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What About the Third Generation?

Posted in Other, tagged , , , on May 10, 2012| 2 Comments »

After visiting Oxford, MS three weeks ago, I began reading William Faulkner again, specifically the Snopes trilogy (The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion). One of Faulkner’s recurrent themes is the legacy that one generation leaves to the next, so I shouldn’t have been surprised by a passage in The Town describing the Snopes, a pretty low-life clan that is gradually inserting itself into the well-bred society of post-Civil War Mississippi:

And then suppose, just suppose; suppose and tremble: one generation more removed from Eck Snopes and his innocence; one generation more until that innocent and outrageous belief that courage and honor are practical has had time to fade and cool so that merely the habit of courage and honor remain. . . .

“ . . . So that merely the habit of courage and honor remain!” Those are really frightening words.

The whole idea reminded me of something I came upon while studying about Puritans a number of years ago.  After fleeing from religious tyranny in Europe,  the early Puritans in America established theocracies in New England, that is, church membership and civil citizenship were the same. Both communion and voting privileges were denied the unbaptized and/or those not admitted to the church.

For the first generation of Puritans, the system worked well. Their children were baptized as infants and  full church membership was granted after their conversion experience, which all prospective church members were required to rehearse in front of the congregation.

Some slippage occurred between the first and second generations, but by the third generation of Puritans in New England, the lack of a personal conversation experience created an embarrassing and difficult situation both politically and religiously.  Because large numbers of these third generation Puritans had no personal conversion experience to relate, they could not be accepted into full church membership, so they could not vote as citizens of New England.

In 1662, only forty-two years after the Mayflower and the first pioneer Puritans landed in the New World, the colony leaders felt compelled to shore up both the church and the state.  Their solution was what was called The Half-Way Covenant, according to which the less-pious third generation could receive partial church membership if they simply agreed with the creed and accepted the covenant.  With this covenant established, the children of the Third Generation could be baptized in the church.

The hope of the Second and First Generation was that granting partial church membership would encourage participation by the Third Generation and keep them and their children from feeling excluded, resulting ultimately in their deciding to go for full church membership with a personal conversion.

Records from the time show the reduced requirements and the lesser call did not dramatically affect the personal piety of the Third Generation, a precedent from which we should learn.  In fact, the historical consensus seems to be that over sixty more years were needed for another generation of New Englanders to find personal faith.  Specifically, during The Great Awakening of 1730, these halfway measures were rejected out of hand and personal conversion became again a requirement for church membership.  The expectation of complete commitment was much more successful than meeting the hardly committed halfway.

Sherrylee and I are enjoying a few days in southern California with our daughter and her husband and three grandchildren—three generations of our family.  Can you see why I’m thinking about this third generation stuff?

The figures I hear are that half of our children who grow up in church with us will give up their faith within a few years of high school graduation.  If that doesn’t bother you, then you probably are a Third Generation and your children are a Fourth Generation group.  It really bothers me!

By the grace of God, our children not only have faith, but have married people of great faith as well.  I know they are teaching their children and taking them to church, but Sherrylee and I as First Generation of this family have committed to Second Generation to be an active part of Third Generation’s lives, so that they not only have every chance to choose Faith, but they have seen something in the lives of First and Second that they want as well.

They will not have seen us accumulate much; they will not see us with great fame or power; but they will see faithfulness—sincere faithfulness—that’s the best we Firsts can give to the Thirds that we love so much.

I do not want to appear in some long, future Faulknerian sentence that says,

And then suppose, just suppose; suppose and tremble: one generation more removed from Mark and his innocence; one generation more until that innocent and outrageous belief that faith and personal devotion to Christ are practical has had time to fade and cool so that merely the habit of faith and devotion remain. . . .

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Where Have I Been? At the Pepperdine Bible Lectures, Of Course!

Posted in Other, tagged , , , on May 8, 2012| Leave a Comment »

The 69th Pepperdine Bible Lectures were outstanding—again! In spite of my good intentions to post during the lectures, especially to keep you current on the class that I led, it was just impossible! Too many people, too many conversations, too many outstanding teachers to take in, and too much late night pie and coffee with friends!

I hope you believe in “better late than never,” because with this post, I’ll try to fulfill my intentions.

