Category Archives: Faith

Feb 05

The whole eBible

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I want to put a Bible on my Kindle – I’ve got room for 1,500 books, after all – but I seem to have a dilemma, and it’s a surprising one, given the popularity of the Kindle in the past year or two.

The Bible translations I’d use most often – the New Revised Standard Version, which is used in a lot of official United Methodist literature, or the most recent update of the New International Version – are available for Kindle, but according to the reviews they don’t have e-reader-friendly navigation. There are some other Kindle Bibles that do have good navigation, making it easy to look up a chapter and verse, but they don’t come in any of the translations I like. There are also some specialty NIV Bibles that cost more than I’m looking to spend right now or that are organized in special ways, including the Passages NIV e-Bible that has the readings broken up so that you can follow along with the Daily Audio Bible. As a DAB listener, I may get the Passages Bible eventually, but it’s not what I’m looking for right now.

I have ordered a Holman Christian Standard Bible for free; I’ve heard them use that translation on DAB from time to time, although I’m not too familiar with it otherwise. But I really want HarperCollins or Zondervan to get on the stick and create a great, reasonably-priced NRSV or NIV e-edition.
Jan 13

God in the locker room

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I have an essay on my web site, which I occasionally tweak or update, called “God on the Playlist.” It’s sort of a statement of my personal faith.

Anyway, there’s one segment of this essay that, as a jumping-off point to something else, deals with athletes mentioning their faith. I thought that, in light of all the hubbub about Tim Tebow, it might be worth excerpting here, so as to save you from reading the whole essay:

… There has been a thread in popular culture that tends toward annoyance with anyone who talks about their faith. For example, any athlete who is open about his or her faith in locker room interviews opens the door for legions of scoffers.
“As if God cared who wins a football game!” they say. “Doesn’t God – if God even exists – have better things to worry about?”
I have a couple of responses to that.
When I first posted this essay, I wrote that I personally did not recall ever seeing an athlete claim that God wanted his or her team to win and the other team to lose. I have seen many athletes praise God for their athletic success – which is not the same thing.
Since that time, there has been at least one high-profile case in which an athlete seemed to imply that he or his team had God’s blessing. But I stand by my original argument that the vast majority of athletes who mention their faith in locker room interviews are saying nothing of the sort.
It is always appropriate, for anyone in any line of work, to thank God at all times and in all situations. If I had a good day at my chosen profession (or, in the case of amateur athletes, my chosen avocation), I would make no apologies for praising God and expressing my gratitude. That does not mean that I am deluded enough to assume that God prefers my sports team to the other team or prefers me to my individual competitors.
Tennis star Michael Chang put it this way, in another story at the CNN web site written by Blake: “Chang won the French Open in 1989 as a 17-year-old underdog. He was booed by a Parisian crowd when he thanked Jesus for his victory at the tournament’s trophy presentation.
“Chang, who now helps runs a Christian Sports League in California, says he thanked Jesus not to gloat, but to show gratitude.
“‘When I go out there and share my faith, I’m not saying God is on my side and he’s not on your side,’ Chang says. ‘The Lord loves everybody, and the Lord is on everyone’s side.’”
In fact, at many NFL games, Christian players from opposing teams meet on the field following the game for a quick celebratory prayer. These huddles are seldom shown on television – because of this same irrational attitude that any expression of personal faith is somehow tantamount to shoving Jesus down people’s throats. (To be fair, I’m sure the network would be even less likely to show such interaction between Muslim players.)
It is self-evident that these huddles, involving opponents praying together, are not based on the idea that God prefers one team to another. They are based on the idea that praise and gratitude are Christian virtues and Biblical commandments.
Objections to faith in locker-room interviews often include either a direct statement or an implication that “God has better things to worry about than a football game.” At first glance, this is quite a reasonable statement. But the extended implications of it disturb me, and I hear it even from Christians who should know better. The Bible makes it clear that God is aware of, and concerned with, not only the great matters of cosmology but with the most intimate details of earthly existence. The Bible explicitly tells us that God knows about each sparrow that falls from the sky and that God knows how many hairs are on your head.
It may be true that the CEO of McDonald’s does not know whether you ordered a large fries or a medium fries, or whether there’s toilet paper in the men’s restroom at your local McDonald’s. The CEO of McDonald’s would drive himself crazy if he had to micromanage each of the thousands of locations the chain operates around the world. But God is not a CEO. God is deity. There’s a difference. God is capable of attending to both the infinite and the intimate.
God has encouraged us to lift up all our concerns in prayer – anything that is important to us. Some of the things we pray about seem petty, and selfish, and beneath God’s purpose. Some of them are. But the funny thing about prayer is that, ideally, it becomes a dialogue. The more we pray, the better we get at it, and over time our priorities change. The dialogue must start with honesty, and I think that’s why God instructs us to bring all our cares and concerns to the holy throne.
Here’s another way of looking at it: a five-year-old may ask her daddy for a candy bar one day, a pony the next. A sixteen-year-old may ask for permission to stay out late. A woman who’s about to be married may ask for advice, some reassurance that she’s doing the right thing. Those are very different requests, with very different levels of importance. When the daughter is a child, the father may have to say “no” and may not have the chance to make the child understand why. But each request is special to the father, and the father will treasure those requests as precious memories.
The God we learn about in the Bible is infinite enough to have created the universe, but also intimate enough to have a relationship with each one of us, and to care about each of our struggles. As we grow in our faith, and our understanding of God’s plan, we may learn to ask God for more important things than our missing car keys. But God welcomes, and listens to, every request, no matter how small or seemingly unimportant.

