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Note to the Readers:

This is becoming a tougher task each evening! So much to share; so little time for sharing!

Tonight’s liveblog will be legendarily short.

Go read the tweets on Dr. Bauder’s address on the New Jerusalem. I have rarely found myself enthralled

Editor’s Note: This article is reprinted by permission from Getting Somewhere.

Hi, I’m Brent. And I am a recovering legalist. I’m looking for a support group for people like me.

I grew up in a Christian home, had parents who loved me and loved God. I went to church every Sunday, learned all the stories, gave my offerings—even went off to a Christian college. And I loved God—and I still do. But I had a problem— legalism. I didn’t know it was a problem, at least not for a long time.

I was addicted to “the list.” The list was made up of all the things that you were supposed to do and not supposed to do if you wanted to keep God happy with you. Most of the things on the list were good things—some of them even came right out of the Bible. But some of them didn’t. They were passed along to me from several sources, but mostly from the traditions of the church. Since I am not much of a rebel by nature, I had no problem with keeping the list. The problem was what the list did to my Christianity. It became way too much about performance, and not enough about reality. And “spirituality” became more of an issue of conformity than obedience.

And the list led to “the line.” The line was somewhere on the list. When a person kept enough of the list to make it to the line, he could feel good about himself, and about his supposed relationship with God. By measuring up to the line, a person could feel like he was good with God. And he could also feel like he was better than others. Think of it as spiritual arrogance.

And many church members think this is a vacation?!

Tonight, I’m on overload, and I need sleep more than you need to hear what I have to say.

So here is a brief synopsis of Wednesday at GARBC 2009:

1) Dr. John Hartog III’s workshop on leadership was excellent. He rocketed through

^{Editor’s Note: This article is reprinted with permission from Doug Kutilek’s free newsletter “As I See It,” a monthly electronic magazine, and appears here with some editing. AISI is sent free to all who request it by writing to the editor at dkutilek@juno.com.}

On Sunday morning, May 31, 2009, around 10 a.m., Dr. George Tiller, perhaps the most notorious practitioner of late-term abortions in America, was killed in the lobby of a Lutheran church in east Wichita by a lone gunman who fired a single shot into Tiller’s head. Tiller quickly passed into eternity on the floor of the church lobby. He had survived a previous assassination attempt outside his east Wichita abortuary some fifteen years earlier. (Photo credit: L.A. Times)

The perpetrator fled the scene. A suspect, alleged to be the assassin, was apprehended in the Kansas City area (where he lived) less than four hours later and was returned to Wichita where he was subsequently charged, along with other crimes, with first degree murder. Under Kansas law, this offense does not carry the death penalty.

Though I never met George Tiller, I once met his father, Dr. Jack Tiller, who had a family practice at Oliver and Kellogg in east Wichita back in the 1960s and early 1970s. In high school and for a time in college, I was an afternoon delivery driver for a small pharmaceutical company and occasionally made deliveries to Jack Tiller’s office.

When Jack Tiller died in a plane crash in the early 1970s (I don’t recall the precise year), George, not long out of medical school, came to Wichita to take over his father’s practice. This development was close in time to the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling that opened the floodgates to American infanticide. I don’t know if George Tiller ever practiced any kind of “medicine” other than abortion. If so, he soon abandoned it, and the whole of his practice was dealing death to the unborn in cooperation with the mothers of these innocents.