Salvation South : The Bootleg Preacher

This article was originally written for and published by Salvation South. You can read it in it’s originally format by clicking the image above.

Image Credit: Still from documentary, “God’s Will”

I almost missed the road, my brake lights surely scaring those behind me as I abruptly cut the wheel.

I’m on this street for only a second before having to make another sharp turn into an empty parking lot filled with potholes, which fling me like the aggressive rapids of the Chattooga River. I shake, rattle, and roll to a stop.  Stepping out of my ride, I regret not bringing a bucket of tar to make the next victim’s entrance a little less adventurous. A prayer for traveling mercies will have to suffice. I say one laced with colorful language as I walk into my destination.

It’s lunchtime, and I’ve brought my appetite with me.

Golden India is the kind of spot you don’t discover on your own—somebody has to tell you. Maybe a local food enthusiast consumed with finding the obscure, or a Wake Forest University college student whose meal card has been maxed out. The invitation might come from a handful of places.

For me, it was extended by a fellow named Don.

Don was a friend of a friend, a person I was told I absolutely had to meet when I moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He wasn’t so much placed on my radar as he was pulled from the shelf like a jar of what George Jones used to sing about. I would soon learn that Don’s presence, like the Possum’s “White Lightnin’,” was punchy and meant to be shared.

The restaurant is nearly empty except for the handful of patrons roaming the aisles of the attached in-house grocery. Grabbing a booth, I watch hands toss lentils, flatbread, and at least one bag of Lay’s India’s Magic Masala potato chips into a small handcart. I’ve never been accused of possessing a sommelier’s nose, but the smells wafting through the room are so distinct, so enchanting, that picking up hints of coriander and ginger takes little effort. I don’t bother with the menu. I’ll eat whatever the server brings. Curry, vindaloo, samosas—it doesn’t matter. Put it in front of me, and I’ll take it down and ask for more.

“You don’t know who Will Campbell is? Do yourself a favor: don’t tell anybody you’re a damn Baptist until you read him.”

Unlike Pavlov’s dogs, I’m already salivating when I hear a ding. A man I take to be Don saunters through the front door. His salt-and-pepper hair is secured in a tight ponytail running down his back. His beard freely wanders. He’s wearing a pair of timeworn overalls that could walk themselves if they had to.

Don slides into the seat across from me, and we go through the motions of Southern salutation. It doesn’t take long to see why our mutual friend wanted us to meet. We go back and forth, discovering our stories intersect regularly, starting with the influences of our Appalachian upbringings and ending with our reluctant roles as misfit ministers to the people known as Baptists.

Over bowls of Indian chutney, we swap “call stories,” an expression ministers use to describe their divine acceptance of their particular purpose. Don tells me how he left a cushy denominational position to till soil, grow food, and give it away. Pausing after a bite of naan, he shares what ultimately led him to the decision: his faith, a few convictions, and the words and work of such people as Kentucky’s farmer/poet Wendell Berry and a man named Will D. Campbell.

He glances up, searching my face for a sign of recognition. Seeing none, he sits his fork down and raises an eyebrow.

“You don’t know who Will Campbell is?” he asks.

“No, never ran across him,” I offer back.

If seriousness was hot dogs, Don’s gaze at me would choke Joey Chesnut, the guy who wins all the eating contests.

“Do yourself a favor: don’t tell anybody you’re a damn Baptist until you read him,” he says.

My hand gets busy writing down the name; I do not yet know my life has just changed. Meeting the right people, at the right time, in the right places is like a game of roulette. Sometimes, we get close, but we rarely beat the house and collect any long-lasting winnings. Be it Don or the Holy Muse working on his behalf, I will soon discover I have hit the jackpot.

Several days later, a copy of Campbell’s memoir Brother to a Dragonfly arrives in my mailbox. The book chronicles Will and his older sibling, Joe, and their closeness by blood and bond. Separating their lives is impossible; to speak of one is to witness the other. I consume it like a starving man does a loaf of bread. Moved to tears by every page, I’m drawn to Campbell’s ability to write about a people who are my own—rural, working-class, Southern whites. Those who often wear poverty, obstinance, and hardships like badges of honor over their eyes, leaving them incapable of seeing the same challenges in the lives of others with different complexions.

For the next few years, I mined for every book, article, and scrap of paper to which Campbell’s name was attached. I'd read about his rearing in Amite County, Mississippi. How in his youth, he brushed up against death, coming down with a severe case of pneumonia. His family would pray and barter with all manners of heavenly hosts to spare his life. Campbell believes this sets him apart in service to God’s will. How, as a medic during World War II, he got his hands on a copy of Freedom Road, a work of historical fiction about race relations in the South during Reconstruction, by Howard Fast. That as a young and aspiring Baptist preacher, he snubbed the expected halls of Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, for the ivy walls of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Then came the short stint as a congregational minister in Louisiana, where his sermons on desegregation and racial reconciliation won him pats on the head but drew few eager souls to join him in those troubled waters. Departing his first and only church, he landed at Ole Miss as University Chaplain. Likewise, his time at the school would be short-lived: his invitation to Alvin Kershaw, a white Episcopal priest and NAACP member, to speak during Religious Emphasis Week raised concerns from the school’s higher-ups. Campbell garnered more attention off the Oxford campus when he and a local African American minister were seen playing table tennis together at the YMCA. This resulted in him waking one morning to find a pile of ping pong balls painted black and white on his front lawn. The writing on the wall came when Campbell discovered human feces covered in powdered sugar floating in a punch bowl during a school-sponsored mixer.

A position he thought would last the rest of his life dissolved in the blink of an eye.

My mother is surprised to see my grandfather holding a Bible. While his sisters, my mother’s aunts, are regular churchgoers and scripture readers, Bun Stigall is not. His Sunday mornings see few pews, and when others convene for Wednesday night studies of the Old and New Testaments, he’s soaking in the testimony of the stars and heat lightning. In one of many fold-out chairs, he gathers with his community—his church—whose congregants are fellow tobacco farmers and dog traders.

“I got Jack something,” he says, holding the book out to her.

He calls me Jack, even though my name is Justin. He never called anyone by their given name. He calls my sister “Sister.” My mother is Little Nance or Nancy Lou. Her name is Penny. When she has me, she becomes Mamie. My father is always Cox, never Marty.

“He’s only four, daddy. Why in the world would you get him a Bible?” she asks back.

“Because Jack is gonna be a preacher one day,” he informs her. This ends the conversation, but the words spoken on my life will ripple forever.

The next time I went to church, I wanted to carry it with me. I knew enough to know my name was supposed to go on one of the front pages. I couldn’t find a pen or a pencil, so I wrote my name in orange crayon. My mother lovingly scolded me.

“He’s only four, daddy. Why in the world would you get him a Bible?” she asks.

“Because Jack is gonna be a preacher one day,” he informs her.

Years later, I’m talking with my cousin Bill at his tire shop. He tells me, “You know, Maw-maw always wanted a preacher in the family. I’m sure glad it was you. I was worried for a while that they would try and put that on me.”

The Bible is my first. Faux leather. Issued by the authority of King James. A bulletin marking the first Sunday I preached a sermon is pressed into the spine. A few obituaries of family members are too. A cutout of my great Aunt Minnie’s hand holds the place of 1st Corinthians 13. She made it while living in the rest home after her dementia got to be too much. A picture of her face rests in the palm like a stigmata, proving her beatification. I use the scripture, words attributed to the Apostle Paul—“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud…”— at her funeral.

And although worn, my orange-printed name is still there. Still legible.

People ask all the time how preachers wind up doing what they do.

Some come back from the grip of death, receive healing, and are prayed into the role by those who love them. Given to God to serve.

Others are prophesied over by a tobacco farmer.

Either way, the work gotta get done.

Free of steeples and academic quads, Campbell becomes an advisor for the National Council of Churches during the 1960s, aiding their Department of Racial and Cultural Relations. He’s on the ground, behind the scenes, in places like Little Rock and Birmingham during the thick of the Civil Rights Movement. Planning and putting tension on the dividing walls that segregate schools, restrooms, and lunch counters. He’s the only white man present at the inaugural Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. At the beginning of the 1960s, he becomes the director of the Committee of Southern Churchmen, a group working with African American communities in the South to bring about social, economic, and political change.

Campbell’s activism continues and grows, branching off in an unforeseen direction following the death of his young friend, Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Daniels. In the summer of 1965, Daniels was in Alabama helping with voter registration. Along with others, he was arrested but was released shortly afterward. Leaving the jail, Daniels and company enter a small grocery store to grab something to drink. A local deputy named Thomas Coleman approaches the group. They exchange words, then Coleman savagely opens fire with his shotgun. Daniels would die at the scene.

Hearing the news while sitting with his brother Joe and friend P.D. East, a Mississippi  newspaper editor, Campbell is asked by East if he wants to amend his definition of the Christian message: “We’re all bastards, but God loves us anyway.” East asks him if Daniels is a bastard?

“I said I was sure that everyone is a sinner in one way or another but that he was one of the sweetest and most gentle guys I had ever known.”

East doesn’t let up.

“But was he a bastard? Now that’s your word. Not mine. You told me everybody is a bastard. That’s a pretty tough word. I know. ’Cause I am a bastard. A born bastard. A real bastard. My Mamma wasn’t married to my Daddy. Now by God, you tell me, right now, yes or no and not maybe, was Jonathan a bastard?” After a moment, Campbell whispers a yes.

He would sit at the hospital bedside of James Meredith, the first African American student at Ole Miss, after he was shot during the “March Against Fear” demonstration. He then went and visited the man who pulled the trigger, Aubrey Norvell, in his prison cell.

Satisfied, East then asks about Thomas Coleman. Campbell’s yes comes a lot quicker.

“Okay. Let me get this straight now. I don’t want to misquote you. Jonathan was a bastard. Thomas Coleman is a bastard. Right? Which one of these two bastards do you think God loves more? Does he love that dead little bastard Jonathan the most? Or does he love that living bastard Thomas the most?”

Rising from his chair and walking past East, Campbell stares out a window. Through tears, he begins to laugh.

“I was laughing at myself at twenty years of ministry which had become, without my realizing it, a ministry of liberal sophistication. An attempted negation of Jesus, of human engineering, or riding the coattails of Caesar, of playing on his ballpark, by his rules and with his ball, of looking to government to make and verify and authenticate our morality, of worshiping at the shrine of enlightenment and academia, of making idol of the Supreme Court, a theology of law and order and of denying not only the Faith I professed to hold but my history and my people—the Thomas Colemans. Loved. And if loved, forgiven. And if forgiven, reconciled.”

Will Campbell, a man who marched with King, John Lewis, and Bayard Rustin, now begins working as an unofficial on-call chaplain for members of the Ku Klux Klan. He shares a communion of whiskey with Bob Jones the night before the Grand Dragon of the North Carolina Knights heads to federal prison for contempt of Congress. He damn near starts a riot in Atlanta when he tells an auditorium full of students that he’s pro-Klansman because he’s pro-human being. Never supporting their actions or upholding their beliefs, he wasn’t pro-Klan—he just believed if you loved one, you had to love them all.

He lived this expression, his simple mantra. He would sit at the hospital bedside of James Meredith, the first African American student at Ole Miss, after he was shot during the “March Against Fear” demonstration. He then went and visited the man who pulled the trigger, Aubrey Norvell, in his prison cell. He would do the same for James Earl Ray, the man who murdered his friend, Martin Luther King, Jr. Campbell’s message was stripped of any pretense and required no vetting, contracts, or titles. The gap between sin and salvation was too small, or at least too hard to tell apart. The kin-dom of his God, a lowly Galilean, was infuriatingly inclusive, and because of this, the more he shared it, the more he himself was excluded. So goes the life of a bootleg preacher.

The Rev. Ralph David Abernathy with Will Campbell in 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, only hours after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The evening I get a call from the pastoral search team, I’m alone in my tiny apartment. Over several weeks, what began as an exchange of emails with the committee chair has turned into phone calls. Then, the phone calls become in-person, sit-down meetings.

“We’re going to recommend you to the congregation,” she says.

I get through the rest of the conversation, stammering my way through thank yous, and say goodbye.

I sink to the floor and weep. Part of me is relieved to be chosen, to be on a path that will take me away from the bland existence of shift work in factories. I want to get up; I want to call my fiancée and tell her the news. I want to call my parents and tell them Paw-paw was right, but I can’t. A weight as heavy as a cast-iron skillet keeps me from moving.

I study theology and church history. I read scripture in its original languages. I get educated. I learn lessons beyond what is taught in Sunday school. The exposure creates a chasm between me and the people I’m supposed to love. Old deacons say, “Don’t go to seminary, son. It will rob you of the faith. It will snuff out your fire.”

My fire, my faith, does get smaller, but it’s only because I’m aware that other burning bushes exist all around me.

Before leaving that church, the people there ordain me in the Baptist way. I kneel before the congregation, and they come forward to lay hands on me one by one. I feel some of them attempting to squeeze what they have of the Holy Ghost into me. When the service ends, they hand me a Bible and a paper with a dozen signatures, affirming my call to Gospel ministry. It’s the only credential I have hanging in my current church office. I look at it often and wonder if the names on it would sign it today.

Time passes. I’m with Don again, this time in a Waffle House. I tell him I think congregational ministry will be hard on me. He tells me he’s glad I’m figuring that out now.

From the 1970s on, Campbell continued to write, and his status as a shit-stirring folk hero grew. Stories about him would be told by all sorts of people. Southern writers like Walker Percy and John Egerton. Country music royalty such as Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, and Jessi Colter. Fellow ministers William Sloane Coffin and Billy Graham. And at least one president of the United States, Jimmy Carter. Accounts from these sources are well documented.

And then there are the others. Heard in contrarian circles from other venerated agitators. Tales of how Campbell was seen walking around the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in the early 1990s. This was during the Conservative Resurgence/Takeover, where moderate to progressive leadership within the convention was systematically removed from office. Campbell had long distanced himself from SBC life, claiming he was not a Southern Baptist but a Baptist who happened to be Southern. When approached and asked what in the world he was doing there, so out of his element, surrounded by fundamentalists, Campbell responded, “I’ve come to watch a denomination die.”

Or the anecdote about Brother Will stepping onto a stage to receive an award from a group he took to be “lukewarm” Baptists.

“I’m told I’m standing in the presence of a bunch of moderates,” Campbell says. The few chuckles are cut short when he clears his throat and spits off the side of the stage. It would seem Brother Will is a Biblical literalist, at least when it comes to Revelation 3:16.

He was a prophet for a South that desperately needed him then and could use more of him today.

Such actions would earn him praise, which he would spurn. Accolades would be extended to him, which he openly abhorred. Bring up anything resembling personal achievement, and he’d sidestep with the grace of a Spanish matador.

Will Davis Campbell released his spirit in the summer of 2013. He is remembered as a force of a nonconforming nature trapped in modest flesh. As an iconoclastic shaker of the status quo. A challenger of institutions. A critic of TV evangelists, labeling them “electronic soul molesters.” He was a prophet for a South that desperately needed him then and could use more of him today. A bloodhound who heard a whistle others couldn’t or refused to—a call to “be ye reconciled” to Maker and neighbor.

Why more people don’t know about Brother Will, I do not know.

I often wonder where the kinship I feel toward Brother Will comes from. I ask my spouse Lauren this question. She smirks and asks me, “What did you write on the application for that big scholarship a few years ago when you were in seminary? What was your answer to the question about what that money would allow you to do if they gave it to you?”

I told them it wouldn’t allow me to do anything other than what I’d planned to do. In so many words, I explained my vocational call would not be determined by any monetary means.

“And the time you looked at having your ordination recognized? How’d that go?” she asks.

When we first migrated to New England from North Carolina, I sat in front of a group of Baptist ministers from a tradition different than the one conferring my grassroots holy orders. They asked me why I thought I needed my ordination acknowledged by them. I told them I didn’t need it but thought it would be nice. When they asked me what I thought about why Jesus had to die to save humanity from God’s justifiable wrath, I paused before offhandedly saying, “I don’t. I don’t think about it one second because I don’t hold to a belief God would do such a horrible thing.” They weren’t surprised when I told them I didn’t see the Bible as being free of error. All parties left the meeting with smiles as empty as my grandmother’s cookie jar.

When they asked me what I thought about why Jesus had to die to save humanity from God’s justifiable wrath, I paused before saying, “I don’t. I don’t think about it one second because I don’t hold to a belief God would do such a horrible thing.”

Lauren nods. Before leaving the room, she says, “You secretly enjoy doing stuff like that.”

Why Will? I’m starting to believe we search for similar voices and seek pens that inspire us to use our own. Brother Will’s hands push my pencil and help me awkwardly pound on a keyboard. His life reminds me of why I don’t want a perfectly curated faith and why I’ll never be what many think a minister is supposed to be. He lets me know I’m not alone.

“Do all Baptists think like you?” The question comes from the choir director at my church. He’s young, passionate about music, and highly talented. I tell him what I think about a literal hell existing and why I don’t think any of us are going to end up there, because God’s scandalous love will not allow it.

“Do all Baptists think like you?”

“No, not all Baptists think like me,” I say.

Just some of them.

Preaching Politics During an Election Year

Stock Illustration (Credit: Comstock Images/ Canva/ http://tinyurl.com/yfhbj3bn)

This article was written for and originally published by Good Faith Media

Everywhere, there are signs. Signs in yards. Signs on faces.

Slogans plastered on hats. Flags are rippling in the wind.

A menagerie of memes is flooding social media feeds.

