Today

Today I drove this hulking fifteen passanger van (with another summer staffer) across the border and bought over $1,875 worth of groceries and cleaning supplies at Sam's, WalMart, Cano's Produce Co., and Texas Meat Providers. What did you do today?

Baggage

Monday morning, even earlier than I would like to be awake on a summer morning, I will be on a plane flying to Texas. I've spent the last couple days collecting things I'll need, not excluding plenty of reading material.

I grudgingly acquiesed to taking my father's large, blue suitcase. Another weird thing about me is that I am inordinately sensitive about the size of my luggage. The smaller the better. It's really an issue of pride. This excessive concern about the size of my suitcase probably points to an excessive concern about self-image and other peoples' opinions. Why I have gotten the idea that people will judge me based on how much luggage I have beats me, but it's deeply engrained.

I packed the big suitcase today, relieved to have the excuse that I was using the extra room to pack DVDs for a pastor there and old clothes to leave at the orphanage, not to mention lots of books. Predictably, the suitcase was way over the 50 lb weight limit. Removing the non-essentials (but since when are books non-essentials?) brought the weight down, but left plenty of extra room. So, of course, I jumped at the opportunity to switch to the smaller suitcase. I fit it all in, including a nice, puffy pillow, but the already worn zipper bulged dangerously. When I sat down to repack everything into the large suitcase, the line "packing and unpacking your junk" from Emmylou Harris' "You're Gonna Change" began replaying in my head, and my muse called me to blog.

The gaping mouth of the large, blue suitcase awaits me in my room. I will soon be repacking, yet again. I'm sure these ten weeks in Mexico will be a time for growth and maturing. Perhaps I'll begin by learning a little something about humilty.

Please note that I have fiercely resisted the urge to pun on the word "baggage" throughout this whole post.

Weird

So, Courtney and Kate want to know in what ways I'm weird. Here's one way.

Sometimes I get a line from a song stuck in my head that relates to my particular circumstances. Those few words will play continuously in my head like a broken record, sometimes spilling out of my mouth in song to the amusement of my companions.

In the middle of the semester when my life was much madness, I sang, "and I'm so tired" from Simon and Garfunkel's "Keep the Customer Satisfied." Four words over and over and over again.

A few weeks ago a bunch of friends and I were planning on going swing dancing, but we were short a guy. Up until a few minutes before we left, every guy we asked couldn't come. For several hours I sang, "and there's no one else" from some song that Wheaton students sing at Honey Rock.

During finals week I sang the line, "my mind's distracted and confused" from S&G's "Kathy's Song."

As I was packing, I sang "Almost home, birds come fly, but I still can't see the shore - the only thing I know for sure , the ocean has in store" and "tonight I'm almost home" from Hem's "Almost Home." When I wasn't singing that, I was singing "homeward bound, I wish I were homeward bound." You might note that that isn't the same way S&G sing it. I change the verb to the subjunctive mood. That's another reason I'm weird.

Never

There are plenty of things I've never done that I'd like to try, such as down-hill skiing. Noodling is not one of those things.

A Kindred Spirit

I'm currently reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I felt an instant kinship with the main character when I read this quote. I'm sure I'd be asking the same question if I were traveling in some strange spaceship in a distant galaxy:

Arthur blinked at the screens and felt he was missing something important. Suddenly he realized what it was.
"Is there any tea on this spaceship?" he asked.

It must have been 4:00.

The Writing Life

Because of Kate's influence, I just read Annie Dillard's The Writing Life. This quote particularly impressed me.

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During
visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

Horticulture

This is the bean plant that I received from Earthkeepers during orientation. He has flourished during the year, giving me joy and delight and beans to supplement my diet at saga. On Thursday, shortly before driving away for the summer, I planted him outside my future dorm window. I'm sure there is deep symbolism in this. I'll leave it to you to figure out what exactly it is. May he be present to welcome me back to Wheaton come August!

Parting is such sweet sorrow

On Thursday I said farewell to my dear friend Katelynn who is transferring out of Wheaton. She has been a wonderful suitemate and precious friend. I will miss her. Lots.

Katelynn and me

Katelynn and me and Sarah, a dear friend of us both

Better Late than Never

I've been meaning to post these for months and am finally getting around to it now. At the beginning of the spring semester, I was part of a program, if you will, called Apples of Gold. Each Thursday night for six weeks, twelve girls in the college group and eight ladies in the church met at the home of my friend who hosts After Hours. We watched a cooking demonstration and are now each equipped with a binder full of recipes. I actually came home during spring break and cooked supper a few times. The sisters present were amazed and perplexed. The mentors shared lessons on kindness, contentment and calling, submission, purity, and hospitality, and then we ate and conversed together. I really looked forward to Thursday night each week. It was definitely one the highlights of the semester, but the passing of time makes it hard to write much about it now. Suffice to say, it was a lot of fun, and no doubt we're all better prepared to be wonderful little wives some day.

all of us attentive learners

our gracious mentors

In need of some levity

Milan stumbled upon my father's doppelganger. He is, humorously, a Czech rock star named Petr Janda. I was shaking with laughter in the middle of saga when I first saw the picture. Enjoy.

my father

his double

Somewhere between troubled and amused

Every college, I guess, has professors that every student there has heard of. Jerry Root is one of those professors at Wheaton. My roommate took his Intro to Christian Education class last semester and raved about him. I was curious about him, and in part because I needed a quad class and in part because I try to take classes based on who's teaching them, I tried to sign up for that Intro to CE class. It was full, so I ended up registering for his Intro to Evangelism course.

