Shaun is in the studio today with one of his (and my) favorite producers, Monroe Jones. Monroe worked on Shaun’s first couple of records, and I’m a huge fan of his work with Holly Williams, Steven Delopoulos , and Chris Rice. I was able to work with him last year on David Phelps’s Christmas record, transcribing and orchestrating his programed string arrangements, and thought that record turned out great. Shaun blogged about the song they’ll be working on a couple days ago, and you can watch him live in the studio right now.

Matthew Paul Turner’s new book, Churched: One Kid’s Journey Toward God Despite a Holy Mess releases today. Get your copy from Amazon here. I’ll be giving away a couple copies next week as part of the blog tour, so be sure to check back.

Saturday, Matthew and I drove down to Atlanta for a Christian music festival he was doing a reading at that Caedmon’s Call headlined, and then we stuck around for a couple Christian television interviews he had yesterday before heading home. It’s great to see others react to these stories, and I’m excited the book is finally out there so more people can read it. Matthew did post the prelude on his blog a while back - read it here.

And here’s one of my other favorite stories from the book, one about Patch the Pirate and the evils of rock music, something I know all about. I not only unthinkingly believed all the arguments against rock music (the only way they can be believed), I wrote 20 page e-mails to friends trying to convince them of their evil ways. So yeah, this story rang true.

“According to Patch, the heart pounding drumbeats made rock music dangerous. “The beats you hear on the radio every single day are the same ones that, in Africa, conjure up evil spirits,” he said confidently. “I’ve actually interviewed African missionaries who tell me that, as soon as the gangs or tribes or whatever they call them get their drums going, the natives dance and take off their clothes. Compare that to what happens at some of these rock concerts, especially the ones sponsored by Budweiser.”
To further prove his point, Patch had three toddlers in diapers - volunteers, he called them - carried onto the stage.
“Now you watch this,” said Patch, winking at the sound guy. As soon as the 80s dance beat began playing, two of the three toddlers began shaking their bodies to the beat. Those in the congregation who had no idea where Patch was going with his demonstration clapped and laughed. I, on the other hand, shaped my face to look as though I was constipated - that was how people in my church looked when disgusted with worldliness, like we hadn’t gone to the bathroom for six days.
“Yeah, the kids are really cute, aren’t they, moving their little bodies to the soundtrack of Hell?” said Patch with a snide grin. “But you see how tempting Satan can be, even leading these precious little babies astray.”
By the end of the evening, it seemed that everybody in the music industry either worshiped Satan, was a prostitute, or their brand of hairspray supported a woman’s right to choose. Satan was everywhere.”

If that brings back memories, you need to buy the book today.

One of my favorite genres of literature to read is religious memoir. Off the top of my head, I can think of six or seven I’ve read in the last year - Frank Schaeffer’s Crazy for God, Lauren Winner’s Girl Meets God, Jon Sweeney’s Born Again and Again, Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church - A Memoir of Faith, and a couple from Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey, Now and Then, and Telling Secrets. Philip Yancey’s Soul Survivor might also fit in that category. There are different things that I like about all of them. For some, it’s seeing someone else who is close to the end of their journey, looking back at the things that happened in their lives that brought them to where they are now, like Buechner - on the back of his book The Longing for Home, there’s a blurb from the New Oxford Review that says, “Journey on, Frederick Buechner. We need your stories to help us make sense of our own.” Others, like Lauren Winner’s and Donald Miller’s, are thought provoking because they are a little further down the path I’m on, or at least a similar path. Schaeffer and Sweeney both come from a somewhat similar background in fundamentalism. Sweeney even begins one chapter in Born Again and Again: Surprising Gifts of a Fundamentalist Childhood by quoting part of a sermon by my Great Grandfather, John R. Rice. (Winner mentions Rice and his book Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers in her chapter on Fundamentalism, but from an historian’s perspective instead of a personal one.)

But while I can find similarities between their stories and my own, it’s not often that I read someone who not only comes from a similar background but who also has many of the same stories, someone who heard the same preachers growing up (to say nothing of Patch the Pirate). Enter Matthew Paul Turner. I read Matthew’s first book, the satiric Christian Culture Survival Guide, back when it was published, in 2004, and found it hilarious. After noticing his stories of Patch the Pirate and about a certain college founded by a friend of my Great Grandfather, with the name changed slightly, I sent him an e-mail. Turned out, he even heard my Great Grandfather preach when he was about 5 years old. In the 4 years since then, Matthew has written ten or twelve books. His newest - his first hardback - is due to hit stores on October 7th. Churched: One Kid’s Journey Towards God Despite a Holy Mess is his first memoir, and hopefully the first of several. He sent it to me after he finished the final draft about four months ago, and I read it in two days. And it resonated with me, not only because Matthew started out in a similar place, but because we are both in about the same place now, more so than with any other memoir I’ve read.

