Katrina Relief Urban Project Part II

Intervarsity is partnering with a local church in St. Bernard's Parish that housed us and coordinated all of our work. Adullam Christian Fellowship is a storefront church founded in 1996 by Pastor Randy Millet and his wife Jill. It is definitely not the kind of church I would usually want to attend. But it was definitely the kind of church I needed to attend last week. Again, I said the word "powerful" keeps coming to mind and that is what I see at Adullam - a power-filled ministry.

If you have ever seen the movie The Apostle with Robert Duvall then you might have a clue as to the kind of preacher and pastor Pastor Randy is. I can't really say that Pastor Randy had a sermon prepared the Sunday we attended his church. But I can say that he had a word from God. That is to say, he preached.

He preached life into what is otherwise a dead community. St. Bernard's was washed completely away by Katrina and Adullam Christian Fellowship lost 9 out of 10 of its membership to displacement after the storm. (In fact, Pastor Randy's mother-in-law was one of the ones who lost their lives in one of those nursing homes.) But I gotta say that Pastor Randy is literally preaching St. Bernard's back into existence. What were once dead bones are now alive again and that little church is becoming an incubator for the Gospel, not only in the New Orleans, but across the world. Mark it down.

So what did I learn? Pastor Randy runs with folks like Benny Hinn and a bunch of other church movers like that. Not the kind of guy I would have chosen to bring a bunch of skeptical college students out to see. I was thinking, "O man, I'm gonna have to do a lot of explaining." But man, there was something very very real about what was going on in worship and I looked up and about half the students who came with us were dancing in the aisles by the end of the service. And those who weren't dancing basically said, "Hey, it wasn't me, but I really appreciated being a part of it all."

St. Bernard's Parish ain't gonna come back to life by boring exegesis. But it is gonna come back - it is coming back - by the proclamation of a Jesus who is alive and wants dead bones to dance.

Katrina Relief Urban Project Part I

I rolled in from my trip to New Orleans early Sunday morning. When I talk about the trip the word that keeps coming out is "powerful." God is doing powerful things in New Orleans. And God is doing powerful things in the lives of the 150 or so college students who I went down there with. I would even say God is doing something powerful in my own life as a result of this trip.

Being that it is Holy Week and I have three services to prep for I am not going to try and put all my reflections into one single narrative form. I just don't have it in me.

But I do want to share a few key points. I'll do this in a series so as to give us all a break.

First, the devastation. It has been nearly three years since Katrina hit and most of the 9th Ward and St. Bernard's Parish, where we served, still look like they did two or three months after the storm. Most of the debris has been moved and most houses have by now been gutted, but very few have been repaired. It looks like a neutron bomb exploded, leaving something like 50,000 hulled out homes.

Those among our group of 150 or so who had been down to help with relief before said it was somewhat disheartening to return for a second or third time and see so little progress. The initial waves of volunteers who responded early on have substantially diminished since 2005. Ergo, so has the rate of progress.

One image from all this was particularly poignant. Most buildings still have the numbers spray painted on them right after the storm. There is the date and time that the building was searched, along with how many animals were found dead. At the bottom very prominently is the number of dead people found inside. All the buildings I saw had zero as that final number. I suspect most buildings where dead were found have by now been either repainted or completely demolished.

So now when you walk by you just see block after block of zeroes. None dead inside; but no one alive.

The Boys of LHS Part V

On the first day of junior high I walked into my first class, Competitive Athletics - soon to be known as "C.A." I scanned the gymn and found a tall black kid with a high, Arsenio Hall fade up top. He was probably six foot at the time, but the fade gave him another two inches at least. He was by far the most athletic looking kid in the place, so I decided it would be strategic for me to get to know him. I sat down with a nod, waited for about five unassuming minutes to pass in silence, then introduced myself.

Elton Jones had just moved to Lubbock from Louisiana. He talked with an acute cajun accent that was hard for my West Texas ears to catch up with. I would soon discover that he not only looked like a good athlete, but was one. I had chosen wisely. Elton would be not only my first, but also my best friend in junior high.

Over the next three years we spent the night at each others' houses nearly every week. We shot baskets, went on trips, smoked Swisher Sweets, drank Kool-Aid (man, that Kool-Aid), threw eggs at passing cars, won three or four city championships, and "macked on" girls together. He was "Big E" and I was "Little P". And together we were a dynamic duo.

As we passed from junior high into high school, however, something happened to Elton and I. Elton started hanging around more with other black kids. I would invite him to do something, but he would have other plans. Then, when I got a truck and started giving Elton rides home from football practice, he was less grateful than I thought he should be. I can't really say things happened consciously, they just began to feel different. We remained friends, but we grew cooler and less trusting of one another.

I tried to make sense of why Elton and I were drifting apart. I had no language of my own to describe what was happening so I borrowed my father's language. It was a language that he had borrowed from someone else as well. It was the language white people always ended up using when blacks disappointed them. "Elton was a good black," I thought, "but he is becoming a N-Word."

