Register for Sight and Sound

"In the Beginning" is the epic musical planned for this summer at the Sight and Sound Theatre in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

A trip to Sight and Sound is one of the Thursday afternoon workshop options while we're at General Conference at Lancaster Bible College. The show time on July 30 is 1:00 to 3:30 p.m. Discounted tickets are available when you pre-register by April 30.

A registration form is in the January Sabbath Recorder on page 26. However, the address to send your requests was incomplete. The house number was left off. Tom Davis let us know, "Depending on which mail carrier is on duty on a particular day, I may or may not get items sent without the house number."

The address should be:
Thomas Davis, Treasurer
572 Jericho Rd
Bridgeton, NJ 08302

Please spread the word that your registration request might not have arrived as planned.

None of the Above

This photo appears in the latest Sabbath Recorder. It features Clarice Sommer (from Brazil) and Ruth Lek (from The Netherlands) looking at a Bible during the World Federation sessions last summer.

My introductory caption in the SR asked, "So, was this Bible in English, Portuguese, or Dutch??"

Thanks to a visit from Janet Thorngate (who took the picture), I've come to find out that the Bible was "None of the Above!" It was in GERMAN! German is Clarice's first language, and Ruth can also converse in the tongue of the Deutschland.

Now you know... the rest of the story.

A Solid-as-a-Brick Reminder

This reminder from Jean Jorgensen:

Seventh Day Baptist young people in the United States, Canada and Australia are raising funds to provide BRICKS FOR MALAWI. They are sponsoring fundraising events, and sacrificing some of their own spending to donate funds.

The Malawi SDBs are making bricks to re-build the maternity ward and three staff houses at the Thembe Medical Clinic. General Secretary Nedd Lozani estimates it will take 400,000 bricks to build these facilities.

They have started the project with 100,000 bricks and need 300,000 more. Each brick figures to cost $.0375(US) or 4 cents. $1 will buy 25 bricks.

On Sabbath evening, March 21st, all of the participating youth will unite for an Ice Cream Social. They will dig in at 4:00 pm PST, 5pm MST, 6pm CST, and 7pm EST. Youth in Australia will join in at 9:00 am-Sunday, Queensland time.

Some groups are planning to invite their church family or community to the social and charge for a scoop of ice cream – to raise more funds for the project. Former Malawi missionary Betty Pearson wrote, “Regarding time, when it's 7:00 EST it would be 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. in Malawi. I wouldn't recommend they have a meeting over there at that time. They're not as much for late night times as youth here. (Nor for ice cream. Mangoes or bananas--or cucumbers--is more their scoop!)”

Please send all donations to SDB Missionary Society, 19 Hillside Ave., Ashaway RI 02804. Write “Bricks for Malawi” on the check memo line. And HAVE FUN!!

BWA Staff at Inaugural Breakfast

From the Baptist World Alliance

Washington, D.C. -- Several members of staff of the Baptist World Alliance, including General Secretary Neville Callam, attended a prayer breakfast held to honor Martin Luther King Jr., and to mark the inauguration of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States.

The Interfaith Prayer Breakfast was held in the US capital of Washington, DC, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Monday, January 19, a national public holiday within the US.

Guests at the prayer breakfast included Lee Tae-sik, South Korean ambassador to the United States, William Rudolph, rabbi at Congregation Beth El in Bethesda, Maryland, and 11-time Grammy Award-winning gospel singer and evangelist Shirley Caesar.

BWA staff attending included directors Fausto Vasconcelos, Emmett Dunn, Paul Montacute, and Eron Henry.

Keynote speaker John Howard-Wesley--pastor of Alfred Street Baptist Church in the Washington, DC, suburb of Alexandria in Virginia--stated that the occasion of the inauguration of Obama to the US presidency is a special moment to be marked.

He said that “Martin Luther King gave us the audacity of a dream of a land of freedom” that inspired a generation “who saw the dream and believed the vision.” Wesley declared to the largely African American audience that this was a moment filled with excitement and celebration, but that “this is not the end of the journey, we have battles still to fight.”

Barbara Williams-Skinner, president of the Skinner Leadership Institute, told the approximately 1,000 guests that “we are the change we are looking for” and that Obama or the government cannot do it all. She called on persons to “tithe” to help raise scholarships, to help those who need childcare and healthcare, and to assist battered women.

