Covenant Stories: Upside Down and Backwards

Story #17 in the Covenant series

I’d like to leave the narrative of Covenant Baptist Church for a moment and talk about something rather odd that I’ve noticed about our church. At Covenant, everything seems to be upside down and backwards. We’re not trying to be different. We’ve never called ourselves an “alternative church.” We do things that seem right to us, but they seem to be the opposite of what most churches do.

Now before I write this, I want to state very clearly and carefully that I am NOT suggesting that any other church ought to do things the way we do them. There is certainly no shortage of “how to do church” books out there, with Dr. This or Reverend That revealing the deep, spiritual truths he has discovered that will increase your fold, or foster real intimacy, or kick-start your small group ministry, or blah blah blah in a postmodern blah.

If I wrote a book it would be called, “How to take a church from 14 families to 40 families in only 10 years of bivocational ministry.” Just kidding, though that title would be accurate. My “how to” church book would be a single index card. Written on it in pencil would be this:

Read the Bible. Pray. Talk to your church friends in long conversations over meals and coffee for years and years. Learn to love each other so that whatever you do in church gets filtered through your concern for how it will affect others in the community. Then do church in the ways that seem right to you. Let no other concern EVER surpass your desire to be right about church.

Postscript to pastors - Be prepared to find a second job.

That would be my book. It’s free. And I think I’ll put a backwards copyright on it. If you like this short book, feel free to distribute it. If by some miracle someone pays you for it, keep the money. If you want to say that you wrote it and put it in a book of your own, go ahead. Copywrong Gordon Atkinson 2009

Well, I’m glad we got that out of the way. So, back to what I was saying. It seems that everything we do at our church seems to be the opposite of what so many others are doing.

We do not know how many members we have. You’d think we would, given that there are only around 100 people who attend regularly. We have all the names written down, so we could count the members. And we would if the need ever arose. But the only reason I can think of to count members would be to have an answer when other ministers ask me how many members we have.

When we built our church, we put it back away from the road, hidden by the trees, because the highway is loud and ugly. And we thought quiet and pretty was better for worship. Everyone, including the City Building Inspector, said we were making a huge mistake. “You want to be on the road where people can see your church.” We thought about that, but we all agreed that we’d prefer quiet and beauty for worship. If there is a right and wrong to this, and we’re wrong, then I pray the Lord will forgive his silly servants.

Many churches are concerned about locking their doors and keeping their possessions safe. And many have valuable possessions, so I think they are right to do so. We, on the other hand, having nothing much of value inside the building, hand out keys to just about everyone. If someone wants to do a wedding at our church, I give them a key, tell them to come and go as they like, and ask them to clean up when they’re done. I usually get the keys back from them eventually. Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve never counted the keys. It does seem that we keep having to make new ones, now that I think about it. There might be 50 or 60 people out there with keys to our church.

We do not pay for marketing. We don’t have a yellow pages ad. We don’t have a sign down the road. We don’t hand out leaflets. I want to be honest about this: We tried those things early on. It felt bad doing them. And not much happened. So we put our energy elsewhere and trust people will find us naturally, and they do. They hear about us somehow, or they find us on our website, which was designed for free by a member. Sometimes people see our sign as they drive by. Ironically, we get some people who pull into the parking lot to see if there really IS a church back there somewhere.

This next one is a little embarrassing to me because other ministers sometimes ask if we have a ministry plan. Then I feel like a slacker when I tell them we don’t. I think we wrote a mission statement (or was it a vision statement?) back in the 90s. We found it to be a pretty useless document, and now it is long forgotten. I could probably dig up a copy in the archive box if anyone wants to see it.

We have a fireplace in our worship room. There is no stage or pulpit or fancy stuff up front. After 10 years of preaching on the floor, in front of the fireplace, not more than a yard or two from one of my friends, pulpits and stages scare me. I got asked to preach in big church recently. A REALLY big church. I had a hard time because the people were so far away from me. My way of preaching really only works if you are within arms length of someone you love.

And finally this. We have no long-range planning committee. We used to do that, but when everything started turning out the opposite of what we thought, that kind of faded away. We have no idea what the future holds. We don’t know what would happen if half the church left. We don’t know how we would handle a sudden influx of 50 people. We don’t know if we will exist in 20 years. We don’t know what God wants to do with us. We do have a calendar so we can see when the next youth campout is. Sometimes the calendar is up to date. Mostly it is. We really live week to week.

