Southern Seminary is planning to operate with a delayed start for Tuesday, Feb. 16. 11:30 a.m. classes will meet as scheduled; classes before that will not be held.

Non-essential offices will open at 11 a.m. and chapel for tomorrow is canceled.

These plans are subject to change, depending on the weather.

Southern Seminary President R. Albert Mohler Jr. will be speaking on the topic of a Christian response to Islam at Sojourn Community Church's East campus at 6:30 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 17.

The event is free, and open to members of both Sojourn campuses as well as the public. Free childcare will be provided as well.  For more details on the event, click here.

When a magnitude 7.0 earthquake pummeled Haiti on Jan. 12, leaving untold thousands dead, the church gained an unprecedented opportunity to rise up and provide the world with a picture of the mercy of a sovereign God.

As casualty totals mounted in staggering numbers in the days following the deadly tremor, many churches in Louisville led or populated by students, staff and faculty from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary did precisely that. Several congregations began relief efforts for Haiti and plan to continue assistance as rescue and recovery in Haiti turns to rebuilding.

Sojourn Community Church, where SBTS graduate Daniel Montgomery serves as pastor, had a unique opportunity in the days following the earthquake. Sojourn had already started plans for a concert to benefit G.O. Ministries, a Christian non-profit organization that seeks to help build sustainable communities in impoverished areas.

When the earthquake devastated Haiti, the church's leadership believed they should focus the concert on raising awareness for the plight of the people in Haiti. All of the proceeds from the concert went to benefit the ministry's efforts in Haiti. As many churches did, Sojourn took a special Haiti offering in all five of its services at its two campuses on the Sunday following the earthquake.

At Ninth & O Baptist, where SBTS professor Bill Cook pastors, former Southern student Robert Patterson acted quickly to help through his connection with Agape Flights. Patterson, himself a pilot, said the Christian missionary aviation group has helped supply missionaries for years through weekly flights to Port
Au Prince.

Patterson and Ninth & O's leadership organized a collection of medical supplies and food the Sunday after the earthquake, which Patterson then hand-delivered to the Florida-based aviation group.

Ninth & O also served as one of the sites - along with Second Baptist Church in Madisonville, Ky. - for Kentucky Baptist Convention Disaster Relief Training. Southern is working closely with the KBC to provide aid to Haiti in the form of resources and staffing. The Disaster Relief Training is necessary for anyone who wants to do volunteer work in Haiti with the KBC.

Michael Clark, director of the Church Planting Center at Sojourn, said that because of the KBC's commitment to disaster relief in Haiti, Sojourn has channeled all of its members to work with the state convention in providing hands on disaster relief in the devastated nation.

Clifton Baptist Church, whose pastor is SBTS professor Tom Schreiner, has a couple of members with connections to Haiti. The father of Jeremy Pierre, a professor at Boyce College and an elder at Clifton, serves as chairman of the board of the Baptist Haiti Mission.

Nate Harmon, a Clifton member, has kept the church appraised of the situation on the ground in Haiti through his family that works with an orphanage in Haiti. In both cases, Clifton's leadership is keeping church members informed on how they can give financially to support these causes.

While some churches, such as Highview Baptist Church, do not have direct contacts on the ground in Haiti, they are heavily committed to helping however they can. Highview's leadership has pointed its members toward the Southern Baptist Convention's existing channels for disaster relief.

William Brown, minister of missions at Highview, said that in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, Highview took an offering totaling nearly $12,000 to help with relief efforts. The International Mission Board, Baptist Global Relief and the Florida Baptists have all mobilized efforts for the disaster relief work in Haiti.

The desire to help in significant ways is a response shared by many churches, regardless of size. New Heights Baptist Church, where Southern Seminary student Cody McNutt serves as pastor, is using church events to encourage its congregants to give to relief efforts in Haiti. On Feb. 14, New Heights will host a world mission's banquet, where an offering will be taken to support Baptist relief efforts in Haiti.

