Update on Forerunner media projects

I updated the look of the forerunner.com website a few months ago. There is still a lot of work to be done on the website, but at least the look is no longer ten years out of date!

Since then I have been getting a lot of emails from old friends. I've also been making a lot of new contacts. I believe this is a direct result of the changes.

For instance, I just got a shipment of this magazine called: "America, Return to God." The editor had contacted me a few months ago about reprinting three articles from The Forerunner. I just learned today that according to their website, this magazine "has been published and mailed out to 450,000 leaders of America of all levels (federal, state and local) and all professions (political, educational, business, church, media etc.)"

I was amazed to see how similar the magazine is to the original vision of The Forerunner.

See: http://gcciusa.org/English/ARTG.htm

It's amazing how God has continues to use what we did many years ago.

In the meantime, I am trying to get back to my original vision for Christian media.

I have a couple of DVD projects in various stages of production. Today, I had a friend come over from Melbourne (I live in Kissimmee, Florida now) and we worked all day and got a tremendous amount done. I figured out the final stages of authoring and burning DVDs -- after a lot of learning and problem solving during several days of working with this. (I am not a technical person, so I need a lot of help and encouragement.)

Part of our plan is building the e-commerce aspect of the website. The goal is to raise enough income to pay my friend to take over the maintenance of the website (keeping it fresh and current) and to build an on-line store.

I decided to put full-time Christian media/missions projects on hold for at least a year when I got married five years ago. I have been teaching in a public high school ever since then. We moved twice and bought a house three summers ago. It's amazing how the time slips away.

Last summer, I went up to visit a friend who has a similar ministry in Nashville. We discussed the idea of me contributing to a few projects. While I continue to be open to that, I decided to concentrate on producing some of my own projects without depending on things to materialize on the other end.

Then I spent the rest of the summer doing creative fund raising and getting all my video production equipment together -- and by the time I did that, I was working again. I've been slowly working over the past school year get to a place where there are a few projects within sight of being completely finished.

I am excited that I now have the leisure and the inspiration from God to do nothing but produce. I have two months off starting this week and I plan to concentrate on this full-time.

I always thought that being a teacher could be a way of balancing the two ideals. I have my vacation time to dedicate to what I really want to do. It is the first time that I have had this much time to dedicate solely to missions projects while being on solid financial ground.

My hope is to eventually get the income from the website to the same level (or more) of support where I was at before I got married. That would potentially allow me to train a few part-time interns to run a Christian media ministry.

I'll keep you informed about what happens over the summer.

Could there be life on other planets?

The consensus among most conservative Christians is that there are no aliens in outer space. This is an evolutionary idea that states that out of billions of stars there must be a few planets somewhere that could sustain the evolution of life. Much of what is currently driving NASA’s exploration of the solar system is a search for life. From a biblical creationist perspective, we will find no amoebas or bacteria on Jupiter’s moons. It is unlikely that we will even find water anywhere in our solar system other than on earth. God made the earth and he created a perfect biosphere that will indefinitely support the life he created.

But the question still remains. Is it possible that God could have created a planet that contains plants, animals and even sentient creatures similar to human beings? While the Bible is silent on this, I would negate the possibility of intelligent life on other planets.

Mark Twain wrote a science fiction story, “Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven,” about the idea of a heaven where thousands of aliens from every inhabited planet in the universe arrive at a heaven that was so populated that it is the size of many planets. In the story, Captain Stormfield is amazed to find out that Christ has appeared on every planet in the universe to life an exemplary life and die for that planet’s sins. He is told, “The worlds He has saved are like to the gates of heaven in number - none can count them." Twain was satirizing the Christian view of heaven in the face of the emerging evolutionary science. However, it is just as likely that a Christian view could be used to expose the impossibility of intelligent life besides ours in the univers.

This doesn’t negate, however, the possibility of worlds that have plant and animal life. It is possible that God could have created these planets on the fourth day of creation (Gen. 1:14-19). There may be worlds He created in the foreknowledge that a redeemed civilization would one day discover and colonize. Just as a millennial impulse drove the Age of Exploration in the 15th century, so a Golden Age of Christian knowledge may drive the exploration of new worlds and the settlement of new civilizations.

If the postmillennial view is correct, we can expect to one day colonize the solar system. It is likely that we will create self-sustaining biospheres – perhaps giant bubbles on the surface of the planet Mars – that will sustain life in a similar manner as on earth. It is even possible that one day we will discover a planet capable of sustaining an atmosphere and all the various species of life found on earth. Another idea is that scientists may someday be able to create a "biosphere" on another planet that would imitate the conditions on earth. Maybe a “Noah’s Ark” of future space colonists will bring the seeds of a new earth to a far distant star?