There is no escaping the buffet of bumper stickers bombarding my front windshield view whenever I go out. For some, I have to squint to read at stoplights. Others are so oversized I can see them from far away. Some read,

“We the People…have had enough!”
“I’ve Got Your Six” appears on top of a battle-tattered US flag.
“J6 Was An Inside Job” under the image of the Capitol Building.
“Don’t Believe The Liberal Media.”
“Don’t Tread On Trump,” printed in the infamous Gadsden coiled rattlesnake style.

An assortment of these and similar stickers can be found on vehicles with gas mileage ranging in the single digits, with oversized tires costing as much as rent.

Opposite the chest-pounding patriot mobiles, you have hybrids and EVs covered in enough decals to make a college freshman’s Hydra Flask water bottle blush. Along with the classic “Visualize Whirled Peas” I have seen,

“Stay Angry, Stay Woke.”
“Science Is Real.”
“Jesus Was A Liberal”
“Is That True Or Did You Hear It On Fox News?”

And finally, a rattlesnake shaped like a uterus pinned on a rainbow background with the words, “Don’t Tread On Me.”

Many may believe the drivers of these vehicles live in different times and worlds, their paths crossing only in philosophical theory or abstract math equations.

Let me burst your naive ruminating bubble. Because, as a pastor, I know either vehicle could be found next to each other in almost any church parking lot.

Navigating the polarization of these Divided States of America at any time is a challenge to ministers and faith leaders. However, during an election year, the air in a sanctuary gets as thin as a Colorado mountain range. Those sitting in pews are in a heightened, if not altered, state of political awareness.

This is why, if given the choice, I would rather go a few rounds with 57-year-old Mike Tyson than tiptoe through the next 11 months. I am sure my kidneys probably wouldn’t function properly after the former, but the latter promises to push my stress and anxiety levels to the breaking point. At least with Iron Mike, I know it’ll be over quickly.

Why the cause for alarm, this tightening in my chest?

On an individual level, I have this sick sense of familiarity, like I have done this before. I am in a horrific pipe dream, one that’s been going on for the last four years, has a bend and is a vicious circle. The ride isn’t ending; it is just starting over. 

This is on top of the depressing realization of being asked again to choose between emotionally detached political parties, one offering a candidate collecting indictments and allegations like they are McDonald’s Happy Meal toys, and the other, a cookie-cutter politician whose best quality is what he isn’t.

Ah, democracy. Or what’s left of it.

As a minister, I get a new bag of issues to sort through, beginning with the false presumption that, somehow, my pastoral credentials strip me of my freedom of conscience.

There is the unspoken expectation for a parson to stand before a congregation as an agreeable fixture, a reverend of reassurance, a trouble-free captain, not a boat rocker. An untouched and, better yet, unopinionated presence to the happenings of a world on fire.

Think of me as a holy hall monitor—positioned to fail while trying to ensure everyone plays nice together for an hour on Sunday.

I am sure this projection can be found and felt in many faith communities. Still, my experience has shown it burns white hot in White churches where comfort is prized, and a policy resembling the United States military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is preferred when it comes to anything considered politically divisive.

Blame it on sanctimony, guilt or just plain exhaustion. The institutional church has become synonymous with a place where difficult conversations go to die, where complacent peace is preferred to offset declining numbers.

There are exceptions to this rule. I know of churches and congregants who actively look, if not downright anticipate their ministers to address the numerous injustices caused by donkeys and elephants. War, death penalties and mass incarceration of minority groups continue to occur no matter who sits behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office.

How will clergy navigate the space between the pulpit and the ballot box?

Say too much, and people leave.

Say too little, and the other half will follow.

It’s a Kobayashi Maru to try to keep the steeple upright.

Clergy will have to decide how they will choose to lose an unwinnable situation.

While I don’t look forward to it, I will do what I’ve always done when accused of preaching politics—I politely remind my accusers as long as legislation negatively impacts the lives of people, most often the least of these, I will continue to rail against the empire and Caesar of my day—especially during an election year.

Even if it means making those around me squirm.

Me included.

Faith and passion for food in holy synergy: a review of “The Just Kitchen”

Photograph by Syd Wachs via Unsplash

This article was written for and orginally published by The Christian Citizen

Episcopal priest and agitator of all things holy, Barbara Brown Taylor, once wrote, “Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.”[i] I can testify to her ponderings.

I’ve cracked a shin, suffered a hockey-worthy hip check, and pinched several fingers on one such altar resting in the parsonage kitchen – a massive rolling tool cabinet.

My spouse and I picked up the hefty addition for the extra countertop and storage space in our first home in North Carolina. Lugging it around ever since, our industrial stand mixer, food processor, and other kitchen gadgets have either filled its drawers or sat upon its sleek wooden top.

When we landed in Connecticut, we petitioned a few extra sets of hands to help us squeeze it through the hallways and doors. Its wheels came to a halt right below a salvaged pot rack where a collection of Le Creuset and cast iron hangs with an admiration usually reserved for works found in the Louvre. Wrapping around the cookware, a dozen nails hold the vintage copper Jello molds, filling in the little wall space we have left.

Some might say it’s a lot to take in.

And I haven’t even mentioned the books yet.

A growing number of them have found a home on the top of the cabinet. Works range from well-known chefs turned authors to spiral-bound church cookbooks with dog-eared pages. All are lined up in no particular order.

I like to tell people it’s a living altar, meaning it changes, growing in its meaning and complexity. New pots, pans, and books become part of it regularly.

The Just Kitchen: Invitations to Sustainability, Cooking, Connection, and Celebration is the latest offering that’s made its way onto our family’s sanctum sanctorum. Its authors, Derrick Weston and Anna Woofenden, have created something original. The Just Kitchen isn’t really a cookbook, nor is it a call-to-action collection of essays urging the reader to join the Slow Food Movement or tackle broken food systems head-on (although all these are good ideas to come away with). Instead, Weston and Woofenden ask the reader to plant themselves in a kitchen, suggesting one’s time there is transformative. “What we discovered and what we share here,” Weston and Woofenden write, “is that our kitchens hold a lot more than food.”

The Just Kitchen isn’t really a cookbook, nor is it a call-to-action collection of essays urging the reader to join the Slow Food Movement or tackle broken food systems head-on (although all these are good ideas to come away with). Instead, the authors ask the reader to plant themselves in a kitchen, suggesting one’s time there is transformative.

While Weston and Woofenden act as co-chefs de cuisine, they invite various voices to join them. Co-conspirators and would-be sous chefs appear in each concept-driven chapter. Many of them have had a prior relationship with the authors through their Food and Faith podcast.

Folks like Nikki Cooley of the Diné (Navajo) Nation. Cooley shares her upbringing on a reservation and how her grandmothers taught her to cook over an open fire, making fry bread, in what she calls the cha cha, a small shack house. Author and podcaster Bruce Reyes-Chow describes his kitchen as sanctuary – a space that allows him to unwind and create.

The Rev. Emily Scott inspires in describing her dinner church, St. Lydia’s Kitchen in Brooklyn, New York, an experimental community that is “working together to dispel isolation, reconnect neighbors, and subvert the status quo.” Yours truly even makes a gracious appearance, preaching the gospel of biscuits and suggesting the kitchen is where people can taste memories.

Insights and personal stories from Weston and Woofenden are peppered throughout, guiding readers through their still-evolving views of kitchens. A reoccurring question appears often, asking contributors what gives them hope. Some of the responses are worthy of being tucked away in a recipe book for a cold and rainy day. And while I said The Just Kitchen isn’t really a cookbook, it has a helping of recipes ranging from red beans and rice to berengena guisada (stewed eggplant).

Finally, there is a liturgy at the end of every section. Weston and Woofenden are open about blending their faith and passion for food but don’t see this as a limitation to The Just Kitchen. “At times in this book, we use specifically Christian language, but we do so to illustrate truths we believe are universal.” The liturgies are one such example. Working more like inclusive invocations, I could see many of them being substituted as a blessing over a dinner table or escaping the lips of someone eating a cold piece of chicken in front of an open fridge, alone after a challenging workday.

It has been a few weeks since I worked my way through The Just Kitchen. I’m done reading it, but I’m not finished with it, and that’s why I placed it on the rolling cabinet. Be it my faith or Weston’s cherry bourbon recipe, I want that which nurtures and gives me life close at hand. Indulging in this liquid philosopher’s stone late one night, I leaned against my kitchen counter and soaked in the altar I’ve built and am still building. Squinting, I can just make out some of the names etched on book spines. Brock, Twitty, Lundy, and now, Weston and Woofenden. Along with Scott, Reyes-Chow, and Cooley, they are fellow workers and kindred spirits – every last one an altar builder in their own way.

I take a sip and mumble a prayer, the core of which counts myself lucky to be among them.

A Comfortable Deja Vu: Why Did I Enjoy Preaching To An Empty Sanctuary?

Stock Photo Illustration (Credit: Pastie/ Canva /http://tinyurl.com/ye225yrc)

This article was written for and originally published by Good Faith Media

Growing up in the shadows of the Appalachian Mountains, the possibility of snow during mid-winter was strong. If not snow, then the threat of an unpredictable ice storm from the deeper recesses of the South. Moving up with a vengeance, like a Mike Tyson uppercut, knocking out power and leaving tree branches and power lines sagging.

During those times, rumbling road treatment trucks would hit the streets, working frantically. Throwing as much salt on the pavement as a country cook does on a Sunday supper. 

All other life and activity came to a screeching halt. Schools were canceled, businesses closed, and while my family wasn’t the steeple-going type, I remember churches followed suit. The gates of hell might not overcome God’s kin-dom, but an inch of frozen water slowed it down.

I was in for a surprise when my family and I moved to Vermont in 2019. Bumping up against Canada, we saw heavy, wet, soft snow a few days before Halloween, our first year there. 

And it never went away. 

The temperature stayed at a frigid meat locker level. Snow was plowed, pushed to the side, and remained present through late March or early April. Life did not stop; it plunged on. 

Wood fireplaces billowed smoke constantly, snow blowers came out of garages and shovels removed packed layers of white flakes around mailboxes. If it didn’t get moved, your mail didn’t come.

Businesses and schools operated as usual. I asked a homegrown parishioner if the six to eight inches would cause a delay in our daughter’s daycare schedule. He scoffed, grinned, and said, “Not for this. It’s just a dusting.”

Likewise, the ritual of Sunday mornings remained unphased. The idea of axing a service over snow was laughable.

And then, in March 2020, the pandemic hit us harder than a wintery nor’easter ever could.

We joined many other faith communities in closing our doors. Those first few weeks were rough—recorded Zoom videos produced in the parsonage library. 

Much of it ended up on the cutting room floor before any sort of groove was hit. Finally, with six feet of recommendations and masks at the ready, I delivered my first of many sermons to an empty sanctuary.

Nothing in seminary prepared me for that moment. No previous experience helped me figure out what I was supposed to do. I felt like a lost contestant on the “Great British Baking Show.” Unsure of my next step, I glanced around at other ministers, hoping to find a clue on what to do.

Churches closed during this time, some permanently. Many pastors joined the Great Resignation. 

Like me, those who came out on the other side did so spiritually limping. As months passed and COVID cases dropped, I hobbled out of Vermont and into Connecticut to accept a new call.

I often thought about how the last three years felt like a lucid dream gone wrong. People ask, “What was the hardest part?” 

Before, I thought those weeks upon weeks of sitting in a silent sanctuary was what broke me. I don’t hold to this belief anymore. Something happened recently, leading me into my cellar of memories to sift through all things labeled “pandemic.”

The revelation began with a snowstorm.

Connecticut is Southern New England, meaning they have four seasons. While they are light years ahead of most states south of Maryland in snowstorm preparation, they aren’t Vermont. 

This means you might get a school delay or closure if the Doppler radar fills up with too many “pink and blue” blips. This was the case two weeks ago.

A foot of snow was projected for Sunday. Church leadership and I kept an eye on the weather. 

By late Thursday evening, we knew we would err on the side of caution and cancel services. The decision was easy as we knew we could record a service to upload online. I contacted the necessary folks, and we scheduled a meeting the next day.

When the time came, we gathered in the sanctuary, reviewed the order of service and took our positions. Sitting behind the pulpit, I waited for the organ prelude to end. With the last notes rising to the bell tower, I rose and stared out to an empty sanctuary, preparing myself for a trauma-inducing deja vu-like flashback.

None came.

In fact, it didn’t feel weird at all. The longer I preached, the more I sort of liked it. By the time I offered those at home the chance to grab whatever elements they had on hand to join me in Communion, I was full-on embracing the self-imposed isolation again. 

What was happening to me? Or a better question, what happened to me during the pandemic?

It’s difficult to pin down, but something shifted in me during those bare sanctuary preaching sessions. A change, a mutation, in how I approach what I do as a minister— transforming me through the brutal, raw and freeing aspect of not having to show up and just keep turning the same old cranks. 

The stale playbook of Sunday morning expectancy was thrown out the window. Church felt different because it looked, sounded, and was different. Being alone in an empty sanctuary again, I felt the absence of inspiration more than the absence of bodies, and I missed not having it.

When Sunday came, I awoke to a barely visible sun. Its shimmering was noticeable from behind ghostly transparent gray clouds. Instead of grabbing a dress shirt and jacket out of the closet, I was hopping in my bibs, wrangling the kids, and pulling out the sled from the back of the garage. 

As hard as it might be to believe, the world didn’t stop when the clock struck 10:00 am, and I wasn’t behind a pulpit. No, it spun on without me. God ringing in a new day like she always does.

Outside, in the throes of making a snowman, I thought churches and their ministers could use more days like this. Snow covers all the places and landmarks we think we know. 

It strips an area of its identity, burying the details, and allows us to see past expectations. Not seeing what’s there helps us see what could be there.

Just like an empty sanctuary.

Maybe we could use more of those, too.

I never felt more Baptist

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

This article was written for and originally published by The Christian Citizen

I have a closet in the corner of my office. I’m inclined to believe most pastors do. On the top of it is a container filled with Duplos. Resting beside the building blocks is an original Lite-Brite.

Plastered all over the outside are drawings from my oldest daughter. Her artwork showcases the leaps of her fine motor skills. Her pictures, paintings, and handprints constantly clarify to me who she’s becoming. Lastly, a long mirror covers one of the doors. Sometimes, when I’m stressed, I look in the mirror for answers. The guy staring back rarely has any.

Tucked away inside the closet is a menagerie of items rarely used. A small washtub for foot washing. There’s a pair of well-worn boots and a neon green yoga mat that has never been unfurled. At eye level, a wooden bar supports several hangers. On them are a couple of cozy sweaters, including a Mister Rogers-style cardigan. Going down the line, a few pieces of academic regalia. And, finally, a plain black cassock with a smattering of stoles tucked around the neck. These vestments are a collection of what I rightly label as comfortably cumbersome.

You see, for me, a low church-grassroots loving sort of preacher, the robes and stoles rarely see the light of day. Sure, I’ll suit up for Lent, Advent, or what others might call the higher holier days. And, in the case of a wedding or funeral, I always ask the family if they’d prefer I wear the more formal attire. Out of courtesy, I respectfully bend the knee.

But here’s the deal: I just don’t possess the wherewithal to know when and when not to wear hallowed garments. You see, my upbringing in institutional religious communities was, shall we say, limited. Even growing up in the Southern Bible belt, all things church were more peripheral; my experiences were shaped by sporadic Vacation Bible School attendance and the once-a-year Moravian Lovefeast service my family flocked to around Christmas time. Not hard to imagine then that I simply never developed an image of what a minister was supposed to look like, or more precisely, what they were supposed to wear. Collars? Cloaks? All an ensemble, a costume I never felt the need to mimic when I accepted a call to work in congregational ministry.

As fate or providence would have it, maybe that’s why I landed in the stream of Christian faith I have. While it took some time to profess it, my identity as a follower of the lowly Galilean is exercised through my identity as a Baptist. Now, the term Baptist is as broad as it is at times problematic. There are a slew of folks who claim the moniker—some of whom I know I can greet in a liquor store, and some who would stone me if they saw me there. While the group comes in all different flavors, one of the primary ties that bind us is the concept of freedom. A mentor once told me that if you want to correctly spell Baptist, you spell it F-R-E-E-D-O-M. From the most progressive to the most fundamental, all Baptists cling to the fragile Bible, Soul, Church, and Religious Freedoms.

Walter B. Shurden gets a fair amount of credit for naming these Baptist pillars. Still, if I could make a small addendum to his famous book, I’d tack on the freedom of attire and self-expression. This is why you might find a Baptist minister in a robe on Sunday morning or a pair of overalls, perhaps even an apron. I’ve worn all three and openly confess to finding more meaning in the latter two. None has an edge in helping me feel like a minister more than the other.

Of course, I know other individuals and traditions that place significant importance and prestige on attire and vestments. I’m fortunate to know and work with clergy peers who absolutely enjoy, value, and treasure their priestly uniforms. I was reminded of this fact recently when I received an invitation to participate in an ordination service for a fellow minister. 

I arrived early to their church, wearing black jeans, Doc Martens, a striped short-sleeve shirt, and an inky unisex dress jacket. The thought of bringing my seldom-used cassock never crossed my mind. I did have enough sense to grab my red stole, a reversible one oozing classiness. However, as the other ministers filed in, I realized I was dressed for the wrong sort of party.

Intimidating-sized traveling bags were flung over my ministry peers’ shoulders. After being unzipped, I saw they were full of stark white robes. Springing forth next came an exhibition of intricately designed polychromatic stoles. Some displayed images of rising flames accompanying a host of Holy Spirit doves. Others came with cincture at the ready, tying knots that would put any Eagle Scout to shame. I knew I should have read the invitation closer when I spotted one gentleman coming through the parking lot supporting a staff which would have made Tolkien’s Balrog of Moria think twice.

