JERUSALEM?Many Christians would cherish the opportunity to travel to Israel and visit the places where our Lord Jesus Christ walked, taught, died and rose again. Such a trip, which some say is akin to a spiritual journey, takes much prayer, money, and preparation.

Unless, of course, you’re a Southern Baptist TEXAN reporter and you get a mid-afternoon call that goes something like this:

Editor: “Hi, Bonnie. I have a proposition for you.”

Me: “Sure. Whatcha got?”

Editor: “How would you like to go to Israel? You don’t have to pay anything. The Israel Ministry of Tourism (IMOT) is sponsoring a press junket and I can’t go so I thought I’d ask you?. And I need to know this afternoon if you can go.”

Me: “Uhhh.”

Such was the beginning of my whirlwind tour of the land of our Lord. I made the list of 12 evangelical writers and broadcasters invited on the trip. By March 6 our party was en route to Tel Aviv, all but one of us being a first-time visitor to Israel. The entire trip was a sprint to see as much as possible in as little time as possible, racing against an unseen clock that would time out before we, as reporters, could confirm that the tomb was, indeed, empty.

Atop Mount Carmel (Actually, atop the gift shop of the monastery whose monks tend the site) I briefly reflected on one of my favorite Old Testament stories: Elijah vs. the prophets of Baal. The tourist-condensed version went something like this: “God 1, prophets of Baal 0. God wins. Everyone, back on the bus!”

There is so much of spiritual and historical significance to see in Israel that one could easily lose sight of them by focusing on the schedule. But in the end, I was thankful for that bus and our very able and long-suffering guide, Rivka Cohen-Berman.
Those whose business and pleasure it is to organize tours to Israel recommend first-time travelers not on a press junket utilize the experience and money-saving expertise of tour agencies or well-established individuals who regularly host travels to Israel.

To make the most of your time in the Promised Land, Joe Diaz, a U.S. regional representative for IMOT, highly recommends traveling with a tour group. First-time visitors can just concentrate on enjoying the sights and experiences without concerning themselves with the minutiae, delegating day-to-day details of transportation, food, and accommodations.

Although some people would rather not travel with a group, the trade-off of solitude for convenience and a lower price could make a bus ride with strangers-soon-to-be-friends more palatable, especially if you think you might return to Israel. And, Diaz said, Israel is one of the most frequently revisited countries. Those who make frequent trips with a tour group are then better suited to travel on their own or with a smaller group of family and friends. But for an introductory visit, it’s much more affordable when you go with a group.

“The guide alone is $300 a day,” he said.

Tony Derrick, president of Ideal Travel and Tours in Dallas, said the costs are shared by the group and therefore go down as the size of the group goes up. One tour bus can hold 50 passengers, but ideally, he said, the number in a group should be between 20-30 people.

“Most of our clients are first-time and probably only-time [travelers to Israel],” Derrick said. “They want to see and experience the things they’ve read in the Bible. This is a pilgrim journey, a completion of their biblical education.”
With that in mind the tours are arranged to stop at many places where the stories of the Bible unfolded.

The president of Pilgrim Tours, David Nyce, concurred that traveling with a tour group provides the best opportunity to educate oneself about the land of Jesus. The company caters to predominantly Baptist and evangelical groups and the devotionals given at each site add to the depth of spiritual and academic knowledge that a traveler takes home.

Leading the way on all bus tours are guides trained and certified by the State of Israel. They can be Jewish, Arab, or Christian. Each adds his own unique perspective to the trip?within prescribed limits?offering new information for repeat travelers who will most likely get a different guide on a return trip. Pilgrim tours, though, has an established relationship with a pool of guides who are Messianic believers.

Although all tours require travelers to be in good health?there is a great deal of walking, climbing stairs, and, on occasion, squeezing through ancient water ways?some groups go off the beaten bus path in order to feel the parch of their throat after days in the desert and the grit on their face and hands from digging for long-lost civilizations.

Jim Sibley, director of the Pasche Institute for Jewish Studies and associate professor of Jewish ministry at Criswell College in Dallas, takes regular trips to the country as part of ongoing archaeological projects associated with Criswell College. A group is leaving in May for a two-week project at a site near Qumran, the region where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.

Sibley said there will be some opportunity for sightseeing but most of their time will be spent on archaeological work.
For those who want to go even farther off the bus path can hike the lands of Scripture with GTI Tours. A hike leaves mid-April led by Houston-area pastor Brian Haynes, a Southern Baptist. The company coordinates study tours throughout the biblical lands. Travelers have little more than a backpack and a Bible.

“It’s intense,” Haynes said. “I think I teach 50 times in 10 days. The hikes are brutal?it’s physical, spiritual, emotional.”

But Haynes added, he has never had a more spiritually rewarding experience in his life.

