Taking Off and Landing

I came to Waco with my share of baggage, and a full U-Haul of furniture to stuff into my first autonomous apartment. I had never lived by myself and was a little wary of a year alone, except for the fact that in retrospect, it was the year that I found a home.

Alone in my apartment that first week in Waco, with two friends struggling to find their own places in a foreign state, I began the inevitable church-shop. It goes on twice a year in most towns with any Christian presence, as the churchgoing students try to find a place that fits, a church to call home. Having not had anything resembling a church home in Arkansas for the last four years, I didn’t really have anywhere to start. So, I started.

**Church Under the Bridge–two months. Aptly named, met under I-35, church that mingled the homeless and the housed. Beautiful, but not where I felt I needed to be.

**Unnamed Baptist Church–one Sunday. The sermon was awful, strung together in nonsensical fashion. That and I showed up in jeans and had someone make a snide remark about it.

**Redeemer Presbyterian–five months. Great teaching, strong exposition. But seeing as I couldn’t get beyond the parts of Scripture that pointed to God’s working with us, and the fact that I was reading a lot of liberation theology that first year, I moved on. That and the coffee was terrible, albeit free.

**University Baptist Church–three weeks. Young, vibrant, upbeat. But too much rock n roll. A good place, but not home. Yet.

The drifting continued, compelled mostly by the feeling that still dogged me from the beginning: the feeling of not belonging, that I had gifts that I wanted to give and had no place to give them. Enter Rachel Hunt.

She had heard that I played guitar, and ironically, she was working with a youth group that needed someone to play music on Wednesday nights. I was in need of a church home, and had never worked with youth–nay, sworn off working with youth–but liked Jonathan Grant, the youth pastor, enough to give it a go. So, for a month before I ever went there on a Sunday, I went on Wednesdays to hang out with kids that I’ve now seen grow up into fledgling people.

Three weeks into going there, I joined. This action by a guy who takes FOREVER to make monumental decisions–three weeks, and I altered my life forever, joining a church that, unbeknownst to me, was the site of protest two years prior when my pastor–a woman–came on board. In three hours, I went from having no home, to being a part of a place, of a people, at last. Before I joined, I was invited to give my gifts; when I joined, I was invited to give my gifts; I’ve taught ESL; I play on Sunday mornings. Cynicism began to fall off my shoulders like a dirty coat. I was watching something happen that excited me to get up on Sunday morning.

I am a part of something beautiful. I have many sisters, brothers, mothers, grandparents, cousins–joined not by flesh and blood, but by the Spirit. I found myself in a place in the middle of the 3rd highest crime zip code in Texas, where people loved one another and gave themselves to one another and the community around them. And now, a terrible thing has happened:

I find it nigh unto impossible to leave. When you find home, be not ready to walk away.

So, the suggestions for the blog are as follows:
**Theology
**Whatever I like.
**The failure of vegetarianism

Given that I post on the first only explicitly when absolutely necessary, the second all the time, and the third never because the vegetables are still my staple, on we go.
******

Coming back to OBU after a summer of having my life changed was, shall we say, difficult. Suddenly, I had this whole new set of friends, whole new set of memories and priorities that couldn’t be translated into anything I knew. I had stories that didn’t fit anywhere, habits that I couldn’t very well explain. I wanted to pee in parking lots, brush teeth outside, make a total jackass out of myself for the sheer joy of it.

Two things kept me remotely sane:

1) The presence of good friends who let me blabber about things they may have not understood. I smoked cigars with Joel Turner; I listened to records with Kevin; Kim Kern let me hang out in the art building at odd hours. I felt less and less a part of the life I had established before, and more a part of something stranger and bigger, a thing that was in many states and in many hearts.

I was becoming part of a church that knew that it was established by Christ, but for the world. But not a church that I knew in the place that I lived–rather, it was one that I knew in my heart.

