Do I Need to be a Republican to Attend Your Church?

I was on the debate team in college.  We were very much a rag tag bunch, thrown together at the last minute by a visiting professor who had a penchant for debate. He put together a group of eight students, enough for four teams, and taught us the basics.  I’m not sure now, but I don’t think any of us had any experience prior to this short one semester experiment.  My partner was a very pretty young woman whose greatest accomplishment during the debate season was being asked out on dates by our opponents.  In fact, on one of our critiques, a judge actually wrote “a very pretty young woman” as his only comment about her performance.

During a very difficult debate, one in which we were clearly outmatched by far superior debaters, one of our opponents quoted from both “The Christian Science Monitor” and “Playboy” magazine.  He was throwing around facts and quotes that were beyond me.  I felt like my best strategy was to throw everyone off guard.  I began my time by stating, “Since we are from a Baptist college, I do not have access to neither ‘The Christian Science Monitor’ nor ‘Playboy’ magazine.”  I got a laugh, we lost the debate, and my partner got a date for the evening. Success! Everyone was happy.

A skill that has served me well through life is the ability to not take myself too seriously. The reason I remembered that experience this afternoon is because I just read an interesting article in, of all places, “The Christian Science Monitor.”  I don’t read it often because I can’t get beyond what my father always said about the Christian Science religion – it is neither Christian nor scientific.

Anyway, the writer of the article made the point that churches that are overly political, especially very conservative, are driving young people away. It is an important issue because study after study has shown that the church is losing its young adults.  If you actually need an official study to convince you of that truth then you must not be paying attention when you go to church. 

What was interesting to me is the opinion that churches that express strong conservative opinions are the ones suffering the most from a loss of youth.  Right wing politics appeals to parents with young children with its emphasis on morality and keeping our world safe.  Those things don’t appeal to young adults.  That does not mean young adults have no morality, just that they have a different standard of morality.  For example, they are likely more interested in feeding the hungry than picketing an abortion clinic, or volunteering at an AIDS clinic than fighting gay marriage.

It’s Hard to Look Up When You Think the Sky is Falling

Remember Chicken Little?  Sometimes known as Henny Penny, she is the main character of an ancient fable that became a children’s classic when I was a kid.  If I remember correctly, the story begins when an acorn falls on Chicken Little’s head and she is convinced the sky is falling.  She then spends her time running around telling everyone that the end is near since the sky is falling down.  Historically, the story has had two endings.  In one, the chicken is eaten by an unscrupulous fox and the moral of the story is don’t be a chicken.  In the other version, the chicken survives by listening to a last minute warning and the moral seems to be not to believe everything you hear.

As I got older, I realized the sky cannot fall (I was never a scientific genius), but it’s amazing how often I hear folks that sound a lot like Chicken Little. Here are some recent examples:

• If we re-elect the President he will destroy our country.
• The federal debt is on the verge of ruining our economy.
• Illegal immigration is going to eliminate all our jobs.
• Dependency on foreign oil is going to turn us into a third world country and make us subservient to the Middle East.
• In a few years, the Chinese will own most of our country.
• Social Security is going bankrupt and by the time we are senior citizens we will starve to death.
• The universe is spinning out of control. (Obviously an overstatement)
• The Motion Picture Association says they will lose $58 billion this year to “content theft” including the loss of 373,000 American jobs. (Do the math.)
• The United Nations is trying to put a cap on the number of people on the earth.
• The President is trying to sneak through a law that will allow him to detain American citizens at his discretion.
• The House of Representatives just passed a bill that is the first step toward eliminating freedom of speech.
• Our current President is ineligible to be in office.

These are all things I learned from reading Facebook in the past twenty-four hours.  Now you might want to suggest that I need to get some new friends, some who are a little more optimistic, but I don’t think the attitude of my friends is the problem.  This is the attitude of our whole society.

A Book of Funerals

Most of you know that my father died a few months ago.  The process of tying up loose ends often requires going through memorabilia and papers.  My father left an old briefcase with my name taped to the front so I brought it home to see what he wanted me to have.  I was not surprised as I rummaged through the papers.  I found a stack of sermon notes, old business cards, a collection of funeral notices, and other miscellaneous papers.  There was also a notebook and two small journal type books.

The notebook, which my father had shown me a couple of times previously, contained a listing of all the people he had baptized and had joined the churches where he was pastor.  It is quite an impressive list.  A little over a year ago Daddy and I had a good time reading over the names and remembering the folks who had been touched by his ministry.  There was also a journal listing all of the weddings my father had officiated during his ministry.