That’s worth getting off the bus.

DENTON?The window dressing may be benign, but behind the curtain remains the dark elitism of the eugenics movement, which continues to flourish in the 21st century with a disproportionate focus on black Americans.

That’s the message of a relatively new video documentary, “Maafa21: Black Genocide in 21st Century America,” from Denton-based Life Dynamics Inc. The group’s president, Mark Crutcher, wrote and produced it and is featured numerous times in the film.

Maafa (pronounced Mah-off-ah) is a Swahili word for tragedy, in this case the continued repercussions of Western slavery that Crutcher argues led to the eugenics movement and specifically to the government’s role in funding family planning, birth control and abortion aimed at minority groups and especially blacks.

The end result: a disproportionate percentage of “family planning” clinics in black neighborhoods and an African-American abortion rate that has skyrocketed in the last 40 years.

The film begins with a scene in a slave cemetery in Denton County, then unwinds for viewers a chronological chain of events, from American slavery, the emergence of Charles Darwin’s survival of the fittest and the eugenics movement that was fueled by Darwin’s cousin, the father of eugenics, Francis Galton, and concurrent social developments.

The documentary proceeds through the years of Civil War Reconstruction, a period when some American industrialists turned to eugenics as a method of controlling wealth and maintaining civil order for fear that 4 million freed slaves would overwhelm the ruling American upper class.

The founder of the American Birth Control League (later known as Planned Parenthood), Margaret Sanger, became a tool of some wealthy industrialists, as one observer in the film states: “[T]hey needed a front man and she needed money.”

Sanger is quoted in the film, from 1922.

“We are paying for and ever submitting to the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all,” said Sanger, lamenting that the resources of individuals and states were being diverted to care for them.

Hitler’s Nazi philosophy was largely influenced, the film states, by American eugenicist Madison Grant, whose book “The Passing of the Great Race” Hitler referred to as his Bible.

Throughout the film, narrated by an African American man and woman, several black pro-life activists are featured, including Alveda King, a niece of Martin Luther King.

The film shows the rise of the American government’s funding of family planning, most notably through abortion but also through sterilization and emerging birth control methods such as Norplant, and the correlation of rising abortion rates among black women since the early 1970s?an abrupt change from earlier periods when white women were getting most of the abortions.

The film’s criticism cuts across political lines, with elitist tendencies aimed at curbing the black population dating back to President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, and proliferating under Republican President Richard Nixon.

The film also includes several quotes from a much younger Jesse Jackson, who at one time was unabashedly pro-life, according to his comments.

“What happens to the mind of a person, and the moral fabric of a nation, that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a conscience?” Jackson is quoted as saying in the 1970s. “What kind of a person, and what kind of a society will we have 20 years hence if life can be taken so casually?”

Among the more interesting stori

GRAPEVINE?What do artwork depicting the widow’s mite and a Rolex print ad have in common? The answer lies within the one-of-a-kind Biblical Stewardship History Collection now available to Texas Southern Baptists through the SBTC Foundation.

Thanks to a partnership between the foundation and the collection’s curator, historic stewardship artifacts, art, and the largest known stewardship research library are on display in Grapevine.

Scott Preissler occupies the Bobby and Janis L. Eklund chair of stewardship at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, is director of the seminary’s Center for Biblical Stewardship, and is the curator and owner of the collection.

“The collection is now available to help SBTC churches educate about stewardship,” Johnathan Gray, executive director of the SBTC Foundation, said. “Stewardship has been a part of the church for years; it’s not something to be ashamed of, it’s a vital part of how we worship our Lord and do his ministry.”

The new, 3,900 square-foot facility at Faith Christian School that now houses the collection was built by volunteers and funded through donations.

“It’s a great privilege to see how groups come together to make things happen,” Gray said.

Volunteers and special guests gathered March 14 to celebrate completion of the facility and be the first group to tour the collection.

“Every person who comes through, something appeals to them,” said Sylvia Crecelius, president of The Stewardship Alliance.

Darin Brown volunteered his carpentry skills on this project, and gained a new insight into the value of the collection.

“You see all these pieces and you think, who used this, when, and why?” Brown said. “You can bring lay people and church staff in and stir their thoughts for how to teach stewardship.”

From the wooden baskets of the old West to the centuries-old large brass alms collection plates, every stewardship artifact tells the tale of the importance of stewardship in the life of the church.

“It’s the [visual] history of biblical stewardship through the local church,” Bobby L. Eklund, stewardship consultant for the SBTC, said.

Preissler has collected stewardship artifacts for 20 years?items date from the 1500s to today. In addition to offering plates, the collection includes missionary boxes, games, artwork and an extensive stewardship library.

“We encourage groups to come and have a day-long stewardship experience,” Gray said.