I had really wanted to post audio recordings, at least excerpts, from the two-day class which I led on “What’s New and What’s Needed in 21st Century Missions,” but I was stymied on two fronts: by technology from doing my own recording and by copyright issues as well, so the best I can do for you is to give you the link where you can purchase the CDs of the class http://www.purelogicvideo.com/page.cfm?pageid=13737.  They really should make it possible to download these files, but I didn’t see that option.

One of the reasons PBL has continued to thrive and grow while other lectureships have failed is because young preachers are given big platforms! 

Jonathan Storment, a friend and the terrific young preacher for Highland in Abilene, opened the PBL on May 1. Jonathan has always been a dynamic and entertaining speaker, but the depth and courage that he now brings with his preaching is a special blessing to those who hear him.  Aaron Metcalf and Josh Ross are two more younger preachers who keynoted before any of the older, established speakers were given the pulpit.

Almost 250 classes are held during the three full days of PBL.  And the range is from textual to philosophical, from field reports to marriage/family, from the best known teachers like Randy Harris, Mike Cope, Rick Atchley, and Jeff Walling to the fully unknown but people with something important to say!

“Lively” would be the word I would choose to describe our class.  I invited Dr. Dan Bouchelle, President of Missions Resource Network, and Dr. Dan Rodriguez, professor of Religion and Hispanic Studies at Pepperdine, to join me in discussing issues surrounding foreign missions in churches of Christ.  We had a great time talking about each other’s ideas.

I’ve given you in the last post the summary of what I was going to deliver. Dan and Dan responded to my ideas and contributed their own. Dan Bouchelle suggested that while I addressed the current situation in American churches creatively, that perhaps I had not addressed the deeper problem that our churches as a whole must become more deeply and completely missional before they will do foreign missions well.

In addition, he said that for the 21st century, we Americans must surrender our patriarchal attitudes toward foreign missions and become co-workers, partners, with existing foreign churches who will more likely know what their part of the world needs better than we Americans could conceive.

Dr. Dan Rodriguez also supported the general tenor of my suggestions, but his personal message was that American churches need to cooperate with each other enough to strategically reach into parts of the world that no single congregation will probably ever have the resources to penetrate—especially those countries in the 10-40 window, which contain the fewest Christians and the largest portion of the world’s population.

I really appreciate so much what both of them said, and they were both quite kind to my rather subversive suggestions regarding the way we do foreign missions.  Don’t forget that you can get the entire discussion through this website: http://www.purelogicvideo.com/page.cfm?pageid=13737.

Dr. Jerry Rushford

Without question, the most spectacular moment of the lectureship was the last night when Dr. Jerry Rushford, director of the PB L for thirty years, passed the baton to his successors Mike Cope and Rick Gibson.  As President Benton said, Rushford could have chosen any number of career paths; a historian, a writer, a preacher, or a professor. But very early in his life he chose to direct the lectureship because he saw a chance to effect a whole fellowship of Christians.

For thirty years, he has been encouraging new preachers by giving them a chance to be heard; he has given foreign preachers and missionaries a classroom or a stage to expose American churches to the needs of the world; he has provided a stage where issues could be discussed with love and respect.

Thank you, Jerry Rushford, for a lifetime of serving the Kingdom in a way that few could have taken to the mountain tops as you have.  And thank you for leaving the Bible Lectures with integrity, passing it on to men of great heart and stature in our tradition.

The theme for next year’s lectureship (April 30-May 3) is “Can I Get A Witness? Faithfully Following the Lamb in Revelation” and promises continued excellence.

I hope to be there. Won’t you come too?

 

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A Preview of Pepperdine

Posted in Other, Re-Thinking Mission Work, tagged , , , on April 30, 2012| 1 Comment »

Sherrylee and I are leaving Seattle tomorrow for Malibu and the Pepperdine Bible Lectures. PBL is the last great Christian college lectureship among Churches of Christ. The main force  behind the lectureship for almost three decades has been the director Dr. Jerry Rushford. This is his last lectureship; he has passed the baton to Mike Cope and Rick Gibson, who assume the responsibility for the future of PBL.

I think they will do a great job, but maintaining the quality while updating the format is a daunting challenge. As great leaders should, they have already begun asking and receiving input from a broad spectrum of people who have vested interest in the welfare of the lectures. 

I pray they do well. We need this forum for our conversations.

Dr. Dan Rodriguez

On Wednesday, we will be discussing the current state of missions among Churches of Christ, and on Thursday, we will go forward to what Churches of Christ need to do to have effective mission efforts in the next fifty years.  I think it will be an exhilarating conversation with these men who are passionate and informed about missions.