Everything is backwards and upside down. Everything seems to be the opposite at our church.

After reading this, I’m pretty sure some people are going to say, “Yes, and that’s exactly why you only have about 100 people at your church.”

And they’re right, you know. There’s no doubt about it. They are absolutely right.

Gordon Atkinson

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Office supplies, love, and little glimpses of grace

I wouldn’t really recommend that we all misuse office supplies (and time!) like this. But I appreciate the sentiment of loving someone with the tools of our everyday work. There is grace and love all around us, and the world can seem like a magical place again when we remember to look in the right way.

The Gift: Don’t be a keeper

Sam here, with Chapter 1 of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. Loved the comments last time. Thanks, all. This week I want to make a list of gift-giving guidelines. Hyde isn’t so regulated, but his principles challenge and encourage. Why not gather them in one place?

Guidelines for a healthy gift economy:

1. Keep the gift moving.

“And the ungrateful son had to feed the toad every day, otherwise it would eat part of his face. And thus he went ceaselessly hither and yon about in the world.” I just love this folk tale by the brothers Grimm (page 12).

2. Don’t expect a gift in return.

Hyde quotes ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski here: “[T]he counter-gift…cannot by enforced by any kind of coercion.” How many times we’ve said, See if I invite HER over for dinner again! Our hospitality quickly turns to hostility when the recipient doesn’t reciprocate (ref. Henri Nouwen).

3. Save bartering for yard sales.

“Partners in barter talk and talk until they strike a balance, but the gift is given in silence.”

4. Use, consume, or eat the gift.

“[W]hen the gift is used, it is not used up. Quite the opposite, in fact: the gift that is not used will be lost, while the one that is passed remains abundant.” Sound familiar? “Whoever keeps his life will lose it…”? Yep, Matthew 10:39. Manna also comes to mind. And the parable of the talents. And gift-cards to Circuit City.

5. Enlarge the gift circle.

“[T]wo people do not make much of a circle.”

6. Include the Lord in the circle.

Okay, Hyde doesn’t mention this, but he makes the Old Testament reference to first fruits: “The inclusion of the Lord in the circle…changes the ego in which the gift moves in a way unlike any other addition. It is enlarged beyond the tribal ego and beyond nature…. The gift leaves all boundary and circles into mystery.” I’m glad the Lord enters the circle even when I don’t include him.

Others I should have mentioned?

Seedhead photo by Claire Burge. Used with permission. Post written by Sam Van Eman.

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Covenant Stories: Lillian’s Eyes

Story #16 in the Covenant series

My third daughter was born on the last day of 1996. Having had two children already, we were feeling very relaxed and at ease, so we named her Lillian. We were thinking of the famous passage in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus urged his followers not to be consumed with worry.

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. Matthew 6:28-29

I’ve often felt it was a blessing that we named her Lillian, because within two months of her birth it was obvious something was wrong with her eyes. The doctor told us she had Strabismus, a condition that was once called “lazy eye.” There is a small window of time, early in life, where our eyes learn to work together. For whatever reason, Lillian missed that window of opportunity. Surgery and glasses might help her look straight ahead, but her eyes would never work in together to produce a three-dimensional view of the world.

About that same time Jeanene and I had become convinced that Covenant Baptist Church was never going to grow large enough to be able to afford a building. We loved Covenant, but we simply didn’t have enough people to pay for something like that. We were in a bind. People in our culture are accustomed to attending churches that have a permanent home. Right or wrong, that is the expectation. Without a building it can be hard to attract people. But without people, you can’t pay for a building.

We didn’t mind Covenant being small, but we now had three children, and we needed more money than Covenant could pay us. We didn’t want to alarm the church, but privately we decided that if something drastic didn’t happen within a year, we would look for ministry positions elsewhere. The thought of leaving Covenant was heartbreaking, but we didn’t see any other options.

Eight months later the time for Lillian’s first surgery was approaching. A local pediatrician, Dr. Wayne Grant, was a friend of my parents and had known me since I was a small boy. I asked Wayne if we could meet for lunch to discuss Lillian’s situation. Jeanene and I had some big decisions to make about her eyes, and I thought it would be nice to hear Wayne’s thoughts on the matter. We talked about Lillian’s upcoming surgery, and Wayne set my mind at ease about a few things. He said the risk of the surgery was low, while the chance of the surgery helping her eyes was very good.

And then the conversation took a surprising turn.

