After coming back to Michigan, we spent a few days at the Birdwells'. The Greshams and Bobos came over for dinner Thursday night. The boys got a karaoke machine for Christmas, so some Beatles songs were sung too. Here are some photos:

We rung in the New Year with donuts and Flightplan (2005, PG-13) (Screen It! review). From Wikipedia:

A variation on the locked room mystery, the movie depicts what happens after Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) boards a fictional Aalto Airlines flight from Berlin to New York with her daughter Julia (Marlene Lawston). After falling asleep and waking up about three hours into the flight, Kyle learns that her daughter is missing. She searches the plane for her daughter, but according to the passenger manifest her daughter never boarded the flight. Also, no one remembers having seen her.

I think Lisa liked it fine, but I didn't care for it. Too farfetched. I give it 2 out of 5.

It was reported recently that the nation's largest church of Christ (Richland Hills in TX, 6400 members) has decided to add an instrumental service with communion on Saturday nights. By definition, churches of Christ don't use musical instruments in worship, right? I first heard about Richland Hill's decision via Mike Cope's blog where he re-posted an essay by Leroy Garrett. It has since been covered in The Christian Chronicle.

Rick Atchley was quoted in the Chronicle saying he "...told the congregation the decision should help ease crowding at Richland Hills' two Sunday morning services. Moreover, he said, it will allow the congregation to "reach more people who need Christ."

Frankly, the use instrumental music isn't fundamentally a big issue to me. We don't find a detailed game plan for worship in the NT like we do in the OT for a reason, I think, and arguments of exclusion don't seem adequate to me given the whole of scripture. On the other hand, about a decade or so ago, when we lived in Knoxville, a friend of ours had the habit of attending the Evangelical Free service on Sunday afternoon after attending the c of C assembly Sunday morning. We went with him once, and my observation was that I was distracted/bothered by my dislike for the style of music that accompanied the singing. Of course, acapella singing is also not a style of music for which I have an affinity, but regardless I've become accustomed to it via three and half decades of experience. So, as a matter of taste but not faith, I suspect I'd have a struggle (initially at least) with instrumental worship. And that's not to say that I have no appreciation for acapella music and the value of that tradition. In fact, I do wonder a little about the rational of adding instruments as a means to reach more people, as a missional tactic. There is probably some validity to that, but on the surface it seems like a close call as to whether becoming more like most of all the other Christian groups would lead to a wider or narrower catch in the end.