As the ministers and others more revered than me lined up for the processional, I was afraid the wielder of the impressive walking stick would bar my entrance into the sanctuary with his own rendition of the wizard Gandalf’s famous line “You Shall Not Pass!” Be it mercy or pity, I was permitted inside.

Now, let me tell you, from the start, the service was beautiful. It was, to me, the epitome of what I understand to be high church. It was dignified, possessing an air of sophistication I rarely rub elbows with. The flow was orderly and scripted. It was layered with solid liturgy, including the part of the candidate’s charge to accept the responsibilities of their call to ministry; the presiding bishop asked them to affirm the authority of Scripture and the Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds. Before I could ask, “What’s a creed?” I surveyed the room and decided not to.

And for those next couple of hours, I don’t believe I’ve ever felt more like a Baptist.

This recognition of my dissenting, non-conforming faith and how I choose to live it out warmed my heart more than a warm cup of soup on a cold New England day. Witnessing what I wasn’t helped me name yet again who I am.

Later that afternoon, I placed my red stole back in the closet, securing it away until I need it again. Thankful how it works for some but not for others. Thankful I caught another glimpse of how big the kingdom of God can be.

The greatest Christmas hymn ever written

Singers Kirsty MacColl and Shane MacGowan with with toy guns and an inflatable Santa in a festive scenario, circa 1987. In 1987, the pair collaborated on the Pogues' Christmas song 'Fairytale of New York'. (Photo by Tim Roney/Getty Images)

This article was written for and originally published by Baptist News Global

Sitting on the floor Christmas morning in my bright red Union suit, I brace myself for the forthcoming onslaught of ripped wrapping paper at the hands of two small children. The kids already have found Santa’s presents resting beside the fireplace. Cries of ecstasy with arms raised to the heavens display the newly acquired toy they couldn’t possibly live without.

It’s a scene opposite of the biblical wailing and gnashing of teeth. Cheer and childlike wonder fill the room like smoke rising in a chimney. If one more Santa-infused spark occurs, I’m afraid my children will spontaneously combust out of pure joy.

During the fray, my spouse and I take the time to exchange our own gifts and sort through stockings. The kids eventually move on to the boxes and bags from grandparents, aunts and uncles. An elfin present from my sister, who lives back in my home state of North Carolina, finds its way into my hands. I tear open the packaging to find a black shirt with a light silhouette of a man with a ponytail playing a saxophone. Under the graphic in bold letters, it says, “I Still Believe.”

My sister and I get each other the way two people growing up in the same house only can. The shirt is in reference to one of our favorite 1980s cult classic horror movies. The outlined figure is a man by the name of Tim Capello. A talented musician whose career saw him support acts like those of Tina Turner, he also made a brief cameo in the movie we both enjoy, a scene in which he belts out the lyrics, “I still believe!” before riffing on his sax.

The expression “I still believe” is appropriate, dare I be so bold to say prophetic, for the Christmas season (and yes, I’m referring to the 12 days after December 25). As a Baptist, I’m always looking for something or someone to confess anew or bless out. Seeking a space where all mortal flesh is silent so I might collect my thoughts, I slip out of the living room to grab a second cup of coffee. Mid-pour, I start imagining the people, traditions and those fragile small “t” truths I still declare to believe in.

“Witnessing what I am this morning, … I still believe the spirit of Christmas is alive and well.”

Witnessing what I am this morning, watching my children’s faces light up like the exterior of Clark Griswold’s home, I still believe the spirit of Christmas is alive and well.

With my sister’s gift in hand, I still believe The Lost Boys is the greatest vampire movie ever made.

And reaching for a treat on the counter, I still believe cookies consumed in the name of Saint Nicholas of Myra hold neither calories nor shame.

Our kitchen is a space filled with as much music as smells, and so this morning, while still compiling a list in my head, I queued up a playlist of choice tunes. Immediately, a gentle piano intro fills my ears and reminds me why I still believe the Pogues and their front man Shane MacGowan’s “Fairy Tale of New York” is the greatest Christmas song/hymn ever written — sacred or otherwise.

MacGowan and his music have been on my mind since his passing almost a month ago. In some regards, his end seemed long overdue for a man who appeared to squeeze every last drop out of life through a series of famous escapades and debauchery-driven shenanigans. Yet, like Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, MacGowan appeared to possess a slippery spirit death never could get a firm bone-clutching grip on. A life filled with too many late nights, mixed with too many intoxicating indulgences, seemed to grant him a level of immunity — for a time at least.

Born under a rebellious star on Christmas Day 1957, MacGowan is believed to be the lord and savior of Irish folk music. During the 1980s and 1990s, he merged the genre with the confrontational counter-cultural message of the punk scene, bringing generations of nonconforming listeners together. Such a feat earned him praise in his beloved Tipperary and worldwide. His unabashed pride for his people, their history and his songwriting ability secured an endearment still rippling 30 years later well beyond the coasts of the Emerald Isle.

“A crooner he was not — his style more of troubled troubadour.”

MacGowan’s lyrics, voice and delivery were filled with imperfections and grit. A crooner he was not — his style more of troubled troubadour. Simplistic, beautiful and never boring. Listening to him belt out “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” “Dirty Old Town” and “The Old Main Drag” is a cure for the overconsumption of the inadequate.

Arguably, the Pouges’ most successful commercial single, “Fairy Tale of New York,” is a Shakespearean tragedy set to the distinct sounds of tin whistle and accordion. The song is a back-and-forth between MacGowan and the late Kirsty MacColl, who provided the other half of the vocals. The duet retraces a couple’s passionate beginnings in the Big Apple and ensuing troubles that leave them on hard times. The song opens with MacGowan behind bars in a New York City drunk tank, surrounded by other characters who, like himself, have cast off the last remnants of anything resembling refinement.

It was Christmas Eve, babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won’t see another one
And then he sang a song
The Rare Old Mountain Dew
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you

The story goes on to describe the fragileness of a couple who are interdependent on one another. They experience extreme highs but slowly begin amassing a banquet of bitterness incapable of being patched up. In their way, they appear to love to the detriment of self. This isn’t your light-hearted “All I Want for Christmas” jingle. This story has real issues, feelings and lives at stake. The vulnerability of it all moves me more than Mariah Carey’s offering ever could.

As the couple regretfully recalls how they’ve grown apart, MacGowan unleashes, “I could have been someone.” To which MacColl quips back:

Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you

What comes next is where I get all choked up in the feels. MacGowan comes back with:

I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can’t make it all alone
I’ve built my dreams around you

The cynic, the Ebenezer Scrooge in me, wants to say this is just a parting shot. An attempt at having the last word and shaming a scorned lover. However, the hopeful romantic in me coaxed out of hiding every Christmas season wants to believe the words are heartfelt. Sure, what this duo is singing about is awful. They are next to empty, emotionally trapped by one another, no longer the persons they used to be before their paths crossed. Hell, I’m not above calling their relationship manipulative and toxic.

The song could end there, the two going separate ways, but it doesn’t. A final chorus promises a small but hopeful outcome.

The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing Galway Bay
And the bells are ringing out
For Christmas day

“Galway Bay,” a song about returning to Ireland, references a chance to go back to what was good and pure. A fresh start. Restoring the magic of what made their young love special. A fleeting, imperfect but genuine adoration of each other.

Call the dark times Christmas Eve in a drunk tank.

Call them a dark night of the soul.

The point is Christmas Day is coming, the bells will ring out and everyone, no matter their previous night or life’s circumstances, gets a chance through sheer volition to start again.

If that’s not a hopeful message worthy of being spread to shepherds in their fields, sought after by wise men and extended to prisoners in their cells, I don’t know what is.

Call it what you will, but it’s the kind of song I like to listen to this time of year.

One with the type of Christmas message I still believe in.

Taking stock of the life I lead

Photo by Herrmann Stamm on Unsplash

This article was written for and originally published by The Christian Citizen

Many of us have a nonchalant tendency to shrug off the concept of time. I have been guilty of this practice. Offering little more than a wince when another year around the sun finds me sitting in front of a birthday cake, wondering where the days go and why my furrowed brow has an extra line to match the additional candle on my multilayer gateau. Sure, the passing of hours can be taken or abandoned. Still, as the years crash unexpectedly into me, I’m prone to think time is marked by highs and lows.

This thought jolted me recently. After pulling into the driveway and checking the mailbox, I discovered a letter from a former student. This letter was a formal invitation, complete with images of him and a young woman wrapped in a youthful embrace of love and future hope. As I entered the house, I showed my spouse the “save the date” card. For the next several minutes, we calculate how long it has been, substituting memories for numbers. We realize that the boy we knew is now a young man on the precipice of a significant life transition.

I take the announcement and, with the help of a magnet, snap it securely onto the front of the fridge. It rests there between local food menus and artwork supplied by our oldest. Now, when I’m in the kitchen (which is very often), this correspondence stares back at me whenever I fetch cream for the coffee or the bacon drippings for the biscuits. Each time the refrigerator door opens, I think of this young man and our time together. I think of the highs and lows of congregational ministry.

I thought about those Wednesday night meals, where I sometimes sat with his family.

I thought about the youth group he was part of and the discussions we had about faith. Chasing rabbit after rabbit down the next hole, I thought about other students during that same time. Those who kept me going and affirmed me more than an ordination council ever could.

I thought about Katie.

In a season of life where I need reminding that God can move in profound ways, I’m thankful for the highs that a card in the mail can spark. I’m grateful for the people I’ve met who are out there questioning. And I’m thankful for time, a constructed fabrication or not, as it forces me to pause and take stock of the life I get to lead.

It was a typical Wednesday evening, and for several weeks, Katie, the rest of the youth group, and I flirted with the subject of reconciliation. On this particular night, we were exploring reconciliation through the means of creation. When I say this, I’m speaking of the all-encompassing kind of creation as birds, fish, trees, and flowers. You know, the type of stuff Wendell Berry writes about, including humanity.

What is reconciliation with creation actually for? The students and I concluded that God wants us to actively participate in creation. God creates and has instilled in us the desire to create as well. This relationship establishes a “co-creating process” between God and all things.

During the conversation, the terms “stewardship” and “dominion” came up. When the students started discussing the idea of dominion, they associated it with ruling or having authority over something. The more they shared, the more I sensed a negative connotation with dominion. Point taken, but what about stewardship?

They struggled here. It’s a churchy word. Most understood it as to watch over something or to keep an eye on it. Because we had played a game earlier that evening involving a small shoe box, thinking on the fly, I picked up the box, walked over to Katie, and tossed the box at her.

“Look after this. Take care of it,” I said.

Thinking this was a sufficient stewardship answer, I prepared for the conversation to keep moving. However, when I turned my back, I heard a noise. There was a small boom, and I reeled to discover Katie kicking the box away from herself.

Now, students don’t need a reason to do anything. Hell, most adults don’t either. How many times have you asked someone why they did something, and their response was, “I don’t know? I just did it”? Of course, I had to ask her what the issue was, and that’s where things got interesting.

“Why’d you kick the box?” I asked as other students laughed.

“You didn’t tell me how to take care of it,” Katie said.

It was a smart-ass answer with a heavy dose of critical thinking.

It caught me totally by surprise, but only for a second.

I picked up a Bible from a nearby table and grabbed the box to hand to her.

“Let’s try this again. Take care of this box. Here’s a book that tells you how.” I turned to walk away when I heard the same boom of her kicking the box.

“You didn’t tell me how I was supposed to read this,” she said.

This was a special moment. I knew right then that it was, maybe not for everyone in the room, but something was happening.

I picked the box back up and began talking to the entire group about what we had just discussed—our ideas, and our definitions of dominion and stewardship.

“Dominion looks like this,” I repeated, handing her the box and the Bible and asking her again to take care of it and use the book. Promptly, she kicked it. I had a small pen in my hand, and I lightly tapped her on the head with it.

“Wrong. Try it again,” I said.

We repeated the entire scene. Me charging her with the task, her kicking the box, me rapping her lightly on the head. By now, I had most of the group’s attention.

“Now, let’s try it this way.” I picked up the box and took the Bible from her. Instead of standing over her as I’d been doing, I sat “crisscross applesauce” beside her.

“Hey, Katie, this box I have here is significant. I really care about what happens to it. I want to give it to you with the hope that you’ll care about it too. I’ve got this book here, which might help you learn how to take care of it. This book can help you see how I interact with the box, but it’s not exhaustive. Do you know what that means? It means there are some gray areas in there that you’ll have to figure out and work through yourself. It means you get to create how you take care of the box, too, based on how you’ve seen me do it. There’s room for error, so don’t feel you have to do it perfectly. I just want to know that you care and try. Cool?”

She took the box, and when I stood up and moved away, I didn’t hear any “boom.”

In a season of life where I need reminding that God can move in such profound ways, I’m thankful for the highs that a card in the mail can spark. I’m grateful for the people like Katie who are out there questioning. And I’m thankful for time, a constructed fabrication or not, as it forces me to pause and take stock of the life I get to lead.

Jack Tales: Remembering Jack Causey

Image Credit - Baptist News Global

This artcile was written for and originally published by Baptist News Global

Growing up in Southern Appalachia, I was reared on what the mountain and foothill people called Jack Tales. Stories involving a young protagonist who finds himself in a world that sounds familiar but is filled with the unfamiliar.

Jack’s adventures drew the exceptional out of the places where his feet would tread, coming in contact with giants, witches and wild animals in need of subduing for the glory of a king. On summer nights, I would lay in bed beside my Great Aunt Minnie as she’d recite Jack’s doings.

Years would pass before I learned these stories were written down and collected in numerous books. And while I appreciate all manner of written words, the Jack I knew wasn’t limited to the space between a dust jacket; he thrived in the oral tradition. Where his escapades could be heard in the voice of another. That’s where Jack truly came alive to me.

Years later, I would meet another Jack who would do the same.

I heard stories about Jack Causey before I met him. His presence made its way down Highway 421 into Eastern North Carolina toward Campbell University, where I was dipping my toes into the Cape Fear River and congregational ministry. His name was one of many bombarding me as I prepared to attend my first gathering of Cooperative Baptists.

My introduction to the Fellowship and the sort of Baptists who called it home starkly contrasted with those I knew growing up. Those preachers and pandering prophets who would work their blood pressure up to a boiling point during a sermon and whose faces would match the red carpet in the sanctuary. I didn’t know Baptists could be anything else.

Along came Jack. Our paths first crossed in a hallway, someone guiding my attention and hand into his affable sphere. We exchanged pleasantries, and I couldn’t help but notice how different we must have looked beside one another. I in my burgundy fedora and black ensemble. Supporting a bushy beard, chain wallet and tattoos.

My appearance was loud, abrasive and certainly not the norm. A black sheep in the fold if ever there was one, but Jack didn’t seem to mind; he held my handshake like an old friend. Like he expected to see me there.

“My grandfather would have described Jack as being no bigger than a cake of soap after a week of washing.”

My grandfather would have described Jack as being no bigger than a cake of soap after a week of washing. I thought the same, too, but was caught off guard as soon as he spoke. A prominent, looming voice erupted from such a bijou frame. One as smooth and alluring as a radio disc jockey.

I kept waiting for him to tell me I was the 10th caller and winner of a pair of tickets to a show at the Orange Peel. Holding his gaze, he looked the seasoned pastor. A steam-pressed suit to accompany a meticulously tied tie, a uniform that usually would have left me skeptical. Yet he permeated a pastoral presence. I wanted to confide the personal five minutes after meeting him.

I took him up on that unspoken offer the following morning when I filed into a large conference room with other young clergy and questioning seminarians to discuss our foggy futures. Jack’s wisdom and practical advice would fill me up better than the meager continental breakfast that day.

As things were winding down, I talked with him one-on-one about my next steps. Listing my concerns about stepping down as a youth minister at my then-current church to move to Winston-Salem to attend Wake Forest School of Divinity. He listened more than he spoke, letting me pour out my uncertainty. When I grew quiet, he finally chimed in, citing names, connections and resources wrapped in a warm smile, conveying it would all be OK. It was the kind of prayer I needed.

“He listened more than he spoke, letting me pour out my uncertainty.”

Jack was right; things did turn out OK. In the coming months, my path crossed with leadership at First Baptist Church of Statesville, and I interviewed for the position of minister to students. Shortly after, I drove up to meet the congregation during a Wednesday night meal. There, in between the welcomes I was receiving, I heard a chummy voice calling my name. Looking up, I spotted Jack.

“Dr. Causey, what in the world are you doing here,” I said, surprised.

“Oh, I wouldn’t have missed this for anything,” he said.

He introduced me to his spouse, Mary Lib, and we chatted another minute or two before he stepped aside to allow a growing number of eyebrow-raised parents to have their chance at putting me through an inquisition. Soon enough, I’d find out from others about Jack’s tenure at FBC Statesville and how he led the congregation through the controversy of the fundamentalist takeover in Southern Baptist life.

During the three years I served the people there, countless parishioners and members of other faith communities would regale me with stories of a man who never seemed eager to talk about himself. I saw this firsthand.

Jack surprised me one morning by popping into my office to invite me to lunch. Sitting down at a high-top table, we passed condiments and stories back and forth while we tried to figure out the most acceptable way to down the massive hotdogs we ordered. He told me of his life before Statesville — when we weren’t wiping chili and gobs of mustard off our faces. I heard about his stints in South Carolina and my old debauchery stomping grounds of Greensboro.

As the lunch window stretched, our conversation turned almost entirely to me. Jack, tossing out those big open-ended questions, bidding me to open up like a fine wine, I spilled a hefty amount of my journey all over that table. Jack would nod, laugh and affirm me that day in a way only a person with a big heart for others can.

“Jack would nod, laugh and affirm me that day in a way only a person with a big heart for others can.”

