The church, located in Springfield, joined the Adopt-a- Church Program created by NAMB in response to the hurricanes’ destruction. This program partners healthy churches with churches that were either damaged or destroyed by the recent hurricanes. "We really prayed God would connect us with the right church," said Jeff Blevins, pastor of Western Oaks. It took almost seven weeks after registering online to be matched with a church. "Part of that was because of Hurricane Rita, so it took a little longer."

Blevins involved the entire church body in the partnership from the beginning. He signed the church up with the Adopt-a- Church Program during a Sunday morning worship service. The ministry’s Web site was brought up on the auditorium’s big screen and the congregation participated as the registration form was completed online.

Western Oaks has been partnered with North Vermillion Baptist Church, in Abbeville, La., a small town in extreme southern Louisiana. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, the church had an average Sunday morning worship attendance of 90 people. Immediately following Hurricane Katrina that number was reduced to 55. Now attendance has moved up into the 70s. According to Blevins, a third of the church members were dispersed by the hurricane, and many of the people now attending were brought in through the mission efforts of the two churches.

A team of four people left Western Oaks for North Vermillion in early November, taking a trailer load of supplies church members had donated. The team also delivered $550 worth of Wal-Mart gift cards, a check for almost $3,500 for the church’s pastor and his wife and what Blevins describes as, "another sizeable check."

Western Oaks obtained the names of nearly 150 children in Abbeville from North Vermillion. The Illinois church bought Christmas gifts for all of the children and made sure the gifts arrived in time for Christmas.

Western Oaks has offered to pay the church’s mortgage for a few months this year when North Vermillion’s sponsoring church is no longer covering the cost. (North Vermillion is a mission). They also plan to help North Vermillion constitute as a church. "Long-term, we hope to help them get strong again," said Blevins.

This year, Western Oaks hopes to send a team to Louisiana to help build a small children’s building for the church. "We will try to help with resources and people power," Blevins told the Illinois Baptist.

Three other churches have also committed to partner with North Vermillion. Those churches are located in Massachusetts, South Carolina and Kentucky.

According to Blevins only a small percentage of the Western Oaks’ membership have a Baptist background. "It’s (the partnership) a very good opportunity to help people in our church understand what Southern Baptists are about. It’s a good environment for teaching what we need to do."

The partnership also fits Western Oaks’ vision statement to "be a church of influence where people live like Jesus loves," said Blevins.

Other plans include a possible pulpit exchange, youth mission trip in 2007 and helping the Louisiana church hold a Vacation Bible School.

For more information about the Adopt-a-Church Program go to www.namb.net

My problem was not in taking the command seriously. I just couldn’t figure out how to do it. How can we magnify or enlarge God? I don’t think that’s possible. He already pervades the whole universe. But we can magnify our concepts and increase our perspective of Him.

A few years ago we were planning to vacation in one of the scenic spots of our nation. Before we left, one of our sons presented us with a powerful and expensive set of binoculars. These would not actually make the scenery larger or more beautiful. Yet it would appear so to us.

Binoculars magnify a specific item by blocking out the foreground, eliminating the background and optically bringing the object closer to our vision. They cause us to see in detail as though we had moved much closer.

Could this be what the psalmist is requesting? Just as we focus our binoculars on a subject, we are to “zero in” on God. We are to block out the foreground and eliminate the background that can so easily distract our attention from Him. We can bring Him into focus once more, get our eyes off of the gifts and fix them on the giver.

What’s the best set of binoculars God has given us? We probably can’t narrow it to just one thing, but I believe praise would have to be near the top of the list. When we’re praising in depth, we become like the three disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration after the voice of the Lord had spoken. They exclaimed, “We see no man save Jesus only.” Praise causes us to get caught up with the person of God and not just His program. It magnifies God to our vision, making Him nearer and dearer to our lives.

