I have seen the future and it is The Rock

The Rock La Roca is the future of the United Methodist Church. Rather, I should say that churches and ministries like The Rock La Roca are the future.

I say this not out of excitement or sentiment, but out of a sober assessment of reality.

1.The Kentucky Annual Conference has tried a number of church plants/restarts, and The Rock La Roca and Hope Springs are the two success stories. Both of them fit a similar profile of working in marginal neighborhoods.

The suburbs have too many churches competing for limited market.

Most pastors want to be in suburban churches. There is more prestige where you can get paid more, and there is a perception of greater stability in the congregation.

Denominational bureaucrats tend to press the need for a church to be self-sufficient and pay money to the national agencies. Therefore, there is great pressure to put the churches in places where it is assumed that the congregation can raise the kind of money that the national body needs.

So, churches begin a scramble to move to the newest area of growth, or the place where they assume they can reach prosperous (largely white) people.

The first problem is simply practical: Methodists are behind the 8-ball and are generally late getting to a location. The success stories are the exceptions that prove the rule.

To make a church work in the suburban area inevitably means 2 kinds of growth: by transfer and sheep-stealing. That is, many churches have made quite a killing by focusing on disaffected Methodists and Presbyterians. The church grows, but not by adding anyone to the kingdom, only shuffling members around.

This is a simple fact; in spite of the growth of mega-churches, there is no county in America with more people in church today than it had in 1990. Therefore, the growth of large churches at best represents a growth for that church, but a net decline for the Kingdom. I read somewhere that failure is succeeding at something that doesn’t matter. What about succeeding at what will ultimately kill you?

If churches get bigger and the Kingdom gets smaller, it means retreat and eventually collapse. So, we can keep trying to fight with other churches to reach the kind of people that can feed our denominations’ hunger, or we can get down to Jesus’ work.

We have to move into new, underserved “markets.” This means neighborhoods like The Rock La Roca is in. Neighborhoods that have been left behind by stores, schools, “good people” and churches. There are a number of churches near The Rock La Roca, but they are all small and crumbling, except for one which still has managed to keep its old members, even though they live far away. The working class areas of our towns are almost entirely unreached.

It’s a difficult population, to be sure, but a large population, one that is unreached. 125 million people in the U.S. live in multi-unit housing (condos, apts, trailer parks) but they are generally ignored by the mainline churches because we want homeowners and the potential money they represent.

I know I’m not being politically correct here, trying to win friends and influence people. That’s not my strong suit. Someone else can do that. I lay out the facts as I see them and try to move forward.

Because this demographic is underserved, it is the prime place to move into. If we keep trying to be suburban, we will have to compete with denominations that are simply better at running the kinds of programs to draw folks in (and frankly, preaching some kind of “conservative” gospel that will reach the people left cold by typical mainline preaching and, again, exceptions like First Church in Santa Monica only prove the rule).

But if we make a move into the unpopular, unreached parts of our towns and cities, we will reap a reward because no one else wants to be there. (Additionally, I think that our rural areas can be a place of revival, but it will mean serious cooperation between small churches—a possibility perhaps as remote as what I am suggesting about urban ministry…)

The advantage that we have is that we generally already have churches in the very neighborhoods I am describing. They are often churches in decline, staffed by part-time pastors. The chance we have is that, as a connectional church, we can direct our resources to fund staff and ministries for the churches in “marginal” areas until they can get on their feet. This is precisely what we would do to “plant” a church in the suburbs. But since planting churches in the suburbs is going to be dicey (i.e. others are better at it than us) and the people I am suggesting we reach are precisely the people Jesus would have us reach, the only conclusion is that we need to put our resources and efforts into a viable future, not the path we are on now, where each church that closes only sends a portion of its members to other churches.

p/g,

Aaron

3/15

A few days ago, the boys and I went down to the creek. How things have changed! A few weeks ago, things were covered in ice and a squirrel was frozen solid. Now, water bugs are all over the creek—they were the first sign of spring. We caught a salamander for a few seconds. Crawfish are out. We caught a toad juts coming out of his hole—he was so just waking up, so lethargic that he really couldn’t even get away from us. It’s a tough world.

Back in high school, my favorite class was Marine Biology. Biloxi High School was 1 block from the beach. A few times a week we would gather our buckets and seine nets and head down to the beach. We’d pair up and drag the seine nets to shore. Sting rays, flounder, shrimp, calamari, anchovies, squids, starfish—all kinds of stuff would be in there. Ever since then I have said that if the world comes to an end, I’ll be on the Gulf Coast because you won’t starve.

I suppose we could make a decent meal from the creek.

Walter Anderson was a great artist on the Gulf Coast. He said something that has stuck with me for years: “The first poetry is written by farmers and sailors, men with the wind in their teeth. The second poetry is written by scholars and students who know a good thing. The third poetry is written, if it is written, by those who make of man and nature one thing.” I like the first poetry and am not sure there has ever been the third.

There’s so much upheaval and turmoil in the boys’ life when Melissa is in the hospital. Somehow, this time, we really pulled together to work on smoothing that out. It was tough—it goes against your instincts, inclinations, and energy. It’s not that we tried to avoid, or hide anything. Rather, we just took time to keep things even and smooth. Finally, it was a spiritual question. It took all of Jesus I could handle to press on, to constantly make the decision to find space for love, not what’s “right” or “convenient” in the sense of getting things done. So lots of things did not get done on time or at all. Some sublime things came from it. In a strange way, Melissa was a powerful mother to them as she was away—there were times we probably needed to be with her, but we were also needed with the boys and she sent us to them. I still don’t have a lot of words about this, or any clear expression of it. All I know is that something intensely spiritual happened, so much of the stuff that me and the boys talk about in John 13 started happening. Will it continue now that much of the stress is off, or is back to the same old thing? I keep asking, Lord, don’t let me and my grown-up ways get in the way of the boys.

Who knows where it all leads? Some days are good, some bad. And it does something to you. My phone rang, I saw it was Melissa, and thought, “she’s calling to tell me something about what the docs say at the clinic.” Is that all we have to talk about? But no. She called to say, “Beware the Ides of March.” That was it. Typical. She always used to do things like that, but other things have so much occupied our attention and time. It’s good to have her back.

Big Doug’s house burned down. Doug is a pretty simple guy. The firemen brought out his shoes (he loves those boots), his wallet, and his Bible. All ok. He said, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” How many of us can testify like that!?

p/g,

Aaron

There's Nothing Cool About It

One of the tropes of studying Southern Literature centers on Richard Wright and Eudora Welty. You can’t find two more different writers, but their similarities of geography heighten their differences, and illuminate broad themes in Southern Culture. They were born within 2 years of each other (I think—Wright in 1908 and Welty in 1910—I am not near any source to check and I can guarantee you I am too lazy to look it up later. You check it out.) They were born in houses on the same street, Congress Street, in Jackson, Mississippi.. Their lives were so different, that being born on the same street almost begs for comparison. A sympathetic white man let Wright use his library card, under the guise of getting books for the man, but they were for Wright. Richard Wright was beaten by his mother when she caught him reading. Welty, on the other hand, remembers her mother throwing volumes of Dickens out the window when their house caught fire. I guess the part that gets me is how two ends of a street in a small town can be so different (Jackson is Mississippi’s largest “city,” but it did not pass 100,000 until the 60s.) In the end, I don’t think Eudora Welty has much to say, but you probably should read (at least) Wright’s Black Boy (and probably Native Son, too).

I’ve got this idea for a series of videos, “Evangelism Stuntman.” It’d basically be me and some other hardy individuals doing pain-inducing stunts so people will believe in Jesus. “So” is a huge word there. The gag would be something like, “If I beat Rosario in a shopping-cart race down Upper Street, will you believe in Jesus?” (Courtnay: stop whining. Your man won’t get hurt. And even if he does, he is cool with taking one for the team.) Thoroughly post-modern: on the one hand, a backhand to the Come-To-Our-Church-Festival-And-Win-A-Car method of “church growth,” and on the other, a clear idea that indeed, this will get some of my kids’ attention. Michele Rodriguez assures me that she has a rap of the Lord’s Prayer that can be our theme music. All I need now is Michael or Nathan to say, “I’m Johnny Limestone, and this is Evangelism Stuntman.”

But back to the lecture at hand (10 points to anyone who can spot the reference there…) Over at Arlington School, there is a wall display, a letter sent from the fourth grade class at Sayre School to the 4^th grade at Arlington. Sayre School is a nice private school, a prestigious one, on the other end of Limestone from Arlington. There, on opposite ends of a street are two terribly different worlds. In the end, it’s not that there aren’t problems for the kids of the rich. My loyalties are to the kids of the 05. [In a minute, or in another entry, I will have to have an episode on de-coolifying the Rock La Roca—because right now, we are struggling with people thinking this is a cool place to be, and coming to watch but not participate in our life.]