Wayne asked how the church was doing. I told him about our church. I admitted that we were a little unconventional, but only because we were committed to doing things the way that seemed right to us without regard for what was traditional among Baptists. Eventually the conversation turned toward our land and desire for our own building.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure if we can grow large enough to afford a building. We’re trying not to worry about numbers, but there are some undeniable mathematics involved here.”

After a few moments of silence, Wayne said, “This may turn out to be a VERY fortuitous meeting.”

Wayne was a member of Trinity Baptist Church in San Antonio, a large and influential church. He was also chairman of their missions committee.

“We just had an important long-range planning meeting, evaluating the vision of our congregation. We’re landlocked. We can’t buy any more property, so we can’t grow. One option would be to sell the property and relocate. But we’ve decided that we would rather find new churches in other parts of our city and help them grow. We wouldn’t try to control them and influence them to become like our church. We’d just find churches that seem to be kindred spirits and give them assistance, allowing them to grow as the Spirit leads them.”

“And your church sounds exactly like the kind of church we would like to help.”

A few times in life you will have a conversation with someone that changes everything. You leave the conversation and your life is changed forever. It is no exaggeration to say that my conversation with Wayne that afternoon changed our church’s history. When I walked into the restaurant to meet Wayne, I had just about given up on Covenant and was fully expecting to leave. I had already started thinking about what I would say to the church on my last Sunday. When I walked out after our lunch, all thoughts of leaving Covenant were gone.

A few months later, Trinity Baptist Church agreed to sponsor our new congregation. Their building committee – made up of members who were construction managers and other professionals in that field - would provide oversight for our process. One of the men on the committee agreed to be our general contractor. And when we were ready to build, Trinity would provide generous monthly assistance for 3 years until we could afford to make our mortgage payment ourselves.

It happened so fast. After years of working and worrying and trying to grow by ourselves, suddenly it was a done deal. We were going to have a place to worship of our own.

Isn’t it interesting how it all unfolded? I’ve thought about this a lot over the years. I don’t think that God impaired Lillian’s vision in order to arrange a meeting between two churches. Of course, I’m not in the business of deciding how God does or doesn’t work. But if you ask me, I’d say that God works through people who cooperate with others in generosity and compassion. Wayne gave his professional knowledge to help my little girl. And his church gave their resources to help our little church.

That’s how the miracle took place.

But however you want to think about it, one thing is clearly true: Covenant Baptist Church exists today because of Lillian’s eyes and Trinity Baptist Church’s vision.

Lillian a few years later, after surgery.

Gordon Atkinson

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Darn Good Poetry: the life factor

L.L. here, for Random Acts of Poetry. Some of my best poems are found on trips. I don’t think that’s because more poems live in Paris or San Antonio. I think it’s because I live when I travel.

At home, I can forget about living and slide into mere existence, so many are my distractions. But on the road I notice things. No one interrupts my contemplation of the waitress in her pink faux-silk at the Asian buffet, while she eyes me. I’m attuned to the color and texture of my socks and scarf.

Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge, author of Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words explains, “Poems hang out where life is.” And I like how she recounts an incident where she gets (literally) saturated by life when she falls into a creek. She writes, “I’ve looped back to the bridge now, where the oak gall continues its circle-diving dance in the falls. My drenched dress clings to my calves. I realize I’ve become part of the action. I’m not just watching any more and that’s where the poem hides, underwater where I slipped in, where my shadow joins the fishes, where my dress, blue and purple, is the reflected lily pad, where I’m the poem, outside of time, on a poem walk at One Mile.”

This week, try to find a single moment to really live. Standing in the grocery line, changing your car’s oil, sipping green tea, plucking new berries in the garden, kicking a soccer ball. Then write it down. You can begin, middle, or end your poem with these words, “I slipped into…” Or not. Just post your poem by Thursday July 2nd and let me know about here or on my blog.

Happy living, happy writing.

Our first featured poem is from Marcus Goodyear…

As the Deer

We owe it to each other
to share what white tail already know.
When the pressure changes, they run
together, hooves clacking across asphalt
then silent on the dewy lawns.

I also liked this, in response to the Apophasis prompt, from nAncY…

n o t

there is no guarantee
that a flight to indianapolis
will not land in grand junction

this life is not always a
smooth ride of yes and
of course you can

a bed is not always
made of fluffy down

a king is not always
born in a castle

no does not always
mean that you are not loved

and silence does not
mean that no one is listening

Last minute, I heard from Tony, who happened upon my blog through Billy Coffey’s giveaway. Glad he stumbled in and shared his poem Country Rain. Here’s an excerpt…

I had sat there watching it come.
It marched purposely across the fields
and then halted just yards away
as if bashful in its desire of me.