On the wings of praise we can be lifted into the presence of God, for that’s His required means of entrance. By praise we can see into the nature of God far more clearly. As we vocalize our praise we can release our deepest feelings of love and adoration unto our gracious Lord. So, “Let such as love thy salvation say continually, ‘The Lord be magnified.’” (Psa. 40:16)

In this last connection, you should read the biography of world-renowned George Washington Carver of Tuskegee Institute. Though world and industrial leaders tried to hire him away, he was content to keep working in his lab down in Alabama, spinning out the most amazing inventions, giving credit to God all along. For instance, Carver was stymied while inventing sandpaper; the sand kept scraping off. But then, by the scientist’s account, the Lord told him in a dream to boil the sand first, and upon waking he did just that, with great results. Carver was only too pleased to announce the providence of God in both the world and in his own scientific discoveries. But what did he know. He lacked even the intellectual sophistication of today’s editorial cartoonists and high biology teachers who sneer at ID.

“Friends of science” urge ID proponents to bring God talk up in Sunday School if they can’t help themselves, but, for goodness’ sake, they need to shut up about God on the public school field trip. Instead, they must stick to some version of “it just happened” – proteins clumped, enzymes flexed, primordial soup bubbled, winds blew, things mated, mutants soared and "Voila!," you have Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion.”  While they may not be able to say exactly how we got from trilobites to the Reformation using only natural selection, we just have to give them time. Time, that is, of two sorts: 1. Gazillions of years to allow for all the happy and unhappy accidents it took for raw carbon and other elements to form single-celled organisms and then develop into Harvard professors; 2. Gazillions of years (if necessary), for scientists to figure out the purely materialistic explanation. They demand a blank check wherewith to buy all the time they need, no matter how obvious it is to most that they’ll never succeed in marginalizing God’s contribution.

I’m reminded of the popular TV show, “CSI” (Crime Scene Investigation), where forensic scientists track down criminals who did the best to cover their tracks. Try as these felons might to swab up the blood, burn the documents or bury the weapons, the sleuths (I’ve always wanted to use that word since reading the Hardy Boys mysteries in my childhood) track them down, whether with black light, DNA analysis of a single fiber or hair or microscopic scrutiny of scratches on a shin bone.

Imagine a CSI cop announcing immediately that the corpse in the park “just died” and then shushing anyone who suggested it wasn’t just from natural causes. When a rookie suggests that someone else might have been involved, he’s quickly told that good CSI men don’t talk that way, that the only proper explanation involves something like a blood clot in the brain, a falling branch or potassium imbalance. To suggest otherwise is simply unscientific. Of course, it’s ridiculous, yet biologists get away this with sort of imperious behavior all the time.

In suggesting that a purely scientific explanation is possible, they, in effect, credit God with the most amazing cover-up in history. Though the Lord has created everything and sustains the universe with his unflinching attention, He has done so without giving away His activity. On their model, one can study the eye or the food chain for a lifetime and find not a trace of intelligence to it; it’s just chance circumstance. What a master God is at masking His providence! Of course, I’m being sarcastic. Signs everywhere, as countless scientists and poets have declared throughout the centuries.

But surely I’m missing the point. It’s not that scientists deny the existence of God. (Actually many of them do, from the vituperative Richard Dawkins to 90 percent of the National Academy of Sciences, who obviously favor agnostics and atheists in choosing their membership.) It’s that they have to stick to testable hypotheses while doing science. And, so their reasoning goes, God’s presence is not verifiable by experience.

But wait, in real life, CSI people don’t always get their man or woman. They don’t always succeed in confirming their hypothesis that someone did it. Does that make their claim unscientific? No, for there is conceivable confirmation of their claim if not actual confirmation. They can imagine what it would be like to catch the culprit.  But, so the argument goes, there is no conceivable way to confirm experientially a claim that God did the deed.