2) The fact that I was not in England. After moving into an apartment my last semester, I saw the folks who were in England during the fall come back very different in the Spring, people that I didn’t recognize as well as I did before. I think in retrospect that if I had gone to England following Barnabas, I would have spun off out of orbit, forever reeling out disconnected stories and feelings.

I drank wine on the porch at night, read Dostoevsky in droves, and pined away for people that lived far away: France, Nebraska, Arkansas. It’s too bad that I didn’t have an extra semester there, because if I had one more semester, I might have been a coherent storyteller. I might add that by this time, I was going to church sparsely and had abandoned Praise and Worship altogether.

It was at this time that I had to find something to do after college, and seeing as I was headed down to Waco to look at doing an M.A. in English, a professor suggested that I look into “that new seminary down at Baylor”, a suggestion which changed my life. I met with the English dept., went to a single class at Truett, and found myself heading to seminary.

Sidenote: as a high schooler, I had felt a draw to ministry. Ironically, it was seeing how little I had in common with religion majors that led me to minor in religion, with more hours there than in my major, seeing as “I wasn’t going to seminary, I might as well get it now”. The ways and means of God baffle me.

At the time, the seminary was meeting in the spare rooms of 1st Baptist of Waco, and the English Dept. was housed in one of the most amazing buildings on Baylor’s campus, and yet, nothing in me clicked the way it did when I was listening to Chip Conyers talk about the difference between Barth and Schleiermacher. It was as if, in that class, the preparation of my heart and head found its true home, and I knew that, despite myself, ministry in some shape was where I was headed after all.

Having given up on ministry from part of what I had seen, I now found myself going in the direction of a call that I didn’t fully understand, nor completely believe, I don’t think. This I knew: God was calling me to seminary, to serve the people of God, and this was the next step in that journey. I was moving to Texas, thanks to Scott Duvall’s small suggestion, on a full scholarship, and a quizzical heart. The best way I can describe it is the way David James Duncan writes in the last pages of The River Why, where he describes God as a fisherman, hooking us through the heart with a razor thin line of love, snagging us just hard enough that we could break the line at any moment, but hooking us so right that we never want to be let go.

Following the Schism of ‘99, I decided that the best place for me to be was overseas. I turned in my application, started saving my money and took a semester off from the frat by taking a job scrubbing toilets at a local doctor’s complex one night a week. So, add janitor to my resume, albeit way down the resume.

I had had it. I wanted as far away from OBU as I could get, and England seemed to be the logical place, the University of Reading specifically. It was a terrifying decision, to go to England in the dead of winter and live in a strange culture with strange people, but it was better than the alternative. Incidentally, at the same time, Kevin Still had convinced me to come work with him at Camp Barnabas that summer before. I’d listened to Kevin weeping through stories about the place over the last year, and didn’t understand, but wanted to see.

Work Week was soon after school let out, and was the week when all the summer staff gathered to put the camp together and get to know one another. And in that week, I met people that would change my life. When I go to Kansas City, these are the people I see–the ones pictured below are all residue from that summer, people that I hold close to my heart and crave like cocaine when I’m not near them: E, Tim Wilson, Sean, Kevin, and countless others.

During that week, of scraping and painting and washing and building, I saw the church in action. I saw people from all dimensions: Nazarene, Methodist, Catholic, Lutheran, non-denominational, all together in one purpose, and in that, my heart was undone. To see the church working together in one purpose was more than I had ever seen. Ever. It’s no miracle to see one church working within its own walls, but to see multiple churches with multiple fractured histories working together for the sake of children most of whom don’t know how to say thank you…the cynicsm began to crack.

I went to Shreveport after work week and registered to go back to OBU.
**

Camp Barnabas is a camp for kids with special needs, mental and physical. I’m no long-termer; this was the only summer I was there full-time, though I’ll probably volunteer with Tim this summer at some point. Founded by two people who wanted to have a summer camp for these kids to share with them the love of Christ, it’s truly holy ground. The kids get to swim, horseback ride, shoot bows and arrows–all the traditional summer things, and all while missing something that their counselors typically had. And if not for leaning on one another, and God, we might have been dead.