However, the item that really captured my attention was another journal type book.  The book has a dark red, imitation leather-type cover, embossed with gold lettering and the words, “Pastor’s Record of Funerals.”  I don’t know if pastors still keep these books with the advent of computers, but it was common practice back in the day.  In fact, I personally have a similar book stashed away somewhere on the shelves of books in my office.

It appears that it was purchased in about 1954 at the cost of $1.00.  It has held up well for nearly six decades.  The book lists 118 funerals my father led between January of 1954 and the summer of 2011.  The very first funeral was for Doris Turner who died of a heart attack.  Although she was born in Wichita, Kansas, Doris was buried in Eads, Colorado, where Daddy was the pastor.  Eads was a small town in the southeastern corner of Colorado and during his four year stay, I suspect Daddy did most of the funerals for folks in Eads, Kit Carson, and Wild Horse, Colorado.  The fifteen people in attendance heard his first funeral sermon titled, “Death of a Friend.”

It appears that 1954 was a good year for dying in eastern Colorado as Daddy did eight more funerals that same year.  That is a sizable number for that sparsely populated corner of the world.  In August of that summer, Daddy did funerals, exactly one week apart, for two people who died from food poisoning.  This is the first I have heard of that event.  It makes me wonder if it was the talk of our little town. He also had back to back funerals for infants, not even listing first names other than “baby.”  I imagine it was a very difficult year to be a pastor.

Can the Media Actually Kill Someone?

The phrase “legendary football coach Joe Paterno” has been written and spoken an innumerable number of times in the past few months.  The reason it has been used so often is because there is no better descriptor to put on the man who coached football at Penn State University for forty-four years, the longest tenure of any coach in college football history.  His first year was 1966 when I was just a teenager and a big college football fan.  It is probable that I would have never heard of Penn State University if not for Joe Paterno.  I never did a lot of cheering for a football team from Pennsylvania but everything I knew of the coach was that he was a great man, strong leader, and known for his integrity.

Joe Paterno died this past weekend.  The death certificate will note the cause of death as lung cancer or some other malady associated with the disease.  He had struggled with cancer for a long time.  But, neither his coaching nor his death has been the cause of so many newspaper headlines the past few months. 

The legendary coach got caught up in a scandal involving one of his assistants who allegedly assaulted young boys.  The reports indicate that Paterno was informed of the indiscretions by an eye witness.  Apparently Paterno did what he thought was the right thing and reported the situation to his superiors.  The problem was that his superiors did nothing.  With the value of hindsight, many now blame Paterno for not being more aggressive.  When all of this became public late in last year’s football season, the University fired Coach Paterno and he has been severely criticized by countless folks in the media.

Needless to say, Paterno’s death this past weekend has been big news and the media is looking for comments from everyone who might have an opinion.  One of his ex-players was asked to comment and he said that although the coach had cancer, he really died of a broken heart.  He went on to blame the University that chose to push the blame onto the coach and the media.

It caused me to wonder if it is possible for the media to actually kill someone.

Having Sex at Church

I have been involved with church work my entire life, which has turned out to be quite a long time.  There are times when I think I have seen just about everything there is to see about the church.  One time I heard a preacher sing his entire sermon, every word, like a Broadway musical, only not very good singing.  I have seen people fall in the baptistery, trip and stumble while entering the choir loft, and just about every other kind of pratfall you can imagine.  I have been served Gold Fish and chicken noodle soup for communion and eaten unidentifiable stuff at a church supper.  If I really tax my memory, I could make a list several pages long of unusual things I have witnessed at church.

It all pales in comparison to what is happening just down the road from me later in the week.  Normally I would not mention the name of the person involved in such an embarrassing event, but he is going to great lengths to make sure folks know about it, so I will help him out.  Ed Young of Fellowship Church and his wife are scheduled to climb up to the roof of their church building in Grapevine and spend twenty-four hours together in bed.  I don’t know why there is a bed on the church roof but apparently it is there.

In a stunt reminiscent of flag pole sitting from early in the 20th century, Ed and his wife will be spending twenty-four hours in the bed.  Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly originated flag pole sitting and his initial foray lasted thirteen hours and thirteen minutes, far short of the twenty-four hours of non-stop sex planned by the Youngs.  Unlike Kelly in 1924, the Youngs plan to broadcast their adventure live on the Internet.

All of this is carefully orchestrated to coincide with the release of Ed Young’s latest book, “Sexperiment.”  It seems this is nothing more than a marketing stunt to drive customers to Amazon where they can purchase the book for $21.95.  As usual, it’s all about the money.  Don’t we have a term for those who use sex for money?