With an early afternoon beginning to slip away, we prepared to depart from one another. Insisting on paying for my lunch, I lost the battle to my undersized opponent in getting the check. Victorious in my defeat, he scooted his chair back, telling me as he did for what must have been the 20th time, “Justin, I’m just so happy you’re here in Statesville.”

I’ve lived long enough to know when a string of words is hollow. When an expression slips past the tongue like a reflex, with little thought or care put behind it. I may not have known Jack long then, but I was sure as hell of one thing as I waved goodbye to him and headed to my car: He meant what he said. I could take his words to the bank.

Over the next few years, I was privy to a few more hotdog sit-downs. Other times, I’d come in to find Jack talking with the senior minister’s secretary or another staff member. Some days, I’d come around a hall corner and think he must have just left because the air seemed a tad lighter and tasted sweeter.

His dynamism of spirit seemed a permanent fixture in the building and not a lingering ghost invoked by others to keep things as they’d always been. Not every minister can give such a gift to those who follow them. Especially one granted the title of pastor emeritus.

When I left Statesville to accept a senior pastor position in Vermont, a piece of Jack tagged along with me. The Jack and Mary Lib Causey Scholarship provided me aid when I sought support to obtain my doctor of ministry degree.

Jack’s reach, not only to me but to so many like me, I’m sure, is more expansive than I’ll ever know. Voices describing their own “Jack Tales.” Told by those who knew him well and those like me who were lucky to be known by him.

I thought of such things on the morning when I heard of his passing. I thought, too, of my last year in Statesville and those Wednesday night meals where he and Mary Lib became a set of faces I could count on seeing in the church’s Fellowship Hall.

And I can remember, on more than one instance, finding myself behind him, waiting in line to be served. Leaning over his shoulder, I’d tell him, “Jack, you know, I’m just so happy you’re here in Statesville.”

I hope he knew just how much I meant it.

Used Dishes: A Thanksgiving Story

Photograph by Stacy Reece

This article was written and originally published by Salvation South

Here in the industrial kitchen, the food is piling up.

The deep commercial fridge is stuffed with fowl, and the countertops are close to bending under the weight of a mountain’s worth of rustic potatoes. Several bodies weave around me and one another. Between the clangs of pots and pans, shouts of Behind! and Corner! and Make it again! waft up into the ethereal plane and mix with the steam coming off the transport trays.

There’s no executive chef here, no chef de cuisine. Yet, there is a leader, a first among equals. I know this because he barks a little louder and demands a little more. He glances to ensure the vegetables are cut into a one-inch dice and double-checks the labor of those on peeling duty. He picks and tosses misshapen yeast rolls that aren’t up to snuff. While his hand might seem heavy, it carries the weight it does because he cares. He wants to serve people good food. He also understands that the kitchen is a wilderness: both angels and demons live there. With so much heat and popping oil, you need a level of order. Someone has to make sure that the cave you’re mining for culinary gold doesn’t collapse into chaos. You need a fellow like him in the back of the house.

Out in the Fellowship Hall, tablecloths and seasonal napkins fit the festive theme. Centerpieces and cutlery are positioned with a precision that even the most anal of engineers would sign off on. A place for everything and everything in its place. Front-of-house volunteers buzz, performing last-minute duties. Looking up, their welcomes and hellos are as inviting as hot apple pies. They embody hospitality.

Off to the side, I keep my head down and continue prepping the butternut squash. This is my second year helping with this meal, my second year as the minister of this church in Connecticut, and my second pastorate in New England after serving a congregation in Vermont for three years. As a Baptist who is Southern, but not a Southern Baptist, I still struggle to find my place in the culture of New England Yankeeland.

This means I do a fair amount of watching and listening, and right now, my greenhorn presence is soaking in what has occurred for decades—a faith community coming together, playing host, and giving thanks before breaking bread. To these people, this meal is just as sacred as the one in the sanctuary where communion is served. In old tongues, this sort of banquet was called “dinner on the grounds”—an event possessing a robust ritualistic power, signaling the appreciation of warmer days ahead, or in this case, a harvest festival calling for a time of rest as the days grow shorter and the nights stretch out like the agitated back of a stray tomcat.

Growing up, I never left without a host extending the offer, “Honey, now make sure you make yourself a plate to take home.” Usually they followed this with, “And make one for your Mama (or Daddy), too.”

People arrive early. They tend to do this when delicious food awaits. Familiar faces alongside the ones returning from a time before my time, coming home to be with family. Flocking like disciples to the shrine of moist dressing and tangy cranberry sauce, they embrace one another as they line up with stomachs expecting to taste nostalgia. For the main course, they will come forward to be served. Desserts, however, require a more hands-on approach. People like the freedom to slice their own petite sliver or overly large chunk of pumpkin pie. A table full of sweets is where they embrace decadence and tell moderation to get behind them, like Satan.

The servers fall into a formation so tight it’s like Nick Saban himself made the call, and the room goes quiet. A hand motions for me to come forward so I can bless a spread that will surely put most in this room into a coma. I haven’t even thanked the kitchen crew yet, but heads are already bowing. Taking in one last look before I close my eyes, I realize this is how my new congregation feeds one another.

As a minister and amateur gourmand, how people choose to feed you is their way of telling you how to feed them in return. Every place is different, but if you stick around long enough, folks will show you how they eat. They have easily seen markers, glowing soft like a front porch light, calling you to come forward so you can find out who you're dealing with.

In my South, one of those markers was the “to-go plate.”

It didn’t matter if it was a family get-together or a friend’s cookout, growing up I never left without a host extending the offer, “Honey, now make sure you make yourself a plate to take home.” Usually they followed this with, “And make one for your Mama (or Daddy), too.” This parting salutation I counted upon, I knew was coming, as much as I did the “Get home safe,” which finally granted me permission to leave. They made sure I didn’t leave hungry by making sure I didn’t exit without an extra hunk of country ham, half a dozen or more deviled eggs, and a sinful amount of chocolate trifle stuffed onto a Styrofoam plate. The people of my raising and nurturing, blood kin and kin alike, instilled this source of grace in me—a cup, or in this case a plate, that overfloweth. A piece of them went with me when I departed their presence.

But we landed in our new surroundings right before the end of the known world. Only nine months of strangers becoming neighbors zipped past before we masked up and promised to stay six feet away from each other.

I am grateful for, and downright blame, these same people for condemning me to a life of planning menus for twelve guests when I know only six have RSVP’d.

The thought of those people, grandparents, uncles, and cousins who aren’t real cousins, is where my mind goes as I begin to pray over this meal in the fellowship hall of my Connecticut church.

What happens when a minister asks for all eyes closed and every head turned down? Nothing and everything. I call out to the divine mystery, trying to summon through oratory that which is seen through a glass darkly, if seen at all. My voice grows bold, pounding at the liminal space between the sacred and secular before it tapers off into a whisper. Silence hangs, and I find myself praying for people who are not in the room with me. Those children of God who have helped me realize the beauty of belonging and the welcoming warmth of grace. Faces associated with a time where I felt I could taste thankfulness in the contents of a casserole dish.

Rolling off the hills of Appalachia, my family traded the sight of Pilot Mountain for the Green Mountains. The opportunity to head to the Northeast presented itself late one night during my last semester of seminary at Wake Forest School of Divinity. While lifting up prayers of lament straight from the book of Psalms for our then infant daughter to go to sleep, my spouse, Lauren, rocked her gently in our large purple La-Z-Boy recliner. Just a few feet away on the couch, in between my own acts of pleading and supplication, I doomscrolled and checked email. During one upward swipe, a newsletter appeared containing, of all things, a list of ministry job openings. I glanced over the positions, until my eyes landed on a description of a church in Lincoln, Vermont. With prayers answered and the baby asleep, I whispered to Lauren what I had just read.

“Sounds nice, right? What do you think? Should I send them something?”

Unlike some of my fellow seminarians, I was fortunate to have a job already—working as an associate minister to youth and their families at a healthy congregation in a nearby North Carolina town. While conversations were taking place about making my position full time come graduation, nothing was set in stone. On top of this, I was discerning too if my time in youth ministry was ending. Looking at Lauren and the babe that night, I knew weeklong summer camps and overnight church lock-ins were not in my future plans.

“Can’t hurt,” she said back. “I know as a musician you audition for everything. It’ll be a good experience for you, regardless.”

“So, I’ve been dropping off food to people, and everyone keeps sending me stuff back. Yesterday, I took Elenor a piece of pecan pie, and today, she brought back my plate with a Costco bag of pecans! Am I missing something?”

Let this be a fair warning to anyone bold, or foolish, enough to step out and into the flowing river of faith—you could unexpectedly find yourself in the land of New England.

Our transition from the South to the Northeast wasn’t easy. My knowledge of Vermont was next to nothing. Outside of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, Bernie Sanders, and the fictional location of the film Super Troopers, I was clueless about the place that was to be our future home. A move of this size brings all sorts of challenges even in the best of times. But we landed in our new surroundings right before the end of the known world. Only nine months of strangers becoming neighbors zipped past before we masked up and promised to stay six feet away from each other. Our relationships just grazed the surface like stones skipped across a pond. Yet, I was called to serve them and learn to care for them in the best way I could. As fate would have it, that turned into feeding them. I wasn’t prepared for what they would teach me by feeding me back.

We slowly adjusted to living in an old farmhouse turned parsonage. Feeling it out and grudgingly allowing the quirks of the narrow stairwell and scalding hot water to grow on us. The parsonage would turn out to be the least of our worries. Those first few months of being in a new place and away from my home in North Carolina were like a negroni, bitter and sweet. Bitter in coming to terms with my pastoral call not being what I signed up for, and sweet in discovering I enjoyed spending early mornings and late nights in the kitchen rolling out pie dough and making chicken stock. My daily devotional? A whoopie pie recipe inspired straight from the Holy Ghost Herself. My time of prayer? Watching my wife and young daughter wake to the smell of fresh muffins and deciding which Ball jar full of experimental sauce I would pluck out of the fridge and take to a parishioner. With pandemonium raging from the pandemic, what I did in the kitchen helped me establish a sense of control. Rather quickly, desserts and sourdough starters began filling up the available counter space.

“My God,” Lauren said. “Who’s going to eat all this food?”

Icing a Hummingbird cake, I replied, “I’m gonna give it away.”

Now, some folks and their nutritionists might tell you they don’t need an entire cake or sheet of brownies for themselves, but most want and will gladly accept one. I know this to be true after dropping off whole homemade pies to lifelong bachelors. Men who know the Stouffer’s section at the local grocery store like they know the backs of their hands don’t say no to anything made from scratch. My activity was appreciated until rumblings around town suggested the new pastor was trying to bless his new congregation with diabetes. In the much-needed revelation, I turned to dispersing single servings.

I made what I knew—Southern staples I hoped would convey to Vermonters who I was and where I came from. Slices of buttermilk-and-vinegar pie went out the door to my neighbor Lisa, whose humble hen eggs made the treat possible. A cake stand supporting half a cake given to a family down the street. A dozen pints of chow-chow left on porches. Apple butter to a local writer who had ties to the Tidewater. Bowls full of macaroni and cheese covered with tinfoil were dropped off at the counter of the local general store. And biscuits, my God, the biscuits I gave away. Baked with cold grated butter and pinched to perfection.

I would feed them pieces of broken biscuit I baked in the parsonage oven that morning. As the warm bread left my hands and fell into theirs, I looked them in the eyes and said their names. It was here where I shared a part of me I believed was the best of me. Through the grace of reciprocity, they would do the same—serving me holy communion, becoming priests and ministers themselves.

I relinquished them all from my kitchen, but like a boomerang, every container would find its way back. Most often, I would find my bowls resting on the parsonage’s steps.

Left there, but never empty.

The first time it happened, it was cookies. I was experimenting with cheesecake and dropped off several slabs to congregants. When the plates came back, the first contained a mess of Dave’s famous chocolate chip cookies. A day or so later, another showed up, but this time filled with Hershey’s Kisses. When the last dish arrived, a small pint of maple syrup accompanied it.

“What’s this all about?” I said to my spouse.

“I don’t know, but I bet you Judy does,” she said.

For three years, I took all questions, big and small, to Judy. Her calling to serve as the administrator in the church was just as, if not more, significant as my call to be a pastor there. People came to me if they had a question and wanted more questions. If you needed an answer, you went to Judy. Like J.Q. Dickinson, she is some of the finest salt of the earth.

Peeping into her office, I asked, “So, I’ve been dropping off food to people, and everyone keeps sending me stuff back. Yesterday, I took Elenor a piece of pecan pie, and today, she brought back my plate with a Costco bag of pecans! Am I missing something?”

She smiled, “Here in Lincoln, you never return a dish empty.”

Even without the use of a telescope, you can catch glimpses into different universes. You see a way of life so counter to what is going on anywhere else that it leaves you wondering if what you’re witnessing is real.

I peeked into one of those alternative realities in Lincoln. A place where empty dishes were unacceptable because the people there would not allow them to stay that way. They replenished everything that was empty, including me. On Sunday mornings, my role was to invite everyone to the Lord’s Supper, one of only two ordinances held by those who call themselves Baptists. Emptying out of pews they would come, one by one. The cradle church-goer, the questioning agnostic, all were welcome. Reaching out their hands, I would feed them pieces of broken biscuit I baked in the parsonage oven that morning. As the warm bread left my hands and fell into theirs, I looked them in the eyes and said their names. It was here where I shared a part of me I believed was the best of me. Through the grace of reciprocity, they would do the same—serving me holy communion, becoming priests and ministers themselves, every time they returned my dish, one I expected to be empty, filled instead with an authentic love and way of living I’m still learning to understand. Sometimes this included something savory or sweet.

It always included something sacred.

That was the case during my last week there as their pastor, when I found myself on the phone with a woman there who had been all things to me and mine. She had allowed me into her life. Inviting my family to her townwide Christmas party, to summer evening weenie roasts where the marshmallow bag was always within reach. She called on me when her beloved dog, Georgia, passed. I prayed with her, laying hands on Georgia as we both choked back tears at the holiness of a creature nobler than most. We cried some more when she sold her home of over thirty years and flirted with moving away.

“What will this town do without you, Nancy? Who’s going to deliver food and gifts to the boys in the trailer? Who could ever fill your shoes as justice of the peace? Who going to be the town’s personal private investigator and notary?”

In the end, we wouldn’t let her leave. She admitted defeat, renting a small cottage a mile or so away.

“I have something for you. I’ll leave it outside your office door,” Nancy said before saying goodbye.

I found a casserole dish waiting for me the next day. It was stained in a few places, proof the previous owner had used it well. It was the only dish someone there had ever given me with nothing in it. Picking it up, I discovered a small Post-it note attached. It read,

Food made in used dishes always tastes better.

She’s right. Plates, bowls, pie tins. All belonging to someone and, somehow, to everyone. Dishes that have spent time in someone else’s house have a special kind of seasoning that can’t be replicated.

I’d like to think that people who are willing to be used for the greater good turn out the same way.

This spirit of never returning a dish empty has stuck with me, becoming a continuation of the doctrine of the “to-go plate” from back down South. It follows me like a shadow.

As I finish saying grace in this fellowship hall in Connecticut, I wonder what new spirit these people will put into me. I watch folks I’m still getting to know from two parallel lines, their stomachs grumbling. I make my way to the end of the line, like the good backrow Baptist I am, thinking of the countless bread puddings I’ve produced in Nancy’s used casserole dish, which I have brought with me from Vermont. I have already taken large gobs of that bourbon-soaked Southern goodness to some of the folks who surround me right now—people who are showing me their own traditions and who will, I hope, welcome some of mine.

A Call for Caution When Removing Books and People

Stock Photo Illustration (Credit: Guzel Maksutova /Unsplash/ Cropped/ https://tinyurl.com/2x9tkeue)

This article was written for and originally published by Good Faith Media

Over the years, I’ve clocked a fair number of hours inside the walls of libraries. As a conditioned student, I cut my teeth on Melvil Dewey’s Decimal System. I’d later adapt, evolve and learn to speak the language of Zotero fluently. 

When I wasn’t roaming the literature-filled stacks of the living and deceased, I buried my body, mind and soul into carrels with volumes wrapped in plastic film. Drizzled with academic-induced stress and beset by new calamities each semester, I’d sequester away from the world for a few short hours. 

Between the stretches of exams and never-ending papers leaving me tired, poor and needing to catch my breath, a building filled with books gathering another decade’s worth of dust became “The New Colossus” I needed.

Times change.

Needs change.

Libraries change.

In the last few years, my experiences in them have shifted. My research is of a different nature than it was when I needed permission to view unique collections and archives.

I now spend my time in libraries chasing kids (they are my own, so this is acceptable). I’ve traded the distinct and alluring smell of musty publications penned by stale authors for chapter-less children’s books, and because of this, I’ve become reacquainted with the influencers of my youth: Harry Allard, Shel Silverstein and Ludwig Bemelmans. 

Bookcases and endcaps for bedtime story materials are waist-high in this forgotten territory. Mixed in with the gleaning of the familiar, my family and I also bring home new offerings. An assortment of Duck and Goose adventures, Ryan T. Higgins’ Bruce the bear series, and my oldest child’s favorite, Barb the Last Berzerker. 

If these titles are foreign to you, I strongly suggest you enter your local library’s children’s section immediately. A mountain worth of magic rests there. These bastions of hope are filled with literature and possibilities, along with activities, crafts and displays beckoning an adolescent’s imagination.

I confess I, myself, would never be so bold as to place glue sticks, colored markers and beads in front of multiple children in a room full of tempting periodicals, but librarians are a different breed. They are, indeed, superheroes.

Their ability to create a space to harness juvenile-fueled havoc is as remarkable as it is commendable. Yet not everyone feels this way.

