There are so many tiny animals
smarter and stronger
than your best elected hope.
There is much of your very own ocean
that we have never even seen.
There are beautiful ideas
being spoiled
right now by simple misunderstandings.
And still you try.
-Dallas Clayton
Dallas Clayton is a genius. That’s all I have to say. His poetry and artwork speak to me in a way that is so deep, yet incredibly silly, that I just don’t have words to describe it.
Enjoy.
Peace,
What should church look like? What should it be made of? How should it function internally? How should it interface with the wider world?
These are questions I’ve been asking myself a lot lately.
Why?
Because I have become heartily dissatisfied with church as I know it, and I’m not alone. In the Mt. Zion Baptist Association [which serves Craighead County Arkansas] almost every church is dead or dying. Out of our 40 or so churches and missions, I’ll bet there aren’t a dozen that are showing year over year growth.
People aren’t coming to church anymore.
Why not?
I think it’s because we have become irrelevant to both our members’ lives, and the wider culture. People don’t live their lives the same way they did in the 1950s, but we still want to do church that way. Most families I know are out almost every night with lessons, sports, and other activities. They keep connected with Facebook, text, and cell phone calls. If there’s an issue they’re passionate about, they research it on 1000 sites and tribe together on the web.
These 21st century families are not interested in easy answers, crackpot preaching, or flawed theology. They don’t want their kids to grow up in places where people gather together and go on and on about how “different” they are from the rest of the world.
They will not abide institutionalized hatred hidden under the name “righteousness.”
Things have to change. So many times I hear other ministers and church leaders going on about Billy Graham, Adrian Rogers, W.A Criswell, Moody, Spurgeon, Wesley, Fox, Luther and so on. They quote these guys endlessly and say that we have “drifted” away from the teachings of these holy men.
What they fail to mention, or don’t realize, is that these men were INNOVATORS who changed the status quo to make church relevant to their generations. If that’s true [and it is], then shouldn’t we work just as hard at innovation to make church relevant to our times?
Of course we should!
Look, I’m not a complicated man. I believe in love, and doing my best to follow the call of the Holy Spirit in my life. For me, that’s what church should be about: Loving God, ourselves, and others; and following the call He has made on our lives to follow Him.
What do you think church should look like?
Peace,
TO the garden, the world, anew ascending,
Potent mates, daughters, sons, preluding,
The love, the life of their bodies, meaning and being,
Curious, here behold my resurrection, after slumber;
The revolving cycles, in their wide sweep, have brought me again,
Amorous, mature—all beautiful to me—all wondrous;
My limbs, and the quivering fire that ever plays through them, for reasons, most wondrous;
Existing, I peer and penetrate still,
Content with the present—content with the past,
By my side, or back of me, Eve following,
Or in front, and I following her just the same.
-To the Garden of the World by Walt Whitman
For years now, Sami and I have been talking about really letting go in our lives and being our “true” selves. Sometimes we see other people, friends and strangers, who have thrown aside the “expected” way of living to follow their passions, and we die with envy.
We go to art shows, organic farmer’s markets, junk stores, festivals, and simple churches and we say, “Someday, we’ll live like that.”
We’ve finally decided that “someday” has to be “now.”
We are round pegs trying to fit into square holes, and it’s crushing our spirits. You see, for a round peg to fit into a square hole, it’s smoothe, curved edges have to be changed into hard angles; and the pressure it takes to reshape the round peg often destroys it.
That’s where we’ve been. We’ve tried all of our adult lives to conform to a consumerist society that we really care nothing about. Don’t get me wrong, money, possessions, distractions, and recognition are nice for a moment, but in the end they just seems so… Well… Empty.
And when we feel empty, we try and fill the void with more stuff. It’s a vicious cycle that is driving us mad. And we’re not going to do it anymore.
We’re starting fresh today. We’re going to reorder our lives around God, family, and friends. We’re going to grow closer to the earth and the beauty of creation. We’re going to start doing church in a caring, loving way where we treat everyone with respect and invite them to join us in following Christ. We’re going to laugh, cry, and sing like nobody’s watching because we’re not going to care if they are or not.
Peace,
Of all the souls that stand create
I have elected one.
When sense from spirit flies away,
And subterfuge is done;
When that which is and that which was
Apart, intrinsic, stand
And this brief tragedy of flesh
Is shifted like a sand;
When figures show their royal front
And mists are carved away,-
Behold that atom I preferred
To all the lists of clay!
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford just held a news conference where he admitted to having an extra-marital affair.
He did apologise to everybody… Including his wife and four sons.
The Journal quotes him using every “evangelical code word” he can think of to try and salvage his political career. Why did an image of Jimmy Swaggart just flash through my head?
This makes me sick.
Instead of taking care of his family and the business of the people who have entrusted him with their state, this jerk disappears with his mistress to Argentina for a few days.
Here’s what [then Congressman] Sanford said about Bill Clinton during the Presidential Impeachment: “I think this president has shown a remarkable disrespect for his office, for the moral dimensions of leadership, for his friends, for his wife, for his precious daughter. It is breathtaking to me the level to which that disrespect has risen.”
You said it Governor… Stunning.
During the hour long rain delay of the Cardinals-Mets game last night, I watched Michael Moore’s SiCKO. Pretty much the “same old, same old” from Moore, but there was one line that I can’t get out of my head. Moore was in France talking with a group of American expatriates, and one of them said something like, “In America people are afraid of the government, but in France the government is afraid of the people.”
She’s right about the U.S., especially for people who live below the poverty line.
Public assistance in America comes with the unspoken threat that since the government is giving you charity, if you cause any waves that charity will be cut off. Better to just keep your mouth shut and take what you’re given.
I think that’s terrible. People below the poverty line need to be empowered not degraded.
They say if you give a man a fish you feed him for a day, but if you teach him to fish you feed him for a lifetime.
I wonder what would happen if we taught poor people how to vote?
Peace,
Warren Buffett [net worth $37 billion!], the CEO of Berkshire-Hathaway, auctions off a lunch date every year. During the lunch, you can ask him pretty much anything you want.
According to The Motley Fool, Buffett asked the guy he had had lunch with two years ago, “Would you prefer to be the greatest lover in the world and known as the worst, or would you prefer to be the worst lover and known as the greatest?” And he said, “If you know how to answer that correctly, then you have the right internal yardstick.”
All I can say to that is, “Warren, you rock!”
Peace,
Back last December, I took my Christmas/Birthday money and purchased a seafoam green Fender Squier Stratocaster. My wife and mother-in-law went together and bought me a small Marshall practice amp.
I felt like Harold Crick in Stranger Than Fiction.
But alas, after learning the riff to Smoke On The Water, I got frustrated and set my new axe aside.
That’s all about to change though, because Sami and the kids got me a month of guitar lessons at Backbeat Music for Father’s Day!
Don’t stop a Rockin’! [I won't!]
“Ain’t singing for Pepsi, ain’t singing for Coke. I don’t sing for nobody. Makes me feel like a joke.” - Neil Young
Why do I feel like Neil is talking about what I do at church?
