I changed my schedule around this morning to go out for aerobic exercise at 5:30, breakfast at 6:30, so that I could attend a press conference and presentation on a new technology. I suppose in a different year I might be in Frankfurt, Germany attending a conference called ACHEMA (chemical industry). But, I’m watching from my patio just like all conferences since March 2020.
Did you know that there was no Christian Bible for the first 300 years of the movement? Bishops and teachers used documents that circulated through underground channels as source material for teaching. The actual fact is that there was a single channel of communication—to God through Jesus.
The Bible was assembled from a variety of documents in the 4th Century (mid-300s) when the church became an official religion of the Roman Empire.
As the Church grew more powerful and then as the Bible grew in importance (especially with the Protestant Reformation), it seems there were multiple channels of communication to God. For some, the Bible became more important than even Jesus himself.
I was jarred into these thoughts by the press conference I just attended. Twenty years ago, engineers were looking for better ways to communicate from the control system to the instruments in the field in large process plants—refineries, petrochemical plants, chemical plants.
Some hoped for a single, standard “fieldbus” for the communication. But every company wanted its own “standard” technology. So, we have been living with many “standard” fieldbus technologies much to the chagrin of the original engineers.
The topic of today’s press conferences was a new technology that allows all those other fieldbuses to come together into one new technology. If you’re curious, it is called Ethernet Advanced Physical Layer.
My connection—there seems to be a movement in its early stages to bring Christianity back to a focus on a single channel of communication—Jesus. We have so many channels now, and even with a single Christian Bible we have myriad interpretations of what it says.
May we bring all of our channels of reaching God together into a new (but actually old) channel—Jesus, the Messiah, himself! For 300 years, Christians experienced Jesus in their midst as they gathered for prayer and teaching and worship. How often does that really happen today where you are? Can you make it happen?
Faith Venture 
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