I'm in to work this morning for a few hours, making up time for earlier schedule aberrations in the week. Nursing a headache, bandaging it with coffee, I'll try and post some news.

Now, whenever I sit down alone to watch TV, I always look for the most boring shows. We are extremely blessed to have not one but three PBS stations, and I usually begin there: 2, 10, 14. Invariably there is political talk somewhere, and there is no end of cooking shows, but occasionally I will get lucky. One time I caught a fascinating documentary on Martin Luther King, Jr. Another occasion turned up a good hour on string theory. The point here, though, is that there is an equation involved in the thing: the most "boring" TV is the best TV.

Last night was our Good Friday service. We were running late, and the traffic was awful, so I barely had time to tune beforehand. Kara was upstairs, and had been warned about acting up (yesterday was a rough day for disobedience!) The hour was attended by alternating songs and readings from the Scriptures. I noticed with satisfaction that Kara was listening intently a few times, and, as far as I know, the communion meal which closed the service was the first time she had even seen that done. She was asking Lynn-nore about it, afterward. Kara's final act of the evening was to fall asleep in the car. L. and I spent the ride home talking about church tradition and the proper age for taking communion.

Low (or revivalist) churches make no sense to me, and the way that communion is done is just another aspect. First, a word about what I mean by "low" or "revivalist" churches. During the Reformation, a large group of pastors, German and English, felt that Luther and Zwingli were not taking their principle of "scripture alone" seriously enough in the area of ecclesiology. Instead of liturgical practices and traditions, church worship and practice should include only what the Scripture commends, all else being ignored as human accretion and popery. By their reading of the Bible, infants should not be baptized, nor should anyone partake of the Lord's Supper without giving signs of true repentance: public confession and a changed life. Now then, when we arrive at the 19th & 20th Centuries, we add another layer atop Anabaptism, and that layer is revivalism. Revivalism is a style or an attitude toward Christianity which further individualizes belief to the point of pure subjectivity. It is highly pragmatic. I always think of Charles Finney. He and other revival preachers reshaped evangelism and the way that people behaved as Christians. Church music (indeed, all forms of aesthetic and artistic expression) became popularized. Feelings were brought to the fore. Altar calls made conversion an "act of personal and public decision." Revivalism stressed, well, revival as the way that God acted in his church. Like a leaf in a current, the church was consistently flowing out into sinfulness, only to be brought back in through the occasional, divine-sent winds of revival fire. I have spent too much time on this. Needless to say, this movement has been around long enough to develop its own secularized church calendar its own liturgical practices and traditions, one of these being rules for communion-taking by the young.

To sum up: even though Kara is regenerate, the signs in her life, no matter how demonstrable, will not allow her to take communion or be baptized until she is in her tween years. Revivalist anthropology, in its emphasis on individual decision, cannot trust a child's mind, and only trusts a young teen upon the word of parents, Sunday School teachers and, probably, an interview with the pastor. There is a logic in this, but it is a logic which rests on presuppositions which may be as much modernity as theology, pragmatic as pneumatic.

Well, I sort of lost myself there, didn't I? There is a lot of work to be done today. Tasks put off by the malaise of the week. Questions that need answering. I'm eager to get started and to accomplish. There is that feeling of not having finished or started anything for too long. In my mind now, Satie's Trois Gymnopedies and the desire to have already read Listening on the Day of Silence (doc). A dull headache demands caffeine.