Home

  • A Gator Fan Comes Back From the Dead

    About three years ago, I featured a video from my church about the healing of Meredith Vining Parker, one of the most amazing miracles I have ever known about, certainly relating to someone my wife and I know very well.

    Now it’s featured on the 700 Club:

    http://dl2.cbn.com/cbnplayer/cbnPlayer.swf?s=/mp4/AS76v2_WS

    One side note: Meredith and her sisters are three of the most die-hard Florida Gator fans I have ever known (or fans of any team for that matter.)  I always kid Meredith that, after her own return from death, the Gators won the National Championship in football.

    Or is it just amusing…Tim Tebow isn’t the only miracle connected with the University of Florida.  God is good.  This testimony is awesome.

  • Month of Sundays: Worth

    This is what the LORD says: Don’t let wise people brag about their wisdom. Don’t let strong people brag about their strength. Don’t let rich people brag about their riches. If they want to brag, they should brag that they understand and know me. They should brag that I, the LORD, act out of love, righteousness, and justice on the earth. This kind of bragging pleases me, declares the LORD. (Jeremiah 9:23-24)

    College preparatory schools rise and fall on the strength of where their graduates attend university. That’s especially important for those just starting, or with no endowment to carry them through. In the case of the school I went to, both were the case. So they were very pleased when a good number in my class were admitted to Ivy League schools such as Harvard, Brown, and Cornell.

    Somehow I didn’t get the memo on this. For a variety of reasons, I went elsewhere. When this got out, I found myself in trouble with faculty and classmate alike. That trouble went right up to the day we graduated.

    Many years later, I went to a class reunion, and shared this with our class valedictorian, a very intelligent mental heath practitioner who is also Jewish. She was appalled at this; she expressed the sentiment that it’s not what school you went to, it’s the kind of person you are.

    Today we have a governing establishment that is loaded to the gunwales with graduates from the “right” schools. But they were unable to prevent the crash of 2008. Our country and our world are well endowed with people of “proper” credentials, who have lots of power and money. But the moral level of our society should tell us that what we’re short of is people of integrity. That’s where real worth lies, and that’s where the real poverty is.

    True knowledge of God will lead to real integrity and personal worth. Those who know God will want to imitate him in acting “out of love, righteousness, and justice.” If your walk with God isn’t leading you there, you may be going in the wrong direction. But he is ready and willing to set you on the right path.

    ,

  • Why I Struggle Writing About 9/11

    This coming Sunday, of course, is the tenth anniversary of al-Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.  Most of the blogosphere (to say nothing of the press, mainstream and otherwise) will fill up a great deal of space dealing with the subject.  When approaching the date, I figured I’d join in the chorus (?).

    Unfortunately I find myself unable to do so, not at least as definitively as one would like.

    Like most Americans, I was deeply shaken by the attacks, and went into something of a funk for several months thereafter.  (That funk was doubtless driven also by the fact that my mother had died the previous December.)  But it was two things subsequent to that that have only driven the whole event further into my consciousness.

    The first was my work as the webmaster for the Church of God Chaplains Commission.  Its director at the time, Dr. Robert Crick, commissioned me to do a Powerpoint presentation with music for their Honours Banquet at the 2002 Church of God General Assembly.  Chaplains–military, police and the like–are right there with the first responders, and I had access to some very immediate material.  Some of that is grisly, especially the photos of the burning towers with people hanging out the windows, some hurtling to their deaths below.  (One Church of God chaplain was in the Pentagon when the plane hit there.)  I left out the worst for the presentation, but watching the photos with the raw memory not even a year past brought tears to much of the audience at the banquet.  I thought of putting up some of that material but I could not bring myself to depict people who came into the WTC on a beautiful day and suddenly found themselves with the clock of life running out so quickly.  Maybe I am too soft-hearted for this line of work.  (The subsequent military operations brought hundreds of photos from the field, which became a part of more similar presentations.)

    The second was the discovery that I not only had relatives in the greater New York area, but one who was on Manhattan when the planes struck.  New York remains the target par excellence for Islamic careerists of all stripes; the thought of that continuing threat to people I really care about isn’t very settling.  Especially before 9/11, for many in the South and South-west New York was the place where investments/savings went into and the bad salsa came out of.   (For South Floridians, it’s the traditional source of most people who live there, and that has interesting aspects of its own.)