Dr. Dan Bouchelle

I hope to provide at least a summary of the two classes on Wednesday and Thursday for you to read—perhaps even an audio file for you to be able to listen, but today I thought I would give you a copy of the handout I will use on Wednesday.  You’ll recognize it as a summary of the blog series I did on “Re-Thinking Mission Work.”  If you want more explanation and detail to flesh out these thoughts, you can find that series in the side panel.

Even if you can’t come to the Pepperdine Bible Lectures, I hope you can enjoy a portion of it vicariously through these next posts. 

Overview of ”Re-thinking Mission Work in Churches of Christ”

By Mark Woodward

The current model for sending, supporting, and overseeing missionaries from Churches of Christ needs to be re-thought for the following reasons:

  1. The selection process is mostly self-selection with only minimal help from experienced missionaries or those who have skills or information that could guide the selection process.
  2. The choice of mission sites too often is an uncoordinated, non-strategic choice with little input from experienced or engaged persons.
  3. The preparation for mission work, if any, is not readily available for most people who would like to become missionaries.
  4. The support gathering system among Churches of Christ not only discourages the vast majority of potential missionaries from even beginning, but also most of those who do attempt to work their way through it.
  5. The “sponsoring church” system neglects spiritual oversight, is occasionally about strategic oversight, and mostly about financial oversight.
  6. The role of either elders or general mission committees to oversee missionaries/mission churches puts the decisions about mission work too often into the hands of well-intentioned people who have little or no personal experience in missions, and little or only secondhand primary information about how to do missions.
  7. The relationship between the missionary and his/her overseers is generally an employer/employee relationship with financial arrangements being the most important control mechanism.

Some of the changes that I would like to suggest that Churches of Christ implement in order to change our paradigm for missions.

  1. Mission committees should be restructured to have as their sole responsibility, implementation of strategies for raising up and surfacing  missionaries from their congregation.
  2. Hopeful missionaries should be expected to seek experienced and skilled help, either inside or outside of their home congregation, for making all of their First Decisions (Should I be a missionary? Where should I go? Who should I go with? How should I prepare?)
  3. Primary oversight of a missionary should be in the hands of Christians who know the person intimately and care about the proposed work, who likely are even personally involved.
  4. Every Missionary Hopeful should be expected to spend two years in an apprenticeship on the field with a Master Missionary before they are supported to work independently.
  5. Financial support and oversight control need to have more separation, so that both are in the hands of Christians who love the missionary and care about the work.

You can read the expanded blog articles on “Re-Thinking Mission Work” at www.markwoodward.org.

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Guest Post: “Why Is Jesus Worthy” by Richard Oster, Jr.

Posted in Bible Study, Christian Missions, Other, Uncategorized, tagged , on March 27, 2012| Leave a Comment »

 Dr. Richard Oster, professor at Harding School of Theology, has a topic-specific blog called 7 Subversive Letters which opens the letters to the seven churches recorded in Revelation 1-3 in a very enlightening way.  These short writings hint at what is soon to become a book on the same topic.

I recommend to you both Dr. Oster and his blog.  I hope this taste will encourage you to investigate his writings further.

WHY IS JESUS WORTHY?

by Dr. Richard E. Oster, Jr.

I suppose that this question has more than one answer.  It is clear that John the prophet embraces the conviction that the Messiah Jesus is worthy. One of the best known and favorite perspectives on this topic is given in Revelation 5:12 where John relates Jesus’ worthiness to the fact that he was slain to redeem humankind: “Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” (Rev. 5:12).  Believers are probably attracted to this perspective because it reminds them of Christ’s sacrificial death and bloodshed on their behalf.

In our enthusiasm for this popular interpretation of Christ’s worthiness there is a related idea given by John that has sometimes been overlooked.  In Rev. 5:9 John writes, “You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.” There are really two points in this verse; there is the traditional understanding focused upon Jesus’ vicarious death and secondly Jesus’ worthiness because of the global consequences of his death for the Christian mission.  In making this second point John tries to move the readers beyond two typical misunderstandings. The first of these tendencies is one that hides and secludes salvation from others because of feelings of nationalism or ethnocentrism.  The second misconception that John’s teaching combats is the idea that converts to Christianity are there to bolster the agenda, needs, programs, and budget of the church.  John’s emphasis is upon the fact that Christ’s role in the first instance is to purchase man and women “for God.”  The church never owns Christian converts; their only rightful owner is God.