I have more stories from that summer than I do from any other time of my life, most of them not fit for public consumption. There’s the one about Paige peeing off the front deck, and the one where blind kids shot .22s and the one where Sean and I played earthball during devotionals. There’s the one where I crushed on a girl and the one where Billy nearly killed Kevin, me and E. And the one where I shaved my legs. It was insane. To work there, you have to have an alternate sense of reality, because mostly, our categories of what works don’t work for these kids. When it’s 10:30 p.m. and a 10-year old has shat his pants for the third time that day and you’re washing corn from between his cheeks, you just do it, pray, and know that this is your reasonable service to God.

But that’s the church: an alternate story that only works when you’re inside. It’s not the logic to understand thermodynamics or the answer to what happened to Alexander the Great. But it is the way of understanding life, a way that is understood by being lived in. And after living in this way for a summer, I knew that what I had seen of the church was a frail shadow, and that life together was what was meant–a shallow insanity to the outside world, but total sense to God.

In the Spring of 1999, I had been elected chaplain of Kappa Chi Men’s Social Club. OBU, having no nationally recognized fraternities as such, had at that time seven “social clubs”, which were effectively the same thing, only with miniscule dues that we still bitched about.

A word about social clubs: nearly 30% of the OBU scene had to do with social clubs, or the lack thereof. I frankly have a ton of fun memories associated with my first two years as a Kappa, though I was a terrible Kappa. I wore letters maybe four times in four years, mostly at rush parties; all of my closest friends were outside the Kappa realm; I hated talking about social club stuff. EVER. It was totally boring. Forget the crap about how “the closest friends I ever had were in my frat”; if you weren’t friends with someone before you were in the frat, there ain’t no way that a week of Hell or common letters is going to cement the two of you together any more than the bonds of war let you really talk about anything but how no one understands what you went through or are going through.

But I digress. On to the Schism of ‘99.
**

The highlights of the year had to do with what were called “outings”, weekend-long dates to Branson or wherever. The only one I went on was almost no fun, mostly because I signed up to go before realizing we were going to SHREVEPORT, which might have been fun except for the fact I’d spent 18 years there and knew there wasn’t much to go for outside the casinos. On one such outing earlier that month, a couple of guys had gotten, shall we say, inebriated.

The next weeks’ meeting turned into a brouhaha over the merits of drinking, specifically the merits of drinking in a “Christian fraternity”. Remember, the KX stands for “Kurios Christos” or “Christ is Lord”. Thirty minutes of debate turned into an hour; one hour turned into three. And we dismissed, only to do the same thing for the next three weeks, three hours at a shot, round and round over alcohol. As the chaplain, I was at my wits end as to what to do. My first week and the frayed bottom of the club had begun to unravel.

On one end were the imbibers, and in the other corner? You guessed it. The same folks from the last segment. “But wait, there’s more. Johnny, tell them what they’ve won….They’ve won a brand new SCHISM!”

We went up, down, sideways, on issues of purity and discipleship and witness, back and forth on what witness was, what it looked like. I found myself sweating through my socks. Around the second week, many of these men that I as a junior looked to for leadership, spiritual leadership in a group of guys on the brink, walked out. I remember, with tears in their eyes, as they professed their love for the guys in the room, and turned in their letters and left. It wasn’t a mean gesture, but a ruthless one just the same.

I look back on that hour and see myself in shocked amazement wondering what the hell just happened, like the world had just cracked in two. The very guys that, in some ways, I knew were more spiritually on track that the guys I found myself defending, were leaving and abandoning the rest of us to fend for ourselves. They walked out, shut the door, as I looked around the room at the remainder, mostly nominal Christians, and a few like myself who really believed that staying was the right call, and who were shellshocked to our bones. THOSE men, I call brothers: Tim Harrell, Jay Baker, Chris Powell, Jonathan Huber–the ones who stayed when the more pure thing may have been to walk away.

