From “Video Tapeworm” in Leo Weekly, June 17, 2009, pg 40.

Apparently, one thing still left for nonliteralists to learn is that it is not reasonable to expect to discover a bucket of millenia-old soft tissue.

Landrum, SC – Last week, Blue Ridge Baptist Church announced the hiring of Josh Burns as Minister of Music to the 215 member congregation.  Burns, 22, is a recent graduate of North Greenville University, where he obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in recreational leadership.  We recently sat down with Burns to discuss his new job.

VR:  Josh, good to see you.  Congratulations on your new position.   First of all, what was the church looking for in a minister of music, and why did you get the nod?

JB:  Thanks!  Yeah, I am really excited about it.  I grew up at Blue Ridge and the leadership here has always placed a high priority on “excellence,” especially when it comes to worship.  However, they place an even higher priority on “availability,” so I guess, above all, they were able to recognize my willingness to do it.  Being a recent grad, I was looking for a job, and the church was looking to fill this slot, so I guess it just made sense for everybody involved.

VR: Your educational background is in recreational leadership.  How did this prepare you for being a minister of music?

Believe it or not, there is a lot that is transferable.  For example, in class we learned how to structure round robin tournaments, based on any number of participants.  This has helped me with scheduling members of the worship band.  Generally, every third week each person gets a bye.  Also, I have the band do an icebreaker or team building activity before each service.  I find that it helps us mesh better, musically.

VR:  BRB’s Senior Pastor has affectionately referred to you as “Spartanburg’s Sanjaya.” Where did you learn how to sing.

JB: Coming from him, that is a huge compliment.  Sanjaya is his favorite Idol of all time – he was super bummed that he didn’t make it to the end.  Well, I learned by singing along with CD’s by the Christian band, Third Day.  People say that if they close their eyes, I sound exactly like Mac Powell, maybe just a little bit more nasally.

VR:  You lead worship with an acoustic guitar.   How long have you been playing?

JB:  I picked up the guitar just a couple of years ago.  I noticed that a couple of my buddies in college who played were getting a lot of attention from the girls, so I asked them to teach me a few chords.  They taught me 3 of the most common ones, and I’ve been playing around with it ever since.

VR: Do you play any other instruments?  For example, the bass guitar?

JB:  Yeah, I can probably play the bass.  It’s pretty similar to the regular guitar, right?

VR: Members of the worship band have noticed your uncanny ability to transpose any song into the key of E and any time signature into 4/4.  How do you account for this?

JB: Pardon?  I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question.  Time signature?

VR: Never mind.  We’ll move on.  Have there been any challenges so far, that you’ve had to overcome?

JB: Well, yeah, one issue that we’re currently dealing with has to do with the piano player.  She must not be overly talented because she requires sheet music in order to play.  When I set down a piece of paper with just the lyrics in front of her, it paralyzes her.  So she wastes a lot of our time, having to write in chords over the lyrics.  To make matters worse, she doesn’t have much of a CCM repetoire, so when I say things like “Can’t you play this song the way they did it on the 2nd Passion album,” she is totally lost.

VR: What would you like to accomplish in, say, your first 100 days?  What goals have you set for yourself and the congregation?

JB:  Well, for one thing, there is a wealth of good Christian music out there.  Musically, most of the songs I am thinking of are designed to showcase the ability of the band and the range of the lead singer.  However, I don’t see any reason why these can’t be implemented for congregational singing.

VR: Thanks for your time Josh!  Best of luck to you as you, through your music,  help lead Christian Solidiers onward as they are “Marching to Zion” under the “Old Rugged Cross.”

JB:  Sorry?

Knoxville, Tenn. – Rocky Top Community Church will hold their fifth annual Junk in the Trunk fall festival on Friday, October 31.  The festivities will be held in the church parking lot between 6 and 9 pm.

The first festival was held in 2004, when church staff recognized the need to provide an alternative to the pagan rituals practiced every year at this time in Knoxville area neighborhoods.  “Halloween is a pagan holiday that promotes death, evil, the supernatural, and cavities,” explains Justin Trueblood, Minister to Children and Families at Rocky Top Community Church.

“We wanted to reclaim Halloween for Christ,” explains Trueblood.  “So we adopted the holiday wholesale, except we moved it from the streets to the church parking lot.”   Junk in the Trunk gets its name from the practice of having church members hand out candy from the trunks of their vehicles.

According to Trueblood, the primary purpose of the festival is to provide a “safe and sanctified” venue for children whose Christian parents want them withdrawn even further from the culture.  However, the event also draws many unchurched kids from the neighborhood.

“I’m definitely going to Junk in the Trunk again this year,” says Austin Fairman, an 11-year old that lives a block away from the Rocky Top church.  The youngster explains that since there is so much distance between the homes in his neighborhood, it takes a long time to get a significant amount of candy.  However, when he goes to the church parking lot, he can fill up his pillowcase in about 15 minutes.         

“In a way, it is an outreach,” says Trueblood.  “Not that we present the gospel or anything, but when church members take candy out of their cars and put it into the kiddies’ jack-o-lantern buckets they reach out their arms.” 

In the past, Junk in the Trunk has received criticism from more conservative churches.  Last year, Gerald Williams, pastor of Regulative Reformed Presbyterian church in Maryville, Tennessee, was reported as saying that Rocky Top Community Church is “the world in a church’s costume.” 

