I recently painted our office room, and had to move a lot of stuff--including my bookshelf--to get the job done. My grandfather has been preaching for more than 50 years. Several times now, he has brought me a load of books that he doesn't use much any more. There have been so many of them, it has taken me quite a while to sort through them all. Some of my favorites are the debates he's given me, such as the Warren-Flew debate and the Woods-Nunnery debate.
I started off thinking the other day that I would have to find some books to set aside, since my shelf is overflowing, and I figured that since these books are decades older than many other books I have, I might have to pick a few of them to put into storage. I figured the most likely thing to go would be some old periodicals that my grandfather had collected. I had them all in a stack on a high shelf. I got them down to thumb through them.
After my recent rant about preaching journals, I'm happy to announce that I found some that I actually like. Yes my friends, I am the proud owner of numerous volumes of The Minister's Monthly from around 1958-1965. These contain articles by many prominent ministers from churches of Christ during this time period, and several biographical sketches. There's one great on on Bob Hendren, whose articles I had recently been posting about Grace. Then there's old Foy Wallace, Jr., Guy Woods, Batsell Barrett Baxter, and E. Claude Gardner. I'm anticipating that of all the people reading this blog, the most likely to care about this would be the Stoned-Campbell Disciple (he's an expert on Restoration history and literature).
For any of you Harding folks, I decided to scan and post this one. Can you even recognize Howard Norton? This was WAY back in the day. I intend to go by his office sometime soon to show this to him. I'm curious how he'll react to it. Hopefully, it will be a fond memory for him.
At any rate, I need to thank my Granddad again for giving me these. It was kind of like Jesus' parable about finding a treasure in a field, except that I already own the field. Pretty cool. As I have time to read through these, I might have more musings about them.
Wow, I don't think I ever would have assumed that was Howard Norton!! That ought to be an interesting meet. But, not only was the picture interesting, but so was the article! Did you read that one? It amazes me that he was saying these things so long ago. The fact that we demand nothing of "students" in Sunday school is one of my biggest gripes. We talk about how we're "losing our youth", and we wonder why. Meanwhile, they just sit there with a blank stare on their faces while we re-hash the same old Bible stories again and again. And, then we have adults that are Biblically illiterate, because nothing's ever been asked of them in their Bible classes. I'm putting this challenge to the test in the upcoming quarter - I'm going to be teaching a class on Revelation, and I'm going to REQUIRE outside work to be done, or else you won't know completely what we're talking about in class. This might be met with some hostility. I don't know. We'll see.
ReplyDeleteI've often wondered whether we wouldn't benefit from classes akin to the Catholic/Lutheran confirmation. I haven't read it in some time, but my first impression of Luther's Smaller Catechism was that I would like to use it to instruct my children one day. His view of baptism was a lot like the Church of Christ's and I can't see how knowing the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the Apostles' Creed would be anything but beneficial. Too many of our adults probably can't recite all 3 of those.
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