VBS 2012: Dive into the Deep Water

As I write this post, Vacation Bible School is going great guns. And it’s pretty cool. We have a holy host of volunteers, including several youth. It’s great fun watching the Terrific Tadpoles (my group) listen as Kim Blackwell teaches them the basics about reading the Bible, like which books are found in the Old Testament and New Testament; and how to pronounce “Naaman” and “Elisha.” The kids are excited and involved. They clamor to answer questions, take on responsibility, and demonstrate how much they know. The people who study religious life in the United States tell us that Christians these days are mostly illiterate or ill informed about the Bible and particularly about the teachings of Jesus. They spout Shakespeare and Poor Richard’s Almanac and call it scripture. They don’t know Old from New Testament, Jesus from John, or saint from sinner. These kids do. If half the membership of any given church were as involved and excited as the Tadpoles, the church would be a healthy and active body of Christ and the world would be a much better place. Misty Speake, appropriately attired in beach wear, a plastic inner tube, and swim fins has the challenging job of warming the kid crowd up every morning by engaging Ocho the Octopus in patter, leading songs, and teaching body movement. It is pretty funny watching a bunch of kids and adults positioning their bodies, hands over heads, to “dive into” the day. And that’s what they did. I may enlist Misty to lead our worship, especially during the Fall Stewardship campaign. She gets results. Kim was patient and firm as she listened to the Tadpoles strut their stuff and share their understandings of terms like God’s love and eternal life. The Terrific Tadpoles could teach us a lot. Cameron Carr was a natural as he dressed up in Biblical garb and talked to the children about doing what God wants us to do—diving deeply into life with God and swimming boldly in the waters of our baptism.  One day Judy Campbell shared with the children the idea of being good stewards of God’s creation. She told about a group of kids who launched a prize winning campaign to save water after they realized how much water a broken fountain in their school produced in a day. Their story was published in “National Geographic for Kids.” On Wednesday, John 3:16 day, teachers had the difficult job of interpreting one of the most mis-interpreted, much beloved and much abused pieces of scripture in the Bible, “For God so loved the world the he gave his Son . . .”  But the children got it right off the bat that Jesus was first our friend who loves us even when we mess up and that Jesus teaches us how we can work with him to help save the world. Many thanks to Susannah Bales Faulhaber, minister with children and families, for leading us; and to all her volunteers for their time, talents, food, energy, and vision. And thank you, God, for the children because you really can’t have Vacation Bible School without a Family Life Center full of kids.

Reflections on the Birth of a Grandson

Reflections on the Birth of a Grandson

Anybody who thought that I wasn't going to write about the birth of our first grandson on May 10 isn't living in the real world. Admittedly, I was not as prepared as I thought for Samuel James Ammons’ birth. I did not think that I would wait anxiously in the maternity unit of Northside Hospital for what seemed an eternity (It was only a few hours). But I was not alone. Sam’s other grandparents, Ricky and Jane, joined Karen and me. We passed the time telling birthing and baby stories. We were all a little wired.

Karen and I recalled that there was no waiting through a long period of labor for Daniel’s birth almost thirty years ago. He came a month early. Even so, I thought that I was prepared for the birth of our first child. We had his room ready for occupancy, diapers stockpiled, pediatricians interviewed. Our subscription to the “Scholastic Books for Young Children” was paid up. We were almost finished with our Lamaze childbirth class. I remember holding Daniel’s five pound five ounce frame just minutes after his premature delivery and thinking, "This has got to be a God thing. It's just too powerful, mysterious, and terrifying not to be."  It was an epiphany, an experience of the divine and we are never prepared for such a display. The tiled floor of Baptist Hospital in Columbia became holy ground for me.

Two hours after Sam's arrival, I held him in my arms and thought, "This has got to be a God thing. It's just too powerful, mysterious, and terrifying not to be."  I recalled the words of the 139th Psalm where the writer says of God, "For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made." I watched Sam's tongue darting in and out looking for his mother's breast to nourish and comfort him in this strange and scary new world. And I remembered Jesus' promise that he would be our bread for any journey and our Living Water; and that he would be with us on the mountaintop and in the valley of the shadow. As I held Sam, his body swaddled in a blanket, I recalled one of the ancient names of God--Sheltering Arms--and trusted that my young grandson would claim that love and blessing that God gives every child.