Young is more than fifty years old so he might need to get a prescription for Viagra before making that climb to the church roof.  Hey, we might get the pharmaceutical company to sponsor the event and generate an even bigger payday.  After all, God wants us to have good sex.  In Young’s own words, sex is about “recreation and enjoyment.” It seems only natural that God would approve of popping a couple of little blue pills to heighten the enjoyment.  I hope they have a doctor on call in case he has one of those four hour problems.

Scoring Touchdowns for Jesus

I am not a huge football fan. Normally, I don’t even follow football until after the World Series and even then I prefer to watch basketball.  Since the basketball season is late getting started this year, I have watched a few more football games than normal.  It wasn’t that long ago that I was a big football fan.  I kept up with all the major college teams and I knew the foremost players on each NFL team.  I’m not sure that I can even name a dozen professional football players now.

My passion for the game changed on Sunday afternoon, January 31, 1999, at the end of Super Bowl XXXIII in Miami.  John Elway led the Denver Broncos to their second straight championship and after that game I decided I had everything I wanted from football.  I was satisfied.  The Broncos, the team I had supported since they were organized in 1960, had given me everything I desired from the game.  If you doubt that I was a Bronco fan for so long, look up the names Frank Tripuka, Lionel Taylor, Cookie Gilchrest, or Floyd Little.  I can tell you all about those guys without having to look it up. 

Since that notable Sunday I have had only a very passing interest in football.  I do know the Broncos have done very little since that Super Bowl victory.  I don’t know for sure, but it seems that they have gotten successively worse each year.  It doesn’t matter though, my football cup is full.

Yet, there has been something about the Denver Broncos this year that has caught my attention.  Apparently it has captured the attention of football fans all over the place.  They have a young quarterback, Tim Tebow, who football experts claim is not a very good quarterback.  To be honest, the Broncos having a not so good quarterback is nothing unusual.  Other than John Elway that’s the only kind of quarterback they have ever had.

The interesting thing about this Tebow fellow is that in spite of his football flaws, he leads the team to victory almost every week.  To hear the experts talk, if you listed all his weakness in one column and all his strengths in the other, it would be very one-sided.  The only thing under strengths would be the fact that for some reason his team wins. It doesn’t look good, the football is sloppy, the score is always close, but at the end of the game, the scoreboard shows that his team has the most points.  Go figure!

A Eulogy for My Father

About a dozen years ago on the evening of the Fourth of July, I was sitting with my father at a picnic.  The entire extended family was there at the Glorieta Conference Center near Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Because of the holiday, the conference leaders choose to have a barbeque picnic with patriotic music and festivities, honoring our nation.  I was especially proud when they had members of the various military branches stand up.  When they called for the Marines to stand, I helped steady my father’s portable lawn chair as he stood proud.

As he aged, it was more and more difficult for Daddy to stand up straight, but on this particular occasion he was as tall as I remembered when I was a kid. Daddy’s size was something that always impressed me.  I don’t know if it was because I was so small and weak, but I considered him to be the strongest man around.  As young children, I remember both Linda and I trying to arm wrestle him but we could never even move his strong right arm.

It is not surprising that when it comes to remembering and honoring his life, strength is the first thing that comes to mind.  Not only did Daddy stand strong, but he was the source of strength for so many other people.

It is hard to comprehend the amount of courage he possessed as he and his fellow Marines stormed the beaches of Iwo Jima. On that seemingly inconsequential volcano in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, he suffered a loss that forever changed his life and impacted the lives of everyone who knew him.  A mortar blast led to the eventual amputation of his right leg and one of the defining moments of his life.

More than three years in and out of the hospital, a tragic automobile accident in downtown Amarillo, a tornado ravaging their home just a few days after Linda’s birth, the emotional struggle of dealing with the devastating effects of polio on his oldest son – none of these events deterred him, they only served to give him additional strength.

Daddy loved his family but he loved the church even more.  I don’t say that with regret or condemnation.  Serving the church was his life.  He heard God’s call to the ministry in 1951 when he had a wife and two very young children, no education, no experience, and no money.  He went off to college but he didn’t have time to finish before God led him to pastor a little church in a nondescript town in southeastern Colorado.

He gathered that small congregation in an auto garage.  He joked more than once that they were the only church in town with a grease rack.  Daddy went to work repairing shoes, a task he knew nothing about, but it was an opportunity to supplement the meager income from preaching. He built that church into a strong congregation and as far as I know it still stands today, sixty years later.