The kids have a lot on their plates. A few of the teachers told me that this year is the worst mental health for the incoming kindergarteners they have seen. I can vouch for it. There’s a lot of sadness, anger, and anxiety in the kids. It’s what they see at home, or maybe what they don’t see at home. Here’s something Jean Vanier says in Community and Growth: “When a child feels that it does not belong to anyone, it suffers terrible loneliness and this is manifested in anguish. Anguish is like an inner agitation which affects the whole body, transforming the digestive and sleep patterns, bringing confusion, destroying all clarity about what to do, and how to act. It closes the child in on itself in feelings of uselessness and death, but also of anger and hatred which are intolerable. A child that is unloved , knows it is not lovable; it is not good; it is evil. Loneliness is quickly transformed into terrible feelings of guilt” (13).

Wow. How many of our kids are like that? The young man whose anger wells in a flash. The little boy whose mom just left the house one day and no one knows where she went. The little fellow whose mom is a stripper—he’s so young, but knows to be ashamed. The girl who has moved four times since November, all around a rocky relationship between her mom and mom’s boyfriend. The two boys who fight each other, because one boys’ father lives with the other boys’ mother. The one boy hates his mom’s new live-in, the other boy hates his dad and the other boy’s mom who took his dad from his mom. They can’t beat the adults (kids always have to take it) so they wail on each other.

Here is the conflict that will emerge at The Rock La Roca. I say it now so that no one will be surprise when we have to face it. The conflict will be around the disruptive behavior of the kids. We are going to keep pushing hard to work with the kids and youth of the community. But what will happen is that some people—parents, other kids, volunteers—will start to balk at working with the difficult kids, at being patient, at being firm in love. We’ll start to say things like, “They’re disrupting the other kids.” And that will be (is) true. We’ll say, “We need to be able to minister to kids without the disrespect and the hassle.” All of what we will say is reasonable, and no one would argue with it. Except me and a few others, because we see that this is, as Bob Lyon put it, the terrible logic of Caiaphas. “The Caiaphas Principle,” that someone should be sacrificed so things will run smoothly or be “manangeable,” makes such sense, is so effective, that Christians agree with its basic premises, even though it got Jesus killed.

Our Superintendent, Paige Williams, has a saying: “Meat-eaters take care of themselves.” What she means is that the stable people, the ones who have a Christian walk have lots of places to go where they can worship, participate in “church life.” They are, to some degree, on the right track. At least, they aren’t suffering from the kinds of terrible issues that plague the people who are messed up. The meat-eaters, then, need to do two things: the first is, quit being gluttons, assuming that it has to be about them “being fed.” That is, they will have to bear with the weaker ones (gee, and the Bible even says that!) Then the second thing is, they need to walk alongside the folks that have not quite made it to where the “meat-eaters” are. This, as best I can tell, is what Jesus meant when He said, “Go make disciples.” I know we all want to think it’s some magic process that the pastor is supposed to do.

But will this happen? Will the people who know Jesus, who have been privileged to lead moral, stable lives step out? It’s a simple fact that many of us have assumed that leading a moral and stable life has meant avoiding not just the things, but the people as well, that are immoral and unstable. Perhaps even in church, we reduced Jesus down to a series of things to do and not do. Jesus became nothing more than a plan for managing sin, not the life-giving power that crushes sin and its effects in our lives. He is life! Not an avoider. He was confrontational—both in the sense of causing the kind of trouble we call “rocking the boat,” and in interfering in people’s lives to the extent that because of His witness and presence, they either had to change or choose to die.

There is an amazing principle at work in the Jesus Life—it doesn’t take many people to lead change, to show a different way. A little bit of yeast works through the whole lump of dough.

p/g,

Aaron

Adventures With The Boys

I. The Naturalists

Joe and I had gone to the creek in those first days after the hard freeze. The creek was frozen, and the deeper pools were wide, thick sheets of ice. In the places where stick-jams have backed up the water, the ice looked like meringue; it’s like the water foamed and froze in layers. At that time, the ice was thick enough for me to walk across. John was at his sleep-over that day, I think. Joe was wondering where the fingerling fish that we see in the pools were.

So a few days ago, the three of us went. Even though the temperatures have not been above freezing, there has been sunlight and the ice was mostly melted. There were a few iced-over spots, near the aforementioned stick jams. The pools were clear in the middle, but a thin layer of ice gradually spread to about an inch at the banks. We found out how thick it was by doing an experiment… “What’s an experiment?” John asked. I tried to explain it’s figuring out something you don’t know, sometimes based on what you do know, and sometimes just by discovering something. Not a very good definition, I know. John had a small piece of tree branch that had a big gall at the end, so it was kind of like a mallet. He started whacking at the ice until he got closer to the edge and we could see how thick the ice was at the edge.

We heard a hawk’s piercing cry, and John found it first—he has always wanted to be the one to find it first.

Joe came down the bank to where John and I were and he made a great find—a dead squirrel. John asked what happened to it—no real sign that anything got it—sick or starved? We poked at it with a stick and it was frozen stiff. Like a hair popsicle.

II. The Theologians

Having been through this a time or two, I know that the boys’ anxiety grows the longer Melissa is in the hospital. They know she is doing ok, doing better, but still… So I try to take their minds off things. Really, it’s not so much different than what we normally do. We try to let Saturday and one other evening be “Daddy-Baby day.” Usually that means wrestling, going to the creek and especially going to “The Train Store--” Barnes and Noble. Well, we were coming back from the train store and I took them by a place I wanted to see: Norton Commons. The development is pretty impressive. It’s one of those TND (Total Neighborhood Development) concepts. Really cool, attempting to make livable, workable spaces, the way neighborhoods were before the advent of the automobile. Anyhoo, I was talking to one of the developers about a year ago, looking for ways to put a church there—you know, to add to the whole TND principle you’d need a church. They had a prime spot because they had been thinking the same thing. They couldn’t give it to us, but they would let us buy it at cost. Problem was the Methodists didn’t have the money to buy it. My claim that we couldn’t afford not to buy it wasn’t cutting it.

So the boys had to hear my spiel about how we need new churches and if we don’t start now, if we keep missing opportunities like Norton Commons, there will come a day when we’ll be out of business.

As we were leaving, John said, “Everybody worships something.” I suppose he has heard me say that. He went on, “some people worship a house.” Man, was he hitting home or what? Joe added, “Or some people worship a horse--” I guess they’ve heard me gripe one too many times about the best land in Kentucky going to horses, then to whiskey, and then maybe for people…. John added, “And what do you do if the horse dies? What will you worship then?” He has inherited the sarcasm gene from me… I said, “You have to worship the One who will not die or fade away--- God.” Joe said, “Yeah, because a tornado can tear down your house.”

I suppose that the one constant in their lives is worship. Always has been. Whether Dunaway, Christ Church, or The Rock, it’s always been about worship. One day in Sunday School, John made his own craft for me. He rolled up a piece of paper, had his teacher tie a piece of strong around it and make a scroll. Inside, John had Ellen (his teacher) write: “Love of the Holy God.”

Joseph was not to be outdone. Melissa wrote a note in a Bible she bought me. It says, “Be safe. Know that I love you. Spread His Joy!” Joe really likes that note. So he gave me a Cat-in-the-Hat sticker to put on the note. I guess the whirlwind that the Cat-in-the-Hat is is a good “symbol” of introducing people to Jesus—if they let Him in, no telling what might happen.

III. Words

A few days ago, Joe dropped something on the stairs. He turned around and bent down to get it. I fussed at him to not lean down the stairs. It’s the first rule of being on a roof—don’t lean over down the slope. I remember Steve McKinney’s lecture about not reaching for a hammer that is sliding away. Just let it drop and go down and get it. I told them about a guy I knew who fell off a roof, landed on his head and “he can’t use his legs.”

“He’s paralyzed,” Joe said. Wow, where did he learn that word? At school where they studied about “the man whose friends put him through the roof to see Jesus.”

What is it about words? I mean, why do we read? The practical side of me thinks, “It’s for transfer of information, description of reality.” But then there is the side of me that likes fiction and poetry, and there is not much practical there. Or is there?

Jack Jourdain was a bull of a man—we called him “The Old Bull.” He didn’t like the “old” part. He was my 7^th grade English teacher. He loved poetry above all else. He was also a body-builder. In his 50s and just huge and ripped. He would arm-wrestle us, three at a time and win. We would hang on him and… nothing. So we read The Odyssey. Eliot’s Wasteland and The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in The Dooryard Bloom’d,” stuff maybe we were too young for. But then, when my best friend in seminary, David Crow, died, what words did I have except some Psalms and Whitman? Mr. Jourdain also taught us that it was only recently that poetry was for wimps. Ben Jonson fought a single-combat in a war with Spain and won. Donne was a tough soldier. And Chaucer, for all he seems like just a writer of rowdy songs, was a bad mamma-jamma. He was attacked by thieves and got away, some of them didn’t fare so well. When you saw a man like Mr. Jourdain, a man’s man up there, reading, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May…” You don’t roll your eyes and think, “Wake me when you’re through…” You wonder about the power of words, about the importance of imagination, beyond diversion or entertainment. You realize that in the artfulness, you pay attention, hearing what you otherwise would miss. And in a story that is unreal, or at least not yours, you find things you would have dismissed because, well, you know it so well, you’d heard it all before.

