I got home from the symphony concert and I had three messages on my answering machine. Two of them were much-appreciated birthday greetings from family members, featuring nieces and nephews who always bring a smile to my face.

The third message was from a representative of the Tennessee Conference of the United Methodist Church.

A good while back, I submitted a sermon for consideration in the selection process for the first-ever layspeaker to preach during Annual Conference.

I’ve made the short list, apparently, and they want me to come to Franklin this Saturday and give my sermon for the selection committee.

Get Religion, the terrific site which critiques mainstream coverage of religious issues (or mainstream media’s failure to pick up on the religious undertones of some stories), has an interesting critique of a Newsweek story about the battle between online matchmaking sites e-Harmony, founded by a Christian self-help author, and Match.com, which offers commercials scoffing at e-Harmony’s selection process.

Right now, I want nothing better than to get out of journalism — the farther away the better — but I can’t say I don’t envy my old college friend Peter Smith.

Even though I live in Bedford County, the tornadoes that ripped through downtown Nashville 10 years ago today had an effect upon me.

I was sitting in the Wartrace United Methodist Church parsonage that evening. The Rev. Diana Hough was my pastor at the time, and was my sponsor for the Walk to Emmaus. I was one of three men from Wartrace UMC who were supposed to attend the Walk that weekend. As we sat in Diana’s living room, getting ready to leave for Hermitage UMC in Nashville, we looked at the weather reports with increasing alarm.

“We’re not going to Nashville tonight,” Diana finally said. Sure enough, the tornadoes that ripped through downtown also passed through Hermitage, damaging the roof of Hermitage UMC and causing the men’s Emmaus Walk to be postponed by a month. Instead of being held two weeks prior to the women’s walk, it was held two weeks after.

I was able to make the rescheduled date; the two other men who’d been scheduled to join me could not. When we posed for our group photo at the end of the weekend, the banner we held still had the original dates of the walk.

Emmaus was a terrific experience for me, although I’m afraid I haven’t done my part about staying involved. We had a reunion group for a little while at Shelbyville First UMC, where I now attend, but the associate pastor who led it left and the group fell apart without him. I was attending the montly gatherings of the Highland Rim Emmaus Community for a while, but my Saturday work and other conflicts have gotten me out of that habit. I need to get back into Emmaus.

As the Wednesday night activities wind down at our church (we don’t hold them in May through August), rather than start up a new Bible study our pastor has been doing “stump the pastor,” fielding questions from the crowd.

Tonight, we got onto a surprisingly and refreshingly frank discussion of the itineracy, the appointment process, church politics and the role of bishops in the United Methodist Church. It was a great discussion, and we ran 20 minutes over our allotted time. Since I’d walked to church, this meant I had to walk home in the dark, but it was still nice outside.

Last Wednesday, I had a pledge or two, but not a penny in actual contributions for my Costa Rica trip.
Well, after sending out a partner newsletter a week or so ago, I got two contributions on Thursday, one in the mail on Saturday, and two at church on Sunday, and I’m now up to $952 in money raised.

The trip is estimated to cost about $1,650, half of which is the estimated air fare (and therefore subject to change).

A big chunk of the money raised is actually left over from last year. My Sunday School class had a luncheon for me during the build-up to the Bolivia trip, and raised more than I needed at the time. I told them they could apply the rest to some other mission project, but they felt that since they’d told the church they were raising money for “John Carney’s mission trip,” that was how the money needed to be spent. There was $502 left over from that event last year, and the class has now given that to me for this year’s Costa Rica trip.

Our class treasurer made out the check to me, so I had to turn around and write a check to LEAMIS. I rounded it up to $505, meaning that I’ve now submitted a total of $955 towards the trip. This is more than the estimated cost of the airline tickets, and so if LEAMIS needs to go ahead and book my ticket, to lock in a good price, they can do it.

When I first read this yesterday, I was afraid it might be an April Fool’s joke, but it’s legit: Ted Turner, who is partnering with the Lutheran and United Methodist churches on an anti-malaria effort, has apologized for his past comments bashing religion and has even admitted to praying for ill friends. He isn’t likely to join a mainstream church just yet, and says that the faithful sometimes go too far (tell me something I don’t know), but admits that faith can be a powerful force for good.

Next time I’m in Nashville, I’ll have to stop by Ted’s Montana Grill and hoist a bison burger in his honor.

Jay Voorhees has an excellent post about Loyd Mabry’s defense of the recent reorganization in the Tennessee Conference UMC office. I was extremely unsatisfied with Mabry’s posting and think Jay does a great job of critiquing it.

I haven’t blogged before about this situation, which happened several weeks ago. For out-of-towners and non-Methodists, the Tennessee Conference of the United Methodist Church (which basically includes all of Middle Tennessee) did away with two staff positions a few weeks ago, including the one held by Beth Morris, who was responsible for the conference’s youth programming and who I was very slightly acquainted with because she represented the conference on the Mountain T.O.P. board. The other position was related to children’s ministries.

The conference says that a reorganization is needed, but even if that is true, these specific changes were handled in an extremely poor fashion, without debate, discussion or warning, and the youth ministry workers and children’s ministry workers who would be most affected by the change weren’t consulted or even warned. The impact on some of the activities already scheduled apparently wasn’t fully thought through either.

Here’s a timeline from Gavin.

