For the next few weeks, we at Baptist Blogger hope to provide some remedial homemaking assistance to the fine young ladies who are soon to flood the campus of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.  It is our prayer that these ladies will benefit from the lessons.  Today’s lesson: “How to Thread a Kenmore Vintage Sewing Machine.”

It is a little after 4:00 PM CST, and I’m sitting at Chili’s Too in the main terminal of Dallas Love Field. In about at hour I will board a plane for St. Louis, where I will attend the trustee meeting of the International Mission Board and the appointment service tomorrow evening in Cape Girardeau. Several of my fellow former seminarians will be commissioned to serve overseas in restricted-access countries, and within a few weeks they will depart for the ends of the earth in obedience to the Lord’s command.

This morning was a tremendously busy morning, and I was afraid that I would have to cancel my trip at the last minute. For several weeks, our church has been dealing with an insurance claim to renovate our worship auditorium, which was filled with raw sewage earlier this month after the city of Arlington failed to maintain the lines properly. We have been forced to meet in our fellowship hall for the past three Sundays, and we will meet there for another three until the repairs/renovations are complete.

When I return from St. Louis on Wednesday, I will meet with our church for the mid-week prayer service, and then I will be in the library at Baylor University for two days at the end of the week. People often wonder how it is possible to lead a church when your travel and study schedules are so busy. The people who ask such questions do not understand, of course, what a remarkable team of lay ministers have been given to Parkview Baptist Church. With the finest, humblest, and most self-sacrificing deacon servants under heaven, as well as the many women who serve in key positions of leadership by handling our church finances, children ministries, and hospitality/grief ministry, and the ministry staff who are able to anticipate my thoughts and act accordingly, I am able to devote myself to sermon preparation, hospital visitation, evangelistic efforts, and academic pursuits.

I am in the process of finalizing a sermon that I will preach at our sister congregation, Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, at the request of their pastor, the Rev. Dwight McKissic. This Sunday evening, November 5, 2006, Parkview Baptist Church will join Cornerstone for an evening of worship. The message will be recorded, and I will make it available online.

Next week, I will be attending a session of the Annuity Board trustee meeting in Dallas, TX, and meeting with a group of North Texas pastors and laymen who share a common commitment to resisting the fundamentalist fringe in the SBC who wish to isolate, control, and excise their fellow inerrantists who believe our historic Baptist identity is regularly compromised by the well-meaning efforts of theological perverts who have arisen in these last days.

The following week I will attend the annual meeting of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention in Austin, TX. I will leave that meeting to attend a session of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, where I have been asked to meet with a group of young BGCT pastors who will attend their first annual meeting of the SBC this coming June.

The week after that I will travel to Washington, D.C. for the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, after which I am scheduled to have a research interview inside the Beltway. The week after that is Thanksgiving, and the following week I will attend a pastor’s roundtable in Arlington.

I will be blogging from/about all these meetings, beginning tonight from St. Louis.