To be completely fortright I am just now beginning to wrestle with the meaning of that word in my life. What does it mean for me, my family, and my work as an agent of reconciliation? All I can say is that I long for a day when there will be a great cleansing. Come, Lord Jesus.

But do not miss the real story. The expletive at the end of my statement was just a symptom of a much deeper force at work. Elton and I were actually being initiated into the cult of racialized manhood. He was undergoing his socialization into blackness, which meant he was beginning to question and take exception to the fact that all the white kids had trucks and all the black kids were left to bum rides. I, on the other hand, was being socialized into whiteness and thus assuming my mantle as one authorized to say who was a "good black" and who wasn't. In my characterization at the time, Elton was the only one who was changing. The reality, however, was that we were both undergoing a change. I was entering into a world of white privilege and he was entering into a world of black anger. In other words, we were both entering into a world fallen.

When I loaded the bus with the boys of LHS we brought that fallen world with us. At sixteen or seventeen their eyes had been opened for long enough to know that a chasm existed between us. And at 21 I was no longer naively expecting them to fall over themselves thanking me for the opportunity to just get out of Lubbock. We all knew that suspiscion and mistrust had boarded the bus with us.

And that is why camp is so important - not only for blacks and white, but for all people. Camp digs you up out of the crusty, hardened earth and replants you in new soil. That means that no matter how strong and invulnerable you were at home, at camp you are in jeopardy of dying.

I've seen it happen. I've seen tough kids, I mean mean dudes, melt to tears when faced with that first faithful step over the rappelling ledge. And I've also seen geeky kids become heroes when they get chosen to act out all of Hamlet in two minutes or less. But the best is when everybody - black ghetto kids and white suburbanites - by the nondiscriminating call of the square dance.

That's when you know that camp is working its magic - when everyone is all turned around in some giant Gordian knot. And that's when the camp speaker has it so easy. She just steps onto the stage and says, "You know, life is like that. We're all turned around in one giant mess. And there ain't not a one of us who knows enough to get out. And so we pray to God for help."

I think that is what happened between me and the boys of LHS. Only it was the horses and not the square dancing that did it.

Young Life has this cool way of keeping everything you are doing a secret. You know that like everybody else you are going to rappel, and you know you are going to do a ropes course, and you know you are going to drive go-carts, and you know you are going to ride horses. But when you are going to do that is a total mystery right up until go time. And it was go time with the horses that everyone was dreading.

We were dreading the horses because the horses - we were pretty sure - we could not control. And control is everything isn't it? Control is what this whole white versus black manhood thing is about anyways. We even said it outright when I was a kid. We would say so-and-so was a great coach because he could "handle the blacks." And when "good blacks" rejected being handled? Well, you already know what we said then.

But here we were with the horses and not one of us knew how to handle them. And because we were all out of our element - planted in new dirt - we didn't feel the pressure to lead on like we weren't scared.

So that's how it happened. It happened with a giant admission that we were afraid of not being in control. And the admission came from a young kid named Duck (Duck is the third guy from the left in the photo shamelessly cribbed from Glenn Austell) in a prayer he volunteered to give on the last night of camp.

It was evident that this kid had been to church. He brought out a giant bass voice from somewhere deep inside his chest. "Lo-ord," he started off, "we thank you for all thy many blessings. . ." I just wasn't ready for this. I had to bury my head into my pillow to keep from laughing. I heard snickers from all across the bunk beds. But funny as it was, there was no doubting the fact that this kid was a preacher. "And we are grateful for this Young Life camp, Frontier Ranch, a great blessing to us all." "And we are thankful for our leaders bringing us to this wonderful place in the Colorado Mountains. We are glad to get out of Lubbock."

The prayer went on. I quit laughing and began to pray along silently. Then, after several minutes, at the tail end came the word from God.

"And Lo-ord," Duck concluded, "if we ride horses tomorrow, I just pray I don't get a crazy one. Amen."

It was out of our control. It was in God's hands now.

Journaling

A couple of weeks ago a fairly well known evangelical leader came to the mega-church in town. He is somebody I have known of for a long time. Theologically and socially conservative, but also understanding of the fact that the post-Christian culture we live in should not be expected to accomodate Christianity.

I thought the guy was worth going to hear and I wanted to encourage some folks from my congregation to go with me. So I googled his name to get a bio that I could email around. The google turned up the most ridiculously absurd. Right in the top five of search results was this: "So-and-so also encourages a dangerous New Age practice - something called journaling."

Suddenly I was imagining some fundamentalist cavemen sitting around in leopard skins. "So-and-so also encourages a dangerous New Age practice - something called writing."

I tell you.

"Other Diversity"

Ethicsdaily is carrying an op-ed by Gary Nelson about the New Baptist Covenant. Nelson has written the most insightful article I have seen yet. It is a friendly yet much needed critique of the old paradigm on which the New Baptist Covenant celebration was built.