Matthew’s trademark humor is evident throughout, although much of it is a little painful because it is so close to the truth. For instance, when he writes about his pastor telling the church how he can spot sin in another person’s life just by looking in their eyes, Matthew recounts, “For a fundamentalist, spotting sin was like going to Disney World.” And after enduring the yelling of a Sunday school teacher, Matthew ends the story with, “That’s when I began seeing a therapist.”
On Sunday school: “I was trained in Sunday school to spot the Devil. My teachers told me to watch out for roaring lions, disgruntled angels, women wearing low-cut blouses, and Billy Graham.” On his pastor: “Pastor Nolan’s sermons were cruel and unusual punishment for people who had imaginations, sensitive eardrums, or someplace better to be.” And, on movies: “A few months later Pastor Nolan proved my mother’s theory about Hollywood correct. Or at least, he supported it. He preached to my junior church class and told us that it didn’t matter if a person went to see a porn movie or Bambi, all of the money eventually trickled down to fund people who made the X-rated stuff.
I didn’t know what pornography was, but the way Pastor Nolan described it, I was pretty sure miniskirts were involved.”

The book closes with a chapter Matthew has titled “Benediction.” The first words you read in the chapter are, “Fundamentalism has little to do with Jesus.” And I’d have to agree, at least the brand of Fundamentalism that Matthew and I grew up with. It wasn’t about Jesus or Hope or Resurrection or a better way, it was about scaring people until they looked and acted exactly like us.

In his 20’s, for the first time, he tells us, Matthew found a small community in Maryland where he found hope, “a Jesus kind of hope.” He writes, “The pastor wasn’t the most dynamic preacher, not according to fundamentalism standards, but every time he spoke about the good news, he cried. He felt something. He couldn’t always communicate the hope effectively, but he felt it. I had moments when I felt it, too… [F]or the first time in my life, I worshipped God without feeling afraid.”

The chapter, and the book, ends with a sentence that I’ve been quoting every time I’ve told friends about the book. It sums up a key difference between what Matthew and I grew up believing, and what we believe now. Fundamentalism is about fear. And if I had to give you one word to sum up what I believe now, it would be “hope.”

In Matthew’s words, “Last Sunday Jessica and I went to church. It was Easter. A couple people got baptized. The guy sitting next to me took two smoke breaks. I closed my eyes during the praise and worship. Pete gave a sermon about hope. We took communion.
I wasn’t afraid.”

Matthew will be on tour this fall with Dan Merchant, the director of Lord, Save Us From Your Followers, reading excerpts from Churched and then interviewing Merchant. There’s a list of links on Matthew’s blog to the different sites where you can pre-order Churched. And if you’re in the Nashville area, join us on October 14th at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Green Hills for a book signing and to hear Matthew read a couple excerpts.

I wrote this last Monday, at the end of my vacation, but haven’t had time to post it until now.

As I write this, I’m sitting in the back of my uncle’s boat, a 43-foot Stephens Brothers wooden yacht, built in 1929, that I’ve been on for the last five days, meandering around the San Juan Islands with him. Last night, over a home-cooked - or would that be boat-cooked - dinner of corn-on-the-cob, green beans, squash, and baked potatoes - and a couple glasses of red wine, of course - our conversation turned to the same small matters like God and the meaning of life that have been the topic-de-jour for dinner conversations on this trip. This morning, as I drink my coffee - made with a french press - I’m watching the fog roll back from land and other boats pass a few feet behind me as they pull out of the harbor. It’s turning into a beautiful day, with the rain that tapped out a rhythm on the roof of the boat throughout the night holding off for now, the sun peaking through the clouds. A light breeze is blowing, stirring the flags on the boats around me, and making the 65 degrees feel just a little bit cooler. Andrew Peterson’s new album, Resurrection Letters, Volume II, is playing on my laptop, and he just sang my favorite line on the album, the bridge of All Things New: “Hold on to the promise / the stories are true / my Jesus makes all things new.”