Jan 10

Jazz doesn’t resolve

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There are some books I read, and get very excited about, but they don’t necessarily stick with me.

“Blue Like Jazz” has stuck with me. After reading it, I suggested it as curriculum for the Sunday School class I was attending at the time. I wasn’t sure what the reaction would be to it – it’s quite frank, and even includes a little bit of profanity – but I think it was well-received, despite my lack of abilities as a teacher.

The book, published with the subtitle “Nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality,” is a memoir – not a linear sort of memoir, but something more poetic – by Donald Miller, focused on his experiences at Reed College in Oregon. Reed is one of the most intellectual universities in the nation, and also one of the most hostile towards religion. Miller went into that environment as a Christian, but also as someone troubled by the fundamentalist version of Christianity in which he was raised. He ends up finding a circle of friends, who are at various stages in their approach to Christianity. They end up recognizing their own failures and shortcomings, and the ways in which they hinder dicsussion about faith with the already-hostile student body at Reed.

The first thing I read from the book was an excerpt published in “Christianity Today” in which Don and his friends participate in the school’s over-the-top festival of debauchery, Ren Fayre by building a confession booth – and doing something quite different with it than anyone would have expected.

It’s a beautifully-written book, and one that stays with you for some time.

I was a little skeptical – and in some ways, I still am – when I heard it was going to be turned into a movie. The movie is being directed by Steve Taylor, who in an earlier life (when I was at college) was one of my favorite singer-songwriters. He later went on to found the crossover band Chagall Guevara before becoming a record company executive, responsible for making Sixpence None The Richer a success.

Along the way, he directed music videos, both his own and for Sixpence. And eventually, he wanted to try his hand at a feature film.

I still have never seen Steve’s first movie, “The Second Chance,” even though I was present for the filming of one scene. I gather, from some things I’ve heard, that it was a little more mundane than I would have expected from Taylor, who delighted in the sharp and satirical as a recording artist.

But when I heard Steve was trying to film “Blue Like Jazz,” I was intrigued. The film was about to go into production when it suffered budget troubles, and a widely-publicized Kickstarter campaign raised more than enough to finish it, and demonstrated just how much the book had meant to so many. I should have given something myself, but money was tight at the time and I really didn’t have it to spare. Actually, that last sentence sounds a lot like an argument Donald has with his pastor in a chapter late in the book.

Well, the money was raised, the movie was completed, and there’s now a teaser trailer:

I think it looks promising, although there are a couple of line readings in the trailer that are a little clunky. I really, really don’t want this to be a typical “Christian movie.” I really, really want this to convey the complexity and nuance that make the book so wonderful.

Jan 02

Which one’s the real world?