I know that James and Jessica, like all loving parents, have hopes and dreams for their firstborn. But I also know that not even our wildest and most generous dreams can hold a candle to God’s dreams for us. Blessings on you, Samuel James Ammons. Welcome to a world made more beautiful by your presence and more perfect by God’s love.

Life Goes On

The week after Easter I took some time to rest a bit from Holy Week. I invited the staff to do the same because people who work on church staffs are bad not to take a Sabbath rest. We all need encouragement to be good stewards of our health. Karen is my encouragement. The effort to pull all the services together, Palm/Passion Sunday to Good Friday to Easter morning, is a huge job involving multiple musicians, volunteers, and staff. I want to thank all the staff and all the volunteers for their creativity and commitment. We offered shofars and palms to start the week of worship, Tzaise and Communion on Holy Thursday, Gregorian chants on Good Friday and a splendidly musical, liturgical, consolidated service on Easter morning.

            Karen will attest that the way I rest from church work is by physical labor. I had a few days, a window of opportunity, to take care of the deferred maintenance to our house and yard—a lot of rest to get done. Thankfully, I still had to preach on the second Sunday of Easter so there was sermon preparation to do and calls and emails to handle. There were periods when I had to sit and think but mostly I rested by hauling multiple loads of soil, plants, compost, lumber, and other building material.  I did some plumbing and repairing of doors and windows, mowed the grass, and made far too many runs to Home Depot and Lowes. It was an exhaustingly restful week.

            So here I sit in the early morning of the second Sunday of Easter ready to preach from the story of Thomas in the Gospel of John.  I will baptize a baby girl at the eleven o’clock service, attend a Trustees meeting after church, go to a study on the Kingdom of God at 5:30 and then a Council meeting at 7 PM. There will be calls to make this afternoon because I missed them while I was out catching up on my rest. And while I was resting, there were at least two deaths of members’ loved ones in distant places; others received bad lab reports and diagnoses of serious illness; and a new baby entered the world. Life goes on.

            And that is in part what Jesus said to Thomas. “You believe because you see the wounds on my body; you know the sound of my voice, the blessing from my heart. But there will be many who believe simply because they believe, many who work because work is there to do, many who know the sound of my voice and no other, and many who follow my lead to love others and to love themselves.

            And the people who do those things in worship and praise of the Risen Christ are called Easter people.

            Blessings.

