Another Casting Announcement

Earlier we announced that someone, perhaps connected with the Kohls corporation, is evidently planning a made-for-TV movie about our lives. The two starring roles have already been cast, and now the producers are cleverly leaking photos of some of the other casting choices.

Here, for example, we see a young fellow who is apparently going to be playing the role of Philip. Quite the impish little moppet--and well dressed, too!

We're also cluing in to the idea that the daily dullness of our actual lives will have to be jazzed up to make this sucker sell on the Hallmark channel. So our real-life, mostly-mutt Maizey will become not one but two radiant purebred yellow labs. Meanwhile, apparently Ron will be commuting to work not in a 1998 Geo Prizm with 100,000 miles on it, but instead will be roaring along astride this painfully hip vintage road machine. In fact, maybe he doesn't work at all, since we appear to live now somewhere in the Scottish Highlands.

Tune in next week for previews of "our" smiling family handing one another food processors and cozy socks under a 10-foot Douglas fir laden with hand-crafted ornaments--all on sale!

Hermeneutical Sophistication

A few weeks ago Debra and I - along with the estimable Nathan Bierma and his wife, Andrea -- visited our friend Nick Overduin and the wonderful people at 1st CRC in Toronto. They've made use of Deb's books and Nathan's in their small groups, and so wanted to meet and chat with them. Meanwhile, I came along to give Nick a week off from his pulpit duties. We had an enjoyable ride up on Saturday, and a lovely evening eating some fabulous Ethiopian food (our fave).

The worship service and other events on Sunday were very satisfying, but I was entranced by a display in the church's narthex.

It is the product of a children's Bible study of the story of Noah. Next to idealized Bible school pictures of an ark full of elephants and giraffes and so forth are comments the students made, like these:

• "The water could not have been this calm."
• "The animals could not have been this familiar to us."
• "They must have taken animals on the ark to be eaten, not saved,"

and my favorite:
Instead of fostering a childish view of scripture (not childlike), whoever was in charge of this study encouraged the children to read their Bibles with their brains turned on, working alongside their faithful trust in Scripture's trustworthiness.

To paraphrase someone I admire a great deal, I've not seen such hermeneutical sophistication in all of... well, in a lot of places I would expect to find it. Children taught this way are much less likely to fall into biblicist patterns of thinking about inspiration, or have their faith shaken to the core when they learn, for example, in their Religion 101 classes, of the documentary hypothesis.

Mark it up as one more thing 1st CRC in Toronto is doing well.

My Grandpa Always Told Me...

...that you've got to toot your own horn, 'cause no one else is going to toot it for you.

Guess Grandpa wasn't right about everything.

Or he didn't know anything about the CICW.

Puddle-ball

Not to compare ourselves to the poor folks on the Gulf coast, but we've had a bit of rain here the past few days. Not enough, however, to stop die-hard sports fans...

When the made-for-TV movie of our lives is filmed...

...these two are who we want to star as us.

Fruits of their Labor

While all the rest of you were lounging around at the beach this past weekend, we put our kids to work in the fields. It was, after all, Labor Day.

And here is their reward: A runner-up trophy for Pip's team, and the championship trophy for Jacob's.


(Sad to say, Mia's team, while displaying lots of potential and improving markedly from game to game, was unable to rack up enough points to be bling-worthy. But she's got a head start on her brothers anyway.)

No More Boring Sunday School

If you're in charge of adult education at your church, check out this hot new curriculum from the good people at Faith Alive, the publishing group at CRC HQ. Available just in time for fall programs! Buy it by the truckload!

Full disclosure: we won't make any money if you do. So never mind the truckload. But still, here's an adult ed. curriculum on worship that we think turned out pretty well.

Ron was working on it last December, when we should have been out shopping for Christmas presents for our children (sorry kids! that doggone kingdom work again!). The task was to write an engaging, five-week study guide on worship for regular folks in a regular congregation: individual lessons for five days each week, then a group lesson for the end of the week.

So Ron took all his best, most tried and true worship talks (let's have a show of hands for how many folks reading this blog have heard, for example, Ron talk about the participate-o-meter); he zazzed them up with nifty stories and examples, then condensed them into this attractive little package, complete with Bible study sections, discussion questions, the whole bit. It fits into the Disciples series as part of year 2.

The daily readings walk, step-by-step, through a typical four-fold worship pattern (Gathering, Word, Meal, Sending). Along the way, alternating lessons explore key adjectives that describe faithful, vital worship. These don't function prescriptively ("Listen to the worship wonk who will tell you exactly what to do!"), but descriptively -- they are extended meditations on virtues and values no congregation would wish their worship to do without.

Of course, if you do want a worship wonk to come to your church and tell you what to do, that could be arranged. (Ron has been known to do a bit of itinerant work from time to time).