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This is the last (I think) in a series of posts about Mountain T.O.P.’s Adults In Ministry program. Look at the bottom of this post for links to the previous installments. In another day or two, I’ll make one last post with links to all of the installments in order, or perhaps I’ll set it up as a standing page on my web site. By the way, I did not do a separate post for Quest, the newest ministry within the AIM program, because I’ve not had the chance to experience it yet and thus really didn’t have much to say about it beyond the summary in my original post. If anyone who’s been to Quest would like to write a guest post about it, I’d gladly put it up and link to it as part of the series.

I sometimes say that my participation in short-term missions trips is a selfish hobby because I get out of my trips far more than I put into them. There’s something about being in intense Christian community — whether on a short-term mission trip, an Emmaus walk, or certain types of retreats — that’s difficult to explain or describe if you’ve not experienced it. In an earlier post, I quoted Mountain T.O.P. founder George Bass as saying that trying to describe Mountain T.O.P. to someone was like trying to explain what a banana tastes like to someone who’s never had one.

In many ways, a Mountain T.O.P. community is a safe place for me, a place where I know I’m among friends, where I could ask someone for a neck rub without being thought creepy, where I can write and receive notes of encouragement, where I’m free to try things outside my comfort zone and know that it will all work out somehow — and if it doesn’t, that will be OK too.

A day at AIM begins with a group morning devotion, led by one of the campers. I am almost always privileged to be asked to lead one of these when I’m at AIM. Last summer, I went to two different AIM weeks; I led a devotion at one but not the other. That made perfect sense — why call on someone a second time when there are plenty of others willing to share? — but I tried to think back to the last time I had been at AIM without doing a morning devotion. I’m sure there must have been at least one other time, but I couldn’t think of it. Even at my first AIM event I led a devotion — which I’ll mention again in a little bit.
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Dec 31

The blind leading the unwilling

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Part of a series of posts about Mountain T.O.P.’s Adults In Ministry program. For links to previous installments, see the bottom of this one.

In the spring of 1993, I was an unofficial member of the Singles Council of the Tennessee Conference of the United Methdodist Church, working on a newsletter which was published at that time.

We had a meeting at Brentwood United Methodist Church, and there to speak to us were George Bass and Gail Drake (now Gail Castle). George was the founder and executive director of Mountain T.O.P., and Gail was director of adult ministries. At the time, Mountain T.O.P. was trying to promote one week of the Adults In Ministry program as “singles week,” an idea that was later scrapped. In any case, they wanted our help in letting our constituents know about the AIM program. I had little if any idea what Mountain T.O.P. was all about; my only connection to it was Mary Jane Tucker,  whom I knew through the conference singles retreats who served on the Mountain T.O.P. board at the time.

At the time, AIM weeks offered only Major Home Repair or Summer Plus. Kaleidoscope wouldn’t be offered until a couple of years later, and the Quest program didn’t start until recently. As Gail described the Summer Plus program – enrichment workshops for teens from mountain communities – she listed some possible workshop topics. One of them was “creative writing.”

I had no experience teaching or working with teenagers, but I am a writer, and I started thinking that it might be fun to teach creative writing. And I thought that Mountain T.O.P. might offer the same kind of Christian community that I had come to enjoy at the time through the conference singles retreats. So I signed up for the third AIM week of the summer, in early August.

At the time, Mountain T.O.P. had a much larger geographic footprint by renting various camp facilities across the Cumberland Plateau, from Jamestown in the north to Jasper in the south. My first AIM event was at Camp Overton, in the little town of Campaign, Tenn., between McMinnville and Sparta and close to Rock Island State Park.

It turned out to be a quite atypical AIM week, for reasons I’ll get into, and yet it was quite sufficient to get me completely hooked on the Mountain T.O.P. program.

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Dec 27

The spoken Word

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A year ago, around this time, I started thinking to myself that I ought to be more disciplined in reading my Bible. But New Year’s Day came and went, and it wasn’t until the second or third of January that I noticed a Facebook post from my friend Sonja Goold about the Daily Audio Bible.

I started listening every day, and I think it’s been a good experience. I wrote about it in my Times-Gazette tech column a while back, but I thought  it would be timely to mention it here this week, at a time when a lot of people are making resolutions or taking stock.