It has been easy for a complacent church at times to laud, magnify, and praise Christ for his redemptive work on the cross, but manifest less enthusiastic about a commitment to the style of globalism in missions contained in the words “from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev. 5:9b).  One does not need to have advanced theological training, or even know Greek and Hebrew, to realize the necessary connection in the heart of God between a believer’s embracing the personal benefits of salvation and then showing a commitment to the globalization of those benefits.

Living in an empire such as Rome’s, a believer would clearer and frequently see the signs of Roman colonialism in Roman artwork recorded on coins, in statues, and on major monuments.  Christians knew they lived in an Empire that controlled the lands and seas between the rivers Thames and Tigris.  When Rome thought of “tribes and languages and peoples and nations” they imagined more areas to conquer, to dominate, and to exploit for their resources, both human and material resources.  It was difficult in antiquity to surpass Rome’s activity in human trafficking.  John the prophet, in contradistinction to the prevailing regime, saw “every tribe and language and people and nation” as parts of God’s alienated, but beloved, creation, longing for a partial redemption in the present, and a complete restoration and redemption in the New Heaven and New Earth (Rev. 21-22).

You can read the complete series at 7 Subversive Letters

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When All Kingdom Breaks Loose!

Posted in Other on March 19, 2012| 1 Comment »

Occasionally my son-in-law Tim Spivey, senior minister for the New Vintage Church in Escondido, CA writes a special blog. He has lots of excellent things to say about leadership, about preaching, and about being church, but recently, this simple reflection of his really touched me.  I love the wordplay in the title, not because it is cute, but because it says Truth in fresh way. 

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. 

Though I’ve read them all many times, I’m still filled with anticipation whenever I read through my Bible and hear any biblical writer (especially Jesus) say, “The Kingdom of God is Like…” I find that phrase unusually exhilarating and I know whatever follows is likely to be crucial Gospel that I need to hear.

I love those words and I found myself reflecting on my week thinking about all the ways I saw God move. Over the past week, I’ve watched the Gospel break out in so many magnificent ways–all in the face of tragedy, sin, ugliness, and despair.

In the midst of all hell breaking loose, the gift of seeing all Kingdom break loose and run over hell is one of a Christian’s greatest joys. I know we aren’t supposed to talk that way–we’re supposed to be civil with our enemies. But, Satan is no ordinary enemy and deserves my coddling about as much as I deserve God’s grace.

So there.

To what shall we compare the Kingdom of God? The Kingdom of God is like:

  • The restoration of a teenager who felt the need to experience the far country.
  • A broken woman receiving grace and acceptance from God’s people.
  • A mom thought dead returning to life (mine).
  • A person with a critical spirit confessing it to the one they’ve verbally cut for months. Reconciliation dawning.
  • A mom and dad burying their infant amidst tears while God’s people help fulfill Jesus’ blessing upon those who mourn.
  • A family provides an entire season’s worth of meat for a family that hasn’t eaten meat in months because they can’t afford it.
  • Tears flowing down the cheeks of a worshiper remembering her departed husband as the church sings Chris Tomlin’s, “I Will Rise.”
  • A man closed to Christ most of his life opens his first Bible and begins to read the Gospel of John.
Yes, there are times when all hell breaks loose. But in the end, we Christians need to remember all hell is no match for the Kingdom broken loose. He who is in us is greater than he who is in the world.
May your week be blessed, and may all Kingdom break loose wherever you are.
If you would like to read more from Tim, you’ll find a link in my sidebar in the Blogroll.

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Does Positive Psychology Know What Happiness Is?

Posted in Christian Culture, Other, tagged , , , on March 1, 2012| Leave a Comment »

While flying back from Nashville last week, I picked up an airline magazine and found myself captured by an article entitled “The Pursuit of Happiness.”  The article opened up a whole new area of psychology to me called “positive psychology.” Positive psychology has been out there for over a decade now, long enough to even have detractors, but the success of a recent publication by Dan Buettner Thriving: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way has rekindled the conversation.

