My Way Or The Highway

"People are not primarily looking to cooperate with our plan for their lives."

Joe Myers
in Organic Community

On Wednesday nights in our church we’ve been looking at John’s epistles/letters.  Last night we finished 3 John, a letter in which the apostle John calls out a man named Diotrephes not only for his own rigid practice of refusing Christian hospitality to traveling evangelists and missionaries, but for also demanding that others follow his course.  Those who would not were being put out of the church by Diotrephes’ own personal pronouncements.

Can you imagine how that sort of thing would go over today?  Just ask Chan Chandler or Frank Harber.  But there seems to be a growing trend in evangelicalism as a whole, and among Southern Baptists in particular, to lead with a heavy hand.  As an example, Pastor Dwight McKissic of the Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas recently appeared on TBN with several former Southern Baptists-turned charismatic/Pentecostals.  As a result pastors from all over the SBC now feel the liberty to tell Pastor McKissic what he should do to remedy the situation and how he must distance himself from these others.

Now, I’m no fan of TBN.  Just ask the people at our church.  Generally speaking I think a person’s soul would be more edified by watching static.  But I don’t know that Charles Stanley is less of a Baptist because he puts money into Paul Crouch’s pockets every time he buys airtime from TBN.  God knows Jan needs the money for pink hair dye and botox injections.  It’s not a venue I would choose, but I don’t suspect Charles Stanley, or Dwight McKissic, or Jack Graham are looking to cooperate with my plan for their lives.

Instead of cooperation we need more collaboration.  Joe Myers writes that "the spirit of cooperation is a rigid spirit, one that stifles creativity and discovery."  He’s writing from the context of the local church.  Of course  his ideas apply to larger organizational structures as well.  But in the local church people aren’t necessarily looking for ways to join in our program for their lives.  The structures we’ve established tend to serve the organization, not the people of the organization.  They perpetuate what we already have going, or what we want to get going.  Instead, people generally want to have some say in their own contribution to the group.  What’s amazing is that Baptists, of all people, are lost on that notion.  Of all church structures Baptists is theoretically one of the flattest - meaning there isn’t a top-down structure in Baptist church life.  There is no one (again, theoretically) sitting at the top telling others what to do and how to do it.

There are challenges with this structure, and perhaps even problems, but those are issues for another day.  But we are living in a strange day indeed when the Baptist police seem to be patrolling nearly every corner these days, blowing their whistles and making citizen’s arrests.  My way or the highway will not work for Baptists and will not work for evangelicals as a whole.  I know that there are many who are fearful of collaboration.  They are fearful of people in other denominations.  They are fearful of people who speak in tongues.  They are fearful of people who baptize infants.  They truly feel that collaboration rather than cooperation will lead to a broad ecumenical capitulation of certain distinctives and probably the good news about Jesus as well.  They see slippery slopes everywhere they turn, and the only way they believe we can maintain solid footing is to make sure everyone is doing things as they deem fit.

And it will end up killing us.  It already is.

Ice Ice Baby - The Podcast

Here’s my first foray into the wubulous world of podcasting.  I’m not exactly sure why I sound like I’m doing this from the inside of a 55 gallon drum and I’ll try to figure that out before next time.  The screeching sound is my wife ripping tape as she was wrapping Christmas gifts.  Aside from that I thought it turned out pretty well for a first-timer.  Later I’ll post some pics of the now famous ice storm.  For your listening enjoyment:

Download BruisedButNotBroken.mp3

My Lunch With A Sports Legend

My wife and I have had season tickets to OU football since the John Blake days when tickets were exceptionally easy to get.  We suffered through games where four different quarterbacks were used - in one series!  But that all paid off when Bob Stoops became coach of the Sooners.

That was BC - Before Children.  These days games are difficult to make.  Most fall weekends we have up to three soccer and/or basketball games the kids are in and as much as I love OU football, I love my kids more.

But when Bedlam comes to Norman I do everything in my power to make it.  I like OSU.  They’re sort of like that stray puppy hanging out in your neighborhood.  Little.  Cute.  But sometimes nasty.  And I love it when OU beats OSU not because I hate their little Pokified hearts, but because it bothers them so much.  They could go 1-10 every season and if that one win was against OU their season would be complete.  No matter their record, if they win they’ll print up T-shirts to celebrate.  God bless those little buckaroos.

So when Bedlam rolled around and game time was set at 2:30 I was going.  But it was cold, and Vera would rather watch them on TV than sit through the cold (it even snowed a little).  So I took my dad.  My dad is why I grew up an OU fan.  He graduated from OU with a degree in Electrical Engineering.  He also wrestled for them.  He wrestled behind some national champions.  When he decided his studies were more important he quit the team even though coaches tried to get him to stick with it.  And all that makes him a member of the "O" club - lettermen.

Last year I met Paul Burleson and his wife Mary before an OU game and we went to the "O" club tent for a burger.  Paul told me they had some great burgers.  They take a hot dog weiner, split it in two and slap it on top of the hamburger patty and you’ve got yourself one heckuva meal there.  Well…earlier this year at the Miami game I met up with Paul and Mary again, but this time we were told that the "O" club tent was closed to members only.  Word had gotten out about how good those burgers were and they had sold out - to the consternation of many an "O" club member.  Drats!

So at the Bedlam game I told dad about the good "O" club burgers and said that maybe they had opened it back up to the public.  Dad told me that he thought he was a lifetime member of the "O" club, but he couldn’t find his card.  But we thought we’d give it a try.  They had tables all set up in the Fieldhouse where my dad used to wrestle.  We approached the table and the young lady asked for a name.  Dad told her he thought his membership had probably expired so she after getting his name she handed him a form to fill out.  While he was filling it out she said, "Oh, here you are.  You’re already on the list."

Sweet.

Much to our delight we were not only going to get a good "O" club burger, we were going to get a free "O" club burger along with chips and a drink.  We went inside, got our food and found a table.  Scanning the room I could see a number of faces I’d seen on the jumbotron in games past…former football players.  I couldn’t remember their names, but it was confirmed several times as kids with their dads would approach one of them with a football or a ball cap to sign.  But there was one face I definitely recognized and could put a name with.  I’d just seen him on TV the week before doing an interview with one of the game crews.  It was ol’ silver shoes himself - College Football Hall of Famer Joe Washington.  Come to find out Joe is the Executive Director of the "O" club.

He milled around and had his picture taken with a number of people - even a few OSU fans who somehow got access to those sacred grounds (he did put an OU ball cap on one of the OSU fan’s little girls when they got their picture taken).  So we invited Little Joe over to eat with us and got to know him real well.  We exchanged cell phone numbers and now I’m on Joe Washington’s speed dial.  Can you believe it?!?!  Well….ok….maybe you shouldn’t.

But I still got to have lunch with a sports legend.  He’s my dad.  Not only was he a wrestler for the University of Oklahoma, he was my T-ball coach, my little league coach, my church basketball team’s coach.  We’ve gone to OU basketball games together and many OU football games as well.

With about eight minutes left in that Bedlam game the outcome was no longer in doubt.  Dad turned to me and said, "We can go whenever you want."  So we strolled back to the car and fought the traffic back to his house with another victory on the field and memories created off of it.