It is a worthwhile read even for those who don't care anything about Baptist life because it lays out the central issues which are defining the church today. The core issue is this: the next generation of Baptists are the now generation of Baptists and unfortunately they were for the most part left off the ticket in Atlanta. The broader implication is that church just can't be done the way we've been doing it. This includes the way we have formulated language like Conservative or Progressive or Evangelical or Mainline. The point being that when I talk with clergy friends my age they say, "Well, I serve a Mainline church. But I'm an Evangelical. But, I mean, I am socially progressive. But, well, I'm also conservative when it comes to issues like sex and violence on TV."

See, the old wine skins are about to pop. And it's going to get messy. And the blood of Christ is going to be everywhere.

As an aside, Ethicsdaily would do well to listen to what Nelson is saying. Younger, postmodern Baptists do not define ourselves by what we are against - ie, the Southern Baptist Convention. Rather, we define ourselves by a common passion for authentic life with Jesus and with others. And most of us could find that in a Southern Baptist Church, or an Episcopal Church, or a United Church, or the bar down the street.

Baptist Blogger

Yesterday the Burlington Free Press ran an article about me and this blog. To be honest, I haven't even read it yet. I just haven't been able to bring myself to do it.

There are something like 80 million blogs out there. I learned that in a Times article yesterday that talked about some of the "ultimate blogs" that are out there. I was not surprised that Fromthewilderness was left off the ultimate list.

That's probably why I haven't read the Free Press article here. Because there is no story. Nothing sexy. Certainly nothing that would be described as ultimate. I mean, my pictures aren't even in focus.

A pastor friend of mine called me to rib me about the whole thing. I told him how creepy I was feeling and that I couldn't even bring myself to read the article. He went into compassionate pastor mode. "Well, it was pretty innocuous," he said. "Yes," I said, "and that is the point. Blessed are the innocuous was not a beatitude."

Look, for some reason I am writing this thing. And, for some reason you are reading it. And so it is what it is. Not sexy. Not ultimate. But a gift. To me and I hope to you too.

Ryon

The Laying on of Hands

Yesterday we celebrated the calling of two new deacons at our church.

I have participated in a lot of laying on of hands ceremonies over the years and for the most part pretty much considered the whole thing as a merely symbolic act. We Baptists are inherently skeptical of rites and ceremony. That's why we have "ordinances" instead of "sacraments". Because we would rather be safe than sorry, we tend to stay well clear of what we see as a fine line between holy acts and "empty rituals".

But yesterday, as I held my hands upon the shoulders of our new deacons, I realized that my hands were more than just outward symbols of an inward blessing. I was literally trying to bless these two with my hands. The best way I can describe what I was feeling is to remember the movie Ghost, when that Patrick Sweazy character was trying to learn how to move things with his mind. The trick, he was learning, was to put all of one's self into the object.

That's what I was doing yesterday. I looked up and realized that my fingers were buried into flesh, and all of my physical and spiritual being - heart, and soul, and mind, - was surging through these 10 points of contact. I was trying literally to squeeze the Holy Spirit out of my fingertips into these new deacons.

And, I believe, the whole apostolic communion of saints, were squeezing with me.

Blessings.

Bus People

I led a discussion last night about Hurricane Katrina with about 20 students from the University of Vermont and St. Michael's College. We are all going to New Orleans with Intervarsity during their spring break to do recovery work. In preparation we have been familiarizing ourselves with the Katrina story, and most especially the stories of those caught up in its path of destruction.

Last night's discussion centered around an article by Danny Duncan Collum which originally ran in Sojourner's Magagine last January. Collum writes about how fear gripped hold of our nation in the days following Katrina. He talked about all the misinformation that was put out - false reports about massive-scale raping and murdering in the Superdome, shots fired at rescue helicopters, etc.

I remember hearing all those reports. And I remember believing them too.

Irie and I were in Houston at the time, visiting a friend's church. As the initial platforms of evacuation - the Superdome, the Alamodome, the Astrodome, etc. - began to overflow with Katrina evacuees, many smaller facilities began opening up as official Red Cross evacuation centers. The church we were visiting was one of them.

The church's gymn was converted into a temporary dormitory. Cots were brought in, a triage medical clinic was set up, and a large breakout room was filled with all kinds of donated toiletry items. There was toothpaste, soap, deodorant, and lots and lots of hair products. I will never forget what Irie said after taking a look at all the hair products that had been collected. "Those are white people's shampoos and hair brushes. They are NOT going to work for the people who are coming to stay here."

The first night there we heard from the area Red Cross disaster response coordinator that a busload of people were coming from the Astrodome. She counseled us to be on our guard because of all the reports that were coming out. Red Cross volunteers then began training us in how to search people for weapons. No one came in without being searched. Red Cross policy.

That night a lot of people stood around and waited for a mass influx of people that never came. Only a few carloads trickled in. Since they had heard the same reports about how unsafe the evacuee centers were, they were not eager to stay. They came in, took toothpaste and deodorant, passed on the hair products, then went on to the next town. Everyone wanted to get as far away from New Orleans as possible.

The next morning - a groggy one for a lot of folks who stayed up waiting - the official word came. More evacuees were on their way. And these, we were told, were going to be "bus people."