Maybe he set the stage for the parables in my life? Whatever it is, there is something going on, even now, in the boys. We have read lots of stories, but now we are at the place where we read books with chapters. Last year, the four of us read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. There’s a deep story for a family fighting cancer. Now it is Charlotte’s Web—again, a story of life. And like the great stories of life—whether St. Peter’s, Lewis’ or White’s—there is no shirking death. No morbid melancholy, just reality. How mysterious that fiction can be so honest, or that it takes faith in the unbelievable miracles and resurrection of Jesus to bring us to real life.

Don’t get me wrong—I don’t buy the idea that Jesus can be read allegorically, that the miracles are “optional.” It is precisely their absurdity, their meta-fictional quality that makes them real—Tertullian said, “Credo quia absurdus est.” “I believe because it is absurd.”

When we finish Charlotte’s Web, we’ll move to one of my favorites from childhood, The Door in The Wall.

IV. The Naturalists, part 2

When we go to the “train store,” it’s not for books, as the boys’ name lets you know. About 5 years ago, my mom introduced John to Thomas the Tank Engine. John doesn’t do much with them anymore, but Joe sure does. So when we go to Barnes and Noble, we’re going for Joe to play with the trains. John likes to look at all the stuffed animals. John loves animals, and a stuffed animal is close enough to the real thing, and lets his imagine go. Joe had picked out two trains he wanted, and John was looking for some animals. He came back with 4 ducks. I said, “look, we’re not getting a lot of stuff. Joe’s two trains are part of one set.” But then John says, “But Daddy, they need to be together! They’re like us! A mommy a daddy, and two babies…” Man, he had me there! Luckily, they were big time on sale…

V. The Naturalists, part 3

My mom, grandmother, and aunt bought the boys a set of horses with trailers, all that stuff. That’s what happens when your parents live in Texas. Now I am in trouble because the boys know I had a pony when I was about their age. We’re reading Charlotte’s Web and they want a pig, a runt, at that. And a rabbit. And some sheep.

Some days back, John was at a kids place where a guy came in from “Silly Safaris.” He had a lot of animals—a rat, a rabbit, a millipede, a corn snake, an alligator. He would ask the kids questions. John is generally hesitant to answer questions in front of a group. But he was really scoping out the big plastic box. That was the last animal he was going to bring out. John snuck up behind the stage to get a look. He came back to me and said, “It’s a vulture!” I thought, “Who brings a vulture?” Well, it was. Some of the kids knew what it was. The guy asked if anyone knew what it ate. John’s hand was up, and not many others. He asked John, and I wondered, “will he answer?” John said with great joy, “Dead stuff!” The guy laughed and John was very happy. I told the woman next to me that when we see buzzards in the air, John says, “we better get moving!”

VI. That’s my boy!

Occasionally, if the boys do something outrageous or bad, I’ll hold my finger up and say, “Prick the finger! Prick the finger!” then I mumble something about going on Maury Povich to see if I’m the father. Rude, I know, but Melissa has to deal with a lot from me, and that’s about the least of it.

Melissa and I both like Fleetwood Mac, but I guess I am a weirdo because I don’t really care for Stevie Nicks. I think Christine McVie is clearly a better songwriter and easily the best singer in the band. Today, we’re going down the road and “Tell Me Lies” comes on the radio. Joe says, “Wow! She has such a pretty voice, Daddy!” There’s no denying him now.

p/g,

Aaron

Psalm 73 Duet

Melissa and I were reading Psalm 73 a few days ago. As we were reading, it struck me that it was speaking to us both, in different ways.

Melissa: “But as for me, my feet had almost slipped; I had nearly lost my foothold.”

Aaron: “For I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. They have no struggles; their bodies are healthy and strong. They are free from the burdens common to man.”

Melissa: “Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure; in vain have I washed my hands in innocence. All day long I have been plagued; I have been punished every morning… When I tried to understand all this, it was oppressive to me till I entered the sanctuary of God.”

Aaron: “When my heart was grieved and my spirit embittered, I was senseless and ignorant; I was a brute beast before you.”

Melissa: “Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”

I guess we all know that the Scriptures speak to us, and we understand that at different times we might seek this or that Scripture, or perhaps we discover that a Scripture we knew well speaks to us in a different way. Somehow, I was aware of that in a really heightened way as we read psalm 73. Melissa and I have talked before about how we may have both been touched by the same Scripture independent of each other. But it was truly awesome to be reading the same Scripture and find different parts speaking to us.

My Gay Church

You never know what someone is going to say at The Rock La Roca. The Board of Ordained Ministry came to visit the church back in November, to expose the future pastors and deacons to our madness. We are a “cautionary tale” of what happens when you jump out and trust God…

Anyhoo, they wanted some of our staff and members to talk about their perspectives on the Church. One of the lay people was Mona, a dedicated worker in evangelism and mission. Mona came to the church with a lot of baggage in her life; mental illness and chemical dependency. And she really came to the church in a strange way. She was in a gay bible study. She told the Board of Ordained Ministry that she had struggled with homosexuality for a while. The object of the Bible Study was to justify the homosexual lifestyle by re-interpreting Scripture. Mona said the best thing about the Bible study was that the teachers really took the Bible seriously, except at its condemnation of homosexuality. Mona felt that she could not accept one part and deny another, so she was really mixed up.

She had an experience with God’s grace—that is, that all people are sinners, but God has made His salvation available to all who repent and trust Jesus. Mona gives an excellent testimony to overcoming sin. So much so that she wanted God more than she wanted what the world says you ought to have. She wanted to sell out to God, and she let go of believing that her lifestyle was “ok.” Now that is costly discipleship indeed!

One of the fundamental problems facing churches today is an inability to say anything meaningful about homosexuality. Some churches don’t have the guts to come out and say they are in favor of homosexuality, and so what happens if a gay person who believes it to be sinful comes along, looking for help? They can’t get any help, because the church doesn’t believe it is a sin, but the struggler doesn’t know that because the church doesn’t have the guts to say what it believes, and there’s no help or worse, they get led astray by those who want to teach that a sin is ok.

Or other churches come out in favor of homosexuality and therefore go against God, and what future is there in that?

And then, other churches come out with nothing but judgment and condemnation, and therefore go against God, and what future is there in that?

Why not do what the Rock has done (and this was done before I came, I merely carry on this most Scriptural tradition), and declare that homosexuality is incompatible with Christian discipleship, but that all are welcome in God’s house to hear the saving message of transformation of hearts and lives?

A sad part of our problem to address homosexuality from the biblical point of view, independent of the culture and politics, is that we miss out on the experience of many who are struggling with sin. On the one hand, “liberal” churches don’t think there is a sin involved, and so there is no relief for those who know they need to change. And “conservative” churches can’t see that in people being transformed, the Gospel is realized.

A few weeks ago, I had an interesting conversation in the house of a gay man I happened to visit. He asked me point-blank, what did I (not the church) think about his lifestyle. I told him that I didn’t suspect there was enough time between us for him to be able to hear me with goodwill. I said that I believed that the Scriptures were clear, homosexuality is not acceptable to God. But at the same time, sin is the very reason Jesus came. Christ came to us while we were powerless to do anything. No one comes to God with anything to offer, He freely transforms us, if we let Him. There was some silence and the fellow said, “I have never heard that before. Thank you.” How is it possible that he never heard that, growing up in church? Is what I said not the plain gospel? Are his choices to be condemned or to have a preacher, God forbid, tell him homosexuality is ok? As odd as it may seem, the Rock La Roca has quite a few gay worshippers. One church asked me if we were gay-friendly, looking for advice on how to be so. I think they were asking how to “condone” the lifestyle. I had to explain what I said above, that we welcome all who want to hear the word of salvation, but that we will not say that any sin is ok. Somehow, gay folks hear the word of grace and come. They know we love them, and because God has loved and saved us, we hope that He will save all who can hear (and bear) the message.

A few Sundays ago, one of our members, Christy, got up and talked about a conference she was going to be part of at UK. It was going to present the Scriptural standards that homosexuality is not an acceptable Christian lifestyle, but also that we try to reach out with the love and transforming power of Jesus. It’s not going to be easy, because a state college campus is not friendly to groups that will say homosexuality is wrong.

