Generous

Here's the first update on Mexico Missions fundraising...and it's a good one. The first response to the support letter I sent out a week ago came this weekend, from a couple that Christine and I haven't seen in two years. And they were very generous. I was shocked at their donation. They're not rich people. I should probably go on here about the widow's mites and priorities and yadda yadda. But I could never figure out what Daddy Longlegs had to do with giving anyway. Instead, I'll just say, "Thanks R. and S." I have hundreds more to raise, but this is a great start.

Oh Mexico. Never really been, but I'd sure like to go.

Wasn't it Five Iron Frensy who sang,
Mission trip to Mexico
Mission trip to Mexico
Get in the van, come on let's go
On a mission trip to Mexico?

Ah what a classic musical composition that was.
Well, I'm taking their advice (sans the van). This summer, I'm going to Mexico City to work with homeless kids. I'm really looking forward to it. I'm hoping to post some updates here about planning, fundraising, the missionaries we're going to help, etc. The paragraph below is the first of such. It's an email from Jesus Guttierez, the founder of Lampas International, the ministry I'll be working with.

One of the staff at Lampas, Joy Jimenez, just had surgery - a procedure that a lot of my friends from church helped to pay for. She had an infection in her sinuses and if she hadn't had the surgery, doctors said, she might have lost her hearing. So she seems to be back at work already. I got this this morning so I'm assuming that "tomorrow" in Jesus' message is today (22 April).

Hello! Greetings from all!

Joy is doing well, recuperating from the surgery. She is still getting her strength back and has some pain, but is much better. Please pray for her tomorrow as it's the Children's day activity and she's in charge of the games. It's her first full day back, but she's planned simple games and think it should go fine. We have invited over 80 street kids to a local park, and will have the typical piñata, games and Bible message, and will serve them "tacos de canasta" & rice and beans for lunch. We would appreciate your prayers that all goes well (we don't have very many helpers this time), and that the Lord will touch many hearts. Thanks so much, and we'll be in contact. Joy is planning to write a thank you letter soon!

In Christ,
The Lampas team

Check back for more Lampas updates and more clashing musical quotes. Only on Otter Fodder do you get references to James Taylor and Five Iron Frensy together.

Enlightenment On Demand

I went for a run this morning. I haven't run in a while, but I felt like I needed to clear my head. Plus, I couldn't sleep. So I ran.

I've got some decisions to make - a lot of stuff going on with work, family, church, etc. Kind-of stressed because decisions always stress me out. I'm working on being more decisive.

Anyway, I went out running and I think I was expecting some kind of illumination - like God would speak while I panted. He didn't. No illumination. Not even a decent sunrise. Too cloudy.

I do that a lot - try to schedule my enlightenment. I'll go on a retreat or just to the park to pray and expect to hear from God - especially if I'm facing a big decision. I go off somewhere and piddle around waiting for the answer to slap me in the face, and then I'm kind-of disappointed when the retreat is over or I finish my run around the block and I get back home without any answers.

Maybe it would be enlightenment to realize that answers don't come that way. Maybe God doesn't always want to give me a skirt to hide my decisions behind so that, if it turns out to be a bad decision, I can't say with pursed lips, "Well, I really felt like that was what God was calling me to do." Maybe he's forcing me to be a man - stand up and pull the trigger and deal with the consequences of my decision - good or bad.

Or maybe things were just too cloudy this morning.

The Death of Smart

I have this idea for a book: The Death of Smart. Here’s what I think: I’m starting to question the value of knowing stuff. I was just at a meeting at church with some other teachers and some of them are in seminary and they were complaining that people in their classes don’t want to learn a lot. That is, they don’t want to learn Greek or study ancient creeds and history of theology or textual criticism. I’ve heard that before from teachers, and felt that way myself when I taught youth. One of the guys in the meeting today expressed it this way: “Well you’re in that world where everything is subject to academic scrutiny and everything is analyzed and thought through.” (I think he meant seminary.) “And you just have to accept that this class will never be that. They aren’t going to want to go deep like you do.”

The Newsboys had a song about this that I used to like. The lyrics said:
I want to preach the word. They want massages.
I check chapter and verse. They check their watches.
I spy another yawn. I might as well be gone.
Let’s stand and say, ‘Amen.’

The implication, I think, is that people in Sunday School classes just aren’t ready for such deep study. They haven’t “arrived” at that point in their spiritual walk. I don’t think I believe that any more though, and that’s what my book would be about. There are two reasons for this.