In my small community of Suffield, Connecticut, librarians, the books they procure, and their vocational competency are being scrutinized. The most recent incident is the most alarming and the one that finally caught my attention.

A few months ago, a children’s book, What Are Your Words?: A Book About Pronouns was part of a large display in the children’s section. The short work by author Katherine Locke and illustrator Anne Passchier describes a day in the life of a young person named Ari. 

Ari and his uncle talk about the words that describe them and how they feel that day, including pronouns like she/her, he/him, they/them, ey/em, and ze/zir. We’ve read this book in our house, finding nothing scandalous or salacious in it. Others in our community have not felt the same. 

A concerned citizen felt threatened and believed the library and its staff were pushing an agenda. This caused an elected town official to become involved, resulting in the book being removed from display. 

Subsequent meetings have transpired at our town hall and library since, with emotions running high and tension tight as piano wire. All this led to the newly hired library director’s resignation.

At first, I watched from afar, catching up with the information I received in an attempt to get it all in order. I went back and read meeting minutes, viewed recordings, and attended the most recent in-person gathering. What I observed was disturbing.

I saw a lack of awareness and a detachment of anything resembling empathy offered by a portion of local government representatives, in this case, the current board of selectmen. Citizens of Suffield have shown up in frustration, worried about seeing their first selectman invoking authority and power to remove a children’s book from display. 

Instead of listening to constituents, elected officials seemed more concerned about waiting for their chance to speak. Bristling with a defense reserved for courtrooms and a strategy to win at all costs, they quickly dismissed concerns as fictitious fabrications. This was done with a mixture of stone-cold stoicism, eyerolls and soft chuckles. 

An acknowledgment of the sensitivity around this issue would have been refreshing to see. What’s transpiring instead is a fracturing community continuing to find another reason to break away from each other.

Watching the overreach of those in political power, my mind went to James Dunn. My time at Wake Forest School of Divinity just missed his tenure. 

His passing a year before my arrival at the school is something I still haven’t forgiven him for. Yet his spirit speaks through those who knew him well, and his voice comes through the writings he left behind for the bold to discover and live out. 

Dunn, a champion of religious freedom for all and maestro of public policy, once reflected, “Like breathing in and breathing out, freedom and responsibility are two parts of one process.” I reread these words recently. 

I thought of the freedom given to those who enter libraries to sift through and pluck out information. Librarians have the right to go and seek and unearth the stories. The stories they choose often showcase places and people that remind readers of the vastness of this world and the close connectedness it can provide. 

Stories provide proof of others out there who are like us or share our passions. Without these stories, we wonder if we’re correct in thinking we’re islands unto ourselves.

I think too of the responsibility that comes with such a gift. As I might find stories and works that resonate with my being, I’m likely to find those that challenge it—making me uncomfortable with the fact that not everything on those sagging library shelves is intended for me. In those moments, I leave the book where it is and my library card in my wallet and simply move on.

Furthermore, I’m of the belief that librarians are aware of their own responsibilities. Their roles are well-defined by the American Library Association (ALA). 

The fact that former Kent Memorial Library Director Julia Styles was not granted freedom to perform her responsibilities in her position is shameful. Styles shared in a parting letter to the community her challenges: 

“My duty as a librarian is to honor the First Amendment rights of everyone. To protect the privacy of our patrons. To not assign any kind of moral value to the books we provide. To let readers—and the caregivers of young readers—decide for themselves what is appropriate. To serve everyone in town—without judgment. Unfortunately, I have not been allowed to do that.”

Today, I hear rumblings from some of my neighbors suggesting, “No books were actually banned from the library.” I’ll concede and say they are right. 

But a book was banned from being displayed. It was regulated, moved and pushed to where it couldn’t be as easily seen. 

And maybe because I’m Baptist—the kind of Baptist Martin Luther King, Jr., James Dunn and Roger Williams were—I can’t help but think of the disturbing similarities of a time not long ago when we regulated, moved and pushed something else from being displayed anywhere but the back of buses, away from lunch counters, and to predetermined red-line parts of towns throughout this country—marginalized people.

Let us tread cautiously when choosing what and whom we relocate from our libraries and lives.

Trading my stole for an apron

Image Credit - The Christian Citizen and Elevate on Unsplash

Since I was a child, I’ve been particular about clothes. I have a faint but unmistakable memory concerning a burdensome yellow onesie with what I’ll call “footies.” The intent of this extra bit of cloth covering the feet was to provide warmth but also traction. Running along the bottom was a material comprised of equal parts non-slip fabric and small rubber dots. The goal was to reduce the inescapable falls a toddler amasses over the course of a day as they unsuccessfully navigate across kitchen tile and wooden floors.

I loathed those “footies.”

I would scream, cry, and refuse to walk on them. I called them “popcorn feet,” a descriptor my young mind conjured up—somehow linking those pesky hard dots to those small and disappointing unpopped kernels found at the bottom of Orville Redenbacher’s bag.

As I grew older, my penchant for clothes having to feel a certain way would follow me. The sleeves of a T-shirt required ending well above the elbow. Abrasive materials like wool were a no-no. Turtlenecks left me with a sense of being strangled. You couldn’t get me to wear what we Southerners refer to as a toboggan on my head when the temperature turned cool outside. I’d strike harder than a union worker if told to wear something over my ears.

My mother would tell you I was a clothes contrarian. She struggled to dress me for the appropriate seasons. If it was cold, I’d pull out a pair of shorts and roll up the arms on my jacket. In the dead of summer, I’d sneak out of the house in a sweatshirt. She still regales anyone who’ll listen about the time when she picked me up from summer school, on the count of my missing so many days from strep throat and tonsillitis likely caused by my exposed head, and saw me walking toward the car in a Mexican Baja hoodie. I hid it that morning in my backpack so as not to catch any blowback from her. It takes a lot to embarrass my mother, but this was a good start.

Somewhere, amid popcorn feet, torn jeans, fishnets, and Converse covered in band names and duct tape, I came to see what one wore or didn’t wear as a window into who they were. Clothing could announce your acceptance of the status quo or be the flag of your resistance.

My attire has always displayed a refusal to be whatever anyone else thought it should be. A collection of pieces actively working in silence to convey what I was screaming on the inside. Habiliments often causing a second glance for better or for worse. One of the most flattering remarks I ever had about an outfit was from a former roommate. I walked into a brewery one night to meet him and a group of friends. He gave me a proper once over before saying, “You don’t look like anyone in here.”

I took this as a compliment. He may not have intended it to be.

You could say that I’ve developed a distinguishable style for myself over the years. And in the words of Skip Engblom, co-founder of the Zephyr Surf and Skate Teams, “Style is everything.”

Because of this, I’m an evangelist of the idea that what one wears should mean something. It helps tell their story.

I will try to tell you a little bit more of mine as it pertains to what attire I choose and choose not to wear.

So, without further ado, let’s talk vestments.

I’ve never been a big fan of robes and stoles. I do have them, of course. When you’re a pastor, you accumulate such items. I can’t tell you how many copies of C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters have mysteriously appeared on my shelves. Too many, to the point you’d think I bought a bundle of them at Costco. Vestments I have, but I rarely use them outside of the church calendar’s heavier seasons. I’m fine with dusting off my cassock for Advent and Lent. Even I can admit, it’s nice rolling out of bed on a Sunday morning and not thinking about what to wear. Ministerial scrubs have their place, I suppose. The only stole I’ve ever bought for myself was a red one I needed for my own installation service. All others have been gifted to me. I have an academic hood and robe tucked away at my church office. It’s the kind they bestow on you at graduation and is as thin as Dead Sea Scroll papyrus.

When I see an apron, I think of service. I think of hospitality. I want my apron to remind me that to follow the lowly Galilean, I’m called to a life of service and hospitality, which embraces the personal and works to strip away anything disingenuous.

Clerical collars are a waste around my neck since you can’t see much below my chin anyway, thanks to the length of my beard. This burning bush of facial hair cancels out the smattering of bowties I still hold onto for unknown reasons, and relieves me of worrying whether or not I need to use a half or double Windsor knot.

I thought these garments would become more comfortable when I became a pastor. Even with the degrees and ordination, the stole, the robe, and the unofficial Baptist blue suit jacket, none quite feel right. For a few years, I thought perhaps I needed to break this divine dress in like a pair of new cowboy boots. Those “boots” never got any easier to wear as time went on. So now, they capture dust bunnies beside the bowties in the closet.

The point I’m trying to make is this: traditional church garb doesn’t feel right on me. I’ve all but stopped wearing it.

What do I wear to church when I stand behind a pulpit?

I still gussy up and don a jacket or sports coat. I’ve got a red argyle one that would make a Scotsman blush enough to match it. No tie of any kind goes around my neck. Instead, I cycle through an assortment of ascots and silk bandanas. If the mood hits me right, I replace them with a handkerchief resembling the likes of what my grandfather would have tucked in his back pocket.

Oh, and I’ve started wearing aprons.

This recent development began when two youths in my congregation helped my family with some last-minute babysitting. When my spouse and I arrived home, we thanked them profusely and tried to stick a couple of twenties in their pockets for the trouble. They wouldn’t accept it. Their firm stance smelled of parental-infused manners and politeness, yet I wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“Well, if you won’t take the money, can I make you something? What’s your favorite dessert?” I asked them. Word has already spread in my new congregation of my bordering-on-obsessive passion for baking.

They glanced at each other, smiled, and quipped almost in unison, “Anything chocolate would be fine.”

Where some preachers might burn Saturday night’s midnight oil to polish off a sermon, I instead see time better spent watching my stand mixer cream butter and sugar together.

As the clock on the stove moves closer to displaying the witching hour, I’ve got a Death By Chocolate Espresso Cake cooled down enough so it can be iced. Here, in a quietness only the darkness can gift, I rotate my heavy cake stand under the warm glow of blessed kitchen lights while applying a fluffy coat of frosting. My presentation skills are improving, thanks to my spouse and numerous YouTube videos. The amount I’ve slathered on is criminal and worthy of a few hallelujahs. I stand back and shove my hands in my pockets.

My apron pockets. I look down and notice I must have slipped my apron on, but I’m unsure when. Doing so has become more natural since I received it a few weeks ago. Before this, patches of lingering white flour stood out on my black jeans with the illuminating force of a neon sign—proof of my cookery doings to all who saw me on those days. A badge of honor, if you will.

I take stock of what this practical article of clothing resting over my shoulder and around my waist says about me. More aptly put, what I want it to say about me.

You see, when I see an apron, I think of service. I think of hospitality. I think of an immaculate server at my table, guiding me through the menu, pointing me to a dish that will leave me making reservations to return and have it again. I think of my grandmother, who wore an apron in her own kitchen and the industrial kitchen of a retirement home where she worked. She fed my family and those who didn’t have much family left. Through her, I learned a person who wears an apron ensures everybody gets fed.

I want the donning of my apron to mean something, too. I want it to be a symbol letting others know I’m here to serve them the best way I know how in the moment. I want it to tell them I’m attentive to their needs, open to them, and while not always, this might mean baking them a cake in the middle of the night out of sheer gratitude for their presence in my life. I want to wear it when I stand behind a pulpit because I want to remind myself that to follow the lowly Galilean, I’m called to a life of service and hospitality, which embraces the personal and works to strip away anything disingenuous. I can already tell you the apron suits me better than the stole. It doesn’t feel as heavy with expectations or concerned with agendas as that stole often does.

I might go so far as to say tying on an apron is like taking on an easy yoke and accepting a light burden.

Maybe more of us would do well to trade in our vestments for aprons.

Cornbread Is Personal

Image Credit: Stacy Reece

This article was written originally for Salvation South

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW ME AND MY PEOPLE, LET ME PUT A CRUSTY WEDGE IN YOUR BOWL.

The farmhouse floor is cold as icicles.

My feet frantically search for the house shoes I know are somewhere near the foot of the bed. Since I woke, I’ve been careful not to disturb the two forms inches away from me, buried under warm flannel sheets and heavy quilts. Silence is necessary. I hold my breath to ensure my slumbering wife and child continue to stay put. If I want to conduct my experiment this morning, I must let my sleeping family lie. Finally, I catch what must be a slipper with my big toe, then locate its mate, and slowly slide off the king mattress and into the darkness of the adjacent room.

What happens next has happened on countless mornings before and since then. The ritual of bathing myself in florescent kitchen lights, starting a pot of coffee, preheating the oven, and once again chasing down the flavorful haints of my upbringing. Sometimes, in those holy hours, with the help of flour, butter, and sugar, I stumble upon an incantation so potent I can travel back in time.

Food has a way of doing that. Connecting me back to something I was afraid of losing.

Growing up on the cusp of Appalachia, cornbread was something I ate weekly and always thought I’d have—until I didn’t. It came from the hands and labor of my maternal grandmother, nicknamed “Dood.”

Dood and my grandfather lived on a tobacco farm an earshot away from my childhood home. Meals for her were not rooted in culinary exploration and refinement but birthed out of the practical and necessary. Her efficiency in making do with what she had available, turning the ordinary into the sacred, is why her descendants talk of her with a reverence usually reserved for saints. Fitting since she was one.

My mother worked a standard office job—9 to 5. My father worked a third-shift factory gig. Sacrifices from both to allow our family to enter what is now a nonexistent middle class. This meant when my sister and I rolled off the bus from school, we had the choice to go home and keep quiet so Dad could sleep or track through the cow pasture and head to our grandparents’ house for afternoon cartoons and snacks. Occasionally, this resulted in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and microwaveable waffles with syrup. It was the 1980s. But, more often, it meant grabbing a bowl of something simmering on the back eye of Dood’s stovetop. If it was pintos or chili beans, you knew cornbread was coming, and it was worth the wait.

My grandmother's cornbread was magnificent, and all other cornbread I've consumed over the years starts at a disadvantage because of this. Simple and pure, it was not made with the bourgeois crowd in mind. Yet, it was sophisticated enough to transcend and connect the different folks who were fortunate enough to gather at her table.

In the winter of 2001, she was preached off to heaven. Immediately, a matriarch-less void was felt, and a lifetime of cooking knowledge was stripped away from her family. My grandmother didn’t teach her children to cook. No recipes were officially passed down. My mother once recounted a time when she asked my grandmother to show her how to make biscuits.

“No,” Dood responded, “because if I show you, you’ll get stuck making them the rest of your life.”

Words laced with truth from a woman who watched much of the ebb and flow of her life from the outpost of an oven. Like the pots and pans that never got the chance to walk away from her stovetop, neither did Dood. Her genius kept her stuck there. Her cooking was held in a tight tension: she excelled at and certainly valued it, but she always seemed to think that something or someone else deserved more praise. Those unspoken “something else’s” rested on the hopes and dreams she clung to for her children and grandchildren. Dood wanted us to explore a calling instead of accepting our gifts. In her world, I don’t believe she thought the two were harmonious.

With my grandmother gone, I worried I’d never again taste certain staples like her stewed potatoes, dumplings, and cornbread. At least not in a way that nourished my belly and soul alike. Those offerings I wrote off as becoming just a memory. Believing this, I settled for that which reminded me of her.

When the family circled like carrion, laying claim to this or that relic of the departed, I was asked if there was anything of hers I’d like to have. I requested only a tiny set of Hull bowls because, in those vessels, her cornbread would lay. There, under a ladle or two of beans, soaking up all that flavor and goodness, her cornbread was a sunken treasure. Working like grace, that small piece of fried gold was a treat you weren’t sure you deserved but somehow got anyway. This semblance I took for unconditional love drew me to her even if she existed in a place where I couldn’t follow.

If one was so inclined to crack open a bible to the book of James, one might come across a verse about drawing near to God and God drawing near to you. In drawing close to my grandmother and the food from her kitchen, I’ve been moved, pulled, dragged even, to answer the question of who I am and where I come from.

I searched all over, in Southern cookbook after Southern cookbook, for something like Dood’s cornbread. Thumbing through words written by Edna Lewis, Sean Brock, and a dozen other well-worn volumes of recipes collected by Rotary Clubs and churches, I pined to come across The One.

Cornbread is personal.

Leading up to this morning, I searched all over, in Southern cookbook after Southern cookbook, for something like Dood’s cornbread. Thumbing through words written by Edna Lewis, Sean Brock, and a dozen other well-worn volumes of recipes collected by Rotary Clubs and churches, I pined to come across The One. All were good, but all fell short. Some flirted with me, urging and discouraging me simultaneously—goading me to keep searching but creating a misdirected jealousy at those who still held the recipes of their kinfolk. Why couldn’t I locate mine?

My idea of providence is looser than a customer’s belt at a Cracker Barrel after they go all in on the infamous Country Boy Breakfast. So, I'm leery of calling my stumbling onto Chef and owner of Hickory at Nicewonder Farm & Vineyards Travis Milton a divine act.

Then again, maybe it was.

Milton is an apostle for the foodways of southwestern Virginia, preaching the preservation of mountain cooking and his beloved greasy beans to all who’ll listen. His upbringing and similar-sounding supper-table staples struck a chord with me. I hastily consumed articles and videos of his thoughts and influences.

A name he kept repeating was Ronni Lundy.

Lundy has been an authority on Appalachian cooking for over thirty years. She has the hardware to back it up: four James Beard Foundation Award medallions. More importantly, she has the recognition of her peers and a new generation of Southern Appalachian chefs. To walk in the works of Lundy is to saunter beside the voice of a region and its people.

My grandmother would say, “People think a lot of her.”

With the proper endorsements lining up, I ordered a used copy of her first book—Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes and Honest Fried Chicken: The Heart and Soul of Southern Country Kitchens (1991). Inside, I discovered, in her words, “real cornbread.”