Bus people. I asked the students last night what that term implied. They were right on the mark. Bus People was a euphemism for a whole lot of things. Black. Poor. Dangerous. Desperate. Nothing to lose. Add all those things up and suddenly you have a word pregnant with a whole heck of a lot of force.

Over a hundred of us New Englanders will travel down to New Orleans in March. We will be taking busses. People will take one look at us when we roll into town and they will pick a name for us right off. They will call us college kids, and missionaries, and Christians, and do-gooderers, and patronizing, and pure of heart. They will call us all kinds of things.

But they will not call us bus people. And I think we all ought to think about that.

The Boys of LHS Part III

Last night I was sitting around a table with some friends and I shared a little about my faith journey. I told them that I caught my first glimpse of Jesus Christ at a Christian camp in 1993. I told them that I was basically blind-sided by Jesus that week. I signed up to for the girls, and the horseback riding, and the girls, and the rappelling, and the girls. Jesus wouldn't have broken into the top 1,000. In fact, I remember sitting by one of my high school friends Lauren Lowe the first night at dinner. Someone stood up to pray for the food. "Oh man," I said, "you mean this is a Christian camp?" Of course I knew it was a Christian camp, but Christians were anything but cool in my book, so I was playing dumb. For Lauren and any other girls that might be listening.

That's the thing about the Jesus I met that week. He is totally cool with the kids trying to be totally cool. Totally cool with the kids trying to be totally unchristian. In fact, for me, that was what great Young Life was all about - being totally cool with the worst kids in the school.

The boys of LHS who climbed aboard the bus with us in 1998 were not the worst kids in the school, but like me, they were definitely trying to be. Sagging pants, wife-beater shirts, foul tattoos, fouler language. They were a mess. I remember talking with a parent of some other kid who was going on the trip from some other high school. He is now mayor of Lubbock. A very honorable guy. Also a very conservative guy with a very Baptist hair cut. I was telling him how excited I was to be taking the kids we were taking from Lubbock High. "Some good kids then, huh?" he said, shaking his head as if he understood why I was so fired up. Obviously he had missed my point. "No, not very good kids at all," I said.

God wants to call the worst kids in the school, and those who want to be the worst kids in the school. If you don't get that you don't get Jesus. But no worries, there's hope for you too, because Jesus has also come to call the people who don't get Jesus.

It's pretty incredible, but a lot of the LHS boys who climbed aboard that greyhound that night had never been outside the Lubbock city limits. They had never had an opportunity to go on a real vacation. Never been outside their confined world. I kept telling people that. "The moment the bus john rolls past the Lubbock line these guys will be further from home than they have ever been."

I was proud. What I did not know, however, was that in a metaphorical, but much more profound sense, I was about to travel farther from my own home than I had ever been also.

Report from the NBC

On Saturday I returned from my trip down to Atlanta for the New Baptist Covenant. The NBC was a meeting of Baptists from all across the theological, racial and geographical landscape. President Jimmy Carter, a life-long Baptist, convened the meeting and some 15,000 showed up in a united effort to say that in spite of all our differences there some common things about our faith that unite us. Those common things are expressed most clearly in Luke 4, the NBC's theme scripture, wherein Jesus stands up and basically says that God has annointed him to bring good news to poor and outcast folk.

There were some brilliant moments in the meeting's four days. There was some powerful black preaching that had me up on my feet talking back to the word of God. "Amen." "Alright." "Okay now." After James Forbes preached on Friday I turned to the white guy from Indiana and asked him if they preach like that in the Midwest. "Not like that." Forbes's Bible might still be hot.

Other notables.

Tony Campolo, one of my evangelical heroes, preached in pictures. Parables of the Kingdom where some say yes and some say no to the claim of God on our lives. I was especially interested in his bold criticism of one of his former students who is out there somewhere doing boob jobs and tummy tucks for the materially consumed.

John Grisham, the author, spoke. I know, who knew he was Baptist? But man, that is a layman who knows why he is a Baptist. He called us to civility and inclusion. And he called us to get out of politics - atleast the kind of politics that co-opt the church into the red state blue state junk.

And there was the rub that made me feel a little out of place all week. Jimmy Carter convened this thing and I think most sane Baptists have all along felt he is a man of sincere faith. I was very happy to hear what he had to say and felt it was full of the wisdom of a man of God. He called us to quit letting non-essentials divide us. He explicitly named our varying beliefs about the inerrancy of scripture, or the place of women in the church, or the practice of homosexuality, and said they were non-issues, much like the issues of circumcision in the early church. Basically he was calling for us to start focusing on what we share in common, our central faith in the Lord Jesus Christ - which he said is in the end the only thing. Everything else is distracting us from our call to proclaim the Gospel into the world. On the last night of the gathering President Carter shared his own story and talked about how it was that simple, central faith that he saw demonstrated in an uneducated, small-time preacher from Brooklyn, that changed his life.

I heard Christ speaking in President Carter.