Spoken-word versions of the Bible have been around for years, of course, on cassette and then on CD. But the Daily Audio Bible (DAB) is a free podcast. You can listen to it online by going to their web site; you can automatically download the podcast by subscribing to it from iTunes or your favorite podcast management software; or you can install iOS or Android apps on your phone or tablet which will take care of retrieving each day’s podcast whenever you want it.

DAB is based in Spring Hill, which is not that far from Shelbyville as the crow flies but due to the way the highways run it’s about an hour’s drive away. One of these days, I’m going to make a field trip to see the Wind Farm Café, a coffeehouse affiliated with the ministry.

The DAB is run by a fellow named Brian Hardin. Many of the Bible-on-CD products rely on narrators with deep, dramatic voices; I think Charlton Heston narrated one successful version. Brian’s is more of a friendly, welcoming voice.

He rotates among different Bible versions from week to week, although that almost changed for the upcoming year (more on that in a second). The readings take you through the entire Bible in a year’s time. There’s an Old Testament reading, a New Testament reading, a reading from Psalms and a reading from Proverbs. Each goes in order; the Old Testament reading starts with Genesis 1 on New Year’s Day and winds up in Malachi on the following New Year’s Eve. The New Testament runs from Matthew through to Revelations in a year’s time, and so on.

If Brian is starting a new book of the Bible, he’ll usually make a couple of brief remarks beforehand about the book’s setting, presumed authorship and theme. After the readings, he will sometimes make a few brief remarks about one of the passages and then will lead a prayer. Then, he’ll usually talk a little bit about something related to the DAB ministry – his own travels to speaking engagements or conferences, the Wind Farm Café or what have you. The podcast usually ends by playing prayer requests recorded from a 24-hour prayer line.

If you wanted to, or were pressed for time, you could stop listening right after the Bible passage, of course.

The web site tries to foster a community around the podcast. There are discussion forums and what have you.

The website also offers a daily Bible podcast for children and several foreign-language versions of DAB.

This year, in particular, the DAB ministry is poised for change and growth. Brian has released a new book, Passages: How Reading the Bible in a Year Will Change Everything for You, along with a companion edition New International Version Bible with readings broken up according to the DAB schedule. A couple of months ago, Brian proposed that in 2012, he use only the NIV, instead of changing versions from week to week, so that those who owned the new companion Bible could read along. I was in favor of this idea, in part because some of the paraphrases in the DAB rotation leave me unimpressed. The NIV, on the other hand, is readable, relatively acceptable to a wide variety of denominational backgrounds, and it’s a translation rather than a paraphrase, meaning it was worked on by a team of scholars and is geared towards accuracy. But Brian put the question to a vote of the listeners, and the listeners voted to keep the current system of rotating from version to version each week.

I think that my first year with DAB has been a good one – although not always an easy one. Some of the early Old Testament passages are challenging, and a regular schedule for listening to them forces you to think hard about what  you believe. What parts of the Bible are meant as prescriptive for our lives today? What parts are meant to be taken literally, and what parts are meant to be taken allegorically? What principles are eternal, and what principles are meant to apply to a given culture or situation? I think forcing yourself to take in all of the Bible, as opposed to just the warm and fuzzy parts, is an important process. In 2012, I’d like to be more disciplined about listening intently to the readings, not getting distracted or letting my mind wander.

I would heartily recommend the DAB to anyone interested in a closer relationship with the Bible.
Dec 18

Special needs

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This is the latest in a series of posts in which I talk about Mountain T.O.P.’s Adults In Ministry program. Starting with this one, I’ll include the links to the previous posts at the bottom instead of trying to put them all here.

Kaleidoscope is an arts program for special needs children from Grundy County. Grundy County has six primary schools sharing one art teacher and one music teacher. “Special needs” covers a lot of ground; it can mean anything from severe disabilities to ADD, ADHD or just a bad home situation. Most of the Kaleidoscope kids are referred by the school system, although (as with Day Camp, Summer Plus and Quest) it’s not uncommon for Mountain T.O.P. to be lining up a home repair project, notice that there are kids at the house, and ask if they’re interested in participating. I think the age range for the program is 6-11, although that’s off the top of my head and may be off. I remember 12 being the dividing line between Kaleidoscope and Summer Plus but I’m not 100 percent sure whether it’s the top age for one or the bottom age for the other.