    In the wake of 9/11 there was created a new sense of unity in this country.  That unity was all too fleeting, indeed.  A great deal of web space has been devoted to whether our response was appropriate or not, but the question remains: what would have been better, especially with Afghanistan?  In a broad sense, 9/11 and the subsequent events reveal two major strategic blunders on the part of both sides.

    Osama bin Laden, schooled in the ways of the Middle East, was convinced that such an attack would bring out the power challengers (Al Gore?) in a divided country, who would at least wound the country to the point where it would pull its military presence out of Saudi Arabia, bin Laden’s immediate objective.  But just the opposite happened: the country unified, driving bin Laden into hiding for a decade until he was finally taken out earlier this year.

    George W. Bush, schooled in the simplistic civics of the United States, thought of democracy in the Middle East inspired/imposed by the U.S. military.  That led to our unsatisfactory result in both Iraq and Afghanistan, to say nothing of the trashing of his own political party (until his opponents stumbled in the recession.)

    The irony of all of this, ten years out, is that the objectives of both may actually come to pass.

    The “Arab Spring” has shown that popular forces can make a difference in the Middle East.  Translating that into a stable, rule of law representative government is going to be a long, difficult process, and the most probable short-term road for the Middle East is the same one the Iranians did (Islamicism.)  It will not be a pretty process and it won’t go in the straight line that our self-conceited punditry might like it to.  The experience of the French and the Russians should teach us that people without a democratic tradition cannot turn themselves into “standard issue” Western style democracies overnight.  For Americans, where the long term is after lunch, that’s a hard pill to swallow.

    In our own case, we are a country where too many of our citizens have become existential threats to others, in most cases in a mutual way.  In the Old West, when the two wasn’t big enough for two men, there was a gunfight, and one or both got shot.  Driven by our lacklustre economy, sooner or later–and I think sooner–something is going to snap in this country, and we will have a complete mess on our hands.

    The core problem with 9/11 is that, bin Laden’s death notwithstanding, there is so little closure to the problems, domestic and foreign, that faced us then and in its aftermath.  At this point we best remember those who perished and pray for those who remain.  There’s not much else that most of us can do.

  • The Perils of Any "Renewal Movement" Staying in an Established Church

    John Richarson, the Ugley Vicar, has his doubts about the course of Anglican Evangelicalism after the “Keele” commitment to stay within in the Church of England:

    When I was a young trainee clergyman (just six years on from Keele), the phrase going round was that we were ‘in it to win it’. In other words, our commitment to the Church of England was on the basis that we expected to change it — we expected it to become more evangelical. But more than that, we wanted it to be not just ‘the best boat to fish from’ but a better boat doing more fishing.

    So is it?

    My own answer would be ‘no’. It is not a worse boat, but it is not a better boat. More importantly, there is no greater commitment to actual fishing now than there was then. Yes, we have ‘Fresh Expressions’ — but doesn’t that say that the old expressions are a bit stale? And we have ‘Back to Church Sunday’, but then we fill our churches at Christmas anyway.

    In bringing this subject up Richardson is tackling one of the most difficult issues that a church with a long history faces: is it possible to “renew” the system from within?

    Evangelicals, in the Church of England or elsewhere, don’t usually consider themselves a “renewal” movement.  The word Evangelical denotes something they do–evangelise–rather than something they are.  Bring evangelism into the church, they say, and the church will grow.

    But Christianity is a religion where doing and being cannot be so easily separated.  A church committed to evangelising the world around it must first be inwardly renewed.  To do otherwise turns church into a numbers game, and American Evangelicalism always wrestles with this danger.  Evangelicals must face the fact that, to get a church focused outwardly it is necessary to change the inward nature of the church, and that’s where the tricky part comes in.