Of course this is speculation. But Christian Reconstructionists and other postmillennialists should be considering the possibilities.

Space Exploration in Postmillennial Perspective

If the moon and Mars were to be colonized some time in the next 100 years, how would this affect the viability of a pre-trib rapture view?

Or how about this question: How do eschatological views affect the discussion on the existence of extraterrestrial life?

This is a topic I’ve always been interested in. I am a big fan of science fiction novels and programs such as the X-Files and Star Trek. As a Christian, I see these stories as entertaining ideas, or as one science fiction writer called them, “thought experiments.” I don’t believe in UFO’s or extraterrestrials but I find the concept interesting. Even the great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis wrote a Space Trilogy, which like his Chronicles of Narnia series is an allegory relating to Christian theology.

As a high school junior, I wrote a science fiction novella about an atheist who invents a space ship capable of interstellar travel. After an argument with his wife, who is a Christian, he decides to travel to the nearest star and discovers a strange utopian civilization. When he returns to earth he discovers that the entire earth is deserted. He is left with no choice except to travel back to the utopian planet. To his surprise, he discovers that his wife and her friends are on the planet. Even though he has traveled many additional light years, they haven’t aged. The situational irony, of course, is that the rapture has occurred while he was en route to the Bernard Star solar system – which people thought at that time was the closest star capable of having a solar system. The novel ends with the realization that the distant planet was heaven. The fate of the protagonist was that he was thrown into a black hole, which according to my story, was the second death described in Revelation 21:8.

The biggest irony in all of this is that when I wrote this story, I was not converted to Christ. I had read the works of Hal Lindsey and seen TV programs on the topic of “The Terminal Generation.” I used to believe that the rapture had to be very close because the Bible spoke only of people being “caught up” in the air to meet the Lord. Once people began to explore other planets, I thought, that would throw a monkey wrench into the possibility of the rapture occurring while people were on other planets. At least I didn’t see any mention of it in the so-called “end-times” prophecies of the Bible.

Then ten years later as a new Christian, I read a book by John Jefferson Davis called, Christ’s Victorious Kingdom: Postmillennialism Reconsidered. Postmillennialism differs from the traditional premillennial view in that there is no “rapture” of the church sometime in a seven year tribulation of wars, diseases and natural calamities. Postmillennialism teaches essentially that the world will become gradually Christianized as time goes by. The Second Coming and the rapture will occur after a long Golden Age of peace and prosperity.

Today as a postmillennialist, I believe that we have enough time left in history to colonize space – and possibly one day travel to other solar systems. I don’t think we will find aliens on other worlds, but I often wonder whether or not God created some of these worlds in a way that would allow men from the planet earth to create biospheres on other planets. Is it possible that the Great Commission involves spreading the Gospel for beyond our own solar system?

(More about postmillennialism.)

Understanding Poverty in Orlando Area High Schools (Part 2)

Teachers in Osceola County, Florida schools were encouraged to complete an “Understanding Poverty” book and seminar. The central theme is that teachers need to understand where their students come from, accommodate them where they are at, and design the curriculum and assessment in such a way as to increase performance. Many traditional teaching techniques are self-defeating when we are dealing with students who are in poverty. The impoverished have a needs hierarchy that values basic necessities and immediate outcomes. Yet a teacher from the middle class tends to be more forward looking and seeks to impose the same standards and worldview on his students. This causes problems in connecting with students who will become increasingly frustrated and see the school curriculum as irrelevant and even oppressive to their need for social interaction and immediate gratification.

It is an oversimplification to say that kids can’t learn is because they are poor. But on the simplest level, this is the thesis of the seminar. It is reinforced by appealing to sociological theory. And I do not doubt that there are many good points of truth here. The problem with this idea is two things. First, students in poverty can learn to be forward looking. Second, the American standard for what is “poverty level” is not poverty at all compared to most of the world throughout history.

The writer of Understanding Poverty points out that poverty has just as much to do with income as an ability to allocate intangible resources, such as relationships, time, talents, etc. I wholeheartedly agree that poverty is as much of a spirit as it is a financial reality. I do not agree that teachers ought to accommodate a spirit of poverty. Every student can learn and make the most of their time. The fact that they often do not should not be reinforced with our accommodations. While it may look like we are doing them a service, we are actually training them to think that adult life is a time with few responsibilities that have hard consequences.