So if your church needs a Sunday-service makeover (or even if it doesn't), this study guide is a nice way to build grass-roots understanding of worship basics. A little understanding can go a long way toward quelling pointless debates and toward opening a congregation to the Spirit's work in cooking up lively, meaningful worship. (Maybe that accounts for the otherwise perplexing photo of a burner on the cover. But does the Spirit use natural gas? A non-renewable fossil fuel?? Wouldn't the Spirit use wind energy?)

Happy Trails

One would think that after making four trips back and forth to California in the past few years, we might head out in some other direction for a summer odyssey, but... no. We've just returned from the wild west yet again. Not all the way to Cali this time, but still far enough and long enough to explain the posting drought since July 4.

Before hopping in the van for the frontier, we spent a fun weekend with Ron's family out at Lake Michigan. The lake was swimmable (or, for our hardy Pipster, surfable), but for the wimpier women, hey, the hot tub is always fabulous.

One evening we gathered on the beach for the traditional bonfire/s'mores combination. I think we've had s'mores about twenty times this summer. At some point, ya know, s'nuff.

Sunsets like this, though, we could handle every night.
Then after a brief pause for a week of soccer camp (Mia) and string camp (Jacob) and blessed freedom from siblings (Philip), it was time to cram into the minivan for hours of family togetherness on the way to: Colorado.

Along the way, we visited many old friends. It turns out we are lucky enough to have friends, if not in every port, then at least in a good number of Midwestern towns, including St. Charles, Illinois; Bloomington, Minnesota; Willmar, Minnesota; Sioux Center, Iowa; and Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

While staying with our friends the Kleinhuizens, the children discovered all the fun things other kids get to do and they don't, such as tubing and fishing (though Jacob found that the infamous "grass bass" was a more common catch than the elusive walleye).

In Sioux Center, Ron got a chance to golf with old friends Todd and Curtis (can you tell the golf course is carved out of the cornfields of the midwest?).

In South Dakota, we visited old friends Dawn and Andrew, whose precious daughter Althea took a shine to Jacob.
At last, we arrived at our destination, Snow Mountain Ranch, where we got to hang out with the Calvin students on staff there this summer and serve as their official professors-in-residence-of-the-week. Besides running around the ranch indulging in camp-style fun, we took a hike one day in Rocky Mountain National Park, and marveled, once again, at how close to the sky one can feel at 12,000 feet above sea level.
After our week at SMR, we zinged home to our little tiny baby puppy Maizey, only to find that somehow, in our absence, she had become... a DOG. We're grateful to the two Calvin students who house-and-dog sat for us, but also suspicious: steroids maybe??
So much for another westward odyssey. We're pretty good at it now. But next year, maybe we'll head east. Crabcakes, anyone?

The Cheesecake-to-Chard Challenge

And now, another installment in our continuing series on the Rienstra family table. Deb's three years of researching the politics of food for her English 101 classes continues to incur collateral damage at home. That is to say, the Rienstra children are suffering from a more and more severe shortage of hot dogs, pop-tarts, and cheez-its. Meanwhile, they are opening the fridge to find it stuffed with things like kohlrabi and organically raised eggs.

So today we will address directly the commonly perceived relationship between the yumminess and health benefits of food. Everybody knows that the better something tastes, the worse it is for you. Scientifically speaking, as yumminess increases, mortal danger also increases. Likewise, as nutritional benefits increase, alas, so does yuckiness.

This is the perception. But is this really the case? A close examination of the following chart reveals a couple of outliers:


Blueberries, for example, rank high on the yummy scale and have also recently been proven to cure major diseases and promote the development of superpowers. On the other end of the scale, lots of fast food products are both disgusting and fatal.

It is possible, of course, to strike a strategic balance. Note, for example, the dish at the precise center of the chart. The classic American tuna casserole with broccoli has been shown in scientific studies at major research universities to balance taste and health in perfect equilibrium. The tasty cheesy sauce, though a little fatty, can be counter-balanced by whole-wheat pasta; the health benefits of the omega-3 oils in the tuna and the roughage in the broccoli can be yummied up with crumbled potato chips or fried onions layered on top of the dish.

Nevertheless, perhaps we need to change our misconception about yumminess and health. In an effort to do that at our house (and also to promote the development of the local foodshed, know our farmer, and build community with crunchy granola types), we have purchased a share in a CSA farm. That means we paid in February for a share of a local farm's harvest from June through October. So now, every week, we bring home several grocery bags (the re-usable kind, of course) full of green stuff like this:



We're trying to eat, in other words, as much as possible in the upper left quadrant of our chart. And perhaps to coax some things in the lower left quadrant into inching upwards. It turns out, for example, that Swiss chard, if prepared correctly, falls higher on the yumminess scale than we thought.


