Miscellany

Random Links & Thoughts

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Today's an outlandishly busy day for me, so what goes on the site? Random links and thoughts.

Oh, joy!

I used to have a lot of Steve Camp vinyl in my heavy CCM days. Steve hit pretty hard back then (though Keith Green had him beat in the heavy lyrics department), and he's still sledgehammering away, this time online. While I find him to be a little too in your face on his blog at times, over the last two weeks he's posted some outstanding material, the first almost prescient in light of the Haggard fiasco:

Tim Challies weighs in on the Evangelical news of the moment with a truly grace-filled post entitled "The Scandal."

Meanwhile, Keith Drury contributes a canny assessment of the reasons some well-known preachers fall. 

Mark Driscoll (whom I fear some people would love to see go the way of Haggard) weighs in with practical and unflinching advice on how to keep one's ministry from going up in flames. While I like most what he has to say, he still advocates the mistaken notion that the pastor is a class apart from the rest of the people in the church. Though that thinking may be the general consensus within Evangelicalism, the general consensus is nonetheless wrong. That consensus only fosters the problem .

Take time to pray for Milton Stanley of Transforming Sermons as he recovers from surgery. Milton's site culls some of the choicest material from the best blogs out there. Make sure to include it in your newsreader of choice.

And lastly, if you want a break from all the Sturm und Drang, you can't get a better laugh than Weird Al Yankovic's recent video, "White & Nerdy." I've got to hand it to the guy, he's still a hoot. I think this is the funniest video I've seen from him yet. Wikipedia's got an entry just for this song/video, and it's fascinating, too. For us fortyish, white nerds, everything in the video hits home. I especially liked the back alley buy of the rare "Star Wars Holiday Special." Nothing says "I have no life" better than coveting a TV show filled with dancing Ewoks. Don't miss. (HT: BHT )

Community,Politics, and Pastoral Shenanigans

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Election Day is only days away and news breaks of the Ted Haggard scandal, conveniently timed (as the whistleblower himself notes) to cause the most political fallout. 

Ugh.

We've been talking about community here lately, and while this post isn't part of the "Being the Body" series we're in, it's close. It's a tale about what happens when folks are removed from real community.

For the less media inclined, Ted Haggard, now the ex-leader of the National Association of Evangelicals and the ex-pastor of a huge Colorado megachurch, has fallen in some sort of scandal, causing him to resign both those roles. The allegations that brought Haggard down are unseemly, and I don't want to go into them here. But Haggard claims that some parts of them are true and, for the purposes of this post, that's enough.

The Godblogosphere is loaded with commentary on the Haggard situation. Everyone is weighing in with the reasons why this happened, but the analysis is the same tired lament focused on the usual suspects.

Recently, I reviewed a book by David Fitch called The Great Giveaway. One of the chapters dealt with pastoral sin, pointing the finger not so much at the pastors, but at the system we've created in our churches that sets the pastor apart as some kind of CEO, celebrity, or otherwordly figure with no ties to the rest of the church body. I believe that Fitch's analysis is far more accurate than what we're seeing discussed on the Godblogs.

A few points:

1. We've created a cult of celebrity around our most noted pastors. That kind of proto-idolatry only sets them up for failure because we no longer allow them grace to fail in the small things before they become larger.

2. Failure and sin are natural parts of the human condition. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, as we know. This includes our pastors, but we act as if it doesn't. Our mental disconnect sets up pastors for further failure.

3. Because of these factors, pastors find themselves separated from healing community. They cease to be fellow brothers within our church communities.

4. God institutes community for correction, even of leaders, yet our cult of pastoral celebrity destroys the natural workings of the correction. This places pastors outside the community and outside of the community's ministry TO them.

So once again, we see what happens when we do not allow the natural workings of godly community to police, protect, and encourage—even the pastorate.

While I do not condone what Haggard appears to have done, I'm not outraged. If anything, I feel sorry for what our kingmaker attitude has done to the pastorate. Unless we reform our communities, stop treating pastors as superhuman, get off our judgmental attitudes, and get back to recognizing that ALL the sheep have gone astray (not just some), we'll continue to see more high-profile pastors fall. We've got to be grace-filled communities that recognize the sin in our own leaders and allow them to receive grace from us, rather than blackballing them, stripping them of their ordination, and so on. With the constant threat of the "laity" turning on them like a pack of vicious dogs, pastors are all too likely to go into "coverup mode." No wonder the small sins wind up turning into monstrosities.

And don't believe that it can't be your favorite big-name pastor. I'm seeing a lot of people claiming their man is immune, all the while dancing on the ashes of Haggard's ministry. That's sickening, frankly. And unless we get wise to the fact our crippled views on community are what make stories like Haggard's possible, we'll continue to treat these pastors like they're a ruling class, rather than as sinful brothers in need of grace, just like we are.

We don't talk politics on this blog, but I wanted to drop that for one second to talk about this Tuesday's election.