As the recovery turns into rebuilding, many churches in Louisville and throughout the country will be praying about ways to continue supporting the people of Haiti. As the situation continues to be sorted out, Southern Seminary will continue to provide details at news.sbts.edu and inside.sbts.edu about opportunities to partner with existing ministries already on the ground. For the latest on KBC disaster relief efforts, visit http://www.kybaptist.org/kbc.nsf/pages/disaster-relief.html.

Garrett E. Wishall contributed to this story.

All classes for Monday, Feb. 15, at Southern Seminary and Boyce College are canceled due to inclement weather. All non-essential offices are also closed.

Moderator:

• R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Seminary.

Panelists:

• Russell D. Moore, senior vice president for academic administration and dean of the School of Theology at Southern Seminary.
• James Parker, associate dean of worldview and culture and professor of worldview and culture at Southern Seminary.
• Mark Coppenger, professor of Christian apologetics at Southern Seminary.
• Theodore J. Cabal,professor of Christian philosophy and applied apologetics at Southern Seminary.

Mohler

The James Cameron movie Avatar has recently passed the $1.8 billion mark in sales. In this movie, we not only have a box office sensation, we have the question of how Christians are to engage with popular culture.

Evangelical Christians have not known what to do with Hollywood from the beginning. This has been true for the Christian church and popular culture going all the way back to early Christians and Roman entertainment and the gladiatorial games.

The title of this panel is not accidental. What we have in Avatar is a new secular Eden or at least an Eden that is very different from the book of Genesis. What are we to do with this?

Coppenger

There is a hunger for Eden. We have that hunger so we fashion a variety of movies. There is this hunger, but the world supplies it in so many idealogical ungodly ways.

Parker

One way C.S. Lewis became a Christian was a longing he had, a sense of unfulfilment he experienced that could not be fulfilled in this life. Buddhism, animism, pantheism cannot fulfill this sense of longing. The glorious news of the Gospel is that this Eden shall be restored and it shall be made available to human beings.

Moore

There is always going to be that kind of person who is going to want to escape from life. When you look at these things they bounce back and forth between utopia -- this vision of Eden -- and dystopia -- some sort of apocalypse. So you have Avatar, but you also have The Road or Planet of the Apes or The Day After Tomorrow.

It seems that in popular culture that you have people's longings and people's fear of judgment and death and those are being expressed in movies the best way people know how. Then you have people looking at those movies and it resonates.

Cabal

Worldviews contain an Eden, an eschoton and a problem in between that must be solved. So, it is not surprise when you have a movie like Avatar that presents that. The problem is not that there is a longing for Eden, that there is a longing for something that is beautiful and fulfilling. The problem is with the solution that the movie presents. The problem with the movie is that primitive cultures are not like what we see in the movie.

Mohler

What about humanity in this film? This is sort of a reproduction of Bambi. This film (Avatar) is so undisguished in terms of its antipathy toward human beings. What do we make of that?

Coppenger

Avatar screamed at every point: I am doing a hack job here, I have overlooked things. It is an adoration of the primitive, as Cabal said. It is also a hatred of humanity. Avatar presents a terrible lie about humanity: the movie depicts a hatred of man, a hatred of capitalism and a hatred of the military. It is this whole package of things that is so anti-Christian and sub-Christian.

Mohler

Hollywood has celebrated Cameron as an engineer and an entrepreneur: that is capitalism.

Cabal

There is a lot of standard science fiction in this movie. It acts like it presents a spiritualism of some sort, but it actually presents a physicalism, a materialism, that trumps spirituality. Capitalism has always pushed along the edges of technology. There is the James Cameron game, Avatar, coming out. So, there is a lot of capitalism going on here in relation to Avatar.

Mohler

Dr. Moore you have described the movie as Rambo in reverse.

Moore

What worries me about the movie is that it is anti-authority. What concerns me is not so much the message, but so many people are not so much getting or seeing the message. The propaganda that comes through that is so obvious does not worry me. The propaganda that worries is what you might not get that then infiltrates your life and affects you and you don't even know it.

