Oklahombres

ists are popular these days on blogs of all types. “Christian” blogs are no exceptions:

1. Four Keys to a Fruitful Pastorate This is hardly a list at all, but good, much-needed advice.
2. Ten Reasons to Oppose a Wall Street Bailout
3. Top Ten Ways to Write Bad Worship Songs
4. Ten Reasons Why I Appreciate the ESV Study Bible
5. Four Lists on Lists, and the Big List

There are five reasons why lists are so popular:

1. They are so easy to create.
2. They are easy to read, digest, and remember.
3. Lists represent a body of knowledge, making its author seem knowledgeable.
4. Lists are a natural way to process information: grocery lists, to-do lists, hit lists, black lists.
5. Most of all, it has been shown that posts made up of lists tend to boost rankings with the blog-bean counters such as Technorati.

Five keys to good lists.

1. Be funny.
2. Be brief.
3. Be informative.
4. Make lists about the minutiae of life, things you don’t normally think about.
5. Lists need to contain at least five items, but no more than a dozen or so.

Martin Luther would have made a good blogger. He certainly was a good list maker. It was on this day in 1517 that this German monk of the Augustinian order wrote a list with ninety-five items. He felt so strongly about that list that he went and nailed it to the church door in Wittenburg, Germany. The list contained things like:

1. The Pope wears funny clothes.
2. And he has bad breath too.
3. Why can’t we build St. Peters in Germany?
4. Do the mass in German. The higher critics will be speaking it in four-hundred years anyway.
5. Besides all that, I want to get married.

Many Christians wrongly believe that Luther’s list of ninety-five eventually boiled down to the five points of Calvinism, when in fact they shook out to make the five solas, but those two lists need to be saved for another post.

Have a happy Halloween Reformation Day and “Boo” to you too, Michael.

y daughter is struggling with preschool Sunday school that she helps teach in her SBC church. The director finds Scripture memorization of a lesser value than “Bible thoughts” and “conversation” with the children. I fear greatly  that this is the case in too many of our Sunday-school programs. We are too busy teaching morality from Lifeway to understand the logic of learning.

The Poll-Parrot stage is the one in which learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable; whereas reasoning is difficult and, on the whole, little relished. At this age, one readily memorizes the shapes and appearances of things; one likes to recite the number-plates of cars; one rejoices in the chanting of rhymes and the rumble and thunder of unintelligible polysyllables; one enjoys the mere accumulation of things.
Dorthy Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning; a paper delivered at Oxford, 1947.

The essay from which this quote is taken sparked the home-schooling movement in America. At least one man, Douglas Wilson, picked up on the idea and wrote a magnificant book on classical education called Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning. Dorthy Sayers’ essay is reprinted in the appendix of Wilson’s book.

Oh that more Southern Baptist preachers, teachers, and parents would understand that morality lessons from the Bible cannot take the place of simple memorization of critical passages of Scripture; passages that may one day - by God’s grace and the power of the Holy Spirit - I say may one day take root in the heart of a child to the lasting benefit of their immortal soul. Wilson’s book would be a good start towards that understanding, but God has to change the mind set of many - most in the SBC.