ALL RAP PARTICIPANTS:
Monica’s Pilgrim Longing
Sally’s Skinny Dipping
Jim’s 76th and Tidbits
Ann’s The Din Undoes Us
Milton’s To a Friend, on the Death of Her Father
Marcus’s As the Deer
nAncY’s not
Mom2Six’s Quest
Claire’s Untangling and Twisted Tale
Tony’s Country Rain
LL’s Muse
Cindy’s Lucid Thoughts
Sara’s Woods
Deb’s Prodigal Mothers
Simple Country Girl’s I Do Not Have

Tulip art by nAncY. Used with permission. Post written by L.L. Barkat.

New Premium Theme Available - Thesis

We’re thrilled to announce a new premium theme is available to everyone with a blog hosted on HighCallingBlogs.com. The Thesis theme is one of the most powerful WordPress themes currently available. And you can use it here!

Benefits

Switching to Thesis will give you much more control over customizing your theme. Everything is customizable right from your HighCallingBlogs.com Dashboard. And you don’t have to worry about programming! It is all done through menu options.

Here are just some of the things that Thesis makes incredibly simple to change:

• Fonts and Font Sizes - Adjust what fonts and text sizes show up in 10 different places on your blog
• Number of columns - Chose a 1, 2 or 3 column layout with a mouse click
• Column Order - You can set where you want your sidebars. Left side? Right side? Both sides? - Your choice!
• Widths - You can adjust the widths of each column independently
• Teasers - You can have teaser text on the front of your blog and customize how it is displayed
• Featured Box - You can feature specific content either on your front page or across your entire blog
• Multimedia Box - You can add a video to display on your blog similar to the current HighCallingBlogs.com home page
• Navigation Menu - Customize your main navigation menu including which pages to include/exclude as well as the ability to add links to other sites

Get at the Good Stuff

To activate thesis, log into your HighCallingBlogs.com blog and click on the “Appearance” link in the left hand side menu. There you will see an option for “Themes”. On page 2 you will see the option to select “Thesis”.

Once you do that you will see new menu options for “Thesis Options” and “Design Options”.

Pretty much everything you’ll want to adjust will be under “Design Options”. Go poke around there and experiment. Customize your blog to your heart’s content.

New Look Coming for HighCallingBlogs.com

We like Thesis so much that we are working on a customized version for the main site here at HighCallingBlogs.com. Soon we will have a whole new design ready to go here that will incorporate all that wonderful Thesis customization goodness and more!

Vocation of staying put

Lore is a Psalmist — of laments in particular. I imagine her sitting with David, reading honest entries with him, understanding the weave of pain and hope as they await the kingdom of God together.

Lore grabbed my attention in a recent lament about vocation. Her message is universal as all of us have dreamed of being in better jobs at better locations under better circumstances.

I page through the conference brochure we just got in the mail at work. It feels pretty. It looks pretty. It shouts names like Louie Giglio and Andy Stanley and Francis Chan. It has a cool cut out in the centerfold, a X marking the spot where you, I, all of us belong at this year’s conference. I look over my monitor at my pretty co-worker and say (as I am expected to say after paging through such prettiness) “I want to go.”

Instead I open the InDesign project I’m working on and adjust character styles and justifications. Because I’m learning to reframe things.

Read more.

Milkweed photo by Elizabeth O. Weller. Used with permission. Post by Sam Van Eman.

Red Letter Believers: She might have cleaned up after Presidents, but she worked for God

David Rupert over at Red Letter Believers shared a fantastic story from the papers this morning about the white house cleaning lady. Here’s a quick excerpt:

Who knows how she influenced the world with her simple duty of cleaning the Presidents office? She would pray for “blessings, wisdom and safety for each of the six presidents she served.” She took great pride in her work. …

Her daughter said, “It wasn’t just her work, it was her character. She was a lady, a Christian lady.”

I encourage you to go read the whole post about one woman’s faith in the workplace over at Red Letter Believers.

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The Gift: Laish and the Silo Effect

Sam here, with Chapter 1 of The Gift, by Lewis Hyde. I’ve wanted to talk about this chapter for three weeks but didn’t want to rush past other goodies. If you’re just joining the conversation, you can read about those here and here. Today I’ll tell you about an obscure Bible story and then ask a few questions.