    When one considers “established” churches–and by that I’m referring to both those established by law (the CoE) and those with long history in the society (“Main Line” churches, and the RCC for that matter)–one realises early that the general style of mind in these churches is that the church is more of a cultural phenomenon rather than the called out followers of Jesus Christ.  Much of the resistance one experiences comes from getting the church to see itself in a different light.  To do so requires either those in authority in the church change their idea or are set out of the way.  That’s not an easy task.  Generally speaking those who engage a church to effect the change either are worn down by institutional inertia or simply leave for more receptive places.  The classic example of this is Methodism.  John Wesley never intended for his movement to leave the Church of England, but by the time of his death that’s exactly what his followers were doing.

    Modern Pentecost didn’t take as long as Methodism to find its way to the door of existing denominations, but within the same century there were those who were attempting to do what classical Pentecostals said could not be done: experience the Christianity of Acts in established churches.  The result was, to say the least, an uneven experience, not without some successes (the Anglican Revolt in the U.S. is one of them, indirectly at least) but one which benefited classical Pentecostal and independent Charismatic churches more than just about anyone else with those who ended up voting with their feet.

    So what’s missing from renewing a church from within?  The biggest missing human element is unqualified support of the leadership.   Without that any movement from within is doomed from the start.  And I’m not aware of a church with that kind of support from the top for any kind of renewal movement.  Liberals seem to have more success in changing churches from the top, but the change isn’t for the better in any respect.  The rest of us just have to move on and start over again, able to work with new institutions but always being accused of adding to the institutional fragmentation of Christianity.

    I admire the Evangelicals in the Church of England for trying to bring new life into their church.  But they’ve committed themselves to the steepest uphill climb Christianity has to offer.

    ,

  • They Don't Call Them "Main Line" Churches for Nothing

    It’s got the liberal Episcopal blog The Lead scratching its head:

    There was news last month that contrary to most people’s expectation, the more educated an American is, the more likely that person is to attend church regularly. So why are the mainstream churches in the U.S. losing membership across the board? Apparently it’s because the working class Americans are less and less likely to be found in congregations.

    I find it amusing that Episcopalians are bothered by this.  This is the church, mind you, that built its post-World War II growth on making it the place for those at or moving to the top to be on Sunday morning.  Now I know that they in no small measure wrecked this in the 1970’s when their underpaid clergy (underpaid relative to their congregations’ per capita income) made social justice (their own?) a big issue, making those who just arrived (in every sense of the word, including the Palm Beach one) wonder why they joined up.  But it was their idea that, if they made social justice their centrepiece, those who were the intended recipients of all of this justice would come to the church that brought it.

    It hasn’t happened that way; in fact, we’re now seeing the opposite.  The receding tide of Christianity in the U.S. is largely a “Main Line” phenomenon; for all of the publicity of “ex-fundies” (who usually go on to be fundies about something else) it’s the Main Line churches who have suffered the largest losses.  And many of those losses are with working class people.

    Having spent over a quarter century in a church which specialises in working class people of all ethnicities–and half of that in its employ–I can tell you that, to be successful “across the lake” (another Palm Beach analogy) it takes an entirely different approach, because you’re dealing with people who look at life in an entirely different way.  As the U.S. becomes more and more a stratified society by class, that kind of outreach becomes more difficult, especially when it’s time for “those people” to take their place in the leadership of the church.  As The Lead and others in the “Main Line” (in the Philadelphia sense) church world wonder “what the Church needs to do better to be able reach them,” they would do well to pitch trendy social theories and get into the daily reality–a reality far better depicted in the Scriptures than any progressive theory–of those who have less in this world.

  • Month of Sundays: Worship

    But a time is coming, indeed it is already here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father spiritually and truly; for such are the worshipers that the Father desires. God is Spirit; and those who worship him must worship spiritually and truly. (John 4:23-24)

    In 987 Prince Vladimir of Kiev decided that his people, pagans up to that time, needed a new religion. So he sent delegations to the various religions around him (including Islam) to see for themselves what was going on. The delegation that went to Constantinople (now Istanbul) was unprepared for what they experienced. They returned to Kiev to report that “the Greeks led us to where they worship their God, and we did not know whether we were in heaven or earth…We know only that God dwells there among men…”

    It’s commonplace today to say that a certain style of worship is “from the throne room” or “will take you into the throne room” of God. We can claim that for our own form of worship. But what kind of impact do we have on those who come in for the first time? Do they, like Prince Vladimir’s envoys, come back not knowing whether they were in heaven or earth? Will they see that God dwells among you? Or will they just be presented with a loud band?

