StraightTalk with Jamie

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StraightTalk with Jamie (Ministries magazine – Fall 1983) (Q&A with Jamie) – Q. I’m a pastor who is considering a call to a new church and the finance committee has asked if I will be willing to come for less than I’m being paid in my present position. How should I respond?…

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Conducting The Small Meeting

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Conducting The Small Meeting (Ministries magazine – Fall 1983) – When you think of a group of Christian leaders seated around a conference table, your mind should conjure up the impression of a great reservoir of spiritual power. Unfortunately, instead of a reservoir what you often find is a swamp. Both contain water, but while the reservoir is pure water, waiting to be channeled, a swamp is stale, defies runoff (much less channeled use), and is a breeding place for unpleasant — even dangerous — things…

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Reconciliation (publication unknown, around 1983)

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Reconciliation (Publication unknown, around 1983) Jamie discusses the importance of reconciliation with former associates, relatives, and friends, and the difference between that and the restoration of relationships, which may never be possible. He uses his own life, and his church, as an example. “It has been 15 years since the Brevard Baptist Association refused to seat our church at the annual association meeting….”

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The death penalty. Is it right? (April 1983)

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The death penalty. Is it right? (April 1983) – Last fall a young Spirit-filled couple who lived a few miles from us opened their hearts to a lonely Cuban refugee. One morning when the husband called his bride from work she didn’t answer. Worried, he hurried home. He found her naked body sprawled on the floor. There were 17 stab wounds and she had been sexually tortured before she died. An 11-inch butcher knife protruded from her neck…

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The greatest serenade (May 1983) – I’ve missed

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The greatest serenade (May 1983) – I’ve missed the song of the whippoorwills in the early morning hours this year. Each year, since we have moved out into the pine trees in the rural section of our little Florida community, the whippoorwills have returned in February. Nocturnal songsters, they have serenaded me with their plaintive calls coming through the tall trees in front of our house, wafting their echoing voices into our upstairs bedroom long before dawn…

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Bibles bound in shoe leather (June 1983) –

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Bibles bound in shoe leather (June 1983) – I thought the fighting had died down, but it seems the evangelicals are still shooting at each other over the question of whether the Bible is “inerrant” or merely “inspired.” It seems to me, though, that unless the Word of God is transferred from book to heart, the question of inerrancy is meaningless. It all came to mind this last week when I was cleaning out my bookcase and found an old Bible with the pages half-missing and the cover chewed away by roaches. The sensible thing was to throw it away, but somehow it didn’t seem right to drop a Bible in the trash can…

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Child rearing: a remembered art (August 1983) –

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Child rearing: a remembered art (August 1983) – One affliction common among grandparents is the urge to take over. I’ve watched my mother, who is 85, do this to our children. Now, as my own five children grow up, marry and start having children of their own I find myself doing the same thing. In fact, it’s hard to keep from taking over when you know you can do it better — and with my five grandchildren I am no exception…

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Their roads just stop (December 1983) – Irian

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Their roads just stop (December 1983) – Irian Jaya is — quite literally — earth’s uttermost part. Lying six degrees south of the equator in the South Pacific, it makes up the western half of the island of New Guinea. Even the Indonesian travel brochure stuck in the seat pocket of the Garuda Airlines described it as “primitive” with extreme heat in the snake-infested jungles…

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