I heard Christ speaking in President Clinton also, but was less settled about his presence there. President Clinton spoke as if speaking to friends wounded from some common battle. In other words, in spite of the large number of black and Northern Baptists gathered, he seemed to be speaking to those who felt hurt by the strong dogmatic and authoritarian turn of the Southern Baptist Convention. His counsel was pastoral, encouraging meekness and humility when we come into disagreement. He impressed upon us our need to remember that we all see through a glass darkly and we are all trying to do what we feel in our hearts is right.

The message was clear and timely and I very much appreciated President Clinton's humility that night. Yet, and this goes back to what Grisham said, I couldn't help but think that it was a mistake to have so many political figures speaking. It really wasn't the fact that any one of them should not have been there, but all of them should not have been there together. It was just too much. And, given the fact that the two most prominent Republicans invited, Mike Huckabee and Lindsay Graham, ended up backing out after agreeing to come, the whole thing ended up being way too heavy with Democrats.

Look, here I inject my personal opinion, if there is going to be a pan-Baptist movement that is seriously going to do things to proclaim the Gospel to lost, hurting, poor, outcast, and imprisoned people, then it is not going to come from former Presidents and old veterans of the Southern Baptist Convention war. Instead it is going to come from new names in Baptist life like Ben Cole, Sarah Jobe, Michael-Ray Matthews, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. If you are a Baptist with an interest in the next 40 years then learn who these people are. They are the next generation.

Perks:

I have never been to a black church conference and was very surprised to see that one of the large convention halls was turned into a market. Now most of the places I have been to will provide space for vendors to sell Christian books and maybe some religious artwork and crafts, and perhaps even stoles and robes. But down in Atlanta they were selling suits. Now part of me thought Well, they're doing something positive for the the black community by inviting black businesses to come in. It is a kind of counter-cultural economy. I have to say, however, that something set uneasy in my soul when I saw all the glitz and glamor. There's a fine line and this market was awfully close, if not beyond.

But here was the perk. I got my shoes shined at this thing and I have to say that the lady did my dogs right. I mean to tell you, she raised Lazarus. And I don't even know if James Forbes could have done that.

The Boys of LHS Part II

When I was in divinity school I served as a chaplain at a small neighborhood ministry program just off East Campus in Durham. Time was a crazy thing there. By that I mean, the whole concept of time was totally different from the concept of time just a couple of blocks away at Duke. People would walk into our storefront ministry and ask if we gave rides to doctor's appointments. "Sure we give rides. Just tell us when you need to be there and you can meet us here and then we'll give you a ride to wherever you need to go." Then the time warp. "Well I was wondering if you could take me now; my appointment was 30 minutes ago."

If you aren't expecting it that time warp in poor communities can be tremendously frustrating. Yet it can sometimes be incredibly liberating as well. In fact, sometimes it can be the kind of thing that can change the whole course of your life and ministry. That's what happened for me at LHS anyway.

Under most circumstances, if you are going to take a group of kids to a camp in Colorado you really need to have pretty much everything squared away a couple of months out. That just makes sense. It definitely made sense at Coronado because parents want details and, perhaps more to the point, kids at Coronado have options. If you don't catch them early they'll be headed somewhere else that week. Tennis camp or Jazz Camp or the lakehouse. They have options and they have schedules.

But not the boys I met in the spring of 1998 anyway.

Here they are, in a totally cribbed shot from Glenn Austell (please disregard the chubby-cheeked Sooners fan in the corner), the boys of LHS.

We were no kidding only about three weeks from boarding a bus to go to summer camp when Lance Dillard, another member of the LHS Young Life team, and I just started going crazy asking any kids we saw if they wanted to go to Colorado with us. I mean we were totally reckless, casting our seed left and right. "Hey, you play football right?" "Yeah." "Hey, I saw you play. You're good. Do you want to go to Colorado?"

Now do you see my point about time? Who are the kids who are going to say yes to this kind of madness? Only the kids who have the time. In other words, only the poor kids.

There is something very biblical about that. Jesus is taking everyone to summer camp, but the only ones who are able to go are the ones who aren't going to tennis camp. The ones who don't have a father to bury. The ones who have nothing . . . nothing but time.

The Boys of LHS Part I

My first ministry experience was in college with Young Life, an evangelical organization geared minister to unchurched high school kids. I became a Christian through Young Life and so by the time I got into college I wanted to do what others did for me. I wanted to tell lost kids about Jesus. After jumping through all the hoops I was officially assigned to my Young Life team. I had been placed at Lubbock High School.

Now I gotta say that Young Life in my high school, Coronado, was pretty white bread. There were lots of rich white kids there and Young Life pretty much reflected that. Rich white kids with nice cars show up for a skit, some songs - including the obligatory "Brown Eyed Girl" - and then a talk about how all the stuff in our lives isn't enough to make us happy. Somebody would say something like, "There is a giant God-shaped void in your life and you can't fill it with anything or anyone else," which has pretty much been true ever since Pascal said it. After Pascal everyone would then stand up and sing "Light the Fire" and go home. Vintage Young Life. And I loved it.