Volunteers lead arts workshops for the kids, or simply help out as caregivers in workshops being led by someone else. Workshops can be things like drawing, arts and crafts, music, drama, and so on. As with the other AIM ministries, the volunteer base for any given camp event tends to be a mix of age and experience levels. We’ve had professional teachers and child care workers, as well as clueless amateurs like, well, Yours Truly.

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Dec 09

If I had a hammer

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A few weeks back, I had a post encouraging you to think about attending Mountain T.O.P.’s Adults In Ministry program next summer.

I followed that up with a post about why going out of town (or out of the country) for a short-term missions experience complements, rather than competes with, the ministry you and your church do in your hometown.

I didn’t really have any master plan for this when I started, and you may be sick of it already, but I think I’m going to continue on with some posts exploring some more specifics. I’m going to start with individual posts exploring the various ministries in which you can participate at AIM.

Mountain T.O.P. was started in 1975 as a youth ministry, with church youth groups as volunteers, and the youth summer ministry (YSM) remains the largest and best-known part of Mountain T.O.P. But as years went on, the Mountain T.O.P. staff saw needs in the ministry’s service area that were beyond the ability of youth volunteers to meet. YSM volunteers perform minor home repairs such as building a wheelchair ramp, but there are people in the service area, which includes some of the poorest communities in Tennessee, who have much more severe housing needs.

Adults In Ministry was started in 1989 as a way of extending Mountain T.O.P.’s impact. Major Home Repair has been, and continues to be, the biggest part of the AIM program.

Like the other AIM programs, MHR is open to anyone, regardless of gender, age (well, you have to be an adult, but beyond that it’s pretty broad) or experience level. MHR, by its very design, has professional contractors or other highly-skilled volunteers working side-by-side with 70-year-old grandmothers. Everybody learns something. The newcomer may learn some practical skill like how to use a circular saw. The professional contractors, I suspect, sometimes have to learn how to bite their tongues.

But no one – no one – should count themselves out of MHR based on lack of experience. The program loves to get highly-skilled volunteers, don’t get me wrong, but it is designed to be a good experience for anyone.

The heart of that experience, and one of the reasons it’s so compelling, is in the concept of team-building. While Mountain T.O.P. exists to be in ministry to the people of the Cumberland Plateau, it has a secondary goal of meeting the needs of its volunteers. That secondary goal is the reason for some of the ministry’s policies and practices, developed over the past 36 years of ministry.

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Nov 29

Hit the road

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A couple of weeks ago, I had a lengthy post about Mountain T.O.P.’s Adults In Ministry program and why you – yes, you – should join me there next summer. If you missed it, I’d consider it a personal favor for you to read it now. I’ll wait here until you get back.

Anyway, I was walking at the rec center today, thinking about that post, and realized there was one issue I meant to cover and didn’t cover in great detail, although I sort of got got close to it a couple of times. It’s a pretty big issue, one I’ve encountered whenever I talk about Mountain T.O.P. or whenever I talk about my foreign mission trips. It’s more relevant than ever right now, because of the tough economy.

People from all over the eastern U.S. come to Mountain T.O.P. camps, but sometimes when I talk to my own friends and neighbors here in Tennessee about it, I get a response – sometimes implied, sometimes stated outright – that it makes no sense to go to Grundy County (or Kenya!) to be in ministry when there are needs right here in our home county.

It’s exactly right that we have needs, serious needs, right here at home. We see that more clearly at the holidays than at any other time of the year, although the needs themselves are year-round.

But the first point I want to make is that it’s not an either-or situation.  Listen to the very last words Jesus spoke to his disciples before his ascension:

Acts 1:8 (NIV) “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

Jesus calls the disciples to be in ministry in their home city, in their region, and beyond.