The breakfast was one of several events of The People’s Inaugural Project sponsored by the Stafford Foundation, held to celebrate and mark the inauguration of Obama, the first African American to become president of the United States.

Hope Springs Eternal?

As the United States inaugurates its new president today, I have been pondering the nature of hope. As times get tough, people look for hope in different locations. Some look to their newly elected leaders for it. Others hope in their own abilities.

Our hope as Christians is that God will make this world right one day, undoing the damage of thousands of years of human sin. We trust that God has saved us from our own sin, and that one day, he will likewise redeem all of fallen creation. Until then, we are left on the earth amid the fray. Ironically, many problems in our world come about when humans try to be "like God" and end up treating each other in ungodly ways instead.

Yesterday, the nation celebrated the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr. King was a Baptist pastor, and the son of a Baptist pastor, and all of his work in the Civil Rights movement was informed by his faith and hope in a God who would one day redeem all creation. But Martin Luther King, Jr. was not content to sit back and wait for God's redemption--he also believed that God called on him as a Christian to stand against sin and injustice (specifically segregation and racism) through non-violent means.

In response to these activities, King was jailed in 1963. While there he penned a letter to his fellow clergymen now known as the "Letter from Birmingham Jail." In the letter, King passionately calls for the clergy (and all Christians) to stand against the injustice endemic in the segregationist movement. But King also gave a strong example to all Christians about how we should deal with the sin in our midst, especially our sins that affect "the least of these"--the mistreated and downtrodden of our own times.

In honor of the celebration of MLK, Jr. Day, Jill Carattini of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries wrote yesterday (in an article entitled, "The Face in a Crowd of Nobodiness") about how we should respond to the vast need we see all around us. After quoting from King's letter, Carattini writes:

When Jesus said that we would always have the poor with us, he did not say it with the despair of one who looks around and sees how vast is the need and poverty of a hurting world. He said it knowing every face in the immense crowd of nobodiness, knowing every name we would try not to learn when the pain of others becomes unbearable. He said it living in time, yet conscious of eternity, showing us the mindset he longed for us to hold: A non-answer is very clearly an answer. "He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters" (Matthew 12:30).

The cries of the oppressed and brokenhearted will continue to resound though we sit in comfortable apathy and languid affluence, and the call of Christ can be heard in the midst of it all, urging us to set aside all that entangles and follow after him. The poor and the downcast will always be with us, and where we will allow ourselves to see, it will be overwhelming. They need justice, they need mercy, and they need our time--even as Jesus seems to tell us that it is we who are most in need of them. "The poor you will always have with you," he said as if it were a promise that he too would be near. He made the comment knowing that throughout most of history the Son of God would not be with us in the flesh. But in the cup of cold water delivered to the least of these, in the reaching out to the downtrodden and oppressed, he is indeed there among us--the hand extended to the one hurting, and the eyes of the one in need--destroying the notion of nobodiness two faces at a time.

God calls on his people to be his hands and feet (and his face) in the world. God's temporary solution to the fallout of sin in the world is to use those he has redeemed to bring healing and hope. Inactivity, sloth and isolation are a rejection of our Lord. All of us encounter people in need of mercy, justice, time and love, and it is our calling as Christians to respond to those needs with the same forgiveness, mercy, love, generosity, patience and provision our God has made for us through Jesus Christ. May we all work to provide hope to the world through our faith and service to Jesus Christ.

Contest Deadline coming soon!

Our SDB E-card site (linked from our main website) now allows you to send E-invitations, where you can include a map to your event, keep track of responses, and more!

To celebrate this addition, we are holding a CONTEST. And the deadline is approaching! We are awaiting your entry!

You are invited to design an electronic Postcard, Flash, or Invitation Card for the SDB E-card service.
Submit your entry to webmaster@seventhdaybaptist.org.
Deadline is January 20, 2009. All of the voting will begin around January 23 and will be on-line. Voting will end February 15, 2009.

The winner will get a new SDB logo hoodie sweatshirt and the name will be announced in the March Sabbath Recorder. How can it get any more exciting??

Click on the animated “E-Card Contest” words on our main page for complete rules and specific submission requirements. Good luck!! Or, God Bless!! Or, BOTH!!