Who’s Been Sitting in My Pew? Grief and Hope

When I go back to my home church in Augusta, I tend to head for the third pew from the front, left middle section. That is where I sat with my family as I grew up in Trinity-on-the-Hill UMC. But when I visit, there are always people I don’t know sitting in my family pew. Things change. The average age of United Methodist clergy used to be somewhere in the forties; now it hovers around fifty seven-years old.  Churches used to hold neighborhood “evangelistic” canvasses but they don’t now because we live in gated communities and we teach our children not to open the door to a stranger. Young adults used to drift away from church during the college years and drift back once they were married and began to have children. Young adults still participate in traditional church settings today, but many of them prefer the “indie” churches that appeal to their musical tastes with contemporary worship. I know of one United Methodist church that serves a catered brunch as part of its worship experience; jazz musicians provide accompaniment; some Sundays after worship, the congregation head off together to do mission work in the neighborhood. And that church is growing. It’s not your father’s way of doing church anymore. 
The culture is changing and the church is changing too. In the Sixties and Seventies, the debate over Vietnam, the civil rights movement, the struggle for women’s rights dragged the Church, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century. In 2012, the Bishops’ Call to Action is a strong appeal to churches and pastors to wake up and smell the coffee before it’s too late. I think that the leadership is about forty or fifty years late in calling us to action but hey, who’s counting? We were comfortable on that third pew from the front, left middle section, of my home church. Why change, why move, why question what would Jesus  have us do? 
These days the mainline Church in this country is in decline  and the United Methodist Church is trying hard to re-root itself in good Wesleyan soil and reclaim its place as a world changer. We are instituting new styles of worship, finding new places and ways to be in mission; we are welcoming the stranger and the pilgrim with a radical hospitality. My God, we even bring electric guitars, electronic percussion, and iPhone generated music into the sanctuary—and call it sacred music. What next--clergy preaching in jeans and tee shirts? No, wait. I do that already. Nothing new there. Change can be a good and positive thing. The early church grew like a weed because its people practiced hospitality in a way that was unheard of in that ancient culture; they actually welcomed and cared for the stranger. John Wesley left the high pulpit of his Anglican sanctuary and preached in the field. He preached spiritual piety and social reform and managed to make everybody with wealth and power uncomfortable; and he ministered to “the least of these” like Jesus told him to. In the colonies, he appointed laity to preach God’s Word and some of them did it with an eloquence only God could have provided; and the Methodist people grew in number and strength. And that is the good news of Jesus Christ. In any age the body of Christ in the world should always be an ever changing, vibrant, dynamic thing. 
But that sort of transformation comes with a cost. When church customs, worship practices, and even the way we engage in mission change, we feel pushed out of familiar surroundings. We lose what used to be comfortable and comforting. When we go to the well for a drink of Living Water and draw up a taste of anything else, we feel cheated. It can make us edgy--but more than that it grieves us. We have lost something dear to our hearts and so we mourn the passing of customs, rituals, and habits of the heart that used to sustain us. Unrequited grief hurts to the core. 
But Christ has an answer for us. Christ calls us out of the garden of grief and what came before and asks, “Why are you weeping? Who are you looking for?” The Gospel of John tells the story well. In her shock and grief Mary Magdalene found Jesus disguised as a worker in the garden of the tomb. Others, like Thomas, found him in their fear and disappointment. Seven of his disciples found him on the beach cooking breakfast after they had fished all night and caught nothing. When Jesus told them where to fish, their harvest was so heavy that it almost ripped the nets.  Simon Peter had decided to go back to the old life of fishing, but he found Jesus and a whole new vocation in the reach and breadth of Jesus’ forgiveness and love. It’s in the gospel of John--check it out. Death and grief happen but for those who believe the promises of Jesus, life and joy follow. Things change. Thank you, Jesus.

Every Picture Tells a Story

In my early thirties, while working full time as the coordinator of pastoral services in a mental health facility in South Carolina, I was invited to become a “stringer” for The Greenville News. The newspaper had a statewide circulation but needed someone in the Orangeburg area to write about emerging trends in the local culture. I had done some writing for areal newspapers on subjects related to faith and mental health so I at least knew what a byline was. Orangeburg and its environs had long been an agricultural community but the local culture was changing fast. A new mall had been opened, a new regional hospital was in the works, and some of the old, established political leadership was being replaced by professional city managers, municipal planners, and whip smart young attorneys from other places. The local newspaper had hired an editor from north of the Mason-Dixon Line.  Old timers with tags on their trucks that read “Fergit, Hell,” met at the Calhoun Restaurant and pined for the good old days before all those outsiders moved to town.

My first assignment from my editor was to write a story about the effect of the new mall on the downtown stores that had lined Broad Street for the past hundred years. I dutifully interviewed the mall manager, downtown store owners, customers on the street and in the mall. My editor said that if I provided photographs, I got paid an extra fifty bucks so I shot a wide angle photograph of Broad Street around one o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. The parking spaces that lined the streets were mostly empty. Few cars, no people, and the downtown business district looked dead. However, the story I wrote painted a different situation. Everybody agreed that the mall had not cut into the downtown stores’ business. Most of the stores in the mall were chain merchandisers and fast food places. If you needed a Stihl chainsaw, you still went to the Ace Hardware on Broad. Churchgoers looking for Sunday lunch still went to Berry’s on-the-Hill Restaurant downtown. If you were shopping for an engagement ring or a high school class pin, you went to Andrae’s Jewelers on the upper end of Broad. Mostly, storeowners liked that there was more variety which encouraged more shopping. But the photograph spoke volumes more than the few hundred words in my article. It showed a vacant, dead looking downtown. I had captured it in a slow moment. I hadn’t meant for it to convey anything but the truth but it did. The photograph ran with my article and the phones started ringing off the hook. My good friend, Jim Cherry, director of the Chamber of Commerce, suggested that I not show my face in any of those downtown stores for a while. The owners complained to him that I had portrayed the downtown business district as dead. My journalism career was not off to a good start.