Buettner’s conclusions and those of several other well-known positive psychologists are backed with very large and well-documented studies that might be interesting to many of you, so here is the link for further details:  Celebrated Living/Spring 2012

But I want to jump to the conclusions of positive psychology as reported in this article:

  • “The most powerful determinant of happiness is the quality of your relationships with other people.”
  • Money does play a role in happiness, but only up to an annual income of $75,000 at which point no increase in happiness can be measured with further gain.
  • Individuals with altruistic as opposed to financial goals experience greater happiness.
  • Church attendance, participation in social events, and regular exercise increase happiness.
  • Choosing to spend money on others makes people happier than spending it on themselves.
  • Place and your surroundings matter! Beauty does affect people positively.
  • Performing meaningful work makes people happier.

As I was doing some superficial research on this psychological scene, I came across a TED video, recorded in 2004, by Dr. Martin Seligman, whom many designate as the founder of the positive psychology model.  (I can’t help but point out the irony that his Germanic surname means literally “blessed man” or “happy man”!) He claims to have classified the happy life into three distinctive types:

  • The Pleasurable Life – characterized by the accumulation of as many pleasurable experiences as possible
  • The Good Life—characterized by intense engagement with work, play, people, and love that “makes time stand still!”
  • The Meaningful Life—knowing one’s personal strengths and using them for something larger than oneself.

His conclusion is that the Pleasurable Life as a lifestyle brings very minimal satisfaction and is far surpassed by the other two. The Meaningful Life offered the greatest happiness. Interestingly, pleasurable experiences, however, could increase happiness when they were an add-on to both the Good and the Meaningful Life!

My favorite authors on happiness concluded all of this and more long before positive psychology appeared. It makes me happy just reading their writings again:

  • Happy are those who know they are spiritually poor; the Kingdom of heaven belongs to them!
  • Happy are those who mourn; God will comfort them!
  • Happy are those who are humble; they will receive what God has promised!
  • Happy are those whose greatest desire is to do what God requires; God will satisfy them fully!
  • Happy are those who are merciful to others; God will be merciful to them!
  • Happy are the pure in heart; they will see God!
  • Happy are those who work for peace; God will call them his children!
  • Happy are those who are persecuted because they do what God requires; the Kingdom of heaven belongs to them! (All of the above from Matthew 5)
  • How happy are those who have no doubts about me! (Matthew 11:6)
  • How happy are those who hear the word of God and obey it! (Luke 11:28)
  • How happy are those servants whose master finds them awake and ready when he returns! . . . How happy they are if he finds them ready . . . (Luke 12:37-38).
  • Happy are those whose wrongs are forgiven, whose sins are pardoned!(Romans 4:7)
  • Happy are those who do not feel guilty when they do something they judge is right! (Romans 14:22)
  • Happy are those who remain faithful under trials, because when they succeed in passing such a test, they will receive as their reward the life which God has promised to those who love him. (James 1:12)
  • Happy is the one who reads this book, and happy are those who listen to the words of this prophetic message and obey what is written in this book! (Revelation 1:3)
  • Happy are those who have been invited to the wedding feast of the Lamb. (Revelation 19:9)
  • Happy are those who wash their robes clean and so have the right to eat the fruit from the tree of life and to go through the gates into the city. (Revelation 22:14)

 

The words meaningful life and larger than yourself become so much more than just psychological jargon when put into this spiritual framework.

George Bailey may be “the biggest man in town,” and Lou Gehrig may be “the luckiest man alive,” but Christians have the potential and the promise of being the happiest of all people.

 

 

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Is The Church Having a Bad Kodak Moment?

Posted in Christian Culture, Other, tagged , , on February 27, 2012| 5 Comments »

My dad bought me my first camera in 1956. It was a Kodak Brownie—very simple point and shoot. No flash! I took it to a TCU football game to watch Jack Spikes play. Later, I became the school photographer at Fort Worth Christian, so most of the snapshots in the 1962-65 yearbooks, I took.  Those pictures were taken with my dad’s Yashica camera, but all of them were on Kodak films.

Kodak has been as American as apple pie and Chevrolet—but Kodak is almost gone.

I recently read a very interesting article called “A Century On Film: How Kodak Succumbed To the Digital Age” by Ulrich Fichtner in Spiegel Online International.

In his article Fichtner shows how Kodak grew to be synonymous with the film industry over 132 years, how all of the Oscars from 1928 to 2008 were shot on Kodak film. In the 1970s, Kodak was making 90% of all of the U.S.’s film and 85% of the cameras.  In 1975, it was Kodak who developed the world’s first digital camera.

