Southern Bread Blog

I finally broke 70 MPG a few fillups ago and I’ve been in the low 70’s ever since. I had been hovering in the high 60’s and the mileage has been increasing steadily since I bought the motorcycle. I guess the engine is breaking in and I’m learning how to drive it better. The tally from my last receipt was 71.5 mpg. I’ve figured out if I keep the RPM’s around 4000 or less then I get the best gas mileage. That usually keeps me at or around 60 mph on the interstate. I get passed a bunch but I don’t care. It’s safer to go slow. Here are my fillups so far:

I read about a new method of packing a pipe in a recent issue of Pipes and Tobacco. It’s called air pocket packing. It involves leaving a small chamber at the base of the bowl that isn’t filled with tobacco. I tried it once and I’ve been packing that way ever since. I’ll try to describe the technique here as best I can. To start with, here is a childish drawing of what you’re trying to achieve:

First, start by taking a large clump of tobacco in your fingers like you would if you were grabbing some Red Man chewing tobacco. Next, rock it slightly back and forth in your fingers with some firm pressure to get the whole thing to clump up and kind of stick together. Once you have a decent ball of tobacco, press it down into the top of the bowl, giving it a slight twist as you push it in. Once it won’t go any further just stop and pluck off any tobacco sticking out of the top. You don’t want it to be too tight and prevent air flow.

This method has a number of benefits. The first is that by not filling the bowl completely it makes it easier to draw. Also, any moisture that collects in the bottom of the bowl (i.e. the gurgles) can be swabbed out by just pushing a pipe cleaner through the stem during your smoke. The air pocket leaves plenty of room for this. Lastly, if you pack it correctly, as you get toward the end of your smoke you can just push the whole clump to the bottom of the bowl and give it a few tamps and finish up the entire thing. This gets some cake development on the bottom of the bowl as well.

So what’s my theory about why people are not coming to worship service as much as they used to? It’s not complicated really. It’s simply boredom. People struggle, as I do, to see how singing a few monotonous choruses and listening to a self-help sermon qualifies as worship. If anything it’s a distraction to true worship. I can sit through an entire John Macarthur sermon on the radio and hang on every word, but I can’t sit through 5 minutes of a normal Sunday morning worship service. And I’m not the only one. I know quite a few people who just go to Sunday School and skip the worship service altogether. For that reason I think people have rightly surmised that the worship service as we know it is in trouble, but they have tried to fix it the wrong way. It’s not the format of the modern worship service that is the problem. It’s the form. And I mean form in the true sense of the word.

Here is how Chesterton reveals “form”:

So with that meaning in mind, what is the true form of worship? I think it can be seen most clearly in the way the early Acts church did things. They didn’t have 2,000 years of pretense and tradition to contend with. They worshipped in the way that felt the most right to them. That involved small groups of people talking, singing and praying together, meeting each other’s needs and keeping each other accountable. We already have a system that looks a lot like that. It’s called Sunday School. If most of us would be honest with ourselves we would admit that Sunday School feels a lot more like true worship than the “worship service”. It’s more raw, and more personal. It just feels more like a “gathering together”. And I think that is the main flaw with modern worship services. The other issues involving format just exaggerate that fundamental problem.

I often wonder why we even still have a worship service at all, but never fear, even with my cynicism in tact I still have a solution. So here is Dave’s 3-step formula for getting people back to the worship service:

1. Shorten the entire service to 30 minutes. The sermon should last no longer than 15 minutes. I am a firm believer that if a sermon lasts longer than 15 minutes you will not retain hardly any of it. If it’s so long that you have to take notes then that’s a problem, because nobody carries there sermon notes around in their pocket all week. Listen up preachers: YOU ARE NOT MORE SPIRITUAL IF YOUR SERMONS ARE LONGER! You have to understand that when you preach for 45 minutes, you are crossing over into lunch time when people are starting to get real hungry, and we’ve already been at church for an hour or more before you started preaching.
2. Bring the children into the service. Children need to see how adults present themselves to God. They can not learn that in “children’s church”. They will see their parents and imitate them. That’s a good thing. The alternative is imitating their friends. That’s not so good.
3. Don’t make the pastor preach every Sunday. I know this is controversial, but I also can’t understand why it would be. It just makes sense to me. A normal pastor can’t possibly visit sick folks, attend meetings, administer the church and still come up with 3 good lessons each week. I think the pastor should only preach once a month. That way he has 4 weeks to come up with a good lesson that is well researched. The rest of the sermons should be done by guest speakers, a core group of good sunday school teachers and anyone else that can teach. Remember, it’s only 15 minutes so even a testimony would be fine.