Actually, that’s not true. In the Judgment, before every knee bows and every tongue confesses, the Lord could say to scientists and non-scientists alike, “By the way, I made the universe.” That would be confirmation. Ah, they would say, but not during this present age, when science must do its work. Okay, try this. Say that one day at noon, every engine and motor shuts down. When people run outside to see what happened, a booming voice proclaims, “I am the Lord God and I have stopped things to announce my sovereignty!” (Something like a dramatic confession in the old Perry Mason courtrooms.)

Sure, but that would be a miracle, and not the stuff of science. But wait a second, they asked for conceivable verification, not conceivable verification using only ordinary physical laws. That would be adding a stricture, which, by definition, excludes intelligent design. It’s like proving the illegitimacy of intelligent design by stipulating the illegitimacy of intelligent design.

Besides, the noontime announcement would not simply be a physical miracle, like the arbitrary reversal of a river’s flow and the mid-January budding of a pear tree in sub-zero weather. God is not a thing. He’s a person, an all-powerful person, and He can do what He jolly well pleases when He jolly well pleases. And if your science makes no room for that, then so much the worse for your science.

You really don’t need astonishing mid-day announcements from the heavens to understand somebody is behind the universe. Most people can tell just by looking. And what’s so embarrassing about saying, as thoroughly scientific doctors often do, “There’s nothing that can explain this except divine action”? They know there is more to the universe than endoplasmic reticula, synapses and their ilk. And they don’t lose their licenses or reputations when they admit this – even in the hospital, and not just in Sunday School.

On another trip on another day, I was worshipping with one of the nearly 1,100 outstanding Southern Baptist churches in Illinois when I discovered that I could not see the speaker primarily due to the rather tall person seated in front of me. I spent the entire morning shifting from side to side, unfortunately in sync with his shifting. “I can’t see! What’s happening?”  At the end of the service I bowed my head as the invitation began. When the invitation was over, I looked up and realized that the tall dude had moved. “I can see!” Then the pastor introduced those who had made decisions. He introduced the tall guy.

Sometimes I fail to see what God is doing because I have my eyes closed by tradition or comfort. Sometimes I fail to see due to self-absorption, circumstances or things that get in my way.  When I open my eyes and look beyond the immediate circumstances and myself, I discover once again that God is working all around me in ways that I could never imagine. I see souls being saved, lives being transformed, new congregations starting and existing churches being strengthened. I am amazed at volunteers helping in times of need. I observe great generosity through faithful Cooperative Program giving and giving to state missions, Lottie, Annie, disaster relief and world hunger.  I see people who are on mission. Indeed, I see Acts 1:8 in action.

God is doing great things in Illinois.  And I believe that the greatest days are ahead! I am reminded of this as I travel from north to south and from east to west. Our great God is doing great things through a great people known as Illinois Baptists. Is this a great state or what?

This heart-wrenching story from Sago, West Virginia reminded us concerning the finality of death and man’s thoughts of life beyond the physical world.  It reminded me of the joy of God’s salvation and the security that we have in Jesus Christ – that calm assurance of passing from this life to the other side. 

This tragedy has reminded me of the struggle every human faces in this transition to the other side.  I probably will not die in a coalmine fighting toxic gases, but I know that my body will also strain and struggle for those last breathes of air while at death’s door on this side of eternity.  Mr. Toler didn’t want to die like he did, he struggled against it, but in the end he expressed a message of hope.      

The “other side” is important to Christians.  We sing about the streets of gold and preach about how the Lord will wipe away all our tears.  Pain and sorrow will be no more.  The old order of things will pass away.  No more hunger or thirst. The Lamb will be our shepherd.  He will lead us into springs of living water.  We will experience a new heaven and a new earth!  Yet, I want to live a little longer with my family, experiencing life and serving my Savior.  I know this world is not my home, but I struggle to stay a little longer.

Over eight million people in Illinois need to hear the clear and convincing hope we have about the “other side” through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.  The new year of 2006 can be an exciting year on “this side” of eternity as we join Southern Baptists around the nation in reaching and baptizing one million souls.  Everyone will die – most are not prepared for the other side. They need us while they are still alive.  Join this challenge!