But around 1980, one of their own vice-presidents reported to the company that unless they made fundamental changes within about thirty years, everything that Kodak was doing would become obsolete and Kodak would be in danger of failing as a business.  That report must have sounded like words from another planet since the company was dominating, hugely profitable, and still growing.

Kodak never found its way into the digital age. The company tried out cheap digital cameras, making digital printers, apparently even thought about making wallpaper and sandpaper—since they were primarily a chemical company, but nothing really worked for them.

The author of this article then writes a very telltale sentence: “Rochester was gripped by an understandable but still fatal attitude: They had given the world pictures from the surface of the moon, they reasoned, so someone else could give it wallpaper.”

I’m reminded of the Churches of Christ in the 1950s and 60s—the one that so many of our current elders and the most respected of our opinion leaders grew up in.  It was a booming religious group. We passed among ourselves statistics that described us as the fastest growing church in the United States. We were among the first groups into war-torn Europe, one of the last out of Saigon. Our Christian colleges had Olympic athletes, and we even had movie stars like Pat Boone who wouldn’t kiss anyone on screen! Those were glory years!

The last twenty years don’t feel like glory years to me. We feel more like a group trying to re-invent itself, searching for something new that will make us relevant.  We tried to become charismatic for a while, but we apparently are too Lockian for that movement to transform us. We have tried and succeeded in joining the worship wars, with some of our best churches even turning instrumental as the key to the future.  Others of our fellowship are abandoning evangelism in favor of redeeming the poor and destitute of this world—a false dichotomy in my view!  Our attempts to re-invent ourselves seem pretty ineffective.

Are we having a bad Kodak moment?  Kodak has not been able to come up with a radical enough solution, so they have now gone into bankruptcy and survive only as a shadow of their former greatness.

The Church is not Eastman Kodak.  While Kodak founder George Eastman shot himself in the head in 1932, the founder of the Church is still very much alive!  Resurrection is crucial to His story and, therefore, should be to ours as well.

You probably don’t like it that I have jumped from talking about the Church of Christ to talking about Christ’s church—but I did that quite intentionally.

Our historical position—and that of our founder as well—is that there is only One Church!  I believe Churches of Christ gave that theological position up sometime in the 1970s. We decided that we were just another denomination, something much less than what we had believed ourselves to have been.

I know why we gave up our claim of singularity! We had been much too exclusive in our claims, thinking that the sign above the door and the mode of baptism—but especially our worship—made us so right that we were the only members of the church of Christ.  Most of us, however, since then have repented of our proud self-righteousness which was our sin.

In our sack cloth and ashes, we, however, have mistakenly diminished His Church! In spite of our prideful abuse of the truth, the gates of hell still have not prevailed against the Church of God! And they never will!

Rather than re-invent the Church of Christ, perhaps we need to rediscover the Church of Christ—the only Body of Christ, the beautiful Bride of Christ. This is the community of faith that is undefeatable, that does not grow weary—and there is only One Body, One Church because there is only One Lord and One God and Father of us all!

Kodak may disappear, but the Church—the only one to which you and I truly belong—will never die!

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“Kinder and Gentler”–Are Those Presidential Words?

Posted in Christian Culture, Other, tagged , , on February 12, 2012| 2 Comments »

Yesterday, Sherrylee and I visited the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum in College Station, Texas. In recent years, we have visited five of the libraries, and I enjoy it more with each one.  There are twelve official libraries and museums, but Gerald Ford has two—a separate library and museum, so only eleven presidents, the eleven beginning with Herbert Hoover and ending with Bill Clinton, are represented.

After visiting each museum, we leave with a picture of a man, his family, and his work who has had an immense influence on our country and the history of the world. Most of these libraries are built shortly after the end of the presidency they honor, so, in some ways, they lack the purview of a longer, historical evaluation. Those libraries built during the lifetime of the man they portray, however, appear to reflect what the man himself wants his legacy to be, how he sees himself, not his opponents’ views, not the media, and not the judgment of historians.

It is this very personal quality that I found both fascinating and encouraging in the George Bush Library yesterday.  This is a presidency that was not so long ago that it has become mythical, nor so recent to still be part of the political debate. He is still alive—not thriving according to reports, but then he is 87 years old.

I saw him at a Texas Ranger ballgame a while back, but my favorite memory is from March 1992, when I heard him speak on the campus of Oklahoma Christian during his re-election campaign–one of the most beautiful March days I ever remember. The Bradford pear trees were at the peak of their bloom and the bright sun just barely knocked the chill off early spring. For a decade after that, I measured the advance of spring by that day in March that President Bush came to our campus.