Mohler

Avatar has its own metanarrative, the Creation metanarrative of creation, fall, redemption, consummation - it is all there. When you look at the screenplay, it is clear that the religious message is pointed in a way that you might not catch. There is an insistence that this is not some kind of superficial religion, there is an insistence that this is real religion. This pantheism with the tree and its interconnected roots.

James Cameron knows what he is doing here: there are hints of the Gospel in this reshaping of a gospel. The movie is tapping into some sort of religious longing that people have, particularly in the area of environmentalism.

Cabal

To me, the thing that leaped out was this overt religious message. It is a glorification of pantheism the whole way through. Cameron knows what he is doing. He was the executive producer for the Lost Tomb of Jesus on the Discovery channel trying to argue that they found this bogus tomb of Jesus that had His body in it.

Avatar appeals to the average postmodern religionist. They don't really know what they want: this movie is aimed at those kind of people.

Mohler

This is a "supermovie:" it is fun to watch. It has a story and it comes with all this technology. This appears more real than reality, one writer said. What do we do with that?

Moore

Think about what people say when they see beautiful things in nature. They say, "This is like a movie." They are so accustomed to seeing movies that they see everything through that grid.

We really are not moving into the kind of world where people are paganizing, but they are paganizing in a way that has to have a counterfeit Christianity in order to address their longings.

Mohler

This movie is really, really good at showing human sinfulness and depravity. But it doesn't know how to depict redemption.

Coppenger

I used to get really frustrated about that reality in movies, that people can't depict rebellion. Then I realized: they really don't get it. It is sort of like a cat trying to do algebra.

We have turned Hollywood over to pagans. We can blow up a movie like we are doing today, but we can't really produce such a movie.

Mohler

I am going to respond by saying we can't do that: you can't meet the medium on its own terms. I am not saying that Christians can't be involved in the film industry: they certainly can. And there are movies that have told a story that is conducive to the Christian metanarrative of the Gospel. As much as we are called to be transformational in every area of life, to make it in Hollywood you have to have the backing of people financially who have a very different goal.

Cabal

One reason the movie is so appealing is not just that is touches the deep longings that we have, but because of the technology that mimics the real world. The movie is so powerful because it is this world presented in film through technology.

Moore

You have Romans 2 there. You have sin and you have judgment in this movie. You have the conscience: it is misdirected, it is misguided, but it is there. That is exactly what Paul was talking about. And you have that in many apocalyptic movies.

Mohler

You can look at the history of Christianity and it is not new for Christians to be interacting with culture and critiquing entertainment in culture. How is it that all of the sudden evangelicals are now consumers of popular culture?

Coppenger

There are rocks on both sides. You can become too culturally immersed or you can go too far the other way. I am not as pessimistic of us (Christians) making great movies. I think there is a kind of insecurity among evangelicals. I think we feel as though we are sort of backward and embarrassing so we like to get our credibility in the culture and sometimes it is kind of pitiful how hard we work to show that we are cool. But putting that aside I think people are awakening to the splendor and power of film and I think that is a good thing.

Mohler

What interests me is that evangelicals are now consumers of popular culture as if there were no moral question about it.

Cabal

We are seeing in this generation what a generation that followed a strict generation does, tending to want to go out and learn what it is like to be free. I went through all the phases of Christ and culture: I was pagan, then I was a baby Christian I thought you had to reject everything in culture. I sold everything, I gave it all away, and I wouldn't watch television. And I think that is a legitimate Christian option. But what I was doing was I was mimicking another sub-culture with its own little rules.

Then I went through a phase where I would watch them with my kids and we would worldview-analyze every movie and my kids didn't like that very much because I was ruining every movie for them. And then there is this sort of thing that says you can't avoid culture, you breath it, and we are going to engage and do evangelism.

