{"id":1475,"date":"2010-04-08T01:00:29","date_gmt":"2010-04-08T09:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/?p=1475"},"modified":"2016-01-23T21:40:05","modified_gmt":"2016-01-24T05:40:05","slug":"the-beacon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/2010\/04\/08\/the-beacon\/","title":{"rendered":"The Beacon"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>by Stephen Rodgers<\/em><\/p>\n<p>As I sat down to write this article, I was confused (which isn&#8217;t going to surprise anyone who knows me). I could have sworn that I already wrote something to this effect, and in a sense I have. There is a lot of information scattered about, mostly in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/?cat=6\">Editor&#8217;s Notes<\/a> since October 2009, that pertains to this blog, its purpose, and its hopes and dreams for the future (at least, insofar as a blog can have hopes and dreams).<\/p>\n<p>But I guess I failed to articulate exactly what it is that the Beacon DOES, and WHY.<\/p>\n<p>Just like it says in the sidebar over there, the Beacon is the official newsletter of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lighthousebc.com\/\">Lighthouse Bible Church<\/a>. We&#8217;re NOT the website&#8230;you&#8217;ve already met <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/?p=1228\">Kyle and his band of merry rogues<\/a> who handle all of that. Rather, we&#8217;re the central means of communication on the website. This is where the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/?cat=14\">pastors<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/?cat=7\">elders<\/a> write their weekly messages to the church. This is where <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/?cat=12\">ministries<\/a> highlight their goals and needs. This is where the staff of the newsletter posts articles to inform, edify, and encourage. (Ok, that&#8217;s hard to link; just look under CATEGORIES to the right). At the end of the day, we&#8217;re just a 21st century means of promoting what Paul talks about in Ephesians 4.<\/p>\n<p>Let me walk you through it if you don&#8217;t mind:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Working for the Beacon will test your humility, gentleness, and patience (Eph 4:1-2). The editor (moi) is tested when he hounds the writers for their articles. I&#8217;m sure the writers are tested in the hounding as well.<\/li>\n<li>Sometimes squabbles ensue. Guess what? There&#8217;s directions for that too (Eph 4:3).<\/li>\n<li>As a staff member, sometimes it&#8217;s easy to think that the Beacon exists for your benefit. Not true. We&#8217;re primarily here to serve and assist the leaders of the church (Eph 4:11) as they serve and instruct the church (Eph 4:12) for the purpose of dragging all of us, kicking and screaming, in Christ-likeness (Eph 4:13).<\/li>\n<li>Sometimes that means that the articles focus on what we&#8217;re doing WRONG (Eph 4:14)&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>&#8230;but there&#8217;s a WAY that is done (Eph 4:15)&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>&#8230;and there&#8217;s a REASON for it to be done that particular way (Eph 4:16).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I could go on and on, but I trust you get the point. You can (and should) read the rest of that chapter for yourself. It&#8217;s not always easy to accept, particularly the application, but as the kids say these days, &#8220;that&#8217;s how we roll.&#8221; (Or at least, that&#8217;s how we SHOULD if we are obedient to God and sensitive to the Scriptures).<\/p>\n<p>Lately however, I&#8217;ve been struggling a little bit with the enormity of the SCOPE of this command. And by that I don&#8217;t mean the fact that it pertains to my entire life as a Christian and not just &#8220;Church stuff.&#8221; No, I&#8217;m talking about the scope of the audience.<\/p>\n<p>Now I need to be careful here so that this doesn&#8217;t come out of a place of pride, but lately we&#8217;ve been growing like crazy. In the past six months, our readership has increased by around 1,000%. In the last month alone, it&#8217;s up by about 40% and there&#8217;s no sign that we&#8217;re slowing down yet. In fact, I tracked where our visitors have been coming from for the last 30 days, and this is what I discovered:<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1485\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/files\/2010\/04\/beacon_map_04072010.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1485\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1485\" title=\"beacon_map_04072010\" src=\"http:\/\/www.lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/files\/2010\/04\/beacon_map_04072010-300x151.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"151\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/files\/2010\/04\/beacon_map_04072010-300x151.jpg 300w, https:\/\/lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/files\/2010\/04\/beacon_map_04072010.jpg 644w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1485\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Beacon Readers<\/p><\/div>\n<p>I know that&#8217;s not the best map (we&#8217;re working on a better one for next time), but let me break that down for you briefly: thousands of people from six continents are reading this. Now the vast majority of them are from North America, that&#8217;s not a huge surprise. And I can guess who some of the others are: my fiancee&#8217;s church is most likely the dot in the Czech Republic, and I still have a few friends from the time I spent living in India. Given the demographics of our church, I&#8217;m not too startled we&#8217;ve got a dot in South Korea, and we have members and former-members currently living in northern California and the east coast. But Saudi Arabia? Sweden? Australia? I have no idea who they might be. And honestly, I don&#8217;t need to know.<\/p>\n<p>Because God does.<\/p>\n<p>You see, in this way, the Beacon is a microcosm of the Christian life. We go through this world, putting off the old man (Eph 4:22), putting on the new (Eph 4:24), loving God and loving our neighbors (Matt 22:37-39), and we&#8217;re never quite sure who might be watching. (And a quick reminder, if you&#8217;re only going through the motions to be seen in the first place, you&#8217;re doing it wrong. Jesus talked about that in Matthew 6:1 and following). Rather, we&#8217;re the spiritual version of those guys on the street corners with the signs. We&#8217;re here to point people to someone else; we&#8217;re not the show, we&#8217;re the messengers. It&#8217;s not given to me to know with certainty all the primary, secondary, tertiary (and so on) effects of that message. God&#8217;s in the business of handling that.<\/p>\n<p>But occasionally, through something as ridiculous as a JPEG of the earth, I get a tiny glimpse. And that glimpse is more than enough to excite me and humble me all over again.<\/p>\n<p>This is way too long; so I&#8217;ll summarize.<\/p>\n<p>You may have noticed that I sign all my posts with the Latin phrase &#8220;Pro Rege.&#8221; Yes, I stole that from Van Til, but that&#8217;s not the point. You see, &#8220;Pro Rege&#8221; means &#8220;For the King.&#8221; It summarizes the Christian&#8217;s mindset and motivation for all that they do, including getting out of bed in the morning.<\/p>\n<p>And including this blog.<\/p>\n<p>(HT: <a href=\"http:\/\/bibchr.blogspot.com\/2010\/03\/reach-of-this-blog-something-to-pray.html\">Dan Phillips<\/a> for the original idea)<\/p>\n<p><em>Pro Rege<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Stephen Rodgers As I sat down to write this article, I was confused (which isn&#8217;t going to surprise anyone who knows me). I could have sworn that I already wrote something to this effect, and in a sense I have. There is a lot of information scattered about, mostly in the Editor&#8217;s Notes since [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":469,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ministry-profile"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/469"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1475"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11765,"href":"https:\/\/lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1475\/revisions\/11765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}