Sunday morning worship in any church is a lot like a snapshot. If you visit on the wrong Sunday or the wrong service, you might not get a positive impression of what’s going in the life of the congregation. If you see pews full of old graybeards and no children, it’s not likely a church you where you want to bring your children. If the lighting is poor and the temperature ten degrees off comfortable, you may check out the church down the road. If worshippers are stony-faced and do not welcome you, what does that say about the church’s willingness to be in ministry to a diverse world? A cold reception always trumps good preaching, the organist’s skill, or how many of your favorite hymns the congregation sings.

Last Sunday, I greeted a visitor, an African American gentleman. He lives in the neighborhood. I had to wait a moment to meet him because other people were welcoming him. He told me that he had driven by several times on Sunday but never saw many cars in the parking lot. He wondered if much was going on in our church. He decided to come inside and take a closer look. I explained to him that our larger lot where a lot of people parked was on the back side of the church and not visible from the street so I was glad that he decided to come inside the building.

I did not get the chance to talk with him after worship so I don’t know what sort of overall impression we made. People come to church for all kinds of reasons but it all boils down to one thing: they are looking for some experience of God.

Next time you see someone new to the congregation, remember that Jesus welcomed the stranger. Greet them in the name of Jesus and say, “Welcome to the kingdom of God.” That’s what Jesus would do. Hospitality on the part of Christ’s followers was the driving force behind the growth of the early church. It is still a defining feature of growing churches today.

Joy to the World

This will be the first of many blog postings from me as part of a new format for our monthly “Source.” The good thing is that you can respond immediately to what you read. Comments will be filtered before they are published.

JOY TO THE WORLD

About this time two years ago, on a night when the temperature was in the low teens, our son Daniel suffered a heart attack and subsequently underwent a triple heart bypass. The cause, we were told, was probably long term hypertension due to an undiagnosed constriction in his renal artery. In March of last year, his kidney function ceased and he went on dialysis three times a week. We are hopeful that soon he will be the recipient of a transplanted kidney. It has been a hard journey for our family. Daniel has faced it with a sense of determination and hope, plus a sort of emergency room sense of humor. When I told him that my 2012 resolution was that I not spend any all nighters at Grady Hospital wondering if he would survive the night, Daniel countered, “Dad, not to worry. I’m an Emory patient now. You can worry at Emory Hospital Midtown.” Joy. Well, yes, joy is what I said. Joy is so much better than just happiness. There is a tinge of the divine in feeling joy. Buying a new sweater can make me happy. Driving my truck makes me happy. Listening to a Paul Thorne song makes me happy. Joy has something to with my relationship to God; it’s about being connected to something larger than me, something so full of goodness and creativity and generativity that I can’t help but feel it. So I joyfully anticipate seeing our first born receive a kidney and get on with a life that is full of potential and love. I joyfully anticipate the birth of our first grandchild in May and I pray daily for our daughter Jessica’s and Baby Boy Ammons’ health and well being. When I see our youngest child, Rachel, working with the children at Oak Grove UMC school where she is employed, I wonder if God is calling to her through their laughter and warm embraces. She has that sort of Earth Mother quality with kids and that fills her with joy and so lights up my day. I am full of joy and thanksgiving for Karen, another gift from God, and the only woman on earth willing to be married to me for forty years come April Fools’ Day this year. And lastly, I am finding that even in a difficult year of moving to a new appointment, a new residence, dealing with family illness, and struggling with a sick economy, I am the beneficiary of joy in serving the Embry Hills UMC congregation. As I said in my end of year report to the congregation, I anticipate being in ministry with you, laughing, having fun, sharing our burdens and sorrows but also giving thanks for the good times and particularly for the joy of our life together. So ends my first blog post. Blessings.

Lee