I take the first bite, and I taste absolution. No sounds from the bedroom where my spouse and daughter sleep. They don’t know; they don’t see me—a 40-something man in a union suit with bedhead and beard, openly weeping because he has tasted a memory.

This recipe stares back at me from a page stained with the remnants of oil from an unknown finger—a phantom digit motioning me to grab cast iron off the wall and drop heavy tablespoons of bacon drippings onto an already well-seasoned surface. By now, the oven is hotter than a Pentecostal sermon, so in goes the skillet. I spend the next few minutes rounding up local buttermilk and eggs, salt, and self-rising cornmeal. The cornmeal has come a long way to fall into my mixing bowl. I got it from the Old Mill of Guilford, which has been around since the late eighteenth century and is little more than a stone’s throw from where I was raised in North Carolina. My mother and father had their engagement photos taken there. My family has a history at the mill, making it feel like this cornmeal and I have a story to tell together.

I clean as I go, putting items back in the larder where I found them before resting against the counter. The morning sun is cracking over the mountains, and I silently pray the spell will work and try to come to terms with what that will mean to me. As twenty-two minutes tick off the timer, I retrace the journey of how my family and I moved to the Northeast and why, by leaving the South, I became more Southern. Cornbread isn’t the only thing I miss; it’s just the embodiment of what I understand to be home. A home I worked most of my life to leave. A place I’ll always call home no matter where I might come to live.

The buzz of the timer rings through the air, calling me to grab a mitt and jump into action. Opening the door, I’m careful of the heat rushing toward my face. I grab a plate to flip it out. It releases with the most reassuring thud I’ve ever heard. Choirs of angels would do well to mimic the sound.

And it is there: gazing at the plate, I see the perfect, slightly dark shade of the speckled brown crust. I knew it would be right and everything moving forward would be all right, too. I knew it would taste like my childhood, my grandmother, and all the roots I associate with a place I abruptly left without confessing how much it means to me. My unspoken appreciation lingering like a hand on a doorknob, unwilling to turn and walk out, move on, say goodbye because I’m discovering I don’t want to leave.

Watching the warmth wafting towards the heavens, I cut a crunch-inducing piece. If this cornbread hits, I’ll learn I can carry the South with me—or at least find slices of it in a Wagner skillet.

I take the first bite, and I taste absolution. No sounds from the bedroom where my spouse and daughter sleep. They don’t know; they don’t see me—a 40-something man in a union suit with bedhead and beard, looking like the eighth Pontipee brother, openly weeping because he has tasted a memory. What rolls down my cheeks, my daughter would call “happy tears.” I think about waking her and her mother but decide against it. There’ll be more hot cornbread in their future. Instead, I think about my grandmother and what I’d say to her.

I’d tell her that who she was and what she knew were priceless. I'd tell her that her grandson cooks for people like she did because he’s trying to learn to love like she did. I’d tell her I’m passing her food and story down to the people sitting around every table I’m lucky enough to be invited to. Telling folks, if you want to really know me and where I come from, you need to set your bowl in front of me so I can show you.

Why I Don't Invite Would-Be Friends To Church

Image Credit: baptist News Global & 123rf.com

This article was orginal written for Baptist News Global

Walking along a well-beaten path, my daughter and I make our way through the canopy of trees toward the small lake’s shoreline. Already, I can see the congregating group of other parents with their children, staking claims with chairs and beach toys with an intensity rivaling that of gold miners. Like old “rabbit ears” found on ancient televisions, my legs demand direct tuning to stay focused as I approach two irks I’d much rather run from.

The first is sand.

I visibly cringe when someone tells me they enjoy long walks on the beach or enjoy the feeling of sand between their toes. Being a red-haired ginger, shadeless spaces beckoning the total exposure of our Milky Way’s favorite flaming star never will make my top ten of life’s most appealing experiences.

The other, small talk.

In a world catering to extroverts, I’ve had little choice but to adapt and become efficient at water cooler conversations. However, since I have children, there is another level of cumbersome unpleasantries forced upon me to discuss all things trivial with other parents.

No longer am I limited to recapping what I watched on Netflix the other night or offering my hot take on New Haven a’pizza. No, I’m left to talk about the mucus content of a 5-year-old and unpack the reasoning behind my choice of their extracurricular activities. Ballet or soccer?

Well, settle in as we discuss the pros and cons of each for the next 45 minutes. I don’t like to think of myself as antisocial, but the longer I’m in these situations, I’m starting to believe Anthony of Egypt was on to something when he decided to pack it all in and head for the desert.

Back on the beach, I lather the kiddo with sunblock. The swim instructors attempt to wrangle her and others into small groups to get the lessons started. I’ve managed to bring a week’s worth of supplies for her, but I’ve neglected to bring a chair or a towel for myself. I sit down on the smoothest flat rock I can find, realizing quickly I should have chosen better, and pull out the one item I did remember to pack for myself: a collection of essays by Wendell Berry.

I’m a couple of pages into The Prejudices Against Country People when I hear, “So watcha reading?” A beach towel away sits another parent. Pale, tattooed, seemingly misplaced — could I have possibly come across a kindred spirit? For the next half hour, we chat off and on. We talk a little Berry. We point out our kids to one another. We discuss spouses and talk about life in general.

“How’d your family end up here?” she asks.

“Job,” I say.

“So what do you?”

Pause. “I’m the new pastor at the Baptist church.”

Another pause. She breaks the short silence.

“So, can I, like, ask you some questions? Promise you won’t get offended?”

We talk about spirituality and religion. I’m not offended by her critiques or anything she says. It’s an open and honest discussion laced with what I’m interpreting as genuine curiosity. Lifeway couldn’t have produced a better curriculum to hold a Sunday school class’s attention.

We talk until I notice the splashing in the water has finally stopped. I take the cue to rise, gather my belongings and dry off my kid while my parlay partner does the same. We tell each other it’s been good chatting. Before leaving, we introduce the kids to one other. She says, “We’ll see you tomorrow.”

And we did. And the next day. And the day afterward. The swim camp lasted for two weeks. Each day, we talk a little more.

More questions about faith. The pressure and concern of raising kids in the current times and what the pandemic did to us and them. We talk about growing food. My spouse joins us on a day when the youngest decides to push through her usual nap time. I entertain the cranky toddler while she gets to know “Morgan.” They keep talking until the next swim class arrives and runs us off. By the time we leave, the two have made plans to meet at another parent’s home for a pool play date.

In the car with two water-dripping children, we talk about Morgan. We talk about her kid and how well she played with ours. My spouse tells me they exchanged numbers.

“She seems cool, right?” I say.

“Yeah, I’m glad we met her,” she says. “Maybe she’ll be a friend?”

“Maybe,” I say. And without hesitation, I follow it with, “Let’s not invite Morgan and her family to church.”

I can hear some of y’all gasping through your screen.

Why won’t I invite Morgan to church?

The truth is, I don’t have one answer.

I have several. Here are but a few,

You don’t need to go to church to be my friend. I see diversity as a virtue, meaning everyone I connect with doesn’t need to be limited to the social circles of Sunday mornings. I want to be careful not to surround myself with people who only know me because of the “Rev” in front of my name.

I’m not only talking about parishioners but fellow clergy relationships, too. Sure, I like the camaraderie, peer help and the “I get what you’re going through” vent sessions, but like a piece of rich pecan pie, I only want a slice, a sliver, from time to time. A little goes a long way.

“I’m not looking for a world where all my people exist in one place or hold to the same beliefs.”

In short, I’m not looking for a world where all my people exist in one place or hold to the same beliefs. That’s excessively boring, and I’d go as far as to say tacky. I need people in my life separate from my vocational call.

I don’t want to commit the faux pas of assuming church is what they are looking for. While I’m still praying Phyllis Tickle’s description of the 500-year church “rummage sale” will kick in soon, I’m not holding my breath. New reformation dreams aside, I’m concluding the modern form of church isn’t for everyone, so I’m not worrying about inviting everyone.

Besides, why ask someone to a space that isn’t ready, welcoming or affirming of them? And if, by chance, they are looking for a community of faith, does it have to be mine? I’m happy to recommend a church if they express interest or hear me out, point them to another group of like-minded individuals who may deal less with spirituality but have the concept of community dialed in.

There are unfair expectations and inevitable disappointments. I’ve found church buildings, stained glass and vestments amplify emotions in the best and worst ways. I’m not eager to attach them to everyone I meet or have them attached to me all the time because, inevitably, and much to my chagrin, I let folks down — consistently.

Can you believe it? I don’t always say the right thing, reach out as fast as some would like me to or live up to the level of revered reckonings passed on by predecessors. There’s a threshold of acceptance of this fact I have to come to terms with, and while I’d love to tell you I don’t care what people think, I do.

The stakes are high every Sunday when I step behind a pulpit and wonder, “Who might this offend?” It happens. I can preach a sermon and, without meaning to, leave someone feeling as raw as sashimi.

I can tell you what generally happens next: the person or family disappears. We’re ghosted right out of each other’s lives. Trying to balance how I can challenge a parishioner who’s a close friend is an awkward dance of me looking at my feet more than I’m looking at them while we both attempt to find the rhythm in our relationship. No one’s having fun because we’re exhausting each other.

Unfair expectations rest on the other side of the table, too. I can project from my pulpit as quickly as someone can from a pew. If I haven’t seen someone in a few Sundays, or the same person keeps forgetting to attend a committee meeting, I have feelings ranging from concern to aggravation.

“There’s an elephant in the room when a group of ‘friends’ in your church determine and vote on your salary.”

I don’t want people to think our relationship centers on their attendance, but damn, their presence matters to me more than they know. Plus, there’s an elephant in the room when a group of “friends” in your church determine and vote on your salary. I can’t help but feel a certain way about this fact. Having friends not impacting my family’s budget is a blessing I want more of.

Honestly, the people I have the most in common with don’t go to church. I had to reread this sentence when I first typed it, and the truth of it hit me like a charging rhino. You see, I’ve never been a church person. I didn’t grow up in church. I don’t have youth camp or group stories.

Outside my sporadic attendance to a random VBS here and there or a Christmas Eve service falling during election years, I never went. It’s not hard to see why the people I bond with haven’t either. Personal history and conditioning have left me associating that friendship exists elsewhere — dive bars, restaurant counters, bowling alley arcades, to name but a few locations.

I tend to believe people seek out their people. If potential friends, the people I like, are anything like me, the church will be one of the last places they show up.

What I’ve shared is born out of my experience in congregational ministry over the last 10 years. I name this because there are other stories — stories from other pastors whose time served in their respective communities run as the antithesis to mine. Pastors who develop deep friendships with those they shepherd aren’t uncommon. I’ve met and sat across from them, slightly envious of their recounting. This isn’t to say I haven’t developed deep relationships with parishioners during my calls because I have. I’m constantly growing strands of connection with those filling the pews.

Yet, when those strands run so close together, they can just as quickly become spider webs, and it’s never fun trying to walk through one of those. I want to avoid them altogether if I can help it.

In the coming weeks and months, there’s a strong possibility our family and Morgan’s will become closer. We’ll do play dates, we might have a parents’ night out together, we may, at some point, even feel safe enough to call each other in moments of joy and crisis. Hey, it can happen.

I just don’t plan for it to happen at church.

The Gospel according to Bluey

Image Credit: Curtis Ramsey-Lucus

This article was written for publication in the Christan Citizen and can be read in original format HERE.

I’m on vacation, but not really.

Vacations are a romantic state of existence currently out of my reach. My spouse and I don’t get vacations. We travel and visit places while doing the same things we do at home in new and unfamiliar places; we work to ensure our two small children do the least amount of damage they can, physically and existentially, while awake.

Referees at a McEnroe vs. Connors tennis match had easier assignments.

Yet, I’ve managed to steal away. The sun is barely up, and so am I. With one cup of coffee in my system and eyes still having issues focusing, I climb into our SUV, drop the large tote bag in the passenger seat, and set out.

One of life’s great pleasures is strolling the tents and tables of a farmers market. The Roman playwright Terence is said to have given the world Audentes Fortuna Iuvat—Fortune Favors the Bold. I’d like to believe he first spoke those words while picking out fruit at a market in Ostia Antica.

This morning, I watch a couple selling artisan cheeses prepare to open their booth while their kids ride scooters on the walkway a few feet away. Beside them, a man sits on a bucket playing a harmonica. I drop a few singles in the small pail inches from his knees and thank him for the personal hymn.

The eclectic barrage continues, ranging from a kombucha stand to an Amish family selling blueberries and duck eggs to a customized van hawking the most fragrant of fresh flowers. All proof the work of angels is happening before me. It’s a taste of the world and a community’s universe at my fingertips. It’s Epcot without the annoying mouse.

This may be what Eden looked like.

I’m taking it all in. Sucking this scene down like delectable bone marrow, I bounce around until I finally stop in front of a woman wrapping tamales. I order a dozen, and while waiting, I hear a string of words coming from a child’s voice—comments I’ve captured at least two dozen times in the last year or so.

“Hey, mom! He’s got Bluey on his arm!”

“It’s actually Bluey’s dad, Bandit,” I say while rolling up my shirt sleeve just a bit so the onlookers can see the whole piece. “We love Bluey in our house.”

Over the next few minutes, there’s an exchange of appreciation for a cartoon show, coming more from the adults than the youngsters.

Bluey brings to life characters who appeal to parents and children alike, and even to folks who don’t have kids but watch the show for its meaningful message. A message, I believe, possessing pieces of gospely good news.

For the uninitiated, Bluey is a six-year-old (in human, not dog years) animated canine. She, her parents, and younger sister Bingo make up a family of Australian Blue Heelers. Their mum and dad, Chili and Bandit, navigate the kiddos’ expanding world, which often includes imaginative games and profound life lessons. If this sounds like your run-of-the-mill children’s program, it’s not. When my spouse and I discovered Bluey on the Disney+ streaming service during the pandemic, we caught ourselves watching episodes late at night after our oldest had gone to sleep. The creative force behind Bluey, Joe Brumm, has threaded the needle, bringing to life characters who appeal just as much to parents as to their children. And yet, the adoration and connection of Bluey doesn’t stop there. I’ve read numerous social media posts from folks who don’t have kids who watch the show for its meaningful message.

A message, I believe, possessing pieces of gospely good news. Here are a few observations of what Bluey invites us to consider about our faith and a few episode recommendations to get you there.

Creativity and the Power of Imagination

I have Bandit Heeler wearing a set of antlers, a striking pink boa scarf, and large purple glasses inked on my arm because of his willingness to become completely submerged in the creative worlds of his two daughters. In “The Magic Xylophone,” Bluey and Bingo discover the instrument at the bottom of a toy bin. Upon seeing it, Bandit recoils and tries to get away. This is a game they’ve played before; the possessor of the xylophone can freeze others in place. Shenanigans ensue, with Bandit usually coming up on the receiving end. The episode deals with the importance of sharing and taking turns, but the nugget this adult took away was the gift of being fully present with my children to co-create moments and memories with them. The power of play and the invitation extended to me by my daughters to immerse myself in their imaginations while bringing along my own is something I believe all creation has the opportunity to do with each other and with God. In play, my kids and I create worlds together. If this doesn’t ring of Genesis and other creation myths, I’m not sure what does.

Fully Seeing Others

Fair warning: Bluey will make you cry. “Baby Race” is a testimony to this fact. Here, Chili recounts to her children how Bluey learned to walk. She captivates them by sharing how Bluey could sit up on her own very early and how proud she and Bandit were of this unusual feat. Bluey does this at a local “mum group” that Chili is part of, but her flash of flaunty-ness is cut short when another baby, Judo, begins to crawl in front of everyone. The imposed pressure and the race of expectations build for Chili, resulting in her decision to stop attending the mum meetings. Another mum from the group, Bella, joins Chili at home, and shares with her that she’s the mother of nine pups. Chili is shocked and remarks Bella must know something about raising kids. I don’t want to ruin the following dialogue between the two mums, but a moment is shared: Chili is seen and empowered to run her own race as a parent instead of trying to keep up with anyone else. The ability to meet people where they are, extend empathy, and assure them they aren’t alone is paramount. How we choose to do the same, being supportive and recognizing the Imago Dei in others, is a practice of how to love our neighbor.

Evolution and Faith: Part of the Same Story

In the episode “Flat Pack,” Bandit and Chili have purchased an outdoor rocking swing. As they unpack the box, discarded trash becomes an item to play with for Bluey and Bingo. Plastic wrap becomes a small body of water, and the sisters decide to be fish, Bluey being the mommy fish and Bingo the baby fish. This relationship dynamic continues as more pieces become available. A large slice of cardboard turns into land, and the girls change into frogs. More items show up, and viewers see an evolution-type pattern forming. When the swing nears completion, Bluey and Bingo have become dinosaurs, birds, monkeys, “cave-dogs” who write on walls, and finally, builders who, with the help of a small shiny tool, construct what resembles an impressive city out of box scraps and Styrofoam. Bingo then informs Bluey that she’s no longer a baby or even a teenager but an adult, and she’s built a spaceship to go and explore outer space. They hug, and Bingo soars off into her make-believe cosmos. Bluey sits down and wonders aloud what she’s supposed to do now. Bandit and Chili get her attention and invite her up on the new swing. As she makes her way up the stairs, Chili reaches for her, the scene playing homage to Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. Swinging and watching Bingo zip around the backyard, Bandit pronounces, “Ah, this is heaven.” The coupling of evolutionary imagery and the recognition of the simple joy of backyard family time as a celestial state proves there is room for science and faith to function together. For me, it’s a reminder of how accessible God’s kin-dom is to us. The sacred is seen in the personal as much as in the wonders of the millennia.