So Rienstra children, take heart. You may dip your kohlrabi in some standard American super-processed, corn-byproduct-infested, overpackaged ranch dressing. At least, for now...

Come to me, all you weary...

In keeping with the theme of interesting chair photos, there is this, from the goofy god-stuff gallery at Ship-of-Fools:

Summer Fun at General Synod. Seriously.

The summer began this year with about three weeks of what I thought was great fun at the RCA's meeting of General Synod in Holland, June 5-10.

"Fun" isn't a word that many would use to characterize these large meetings where the denomination does its business. (Those of you who have been to such meetings can leave your favorite adjectival descriptors in the comments.) But by God's grace, I wasn't reading sub-committee reports and analyzing debate on contentious topics -- I was preparing for, and then leading, daily worship every day. Hooray!

The opening and closing services, held in the gothic Dimnent Chapel at Hope College, were rather substantial affairs: a congregation full of elders, ministers, and guests; a whole phalanx of pastors to read and lead, to preach and pray and preside at the table; a group of outstanding dancers to physicalize scripture or key liturigcal moments; an organist and choir, brass and string quartets, my old pals Bob Keeley on guitar and Rachel Klompmaker on piano, and my super-friend partner in all this, Greg Scheer ("Worship-twin powers activate! Shape of... an ice-harp! Form of... a gorilla!")

A number of my WTS worship students were there, and noticed that the services reflected an emphasis we'd discussed in class: to worship as voluminously as possibe -- to shape our celebrations so that they were diverse in expressive styles, engaging people on many levels, speaking as fully as possible (in words and more) of the extravagant covenant love of our faithful God. They also noticed that we were intentionally faithful to the RCA's liturgy. While I might offer some suggestions for improving it, it is ecumenical and reformed, rich and beautiful, and therefore - not surprisingly - impossible to do voluminously in anything less than 90 minutes: and on those days in early June, 90 really hot and humid minutes.

Yet the services were deeply satisfying, praise God, and my deepest fear -- moments of logistical terror ("The service starts in one minute -- Oh no! Where's the bread and the wine?") -- were minimal. Those we had were ably managed by an old friend and former student Tim TenClay who stepped in like the Christ-like servant-hearted pastor he is, and took those burdens from my shoulders.

Because these 'festival' services were such hefty and hearty affairs, and because during the day the delegates spent hours and hours and hours talking about God-stuff, it seemed good to Greg and to me to plan the every-day morning and evening prayer services to be just as deeply participative, but a bit less wordy, a bit more stripped-down liturgically and musically.

It helped that we met in a beautiful worship space: a slice of the DeVos center (a large sports venue where the delegates did their work each day) that had been curtained off and shaped for our purposes. The morning services followed a simple daily prayer pattern rather than the more typical word-and-sacrament-without-the-sacrament service ordo. My favorite new worship-wonk friend, Rosanne Barton-DeVries, helped us to worship with our whole bodies and not just our heads, Bob Keeley again helped out on guitar and djembe, and my newest best keyboard-playing friend, Jeremy Simpson, helped to lead the music, with selections largely taken from Sing! A New Creation, a copy of which every delegate took home.

The evening prayers were even more stripped down: one well-chosen song, with each sung verse prompting spoken and silent prayers for ourselves and the world. So, for example, one evening I used a JT-infused guitar riff to accompany our singing of the classic gospel song, "He's Got the Whole World In His Hands" -- grounding our petitions in God's providential care. For example, when we sang about the "little bitty baby," we then prayed for our families. When we sang about the "wind and the rain," we spent some time praising God for care of creation, etc.

But the key to what we did that evening was this: instead of singing about God, we tweaked the lyrics so that we sang the song addressed to God: "You've got the whole world in your hands." Changing just that one pronoun alters the way one experiences the song, shifting it from testimony to prayer, and prayer that even while earnest or even desperate, has an undertone of confidence in God's power and love. (Bonus result: excising the overt and exclusively masculine language for God.) Interested worship wonks can learn more about this prayer/song on the related post over at WorshipHelps.

All told, preparing and leading worship this past month was delightful and exhausting and invigorating -- and because it was all resting in God's hands, it was fun.

An Instructive Comparison...

Go West -- A discotheque semi-hit by the Village People (and another semi-hit when covered by the Pet Shop Boys in 1993).

Give Thanks -- a worship mega-hit by Henry Smith. Covered a gujillion times by every praise band on the planet.

Timing? BOTH songs were written in 1978, and released in 1979.

Coincidence? You be the judge.

(Of course, it's not like this particular chord pattern is unique.)

Disclaimer: Listen at your own risk. The authors of this blog are not responsible for the onset of worship-impairment syndrome brought on by viewing these clips.