I am, for various reasons, generally glad that I took that class. I don't quite know what to think of Dr. Root, though I love him as a brother in Christ. His zeal for the gospel and genuine love for humanity - including each and every student in his class - is abundantly obvious, but his charisma and smooth speech make me wary of him. I dunno.

Dr. Root has been all over - including at College Church - and he's currently at Bill Hybel's Willow Creek Church. Those are pretty different extremes. (Do I mean extremes? I'm not sure.) Maybe it's my own bias, but that makes me a bit uncomfortable. Is there "right and wrong" in ministry styles, if you will, or just "effective and ineffective", "poor, good, and better?" I know no way is the perfect way. It's all so confusing. But I'm okay with being puzzled - I'm skeptical of freshmen who think they have everything figured out.

I do feel that, at the very least, I should be challenged to think about these issues, develop my opinions, and learn when I need to see beyond doctrinal or practical differences. Right?

So many jumbled thoughts. I don't even know how to form them into coherent questions.

This was a lengthy introduction to what I first intended to write about. I had to read a book for the class called Prepare Your Church for the Future, by Carl F. George. The book was originally published in 1991. It's now on its thirteenth printing, most recently in 2001. In it he propounds the "meta-church" as the ideal church for the 21st century. For everyone. Period.

The idea is of a church of tens of thousands of members, made up of many "small, home-based groups" called cell-groups. Among other things, proponents of the meta-church emphasize lay leadership and involving everyone in ministry so that pastors don't become over-burdened and burned-out. This makes sense to me, in light of the passage we studied in Bible study this week: "And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastor and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ. . . " (Ephesians 4:11-12)

I know that small groups would be of utmost importance in a church of that size. (I'm so grateful for the small group I'm part of at College Church which isn't nearly so large.) But I wonder, in their effort to stress the importance of Christian community and nurturing and so on, if they've lost sight of other things that are important, such as Biblical instruction. Or if not lost sight of it, than at least given it too low a precedence.

Some of the general ideas expressed in the book make sense to me. Other things are troubling, and still other things are absurd. Here are a few choice quotes. I'm sorry if the picture I'm giving of the meta-church is incomplete. I could write more but I'm rushing to get this done before I run off swing-dancing!!!

Acronyms and abbreviations and color coding and jargon abound. Reading the book is like reading some sort of manual. In parts it's barely intelligible. The meta-church is led by "CEOs, Ds, DAs, Cs, CAs, Ls, LAs, Xs, XAs, and Ls". "Zones" of the church are identified by colors: purple for governance, gray for finances, red for "celebration activities" (this refers to the Sunday morning worship service), green for nurturing, and so on. There's an especially great passage in the book that describes how these different groups can be identified by their color-coded plaid table cloths when they meet during the "huddle" session of their VHS meetings. (VHS stands for "vision, huddle, skill." I really can't explain more.)

Here is a quote unfortunately typical of the book:

How about yellow zones? As with the orange, church strategists can create intentional migration patterns whose ultimate destination is the green zone.

For example, remember the golf foursomes noted earlier in this chapter as "plusses" in the yellow zone? Those icons for foursomes will be colored green. The implication is that new prospects will be referred to cells in the green zone. Or some of the yellow-zone plusses from the family-life seminar could be coded blue. This color would indicate that attenders will be encouraged to join a blue-zone support and recovery group until they're ready to be part of a green-zone nurture cell.

Or upon reflecting about a certain congregation-size group, a pastor may conclude: "This yellow group has no acquaintance-making place (AMP) plus mark. That means that people may not be moving beyond the drinking-coffee-together stage. We need to add an AMP component. This change will help the small-group leaders who attend meet new people by taking part in a round-robin get-acquainted time."

Any discussion about these AMP plus-sign mixers will begin to probe the deeper issue of Affinity Facilitation Structures (AFS). Much has been written, especially by Lyman Coleman, on how to get people to open up by using skillfully crafted self-disclosure questions. It takes skill to help people get to know each other.

And another one, even more disturbing to me:

What does the future look like in terms of the spiritual formation of children? . . . [Some churches] will experiment with off-premises neighborhood meetings, combining ideas like Boy and Girl Scouts with Child Evangelism Fellowship's backyard Bible clubs (green zone). When children do come to church on Sunday, they might, as one big group, watch a Christian version of "Sesame Street," performed by crack teams of talented artists (shadow events in the red zone). Occasional retreats to which guests are invited might look like Scouting Jamborees, so could be considered in the yellow zone.

I laughed out loud when I read this:

Planning teams of staff and lay leaders who attend Fuller Evangelistic Association Meta-Church Cluster Consultations learn to shove activities across borders, manipulate the colors, and do whatever else is helpful to visualize: How could this ministry better represent what God wants our church to accomplish?

This troubled me:

The life of Christ in a loving cell group may be presented so attractively and powerfully that conversions may occur even without formal soul-winning skills on the part of the leader! Someone may join a cell and four months later report, "I met God this week." Everyone asks, "How? Nobody here explained the plan of salvation." The person answers, "In desperation, I got on my knees and said, 'O God, help!' I've always felt accepted by this group; now I sense an acceptance by God." There was an experience of conversion! Now the group must help the new believer put a theological form around his or her experience.

Carl George himself says that the participants in the cell groups are to "study the written Word of God and apply its teaching to their lives. They experience the ministry of the Holy Spirit as they build up and encourage one another." How can that be happening if the gospel isn't being preached?!

This also troubles me:

One pastor says, "I consider my twenty- to thirty minute opportunities for vision casting to be my central speaking engagement - more important, even, than my Sunday-morning preaching!"

Especially troubling to me is the fact that missions is barely mentioned in the book, except to fit it into the "orange zone" which is, by George's own description, a "catchall zone".

I don't have time to write more. What are your reactions?