What we ought to be teaching students is that even if they do not have the opportunity to master the reading, writing, math and science curricula, they need to work in class, complete assignments on time and come to each class on time each day ready to work. “Eighty percent of success is showing up” does not mean they will automatically become 4.0 students and qualify for scholarships at the college of their choice. But it does mean that they will be trained with the necessary skills to either hold a steady job or succeed in some type of higher education. In today’s fallen culture, it will mean they will be in positions of leadership somewhere.

In a few years, the reality will become more apparent to many of these students. If car payments are not made bad credit and possible repossession will occur. If they do not show up for work on time, they will not keep their jobs for long and will not advance in their position and salary. If utility bills are not paid, they will have the added stress of the possibility of losing their water, heat and lights until they can make a payment.

For several months of my life, I have had opportunities to work closely with high school and college students in Ukraine, Russia, Venezuela and Peru. These were countries that had fallen at one time into a slavish oppressive society. One of the greatest problems to overcome in former communist nations is not an oppressive government, but rather a socialistic mentality of the people that expects the government to do everything. Dependence can lead to a slave mentality. The irony of this is that even in these countries, educational standards are much higher than in the United States. The United States of America is the most affluent nation in the world. We have many social programs in place that purport to provide assistance, food, education and housing to our poor. The average welfare recipient in our country has more material wealth than the middle class in many other nations. Our “poor” are materially rich. Many have cars, multi-room apartments, computers, disposable income for entertainment and food. Our “poor” are poor mainly in spirit rather than in material goods.

Bluntly put, our current system rewards the poor for a lack of initiative and industry. This indoctrination begins in school with a free education, thousands of dollars of free tuition per year and many more in resources that are wasted by educators who believe that if we only had more money, we could attract better teachers. More resources will supposedly solve the problem. The sad truth is that more money is being spent on public education than ever before. American teachers, although still underpaid, still make more than in any other nation at any time in the history of the world.

We could point to the breakdown of the family unit, but other nations that have the same divorce rate as America and a lower economic prosperity do better with their schools. The reason for educational decline among the lower income is not poverty. In my years as a teacher among lower income students, I have come across many theories on how achievement can be raised. These are the same theories I heard in the 1980s when I was an education major in college. After several years of some thought, I have reached a conclusion.

In the words of Walt Kelly, creator of the comic strip Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Understanding Poverty in Orlando, Florida Area High Schools (Part 1)

I was at my 25th high school reunion in Framingham, Mass last week and ran into a guy I knew named John. He used to be in METCO which was a busing program that brought kids from Roxbury and Dorchester (two lower income areas of Boston) to the suburban schools so they could receive an adequate education. The ride was 90 minutes each way – a whole hour of pick-ups and then a 30 minute drive to Framingham on the highway. I asked John why he would endure that every day. It sounded crazy to me. He said, "To get an education, man! I look at the kids that grew up around me who still live in my neighborhood. They all have messed up lives. The main thing that saved me was my education."

John said he was one of those kids who could not sit still, who was always in trouble and only came to his senior year to see his girlfriend everyday. He barely graduated with a diploma and worked a full time job after graduation. However, he eventually graduated from college with grades good enough to get him into Harvard. He has his masters in education. He has been a principal of a Boston high school and now works for a program similar to METCO – but urban based. Few people expected him to achieve this. "Least of all me," he said.

We had a long discussion about Poinciana High School which has 30 percent or more students who transfer from New York and Boston inner city schools. I explained that it seems strange to find this population in suburban central Florida, until you consider that the areas tourist attractions draw lower income families like a magnet. The two things that I came away from that conversation with were:

1. Have high expectations for students. Expect that everyone will go on to college and tell them that they can achieve success.

2. Students that are not trying know that they are not trying. The question they need to ask themselves is, "Why?"

Every person who wants something does what one needs to do in order to get it. If that means education, then he will get an education. More school is not for everyone, but we are cheating our students if we don't think they are capable of greatness. Practically, they need to understand that what they are learning is not so much Math, Science, Literature, History, but the fact that they need to work hard in order to achieve something. It is not financial poverty that holds people back as much as a poverty mentality.

A Hollywood director who received several Oscars was asked to explain the secret to his success. "Eighty percent of success is showing up," was the reply. "Showing up" means more than physical presence. Many of our students (and possibly some of us teachers) do not "show up" each day.

Henry David Thoreau wrote: "If one advances in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success in the common hours." In other words, we have to start every day with the idea that there should be an outcome. What do we expect to learn and master that we did not know before we started? Everyday we can achieve something small. Then who knows what might happen in time?

Many of Florida’s public schools have more potential than my high school did to reach kids from the inner cities. A lot of people don't realize it, but the demographic make-up of this "tourist city" is more diverse economically and ethnically than most inner cities. At the same time, it resembles the typical suburban city. We have similar resources and enough qualified teachers. Ironically, we have a large group of lower income kids to deal with, but we can accomplish more if we have the idea that every student is capable of more than we expect.