But then I got assigned to the team at Lubbock High School and Young Life changed. I would even say God changed, or better, my whole idea about God changed.

LHS was anything but white bread. Sure they had their fair share of white kids walking the halls - about 40% in fact - but these white kids were not the same kind of white kids rolling around Coronado. They were smart and they were into music - often their own music - and they had heard of other colleges besides Texas Tech. So they were weird. Then there was another 40% of LHS kids who were latino. Out of ignorance we called them Mexican, and some of them may have been. Then there were the black kids. About seven percent. The rest of the school was "other."

So you see my dillema. Freaks, Geeks, Mexicans, Blacks, and others? Come on. Who was I going to connect with? Who in that group would want to join arms and sing "Brown Eyed Girl"?

"There must be some mistake, I ordered my sandwich on white bread."

The area director for Young Life tried to cheer me up with an eye of the tiger pep talk. He told me I had been assigned to LHS because I wasn't a quitter. He said something about only the tough surviving ministry at LHS. In other words, he was basically saying they assigned me to LHS, not because they thought I would necessarily do well, but because they thought I might actually be willing to die trying.

I did not die of course, but over the next two years of ministry at LHS I did give my life away. That is to say I gave away the person I was and became someone entirely different.

The Particulars of Ministry

At the suggestion of Kyle Childress, pastor of Austin Heights Baptist Church in Nacodoches, Texas, I've been reading Garret Keizer's book A Dresser of Sycamore Trees. It is a memoir of a lay Episcopal minister's journey with a small congregation in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. I'd really like some of my Vermont readers to tell me why the heck it took two years and a preacher from Texas to put me on to this book. I mean, come on people!

I'm enjoying the read. It is at times a little gushy and too liberal with words, but I am finding that Keizer's attention to the particulars of ministry is full of insight into the subtle and sometimes hidden forms grace takes in our lives. I suppose that pretty well somes up the art of the spiritual life - opening the eyes to see Christ in the most particular and inauspicious of encounters. Page one in Keizer's book says it all. He's talking about coming back from a visit with a parishioner's home. As he drives his mind floods with subtle images of the visit and suddenly becomes aware of how mercifully connected his life and the life of his parishioners are with all the rest of this God blessed world. In other words, he remembers:

The image of an old woman taking the wafer reverently in arthritic hands overwhelms me as I round a mountain and the full moon appears blessing the branches of a great dead elm. The ionosphere has come down in the night, like St. Peter's visionary sheetful of clean and unclean animals, and my car radio isa feast of stations . . . I give thanks for my family, my church, the Supremes. Next week, without fail, I will stop at the farm which it is too late to visit now, but passing by I pray for the family who live there. I pray for their cows and the land. And I tell myself by way of exultation what I now tell my reader by way of warning, it won't get much better than this.

It won't get much better because being alive to the subtle sacraments of life, those crevices through which heaven's light breaks in, is what life and ministry and Keizer's book are about. It doesn't get much better than that because that's pretty much the best life has to offer anyway.

I listened to Ken Burns give an address tonight and he pretty much said the same thing. He said the way he goes about history is to look for the universal through the insights of the particular. He even used religious imagery. "What is true below, is true above," he said. Then he quoted Blake who wrote of seeing "the world in a grain of sand." And, of course, Blake got that from a certain Jewish rabbi who talked of seeing the kingdom of God in a mustard seed.

Our world is addicted to dazzle. If it doesn't blow our socks off then it isn't worth it. If it doesn't blow our socks off then we'll never even notice it.

But the kingdom of God . . .the kingdom of God is among us. Hidden, like a treasure in the field. Hidden in the tiniest of particular acts, where God speaks in subtle whispers. Tiny whispers that only those with ears to hear can discern.

Over the next couple of weeks I'm going to try and write about a few of those tiny acts that I have been graced to be a part of. Pray for me, that like Keizer, I too will remember well.

Getting Gas

I haven't been a good blogger lately. I've been really distracted by a lot of stuff and, frankly, have been on E ever since I returned from the break.

When I was 21 my grandparents picked me up in Colorado, where I was spending the summer guiding backpacking trips, and we drove to see my uncle and aunt in Cody, Wyoming. My grandparents bickered almost the whole way there and all the way back and so most of the ride was sort of colored by their domestic complications.

But one other thing from the ride stands out also. My grandfather never let the fuel get lower than half a tank. "Remember this Ryon," he said, as if about to pass on some very important key to life, "you can go just as far on full tank of gas as you can on a half."

It was his dry, riddling cowboy way of saying, "Get gas while you still can."

I suppose that's the point of keeping Sabbath. Getting gas while we still can before we run so completely dry that we can't make it another mile.

On Being Seen at South Plains Mall

A couple of days after Christmas Irie and I took some of the money we got from my family and went down to Dillard’s department store for shoes. Dillard's is in South Plains Mall, and my favorite hangout from sixth through eighth grades. I loved it because there was no telling who you might run into there. It was all about seeing and being seen. Plus, SPM holds the unsubstantiated claim to being the world's largest one story shopping mall, which really doesn't make sense since a lot of stores there have more than one story. But anyway:

The lady who waited on us at Dillard's was real cordial but I could tell we interested her a great deal. As we were paying out she finally had to ask. “Where are ya’ll from,” she said. I told her that I was born in Lubbock but that we live in Vermont now.

