'd prefer 5 or 6 thoughtful questions to two or three dozen ones that require no engagement from the student.

Even the structure of the book is questionable. Eighteen lessons could easily have been condensed to the standard thirteen, as several consist of nothing but lists. (Show of hands: Who thinks the roll call of names from David's "national convention" in I Chronicles 23-29 is worthy of a whole lesson?)

A reasonably competent Bible class teacher should be able to turn out a better effort with a couple of weeks' work at a lower cost. I'd advise anyone who would consider this book to look elsewhere for a helpful guide to I & II Chronicles.

As I mentioned, I got an invitation to the beta of eBible.com. Basically, eBible is a competitor to the venerable Bible Gateway, a Biblical research tool for looking up verses, searching for words or phrases, etc. However, eBible has a few other tricks.

The home page is Google-simple, with some links at the top, a prominent search box in the middle, a tag cloud (yuck) below, and a footer.

One neat feature of eBible is that it allows you to bookmark verses and tag them:

While this isn't exactly a breakthrough in interface technology, it's more than the Gateway allows right now. Very handy for topical research.

The "Bookshelf" link displays several virtual books.

From here, you can set your default Bible version, dictionary, encyclopedia, or commentary. Interestingly, it looks like some of the reference works can only be purchased via subscription ($9.99 to $31.99). It'll be interesting to see if eBible produces an API allowing users to create their own reference works and allow others to access them.

One note: eBible offers only 6 versions at present (all English) vs. 19 English versions and 51 world language versions. Most of these are no great loss (c'mon, does anyone use the Darby Translation?), but notable among those not making the cut is the NIV. While I personally won't miss it much, it is a fairly significant omission. We'll see if other versions are added in the future.

The search function itself is very well-designed. Intuitive and user-friendly, it takes advantage of AJAX and other Web 2.0 technologies to cut down on reloading the page.

You can view two versions in parallel, scroll through the entire Bible, bookmark, change the font size, view the verse's tags and so on. One little quibble: the rollover arrows on the right cause the page to scroll a bit too fast for my tastes. Plus, rollover behavior is kinda strange to me; I'd much prefer a clickable set of arrows, a scrollbar, and maybe a slider control for scroll speed.

In addition, the search function hasn't quite mastered all the common abbreviations and produces weird results when it doesn't match something. For example, entering "I Peter" instead of "1 Peter" brings up a number of verses elsewhere in the Bible. Interestingly, when I did finally get I Peter 3:21 to display, no one had tagged it with "baptism," only "conscience." Funny, that, huh? I fixed the omission.

The "Answers" area appears to be empty and useless at present. As a friendly error page reminded me, it is just a beta at present.

The "Tags" area is just a search for all verses hit with the tag you're searching with. One annoying note: the sort order appears to be random and can't be changed. Ideally, I'd like to be able to sort by number of times tagged, most recent tag, Biblical order, etc., as well as specifying a book or range of books to search. Nice idea, but the implementation needs a little tweaking.

eBible is also featuring advertising (again, Google-like) in the form of links to the right-hand column. During the beta, this is free, so I signed up my web site. To date, not one hit. Guess you get what you pay for.

There's also a forum, which right now is largely limited beta issues.

In short, eBible looks like a great challenger to Bible Gateway, with a world of promise and a few areas of improvement needed before it's ready for prime time. If you can't find a beta invite, bookmark it and check it out again in September, when it's scheduled for opening to the public.

I got a copy of The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement and decided to do a review. I only wish it could be a more positive one.

I'll start by looking up "institutionalism." I flip past 4+ pages on "instrumental music," so debates over issues are listed. And then... should be right there, between "Inman Christian Center" and "Institut zur Erforsomethingorother." It's not. Check the index. Nope.

All right, let's try Foy Wallace. Ah-ha, over a page. Hrm. Twice as much on the Christian's attitude toward civil government as on institutionalism? Half again as much on premillenialism as on the institutional debate? Including the Lufkin church split in Cled Wallace's article, but omitting it as the motivating factor causing FEW to drop out of the institutional debate and spend the rest of his life trying to explain how he'd never changed positions (despite the fact he had)?

And there's a quote on page 768 that's... well, let me just cite it:

After 1949 many leaders of the nascent non-institutional movement among churches of Christ looked to Wallace for leadership. While initially favoring some of the positions of this movement, Wallace had by 1959 rejected the movement as divisive and by 1964 was completely separated from the movement and its followers.

Wow. So many errors. Wallace was the guy at the head of the debate as far back as 1938. He wasn't "looked to for leadership"; he was the chief leader. He didn't "initially favor some" non-institutional positions; he largely defined and vigorously argued for all of them for over a decade. Not to mention that it was the institutional side that was the "movement"...