It was then that I decided that if that was what ministry was–the walking away from sin when it finds itself inhabiting those that you wear the same clothes as–that I wanted nothing to do with it. I was heading up a group that fed homeless men in Little Rock once a month, and that would be my holy work. Staying would be my holy work. But ministry?

I would have none of it.

The wedding? Enormous. Enormously fantastic, that is.
**

Praise and Worship was started the year before I showed up on campus by a duo known later as Nickel and Dime, aka John Shirley and Zac Murtha. The leadership had changed the year I found it, and the shoes were big. I’ll say that the first year was good. I went on an overnight retreat with total strangers, fell asleep in the middle of a midnight planning meeting, and helped give birth to a structure that would eventually eat us all.

It was simple enough: music, Scripture reading, meditation in the form of some words by Kevin Still or another person. Suzanne provided some background music as people came in. But as the thing grew in the second year, things began to change. This is where the laundry gets dirty, so check out here if you like.

I remember coming in one evening before P&W, only to find that I wasn’t really needed that night, unlike the nights for a year before then, that the one preaching would do the reading that night. It was around that time that Kevin was asked not to teach anymore, and since I didn’t really have to be there to read, I decided it was time to make my exit. Part of it, I think, was that I wasn’t in their loop. I wasn’t a religion major; I didn’t go to their church in Hot Springs, mostly because I didn’t like it; I wasn’t part of what people had begun calling “the Christian Coalition”, who practiced holiness and lay around naked in their dorms. In Pt. 3, these will be key players as well.

I hate to harp on this, but in retrospect, it was all symptomatic of the division created in many religious campuses between the secular and the spiritual, a divide that kills the church today. Yes, some things have to be wholehandedly rejected, but not people. Things, ideas, articles of clothing. Not relationships.

More and more, the planning of this time began to centralize around two people, whose names I’ll forgo. At the same time, P&W was growing like wildfire. We were moving out of the small Miller Chapel, where people were hanging out the windows, and ironically, into the Jones Performing Arts Center. I’ll not make a judgment call about the fact that the whole thing moved from a chapel to a performing arts venue, but draw your own conclusions. Part of it was logistical, granted, but with growth comes the desire to make tight that which was loose. Loose ends need to be gathered up; things need streamlining. And so, models were sought.

Specifically, a model in Hot Springs was sought, a church that was growing and moving, one I visited once or twice and was frankly awed by. It wasn’t my thing; I didn’t feel any need to belong there, mostly because I already didn’t. The OBUers that went there were already their own group; I saw a bunch of them at a wedding a few years back, and the same circle was set–in the reception, an unspoken circle of chairs formed facing in. The sad thing is that I don’t think they realized it, or that they knew that every circle has a center, and that only the center knows how big the circumference can be.

But it cuts both ways. The English folks were an exclusive bunch, only ours ran to more esoteric tastes than what youth specialty events were coming up. Everyone creates circles with new circumferences once they’ve been pushed out of one. And so we did, and the edges never touched as far as I can tell.
**

An interesting sidenote: I looked up today where the key players in all of this tragic ball of fun are. One is in Houston; one is back at that church in Hot Springs; one disappeared into West Memphis. They’re doing totally normal things. They’re not taking over the world in fundamentalism or power-hungry conspiracies. Frankly, we were all kids; we were 19, 20 and trying to throw our arms around the God of the Universe. And when you’re 19 and zealous, you do stupid things–stupidity upon stupidity and lead others down a really f’in stupid road.

You know who you are. And it’s okay. We’re all fine.

Make that FOUR states I’ve blogged from: Kansas, Missouri, Louisiana, Texas…the addiction continues. Right now, I’m with Kevin and Sean at a local cofffeeshop. Kevin’s engrossed in wedding meditation; Sean’s lost in Dune. Me, I’m reading The River Why. Fascinating.
***

I have mixed memories of the Ouachita Baptist University. On the one hand, it was a crucible for spiritual formation. On the other hand, it was a crucible for spiritual formation. Being Baptist to the bones, translating spirituality to structures always gets a little tricky. I had more conversations about predestination than I ever wanted to had, and shed more tears about personal piety than were necessary. What good does it do to weep if my tears lead me to turn more inwards than I was before?