I was very proud of her, because I know how hard it was for her to get up and share her own transformation, and then also because she wanted to make sure that she would not back off the truth. She did a great job, and 9/10 of it was because when you give people straight talk, they can hear it. It’s when you start shucking and jiving that people smoke you out.

Fasting Mark 2

After I posted the piece on prayer and fasting, I went out into the hall to read some Scripture. Melissa has given me two Bibles—one I use at home, and the other is my office/pulpit Bible. There’s something about having either one, and knowing she got it for me. Anyway, my “traveling” Bible is falling apart after 12 years of rough riding in my back pocket. So I have the one from home with me. It’s one that I have used to do my “slow read” of the gospels—anywhere from 2-6 verses a day. So I was back doing that in Mark (having set aside Luke for some reason) and was in Mark 2 where Jesus is questioned about why His disciples aren’t fasting like the disciples of John and the Pharisees were.

Jesus’ answer: “How can the friends of the bridegroom fast while He is with them? When he is taken from them, then they will fast.” How wonderful it was that this was the Scripture passage for me to read! And so, indeed, we fast because we do not have His presence, but then we fast also to find His presence.

p/g,

Aaron

Prayer and Fasting

In his sermon on fasting, John Wesley points out that fasting comes naturally. That is, at various times we fast, perhaps without knowing it. If we are heavily burdened, depressed, grieving, anxious, we may go without eating, as things are or seem to be more important than eating. Our concentration is focused somewhere besides eating. We may not know, however, to commit ourselves to fasting on purpose when we find ourselves heavily burdened, depressed, grieving, or anxious. We may not know to practice fasting in a disciplined way, so that we can go straight to it, in its spiritual dimensions, when tough times come. And we definitely do not recognize it as a powerful kind of celebration whereby we announce that a consecrated time to God is more important than “the necessities of life.”

Prayer is much the same. Or perhaps I should say, something of the posture of prayer is as unconscious in us as fasting sometimes is. Here I am the UL hospital, 4 in the morning. I was awakened at 2 and can’t get back to sleep. There are any number of family members here, on the bone marrow transplant unit and in the various ICUs. What are they doing? They could sleep at home. There’s not much they can do here, other than be here. Something about this is “natural.”

They are keeping a vigil, meaning to or not. They are doing the very thing that they would do if they knew to pray—staying close to the loved one, looking for some way to communicate presence and express hope for healing. But how much deeper prayer goes. Prayer is presence with the one prayed for. And it expresses more than hope; it is communication with God, the ardent expression of desire.

While the posture of prayer—staying close and hoping, and the ways that shows up in hanging out at the hospital—come naturally, the substance of prayer does not. That is, we might be able to quickly ask God for something in time of need, but the discipline to turn a “natural” inclination into focused prayer comes only with practice.

Prayer and fasting are inextricably linked because fasting leads to prayer. Prayer sustains fasting, but fasting opens the time and space for focused praying. If you spent in prayer the time it takes you to go to, prepare, and/or eat 4 meals a week (fasting 2 days), you will carve out a significant chunk of time for prayer. And so when the need or desire for much praying comes upon you, you will be ready.

The “natural” fast usually comes with negative connotations. It comes from stress or sadness. The spiritual fast can be a response to negative emotions or situations, but is more often a positive response of desiring to spend serious, powerful time with God in a way He has naturally ordained. The “naturalness” of various kinds of vigils also come from negative situations and emotions. But if prayer is the substance of the day for you, there will be more balance in how you “feel.”

So, you already know that you will fast and keep vigil. Why not be prepared? Jesus teaches that prayer and fasting are of vital importance. And more than being prepared for the hard times, what about making prayer and fasting a part of those times when nothing is going on? It will be as simple as breathing to you. And then, to be really blessed, what if prayer and fasting move beyond the “natural forms” and are actually a part of the good times you experience? What if focused prayer was full of the desire and language of praise? What if fasting became primarily a time when you experienced God’s provision through the Word and prayer? You could turn the “natural” upside down: instead of reacting to hardship unconsciously, the “natural,” exhausting responses of not eating and keeping vigil become the times of sustaining. When hard times hit and you know to pray and fast, you would be ushered into a time that, because you have known it constantly and in all seasons, is a comfortable place, the right place to be, a pleasant place even in the midst of trial. If God became present to you that way, just on the surface reaction of turning to fasting and prayer, how much moreso will He be present in the praying and fasting?

It’s not just that this makes sense or is scriptural, countless Christians over the centuries testify that it is their experience.

Close Encounters

I had a meeting a few days ago with some guys I have been trying to make contact with. One of the cool things about ministry on the edges is that there aren’t as many blocks to weird ideas. So far, no one has said to me, “that’s crazy.” And believe me, I have proposed some far-out stuff. So, these contacts are about brain-storming, about doing ministry in ways that are different not because they are so much new, but because they have been forgotten.

One of the guys, Ryan Koch, is a counselor and is looking for ways to bring counseling to some people who need it but can’t afford it—the very kind of people in our neighborhood. We are setting the groundwork for having a “counseling bank” where people can come, maybe on our mission night, and also receive some counseling. Hopefully that can take off, and make some use of the counseling students at the seminary.

The other fellow, Will Samson, is writing an interesting book on living a life of justice in the burbs. When I can remember the title, I’ll pass it on. It’s big stuff. Anyway, he and I have been in contact because in a totally random way we found we have a passion in common: getting good, nutritious food to the hungry and poor. In another blog entry I’ll tell you how I got into that (because it is an important lesson in the HOW of ministry with marginalized people), but for right now, it’ll set me off on an episode and I’ll get confused and this will make less sense than it does! Will is part of a sociology project that looked at food access in North Lexington. He has some great detail about what we already know on a general level: if you are poor, your access to food is not good, and what food you do get is more expensive. The simple fact is if you walk to the neighborhood grocery, you will pay a premium on goods you could get cheaper if you had a car. In addition, none of the grocery stores in our area had any fresh vegetables, and the only cheese they had was processed cheese product.

So a few months ago we started hatching plans to have a farmer’s market at The Rock La Roca. It will be a long process to get going, but I am hopeful it can work, because there are a lot of Africans on the North Side, a lot of Hispanics, and as I am finding, most of the Anglos have Eastern KY roots, and “garden food” is always a favorite. But it’s not going to happen this summer.

But here’s what is going to happen: we are going to garden and bring some fresh produce into our mission night so that we can add the good nutrition to what we offer. I think I have a lot of gardeners in the church. We’re going to have some cooking and nutrition classes. And I have initial permission from the elementary school principal (he is an awesome dude) to use the property behind the school as a garden.

Then, yesterday (Feb 7), Will, Ryan, and I got to talking about some guys who are doing what is called Community Supported Agriculture. That is an idea where a small farm sells “shares,” and once a week brings in the produce to people who have bought the shares. So one fellow, for example, sells a share for $400, and that gets you one bushel basket of picked-that-day produce once a week for twenty consecutive weeks. The basic idea is that a community would be related to a particular small farm. Some of you who have read Wendell Berry’s stuff are familiar with this idea of connecting an urban area to a farm, so that the connection between food, eater, and farmer is a close one. It’s clear as day: it would be awesome if we could connect our community with a farm—connecting families to good food, how to prepare it, connecting urban kids to a farm (because a lot of the farmers love to have people come out and work).

So anyway, I’ll write more about how and why I got into this, why I know it works, and how some of y’all can get involved if you want to.

We met on a day when I was fasting (and there we were talking about food!). After they left, it was time to break the fast, so I sat down with some Scriptures. I usually read Psalm 6 in breaking a fast. And then I’ll just read whatever else comes to mind. Well, yesterday it was Psalm 65, “Praise awaits you, O God, in Zion.” The verses just jumped out at me: “Blessed is the man whom thou choosest and causeth to approach unto thee, that he may dwell in thy courts: we shall be satisfied with the goodness of thy house” (65:4). I began to think of a great banquet in God’s house, where every one is sitting around, not just eating, but being together, totally satisfied with the all-encompassing goodness of God.

But at the same time, I was having a hard time feeling that; I was wondering, “what does this mean for Melissa?” We talked about it a little bit, and it was one of those moments where you realize you’ve been having the same thoughts about the same Scripture, but we were led there in different ways. The Scripture was Job 13:15. I got there because I was wondering about being drawn near to God’s courts and thinking it really wasn’t happening. Melissa got there because, well, she likes Job. We spent some time rejoicing that the Lord had given us the same Scripture.