Now most people when you tell them where you live will ask how you like it, what the people are like and so forth. Not this lady. When I told her we live in Vermont her immediate response was, “Don’t ya’ll just want to get back to Texas?”

“Well, not really,” I said.

“You don’t?”

The idea that life might actually exist beyond the Arkansas River seemed unbelievable to this woman. The chat continued on. She asked what I do in Vermont. I told her I am an American Baptist pastor. She had never heard of American Baptists.

“Is that like Southern Baptist?” she asked.

“Yeah, sort of,” I said.

She seemed incredulous.

“Same God? Same Jesus?”

“Yes, same God. Same Jesus.”

I read her eyes. They were saying, “Mr., are you telling me that not all Christians are Texans?” I was telling her even more than that. I was telling her not even all Baptists are Texans.

This news had her flipping out. Overcome with joy at just the thought of it all.

As we were leaving she yelled after us. “We’ll see each other again!”

Irie and I made our way past cosmetics and through the juniors section toward the door and then ran right into my high school girlfriend. She and Irie had not met and things were a little surreal for a second.

None of us had imagined seeing each other with sweat suits on and sneaker boxes in hand. No one had a chance to look in the mirror or put on high heels. We were all just us and perhaps that was life's way of saying that everything is okay now, there is no need for pretense.

And there wasn't any need for pretense because everything was okay. After the nerves wore off for us all we talked about marriage and kids. She said her dad is sick with cancer. I said I was sorry to hear that and I was.

It was brief, but meaningful. Almost sacramental. I left Dillard's with the knowledge that God is redeeming us all, and certain that what the shoe lady said was Gospel truth:

We will all some day see each other again.

With a little help from. . .

Last week the oldest member of our church turned 95. I went over and saw him. He is still as sharp as a tack and rye as Irish whiskey.

"Ninety-five," I said, "You know, Abraham had a child at a hundred."

"Yeah," he said, "and he might of had a little help too."

I almost fell out of my chair. "Well, that's not quite the orthodox understanding of the story, but that is about the funniest thing I've ever heard," I said.

But I got to thinking about that. Wait a minute. He was exactly right. What he said was entirely orthodox. Abraham had a little help. In fact, he had a lot of help.

And I suppose that is the whole meaning of this story we are living into over these next few hours. We needed help. And God gave us a child.

Letting Tony Speak

You know that I was born to be a preacher because I actually like to listen to sermons. I’m hopeless I know. Sometimes I go to St. Mike’s where they have really fast internet connection, and I log in under my wife’s name and I just sit back and watch three or four sermons in a row.

A couple of weeks ago I was there listening to a guy named Tony Campolo preach. He was preaching at my alma mater Duke University and on vocational discernment Sunday there at Duke Chapel. He was telling all those Dukies how they ought not to waste their lives. He was telling them that the world tells them to go to school so they can get a good ____ so they can make a lot of _____ so they can buy a lot of ______. I’m listening to this sermon and I look around and notice that I’m surrounded by college students who are all studying for finals so they can get out and get a good job and make a lot of money and buy a lot of stuff. So I think, Man, I’m need to pray for these cats. So I start praying for everyone in the room as I continue listening. And then I hear Tony tell a story. He used to be a college professor and he had one young student come up to him and tell him how proud she was because out of like 90 candidates she had landed this job. Tony heard that and looked that girl right in the eyes, and said, “That’s terrible. Why go somewhere you’re not needed when you could go somewhere you’re desperately needed? He told her last year there were something like 200 teacher vacancies in the city of Philadelphia alone why not go there and make a difference instead of going somewhere else to make a dollar?

So as I’m listening to this and looking at all these college kids surrounding me my heart starts pounding and I decide its not enough for me to pray for them; they gotta here this. It’s dead quiet in the computer cluster so I hit the volume button all the way up and then bring it back down like I’m having technical difficulties. But the truth is I’m trying to get their attention. Then, having gotten their attention, I start bringing that volume back real slow like and I start letting Tony preach to these people. And one girl keeps looking over at me. And I know she’s not studying to make a lot of money but wants to become a librarian, because she keeps giving me that irritated librarian face. “SSHH.”

Patron Saint

On Thanksgiving I obscurely gave thanks for the Rev. A. Ritchie Low. Here's why:


Most Baptists don't have patron saints, but maybe that is because they just haven't found there's yet.

I've found mine. His name is Rev. A. Ritchie Low.

I discovered Ritchie Low when I was researching former ministers of the church where I am now pastor. There were funny stories about a number of ministers - one whose "sermons were hortatory" but who was better remembered for his wife's culinary skills, his love of a fast horse and the "glop of a clambake he proposed." The story on Ritchie Low, pastor of the United Church of Colchester from 1927-1933, was equally anecdotal, replete with stories of erratic and dangerous driving through the backroads of rural Vermont.