Later, after leaving the farmers market, I’m back with my family. I tell my spouse the story about being stopped yet again for the tattoo, and she tells me it’s about time she gets herself one. The rest of the day is full of ups and downs every parent experiences. Near evening, my two daughters want one more stint outside. My spouse and I oblige. The oldest moves quickly and assuredly. The youngest, not so much. Her bare feet traverse the backyard, and she appears shaky, trying to go down the sloping hill. She reaches for my hand, and I take it into mine. Warm and fleshy, her touch is like her hand, unblemished. We stroll together, watching her sister run ahead and pull an unripe apple from a nearby tree and sink her teeth into it. Glancing back, I see their mother. The breeze of Lake Michigan nudges her closer to us. And there, amid such beauty, a cartoon dog just might have it right.

Ah, this is heaven.

Tomorrow Belongs To Oliver Anthony?

Stock Photo Illustration (Credit: Gabriel Gurrola / Unsplash/ Cropped/ https://tinyurl.com/mu63p7ja)

This article was originally written for Good Faith Media

I must have let out more “Amens” than a Pentecostal while listening to Woody Guthrie’s song “Jesus Christ” for the first time.

Jesus Christ was a man who traveled through the land

Hard working man and brave.

He said to the rich, “Give your goods to the poor.”

So they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.

Guthrie is considered one of, if not the, greatest American folk musicians. His name is mentioned with Seeger, Baez, and Dylan. Yet, there’s an additional mythos about him. 

The same aura covered the likes of Hank Williams, James Baldwin, and Frida Kahlo. Given to them freely by their own generations, their work represents the trials and circumstances they experienced in their respective and pivotal changing worlds. Their art became a mouthpiece for the people. 

In fact, Guthrie’s genre, folk, comes from the German word volk, meaning “the people.” You could argue then the music belonged less to Guthrie and more to the folks he wrote it for, those who felt the hardships brought on by The Great Depression and Dust Bowl. 

The appeal of Guthrie’s work rested on his understanding of hard times and his ability to challenge the injustices of classism. He did so by knowing not to kick people when they were already down. He knew people’s problems were not always rooted in their own making. 

You won’t find the lyrics “You should have left the Texas Pan when you had the chance” in any of his ballads. Instead, his hands worked his guitar with the same enthusiasm as a gold miner, panning for and pointing to an all-shining truth amid fragmented bleakness. 

No, his words of rebuke were saved for wheeling and dealing tailored suits. He knew his battles weren’t with his neighbor but with the powers and principalities of the world. 

Race hatred cannot stop us

This one thing we know

Your poll tax and Jim Crow

And greed has got to go

You’re bound to lose

You fascists bound to lose.

During desperate times, desperate people often look for a voice like his. Many think they found it in Oliver Anthony. 

Who’s Oliver Anthony? He’s not hard to find these days. Crashing onto the scene last week with his tune “Rich Men North of Richmond,” he now boasts several songs in the top ten U.S. iTunes charts.

Endorsements came in waves from all over the country, from the Joe Everyman types to right-wing political commentator Matt Walsh and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene went so far as to say on Twitter that Anthony’s song is “the anthem of the forgotten Americans.” 

Yet, Anthony is still relatively unknown. His rags to riches, pulling-oneself-up-by-the-bootstraps story, is part of why so many are fascinated by him. What little is known has come from Anthony himself, and on paper, Anthony appears to check the “everyman” criteria he shared on social media.

“I dropped out of high school at age 17. I have a GED from Spruce Pine, North Carolina. I worked multiple plant jobs in Western North Carolina, my last being at the paper mill in McDowell County. I worked third shift, six days a week for $14.50 an hour in a living hell. 

“In 2013, I had a bad fall at work and fractured my skull. It forced me to move back home to Virginia.

“From 2014 until just a few days ago, I’ve worked outside sales in the industrial manufacturing world. My job has taken me all over Virginia and into the Carolinas, getting to know tens of thousands of other blue-collar workers on job sites and in factories.

“I’ve spent all day, every day, for the last 10 years hearing the same story. People are SO damn tired of being neglected, divided and manipulated.”

This was included in the same Facebook post where he claims to have turned down an $8 million music deal. No fame, no money, no giant music tour. Just a message.

This message, and more particularly, who it appeals to, is why my ordained back-row-Baptist self came out of my pew and into the public square again. I, like Anthony, am the child of the working class. 

I had one grandfather in the tobacco fields and the other in the textile mills. He, my father, and even I wore the literal blue-collar Dickie’s to manufacturing jobs. 

We worked 12-hour shifts in extreme conditions, breathing in contaminated air laced with chemicals used to plate electronic parts for automobiles and cell phones. We worked jobs that have long gone south or overseas. Anthony is right; those spaces were filled with the neglected, exploited, and paychecks that didn’t come close to what they should have been. 

But I don’t ever remember punching the clock, thinking that somebody on government assistance was to blame for those conditions—not when I had a CEO like Dennis Kozlowski. This is where we differ.

Thousands have embraced Anthony as the genuine article, but not all. Rumblings have surfaced of him being an industry plant or “astroturf artist.” 

While Anthony says his politics are middle of the road, his now edited YouTube playlist channel “Videos that make your noggin get bigger” suggests otherwise with a conservative cocktail of Jordan Peterson, conspiracy theories, and a splash of religious fervor in the form of Billy Graham. 

Speculation aside, two things are clear. Anthony has struck a nerve with working-class whites. He’s gaining support in right-wing political circles. 

How? He speaks a familiar language through the repackaging of tried-and-true class- shaming and fear-inducing propaganda. 

Whether adopted or inherited, Anthony’s lyrics touch on everything from Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” and Jeffery Epstein’s pedophile island to assuring a group of people they are right in believing they are losing agency in a country that means to leave them behind. 

I wish politicians would look out for miners

And not just minors on an island somewhere

Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat

And the obese milkin’ welfare

Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds

Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds

Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground

‘Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down

Not exactly the unifying class cry of Guthrie, Seeger, or Baez.

Shaming someone for using their EBT (electronic benefit transfer) card to purchase a Little Debbie snack is classless. Continuing to perpetuate Pizzagate conspiracy theories displays either a need for security in one’s own life at best and, at worst, a desire to feel superior over others. 

No, this is something different. More of an anthem for a people eager to see things return to a perceived great-again era that was the case for some but not for all. This isn’t like Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” calling a nation to deal with its systemic problems.

One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple,

by the relief office I saw my people.

As they stood hungry,

I stood there wondering if God blessed America for me.

I worry it’s more of Cabaret’s “Tomorrow Belongs To Me.”

Now Fatherland, Fatherland, show us the sign

Your children have waited to see

The morning will come

When the world is mine

Tomorrow belongs to me

That’s a chilling message. One undeserving of getting a tomorrow.

And if Anthony is the voice for his people, I’ll count myself as not part of his crowd—even if they are the people I come from. 

For now, I’ll stick with Guthrie.

Calling All Prophets

Civil rights march on Washington, D.C. Film negative by photographer Warren K. Leffler, 1963. From the U.S. News & World Report Collection. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division. Photograph shows a procession of African Americans carrying signs for equal rights, integrated schools, decent housing, and an end to bias. https://www.loc.gov/item/2003654393/

Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

Throughout my life, I’ve encountered all sorts of definitions for the word prophet. For years, I thought broken-down marquee signs resting on dying grass beside dirt roads signaled the coming of the next prophet or prophetess. I imagined these individuals showing up like a force of nature for a mid-week revival in some tin roof-tottering tabernacle. Their presence, words, and promises of the Holy Ghost were dangerous instruments of revelation. I found prophets to be scary.

I grew older, a little wiser. Still leery of attending any sort of revival, even if dinner on the grounds was promised, I received other ways of viewing prophets and what they did. Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination helped strip away the 1-900-Miss Cleo soothsayer imagery I had so linked with the vocation. This was a big step.

But it was Kathleen Norris’ work The Cloister Walk that resonated with my spirit. Her words describe the prophet as society’s “necessary other.” It’s a moniker that struck me. Like an artist or poet, Norris’ prophets were necessary because they possessed something that needed to be heard and seen but that people perhaps didn’t want to hear or see. Prophets are complex in nature, offering language laced with abrasiveness. I came away thinking the purpose of a prophet was to start conversations rooted in necessity.

However, Norris also uses the word “other” to describe their role. An “other” is considered the supplemental, the additional, or the extra. The one who offers the counterpoint, the different perspective, and the dissenter. Those “other” voices are essential in the biblical narrative, frequently attributed as representing God’s message to the masses.

With the help of Norris, Brueggeman, and many others, I’ve since been on the lookout for prophets—those I felt spoke directly to me.

Prophets like Will Campbell—a renegade Baptist minister who, in 1957, marched alongside 9 African American girls on their first day of school as they integrated the previously all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Campbell was the only white person at the inaugural Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This same man would later minister to members of the Ku Klux Klan. He even met and ministered to the killer of his friend, Martin Luther King Jr, James Earl Ray, because he believed “if you’re gonna love one, you’ve got to love them all.” Campbell knew that white supremacy was manipulating poor whites in its own unique way.

I came across Carl and Anne Braden in Louisville, Kentucky. Carl and Anne, seeing the damage and unfairness of redlining, which allowed suburban housing access to whites but not African Americans, were charged and prosecuted for sedition by the state in 1954 for helping purchase a home for Andrew Wade and his family. The sedition charge came because Wade was a black man.

I also found a prophet in Howard “Buck” Kester. As a college student, Kester would visit the ghettos of Poland and see the similarities between how Jews were treated in Europe and how African Americans were treated in the States. He would come back changed, striving to unite poor whites and blacks around a common cause. His work with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union as one of its core leaders helped forge powerful relationships between the two groups.

“The end of the relevance of the church will not come at the hands of a pandemic, AI technology, or a particular party gaining power; no, it will come at our own doings. It will come when prophets stop speaking.Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”

Some of you may be picking up on a theme here; I’m talking about white folks, prophets, in the South. Sometimes we have to see others like us doing the work we want to do before we can do it. As a pot-stirring Southerner, so was the case for me.

I look at such prophets as individuals who challenge the larger narrative. They are invitation givers who ask society to reflect. They are course changers who tell us it doesn’t have to be this way. They have a participatory message of involvement. They ask for a response, one way or another.

I guess you could say prophets have been on my mind. How could they not when witnessing our world? Protestors responded with demonstrations of civil unrest every day. Holy agitators feeling a burning in their bones have a message needing release. And it all starts with taking a step back and receiving that “necessary” vision, that “other” word one doesn’t already have. Producing a response of repentance to say, “No, I can’t go in this direction anymore.”

For me, this means I can’t keep allowing injustice to permanently affect my community.

I can’t stand by and enable lobbying committees to pass legislation that oppresses minority groups in this country and worldwide.

I can’t stand by and hear these statistics revealing the disparity in the criminal justice system.

I can’t uphold the construct of racial supremacy and allow it to keep the division between people.

I can’t stand by and say, “Well, that’s just too political.”

I can’t stand by and allow comments and jokes of racism, misogyny, and bigotry to go unchallenged.

I can’t let a world that keeps on spinning go on, knowing a gender pay gap exists that will one day affect my daughters.

I can’t stand by and allow the elite to make laws that discriminate against those in the LGBTQIA+ community, nor can I allow those with religious authority to falsely condemn them for who they are. Not when I know they are children of God.

I can’t stand by and be silent while broken families are at our borders.

I can’t keep silent and watch young men and women being deployed to war with the belief that redemptive violence is the answer because it never is.

I’m done with all of this.

I can’t be a peacekeeper anymore. Instead, I want to be a peacemaker.

For too long, those who Christ came for, the broken, the suffering, the oppressed, the shackled, the beaten down have cried out to God, aimed their voices at the church, and said, “Here, here is our problem!” And the church’s response has been to keep the peace, remove itself from the issue, and not talk about it. I can’t be part of that anymore. Not if I want to be a prophet like Campbell, the Bradens, and Kester.

I hear the concern from folks. There is fear about the future of the universal church. They worry the church will be replaced, and other institutions will swoop in and fill an individual’s time. They fear what many old prophets discussed: the coming doom and destruction.

The end of the relevance of the church will not come at the hands of a pandemic, AI technology, or a particular party gaining power; no, it will come at our own doings. It will come when prophets stop speaking, and people stop saying, “I can’t.”

And when that day comes, we ought to just let it die.

Put that on a marquee sign.

Jason Aldean and Tyler Childers and two visions of small-town community

This article was original written for Baptist News Global.

Image: Tyler Childers in music video for "In Your Love."

It doesn’t seem like it was just a couple weeks ago Jason Aldean released a music video to expand on the lyrics of his now widely popular and equally controversial hit “Try That in a Small Town.”

Nor does it seem like a week has passed since I penned an article here at Baptist News Global, raising my eyebrow in suspicion along with my concerns about the video’s problematic message. I was as surprised as anyone at how the piece resonated with readers.

I gathered as much while browsing my own social media feeds. Most comments were supportive; others, well, they politely disagreed, only they held the politeness like some folks hold the ketchup on a hotdog.

A childhood friend who still lives in our small hometown shared the spiciest thread I encountered. The heat rose so fast that I decided to finally stop reading. People have a way of getting riled up when you bad-mouth what they think is Mayberry. Hell, just because it’s Sheriff Andy doesn’t mean he gets a pass.

So as the week went by, I kept receiving messages and emails about the piece, and “Try That in A Small Town” continued to rack up views on YouTube.

And then the universe did a funny thing in the form of Tyler Childers and his new song.

For those ears not blessed to have heard the wailing ginger from Lawrence County, Kentucky, I’ll add you to this week’s prayers and concerns list. I caught wind of Childers a few years ago, drawn to his storytelling and songwriting abilities.

Yes, Childers writes his own music. (Entertainers from Macon take note of this fact.) His songs reflect an upbringing in the Bluegrass State, producing a sound so naturally Southern you’d think cicadas were brought into the studio.

There’s just something real there. A level of authenticity missing from most of what comes out of Music City. Growing up within earshot of Loretta Lynn’s Butcher Hollow home might have something to do with Childers being considered the genuine article.

The song “In Your Love” was the raised flag announcing Childers’ new album arriving in September. The lyrics are raw, vulnerable and relatable to anyone who’s come face to face with love only to limp away in a Jacob-like fashion, wholly changed by it.

I will wait for you
‘Til the sun turns into ashes
And bows down to the moon.
I will wait for you;
It’s a long hard war
Ah, but I can grin and bear it
‘Cause I know what the hell I’m fightin’ for
And I will wait for you.

Now if you’re a fan of popular country music, you might close your eyes and see images set into motion by such words. Perhaps a dirt road with a long fence running beside it. Every so often, a broken post or two blows by here and there. The camera pulls back, and a beat-up truck winds through the hazy debris. Inside the cab is a young man making a surprise return home. He’s still in his military uniform, but the bag on the seat beside him lets you know he’ll be staying awhile. He smiles when the tiny house comes into view. That’s when the scene changes, and we see the woman, maybe one or two kids, getting ready to sit down for an evening supper.

We were never made to run forever;
We were just meant to go long enough
To find what we were chasin’ after.
I believe I found it here
In your love

There’s a knock at the door, the woman answers, sees her partner and collapses into his arms. The kids drop their spaghetti-filled forks, and the Golden Retriever you didn’t know was there (but you knew had to be) comes running out of nowhere, jumping and licking this perfect Hallmark family. The scene ends with fireworks erupting over the house because, surprise, it’s also the Fourth of July.

“The scene ends with fireworks erupting over the house because, surprise, it’s also the Fourth of July.”

Doesn’t that sound like a modern-day country music video? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen something like it before because, let’s face it, there’s a hungry audience out there for it.

We could ride on this dead horse again, but Childers rescues us from such an experience. He saves us by enlisting the help of a fellow Kentuckian, author and activist Silas House to write and direct the video. The creative duo instead gives the world something else — a more accurate and honest retelling of marginalized lives in the small rural towns of Appalachia.

A place where two young men fall in love in the coal mines of the region. They find each other and battle the bigotry of being gay by those who join them down in the darkness of the mountain. Forced to leave, they find a small farm and start anew. There they garden, invite family and friends over and begin a life together until tragedy strikes the way it does for those who’ve spent too much time around the fine particles pillaged out of the deep earth.

It’s not your typical love story associated with country music, and that’s precisely why it needs to be told.

“To our knowledge, it is the first-ever country music video with a gay storyline to be released by a major label,” House told his Instagram followers. That’s a massive accomplishment, but Childers, House and the talented folks who made this video possible invite the masses to reconsider what we think we understand about the places we are from.

Where Aldean tells his listeners what kind of people should live in a small town, Childers nudges us to look around and see the beautiful diversity and worthy “others” we’ve missed or kept silent. It’s a message laced with atonement, ensuring these stories need hearing and aren’t shoved purposefully aside into some clandestine corner.

“It’s not your typical love story associated with country music, and that’s precisely why it needs to be told.”

While the video suggests a more remote section, the cultures of Appalachia are significant in scope and uniquely different depending on where you find yourself in it. Don’t believe me? Do yourself a favor and visit Appalshop or listen to Black in Appalachia, Read Appalachia or the Trillbilly Worker’s Party podcasts. You’ll get the sense quickly that no group outright owns rural America and that J.D. Vance’s version isn’t the only one out there.

This differs considerably from the type of people depicted in “Try That in A Small Town.” Where Aldean sings of a place where you can’t dare be different, where things must stay the same, where you must assimilate or else, Childers’ art reminds us that minority and fringe groups have and still do share this space. It’s theirs too. Their voice, presence and perspective make it richer.

“In Your Love” warns us against the damage done when constructing communities of nothing but quaint white fences protecting heteronormative cisgender white faces. A combative gatekeeping ensues and never stops.