I don't think there is one standard way that we have to deal with culture, but I think that the sort of uncritical engagement of popular culture that you are talking about is very dangerous.

Moore

I agree with the generational shift. I think most people in this room have seen a movie that your grandparents would consider to be pornographic in a way that is not alarming to you because you don't even have the tools to see what is even there. I am worried about the things that we don't even notice in films.

Coppenger

I think the most dangerous film I ever saw was a PG rated film called "Same Time Next Year." It is a guy who is in a lodge in the mountains and he meets a lady who comes up for a retreat. It led to an adulterous affair and she would come back each year. There was no skin, no cussing, but it showed that adultery is workable and charming if you do it right.

Mohler

Let's talk about the particular power of film. There is something about film that is unique. It is a way, as some cinematographers say, entering into a different world. What is the power and what is the danger of that?

Parker

The danger is that your critical faculties are set aside. You might find yourself rooting for the adulterer. Things could be great on the cinematograpical level and this could cause you to put your critical faculties on hold.

Moore

One of my favorite novels is Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer." The protagonist in that novel is living this really boring, kind of meaningless life, because these movies have a meaning with a storyline.

I think that is kind of the good side, the glory, of film. People have these lives without meaning and they go to all of these films that do have meaning, that do have a storyline, they do have a resolution. We have to ask what are people wanting to escape to? They want to escape for the freedom to sin, but ultimately it is because they are created in the image of God and are trying to escape the Fall and we have thus have an opportunity to say something to them.

Cabal

Pastors need to patiently and lovingly teach their people how to engage with culture. Our job as Christian leaders is to help people think through what it is they are experiencing as entertainment that they don't realize has become the prophet and the preacher to them because they don't critique it.

Mohler

Popular culture is not a new challenge. We must be asking what we are watching, reading, and listening to and what is it doing to us? It also helps to define our mission field. If this is the story that millions of people are paying to see, those millions of people are looking for a story and that gives us an opportunity to speak of the story of stories, the narrative of narratives, and that is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The Feb. 8 edition of Towers focuses on how the Southern Seminary community is responding to the crisis in Haiti. Haiti-related stories include:

• Haitian Boyce student praises God his family is safe, prays for the future of his country (page 3).
• Former Southern Seminary students ministers amid "enormous suffering and confusion in Haiti" (page 3).
• How do we answer the burning question: Where was/is God in the tragedy in Haiti? (page 4).
• SBTS community works through local churches to help Haiti (page 7).

Other stories include:

• "For Tebow, abortion is not political, but a matter of life and death," an editorial by Jeff Robinson, director of news and information at Southern Seminary (page 5).
• "Avoiding semester burnout before it begins," an editorial by Eron Plevan, master of divinity student at Southern (page 5).
• SBTS to host stem cell donor drive for professor Carl Stam (page 7)
  The stem cell drive is from 11 am.-3 p.m., Feb. 11, in the Honeycutt Campus Center lobby.
• "Holy Subversion: Allegiance to Christ in an Age of Rivals:" A Q&A with recent SBTS graduate Trevin Wax on his book by that title (page 9).
• 3 questions with Ray Van Neste, assistant professor of Christian studies and director of the R.C. Ryan Center for Biblical Studies at Union University in Jackson, Tenn. (page 16).

I used to be a hacker.

No, not that kind of hacker: a Greek hacker. If Greek found its way into one of my sermons or Bible Fellowship Group lessons it was basically a glorified word study on a verb or participle spliced out of its original context. Because I didn't want to do that, I actually wasn't really a hacker: I was a non-user.

Five months ago, however, I decided I wanted to change this. I enrolled in Southern Seminary professor Tom Schreiner's Galatians exegesis course. And I started using BibleWorks 8.

Now I am no longer a hacker; I am a user. Not an expert, or even a semi-expert mind you, but I am a user.

There is only one way to learn Greek: long hours of study. There are no shortcuts, no secret passageways to Greek mastery. It is like digging the Panama Canal. But there are tools to aid you in your work and over the last five months BibleWorks has been my central tool.