Yes. Yes. During those times when I believe, and the days in between when I want to believe, that’s what I hold on to. That the stories, somehow, incredibly, really are true. That in some way I can’t even begin to fathom, Jesus will make, and even now is, making all things new. Over a dinner of seafood and pasta at a restaurant on a nearby island a couple days ago, my uncle asked me why I went to church. And none of the answers I gave him - that I like what my church does in the community, or for the friendships I’ve found there - answered his question satisfactorily, either to him or to myself. So the question has stayed on my mind. One of the books I’ve been reading on this trip is Frederick Buechner’s Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons. I’ve read and re-read a couple sermons a day, and in one sermon I read for the fourth or fifth time yesterday, Let Jesus Show, I found an answer to my uncle’s question, the reason why I go to church. Buechner writes, “‘You will seek me,” Jesus says, and no word he ever spoke hits closer to home. We seek for answers to our questions - questions about life and about death, questions about what is right and what is wrong, questions about the unspeakable things that go on in the world. We seek for strength, for peace, for a path through the forest. But Christians are people who maybe more than for anything else seek for Christ, and from the shabbiest little jerry-built meeting house in the middle of nowhere to the greatest cathedrals, all churches everywhere were erected by people like us in the wild hope that in them, if nowhere else, the one we seek might finally somehow be found.”

That’s why, every Sunday, I make my way to church, one in the morning and another one in the evening. Out of “the wild hope that…the one we seek might…be found.” And to be with others who are on the same journey, who are seeking the same thing, with more or less degrees of hopefulness and certainty. Others who believe the same wild stories. And in hopes that maybe, just maybe, Jesus will show in those churches.

Buechner’s sermon continues, “Let Jesus show in these churches we have built for him then - not just Jesus as we cut him down to size in our sermons and hymns and stained-glass windows, but Jesus as he sat there among his friends with wine on his breath and crumbs in his beard and his heart in his mouth as he spoke about his death and our ours in words that even the nine-year-old angel [in the church Christmas pageant] would have understood. “Let not your hearts be troubled,” he said in the midst of his own terrible troubles. Take it easy. Take it easy. Take heart. “Believe in God,” he said. “Believe also in me.”
“Well, we are believers, you and I, that’s why we’re here - at least would-be believers, part-time believers, believers with our fingers crossed. Believing in him is not the same as believing things about him such as that he was born of a virgin and raised Lazarus from the dead. Instead, it is a matter of giving our heart to him, of come hell or high water putting our money on him, the way a child believes in a mother or a father, the way a mother or a father believes in a child.
“‘Lord, where are you going?” Peter asked from where he was sitting, and Jesus answered, “I go to prepare a place for you … that where I am you may be also.” Can we put our money on that? Are we children enough to hear with the ears of a child? Are we believers enough to believe what only a child can believe?”

Buechner closes his sermon, after describing himself as a “skeptical old believer, [a] believing old skeptic,” with this encouragement: “By believing against all odds and loving against all odds, that is how we are to let Jesus show in the world and to transform the world.”

A couple weeks ago, Shaun Groves blogged about how his wife responded to conflict with a neighbor contrasted with how others in their cul-de-sac responded. Shaun wrote, “That night she called me. I was in a hotel room in Florida. It’s hard being away from her and the kids - harder still when anything goes wrong while I’m away. She told me what had been shouted at her and what she wished she’d said back. Have you ever had the perfect thing to say come to your mind way too late? I told her I thought she should call our neighbors and say every word of it. So she did. “This is Becky from next door,” she said. “I’m sorry things turned out the way they did. I’m not angry at you. I want you to know I had nothing to do with the police getting involved. We don’t handle things that way. I’d rather talk through things with you so if you want to talk please call me or I’ll catch you in the front yard sometime this week maybe and we can talk then. Let me know how I can make things right.””

Read the rest of Shaun’s story here. During interactions with my neighbors in the past week or two, it came to mind a couple of times, and I thought of it again this morning when I read a blog post from my uncle about a recent experience he had involving his boat. He writes about a conflict at the marina involving filling his water tank, and how he ended up handling it. His response was prompted by reading Walter Wink. He writes, “Wink proposes that nonviolence need not be submisssion to violence, nor a passive retreat from aggression or abuse, but rather should be an active, bold, initiatory striving for justice based on compassion. By responding to the anger and violence of others with a sharp, clear, bold yet nonviolent compassion, we can lay the basis for others to change their behavior, and we can learn how to change ourselves as well.” Here’s the link for his blog post.

So what would that “bold yet nonviolent compassion” look like if put into practice in our daily actions and attitudes? How would tomorrow be different? How does that inform the way I’ve acted today?