And then, these words, a wonderful poem of God’s amazing, bountiful, simple provision:

You care for the land and water it;
You enrich it abundantly
The streams of God are filled with water
To provide the people with grain
For so you have ordained it
You drench its furrows and level its ridges,
You soften it with showers
And bless it crops (Psalm 65:9-10)

So indeed, how foolish is it that there is earth and sun and rain but right next door, some are hungry, lacking good food? That one’s on us, I’m afraid.

p/g,

Aaron

In the Name of Jesus

Ok, so I don’t think I can rehearse the reasons why ministry to the poor really has to be ministry with the poor (or go too much into the difference), but I will tell you how I got there. I had good teachers: John Chrysostom, the bishop of Constantinople in the late 4th century. And there was Bob Lyon at Asbury. I thought I was taking Greek, but it turned out we were digging hard into the meat of the New Testament, and what grace and discipleship will look like. And then there were the best teachers I had on this, the ones who made the point as Scripture came to life: Calvin and Arvilla Mynhier.

Calvin and Arvilla and their family were my first converts as a pastor. They had grown up under a very harsh fundamentalist faith. So when I stood with them in the pig-pen talking about grace, about Jesus dying for us precisely while and because we were sinners, and providing us grace even after we placed our faith in him, they were just shocked. They felt like they had to be good enough, and since they were poor (they are the most marginalized people I have ever met; their poverty is precisely the range of poverty defined by the New Testament—not necessarily economic, but one that infiltrates the social and personal aspects of life as well), God was not on their side. Or maybe some days they might think that “This is what it means when He said, ‘blessed are the poor.’”

The way I met them was classic. I was maybe two months into my first church. My mentor, Howard Willen, always emphasized visitation, and so as I didn’t know anything else to do, I started visiting, and if no one was home, I would leave a small card telling who I was and where the church was. Long story short, I had shown up at the Mynhier’s trailer and left a card. So anyhoo, one day I am at Fox’s store and this woman stops me and says, “Aren’t you that new Methodist preacher?” which is one of those questions you aren’t sure you should answer. But I was ready. Infant baptism? Free will? I was ready to answer any controversy a Baptist might start with me.

Well, all she really wanted to tell me was that she had a huge garden and could I see that the food got to the hungry? I didn’t know how it was going to get to the hungry, but if you’re Bob Lyon’s student and you don’t answer with a resounding “Yes!” to such an opportunity, well, you might know how to identify the perfect tense of a middle voice verb, but you weren’t paying any attention. So I said sure I would.

Now, back up. When we were moving into the parsonage, Pablo Shafer (a friend from Lexington who was helping us move) says in passing that the high ground behind the parsonage would make a good garden. Next morning, Robert Curtis is out there with a single-bottom plow and bam I have a 1000 sq. ft. garden. So as the summer went along, I had been taking vegetables with me on my visits, leaving them as a gift from the church. Everybody loved it, even atheists would open the door for me when they saw corn, beans, and tomatoes.

Well, Arvilla and Calvin were as good as their word and next thing I know, twice a week the parsonage porch looked like Kroger. Various kinds of tomatoes, lots of beans, all kinds of peppers, cukes, zucchini, corn. I realized pretty quickly that I was not going to be able to get it all out. So I took what I was not using up to the community service center, and it ran out of there, people were so happy to have the fresh produce.

That’s how it worked that summer. The next summer, we got a little more ambitious. There was an article in the paper that said at some point during the year, 20% of the children in Clark County were hungry. Well heck, I knew some of them, and I was pretty hot because the numbers say there are about 1000 Methodists in Clark County, and I said no way. If there were that many Methodists, no one would be hungry (see, in those days, I still thought that if someone had the guts to call themselves a Methodist, not only were they saved and sanctified, they were hard after ministering to the needs of people. I know, I know, I’m naïve.) Surely 1000 Methodists would have fasted until there was enough to eat (because Methodists are supposed to fast two times a week) and surely they would have opened their cupboards. But no. In my own church, some leaders said, “the poor are poor because they deserve to be.” The most decisive thing I ever heard Bob Lyon say was that the idea that the poor are poor because it’s their fault or they deserve to be “comes from the Evil One.” So, the battle lines were drawn, and the honeymoon was over, all because a poor family wanted to make sure no one went hungry.

One year, Calvin raised rabbits and pheasants, rigging up an incubator for pheasant eggs. “There won’t be no going hungry no more,” he said. And his tithes were pheasants and rabbits. Good eatin’.

So anyway. We realize we can do a lot more than a little gardening here and there. So we get a story in the paper about giving produce to the Community Service Center, about how we’ll come pick it if we need to, plant a row for the hungry, etc. Then we got organized into something we called the Food Security Coalition. Arvilla was there with us from the beginning. We got hooked up with other agencies, and pretty soon we were doing more than getting “garden food” to people. Sure, we had all kinds of people bringing food in (and I think I made the Community Service Center people a little frustrated with the bulk of stuff coming), but we were also showing people how to garden, doing nutrition classes, and then two women at the church (Frankie and Cynthia) started a food pantry so we had the whole range of good food to give people. Man, were we praising God for all He was doing through us. Over about three years, we did some good work.

But the powerful thing, the powerful lesson was not what we did, but how. See, in our initial phase of discipleship, we do ministry “to” the poor. That is, we have some program where we show up to volunteer, they show up to get something and bam we’re done. That’s ok, and indeed it has to be done. But where the Jesus life gets real is when you start to form a transforming relationship with the people you serve. And as you witness to them about faith in Jesus, and you call them to be disciples (that is, you don’t want them to just keep coming to you for help unless, God forbid, you like it that way), then they should be finding their own ministries, using their gifts for the glory of God.

Think about it. This work was Arvilla’s work. Maybe we were like Moses and Aaron, and I did all the talking, the up-front work. But it took her giving from her abundance, her desire to see the food spread out to the poor and hungry. How different would it be if I had thought, “their family is poor. I must minister to them because that will make me a good boy,” rather than the way God worked through it: He placed it in her to undertake this ministry, the hard work of planting and weeding and harvesting, and wondering what could happen if…

And now, here I am at The Rock La Roca UMC, looking to do the ministry that Arvilla and Calvin taught me, knowing it works, knowing that feeding the hungry is a process, a plan, a lifestyle in some way, a ministry that is a direction for a church, not a program among others.

In the end, there is no one who knows what ministry to the poor and hungry should look like except the poor and hungry themselves. Set them free in Jesus’ name and watch and learn.

p/g,

Aaron

It's All How You Look At It

When I take Melissa to the clinic, I try to read some, and because it is a scientific place, there’s usually some science magazines around. One of them had an article on Asperger’s Syndrome, a type of autism where the person can function, but has limited social skills. The article I read said something about kids with Asperger’s being able to judge as well as the general population a person’s trustworthiness by looking at their face. (Generally speaking it is assumed that part of the problem of Asperger’s Syndrome is the inability to read social clues in faces). And then it made some comment about how kids with Asperger’s Syndrome can see fine details in a picture, but will miss the whole. The example was that if you show someone with Asperger’s a large “S” that is made of nothing but small h’s, they will quickly perceive the h’s but not the larger picture they are making, “S.”

So, as things turn out, one of the boys I work with at the school has Asperger’s. Let’s call him Eddy. He’s a fun kid. I work with him on learning French, and he has an amazing ability to hear and repeat, even getting the accent right. Of course, you never know what he’ll ask you to teach him to say, like when he asked me how to say, “Farewell, my alien brethren…”

One day we got to talking about his science fair project—determining if body language can give a clue to whether or not someone is telling the truth. Interesting—people with asperger’s can still gauge trustworthiness and perhaps are more keyed in to details like aspects of body language that a person without Asperger’s might lose in seeing the “big picture.” It’ll be neat to see how it works out.

And then, we’re going down the hall and we pass some artwork. One class had put up construction paper with cut-out shapes glued on. Neat stuff, lots of colors. And then we saw why—there was a big poster of one of Matisse’s paper cut-outs. I was tying it back to our French lesson and remarking that the work is about 10 ft tall and 5 ft wide when Eddy says, “Look! Fish! A Seahorse! Jellyfish! Eels!” Now, if you have ever seen a Matisse cut-out, you know it’s fairly abstract. (A friend of mine gave me a print of Matisse’s “Winepress,” and it took me awhile to figure out why it was called that.) I look at the bottom to see the title. “Beasts of the Sea.” I asked Eddy if he had read that. “No,” he said, “but it’s a good title…”

p/g,

Aaron

Meditations in the midst

I have lots of stuff to put on the blog, but I have not had access to internet for my laptop, so... And since I don't feel like typing much, I guess I'll have to wait until I get around to putting stuff up.

On Wed Feb 7, Melissa and I had a moment where we realized that we had been thinking about the same Scripture: Job 13:15, "Even though He slay me, yet will I hope in Him." There was a time in my life where I thought something like this, "I am still going to place my faith in God even if it seems like He is not treating me so well." That's kind of ham-handed, but what it amounted to was a kind fo stubbornness, some way of thinking that said, "I have no one else but God." And in the end, we find that what seemed like a curse from God was really not, more likely it was a burden being lifted.