I live in a state racked with pain. Ohio is in serious trouble. Our current Republican administration in this state is rife with malfeasance and failed agendas. The Republican governor has been an unmitigated disaster. His failures have resulted in Ohio being anathema to businesses of all sizes, driving many out of the state and attracting nothing to take their place. Now Ohio, the birthplace of more presidents than any other state, is in dire condition economically. We're the number one state for job losses, one of the worst of the worst signs of trouble.

I've noted in recent months through one of the series I did that I'm what they term a Crunchy Conservative. While much of what I believe politically sounds Republican, I oppose the Republican Party on many environmental, employment, and social issues.

This political season has underscored for me that we're drastically in need of some kind of reform in government. The Republicans don't represent the average family when they put big business ahead of the environment and small businesses. They don't represent the average family when they make all sorts of claims about supporting the family, but their final interest only comes down to supporting the richest one percent of families out there.

The Democrats, on the other hand, mouth some sort of allegiance to the little guy, but their party is responsible for supporting nearly every social evil imaginable.

And in the end, it seems like they're all liars anyway.

I believe that the same problem of making kings out of our pastors has soiled our politics. While politicians say they're part of the community, the community they're a part must only be millionaires and hedonists. I'm divulging no new truth here when I say that most people aren't like that. But the demographic on Capitol Hill doesn't reflect the common man out struggling to live in America 2006. It represents CEOs and loud-mouthed deviants.

My current rep is gung-ho about putting a nuclear waste site in a poorer area of the state not far from my home. Remember, I live in OHIO, not the Sonora Desert. She claims to be a part of my community, but I've got to wonder how any sane person would consider putting nuclear waste in a populated area with a high water table upstream from a major American city. I've got to wonder what PAC got to her and for how much. Isn't that sad?

She's a Republican. I don't know how I can vote for her, though. Her Democratic opponent supports a number of grievous moral sins. I can't vote for the opponent, either.

In short, no one represents most of the people I know in this district. Though they would vehemently protest my assessment, the candidates in this election aren't really part of our community. They're a part of some other class of people entirely who don't get us as much as we don't get them.

Sounds like some of the pastors in our churches, doesn't it?

I'm not sure what we can do about the problems in politics, but we can start doing a better job in our churches of allowing our pastors to fail in our community just as we ourselves are (or should be) allowed to. We need pastors who are like us, too, not outsider glamour boys who seem more attuned to politics than pulpits. 

What I Did During My Summer Vacation

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No longer soaking...I'm back as promised, toned, tanned, and terrific! Well, maybe only one of those. I'll let you decide which one.

As a kid, I remember the first day back to school started many times with an essay, "What I Did During My Summer Vacation." I wish I could say that such exercises passed away many moons ago, but the sad truth is they linger on. Especially at blogs run by harried bloggers.

So with that topic in mind, I present the rundown of my activities the last few weeks:

1. My son started HOMESCHOOL.

There. I started a flame war just by using that label. I'll be talking about labels soon, seeing that within the first week of my absence, labels assumed a prominent role in my life as other people went nuts trying to label me, or unlabel me, as the case may be.

Anyway, school's going fine. I should hope so considering I have an education degree.

A bit o' homeschooling fun: If you're a male and wish to experience "the other side of life," go to any meeting that revolves around homeschooling. For added hilarity, leave your spouse at home. While the homeschooling program we're using isn't quite as rabid as some, nothing spells "frightening loner" than showing up male at a homeschooling event sans your female consort.

2. I wrote—constantly.

Talk about being a prisoner of the keyboard! I think my nearly 44-year-old eyes finally waved the white flag. For years I maintained perfect vision. In the last two years, though, I've seen (no pun intended) a progressive diminishment of arm length. Oddly enough, when writing, if I stretch out my arm, my montor is six inches beyond my upraised palm. That explains much.

Anyway, I wrote a horror piece that got an encouraging rejection from the leading horror lit magazine. I wrote it as an exercise in developing a full story arc in under 2500 words. I think it works well, but the magazine thought it could profit from being longer. I may rewrite it. We'll see.

I also wrote a controversial piece of speculative fiction sure to alienate both secular and Christian readers. It's too Christian for the secularists and too sexual for the Christians. Definitely a redemptive storyline, but like most of what I write, I suspect no market will dare touch it. I submitted the first half to my critique group and they loved it. Later this month we'll see if they liked the second half as much.

I spent about sixty hours editing my novel and I'm STILL not finished. About a hundred pages to go. One thirty-five page section consumed nearly twenty hours. I've burned up more time editing than I did writing the first draft! Being used to works under fifty pages, which comprise about 99 percent of what I write, I totally mismanaged the editing process for my novel. I'm sure I tripled my work by failing to use a more logical editing approach. If any of you novelists out there have any advice or tools for editing, let me know.

Writing…always writing.