There are times when I’m driving home from a friend’s house, from an evening filled with good food and wine, laughter, great conversation, and friendly competition in boggle or speed scrabble or dutch blitz, and I’m almost overwhelmed by a feeling of loneliness, of aloneness. And I’m always surprised by it. It makes me wonder what I was hoping for, what I wanted from that night. Last week, my friend Andy wrote a blog post after seeing the new Batman movie, about how it revealed to him (again) that he was putting his hope in the wrong things. He wrote,

“Was I really putting my hope in some movie, you might say? Hoping it would do do what? I don’t know, honestly, but I do know I was disappointed that I wasn’t different after watching it, that it hadn’t changed me. Which means, at some absurd and obviously flawed level, I was putting my hope in a movie.

And this is something we all do. Whether it’s Batman or the new Coldplay or U2. We can put our hope there. Or we can put it in our pastor’s sermons or our small group’s honesty. We can put our hope there. We can put it in the girl that got away or in making love with the one we married. We can put our hope there.

We have some bit of hope that it will change us, make us better. Or we’re trapped in some cycle of secrets and habits we can’t escape. Maybe this thing will curb our appetite for the sins that we feel define our secret selves, or at least it will let us not think about it for a while. Or at least it will make us feel. We’ve been so numbed for so long, for some unknown and hated reason, that we can’t feel anymore, and maybe this thing will connect us, revive us.

And at some point we’ll have to look at this thing, this movie or relationship or feeling, however truly good it may be, and say: “is this all?”

read the rest of Andy’s post here

When I read that the other night, this quote from C.S. Lewis came to mind: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

Tomorrow is the last day of the 40 Day Fast. There have been a number of good posts recently, including this one by Kristin about fair trade. Check out inspiredtoaction.com in the coming days for a roundup of this year’s campaign.

edited to add: Kat has a post about the end of this year’s 40 Day Fast up now, and included the audio for the JJ Heller song I quoted in my post at the beginning of the 40 days, Little Things. Give it a listen.

As I’ve mentioned before, I find David Dark to be one of the more thought provoking authors I’m reading now. And I enjoy every chance I have to hear him speak or talk over coffee. When we met at a coffee shop near his house a couple weeks ago, our conversation ranged from discussion of one of my favorite films of last year, There Will Be Blood, to church to relationships and how our sharing our secrets helps those around us have courage to share some of their own.

A friend of David’s sat down with him recently and asked him questions with a camera rolling. There’s at least an hour of footage that will be edited and posted on David’s blog as it becomes available, and the first clip is up now. In it, David shares about his work in a movie theatre as a teenager, and how it was a “space of the talkaboutable.” And he talks about his definition of the word “apocalyptic,” a central idea behind his book Everyday Apocalypse. He says, “Apocalyptic, as I understand it, is not so much about buildings being destroyed or the end of civilization so much as cracking the pavement of the status quo. Apocalyptic names what we could call socially disruptive newness.”

Last time I counted, I had about 15 books on my bookshelf by Frederick Buechner. A good start, but I’ve still got a way to go before I catch up with Eric Peters and Andrew Peterson, fellow Buechner aficionados. One of his books I’m reading now for the first time, Secrets in the Dark - A Life in Sermons, was given to me this past Christmas by my brother and his wife. And there are several more books by him on that shelf that I haven’t read yet. After reading his newest book, The Yellow Leaves: A Miscellany, when it came out a couple weeks ago, I wondered why I have any books of his that I haven’t dropped everything else to read. And I figured out that it is for the same reason you set aside a good bottle of wine.

Last week, while browsing at a used bookstore with my friend Clint, I pointed out a good Buechner book to start his collection. And on Thursday, I loaned two of his books to another friend, Andy, after quoting several passages to him over lunch. Andy has already posted a paragraph from one of them on his blog. As I mentioned, I read The Yellow Leaves: A Miscellany a couple weeks ago just after it was released. My review is up now at the Rabbit Room. Check it out. It wouldn’t be a bad choice with which to start your Buechner collection.

Philip Yancey’s Soul Survivor: How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church was one of my three favorite books I read last year, so I always enjoy reading his articles for Christianity Today. Tuesday, CT posted an article from him, Found in Space - How C.S. Lewis has shaped my faith and writing, that is adapted from the upcoming book, Mere Christians: Inspirational Stories of Encounters with C. S. Lewis. In it, Yancey talks about reading the space trilogy, his introduction to the writings of C.S. Lewis. Echoing what Guillermo del Toro said in the interview I quoted last week, he writes, “[Lewis] made the supernatural so believable that I could not help wondering, What if it’s really true? What if there is a God and an afterlife and what if supernatural forces really are operating behind the scenes on this planet and in my life?”

Pointing out our need for and the importance of myth in popular culture, he quotes William James, “… in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion.” You might want to read that again. I’m sure I’ll keep coming back to it until I have it memorized.

Here’s the link to Yancey’s article.