My friend Peggy has recently received an award for her poetry. You can read about the award, and read her award-winning poem at her blog: Patchwork Quilt.

Prior to posting about her award, she had taken a long absence from posting. I hope that this will encourage her to make time to start writing again.

There are many reasons why someone would blog about eschatology:

• To establish their own views as the only correct view
• To identify the “antichrist”
• To predict the date of the second coming
• To prove they are smarter than everyone else
• To further endless debate

I am sure that there are other reasons as well. However, none of these are my reasons for this series. I have a couple of reasons:
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As I have posted in the past, I am part of a young church. We have been meeting for Sunday worship for a little over 2 years. We brought in our first pastor at the end of January.  I am an active volunteer with the church and am very emotionally invested in what is going on.

In the past month, we have said goodbye to two families. It is never easy to say goodbye. I think that this is especially true in a church plant.

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So, the first question for this series is whether it really matters what the Bible teaches about Jesus coming back, and the end of the age. To be honest, for a long time, I did not think that it mattered. My focus was on other issues, mostly my daily life, rather than the end of time. Back in high school, I went to a church with a dispensational theology — I will define that term in due course. This church put a heavy emphasis on the second coming and particularly on the concept of rapture. While I thought that the rapture sounded cool, I still wasn’t convinced that I needed to spend a lot of time on the subject.
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In browsing the web the other day, I came across a post in which Bill the Reasoner claims Short Term Missions is No Missions. The author relies, in part, on an article about Band-Aid Approaches to Complex Problems from a site recruiting military personnel into full-time missions. While I agree with some of the premises to the article that he relies on, I still believe that there is a purpose to short term missions, with the right emphasis.

In short, Bill states that short term missions is a drain on funding, and that the primary effect of short-term missions is to entertain those who go on the trips. He concludes by claiming that because the people on those trips are not committed to the long-term effort and to church planting, that they are largely ineffective.
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