Two things stood out to me after two hours in President Bush’s Presidential Library and Museum.  First, I never knew how much his personal faith in God penetrated his life and presidency. At every turn, the exhibits very quietly but explicitly testify to his faith in God .  The section on his parents mentions not only regular church attendance but that each day the family read the Bible together and prayed together. The ordination certificate of Bush as an elder in the Presbyterian church during his oil days in Midland, Texas, hangs in the middle of his early business career exhibit.

You probably don’t remember that his very intentional first act as president, just a couple of minutes after taking the oath of office, was to lead the nation in prayer.  Here are his words:

And my first act as President is a prayer. I ask you to bow your heads:  

Heavenly Father, we bow our heads and thank You for Your love. Accept our thanks for the peace that yields this day and the shared faith that makes its continuance likely. Make us strong to do Your work, willing to heed and hear Your will, and write on our hearts these words: “Use power to help people.” For we are given power not to advance our own purposes, nor to make a great show in the world, nor a name. There is but one just use of power, and it is to serve people. Help us to remember it, Lord. Amen

 

His library is amazingly full of expressions of personal faith during his presidency. Did you know that President Bush built a chapel at the presidential retreat Camp David and was the president who first initiated regular worship services there?

Second, I heard a war hero who flew 58 attack missions in WWII, a man who was shot down by the Japanese and barely escaped with his life, a man who directed the Central Intelligence Agency and who was the ambassador to the United Nations during the Cold War, call in his inaugural address for a “kinder . . .  face of the Nation and gentler  . . . face of the world.”

Some have accused him of being a wimp, for not having the guts to finish off Saddam Hussein, for instance, in Desert Storm.  I read his first words as President—the most powerful man in the world—and I don’t hear someone longing for power. I hear someone who feels blessed with power, not because he deserves it, but as an opportunity to do good in his neighborhood.

I really like “kinder and gentler”. We need that not only in the political rhetoric today, but in the hearts of our political leaders.  I suspect the daily Bible reading and prayers and the “kinder and gentler” thing are part of the same package.

I’m glad to have learned this about George Bush. It is not the whole story, perhaps, but it is part of his story that he wanted told on the walls of his library.

Thank you, Mr. President.

As we are taught to pray for the leaders of our country, so we pray for you and Mrs. Bush and give thanks for the good you have done in this world.

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O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go!

Posted in Other, Sunday Hymns, tagged , , on February 5, 2012| 1 Comment »

The words are a little archaic, but the hymn O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go has always been one of my favorites.  The melody begins rather simply but moves quickly to a quietly triumphal—not a Sandi-Patty-rock- the-world–conclusion!

George Matheson (1842-1906) was a Scottish minister. While studying theology and with a promising theological career in front of him, in his twentieth year, he went completely blind.  Not only did his blindness block his academic ambitions, but the story is that his fiancé also left him, not being willing to be burdened with a blind husband for the rest of her life.

He was quite a successful pastoral minister who was served himself by his devoted sister.  When George was forty years old, his sister married and left him on his on. It was on the occasion of his sister’s wedding that George penned the words O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go.!

O Love that wilt not let me go,

I rest my weary soul in Thee;

I give Thee back the life I owe,

That in Thine ocean depths its flow

May richer, fuller be.

First the loss of his sister’s care, rekindling no doubt the painful reminder of his own lost love, and all of this framed with his lost sight would have left many people bitter and angry. Matheson acknowledges the weariness of loss, but finds the ocean waves of God’s steadfast love life-giving as opposed to diminishing.

O Light that foll’west all my way,

I yield my flick’ring torch to Thee;

My heart restores its borrowed ray,

That in Thy sunshine’s blaze its day

May brighter, fairer be.

I love the “flick’ring torch” line. Our energies are too often spent trying to walk through life by the light of our flickering torch, when we could walk in the sunshine’s blaze with great confidence if we would yield.

O Joy that seekest me through pain,

I cannot close my heart to Thee;

I trace the rainbow thru the rain,

And feel the promise is not vain,

That morn shall tearless be.

The great hymns acknowledge pain rather than pretending that this world is tearless!  But Believers know that Joy is seeking us, not trying to allude us! Matheson may even suggest his own struggles with Joy because pain in this time can be a defining reality that we are tempted to close our hearts to Joy in doubt that it really exists.  Matheson traces the rainbow—not here a symbol of accomplished salvation, but rather a reminder of a sure promise!

