Please Welcome Haruo as the New ABC Forum Moderator

[Bruce Gourley]

Due to other priorities in his life, Timothy Bonney has resigned as the ABC Forum administrator. I am very grateful to Timothy for all of his help with this Forum, and personally glad that he will remain as a forum contributor and a behind-the-scenes guiding force for BL.Com. I hope you will join me in expressing your appreciation to Timothy, as well.

Taking Timothy's place as ABC moderator is the very well-known, musically-talented, insightful and clever Haruo, a BLifer regular contributor (and dare we say old-timer?) hailing from the Northwest. Haruo is a longtime American Baptist who brings an inside perspective to this branch of the Baptist family, and whose knowledge and expertise extends across ethnic realms into the larger world of Baptists. Please join me in welcoming ..... HAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRUUUUUUUUUUUOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

[Haruo]

Thanks, Bruce and Timothy. I have other priorities in my life, too, some of which were touched on by Bruce, but I'll do my best to keep this place neat, civil, active, thoughtful, provocative, and broadly baptistic.

Suggestions as to new thread topics are always welcome. My wife promises to stir the pot at times, too.

Haruo

[William Thornton]

I don't spend time here but do think highly of Hauro and am pleased that he has joined our group of moderators.

[JaneFordA]

[Neil Heath]

Excellent choice for the mod team! Welcome, and good luck in the trenches, Haruo. Timothy has indeed "fought the good fight" and deserves a bit of a break. Delighted he will still be around to contribute to the fray from time to time...

NH

[Ed Pettibone]

[Ed Pettibone]

[Haruo]

Thank you all for your comments. While I suppose I am near the left edge in many regards (indeed, in some ways perhaps even the left edge of the Evergreen Region), I hope I will not moderate in such a way as to make Mike Jordan or Ed Pettibone feel unwelcome. I tend to come down in favor of civility and against shunning or banning (I practice chinmoku at times, but I try not to be proselytic about it). In any event, I hope to add at least a thread a week of my own in hopes of increasing participation here. Also, given my hymnnuttiness, I intend to maintain an ongoing thread or two dealing with the musical content of our worship and fellowship. I probably won't push Esperanto much (apart from its place in my sig) unless there's a clear ABC tie-in. And I will encourage participation by non-ABC folk where feasible.

To summarize my own credentials, I am 54 years old, married to Mrs Haruo, a native Seattleite (have only lived outside King County 3 years of my life, though I've done a fair amount of traveling). I was raised in University Baptist Church, Seattle, until I was 13; my dad was the ABC campus minister at the University of Washington and founder of the ecumenical student center there (originally the Baptist-Disciples Student Center, then Koinonia Center, then Covenant House of Campus Christian Ministries at the UW, and now UW Crossroads Campus Ministry, pretty much an ELCA/TEC show). As a kid I traveled almost every year back to the Midwest, East, even Near South, so Daddy could go to conferences at Green Lake or wherever (I remember one in Michigan in the mid-1960s—Lansing or Ann Arbor, not sure—dealing with the theology of cybernetics or something). We were also heavily involved in the Civil Rights Movement, with Daddy taking UW students down to march with Dr. King, and us marching for Open Housing here in Seattle, boycotting the schools to go to Freedom School at First AME, etc. Then we lived in Tokyo for a year, where my dad was a Visiting Fellow of Waseda Hoshien Christian Student Center at Waseda University; we kids went to Japanese public schools during that year. We returned to Seattle the long way round, via the Trans-Siberian Railroad, buying a VW Camperbus in Stockholm, and driving it across northern Europe and then across the states. Three weeks after our return to Seattle, my parents were both killed in a car accident in which I was the only "uninjured" person. The four of us kids went to live with our Uncle Roger and Aunt Annie in Kirkland, where we attended Rose Hill Presbyterian Church. I was in rebellion against God, my aunt and uncle, and the Presbyterians, not necessarily in that order. After a brief run at converting to Judaism (maybe Jesus was the problem) I went off to Yale and promptly entered the world of alcoholic drinking, dropping out of school in the second semester of my freshman year. After about 12 years of mostly drunken floundering, including a four-year marriage to a woman I imported from Fiji to be my bride, in August of 1984 I was suicidally fixed on robbing a bank (and hoping to be killed) the first Monday in September. By the grace of a God I did not believe in (and didn't want to believe in because I thought if he did exist he had killed my parents and was out to make me miserable) on Saturday, September 1, 1984, I ended up in an AA Hall, two days before my planned bank robbery (which would have been a fiasco, since I had no heavy equipment and the banks are not open on federal holidays; I was pretty toxic ). I haven't had a drink since. On the twelfth day of abstinence, God revealed Godself to me in a bottle of Almaden wine, but it was another five or six years before I came to believe (again?) in Jesus as more than a wisdom teacher. I was reading Hans Küng's The Church in the summer of 1990, and when he wrote (I paraphrase and condense) "If you believe these things, then it's incumbent on you to be baptized and join a local church", I started down the path that led me into the baptistery at Fremont Baptist Church, Seattle, on January 27, 1991. I have been a fairly committed Fremont Baptist ever since. I am a layman, and have never felt particularly moved to seek ordination (so I guess I haven't been called). I am a hymnnut and a serious Esperantist (elected this year to the Board of Esperanto-USA). I am a polyglottal maniac; in addition to the English, French, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, German, Esperanto and Latin (plus bits and pieces of Tagalog, Greek, Yiddish, Scottish Gaeliec, Albanian, hangul and Norwegian) that I learned before I got out of high school, I have since added Swahili and Hindi to my repertoire, as well as some limited Lushootseed and Chinuk Wawa. I am the proud owner of the largest online Esperanto-language hymnal, . I am Fremont Baptist's webmaster. I work as a phone-room supervisor in a research company, supervising people who call random folks up to ask personal questions on behalf of government agencies. I was married to Mrs Haruo (we were high-school biology lab partners, but subsequently lost track of each other for 30 years) in 2003; our cat, the Pope of the Indoor Cat'lick Church, is Harry.

Pope Harry in the Catican computer center

Harry staring down at the infidels

Harry in his Primitive Se-Baptist phase — sitting in the font — most cats don't go in much for full immersion on psychological grounds

Haruo

[Ed Pettibone]

[Mark]

I just saw this thread. Congratuations and best wishes, Haruo!

[Mrs Haruo]

Welcome, welcome Esteemed Spousal Unit! How about a thread about the Pastryfarians??? We believe in Pie in the Sky by and by, and a slice on my plate right now, thank you! I had a lovely slice of Costco pumpkin pie this evening, the one I baked from my father's pumkin was downright disappointing. I tossed it over the fence for the deer to eat. (no folks- we don't have tame deer in Seattle, I am taking care of my parents on an island in Upstate Washington.)

[Haruo]

[JaneFordA]

[ehart]

Welcome as Moderator, Haruo.

I value you as a member of this board. You were the first to answer a question of mine and I consider that a privilige. You are gracious in all your posts.

You have a powerful testimony. Thanks for sharing.

And a wonderful wife as well.

I'm looking forward to any changes you make here. This is the forum that brought me to Baptist Life in the first place. I would love to see it more active with input from both ends of the spectrum.

[Mrs Haruo]

Ehart- thank you for accusing me of wonderfulness- I have had some major dental work done recently, and have not been very wonderful to Hauro, but he puts up with me anyway