During the period of the Judges, the tribe of Dan sent five men

to spy out the land and explore it…. So the five men left and came to Laish, where they saw that the people were living in safety, like the Sidonians, unsuspecting and secure. And since their land lacked nothing, they were prosperous. Also, they lived a long way from the Sidonians and had no relationship with anyone else…. Then six hundred men from the clan of the Danites…went on to Laish, against a peaceful and unsuspecting people. They attacked them with the sword and burned down their city. There was no one to rescue them because they lived a long way from Sidon and had no relationship with anyone else (Judges 18:7, 11, 27-28).

This story demonstrates the consequences of limited gifting. Laish lived independently of others. They gifted to themselves, creating what Hyde refers to as an “ego-of-one.” The business world is all abuzz about something similar called the silo effect. The silo effect is “a lack of communication and common goals between departments in an organization” (Wikipedia). Think farm silos: narrow, vertical, window-less. If you’re in one, it’s the only world you know. Laish was a silo of a town.

1. What gifts - given or received - might have assisted Laish?

2. Are there areas of your life where you are like Laish?

3. Do you see other connections between this story and Chapter 1 of The Gift?

Water photo by Elizabeth O. Weller. Used with permission. Post by Sam Van Eman.

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Apophasis, or the Power of ‘Not’

L.L. here for Random Acts of Poetry. Thinking negatively, in a positive sort of way– thanks to a random tweet of Marcus Goodyear’s. Somehow he got caught in a glossary of rhetorical terms (watch out, you might get stuck in there too if you’re not careful), and seemed to be tweeting his way out starting with the a’s.

I ignored the S.O.S. of aposiopesis and apostrophe, but somehow got sucked in by the plea of apophasis; though this sounds vaguely like an incurable heart condition, I assure you it is a terribly fun way of exploring what something is by explaining what it is not.

In other words, upon hearing the tweet, “apophasis,” I went off in search of a Billy Collins poem I seemed to recall. You can watch Collins read it here, which gives the poem a rather more humorous turn (he begins the reading by discussing poetry theft, “I take the first two lines of someone else’s poem and rewrite it for them out of courtesy.”)

And yet when I read the poem in the silence of my room, from the pages of Nine Horses: Poems, it had a far more poignant feel, which I preferred. Here is an excerpt; note the appearance of apophasis in stanza two…

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass,
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is no way you are the pine-scented air…

One of our featured poems this week relies slightly on apophasis. And if we are lucky, more of next week’s will. (That’s shorthand for, “This is our new prompt… describe a person, place or thing in terms of what he or she or it is not. Post your poem on your blog by Thursday, June 25 for definite links and possible feature. Please send me the link by leaving it on my blog.”)

Still feeling that pull towards the poignant (maybe it’s this incessant rain we’ve been having), I wanted to start by featuring a poem from Sara, excerpted here…

I learned that sometimes there isn’t one answer I can
think of for this question. And I learned that Michaela
and Noah and Eli are not coming back next year (and
the rest will never come), and I learned that someday

I might want to go across the log and I learned that
you can’t sun-cook with aluminum foil and an empty
orange juice bottle, wild mustard leaves, in the woods
and I learned that I keep trying to write about the…

I was also impressed by Monica, who tried her hand at a sonnet, with His Delight, His Applause. Here’s an excerpt…

The blue-sky sunlight teases guarding clouds.
I turn my back on kitchen-window view
When sudden shift envelops sky in shroud
Of clouds now gray and darkened. Thunder, too…

Mom2Six’s Connecting tickled me with this opening phrase…

My life is a sequence of dots…
Not really a series of starts and stops…

Now I’m off to think apophasistically (is that a word? :). Oh, and if you would be so kind, perhaps you could rescue our friend from the glossary of rhetorical terms… that, or bring along your crystal goblet, your bread and some wine and provide a little camaraderie.

ALL RAP PARTICIPANT’S
Monica’s His Delight, His Applause
Mom2Six’s Connecting
Sara’s Before it Was Gone
Laura’s Red and yellow…
Deb’s The Verse
LL’s Holy Writ
Joelle’s Sacred Heart Abbey
Erica’s Silver Coin
Simple Country Girl’s I Spied God…

Blue Woman by nAncY. Used with permission. Post written by L.L. Barkat.

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