First, I think the church may have over-emphasized the importance of intellect and reason in recent years. That would have been only natural in the cultural of the last two centuries in which reason and science have dominated. Our churches meet in lecture halls. Our classes are based around a teacher. The very geography of our meetings reveals what is most important to us. If the church considered service to be its most important task, wouldn’t we meet in soup kitchens? If we considered evangelism our most important mission, would we meet at all? If fellowship were our primary goal, why not meet in homes? Instead, it’s learning, knowledge, and growth (which even for all of our “life application” baubles is still seen as an intellectual exercise: we have “life application studies” not “life application activities.”) that form the central mandate of our modern faith. Worship is encouraged, but better not to worship too late on Saturday night lest we miss the worship service on Sunday. Fellowship is important, but let’s keep the retreat to Friday night and Saturday so that everyone can be present for lecture on Sunday.

I don’t think it was always like that. The first church met in homes. The original rule of St. Francis included a vow to abstain from education. Francis originally didn’t allow his brothers to own books. I wonder how important learning is to God. Certainly, He doesn’t want us to float through life “fat, dumb and happy”. But if learning is the central purpose of the church, why didn’t Jesus talk about it more? In fact, I can’t think of many people in scripture who are praised for their learning. The Bareans, I suppose. And there were “men of Issacar” who “understood the times.” And Jesus himself “grew in wisdom” and said to “take my yoke upon you and learn of me.” But those seem to be more about wisdom, as influenced by lessons learned living life. I don’t know that any of those have a classroom in view.

I hope, in saying this, that I don’t seem to be complaining about church. I love my church’s worship service. It feeds me. It encourages me. I miss it when I’m not able to attend. Nor, am I complaining about format. I enjoy a good lecture, and my church works hard to avoid the “sage on a stage” format and present messages in creative ways. But when I try to put myself in the shoes of a non-Christian, I can’t think of any format that I would find less appealing than a church service. Which brings me to the second reason for my book: smart churches aren’t post-modern churches.

Fifty years ago, what you knew was very important. We elected leaders and trusted teachers if they had amassed an impressive amount of information. They must have studied. They must have done research in windowless libraries with dusty books. But now information (both good and bad, accurate and inaccurate) is available to a much wider audience with must less effort in its discovery. Thus we don’t value knowledge as much as our grandparents did. We elect politicians because we liked them in a movie or a sport. We shrug when a president can’t recall the name of a country’s foreign minister. And we raise an eyebrow when our pastor reads a suspicious quote from Winston Churchill. We may even visit famousquotes.com after the service to see if Churchill was really the author.

Witness this blog. I don’t have a degree in social science of any kind so why read something by someone who is obviously not an authority on the subject? Or consider the blog format at all: part of the function of newspapers and publishers used to be that they were vouching for their content. The reporter or essayist was someone who knew their stuff, someone the public could trust. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have his own book or column. So why do post-moderns read blogs by people they don’t know and don’t know if they can trust? Because facts aren’t as important as they used to be. Facts are cheap. Thus the teacher, the person with all the answers, is no longer the leader we’re drawn to follow. In fact, we’re suspicious of anyone who has answers. And because of all of that, the target for a “culturally-relevant” church has moved while the intellectual format has kept its static aim. As a result, we might as well be shooting blanks.

Churches nowadays like to talk about being “culturally relevant.” It’s a buzzword. But I wonder if we are making ourselves relevant to the wrong culture. For instance, our services, programs and auditoriums have gotten increasingly modern. The church in America has spent millions of dollars so that its leaders can “repackage the ancient message in a culturally-relevant way.” I think what that means is putting hymns and Bible verses in PowerPoint. That’s a very modern idea. (So modern that it took years for my home church to come around to the idea. The old lights called it, “music on the wall” and wanted no part of it.)

But the post-modern person isn’t impressed with PowerPoint. She uses it in office meetings. Not only that, she has experienced life on Tatouine and watched some roughnecks blow up a meteor to save the world and seen a lot of other fancy tricks with technology that’s way better than PowerPoint. Years ago, before I thought of any of this and when I would get really excited that a Christian band could pack out a football stadium and put on something really cool like a laser show, a friend of mine saw all this coming. His name is Andy. We were at just such a concert. It had smoke and it was very loud and I thought it was so cool – just as cool as anything a secular band could do, so there. (Except that it was in a church, which wasn’t as cool as if it had been in a football stadium.) Anyway, my friend told me, “You know, we will never be able to outdo the world, the secular bands, with big, expensive, flashy shows. That’s not what the church is about anyway. The one thing that we can offer the world that secular bands can’t is genuine relationships. Love.”

<>I nodded as if I agreed with him, but deep down I was thinking. “No! My youth pastor told me I could be Christian and be cool too! And that’s what I want! Plus, we’re doing this to be ‘culturally-relevant’.”

But my friend was right. In the post-modern culture, my friends don’t care that much what I know or how convincing I am. So they won’t really care what the people at my church know or how convincing my pastor is. If there is one, highest virtue of our post-modern culture it’s tolerance. But if there’s a second-highest virtue, it’s genuine-ness. We have enough data. We want something more.

So the book will be called The Death of Smart, or Smart Church. Dead Church, or something like that. And it will sell millions of copies. Watch for it coming soon to an amazon.com page near you.