It goes back to what Melissa has talked about, being yoked with God and knowing that when it seems the hardest and roughest, He is carrying, as He always has, the most part of the load.

And then there was yesterday when we talked about the story in Mark 2 of the paralyzed man, where his friends lower his mat thru the roof so he can get to Jesus. Jesus forgives him his sins, and only heals him later. Melissa and I were both thinking, "well, there it is, the one thing you really need, forgiveness of sins." I can't tell you how hard that hit me, to hear her, of all people, say that. If there were a choice, would I not take the healing?

Maybe Hauerwas and Willimon are right. Maybe justice is a bad idea. maybe, as Melissa pointed out from Mark 2, God's promise in Jesus is GRACE, not justice. Justice is nice, but don't look for it from men. Take God's grace and live it. I wonder: if we lived lives of grace, how much more just would our justice be?

Preachers Together

from a few weeks ago...

Well, a wonderful day came out of messed up circumstances. Because of Melissa’s fall Saturday evening, the doctor said to keep an eye on her. No need to worry that it’s anything serious, let’s just wait and see.

I had planned on taking the boys with me to Lexington, to do some visitation. But with Melissa at home , maybe dizzy, I decided to stay here and do some work from home. But then, Melissa was feeling a lot better overall. So I asked her if she felt up to coming on the visits with me. She said she’d see, and anyway, if she couldn’t, we could cut it short.

We went to visit some of the Congo families, with an eye to letting John and Joe play with them. That worked out really well, to see that boys are boys everywhere, and language barrier is no barrier to play. And then, Melissa got to meet some people who have been serious prayer warriors for her. It was huge for everyone—the Congo kids bonded more closely with my boys than they could at church. And Melissa and a Congolese woman got to meet and find they have much in common, forming a friendship that will be important to both. The boys did not want to leave when Melissa said she thought she was really running down.

Haven’t we been praying that we would be preachers together? God is so good.

Geography of Love

Joe got a talking globe for Christmas from my parents. It tells you the country, continent, states, population, highest points, etc. He calls it a "glove" (long "o," and y'all have no idea how much restraint it takes for me to not go off on phonics and the rules of English...)

He has really messed with it a lot, more than we know. Because you'd be amazed at what he can find on it. He knows the two Congos-- he wanted to know them first because, "because that's where my friend Malippo is from..."

Now he'll say, "Daddy I love you all the way to Florida. Is that far?" "Daddy, I love you all the way to Turkey." or "all the way to Russia." or "all the way to Gulf of Mexico."

Not Sure What to Title It

This long illness and recovery of Melissa’s is just that—long. You get it in your head that there will be this benchmark or milestone. And to be sure there are some. But then there are setbacks, or milestones you reach without knowing you reached them. Melissa did really well in terms of the treatment. But then came the fall and going back into the hospital, and then two months of infection and now spleen removal, and even tho she gets past all of those things, it feels like it slows her down, and when do you get to the place where all the little and the big things are cranking like they should?

Melissa is very tired lately, most likely because of the combination of seizure medicines that have had their dosages upped. The long haul from being hospitalized in August, infection that ran through November and splenectomy has taken it’s toll. Remember her in prayer.

And permit me some stream of consciousness Psalmifying. Psalm 39 looms large these past few days. “I said, ‘I will watch my ways and keep my tongue from sin…’ but when I was silent and still, not even saying anything good, my anguish increased” (Ps 39:1-2).

This is one of those places in the Bible that reminds you that all the good intentions will get you nowhere unless they are united to faith in God. Faith for forgiveness of sins, faith for holiness. It’s all by faith in God’s ability to change our hearts. It has never relied on resolution.

Well, I was thinking about that, and what does it have to do with where we are? It got me to thinking about how much everything has to do with faith. The times I have cried or been burdened to the point of sorrow have come when faith flags. Not that it’s not natural to feel those things—it’s more that in me they tend towards pessimism, thinking, “well, the gig is up.” Fear of the unknown. Fear of having no faith.

Melissa is struggling with some really bad stomach cramps. Every night we’re praying and wondering, “when? why?” And there it is, Psalm 39, about sanctification, but really about faith. God says more than you think, it seems.

Walking Around Money

A couple of good books: Christine Pohl’s Making Room, a study on hospitality in the Christian tradition, and Amy G.Oden’s And You Welcomed Me, a collection of writings from the early church on the issues of hospitality. “Hospitality” unfortunately is hampering the cause; that is once it becomes a defined field of study and God forbid there are conferences on the subject, no one will pay attention!

I came away from the books very refreshed. Oden’s book has a section on the practice of hospitality, and there’s one thing that comes out clearly, something that has long stirred me, and has special value at The Rock La Roca. Across space and time, one can summarize the early church’s view of the practice of hospitality in this simple command: “do not go to the poor empty-handed.”

Rarely have we ever thought out our response to their poor in our midst. Most often, we decide we need to do something, and then we do… something. But then we start to have all the reasonable worries: shouldn’t they get a job? Aren’t we just teaching them to be dependent? Are we enabling bad behaviors? And pretty soon we develop “policies” to define when and how we “help.” This usually involves things like stipulating an amount that we will give, how we will judge the need, what is the process for delivery, etc. I want to suggest that these policies are totally about us, about protecting us, not about actually helping.

Here’s what I mean. If you decide you won’t pay more than $50 on a gas bill, for example, what is that about? Is it really about making sure someone “doesn’t work the system?” By the time someone gets to asking for help on a bill, it is way past $50, so you’re not really helping.

Then we decide that to be responsible stewards, we need to make sure that the need is actually a worthy need. Our mania for organization takes over and we ask that the person in need come in for an interview. I am not sure what that’s about either, because it is most assuredly not to start an on-going relationship with the person in need.

We have paperwork to file before we can get the money. Again, this is to make things easier for us. I readily admit to the difficulties of cutting a check on the spot. And indeed, you have to really beware of someone asking for money “right now!” But on the other hand, many needs of the poor come up because 2 days before rent is due, they have to repair a car or by medicine. If they could just plan it so it could fit the day we cut checks…

None of these ways of handling “benevolences” fits the pattern laid down for us by the early Christians. The emperor Trajan, when he was considering persecuting Christians asked Pliny to investigate. After checking it out, Pliny wrote back and said that the Christians have a weird religion, but they’re not enemies of the state. They take care of the poor. If someone is sick, they take care of them. If someone is hungry, others will fast until there is enough to eat. The early Christians were in a word, extravagant.

If we take into account the way we generally do things as churches, we’ll see something that ought to shame us: our charity ends up as a burden. If someone owes $200 and has to go to 4 churches to get the help, has to go to 4 interviews of people determining if the need is valid (4 different churches for a single mother taking the bus—you get the picture) and then having to balance when the different checks come… not really very helpful.

Let’s get challenged by something: you are working the system. You had way more than a $200 gas bill. The Lord paid it all. He did not give you $50 worth of salvation and then tell you to try Buddha or Mohammed or help a little old lady cross the street, and maybe it would all work out! It’s called grace. You’re working the system. You said you’d repent and lead a new life, but it’s hard and the old life keeps cropping up, and you need His mercy anew! Thank God He did not say, “they’ll become dependent on me. I dare not offer them salvation! They’ll just work the system to their advantage. Why don’t they just straighten up?”

You won’t find anybody more interested in making sure someone’s life doesn’t change if the church helps them. And that’s the key—most times we don’t really care or try to see that their lives change. But that is what we are called to. What if we decided to be graceful? What if we sought to meet needs thoroughly? Now, we won’t do that most times because, well, it’s crazy talk. But it is only crazy talk if we are not willing to follow through. And it’s our long inability to follow through that keeps our charity as no charity at all.

I have long wanted to have what I call “walking around money,” that is, some funds that are available to always be ready so that if someone is in need, if I pass someone on the street, or I visit a poor house, that I won’t have to be there with some pious words and the hope that maybe things will work out. So I keep a stack of Wal-Mart gift cards with me, and if there is a need, we try to meet it as best we can.

But let’s go deep, and put forward a plan that can get us back to how we are supposed to live as God’s people. We have learned that the biggest problem facing the kids (and therefore the families) in our community is transience. That is, by November 1/3 of the students at the elementary school had not started there. What that means practically, is that the kids have to start all over each time they move. They fall behind, and if they have learning difficulties, it only gets worse. For the family, it’s not much better: they fall behind each time they move, too, in terms of money and reputation among people who might rent homes. The school principal says that if kids can stay in the school for three years, they can overcome most learning difficulties or being behind.

So, how do we address something like this? We came up with an idea, a Methodist idea, an early church idea: what if we meet the needs that cause people to move? That is, instead of waiting until the family is behind on rent, let’s figure out what the gap is and subsidize that gap. The practical result is that we keep the child in the school because we kept the family in the neighborhood. So. Are you willing to spend, say, $250 a month on a few families?