The usual stuff you find in church histories. Nothing to get too excited about. But then this one line stuck out. During his tenure he "began working out plans for interracial fellowship at the child level." Plans for interracial fellowship in the early 30s? In Colchester, Vermont of all places?

When I was installed as pastor I told the congregation that I had no idea what interracial fellowship at the child level would have meant in this part of the country at that time. But, I said, "one of these days my wife Irie and I are going to have a child, and Ritchie Low's plans will come to fruition. You will have interracial fellowship a the child level every Sunday." We do now. On March 28 of last year Irie and I had our first child, Gabrielle Zipporah Price, the bi-racial child of a white man and a black woman.

If the story had ended there it would have been a pretty good one. But it didn't end there and is now becoming a great story.

I put Ritchie Low on the backburner for about a year but not long ago I was reading a history of race relations in Vermont and lo and behold there is a minister from the United Church of Johnson, VT who in the 1930s helped to integrate the major downtown Burlington, VT hotel. I knew then there is a story that needed to be told about Ritchie Low.

In 1943 Rev. Low traveled from Johnson, VT down to Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. There he stayed in the home of Adam Clayton, Powell, Jr. and upon his return began the Vermont-Harlem Project which would bring over 100 Harlem children to Vermont during the summers of 1943 and 44. This was a project aimed explicitly at bringing blacks and whites together. In an article in the 1946 summer issue of Common Ground Rev. Low wrote:


These were not underprivileged boys and girls in the usual sense of the word. They were coming as representatives of the thirteen million colored people of America. They were coming as friends, as ambassadors of goodwill. They were coming to the Green Mountains so that we might get to know them and, through them, their race.


The Harlem-Vermont Project made headlines throughout the nation and brought Rev. Low considerable attention. One quote from a Time Magazine article from August 28, 1944 was especially prescient for the day: "The Negro is not a problem to be solved but a human being to be understood."

Rev. Low continued his work at improving race relations in America before his untimely death on Christmas Eve 1948. He even traveled to the South as a part of a vanguard of civil rights activists, gathering information and encouraging blacks to organize for equality. In an article he wrote for the Christian Century titled "Zigzagging through Dixie" he wrote of the trouble he caused when he decided to sit at with the blacks on the back of the bus in Savannah. In that article he also described the inherent disparities between blacks and whites in the Jim Crow South.

I have to confess that I feel very connected to the Rev. Ritchie Low in a very mystical kind of way. Two white pastors, the same small Vermont church, both our lives surprisingly bound up with the story of race in America. The world outside the church would call it ironic. But inside the church we have an even better term for it I think. The communion of saints. That sounds right even to my Baptist ears. Perhaps it should not be too much of a surprise that Rev. Low began his tenure here at the United Church of Colchester on the first day of November - All Saints Day.

The thing is almost nobody has ever heard of Ritchie Low or the United Churches of Johnson and Colchester. And that's perhaps the whole point of the story. A guy from nowhere Vermont does some seemingly small, hidden act and it helps to change the world. It helps to change the way whites and blacks think about each other. It helps to change the laws so that a white man like me and a black woman like Irie can marry each other in the South. And it helps to change America so that wherever we bring our daughter Gabrielle there is interracial fellowship at the child level.

Amen.

Putting the (other) B in Baptist

When I was installed as pastor I asked one of the church pillars to say a few words. He told those gathered that I was teaching the congregation how to say Baptist like a Texan.

"Babtist," he said.

I didn't get it.

"Babtist," he said again.

Everyone was laughing, but I had no idea what was going on.

Finally he clued me in. "BaBtist. You say it with two Bs."

Things finally made sense for me a couple of weeks ago when I received a letter from my uncle down in Texas. The letter was addressed to:

The United Babtist Church

You can't make this stuff up.

Oh well, I borrowed a line from Stanley Hauerwas last Sunday and told the church that I'm proud of my accent. It is like my bellybutton; it reminds me that I came from somewhere.

Baptist and Blogger Part VII

Gil Gulick, a third year student at Wake Forest Divinity School is doing research on Baptist bloggers and the role of the blog in 21st century Baptist life. He solicited my help. I thought I would share my answers to his questions here with you. I think something profound is happening with blogs and I would be interested to read what Gil arrives at.

I'll do this in a series of installments. This is the seventh and final installment.



7. Historically, Baptists have been a people of dissent. How does blogging
fit into this idea and the Baptist idea of priesthood of the believer?

Like I said, this is a thoroughly democratized medium. Greg Horton of theparish is a great example of a guy who is writing honestly about faith and the struggle to live fully into Christ's claim on our lives. Greg probably wouldn't last very long in most traditional pulpits but his blog gives him a platform for all sorts of unchurched and outchurched folks to come and wrestle with God over his words. Blogs offer a counter to the neo-clericalism of our day which tries to determine who can and can't say something. If Roger Williams were alive today Rhode Island would be a blog. Heck, maybe it is. I'll Google that and see.