If you are looking to unpack, understand and use the original biblical languages, BibleWorks would be a great resource to consider. In the five months I have used it, BibleWorks has done two key things for me: save me time and enable me to better understand biblical Greek and, thus, the Bible.

A time saver

So far, BibleWorks has saved me time in two main ways. First, it helps me rightly identify words quickly that I can't break down (parse)
at first glance or that I might break down wrongly. This is particularly helpful for words with irregular forms or that look like one form, but are actually another. In years past, you would have had to look up each word you didn't know in a dictionary. Now, you can scroll over the word and you have everything right in front of you.

Of course, if you lean on BibleWorks in this way too hard it will become a crutch that cripples you versus an aid that helps you. But if you take a moment to figure out why a verb is an aorist - drawing on the paradigm chart tucked away in your mind from previous study - you will begin to need less and less help.

Second, BibleWorks provides a number of reference works that are readily available and searchable. For instance if I am trying to determine how an infinitive functions in a sentence, I can search Daniel Wallace's "Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics" and get his thoughts on different uses, broken down into categories (purpose, result, time, etc.). This is an instant time saver.

Of course, there are many other ways BibleWorks would save you time. One is its ability to allow you to quickly cross reference words and phrases to other passages. One prominent example of this is John Piper using a Bible software program to cross reference the key verb and noun in the phrase "filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions" in Colossians 1:24 to Philippians 2:30 to help him determine its meaning. With BibleWorks, you can do this in a matter of minutes.

For those who are not mere users, but who are experts or scholars in the biblical languages, I am sure that BibleWorks saves times in more advanced ways as well. For example, SBTS professor - and Greek and Hebrew scholar, and pastor - Jim Hamilton says "If my computer is on, BibleWorks is open" (For more of Hamilton's thoughts on BibleWorks, visit jimhamilton.wordpress.com/2009/01/17/bibleworks-8).

Better understand biblical Greek and, thus, the Bible

Another key benefit, perhaps the greatest benefit, of BibleWorks is that it helps you understand biblical Greek and, thus, the Bible better (yes, it can help you better understand biblical Hebrew as well: I just haven't used it for that purpose yet). Bibleworks enables you to access the original languages of the Bible in a more efficient manner. For busy students and pastors, the importance of this can not be overstated. Students and pastors must balance the priorities of family, counseling, pastoring, studying, reading and evangelizing to grow in their understanding of the biblical languages. It is possible to do this without BibleWorks. But BibleWorks makes it much more feasible. It is like digging the Panama Canal with a backhoe instead of a shovel.

Due to inclement weather, all Wednesday classes at Southern Seminary and Boyce College are canceled. Seminary offices are also closed.

All Tuesday classes at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Boyce College are canceled due to inclement weather. All offices on campus are also closed.

Update: the Philip Webb concert previously scheduled for tonight has been canceled as well.

Preacher: Russell D. Moore, senior vice president for academic administration and dean of the School of Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Text: 1 Kings 1:1-4

Moore recounted a story of Michael Card giving the back story behind his song, "Underneath the Door," where he spoke of sliding letters under the door to his father who was preoccupied with work.

Card respected his father as being a good man, but this self-preoccupied aspect of his father's life was still a reality. Card shared that this self-preoccupation was built on the false idea that his father was his gift, versus his father having a gift that he should use appropriately.

Moore was convicted recently that he was taking on the characteristics of Card's father through an interaction with his son, Benjamin.

You are not your gift

David in 1 Kings 1 is experiencing the kind of a collapse that comes when a man has not accomplished everything that he wanted to accomplish.

In David, we see a man who provides an example of what to do in the face of a giant and what not to do in the account of David and Bathsheba.

With this passage in 1 Kings 1, we see a picture of a man whose life did not turn out the way he had planned. The temple he desired to build was not built.