Regulative Reformed Presbyterian chooses instead to celebrate Reformation Day on October 31.  This year’s events will include a contest to see how many strokes of a hammer it takes for contestants to nail a facsimile of Luther’s 95 theses to a hardwood door as well as a prize for the attendee with the squarest jaw.  A stout German lager will flow freely from the tap, which will serve as fuel for the annual farting contest, a kirk favorite.         

Boston, Mass – Before he visited the popular faith healer Benny Hinn, Adam Petrovicki was a skeptic.  “I was agnostic,” explains Petrovicki, a 16 year old junior at Fenway High School, “but I was intrigued by Hinn every time I would watch his ministry, late at night when I couldn’t sleep.” 

“It is fascinating to watch people come to Hinn in wheelchairs, get healed, and walk gingerly off the stage,” says Petrovicki.  “I couldn’t help wondering if it could happen to me.”  What makes this personal for Petrovicki is the fact that he has suffered from Tourette’s Syndrome since he was three years old.  Tourette’s is an inherited neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by involuntary outbursts of socially inappropriate, offensive, and often vulgar expletives, called tics.

As a result, Petrovicki joined 18,000 others in Boston’s TD Banknorth Garden, the site of Benny Hinn’s latest crusade.  The teenager also found himself among thousands of others hoping for a miracle, when the time came in the service for healing.  Unfortunately, Hinn’s screeners bypassed Petrovicki after a brief interview.  “I didn’t fit the profile of what they were looking for,” said Petrovicki.  “They were looking for people with general head or back pain…or people on crutches.”  Petrovicki also speculates that since the crusade was televised, the producers didn’t want to take a chance that he would tic on the air.

Disappointed and disillusioned, Petrovicki was about to give up on his brief experience with religion, but decided to attend church the next day – “to give God one last chance to prove himself,” as he puts it.  At random Petrovicki selected the First Baptist Church of Boston.  Much to Petrovicki’s surprise, he heard the gospel message clearly presented, walked the aisle, and had a conversion experience.

Astoundingly, Petrovicki’s conversion to Christianity brought about a miraculous change to his Tourette’s.  “Before, I would spew forth vulgarities that would make a sailor blush,” explained Petrovicki.  “Now, well, I …er, ugh…geez, frick, shoot, dang-it, gosh darn freaking, sonuva gun!….as you can tell, I still tic, but what comes out is this non-offensive, sanitized, slang.” 

According to Petrovicki, his post-conversion symptoms are such an improvement that “it’s as good as being fully healed.”  He reports that when he has an episode around his new Christian friends, they dont’t even notice.  In fact, says Petrovicki, “I think a lot of my Christian friends have Tourettes too.”

Pawtucket, R.I. – On Monday, Hasbro Inc. announced a new and improved version of the classic Easy-Bake Oven.  The updated version of the best-selling toy oven, originally manufactured in 1963 by Kenner Products, contains many earth-friendly features, and is marketed towards environmentally conscious youngsters and their parents.

The new ”green” oven, is now actually green, replacing the traditional mustard color.  Though the shell, made from recycled plastics, was painted in China, Hasbro assures customers that the paint contains no lead.

The most significant change in the Enviro-Friendly version is the heating element, with the standard 100 watt light bulb being replaced by a 25 watt compact flourescent light bulb (CFL).

“We realized that by using incandescent bulbs, the traditional oven was not only heating up little cakes, but was also responsible for heating up the globe,” explains Mark Newland, Hasbro’s Product Development Manager.  “According to the consensus of all scientists everywhere, the use of these light bulbs has led to global climate change,” added Newland. 

“By using energy-efficient CFLs as the heating element in the new ovens, Hasbro is doing its part to reduce carbon footprints among toy users,” announced Newland to wild applause and the flashing of hundreds of cameras at Monday’s press conference. 

However, not all reviews of the latest Easy-Bake Oven have been favorable.  Skye Parker, a 10-year old from New Haven, Connecticut received a beta version from Hasbro last month.  “It was really bad,” said Skye.  “I wanted to make cookies, so I put the dough in the oven and turned it on.  I checked on it every hour for a whole day, and it never even got hot,” reported the young reviewer, who eventually gave up.  “I wanted to just go ahead and eat the raw cookie dough, but my mom said I couldn’t because it would give me worms.” 

When reached for comment, a Hasbro spokesperson suggested that perhaps the young girl did not follow the manufacturers directions and, instead, mistakenly used a cookie dough that was not certified organic.

Shanghai, China - A recent report finds that China’s severely limited bandwidth is being sapped by blogs that have been “orphaned.”  The phenomenon occurs when a user fails to post updates and, after a period of significant neglect, finally abandons the online journal.

The report finds that most Chinese citizens begin new blogs, rather than update old ones, after an average of 8 months of neglect.  “I needed a fresh start,” says Tan Dao, an economics major at the University of Shanghai, who is now on his third blog. 

“I just got busy and lazy, I guess, and didn’t update my blog for about a year.  It would have been embarrassing to post again, never mind that all my friends probably haven’t looked at it in 11 months…so I just started another one,” Dao explains.  The average resident of China has 3.6 blogs. 

The study finds that subsequent blogs tend to take on a slightly different look and feel, and are devoted, at least initially, to a specific theme.  This finding is contradictory to a previous study, which claimed that all Chinese blogs look the same.

China’s population, now approximately 1.3 billion, has led to a soaring data density.  The country’s bandwidth per capita (bpc) is currently the lowest in the world.  Orphaned blogs, most of which have active RSS feeds, links with search engines, and embedded images and videos result in a critical bandwidth shortage.      

According to most experts, these recent findings will undoubtedly lead China to implement a ”One-Blog” policy, strictly sanctioning those who begin new blogs.