No, actually, most people would not be. For all the reasons we talked about above—it’s working the system, maybe they need to work harder, etc. But, those reasons were also exposed as shams because we talk ourselves out of generosity because we won’t take on the whole of the work of charity.

See, we have to be willing to go deep. That is, the Lord has blessed this already because the school has paired us with our first family, the family of a little girl I have been working with on school issues. Who knew it would be her family? And when I approached the family and said we would like to help, they were a bit shocked. Who does such a thing? They were still freaked out when I told them it’s because of Jesus ( thumbnail way of saying Luke 14 and Matthew 25…).

I also laid out that we would be asking them to be willing for me and Curtis Book (our missions pastor) to meet with them, to discuss where the money goes, how to budget, set priorities, learn life skills, and talk about new life in Jesus. Hey, if you take my rent, you gotta take my love.

The only way to actually be generous is to not give money, but rather to give the money it is going to take to get the job done, and then enter their lives in love. A little bit of money for a gas bill makes no difference. Pay more generously and enter into the real work of long-term transformation. This is why you came to Jesus. If He had forgiven only part of your sins and then left you to fend for yourself, what a mess you’d be in! But instead, He paid it all, and left you His continuing presence in the Holy Spirit and Holy Communion. He sticks with you through the hard times, not leaving when you are selfish, lazy, or ignorant. Lord, may we be willing to deal with others as you have dealt with us. Amen.

So how did all this happen? Well, it started on a small scale in Clark County. The missions person, Becky Taylor, was pretty generous with people in need. I learned a lot from that. And the need was everywhere. Pretty soon Frankie Moore and Cynthia Long were wanting to feed people. So wherever I went, I was not empty-handed, and quite simply, the Lord blesses that.

I am really just a country pastor in the heart of the town. I visit, like Wesley asked his pastors to, from house to house, to find the social needs and spiritual needs. Woe to me if I can preach the Gospel but cannot feed the hungry!! And though I don’t get to pray for sick calves or mean horses anymore, or help people load hay, it’s not that much different, the visiting from house to house. Maybe the needs are more stark, or maybe they are just more concentrated.

Somebody gave me $3,000 for my “discretionary” fund. I don’t know what all will happen with it, but I can guarantee you I will never be embarrassed again by saying I can’t help. Or won’t help.

Riders on the Storm

Saturday was a such a good day. We hung out with the boys, went to see Charlotte's Web, had a good dinner together-- all seemed as right with the world as it can be in our situation. I stepped into Kroger to pick up something quick. When I came back out, I saw that Melissa was laying on the floor of the van, stuck between the seats. I thought maybe she had had a seizure, but she said she didn't think so, and she was not in the usual fog after one. I was mad, sad, worried all at once-- there were the boys in their car seats, unable to do anything. To add insult to injury, John said he didn't think it was a seizure; I had always hoped he would never have to deal with that. His great strength was his weakness: he is my helper in so many ways, and he could not do anything to help his mommy. Joe said, "I hollered for you, Daddy. Did you hear me?"

Luckily, in spite of being worried, John got back to his normal self. By bedtime he was talking about protecting Joe from bad guys. John has definitely made things easier for Joe. Every transition that the boys make is harder for them, given Melissa's illness. But John keeps a stiff upper lip for Joe, holding his hand or putting his arm around him. And so Joseph becomes something of a spokesman; he hollered for me while John worried what to do. Most times, Joe will step forward to speak on their behalf. I guess they're like Moses and Aaron.

I spent some time talking to the boys about how to help Melissa if she has a seizure. Ack, what a discussion. I wonder why I forget sometimes with the boys what I try to live with-- being up front and honest about situations? I thought the boys would be wigged out by talking about it, but they were glad to know what to do. Joe said, "And I'll pray."

We also spent some time on perspective. That is, Melissa's cancer is gone, hopefully to stay. So if she has seizures, that's a lot better. We'll pray and trust those will be gone, too.

In the midst of all this, we still find so much joy in the Lord. I visited the Itoula family a few days ago, discussing the problem of their children still in the refugee camp in Gabon. I read them Psalm 126, the Psalm we rejoice in so much. We prayed about getting ready to sing this Psalm when their children come: "When the Lord brough back the captives to Zion, we were like men who dreamed! Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy."

Martha, Barbaro and Shipwreck

Melissa’s surgery went well. The doctor said the spleen just about jumped out. We won’t know for a few weeks if it works. That’s average. But it may be apparent even more quickly. But for right now, we’re happy that it went well, and she did not need any blood. She had a lot of pain after the surgery, and was not able to move much, but in a few hours, she picked up.

She was really peaceful about it all. I guess given everything else, this is small stuff. She said beforehand that lately with God and her it’s been all about trust. So she wasn’t worried.

When Melissa went in for the first chemo in 2005, it was when Martha Stewart was getting out of jail. There were news stories, and everyone was talking about Martha, feeling sorry for Martha. I was not too sympathetic; if I had done what Martha did, the cavity search would still be going on. Melissa was really mad, tho. She said that Martha did something wrong and was getting out of jail, and there Melissa was, having committed no crime and starting a two-year sentence (that’s what she called her chemo regimen… little did we know!)

Then came Barbaro back in the Spring. That was crazy. A horse was treated better than most humans, but again, there’s Melissa being irradiated. The cynic inside her said our lives must be really shallow if we get so worked up about a horse. And it only makes it worse if you say it’s because there’s so much money involved… It’s one of those moments where you laugh at how things don’t change. Wesley wrote a great essay more than 200 years ago, I think it’s called “On the Present Scarcity of Provisions.” Basically, he was decrying the idea that there are too many people to feed when the best land in England goes first to horses for racing then to grain for whiskey. Wake up, Kentucky!

And now it’s that dude who had to get rescued because he was trying to sail around the world and his boat sank. I am glad they rescued the guy, but at some point you have to wonder how come no one ever says to themselves, “I need an extreme rush! I need to face down danger and possible death! I want to do something that will demand focus and endurance! Even if I can’t get leukemia, can I at least take 105 minutes of radiation and chemo that can cause secondary cancers? Hoo-ah!” Somehow it’s cool to have to call everybody in to get you off a mountain, out of the sea, or cut off your own arm because you had to have that rush. This has been a two-year rush, but where are all those pansies?

You see why I like Cake’s song, “The Distance,” so much:

No trophies, no flashbulbs, no flowers, no wine
He wrestles with something he cannot define
Bowel-shaking earthquakes of doubt and remorse
Assail him and impale him with monster-truck force

A Child's Prayer

Wow, there are just so many layers to prayer. Firday night I told Joe that Courtnay didn't feel good. Courtnay works at the church and is a favorite of the boys, altho she has for the moment been supplanted in their affections by Allison Krauss. Anyhoo, Joe stops to pray and says, "Heavenly Father, Courtnay doesn't feel good. Amen." I was immediately struck by his simple statement. He didn't ask God to do anything. He just stated the facts. A child knows something is up, but doesn't always know the answer. Joe does this in lots of areas. "I'm hot" or "I'm hungry," and then we do what seems best. BUt isn't it funny-- there's always that moment of frustration where you say, "what do you want to eat?" or "why don't you take off your coat." But what profound faith to say to God, "Courtnay's sick" and trust Him to know what's best.

Father, my children are burdened with me and my grown-up ways. Amen.

Prayer and Preaching

There is a great and mystical connection between prayer and preaching. I learned at First Church that once we started having times of intercessory prayer during the services that the worship became more powerful—music, preaching, the feel of the service, because God’s people were praying, and people knew there was always a team back there praying. But it goes deeper than that. It reaches down into the life of the people from the lives of the worshipping congregation in heaven. And it does more than impact preaching. But preaching is on my mind right now.

When the angel Gabriel announces to the priest Zechariah that he will have a son, John (to be called the Baptist, although he sure seems like a Methodist to me…), it comes at the time of prayer, the time of burning incense (Luke 1:8-10). So, the proclamation of the birth of the one who will lead the way for the Messiah comes at the time of prayer. The task of the preacher is much like John’s, to prepare the way by convincing people of sin and showing them the way to Jesus, so should it not come at the time of, at the cost of, prayer?

A few years back, Melissa shared something powerful with the prayer meeting at Dunaway. In Revelation 5:8, there are golden bowls of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. She shared with us that she visualizes her prayers as being in those golden bowls of incense, and how the prayers of all the saints around the world, perhaps from all eternity, are in those bowls.

I have noticed a connection between the bowls of incense and prayer in Revelation and the incense and time of prayer in Luke. That is, in Luke, the incense and prayer come at the time that announces the coming of the one who will prepare the way. The incense-as-prayers of the saints in Revelation come as the Lamb whose blood has cleansed believers of sin, is declared worthy because His blood has saved us from sin. And indeed, John the Baptist cried out, “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world!”