    There’s a lot of dispute over what style of worship is really “from the throne room” these days. But there’s no disputing that, for God to dwell in us corporately, he must first dwell in us personally.

    It’s no accident that, in the passage above, Jesus foretells the beginning of true worship to the Samaritan woman, who was anything but spiritual. Before we have spiritual worship we must start with spiritual people whose worship is in truth, and that truth can only be Jesus Christ himself and the life he has commanded us to live. So when you worship, think about the kind of person you are in Christ before you think about the form of worship.

    My desire, then, is that it should be the custom everywhere for the men to lead the prayers, with hands reverently uplifted, avoiding heated controversy. (1 Timothy 2:8)

    ,

  • My Thoughts on "The Help"

    The recent move The Help has focused a great deal of attention on the whole relationship between wealthy white people (and “wealthy” is a relative term) and their black domestic help.  The movie (at least, I haven’t read the book) cuts across many stereotypes on every side of the issue.  And it’s always dangerous in this country to deviate from the conventional wisdom on any subject.

    As you would expect, an elitist snob like myself was raised with household help.  From my experience growing up, what I saw in The Help had the ring of verisimilitude.  But our situation was a little different.

    First, I wasn’t exposed to black household help until we moved our family and the business to Chattanooga, TN, in 1960.  As a general rule, when we lived in Chicago, we had a preference for Scandinavian help (live-in back at the turn of the last century.)  The situation we had in Tennessee was more typically Southern (and thus more reflective of what I saw in the film) than before or after, and the black maid we had was very sweet.  But that only lasted four years.

    One of the really sad realities the film depicted was that, until the late 1960’s and even later in some cases, the only really meaningful contact that white Southerners had with people of another race was through the help, both domestic and in the workplace.

    After we moved to Palm Beach, the black help continued.  But Palm Beach isn’t very Southern, so things were different.  My mother was, though, and she pretty much ran with the tradition.  There were the usual “bathroom restrictions” the help had to endure, although our house in Palm Beach actually had a maid’s quarters inside the house.  It was a humiliating system, but at least the creature comforts were better than the slovenly accommodations one saw in the film.  (It’s reasonable to say that our help had little incentive to use the bathrooms my brother and I, elementary and junior high boys, used.)

    The experienced help, in many cases, had interesting resumés.  One of our maids (and we didn’t have “lifetime” help, unlike some in the South) had worked for the Pulitzers; my guess is that gossip columnists and writers were interviewing the help long before Kathryn Stockett got the idea.  One memorable experience we had with our maid was that she introduced us to Burger King, something my parents, who always associated the Miami-based chain with black people, never would.

    But one thing my mother would not do was turn over the rearing of her children to the help.  In that respect she was an outlier in Palm Beach, and we were very much aware of that fact.  She also insisted that we extend the courtesies of “please” and “thank you” to everything the help did for us, which doubtless smoothed over many of the rough edges we had in those years.

    I never found the whole racial paradigm of those who came before me very appealing.  Part of that was Biblical; the Bible I read didn’t have room for that.   The New Testament proclaimed a unified humanity; I saw no reason to view it any other way.    But another part was the social scene in South Florida in general and Palm Beach in particular.  I saw some of the meanest gutter racism, worse in many ways than the Old South.  Being at the bottom of the social system in Palm Beach didn’t engender much WASP loyalty either, which inspired the search for alternatives.

    That search really didn’t come to full flower until I went to work for the Church of God.  As I noted in this 2008 piece:

    In my early years of working for the Church of God, I got to know the Executive Director of Church of God Black Ministries, Asbury Sellers (photo at right.)  When I tell people I grew up in Palm Beach, most let it pass.  Not Bishop Sellers.  He quizzed me down extensively on where exactly in Palm Beach I had lived.  I ended up giving him driving directions to the place, at which point he was satisfied I wasn’t a poser.  How could he do this?  He had been a pastor at one of our churches across the lake, and doubtless some of his church members worked on the island.