After visiting the Stewardship Collection, groups are invited to the SBTC building where they will learn about how the Lord is using gifts through the Cooperative Program, Southern Baptists’ unified missions funding channel.

Groups will learn “how resources come in from our churches and how they go out to reach Texas and touch the world,” Gray noted.

All ages can benefit from a tour of the stewardship artifacts, Preissler said, noting he recently hosted a second grade class. While one generation will enjoy reminiscing about missionary boxes they used as children, another will benefit from seeing the priority stewardship had in the livelihoods of generations before them.

<span style="font-family: '

I heard an ad campaign some years ago that prompted us to ask ourselves one simple question before doing most things: “Is it good for the children?” The campaign’s motives were noble and its point was fine, as far as it went. The problem was that it addresses most problems related to the welfare of children too far downstream from the source. Unless we really do consider the “village” (government at some level) the primary caregiver and discipler of our offspring, the marriage between a father and a mother is the wellspring of most blessing and cursing sprinkled over children.

It seems missing or broken marriages are louder in their cursing than whole marriages are in their blessing. The most often cited statistics show that children are 3-4 times more likely to live in poverty if they live in a single-parent home?without regard to race or the employment status of the mother. We don’t need statisticians to tell us that. Anyone who’s worked with the complex and fragmented families of divorce or fatherless homes has seen problems even more significant than poverty. Even though beloved friends and brothers known to me find themselves in those same complex situations, the traditional and unblended family is the strong core of our congregations. And that is where churches should start in family ministry.

Yes, we do have conferences and curricula and some fine books on the subject. Go to those conferences, offer studies using a good biblical curriculum designed to build strong marriages, read those fine books. Maybe some churches out there even have ministers to marriages on their staffs. As laudable and potentially useful as good resources can be, those things are not what I mean. If ministry to children and parents can be integrated into the cellular structure of our churches, and this is an exciting thought, then we can and must do something similar to our strengthening of marriages. Here are a few that make sense to me.

Exalt the marriage covenant from the beginning?Too many people get married in church. I’ve performed those ceremonies where I’d come to understand that the happy couple understood little or nothing about God. Why were they being married in church and what was I doing in the middle of it? They wanted a traditional service in a photogenic setting and that’s it. Shame on me and shame on us. I will no longer perform a wedding for those who are not known to me to be maturing Christians committed to God’s will. If people in or outside our congregation want a religiously oriented civil ceremony, let’s not settle for that.

In service of that, young pastors should do what I didn’t?develop a theology of marriage. What do you believe Matthew 5:32 means? How does that passage and others that explain marriage and divorce impact your practice when an idealistic couple makes that initial appointment with you? Build some policies into your own ministry and into the practice of your church that don’t discourage marriage but which do make it a more sober covenant, not lightly entered into. And yes, I’ve led people to Christ during pre-marital counseling. That’s a fine reason to agree to pre-marital counseling. If that’s the plan, do at least a couple of sessions before deciding if you’ll do the ceremony. Take that decision seriously?meaning you sometimes must decline.

Exalt marriages that persevere?And let’s do more than let Walter and Nellie stand up to congregational applause on their 50th anniversary. How did they make it to 50? Some younger couple with budding relationship problems would be interested. Rather than let wise husbands and wives serve out their years of influence in the Adult XXVII Sunday School class, let them spend some time with newlyweds and 30-somethings. Isn’t that a value of multi-generational churches? They are more like families. I learned things never overtly taught from my grandparents and even some from my great-grandparents. I’ve learned things from some of my grandparents in the Lord over the years also. This can be arranged intentionally by wise church leaders without creating a new program.

Exalt the significance of covenant vows?One of the discouraging things all pastors face is hearing solemn vows made insincerely. Sometimes that breaking of vows will manifest itself as adultery, abandonment, passivity, or even abuse. Churches will often officially ignore the behavior or the problem but that’s not the same as saying no one notices. If Walter and Nellie are role models on their 50th, so are men who send their wives and kids to church each week alone. So are spouses who abandon their mates for some silly understanding of freedom or success. So are adulterers. The wandering spouses are examples and so are we who merely fidget and watch. Our children watch to see how important this is to us. Couples with problems watch to see what we do when the problems go somewhat public. Couples who don’t currently have problems watch to see how high their own views of marriage should be.

Yes, I’m referring to accountability, edification, and even discipline if need be. We’ll have weaker marriages, poorer children, and anemic family ministry so long as the things we say about marriage and during ceremonies are only theoretical. And we’ll wonder why our efforts aren’t bearing more fruit.

Exalt the significance of marriage at the end?Divorce is not an unpardonable sin. It’s not the worst of sins in its consequences. It is something the Lord hates, though. It is a sin, not just something that happens. It also has devastating consequences that go far beyond the couple in question. It is no more a part of love or mercy to be neutrally encouraging to a