I’ve watched Childers’ video several times now. I wonder if I’m being moved by its beauty or if the Holy Ghost is convicting me to work harder to ensure a world like that can exist because that’s the kind of world I want to hear about and live in.

It’s the kind of world I want to help create. A world where having neighbors like the young lovers in the video is seen as a blessing. Neighbors who don’t have to look like me or feel pressured to join a socially accepted idea of normal.

I’m looking for something other than a society run like an aggressive home owners association, and instead something more akin to the Beloved Community, an inclusive space where the kin-dom of God is seen and felt. Where everyone is welcomed and conformity goes to die.

I’d take something like that over certain small towns any day.

‘Try That in A Sundown Town’

This article originally published at BaptistNews.com
Image: Baptist News Global

A small radio rested in my grandmother’s kitchen — one of those gadgets stained by time and the touch of hands that saw a day’s labor before sunrise. On it played nothing but Country Gold.

As pintos simmered on the back eye of the stovetop, the Oak Ridge Boys inched us closer to lunch. Alabama’s “There’s No Way” mixed right in with the cornmeal. And Marshville’s own Randy Travis gave us something cool to listen to during the summer of 1986.

Last night, I dug your picture out from my old dresser drawer.
I set it on the table, and I talked to it ’til four.
I read some old love letters right up ’til the break of dawn.
Yeah, I’ve been sittin’ alone, diggin’ up bones.

We’d listen to Randy and other salt of the earth saints until Maw-maw’s “stories” came on in the early afternoon, and we found ourselves shoved gently outside. As I got older, I drifted away from country music, ashamed of how it made me feel or how it made others feel about me. Sure, we watched Hee Haw, but I tried hard not to sound like Roy Clark and Minnie Pearl.

As I got older, the idea and identity of country music changed. The business of Nashville went full-blown mainstream. Pop producers replaced the troubled troubadours of the destitute. Polished tunes pandering to the masses did little to convert me. A mantra of “sell, sell, sell” replaced those reconciling hymns working out why some humans have to live like dogs.

Years passed before I finally accepted a homecoming call courteous of those old Outlaw voices. Those who touched on eschatological matters sang of the human condition’s depth, struggle and beauty. Some penned songs that would have fit nicely into a pew hymnal. They brought me back and turned me toward the next generation of musicians dealing with the lowly, the lonely and those made to feel inferior because of where they came from — a class of people associated with a particular landscape consisting of street lights and horses in equal supply.

I’m talking about small towns. 

There’s been an awful lot of talk about small towns lately, especially in country music.

Last week, entertainer Jason Aldean caught fire with his single “Try That in A Small Town.” Released in May, the song didn’t become the talk of social media until the music video dropped just over a week ago. Since then, a divided nation of listeners continues to widen the chasm from one another, letting loose words of support or outrage toward Aldean.

Under pressure, Country Music Television pulled the video, which pushed the song’s popularity. As of the writing of this article, the video has reached more than 12 million views on YouTube.

What garners all this attention? Well, for the uninitiated, the video depicts violent altercations between law enforcement and civilians in urban locations: convenience store robberies and department store lootings, buildings set on fire, and tear gas raining down from above on any and all not complying with white conformity.

In the video, these images play on the backdrop of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tenn. — a place with a history. A race riot erupted there in 1946. The slaying of a child of God, 18-year-old Black teenager Henry Choate, at the hands of a mob took place there in 1927.

I wish I could say the Maury County Courthouse was one of a few halls of injustice in the South where detestable acts of hate occurred, but it isn’t. Too many small towns and their government buildings house similar stories.

“Whether Aldean or his team of producers knew this history is debatable. What isn’t, however, is they don’t seem to care now that they know.”

Whether Aldean or his team of producers knew this history is debatable. What isn’t, however, is they don’t seem to care now that they know.

Needless to say, the video conjures all sorts of feelings. When not depicting metropolitan areas as new Babylons, the lyrics written by Kelley Lovelace, Neil Thrasher, Tully Kennedy and Kurt Michael Allison (yes, let it not be lost that Aldean didn’t even write the song he is adamantly defending) accompany picturesque propaganda.

Backyard football games, duck hunting and families standing beside classic roadsters appear as if you’re watching an old home movie.

Cuss out a cop, spit in his face.
Stomp on the flag and light it up.
Yeah, ya think you’re tough.

Baseball games, hopscotch and a group of farmers supporting one another flash in a series of slides Dinesh D’Souza and Dr. Brodsky from A Clockwork Orange would be proud of.

Got a gun that my granddad gave me
They say one day they’re gonna round up.
Well, that shit might fly in the city, good luck.

Scenes flash with a message pointing to a reinforced truth that our country was great while under the banner of white America’s idea of heaven. What happens to those that challenge this truth?

Well, try that in a small town.
See how far ya make it down the road.
Around here, we take care of our own.
You cross that line, it won’t take long.
For you to find out, I recommend you don’t
Try that in a small town.

In short, fool around and find out. Don’t think it won’t happen to you if you step out of line. Find yourself in a small town where a group of folk has all the power and calls all the shots, do things the way they believe should be done, where they don’t feel the need to entertain outside agitators. You’ll find out the way others have.

Those like James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. Student activists who worked in Neshoba County during the summer of 1964.

Murdered in the small town of Philadelphia, Miss. 

Those like Matthew Shepard. Abducted by two men. Tied to a fence post, severely beaten, left to die.

Murdered in the small town of Laramie, Wyo.

Those like Emmett Till, a child kidnapped from his relative’s home.

Lynched. Murdered in the small town of Drew, Miss.

I could keep going. There are too many like James Byrd Jr. (murdered in Jasper, Texas).

Too many like Jonathan Daniels (murdered in Haynesville, Ala.).

Too many like Carol Jenkins (murdered in Martinsville, Ind.)

Unlike Aldean and most of the songwriters who wrote “Try That in A Small Town,” I grew up in a small town. Yes, there was a sense of community there. Folks did try and help one another during hard times. All that is true, but the promise of violence always was present — hidden behind masks of civility.

As a child, I saw those masks and sheets when the KKK marched and handed out flyers in the heart of Kernersville, N.C. Later, I would learn who they were, what they did and that some behind those masks lived in my small-town community. People like that live in big cities and small towns.

Whether Aldean wants to sing a song about such facts is something we will have to hold our collective breath to see.

If he does, might I suggest his songwriters go for a more accurate title to fit their lyrics; “Try That in A Sundown Town.”

A Pastor With No Vision

This article originally published at GoodFaithMedia.org
Image: Stock Photo Illustration (Nathan Dumlao/Unsplash/ https://tinyurl.com/5n76fr7p)

If you’re a sadist and enjoy seeing someone squirm with discomfort, I invite you to watch me suffer through a business meeting. In such a setting, one discovers I take on the desperate actions of a fish snatched out of the sea.

Flailing around, eyes bulging with panic, praying for a return to the deep blue or a quick and painless death. When discussing budgets, finances, and anything involving numbers, a prolonged excruciating demise for me is preferable.

Now, I want to tell you that other types of meetings are different.

I want to tell you I receive a healthy dose of self and vocational worth when discussing church attendance, the number of new member prospects, and outreach opportunities.

I want to tell you my disdain for meetings rest on Robert and his intolerable rules of order.

But the truth is I harbor ill feelings toward most meetings because of the expectations lauded upon me in such spaces. My designated roles and title conjures specific, shall we say, projected suppositions that leave me spiraling into a Lovecraftian abyss.

Those like Lead or Senior pastor. And God help me, the pretentious moniker Executive pastor. I find each a shallow descriptor pulled from corporate jargon.

I thought I walked willfully away from such lingo when I departed the manufacturing world over a decade ago, blissfully erecting a headstone over the dogma of all things Six Sigma. However, I have yet to bury the burdensome perception that I’m a little more than a religious office manager.

I admit, this isn’t all that surprising of a revelation. One needn’t look far to discover countless faith-based leadership books and programs pandering to churches looking to embody a very Wall Street concept of “bigger, stronger, faster” success.

Hell, even the current seminary experience offers a “lead or get out of the way” concentration track tacked on to its Master of Divinity degree. This has produced a modern ministry model that inevitably demands a pastor to operate more as a CEO than a system-challenging prophet.

In this office, one is continuously asked to manage and address a specific query. What’s your plan for us? What’s your vision for this church?

Since arriving at my new call, I’ve bobbed and weaved around this question with the grace of Muhammad Ali. So far, I’ve worked my way off the ropes by stating, “It would be a little pompous of me to believe I know what’s best for this community when I’m still getting to know it.” This sting would allow me to float away to fight again another day, but a retorting jab only works for so long.

There finally comes a time when the question must be answered. As I approached the end of my first year there, I thought of the concept of vision. As I did, I decided to reacquaint myself with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. He minces no words when dealing with most leaders’ supposed visions.

“God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own laws, and judges that brethren and God Himself accordingly,” he writes.

The martyred German’s words are with me as I grab a chair at a recent diaconate meeting. On cue, a board member tosses this loaded question at me again. With all the honesty, humbleness, and sincerity I can muster for an evening meeting, I deliver, “I don’t have a vision for you.”

There’s a pause, and all air goes out of the room. Eyes dart, making contact with one another before glancing down at shoes. I lean back and take a deep breath before continuing.

“I don’t have a vision because what will happen at this church isn’t up to me. It’s up to you all. You have to remember, I’m a Baptist minister. I can’t even vote at any of our meetings.

In fact, I’d argue I have the least amount of power in this church. My voice and opinion have a soft influence, but even that feels contrived.

I don’t want to influence or coerce you. I don’t want you to think like I think or believe what I believe. At best, my words and actions, I hope, inspire you to consider an alternative way of living out your faith.

My call is to point out multiple visions, possibilities, and paths you can choose to journey down. I can’t make these decisions for you, but I’ll be there as you and this community try to answer them.

I’m not your boss, I don’t have an agenda, and I certainly don’t hold all the answers. My presence is best used walking beside you, not in front or behind you. Not pushing you, or worse, dragging you across a line I determine is admirable.

I don’t have the energy to impose my will, and my shoulders aren’t looking to hold anything up alone. If changes occur, if there’s a vision to be had, it will be because of what the congregation decides, not me.”

A mighty wind sweeps through the room, and I can breathe again. I imagine my answer to this group differs from what Dale Carnegie would have delivered. Would Simon Sinek or Rick Warren say something similar? I doubt it.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s not a bad thing. There may need to be an anti-leadership TED Talk in the near future.

That’s a meeting I might consider sitting through.

Back to the ATL, hungry for a welcome home

This article originally published at BaptistNews.com
Image: Baptist News Global

Let’s start with a bit of disclosure.

I’m not afraid of flying. Really, I’m not.

But as the plane I’m on starts to descend, I realize I’m afraid.

Not beacuse we’re rapidly losing altitude. There’s been no abrupt change in cabin pressure. No air masks have dropped, and I’m not jumping into action because I’m the only person sitting in one of the exit rows. There’s been no last-minute bout with teeth-rattling turbulence. This has been a smooth and uneventful flight. In fact, the only moment where my eyes rolled and my stomach lurched was when the airline announced they were charging for Planters peanuts.

This fear is different, causing me to feel like I’m standing at the mouth of a dark cave and my flashlight batteries are running out. I know I have to go in, but I feel unprepared, just like I do now, unsure of what will happen when I land.

When this plane touches down, my feet will grace Southern soil for the first time in almost five years. And as silly as it might sound, I’m worried if the home I left, the South I left, remembers me.

A memory circles around me like a vulture. One where I visited an old stomping ground I hadn’t frequented in 10 years. Some life-giving times happened there. Some heavy and intoxicating moments took place there too. Upon my return, I was sure I’d feel connected as I once did. Back when I was as much of a fixture as the Friday night fiddle player and the thick and encroaching ivy covering the brick exterior. I knew the place no longer belonged to me in less than five minutes. The faces I saw around me were the new occupants. I was only visiting.

I’m afraid the South will treat me the same, which nearly breaks me.

I stroll off the plane expecting Atlanta to welcome me with a sweltering, humid hug typical of early summer. Smothering me the way a grandmother or great aunt’s embrace might. Instead, the ATL greets me with a cool-laced kiss that makes the light denim jacket I have on seem like not such a bad idea after all.

“I stroll off the plane expecting Atlanta to welcome me with a sweltering, humid hug typical of early summer.”

I graciously accept my good fortune, grab the keys to my rental car and receive a sign I know is coming from God almighty herself. On the halo-shaped stretch of road known as I-285, the heavenly hosts nudge me toward the billboard reading “Bojangles Famous Chicken and Biscuits.”

I knew this would be my first stop and first meal.

Since being called away from the South, I have tried to find meaning through different practices. I’ve worn my accent on my sleeve, accepting it with a bit of pride I didn’t know I had in me. I’ve consecrated kitchens and turned them into sacred spaces to invoke my people’s spirits and unique foodways. This has left me tasting my way through the tidewater of Virginia and experimenting with the sweet Sonkers of North Carolina. I’ve dabbled in the richness of low-country recipes and even tried my hand at the profound regional offerings of an Alabama barbeque sauce good enough to sop up white bread. All have grounded me and affirmed I can carry the South with me wherever I go.

Yet, I’m discovering some things aren’t portable, and there are some things even Amazon cannot deliver. A Cajun filet biscuit is such a testament. Coasting down the beltline, I realized I was missing more than spicy yardbird wrapped in wax paper. I missed the experience of receiving one. The early morning drives where I’d wait ever so patiently in those long lines inching my way around the drive-through lane. Congregating with others needing the exact fix of bo-rounds and sweet tea. It would seem my concept of comfort extends beyond the food to the ritual of obtaining it.

Rituals and remembrance are dangerously powerful. Step into any church building, and you’ll whiff their alluring aroma along with hints of incense and last Sunday’s casseroles. There are rituals we look to continue and the ones we’re brave enough to create. Both offer transitional opportunities.

Like doors, rituals can be passed through and, in turn, be closed and left to mark the former. They allow one to move into the future or venture back into the past. As I pull into the parking lot, I think of the words of fellow Southerner and theologian Tom F. Driver. “To lose ritual is to lose the way.”

As I place my order, I silently pray I’ve retained the ability to enjoy this simple offering of fried goodness. The first bite seizes my soul and leaves me in a transcendent state. Yes, I still have it, and this ritual still has value.

For the next several days, I’m walking in and out of those ritualistic doors of value. I participate in the ritual of gathering in person with classmates I’ve never seen from their shoulders down. We worship, study and eat together every day. We are an incarnational community. Present with one another. Struggling to resurface from the half-life we’ve been in the last three years. Together, we reinvent the ceremony of proximity that includes the elements of space, time and relationship.

By the end of the week, I’m drained yet somehow complete. My appetite is too. I enjoy meals from around the world thanks to the strip malls running up and down Buford Highway.

I suck down hand-crimped dumplings and destroy monster Mandarin lion’s head meatballs at Northern Chinese Eatery. I use two hands to carry a paper plate filled to the breaking point with Indonesian cuisine courtesy of Batavia in Doraville. I chat about Hot-lanta’s living conditions with Makayla, the bartender on duty at the French-themed Blind Pig Parlour Bar. Our conversation is natural, turns spiritual, then back to her gushing over the beauty of her city.

While holding the muddler, she holds my attention, explaining the ingredients of the custom cocktails she concocts on the fly for me. As I stir my drink and take a sip, I’m blown away by her attention to detail and humbled by the consistent heavy pouring of hospitality I’m receiving from the South. I could walk out of The Blind Pig tonight and be content with all I’ve experienced. Still, there’s one more ritual to enact before I say my goodbyes, head to the airport and home to my family.

I need to visit the shrine that is Waffle House.

“Where Bojangles was my welcome-back meal, Waffle House will be my farewell bite. Nothing crazy.”

Where Bojangles was my welcome-back meal, Waffle House will be my farewell bite. Nothing crazy. I’ve eaten too well the last few days for tatters scattered and covered. As much as it pains me, I’m passing on the grits too. Instead, I go for the classic, the pinnacle of culinary excellence: Coffee and a pecan waffle smothered in a liquid most outside of Vermont would recognize as syrup. The place is mostly empty, with more staff than patrons. This is good since I need a booth. I need to sit where there is an empty space across from me.

Empty chairs placed around a meal have meaning. Signifying a readily available space, a literal seat at the table, to any who need it. For those of Polish heritage, particularly during Christmas, the expression Gość w dom, Bóg w dom is lived out.

A guest in the home is God in the home.

A reminder: Those we welcome to our tables can bless us as much as we can bless them. So keeping an open seat is a hopeful practice to encounter the holy. It’s a ritual of expecting and welcoming a blessing from another.

“Those we welcome to our tables can bless us as much as we can bless them.”

I keep this seat open for such an opportunity.

And in the same way, other expressions of faith leave a chair open for a beloved prophet; I leave this open for a prophet I knew named Don. We spent time in many Waffle House booths together, and this visit was no different. His spirit and memory are here with me now. I wonder if I’ll ever eat in a Waffle House again without making sure there is an empty seat for him.

Finally, with the coffee consumed and the cup empty, when I can’t muster another bite, I go to the counter to pay my check. I’m greeted with the sounds of familiar warmth wrapped in a southern drawl.

“Was it good, baby?” The angel behind the counter asks.

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you for that. Thank you for feeding me and feeding my soul. I haven’t been in a place that sounded like me in a long time. I appreciate listening to you sing as you cook. Thanks for serving me a bit of home.”

“Hot dog, baby! I like to hear that!” She says, clapping her hands. “You have a blessed day, baby,” she said.

I told her I was off to a good start.

Amen, and amen. Until next time ATL. Thanks for remembering me.