Hey, Everyone!!!

This month I will be speaking at one church and at two Ratio Christi meetings. On Saturday, March 6, I will be speaking at the 11:30 AM Ratio Christi meeting at Bradley University in Baker Hall Room 451, and the talk will be, 'Can Other Theories Explain Away the Resurrection?'. On Sunday, March 13, I will be speaking at a 6:00 PM event at Faith Evangelical Free Church of Metamora, located at 1337 Lourdes Road, Metamora, IL; that talk will be 'A Positive Argument for the Bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ'. On Saturday, March 26, I will be speaking at the 11:30 AM Ratio Christi Meeting at Bradley University in Baker Hall, Room B51, and the talk will be, 'Are There Good Scientific or Philosophical Objections to the Resurrection?'.

In February, I spent time writing material for the talk that gives a positive argument for the resurrection. Some of the positive argument for the resurrection talk that I had produced last year would not have been very clear nor easy to follow for a regular church attender. The new material is much more clear and easier for a lay person or college student to follow, and I managed to make the improvements to clarity before giving the talk for the first time in public. I also spent time composing music that I would play while reciting some of the Gospel of Mark and spent time figuring out what words I would say at different places in the music.

In my previous email, I indicated that I might have an opportunity to speak in the Chicago area on February 29th, and it turned out that I did get such an opportunity. I met with some of the staff members of the Chicago Campus Crusade team and delivered some of the newest version of the positive argument for the resurrection talk. I also did a Gospel of Mark 1-5 presentation. My hope would be that this would be the beginning of relationships with Cru staff that would lead to reaching more students with the gospel and with an intellectually credible defense of the Christian message and of God's Word. I also gave the positive argument for the resurrection talk at the Ratio Christi meeting on Saturday, February 27, at Bradley University, where for some of the talk 17 people were in attendance. I also spoke to a group of Fellowship of Christian Athletes students at Bertha Frank Center of Morton High School, on Tuesday, February 23. The leader of the Morton High School FCA, my former French teacher Madame Johnson, wrote me later, saying, "Thank you SO MUCH for speaking to our FCA group this morning! You were fantastic! You're a great example of the fact that Christians who believe in the Bible and what it teaches aren't dumb, naïve, or blindly following something without reason to do so. It's something they really need to know and understand before they go out into the 'real world'." Another individual who has been involved in FCA, Scott Krause, also wrote me, saying, "It was a great morning at Morton last week. You did a great job with questions that teens (and our culture as a whole) need answers on. So many are hungry for the truth, and are tired of dead-end answers. Keep “preaching it” brother."

On the family side, the port that my nephew Jeremiah received when he needed chemotherapy was removed surgically in the past three weeks. February 19 was the 90th birthday of my Grandma Ruth, and we had a big family gathering at Pizza Ranch in Morton on the 20th in celebration of her birthday. I am very blessed to have had Grandma Ruth as my Grandma. In many ways, she has exemplified the character of Christ.

PRAYER REQUESTS
1. Fundraising. Financially, one of the hardest seasons for a ministry is the beginning. Please pray that God would bring monthly supporters alongside Credible Faith. Credible Faith is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization and donations are accordingly tax-deductible in the US as permitted by law.

2. The Donation of a Used Car. My car is a 2002 Saturn with over 130,000 miles on it. In itself, that is not very bad, but it has become something of a money hole. When I was at Trinity, I think that much of the transmission was replaced, and in January over $700 was paid for fixing part of the transmission system. Yet, there continues to be jolts when shifting, and I am concerned that it will deteriorate as has happened before and again be in a situation where a large expenditure is required. There has also been battery failure and the failure of the starter, both of which were replaced. I do not have much money and don't have enough to buy a good used car. Pray that someone would donate a used card before I would need to sink a lot more money into the one that I do currently have, or pray that the current car would not need significant expenditures.

3. Ministry Opportunities. Pray that doors would be opened for ministry in churches and on campuses and for relationships to be formed that would be mutually beneficial for ministry in those places.

Have a great month!!!

Sincerely,

Paul

Thursday, March 3, 2016
Illinois, USA

Quote of the Month

From Ross Douthat's 'Return of the Jesus Wars', New York Times, August 3, 2012: The fact that Aslan’s take on Jesus is not original doesn’t mean it’s necessarily wrong. But it has the same problem that bedevils most of his competitors in the “real Jesus” industry. In the quest to make Jesus more comprehensible, it makes Christianity’s origins more mysterious. Part of the lure of the New Testament is the complexity of its central character — the mix of gentleness and zeal, strident moralism and extraordinary compassion, the down-to-earth and the supernatural. Most “real Jesus” efforts, though, assume that these complexities are accretions, to be whittled away to reach the historical core. Thus instead of a Jesus who contains multitudes, we get Jesus the nationalist or Jesus the apocalyptic prophet or Jesus the sage or Jesus the philosopher and so on down the list. There’s enough gospel material to make any of these portraits credible. But they also tend to be rather, well, boring, and to raise the question of how a pedestrian figure — one zealot among many, one mystic in a Mediterranean full of them — inspired a global faith.