3. I read—constantly.

When I wasn't writing, I read. A writer needs a feel for what's getting published, so I sent out feelers by reading more novels during my hiatus than any other six-week stretch I can remember. Hoping to understand popular writers, I read outside my usual suspects.

Never having read a Dean Koontz novel in my life, I picked up The Taking. For the purposes of my mission, I'd hoped to avoid any kind of pseudo-Christian themes in any secular authors I read, but failed miserably by choosing this book. If LaHaye & Jenkins' Left Behind series met The Exorcist, Naked Lunch, and a large stash of peyote, you'd have The Taking. If you wish to speculate on what the Rapture would like like if Satan ran it, you'd have this book. By all means, skip. And let me end by saying that it's hard to read this book and not question whether a committee wrote it. The prose wandered between outright purple and brilliant. Unfortunately, the former won.

I read Ted Dekker's Obsessed, and by the time I'd completed it, I wondered if I'd accidentally picked up a Ted Dekker parody. More than once I checked the cover to see if the name on the book read "Tedd Dekker" or "Ted Dekkker." So over-the-top it bordered on camp, Obsessed had me in stitches when I should have been crying. I know Dekker can write, but this smacked of contractual obligation and a ridiculous deadline. Read anything else he's written, but avoid Obsessed like the plague.

At last year's American Christian Fiction Writers conference, I had the pleasure of meeting Kathryn Mackel. She told me the premise of her upcoming book, The Hidden, and it knocked me out. A psychiatrist who lost her mother and son to suicide (and her husband to a brain aneurysm) ventures back to her father's Colorado dude ranch when dad takes a nasty fall and mangles a leg. After botching the delivery of a prized foal that represents her father's entire financial future, she bolts into the mountains on an unfamiliar horse that tosses her into a ravine. To her astonishment, she finds a young man chained in the bottom of the ravine outside a cave, the key to his shackles a few inches out of his reach. Wow. How can you not want to read a novel with a premise that good? Fortunately, Mackel delivers on the premise with strong characters and enough chills to keep spec fic readers happy. Though I felt she threw readers a few too many false leads on the young man's identity, the story held up. If you like supernatural thrillers, you'll like The Hidden.

Randy Ingermanson served as my writing mentor at the same conference where I met Kathryn Mackel. His book Double Vision explores a high tech startup's woes when they develop a sophisticated cryptography method that could get them killed by competitors, the US Government, the mafia, or anyone else looking to crack RSA encryption. Obviously, Randy's got a hard science background. That makes him a rarity in Christian fiction. Though I wanted to like this one (since I worked for a startup), I thought Randy tried to please everyone with his ending. The implausible result undid everything that came before. I will give Randy a kudo for brilliant marketing, though. He creates storylines that tie-in characters from his other books. I liked that one of the characters in this book is the cousin of one of Randy's well-known characters. That's not easy to do without seeming forced.

I'm not yet through Carl Hiaasen's Skinny Dip. So far, this book's been my favorite of the bunch (despite being tawdry in spots). Hiaasen's world-building should be a model for all writers. His descriptions slay me, and his characters, despite their implausibility, live and breathe like real people. Though just about everyone in the book is missing more than his or her fair share of grey matter, I've met these people. That's good writing and one of my beefs with most of the Christian fiction I've read. In too many Christian novels, the lead characters don't resemble anyone I've ever met. Too often they're an amalgam of certain "writerly" traits, so much so that their Christianity feels plastic to me. They're not so much written as they are designed.

I also read some non-fiction, specifically David Fitch's The Great Giveaway, a book which made me wonder if the author had cribbed from this blog! I'll be discussing the book in days ahead. 

4.  Geocached.

I've been enjoying this new hobby, one of the few I have. Gets you into the outdoors. Can be great exercise. I'd encourage anyone reading this to consider the sport. Kids love it and so do adults. You can go as hardcore as you want, or just dabble in it. A GPS receiver and Geocaching.com are all you'll need to get started.That's it.

Not a very exciting vacation, eh?

I missed out on writing about the death of Steve Irwin (of Crocodile Hunter fame) in a horribly unlucky encounter with a normally docile creature. Even stranger was the wish fulfillment displayed by so many Christian fans of Steve when the rumor started that he'd come to Christ a month before his death. I'm not going to touch that one.

I didn't read blogs much, but I do have a few posts I'll comment on in the days ahead.

The Wall Street Journal, just days after my hiatus began, featured an article discussing what happens to a blogger's blog when he or she goes on vacation. Nice synchronicity on that one, huh? Cerulean Sanctum proved the article's point: you've got about three weeks before the traffic hemorrhaging begins. My first three weeks away didn't see much traffic fall-off. The last three, on the other hand, have been extreme. If I held out another two weeks, Cerulean Sanctum would probably die on its own. Or I could just post once a week on homeschooling and live off the weekly traffic spikes.

That's all for today. Stay tuned for what the rest of the week brings.