I was sitting here, after a perfectly lousy day at work, feeling sorry for myself, when I read this post from Kat Coble, who is living outside herself — and grieving for a seriously ill companion — even while I’m sitting here feeling selfish:

The Bible tells us over and again that God was grief-stricken when sin entered the world. He loved mankind fiercely and terribly and that rot of sin just leaked in and stole his companions from him. They were gone–disappeared in the sludge of dark lonely evil. I am arrogant when I say that today I understand how God’s heart was so bitterly broken.

Here’s an ethics question: at what point in your retail experience do you call attention to being undercharged (or getting too much change, which is the same thing)? If you are standing right at the cash register and get a nickel too much, you might give it back. But if you don’t realize the error until you get all the way home, unless your name is Abe and you have a stovepipe hat, you probably won’t worry about it.

What if the error is $20? Does that make a difference in your answer? I once got undercharged $20, if I recall the figure correctly, and I took it back to the store the next day, mainly because I didn’t want the checkout person to get in trouble.

How about $40?

Yesterday, I transferred a prescription to a local grocery store which has a pharmacy. I was attracted by the fact that this grocery chain (like one of its competitors, a big discount store chain) is now offering some generic prescriptions for $4. That’s less per month than I’m currently paying for my mail-order prescription.

My mail-order prescription had been for a 90-day supply, which my insurance company allowed because they are affiliated with the mail-order supplier. I knew that the grocery would only be able to give me a 30-day supply.

But it turns out that this particular drug is so inexpensive that they told me I could pay cash, bypassing my insurance company, and get a 90-day supply for the same $4 per month, a total of $12. It sounded good to me.

Here’s where things got interesting. I didn’t know about it in advance, but this grocery chain also offers an incentive for people who transfer their prescriptions: $20 in free groceries for each prescription transferred to the store from some other pharmacy.

When the woman in pharmacy was ringing up my purchase, she told me about this, and I was pleased. But then she said something along the lines of, “well, you got a three-month supply, so I should probably count this three times.” So she put a $60 credit on my grocery card.

I am almost certain that she interpreted the promotion wrong. I was only transferring one prescription, regardless of how many months’ supply. But it was her conscious decision, not mine, and it would have been kind of arrogant for me to argue with her about her own store’s policies. It wasn’t the same thing as her accidentally handing me the wrong denomination of bill.

So I shrugged and got over it. And today, after I got off work, I went and bought groceries.

Was I wrong?

My friend Chris Oakes sent me a terrific YouTube link: it’s author and pastor Eugene Peterson, best known as the author of the Bible paraphrase “The Message.” It’s about a half-hour interview, but worth bookmarking until you have the time to watch it.

The interview talks about the importance of story and imagination to the Gospel, and to life and it also includes Peterson’s account of turning down an invitation to spend a few days with one of his great admirers — a fellow you might know as Bono.

The interviewer, a journalism professor at Point Loma Nazarene University, manages to get in a great line about The Living Bible: “Mine died. I didn’t know what to feed it.”

The video is after the jump:

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Bob Gersztyn’s terrific remembrance of Larry Norman anchors the Wittenburg Door’s coverage of the iconoclastic Christian rock legend.

My sister bought me a copy of The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers a couple of months back, and I didn’t really get a chance to sit down and read it until this past week.

What a terrific, terrific book. Author Amy Hollingsworth, whose first interview with Fred Rogers turned into a long friendship, captures the deep faith that informed Rogers’ life and work. Many people know that Rogers was a Presbyterian minister, and although his show never featured any overt religious content the gospel oozed through every pore. Hollingsworth does a terrific job explaining Rogers’ theology, both in terms of his work and in terms of the man who she came to hold so dear. Moving and extraordinary.

This also gives me a chance to refer you to another recent post:
Won’t you wear a sweater on March 20?

VeggieTales creator Phil Vischer, who very publicly lost control of his company, has some great thoughts about the intersection between Christianity and culture at his blog. A couple of excerpts:

Political activism has been the rallying cry of the church for the last 30 years. As a result, we conservative Christians managed to remake congress, reshape the Supreme Court, and elect a President. Twice. We have engaged our culture in a war. (We call it “the culture war.”) And we have won many victories.

But there has been a price for this political focus. Today, 80% of non-Christians in America have a negative view of Christianity. When asked what word first sprang to mind when the term “Evangelical Christian” was mentioned, the number one answer from young adults in America was not “loving” or “self-sacrificing,” but rather, “homophobic.”

For an entire generation of Americans, Christians have become defined by what we are against. By what we hate. By whom we oppose. Jesus’ call that we would be known “by our love” has been lost in our generation.

And this:

So an amazing film about Jesus attracts everyone’s interest, and, research will later show, accomplishes nothing. Why? Because the world doesn’t learn about God by watching Christian movies. The world learns about God by watching Christians. And we Christians are failing to show the world the love of God. We’ve failed to make an invisible God visible. We’ve shown them cranky Christians. Politically-savvy Christians. Market-driven Christians. Ambitous Christians. What we haven’t shown them, are loving Christians. And since Jesus said they would “know you by your love,” I think it’s safe to say the world doesn’t know what a Christian is. And sometimes I suspect we don’t either.

It’s a great post, long but well worth your time. Vischer has been promising some information soon about his next big project.

Kat Coble has hit the nail squarely on the head. Here’s the key paragraph:

As Christians enter politics–right, left or libertarian–I think we should strive to change the nature of politics for the better. Our first mission here is ALWAYS to grow in Christ, to demand less of God’s grace even as we reflect that grace to the world at large. Things like presidential terms, Senate seats and Justices on the bench are all temporary. They are the withering grass and falling flowers. What good does it serve our ultimate goal to become like the filth in which they grow instead of the light?

Go read the whole thing.