Some of you in this room have a ministry that is not playing out the way you thought it would play out. Some of you have a fear of failing in ministry, a fear of falling short of what you want to accomplish.

I want to encourage you to fail to the uttermost and to find freedom there.

Freed from the illusion of ego

David is attending to the people of God and protecting them from enemies. This is exactly what the pastor of a congregation is called to do. But David, this mighty warrior here, at the end of his life is not there with his sword. He is not his gift. He is a man.

Some of you in this room right now are in despair and exhaustion. Some of you in this room are planning out and trying to live a life of ministry that you can't keep all together. Some of you fear that you are going to fail and that your ministry is going to collapse.

Others of you in this room are holding back and not using your gifts out of a fear of failing. To you I say, "Fear. Fall. Collapse."

In this passage, David is on the verge of death. But God is gracious to him as he approaches death. David will not die as Saul did. David is here in bed about to die. Saul was left with illusions: he retained his title as king, dying in battle. He retained his role as leader. But Saul did not retain the anointing of the Holy Spirit.

David here is retaining what God has revealed to him throughout his life: he is not his gift and he is not his anointing. David is reminded consistently throughout his life that He is reliant on God.

David not being unable to get up out of his bed, lying in impotence while his kingdom is being fought for around him, while the temple he wanted to build is not built; David is failing, but he is failing graciously and gloriously. David is failing, but God is allowing him to fail graciously by exposing the illusion that David is his gift.

I am aware and grateful that God reveals to me something that must be cut down in me and that must be cut down in all of us: self-importance. We are tempted to live as if the advancement of the kingdom of Christ of necessity depends on us.

You who are self important and view yourself as the best exegete in your Hebrew class and the best preacher in your preaching class but never use your gifts because you are afraid of exposing your gifts for what they actually are, are lazy and fearful because you do not want to show yourself to be a failure.

Every person in human history has had this Messiah complex -- a self-important focus that says they can and must save the world -- except for the Messiah Himself.

Jesus's anointing with the Holy Spirit carried forward from the moment of His baptism to a death on the cross that linked His anointing with weakness.

If you are anointed with the Holy Spirit for a ministry that advances the kingdom of Christ, then you will minister in the midst of weakness.

David in his humiliation and in his weakness did something he could never have done in his power: he spoke the Word of God with the credibility of a humiliated man. He was freed for that and so are you.

Personal weakness frees you for the glory of Christ

In the Southern Baptist Convention, you have the reality that men who have served long in a church and seen success in a church, viewing themselves as the gift. Thus, they don't want to pass on their church, they don't want to pass on their ministry success, to someone else.

You also have a younger generation that is self-preoccupied and views themselves as the gift. They don't want to inherit a ministry from someone else.

We will never have renewal and Great Commission Resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention by replacing preening people of one style with preening people of another style.

David sees this because he knows that he is not his gift and he knows that there is a Gospel that lets you fail, that lets you fall, that lets you be frustrated, that lets you be chained and beaten or laughed at, but still stands.

We have a Messiah who was power through weakness. Who died, but then three days later rose again.

David failed. But David's failure gives us Jesus Christ.

Some of you are scared to death of falling, slipping or failing.

Some of you are scared to death of having a church plant that only has 10-15 people and where you have to go and explain why at the next conference.

You are scared to death of a failure, but you are not your gift. And the surprising ways that God takes you and the surprising ways that He allows you to fail are all in order to conform you to the image of His Son Jesus Christ.

Jesus is the ruler and I am not. Jesus bears the anointing and I get to share in it with Him. Jesus has the mission and He calls us to join with him. Let's be disappointed, let's fail, let's be humiliated, but let's do it to the glory of Christ as children who are not bringing our prizes to a father so that He lets us stay in the house but as children who are learning to say "Abba."

There is a freedom in that. You will be able to have a freedom and courage and a Spirit-fire in your ministry that enables you to say "I am free because of the Spirit of the Lord." Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

You are not your gift.