My Prejudice

I just finished reading Blue Like Jazz. It was incredible. Donald Miller has written a book without pretense about, among other things, his struggle with being pretentious. It's disarming. Entertaining. And he read my mind. Or, more precisely, my heart.

There were so many things from the book that I would like to discuss. But one (and I don't even know if this was really in the book, but just came to my head while I was reading it) is that I have this problem with intellectual snobery. I really think I'm smarter than most people.

I don't know how I've come to such a conclusion, but I have. Most people that I meet, I assume that they watch too much TV, don't read much, don't know the capitol of China, haven't thought clearly through their political affiliations, haven't thought critically about the literary merits of Napoleon Dynamite, etc. If I disagree with them, I don't say so because I know I'm right and to show them so would either make them mad or ashamed that they could have not known what I know. Ya know?

The other day, I had written something to someone that included a reference to the UK. They asked me "what's UK? Ukraine?" I said, "United Kingdom." They said, "Oh. Where's that?" I said "Great Britain." They said, "Oh."

I sometimes wish I were part of some deeply spiritual, rigorously academic, culturally hip crowd that could talk about Derek Webb and the Gaza settlements and Second Temple Judaism and Eric Dampier without missing a beat and always have something insightful to say about each topic. We would meet in a coffee shop, of course. Not like, have meetings, but just run into each other there like at Central Perk in Friends but without the lame jokes. And even though I know hardly anything about the topics I just listed, we would all know everything about them and lots about lots more because we would pay attention to such things so that we could talk about them at the coffee shop.

I even have this problem with people who know more than me. My brother-in-law, for instance. He's a genius. He knows like six languages. He picks up languages like I pick up movie lines. He learns them so he can study ancient manuscripts and stuff. When you ask him about a difficult passage in the Bible, he can quote it to you in the original language, tell you the three most common interpretations of it, and give at least two textual insights to support or discredit each. I'm not kidding. But even with him I have this idea that I'm smarter. At least in what matters, right? I mean, who wants to know about the Old Testament Pseudopigrypha anyway? Only seminary professors and dorks who hang out at coffee shops and don't have a real life. And bloggers who want to drop words like pseudopigryha so they sound smart. I don't think I'm spelling that right.

Like I said, I don't know how I've come to this point. It might have been the newspaper. My editor at the newspaper was never surprised at anything. He had a mental cubby-hole for every story. He would say things like, "The city is cleaning up the streets again. Big campaign. No more litter. Gonna clean things up this time. Give me 12 inches on it." This really impressed me. I thought, "Wow, he must have seen dozens of city street-cleaning anti-litter campaigns in his time. He's been around the block. Nothing impresses him. He knows it all." But he wasn't a know-it-all.

I've written 601 words now (I checked) and just realized I don't really know what point I'm trying to make. Other than, this is the stuff that clangs around in my skull and I think that's what a blog is supposed to be for. So there ya go. Go check out Blue Like Jazz.

The Back Nine

Here's your two-paragraph, behind-the-scenes report from the Masters.
1. The golf was incredible. Tiger is the Michael Jordan of golf. On the biggest stage, when he needs it most, he can just turn on this overdrive. It's amazing. We saw him putt one into the creek on Thursday and hit a tree on Friday. And then he comes back on Saturday with 7 straight birdies.
2. Augusta National (just "the National" to locals) is everything you're afraid it would be - rich, stuffy, elitist. It's like a Dixie white supremist camp that puts on a golf tournament. Well, maybe not that bad, but it's clear that the members enjoy having their boys club - I can go in the clubhouse and you can't - I have a green jacket and you don't - I can drive a golf cart around the course and tell people to get out of my way and you can't. Not that they shouldn't be that way. I mean it's their club, they can do what they like. But you definitely get the feeling when you walk through the gates that there are two kinds of people in that world - friends of Hootie, and the rest of us.

Georgia on my mind

Well, tomorrow I leave for Augusta. Yes, Augusta National where I'll hang out with Phil, Tiger, Justin and the boys. Probably give them some pointers...
"Phil, you're dropping your left elbow..."
"Tiger, try putting more weight on your left foot..."
"C'mon, swing Vijay! Mom mamma can hit it farther than that!"
Well, maybe not. But you can watch for me. I'll be the one in a khaki cap and maybe a maroon A&M windbreaker. Also, I'll be the only one there who knows secret nunchuck moves from the government. I will NOT be the one who yells, after every swing, "GET IN THE HOLE!"

I loves me some daylight savings time!

Well, here goes...

Everyone else has a blog so I just couldn't be left out. I thought it would be cool to have a place to rant but, come to think of it, I don't rant near as much as I used to. I do a lot more ruminating than ranting these days. So here are my ruminations...the cuds of my semi-creative consciousness.
Enjoy.