The Museum trip is now postponed to the weekend of August 29-31.  There were a bunch of conflicts in people's schedules for this week and the next, which made it necessary to change the time.  That weekend is now the FINAL date.  We will not be postponing it again.

All other details are still in place, except that the cost of food is going to be lower than we anticipated (which is good!).  We are now thinking meals will be around an average of $4 per meal per person.

Please let us know for sure whether or not you will be coming, if you have expressed interest.  You must contact us by August 25, 2008 if you are planning to participate, but definitely the sooner the better.  Thanks!

 

From Josiah

Our Creation rally Monday, July 21 was a smashing success. We had close to fifty people attend, at least two-thirds of whom were young people. We re-organized the schedule for the evening at the last minute, so that we sang first, then Mr. Orcutt spoke, then we had pizza, then games, and finally, the door prizes and dinosaur giveaway. This lineup made for a much more suspenseful and dramatic evening I believe.

Special thanks to Pastor John Griffith and Faith Independent Baptist Church for the use of their folding chairs, to my brother John for his great work in helping clean the building, and to Rahab Hackett for the piano and harp music. Also, thanks to my dad, Roy Magnuson, for his brilliance of ideas and hard work helping me organize everything, and to all those who provided food, drinks, donations, etc., including my sister Stephanie for baking her famous giant chocolate-chip cookies!

Thanks most of all to our amazing speaker, Mr. Jon Orcutt. Mr. Orcutt spoke on the need for leadership in America from a Creationist perspective. He emphasized that a new reformation is within our reach. He said if all the two million Christian homeschooled kids in the United States would mobilize and take initiative, it would be a complete juggernaut for the forces of evil in our country. However, he said that nothing will happen until we are willing to face real persecution and perhaps death. We must, in truth, give everything we have back to our Creator.

My dad gave a brief invitation after this stirring message. He asked whether anyone wanted to change from being a "consumer" Christian to a "producer" Christian. Did we want to seriously follow Christ in our lives? Many people raised their hands.

Afterwards, the pizza was great and the games were a blast. We played "Upset the Fruit Basket," in which players must switch seats when their team name (a kind of fruit) is called. We also played the secret magazine game (shhh!) where players take turns trying to figure out how the second of two people is being communicated to regarding which magazine of nine the first of the two people has chosen. There was also a treasure hunt for the younger children, for four lizards hidden around the building.

The life-size dinosaur turned out to be (for those who didn't know what it was) a model of a baby T-Rex. It was only about two feet high. An often-asked question is, "How could Noah have gotten all those dinosaurs on the Ark?" The answer is that the dinosaurs on the Ark, like the baby T-Rex, would not have had to have been fully grown; and, very few dinosaurs grew to a large size to begin with. The average size of a dinosaur is currently estimated to have been somewhere around the size of a sheep.

We concluded in a word of prayer, asking God to continue to bless our efforts and help us finish raising the money for our Creation Museum trip in mid-August, and praising him for the wonderful success which our meeting was!

Hopefully, we will be able to have another meeting like that in the not-too-distant future. Also, we are hoping we can have a fund-raising car wash sometime in the first week of August, perhaps Wednesday afternoon the 6th.

Thanks again to everyone for your ongoing prayers and efforts! God Bless!

Saturday we were able to pass out nearly 50 Chick tracts around the mall.  Some people gave out cookies with the tracts.  We were going to do it at the park as usual, but it was raining.

Overall, the people we gave tracts to seemed fairly interested.  The question I mainly asked was, "Would you like to know about your Creator?"  I think some people said "Jesus Loves You" and of course then there was the perennial "Would you like a tract?"    But mostly we tried to be creative.

Afterwards, we ate ice cream!

Let's keep praying for the people to think about the message we gave and get right with God!

Yesterday we scheduled our first more official meeting in a while for the evening of March 29, at my house.  We will be discussing the new Answers magazine program and a members' handbook, and hopefully adopting our "square-rooted" new constitution.    From Josiah

We discussed several strategy issues, including deciding to adopt as our three key points the themes "Creation, Constitution, Cross."  We also tentatively decided to launch a fundraiser selling Answers magazines (published by the ministry Answers In Genesis) and use the money to pay for a trip to their Creation Museum later this spring.  Finally, we reviewed the ideas of our new, simplified constitution-in-the-making.