Prayer must surround the word of proclamation if it is to have any effect at all, if it is to be more than just words, however fine, however well-put together, however full of Scripture. If there is no prayer, there will be no power. And it must be more than the preacher’s own prayer and study time, which anyway if most people are honest is more study and less prayer. No, there must be thick prayer rising up to God from the many people.

Orth it Up

A couple of days ago, I was discussing some plans for a service of prayer and fasting that I want to have every Wednesday during the lunch hour. I hope that it will be something that brings some peace into the day—the peace of repentance and the peace of staying close to God in fasting. And I hope that there is just some peace and quiet. Bonnie MacDonald, deacon at Christ Church, would always begin her pastoral prayers with a time of silence. I took that good advice and started, too, and someone remarked to us that it was the only time of silence they had during the week.

Anyhoo, part of my plan involves some fixed praying and also some incense, both as a pleasing aroma (part of the peace and quiet) and also to symbolize the sacrifice of prayer, ascending to God. So I pulled out my censer (I have always wanted a censer, and it was my Christmas gift to me). Rosario came in and said, “All right! Way to orth it up!” So now we have a new word, “to orth,” to make something orthodox.

Even as I write, we are “orthing it up.” When the boys were first born, they came at the times when I was working on my Board of Ordained Ministry paperwork. It’s a long process and took a lot of time and effort. I would put the babies in a bassinette next to the computer and they would nap or play while I worked. I like to think it’s why they both like my set of books on the Early Church Fathers—they were right there with them from the beginning.

Anyhoo, it has been a good day for us—playing, huge naps (all four of us!) and a good dinner at a Mexican restaurant. So now, I have some stuff to write, sermons to prepare, and the boys are in bed. They seem ok that I am here in the monitor’s glow. And I have a CD of Gregorian Chant in, low volume. John says, “can this be my lullabye?” Way to orth it up, John!

A few days ago, Joseph was singing to Melissa, “You are so beautiful to me.” I thought, why is she beautiful to him? In the end, it has nothing to do with how she looks, it has to do with who she is to him, his mommy. When does that change? When does beauty quit being about the inner quality? St. Peter said, “Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes. Instead it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight” (1 Pet 3:3-4). Way to orth it up, Joe!

In Defense of Brute Force

Some years back, I started getting interested in the Japanese game, Go. Actually, my interest has come in three waves, and the first two waves died for lack of time or someone to show me how to play. The third phase of my interest came to an end about a year and a half ago. See, Go is a strategy game, but it’s not like chess. It’s a 19x19 grid, and players take turns placing a black or white pebble on the points of intersection. The goal is to surround as many of your opponents pieces as possible. There is not a set opening, as in chess, where all the pieces are on the board. The game has almost infinite variety. So much so, in fact, that a computer can’t play it and win, whereas in chess, a computer can now beat the greatest players because it can predict all the possible moves.

Chess is a game of force, whereas Go is a game of patience. Maybe that’s not the right word. You take possession of property in Go by surrounding an opponent’s pieces, and the patterns that develop from that are beautiful. You take control in chess by bluntly forcing the opponent off the board, by bringing more force to bear than your opponent has.

I confess, I was interested in Go because of its elegance. I like chess a lot, but Go had some hold on my imagination. I also used to like bonsai. I always wanted to have a cedar or pine bonsai that I could make to look like the memories of my childhood on the beaches of California’s Central Coast—windswept and battered, but the tree endured, flourished, even, in spite of circumstances.

But my interest in Go ended because my interest in bonsai ended, and my interest in bonsai ended in George Strunk’s office. See, he has a bonsai plant there, in its nice little enameled trough. But it is totally dead. All its needles may be gone by this point. I asked him about it, and his answer was a real wake-up call. He said he just could not get into bonsai, could not bring himself to accede to the very idea of bonsai. He went on to say that he thought it was unnatural, to keep something from growing, to prune it, to take it out of its pot and prune its roots to keep it small, to keep it from growing. “It’s not the Kingdom,” he said.

Sometimes you need someone else to shake you out of complacency. You think you know something, you think you’re sold out to something. In my case, I like to think I am sold out to the growth of the Kingdom, the agricultural metaphors of Jesus. And yet there was a double-mind of interest in bonsai.

I know that sounds melodramatic, but I think that what was behind what George was saying was you have to believe. I don’t mean just lip-service, or think it’s a cool idea. But there is more to it than even working hard at it.

So there I was. I let go of bonsai, and Go, too. Because around the time that I heard George’s parable, I was also reading Victor Hanson’s Carnage and Culture, a book everyone should read. Hanson discusses the Western way of war in contrast to non-Western ways. He says what makes the Western way more effective is that it is finally amoral and not ritualized. That is to say, it is not so much interested in how as in what. There is a goal that is independent of the means to the extent that the Western way adopts and adapts to accomplish the ends of war as opposed to the forms.

This is what I mean by the title of this blog entry—in defense of brute force I mean we have to let go of notions about church that may be pleasing, elegant, or time-honored. Bonsai are pleasing. Go is elegant. Sure, if you want to sound cool at a cocktail party, read Sun Tzu. But if you want to win, try de Jomini. Sure bonsai is fun in a solipsistic way, but better the man who plants a tree that produces fruit that produces seeds to produce many more trees to produce fruit…

There is a K-mart future for the United Methodist Church. That is, in the next 10 years, we will see an acceleration of churches closing, especially in the rural areas. Some will close because older congregants die. Some will close because they are run by wolves and vultures. Some will close because the pastors, perhaps hampered by wolves and vultures, won’t bring in the new people who have moved to the country. But close they will. And then there will be one option: to sell the property. And then we will, like K-mart, make a killing. Then comes the crucial moment. What will we do with the money?

What we should do is put it into starting new congregations all over the place, even in the poorest, inelegant places. Find by hook and by crook the kinds of pastors who can start a new work, and rebuild the church. What we will do, I am afraid, is send the money to the bureaucrats who can prop up the same failed plans that got us into this mess in the first place. But for a little while there will be a chance to lay aside things that are pleasing and even elegant in our own tradition for the things that will get the job done. From the beginning, the Kingdom has been forcefully advancing…

Let me give you an example of the frightening problems at the highest levels of the United Methodist Church, the jokers who get too much of our money. When I was at Christ Church, I was doing some research on how do churches grow by conversion, not transfer. Our growth comes from transfer—people moving from one town to another, or people who come from another denomination. That’s not growth. You can see it in a horrible piece of reality: there is no county in America that has more people attending church now than it did in 1990. Lots of churches have grown, but Christianity is dying. So, the key is to learn how to get back to making converts to the faith.

So, I did the logical thing. I called and emailed the United Methodist Church’s General Board of Discipleship and asked for the Evangelism bureau. We have a few people heading that up for the church. I asked what I thought was a simple question: which UM churches are growing by “profession of faith,” that is, conversion? I figured once I heard about who was doing it, I would look for churches about Christ Church’s size and learn from them.

They did not know. The very people in charge of evangelism for the largest mainline denomination in America have no idea which of their churches are growing by profession of faith; the people in charge of evangelism do not know which churches are doing evangelism!

But they did have a suggestion for me: I should get in contact with GCFA, the General Council on Finance and Administration. This agency keeps all the records for the UMC. So, since every church turns in a yearly report that has a line for “professions of faith,” they should be able to tell me which churches are growing by professions of faith.

Now, disregard the fact that maybe the evangelism gurus in the Board of Discipleship should already know that. So I got in touch with GCFA. Naturally, it’s not really their job to worry about that specific line in the report. They offered to send me the data reports of all 40,000 or so United Methodist Churches and then I could look at the profession of faith lines for each church…

Finally I broke down and called a retired bishop, Bishop Looney, who started the Foundation for Evangelism. I guess he started it because the bureaucrats weren’t doing evangelism. He gave me the names of a few churches based on my criteria. He knew it off the top of his head—because first, there are very few churches growing this way, and because he keeps up with such stuff.

We can keep doing what we’ve been doing. Or we can take the chance that is going to be offered us: to put our money to good use. Quit doing it the way we have been and do something that works. We have such an elegant structure, vast and sprawling, and many times that is all Go comes down to—a game that is about a beautiful and unpredictable complex design. Looks cool in a coffee house, but it’s not very good training for war.

New Year

Already, this New Year is better than last. Last year, we knew we were headed for bone marrow transplant, that the disease would spread rapidly by the time we could get the transplant, and who knew what would happen? Who knew where things would stand at this point?

So we are thankful and full of praise. We are glad that things like seizures and splenectomy are not life-threatening parts of the disease. We are blessed. Family and friends have made this journey not just easier, but possible. So, what will this year be like? I am hoping it will be like last year, from the standpoint of relying on God. You can't go wrong there.

Happy New Year!