In a lot of ways, OBU picked up where the youth group left off–those that were the most outspoken were the voices most heard, in the context of worship or the classroom. There’s a threshing floor that happens in a relgiously based university that doesn’t happen at a secular school, I think, in that at a secular school, I would hope that there would be more of an impetus to embrace the forms of Christianity, given that a) we’re all for the same Jesus and b) there’s not that many of us. At a religiously oriented school, however, for better or for worse, the reigns are tightened around a specific doctrinal mode.
**

A story: I was involved my first two years in the planning of the Praise and Worship time. It had gotten off the ground the year before I came to campus, and as a freshmen, found myself wanting to do anything: pray, read, wipe pews. I found myself reading Scripture for the first two years, but as things went along, found myself less and less a part of the actual planning and more an afterthought. Music and message coalesced together into the core of two people, with the rest of us feeling, once again, on the outside, including Kevin and myself.

I’ll let Kevin tell his story, but long story short, Kevin found himself outside the planning of the time my sophomore year, told that he was quasi-heretical and not needed,and so, feeling less and less like I was wanted or needed, I left as well, one more time feeling as if what I had to offer was not needed. Can I contribute to the necessity for a tight-knit structure? Was it the evolution from a loose community to a highly-wound machine? Am I a little resentful? Probably all of the above.

To truly understand this, you have to realize that for OBU, Praise and Worship was part of the campus social structure. The sociology of the university was a squirrely thing, integrated not so much around an understanding that the Spirit incorporates all the pieces, but rather that some pieces are not so much needed. To go to Praise and Worship was to be seen and to be part of the community; to not go was to put yourself outside the camp, the scapegoat of sorts. And so, I would go for a few minutes, or sit in the back, or not go at all, leaving Thursday nights to others, while I would once more retreat to the Waffle House or Hardee’s. Or the photo lab.

It wasn’t all this way. There were enormous moments of spiritual growth, of amazing community and the Spirit moving in curious ways. But Praise and Worship became one more enclosed circle that I would break into for a moment, and then quickly find myself outside.

After seeing what Ochuk was doing, I decided to follow suit for two reasons:

1) I’m leaving tomorrow to go to the wedding of one Kevin Allin Still. He’s walked with me through the second part of this story, and seemed perfect timing.

2) It’s time to walk through why I would have a terrible time leaving Waco, given that I have found a great church community, the first I have really called home.
***

The story starts in Shreveport, high school. I was the kid who wore flannel and had really long sideburn chops that in retrospect were pretty cool, but totally out of step, given that while I liked old school Pearl Jam and tried to squeeze any bit of coolness out of old CCM bands like Steve Taylor and the Newsboys, the rest of my world was either listening to Garth Brooks or whatever was Top 40. I felt out of place, out of the mix.

My youth pastor was a great mentor. But the group was big. Too big. And all the things I felt compelled to offer to God had no real place in a group dominated by the loudest or most outgoing ones. We did the skits; I endured weak Bible studies by upperclassmen I knew were sleeping with their girlfriends. And so, I was left to wonder what my gifts were and why I liked to read and why I loved music so much but had nothing to do with this love. And so, by the grace of God, I hosted a locally produced Christian music video show. And then, the complaints came over how loud the music was and why didn’t we play Steve Green.

Thus, I left for college: unsure what my gifts were, grateful to have been in a group, but within a year, having no real ties at all to the group. One of my best friends from then went to the Air Force; another sold real estate; another went to work for AlTell answering phones. I went to school, from a huge church that I had some lingering connection to, but couldn’t tell you why. We had joined the Baptist church when I was in high school, by lineage being Methodist until that point, so the obvious choice was a Baptist college, but mostly Baptist in the administration.

Next: the politics of Praise and Worship. Have a great week. We’ll see you next Monday if not before.