This is as bad as Richard Hughes' quote in Reviving the Ancient Faith that "the anti-institutional movement never developed much of of a following in... Middle Tennessee" (page 238). Would be news to my wife, a Murfreesboro native.

Hey, the author is the guy who critiqued my nascent Wallace article on Wikipedia at my request. Hrm. And his big criticism was that I listed FEW Jr. as junior with the middle name "Esco" and his father as Sr. with the middle name "Edwin." Just like he does. Hrm.

Okay, let's move on. "Non-institutional churches of Christ"? Nope. Nothing like that in the index. Ah, here it is: "Noninstitutional movement" (sic) on page 567. Okay, good explanation of the background. Check. Wallace as leader. Check. Hrm. More about the Cled Wallace "rock fight" articles than about the issue itself? I'm thinking... yep, writer is Ed Harrell. And he quotes himself. At length. Okay."Mean-spirited debate"? I'm guessing DEH is talking about his treatment by the Guardian of Truth over his misapplication of Romans 14. Hrm; I doubt that would fly even on Wikipedia. No "yellow tag of quarantine" quote? Misdating B.C. Goodpasture's effort at exiling non-institutionals? Feh.

Guardian of Truth? Okay, two references in the index. Page 225, under Roy Cogdill (just mentioning its beginning), and page 384, under Herald of Truth (where they mention it was divisive, but say little about the division). The Cogdill article is kinda weird as well, with all kinds of personal detail about moving around, but aside from a debate and a book, very little about the division itself. Written by Steve Wolfgang; I expected better.

Homer Hailey? More on him than on Foy Wallace. Oddly, Wolfgang, not Harrell (Hailey's biographer), does the writing. Very little on the institutional division, except that Hailey "was not prominently involved" in the debate but was judged guilty by association.

Florida College? Hrm. "Affiliated with non-institutional Churches of Christ." Affiliated? A little too close to the Temple Terrace church for my tastes, but "affiliated"? No. Otherwise a decent recounting of its history.

B.C. Goodpasture? Wow. The "most influential man in the Churches of Christ" for two decades (and the one who drove the wedge of separation) gets a mere four paragraphs. And barely more than a sentence on institutionalism.

G.C. Brewer? Four paragraphs as well. Nothing on the fact that he was the one who fired the first shots in the institutional debate.

Fanning Yater Tant doesn't even have an entry, though his father gets two pages.

Okay, part of me wonders who I am to be criticizing men who have probably forgotten more about the institutional debate than I'll ever know, and who are professional historians to boot. On the other hand, I'm not the one who misdated FEW's death by a decade or who tried to make NI churches in Middle Tennessee vanish. If I can find this many errors and omissions in the subjects I know something about, it makes me wonder what's missing from the things I'm ignorant about (and there are a lot of those).

Flipping through, there's not even a page on the International Church of Christ (Crossroads Movement) and no entry on Kip McKean. I'd think it deserves more than, say, "Gay and Lesbian Rights."

In short, I'm less than impressed with the volume in general, especially in its treatment of NI churches and the institutional debate as a whole, and that makes me reluctant to even bother with the rest of the book. I'm currently considering sending it back to Amazon for a refund and can't recommend it as the authoritative historical reference it claims to be.

On the other hand, it does remind me that I need to interview my father over the Spring Creek, TN, church of Christ split engineered by Freed-Hardeman, as well as scan the handful of documents I have. After all, if you don't write it down, it didn't happen.

Rick Warren has become a household name in America on the back of his New Agey Purpose Driven Life bestseller. However, in 1995, seven years before he penned that book, he wrote another book: The Purpose Driven Church. It has become the Bible for the community church, megachurch, and "seeker sensitive" movements.

I approach writing this review with trepidation. About 80% of this book I strongly recommend, and about 20% of this book I could not more strongly urge you to avoid. It's hard not to nod along with passages like:

• "A building, or lack of a building, should never be allowed to become a barrier to a wave of growth. People are far more important than property." (page 46)
• "Transferring Christians from one church to another is not what Jesus had in mind when he [sic] gave us the Great Commission. God called us to be fishers of men, not to swap fish between aquariums." (page 50)
• "... many churches seem to think that the 1950s was the golden age, and they are determined to preserve that era in their church" (page 55)
• "Proclaimers of truth don't get much attention in a society that devalues truth. To overcome this, some preachers try to 'yell it like it is.' But preaching louder isn't the solution." (page 226)
• "Many American Christians, however, hop from one church to another without any identity, accountability, or commitment... They have not been taught that the Christian life involves more than just believing - it also includes belonging." (page 310)

And then Warren follows it with eye-popping error like:

• "Every once in a while I hear someone say that all churches should get together under one denomination [sic] where we would all be the same. I couldn't disagree more." (page 61)
• "The truth is, there isn't a biblical style of worship." (page 241)
• "At first glance you might wonder why the Great Commission gives the same prominence to the simple act of baptism as it does to the great tasks of evangelism and edification... Why is baptism so important to warrant inclusion in Christ's Great Commission? I believe it is because it symbolizes one of the purposes of the church: fellowship - identification with the body of Christ." (page 105)

On pages 92-93, 179-180, and 183, Warren demonstrates he has no problem chasing off anyone who doesn't agree with his "vision" of what a local church should be; not exactly the pattern for unity we find in Scripture. Warren jumps from translation to translation (and even to paraphrases) in order to find verses that fit his point instead of building his points from the Word. He contradicts himself by saying "Strong churches are not built on programs, personalities, or gimmicks," (page 83), and then spending the majority of the book talking about programs, personalities, and gimmicks. In addition, there are the usual Baptist misunderstandings of Scripture: what a pastor is, tithing, etc.

The most effective false teaching always has at least a grain of truth at its core. This serves a dual purpose for Satan: aside from making the doctrine more attractive, it gives him opportunity to lead those in opposition to deny the basic truth or problem that led to it.

Warren shields himself from criticism with the statement "Never criticize what God is blessing." The whole question, of course, is if the "blessing" comes from the God of heaven or the god of this world. Church growth (by which Warren almost always means numerical growth) can as easily be a product of that which is false as that which is true.

So, what does Warren get right? First, the idea of the Christian as a servant rather than one served. Most churches I've been at suffer from this problem. Instead of equipping people to bring the world to Christ, we build nice little social clubs. Instead of challenging people to grow, we lull them into a sense of adequacy. I've heard a preacher say that cleaning the building one month a year might be all God expects of us; God forbid! The largest part of TPDC covers how a church can help one go from a non-Christian to a babe in Christ to a worker in the vineyard to a pillar of the church. Christ's churches need more planning, thought, and organization around this. I worry we create a priesthood of preachers to minister to us instead of each member being a "royal priest." I certainly wouldn't require someone to sign a document showing their commitment and then strike them off the roll book if they don't meet it, but a stronger emphasis on commitment seems needed.

Second, Warren emphasizes practicality. God's Word isn't some theoretical construct; its purpose is to show us what to do, how to live, how to face problems and temptation - in short, how God wants his servant to live. Too much preaching and teaching (perhaps some of my own!) in my experience treats Scripture like an academic subject. A lesson which has no chance of changing anyone's life for the better is probably a lesson best left untaught. A sermon which is "long on diagnosis and short on remedy" (page 229) needs rewriting. You also need to know your target in order to understand how best to reach him; while Warren, IMO, goes overboard on this point, it's good to be reminded that our approach needs to be tailored to our audience.

Third, Warren's book is consumed with making and strengthening converts. There are pitifully few churches of Christ in my experience that are built around evangelism; most lean heavy toward edification. A few are almost smugly condescending toward the unconverted. For all that Warren lacks knowledge of God's will as shown above, he certainly isn't short on zeal for reaching the lost. After one is converted, the plan Warren outlines takes them through a planned process of growth. I also don't know too many churches (especially those without elders) where spiritual growth is truly seen as a church-driven process. There's not much of a plan for aiding in constant growth. For example, when was the last time you actually saw a church with a plan to help men of differing ages grow to become elders? In my experience, it's simply left up to the individual until one day they're in their 50s and a determination of their qualifications is made.

I'd cautiously recommend The Purpose Driven Church for the mature Christian able to sift the wheat from the chaff. As a strategic book, it has some value. There's something to be said for re-examining what we do as a church toward the non-Christian, for refocusing our aims away from a nicer building and more comfort for members to seeking and saving the lost. It gave me much to think about in how we try to reach the world for Jesus.

As I said before, ten of the Dead Sea Scrolls are on exhibit at Discovery Place here in Charlotte. I went to see them two weeks ago with Wendell Powell (the preacher here in Charlotte) and my father.

The exhibit gives background on the scrolls and the Essenes who are thought to have copied them. However, if you're familiar with both of these (as I was), the first half of the exhibit is a recap, leaving only the scrolls themselves of much interest. This is what I meant when I said I was "underwhelmed": most of it was just telling what I already knew.

The one thing that surprised me most was their size. I had gotten the idea from somewhere that they were perhaps a foot or more tall, but most of them were barely as big as my hand. I had to marvel at the craftsmanship of the tiny yet precise writing on them. No wonder many scribes went blind!

However, the exhibit largely missed the major point of the scrolls: they confirmed the accuracy of the manuscripts that had previously been used to translate the Bible. While unsurprising, it was still a disappointment. It's not merely their antiquity or their craftsmanship that make them such a find, but their significance.

You can read an alternative view on the Charlotte Observer website.