    Many of our churches in South Florida are black churches, be they African-American, Haitian, West Indian, or what not.  We also have a rapidly growing (approx. 20% of our local churches) group of Hispanic churches.  We serve these people through conferences (my superior was in North Miami last weekend to speak at a men’s conference at a West Indian church,) support for their men’s and evangelistic ministries, and product sales.  They are our brothers and sisters, and they’re great people (take a look at this posting from a recent leader’s conference in Orlando to see the composition of a Church of God delegation.)

    When you are put in a position where you deal with such a diverse group of people as equals, your whole perspective changes.  It’s put me in a position of dealing with people whom I would have never rubbed shoulders with had I stuck with the social circle I was raised in.  But I’m certainly the better for it, and have had a lot of fun in the process.

    Now, of course, I teach at UTC, and our civil engineering department head is Kenyan, a fact I celebrate in They Tell Us What to Do and We Do It.  My life has come full circle; it is beautiful.

    ,

  • Month of Sundays: Witness

    So the Jews again called the man who had been blind, and said to him: “Give God the praise; we know that this (Jesus) is a bad man.” “I know nothing about his being a bad man,” he replied; “one thing I do know, that although I was blind, now I can see.” (John 9:24-25)

    The disciples were confused. They had been told all their lives that good things happened to good people, and bad things happened to bad people. Why was this man born blind? “‘Rabbi,’ asked his disciples, ‘who was it that sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ ‘Neither the man nor the parents,’ replied Jesus; ‘but he was born blind that the work of God should be made plain in him.’” (John 9:2-3) And Jesus forthwith healed him.

    Then he and eventually his parents were hauled in front of the Pharisees. Who healed you? Was he a good person? A bad person couldn’t have done this! But they were stuck with one enormous fact: the man, once blind, could now see. And the man once blind clung tenaciously to his testimony.

    We can and should learn how to share our faith with others. It should be a central part of every man’s discipleship process. In addition to being able to bring others to Jesus, it forces us to learn our faith, and that’s a key goal of discipleship.

    But early in any gospel presentation, we give our testimony. What has the Lord done for us? How has he changed us? What were we like before? How much better is it now? These are things which people can connect with: if Jesus Christ can do it in our lives, he can do it in the lives of others. The abstract presentation of the Gospel becomes concrete when others read the Bible that God has made us into.

    What’s your testimony? Write it down and commit it to memory so you can share it with others, and they will be drawn to God through it.

    Let your light so shine before the eyes of your fellow men, that, seeing your good actions, they may praise your Father who is in Heaven. (Matthew 5:16)

    ,

  • After the Palm Beach Season: Sometimes It Pays to Stay on the Island

    A few “snowbirds” are finding this out the hard way:

    Palm Beacher Jessie Araskog said Saturday she and her husband, Rand, decided to evacuate their Southampton home and get a suite at the St. Regis hotel in Manhattan. “We are all boarded up and ready for the storm,” Araskog said.

    Jessie Araskog said her daughter, Kathy; son-in-law Andrew Thomas; and the couple’s children decided to stay in Southampton at the home of a friend. People who live inland have offered shelter to residents of the coastal areas, she said. “They’ve been very generous,” she said.

    Araskog said she and her husband expect to be back in Southampton once the storm passes.

    Palm Beach–along with much of South Florida–is very much a “seasonal” proposition.  People come from the North in the winter and return in the summer.   The reasons to do this are numerous: it’s hot in Florida during the summer, everybody else we know does it, we’ve always done it this way, etc., etc.

    But one reason given is usually the clincher–to get away from hurricane season.  This time, however, hurricane season has followed the snowbirds, much to the amusement of year round residents, past and present.

    But you have to admit that using the St. Regis as a hurricane evacuation shelter–Rand Araskog is a former CEO of ITT and a member a Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church–is a fantastic concept.

    ,

  • Covenant Community: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

    I’ve dealt with the issue of Catholic Charismatic covenant communities–and why I avoided them–at length on this blog.  Now my friend John Flaherty has started a Facebook group on the subject entitled Covenant Community: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.  It’s a road that is potentially painful for some, but it’s time for some closure, some healing and certainly some education on the subject.

    You can find this group here.

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started