BWA responds to Muslim letter

(Report by Eron Henry, BWA, Washington)

The Baptist World Alliance (BWA) has issued a formal response to “A Common Word Between Us and You,” a letter written by 138 Muslim leaders and scholars that appealed for Christians and Muslims to cooperate in engendering peace and religious freedom.

Upon receipt of the letter--dated October 13, 2007, and sent to 27 named world Christian leaders, including BWA President David Coffey--BWA leaders welcomed the letter and indicated that the BWA would make an official response after consultation with Baptists from around the world.

Coffey, in a personal response said, “I welcome the letter from the Muslim scholars and leaders and commend it as a groundbreaking initiative which could make a major contribution to a better understanding in Christian-Muslim relations, the cause of religious liberty and global peace.”

In preparation of the formal response, BWA General Secretary Neville Callam sought comments from Baptist scholars and leaders, including those living in countries with a Muslim majority, regarding how the BWA might respond to the letter.

Coffey and Callam sent the BWA response to Prince Ghazi Bin Muhammad Bin Talal of Jordan, President of the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, on December 19, 2008. In their letter to the Prince, the BWA leaders said, “We have listened carefully to a wide range of responses from our diverse Baptist family, and taken into account the views of our friends and colleagues in other Christian traditions, and believe that this response reflects the mainstream of Baptist thought on the important issues you raised in ‘A Common Word.’”

“As Baptists, we are aware of the need for better understanding between Christians and Muslims and our response represents an effort to give expression to this commitment,” wrote Coffey and Callam.

The formal response to “A Common Word Between Us and You” is available on the BWA website here.

Variety of faith, Baptists, in new Congress

(ABP story by Robert Marus, Washington)

Baptists, they say, multiply by dividing. And the various Baptist churches and denominational groups represented in the incoming 111th Congress are emblematic of America’s broad array of Baptists -- and of religious life in general.

While precise figures and specific answers on some lawmakers’ church membership are hard to come by, there are 66 self-identified Baptists in the new Congress, according to a study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Baptists make up a slightly smaller percentage of the new Congress (12.4 percent) than they do of the United States’ adult population at large (17.2 percent), according to the Pew study. It was based on biographical data that Congress members’ offices provided to Congressional Quarterly. The nation-at-large statistics come from the results of a massive survey that Pew released last year.

An analysis of the new Baptist Congress members by Baptist blogger Aaron Weaver reveals that congressional Baptists are a broadly diverse lot in terms of denomination, race and political party.
For instance, congressional Baptists belong to churches affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, the three major African-American Baptist denominational groups, the American Baptist Churches USA and the Baptist General Conference.
There are also several members of Congress whose churches’ primary affiliation is with para-denominational groups that resulted from the division between moderates, progressives and fundamentalists in the Southern Baptist Convention during the 1980s -- the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and the Alliance of Baptists.

In the House, self-identified Baptists are evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, with each party claiming 29 Baptist representatives. African-Americans make up 33 percent of House Baptists.
Baptists are the second-largest religious group in Congress after Catholics, who make up 30 percent of lawmakers. The next four largest groups -- Methodists, Jews, Presbyterians and Episcopalians -- are represented in Congress in greater percentages than they are in the population at large.

The “religious group” most underrepresented relative to its share of the overall population is the religiously unaffiliated. Only five members of the 111th Congress failed to list any religious affiliation, according to Congressional Quarterly. But the Pew survey found that the religiously unaffiliated make up just over 16 percent of the U.S. adult population.
The 111th Congress is also home to Lutherans, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Pentecostals, Mormons, Seventh-Day Adventists, Muslims, Buddhists, Unitarians, Christian Scientists and a Quaker.

For the complete story, go to Associated Baptist Press.

Week of Prayer reminder

The 2009 Week of Prayer begins on Sunday, January 4.

Sponsored by the SDB World Federation, the meditations for the 2009 booklets were written by Jan and Ruth Lek from the Netherlands. Jan is the Federation’s new General Secretary. Their theme is "Prayer that Connects."

Each church (stateside) should have received the booklets to hand out. If you’re unable to make it to worship this Sabbath, and would like an electronic version of the Week of Prayer writings, click on the “Ministries” tab above, choose “World Federation,” and you can download a Word version or a pdf of the complete booklet. Then, you can either read it on your computer or print it out for your daily prayer time.

May all Seventh Day Baptists unite this year with a “Prayer that Connects.”