CDM Archive

Discipleship Ministries of the PCA

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Living in the Shadows

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Raymond C. Ortlund, Jr. I was standing atop the Hill of Fare near our village in Scotland. It was a glorious September day. The Dee Valley lay before me, a patchwork of little fields and stands of trees. The clouds cast shadows randomly on the valley floor. Over here, all was green and bright. Over there, it was shadowy, grey, subdued. And I thought, “The Church is like this. In some quarters, the light of God is streaming down in unclouded brilliance. In others, the clouds block the light. A chill has set in. The color has faded.”

God’s reviving power is not evenly distributed throughout his Church. And I write this article for my brothers and sisters who are living in the shad

Lotus Flower

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By Agnes Boggs. Lotus Flower was a little girl who lived with her father, mother and brothers in a boat on Pearl River. She was a bright, winsome little girl whom everyone loved.

Ah Muk, the mother, rowed her boat up and down the river carrying passengers while the father worked all day on shore, Ah Muk stood as she rowed in the stem, with tow long oars crossed; the older boy sat on the little front “deck” with one car; and Lotus Flower would slip another oar into a woven bamboo ring dropped over a peg on the boat side, and she would help too. Little Brother, with a big gourd tied on his back for a float, sat inside by the neat little cupboard and stoves which furnished their floating home.

One day, Ah Muk had a bad toothache, so she decided to have the tooth pulled. The Chinese street dentists, with their long strings of teeth for advertise

Time for the Lord’s Work

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Hendersonville‘s Herb Hollender is a quiet, self-effacing man who needed some convincing that an article about his career and current volunteer work would interest and inspire others. But upon the urging of his pastor, John Neville of Covenant Presbyterian Church, Herb agreed to an interview.

Herb’s story takes us from the exciting quest to find food suitable for the first astronauts, to the quiet mountains of Western North Carolina.

Herb, now seventy-four, was brought up in a Christian home on a small dairy farm in central Wisconsin. Holding degrees in bacteriology and food technology, Herb was associate professor at Purdue College of Agriculture when he left in 1955 to join the Armed Forces Food and Container Institute. At F.C.I., Herb soon was responsible for food prod

Mom Chisholm

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By Charles W. Anderson. It was during the early 1920s and she worked in the office of the Sunday School Times. One Monday morning a young doctor, William H. Chisholm, M.D., came into the office to meet with the editor. He noticed Bertha and realized she was the same woman he had seen the previous evening at a Presbyterian church in Philadelphia. He had been introduced to her that night-she was a strikingly beautiful young woman-and now here she was again! Four weeks later they were married and on their way to Korea where they served for many years as mis

Myths, Myopia and Maytags

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By Howard Eyrich. A necessary component in understanding aging is the demythologization of our cultural folklore about “old people.” Demythologization is a fancy way of saying that is important to investigate current assumptions about aging in our society and compare them with the facts. Furthermore, it means that our individual and collective behavior must be adjusted to the facts.

Myth One: Elderly people are non-productive.

A common belief is that the elderly neither desire to or are they capable of being productive contributors to society. This myth no doubt has several roots. At least two of these roots society has planted and then harvested the results and created this myth.

Society arbitrarily established an age for retirement when the population was bulging with young people putting upward pressure on the job market. The extension of longevity for the masses was not yet perceived as problems. Retirees began to be viewed as people past this “magic age” of productiveness. Many became non-pro