It needs to be said, immediately, that what you do on a mission trip, domestic or foreign, is not a substitute for, or an alternative to, being in ministry in your home community the other 50 or 51 weeks out of the year. And, in fact, many of the people I know who are most passionate about short-term missions are also heavily-involved in various ministries, non-profits or community outreach in their hometowns. One of my good friends from both Mountain T.O.P. and LEAMIS trips, Jan Schilling, is a great example of this. One week, she’s in Kenya making charcoal; the next week, she’s back home in Smyrna working for Habitat For Humanity or an animal shelter or doing some other type of volunteer work.

The “Mountain T.O.P. song,” which the ministry has adopted as its theme song, makes allusions to this; we can’t live on a mountain top, but we can take our mountain top experiences home with us and share them “in the valley below.”

It’s also important to note that there are different types of needs in different places. I would never make light of poverty here at home, but then again there’s no comparison between being poor in Bedford County and being poor in the Kibera slums outside Nairobi. The poorest person in Bedford County has access to clean water, free school for the kids, emergency room care, and various types of public assistance. People in Kibera live in tiny huts, crammed together like sardines, with filthy water running between them, in constant danger of being attacked or robbed.

Grundy County is much closer to Bedford County than to the Kibera slums, but even in that case the needs are different. Poverty in Grundy County goes back decades, and there are conditions which are short-term hardships for us but a way of life for them. There are cultural differences, geographic differences and vicious cycles that apply in the mountains that make it different from life here at home.

In some ways, it’s not a matter of one person being needier than another. You’d go crazy if you tried to rank or prioritize the needs of every cultural subgroup in Tennessee, much less Planet Earth. But when we recognize that there are different types and levels of need, we recognize the value in exposing ourselves to different cultures and different types of ministry.

Short-term mission work takes nothing away from local ministry. But I’m going to go further than that: I think short-term mission work enhances local ministry.

The primary purpose of a short-term mission trip is the ministry being conducted, the people being served. But an important secondary benefit of a short-term mission trip is that it often serves as a time of spiritual development and refreshment for the volunteers themselves. I know it has served that purpose in my life; I sometimes feel selfish for going on such trips, because it seems as if I get more out of them than I put into them. There is something about the process of separating yourself from your regular routine, immersing yourself in intense Christian community, making obedience to God your primary focus, that can be powerfully inspiring and uplifting. As a former Mountain T.O.P. board member, I’d like to think that Mountain T.O.P. is organized and operated in ways that maximize this effect, but it’s by no means unique to Mountain T.O.P. or any other specific organization.

I think that process requires getting away from your regular surroundings. If you lived in Grundy County, I’m not sure Mountain T.O.P. would have the same impact on you as a volunteer. Frankly,  I think you have to get out of town to get the full impact of being in short-term mission.

If that sounds interesting to you, get in touch with me or go to the Mountain T.O.P. website for more information.

Nov 16

Why AIM? Why you?

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I’ve posted or Facebooked several times lately about Mountain T.O.P. Adults in Ministry. Last summer, I went to two separate weeks of AIM (just to be clear, I’m only suggesting you do one). It was the first time in several years I’d been to the summer AIM ministry. I’d been a couple of times to fall AIM weekends, and those are great as well, but to me there’s something special about the kind of community that forms during a week-long event. Plus I have a passion for two programs that are only offered during summer AIM events. I had forgotten just how much I missed the program, and it meant a lot to me to be there.

I’d really like to take some more folks with me in the summer of 2012. I’m already trying to lay some groundwork at church. I already go to church with two Mountain T.O.P. regulars, Andy and Edna Lee Borders; Andy is currently on the Mountain T.O.P. board, just as I used to be. But we’ve never been able to make that connection to convince others to take the plunge. I’d like to change that this year.

But if the reader will indulge me, I’d like to widen my net a little bit, and invite you – yes, you – to join me next summer.

George Bass, the founder of Mountain T.O.P., used to say that trying to describe Mountain T.O.P. to someone who’s never been is like trying to explain what a banana tastes like to someone who’s never eaten one.

But I’m a writer, and I like explaining things. So I’m going to endeavor to explain what this program does for me and why I think you would enjoy it as well. But first, here’s the brand new AIM video, which will take  you about four minutes and change to watch:

 

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