How to drive traffic to a web site

The Forerunner web site has been around since 1996 and is a record of almost every article I have ever written or published. It contains articles I wrote from 1987 until the present. It also has a massive pro-life site designed by Meredith Raney that is more vast than anything I have yet seen. It is the public record describing how, by the grace of God, a handful of Christian activists closed all the abortion clinics in Brevard County:

http://forerunner.com/fyi/

While a lot of things have changed with me in the past few years, I haven't changed my theology and worldview so drastically that I will ever completely disavow what I wrote all those years ago. At worst even the most irrelevant articles are an accurate historical record of my work.

However, when I redesigned the web site four months ago, I was considering jettisoning a few of the articles that were no longer relevant to anything I am concerned about at present. Then a friend pointed out that some of those articles, even if they have relatively low traffic, may be stumbled onto by people doing searches. Since I have over 2000 articles at forerunner.com people are not entering mainly from the front index page. People find one of those 2000 pages and they navigate elsewhere on the site.

All external links to those 2000 pages drives the traffic to the site. Ranking.com has recorded over 11,000 links to forerunner.com. Because I have so many links into the site some individual pages are very popular.

For instance, go to Google.com and type in PHILLIS WHEATLEY. You will see forerunner.com is #3.

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0214_Phillis_Wheatley.html

The key word THEONOMY yields a #1 ranking for forerunner.com on Google.

http://www.forerunner.com/theofaq.html

And there are many other search words that yield similar indexing/ranking.

There are many other key words and phrases that give forerunner.com a page rank in the top ten on the major search engines.

Why are these ranked so high?

1. The pages were the first on their topic ten years ago when the web was still in its infancy.
2. In that time, these individual pages have generated many outside links from other sites.
3. Search engines look at the number of links as the number one factor for indexing / ranking.
4. A high ranking in the search engines leads to more visits and higher ranking in the index.
5. All these factors work together to drive traffic, it's like a snowball effect.

And because of that situation, I can add a single page and it will quickly be indexed and ranked highly because of the preeminence of the entire site.

For instance, two months ago, I bought a non-copyrighted an article called:

"Analyzing Website Traffic"

http://www.forerunner.com/e-business/X0021_Analyzing_Website_Tr.html

Do a search for "Analyzing Website Traffic" and you will see The Forerunner's article is already #9 in ranking on the Google index. The amazing thing about this is that this is a non-copyrighted article that is sold to help web sites generate traffic. It appears on 416 other sites indexed by Google.

The reason for the fast track on the major search engines is that forerunner.com has had ten years to build its traffic. Other web sites and search engine robots have done all the work without me even knowing how was done!

(Does that sound like the premise of a science fiction novel?)

That is why the domain name of forerunner.com is more valuable to me than it would be to anyone else who did not have 2000 articles on their web site for ten years. There will probably never be a need for me to start another web site under a new domain name. This domain name will always give me the better traffic than a new site would.

In fact, my top priority for the summer of 2006 is to add 1000 pages to the site. That in itself ought to double my traffic and e-commerce income simply because I know which are the most popular types of articles on my site.

I am often surprised that a long ago forgotten article will suddenly make it onto a national news service's list of links and suddenly that article will jump to the top of my referral list. We just had our national day of prayer, so people were searching for information on that and they found a 1988 article about the first national day of prayer that President Reagan instituted as a yearly event. Until last week, it was a forgotten article, but in the last seven days it has vaulted to the number 1 page on my site.

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0324_National_Day_of_Pray.html

Now the key phrase "National Day of Prayer" is currently #7 on Google.

You might be surprised to see the list of the most popular referrer pages in the first week of May 2006:

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0324_National_Day_of_Pray.html

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0497_DeMar_-_Behaviorism.html

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0214_Phillis_Wheatley.html

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0038_Bette_Davis.html

http://www.forerunner.com/chalcedon/X0020_15._Council_of_Trent.html

http://www.forerunner.com/champion/X0004_3._Oliver_Cromwell.html

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0098_Ban_on_school_prayer.html

http://www.forerunner.com/videos.html

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0388_Effects_of_Pornograp.html

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0526_Bios-_John_Winthrop.html

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0525_Bios-_John_Knox.html

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0332_Ted_Bundy.html

http://www.forerunner.com/

http://www.forerunner.com/mandate/X0069_The_Education_of_Joh.html

http://www.forerunner.com/champion/manson.html

By now you should have figured out the several ways that just posting this article to my blog is going to increase my traffic. Take these principles and prosper!