Maybe I’m living in a fantasy land, but remember, it’s the content that’s sacred, not the format. The format can change radically as long as the core (i.e. it’s “form”), which is worshipping God, is the same. Teach the word, pray and help one another. Anything more than that can be changed whenever necessary.

I read an article today that confirms something that I’ve suspected for quite a while. Sunday morning worship service attendance in the U.S. is declining. Here is the money quote:

This struck me because I think that’s right on the money also. It seems like the decline has happened quickly over just the last few years. It’s not just direct observation that has convinced me of this. It’s things like this flyer I got in the mail the other day from a local church in our area:

Yeeeeeehaaaaaaawwwww!! Anybody for some Sunday morning bluegrass worship? I’m sorry but that’s just goofy. What that says to me is that they are having a difficult time getting people to come to worship and they’re trying everything they can to get people to come. I really see that as a major factor in the whole “contemporary worship” movement. Let’s face it, churches don’t change things unless they have to. And if they are radically changing the worship service then something is evidently wrong. I’ll tell you what I think it is tommorrow.

I know what you’re thinking and no, I didn’t take a picture of my toilet and put it on the blog. This is what you call “twist” tobacco. I recently read about it in the last issue of Pipes and Tobacco magazine. Saying recently is kind of ironic though, because this form of tobacco has been around for centuries. It was a common way of making a tobacco that was very portable. The tight twisting and outer wrap helped to keep it from drying out over time. Because of this it was a favorite of sailors who could just keep it in their pocket over the course of a voyage. It’s still being made by a company called Samuel Gawith and they are evidently one of the only ones in the world making this style of tobacco still.

I managed to get my hands on some last week and got to smoke it for the first time last night. It was a very pleasant smoke. The nicotine content was definitely high so you don’t want to smoke it on an empty stomach if you are sensitive to nicotine as I am. I just peeled it apart and cut it up with kitchen shears into small bits. This seemed to work fine though I’m not sure if it’s the proper way to do it or not. Here are a couple of pics:

You can get some twist for yourself at SmokingPipes.com.

And here’s the review of the above tobacco at TobaccoReviews.com.

Anthony Esolen is, in my opinion, the closest thing you can get to a modern day C.S. Lewis. His article called What Sports Illustrate is packed with great insight. It’s definitely worth your time to read. I was particularly taken by this passage:

He’s spot on in this. Call me a chauvinist if you want to but I will always gravitate toward a man for my intellectual growth. Religious instruction is no exception to this. There is a reason why you don’t see many men in a Kay Arthur class. It’s hard for men to take instruction from women. Something inside of us makes it feel awkward and wants to rebel against it. It’s one of the reasons why we have always had “boys” schools, and why they have always been so successful. It’s just the way we are made. It might not fit the PC mold, but acting like something doesn’t exist doesn’t change the fact that it does.

*Track 1,*Track 2,*Track 3,*Track 4,*Track 5

I guess I’m just on a YouTube kick or something but this is just awesome. Andy McKee is amazing. I love a song that is cleverly translated onto the guitar. This fits the bill nicely:

Andy, I hate you and love you at the same time.

The headquarters for the EWTN catholic television network is located here in Leeds, AL. I passed it this morning on the way to work. I’ve passed it many times in the past but for some reason I just noticed that the sign out in front says: “THIS HOUSE OF WORSHIP IS OPEN TO PEOPLE OF ALL FAITHS.” Excuse me? So you’re saying that if I’m a muslim I can go in to the sanctuary there at EWTN, lay down my prayer rug and pray towards Mecca? That is sick. I knew that Pope John Paul II had handed down lots of inclusivistic language ex cathedra over his tenure, and it looks like it stuck. Maybe Benedict needs to reacquaint himself with 2nd Corinthians:

People try to make that passage mean a lot of things(like marriage) but one thing it definitely means is that worshipping together with people of different faiths is not ok. That is as clear as it can be from scripture. Even if you think that Catholics are not bound by scripture alone, surely they would still hold the words of St. Paul in high regard. High enough to not trample all over them.