O Cross that liftest up my head,

I dare not ask to fly from Thee;

I lay in dust life’s glory dead,

And from the ground there blossoms red

Life that shall endless be.

  A hymn that begins with a Love that will never let go ends with the Cross, a dying place.  Matheson’s hymn reminds us that we cannot circumvent the Cross—we dare not ask to fly from it—because only on that Cross do we find the Love that will never let us go—ever!

Amy Grant has a popular, somewhat bluesy version of the song with saxophones. I like a little more traditional version, but I don’t like at all the artists who turn it into a slow, sad dirge.

Matheson once described his life as “an obstructed life, a circumscribed life… but a life of quenchless hopefulness, a life which has beaten persistently against the cage of circumstance, and which even at the time of abandoned work has said not “Good night” but “Good morning.”

The pain is present, but there is nothing sad about this hymn!

 

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Cocoa and Carols and Excellence!

Posted in Other, Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 5, 2011| 5 Comments »

Oklahoma Christian University has been a best-kept secret for too many years!

Last night Sherrylee and I were on their campus again for the 35th Annual Cocoa and Carols, a wonderful program that our dear friend Dr. Ken Adams has produced and directed from its inception. He is retiring at the end of this year after forty-one years at OC, so we especially wanted be there to share it with him and his wife Lindy.

One of the reasons I enjoyed teaching at Oklahoma Christian for so long was that OC has always been committed to excellence, and excellence is difficult to pull off when you are small and in the middle of Oklahoma! Cocoa and Carols is a great example of this kind of excellence, however.

For thirty-five years, Oklahoma Christian has offered its community a classical Christmas program, almost always using a full professional orchestra to accompany its own student choir. Each year they offer their audience a master work by not only the likes of Bach or Mozart, but also modern composers like the Gloria by John Rutter this year! (You can find excerpts of this modern classic on Youtube, if you are unfamiliar with the work like I was.) And this Christmas gift has always been given free to the public! I love it!

I’ve always believed OC has had an excellent academic program, if anyone cares about that anymore! OC has strong majors in sciences, with an excellent record in students going into medical school and other health-related fields. The school of business is highly recognized and the MBA program is one of the best in the State of Oklahoma.  OC has an outstanding engineering program, with a very hands on approach because many of the engineering professors have come directly from their industry to join OC’s faculty.

Of course, I’m a big fan of the liberal arts, so I can say that OC’s English department, history and political science departments, music department, art and graphic design areas all have outstanding professors and, though small, give their students just as much with more personal interaction than is really possible at larger schools.

No, you won’t find a big football program at Oklahoma Christian, but you can find championship golf, tennis, and  track and field, as well as baseball, basketball, women’s softball, and soccer! Social clubs and intramural sports offer plenty of time for play

And I do believe that Oklahoma Christian is still committed to delivering a Christian education, something that not even all colleges with Christian in their name are doing any more.  You can go to church with your professors, or work in inner city missions with them—not just your Bible professors, but your accounting or your biology professor as well.  They may invite you to join them on an overseas mission project during summer break, or they may just sit down with you in the coffee shop to check on your life!

I was trying to decide what keeps Oklahoma Christian hidden from the mainstream of Christian education. Part of the answer is its location—Oklahoma. I have a friend here in Fort Worth, who although living only about 100 miles away from the Sooner state for decades, had never been to Oklahoma.  It’s not Malibu!

Sherrylee would admit to thinking that God had made a big mistake when He sent us to Oklahoma Christian in 1979.  We thought He had taken us way off the map, but I can truly say now, that our years in Oklahoma were just wonderful!  And, although Oklahoma Christian likes to identify itself with the Oklahoma City community, the town of Edmond, to which it truly belongs,  was selected in 2011 #1 on CNBC’s “10 Perfect Suburbs” list!

Let’s don’t keep Oklahoma Christian a secret! It’s not perfect! It’s not the right university for every student! But don’t skip over it just because . . . . You and/or your student might find a wonderful oasis of people who love God and who are committed to offering excellence.

Thank you, thank you to people like Ken and Lindy, to Stafford and Bailey, to Ron and James and Lynn and Bill and John and Joe and Elmo and Kim and so many others who have committed the major years of their lives to teaching young people to be excellent Christians!

Well done, Oklahoma Christian!

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