King David's coffee mug...

... was recently found at the Elah Fortress in Khirbet Qeiyafa, an archaeological site in Israel some 20 miles southwest of Jerusalem.

Okay, so it's probably not David's coffee mug. But it is the oldest Hebrew text ever discovered, and carbon dating puts it during or near the reign of Israel's greatest king. (You can read a CNN article here.) The 5 lines of text have not been deciphered yet, but archaeologists think they may contain the words "slave," "judge," and "king," indicating that it may be some kind of legal document.

I love stuff like this. And the best part? The Elah Fortress site is only 4% excavated. Who knows what else they'll find?

Young clergy age trends

The Lewis Center for Church Leadership at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., has released an updated version of its Report on Clergy Age Trends in the UMC. This updated report is built upon the original report done by the Lewis Center, which was chronicled in the book, The Crisis of Younger Clergy by Lovett Weems and Ann Michel. (I wrote a book review of Crisis, which you can access here.)

There is information on all age groups (including elders, deacons, and local pastors). My own interest is largely in the "younger clergy" age group, and the good news is that there is actual good news to report.

The numbers of under-35 year old clergy elders and their percentage as a number of all elders bottomed out in 2005 (the year I was ordained), but it has climbed since then. The numbers for elders look like this:

Year - % - Total
2005 - 4.69 - 850
2006 - 4.89 - 881
2007 - 4.92 - 876
2008 - 5.21 - 910

Those changes aren't huge, but they are promising. There is also a nice statistic to report from my home conference - the Arkansas Conference. We have the highest percentage (9.29%) of under-35 clergy of any conference in the U.S.!

[Note: the report is helpful this year in the amount of information it contains on the trends in numbers of deacons and local pastors, which were missing from the report as it was presented in The Crisis of Younger Clergy.]

Adam Hamilton speaks...

... and the United Methodist Church listens.

I don't think it is an overstatement to say that the Rev. Adam Hamilton has become a force within the United Methodist Church. Hamilton's Church of the Resurrection in suburban Kansas City, MO, has an average Sunday attendance of 7,500 worshipers (and a membership of almost twice that). His books - on topics as diverse as preaching, marriage preparation, church growth, and contemporary ethics - sell thousands of copies around the country. Hamilton's church also hosts a number of conferences throughout the year around areas like nurturing pastoral leadership and renewing the mainline church. There are a few bigger churches than Hamilton's in Methodism, but I doubt any have the influence that his has come to have.

On his blog this past June, Hamilton announced an intriguing project that will be carried out over the next six to seven years. He wants to visit all sixty-six annual conferences within the U.S. in order to present a three-part workshop series, covering the topics of: Essentials of Leadership, Improving Preaching and Worship, and Evangelism & Outreach in the United Methodist Tradition. Take note that this is essentially an episcopal function that Hamilton says he is going to claim. In the Christian tradition, the teaching office in the church is located most fully in the bishops. And in the Methodist tradition, those bishops are supposed to be true itinerants. So Hamilton is basically saying that he is going to exercise the itinerant episcopal office (though without the power to appoint, of course!) Don't think I'm exaggerating here; Hamilton invokes the itinerant episcopacy when discussing his plans on his blog post.

Clearly, Hamilton believes he's doing something right and he wants to share it with the rest of the connection. He came to Duke Divinity School a few days ago to share some of his views at the annual Pastor's School and Convocation, and I got to hear him. In my current UM Reporter column, I share some of my reflections on hearing him. Hamilton has the ability to come across as high-energy but with an intense focus and calm demeanor. As I say in the column, it is a bit like a combination of a preacher, CEO, practical theologian, and motivational speaker all rolled into one.

The part of Hamilton's talk at Duke that stuck with me the most was around the theme of "leading by example," where he talked about the need for pastors to be willing to go themselves where they wanted to lead their congregations. He talked about the need not only to inform when it comes to mission and outreach, but to inspire through story and personal example. Like any visible, large church pastor, Hamilton attracts both praise and criticism. For myself, I've always contended that he probably does mega-church ministry as well as it can be done. And I admire his willingness to pursue Wesley's original mission for Methodism: To reform the nation, and particularly the church, and to spread scriptural holiness over these lands.

My Obama problem

The presidential election is less than two weeks away, and I still don't know who I am voting for - or even whether I'll be voting. I've struggled with whether to bring this up in a public way on my blog. But a civic forum at Duke Divinity School a couple of nights ago convinced me that I should, and so I am asking for your help.

Please read the following with an open mind (even if you don't agree with me on the issue in question). And if you can help me to reason through this, I would greatly appreciate it. Let me also say that I am revealing a lot more of my political views than I would normally do in so public a setting, so please take that into account if you choose to respond.

My Obama problem is with the issue of abortion. I am a pro-vita Christian, which means that I am ardently pro-life in all of the social/moral issues that tend to confront us. (In this blog post last year, I proposed the term 'pro-vita' as a way to identify those Christians who are both anti-abortion and anti-death penalty, issues that typically divide liberals and conservatives. I would also add an extreme reluctance to engage in war, which I understand to be the very minimum in Jesus' admonition, "Blessed are the peacemakers." Maybe that just makes me Catholic. Whatever.)

During my time as a student at Vanderbilt Divinity School, I was converted to the anti-death penalty position and demonstrated publicly against it in Nashville. I have been generally pro-life on the abortion issue for many years, but during my time at Duke, this fairly passive pro-life position has been transformed so that I view the abortion issue as indicative of the whole Christian view on the sanctity of life (That is, I tend to think that Christians who rather blithely describe themselves as pro-choice are either: a) unreflective regarding the doctrine of creation; or b) simply inconsistent in their Christian self-understanding due usually to an idolatrous loyalty to the radical privatization of American individualism and the consumerist commodification of all things, including babies).

For what it's worth, I am grateful to both Vanderbilt and Duke for the impacts they have had on me regarding issues of life, and I think it the particular ways they influenced me are a testament to those schools' particular strengths.

Here's how I understand my Obama problem. As a Christian, I see one of the greatest duties of politics as the amelioration of suffering for the citizens of the body politic. (A more optimistic view might say that politics should promote the flourishing of life, but my understanding of the pervasiveness of sin is too great to allow me to make such a statement.) At this point in history, it seems like the Democrats are poised to be much more effective than the Republicans at this task. For one, I think the legacy of the Bush administration (and the complicity of the pre-2006 Republican Congress in its policies) discredits the Republican Party generally. And secondly, I find the McCain/Palin campaign's proposals to help us recover (from war, from economic disaster, from environmental degradation) to be fairly unconvincing.

On the contrary, I think the Democrats are more in touch with some of our pressing problems, including healthcare, the environment, the economy, and U.S. relationships with other nations. Plus, I like Obama. True, I wish he had more national political experience. But I think he reasons well (one of the greatest political skills required of a president), and I think he will surround himself with those who can help make up for some of his areas of inexperience (e.g., his selection of Joe Biden to bolster his understanding of foreign policy). You can go down the list of issues, and in this election at least, I will check off with the Democrats on just about every issue - save one.

But that one is a big one. Depending on whether you go with the CDC or the Guttmacher Institute figures, there are between 850,000 and 1.3 million abortions in the United States each year. And if you regard each one of those abortions as the taking of human life in a way that transgresses the law of love as given to us by Christ, then the issue of abortion looms at least as large as any other single political issue. At the civic forum at Duke earlier this week, one of the professors present said that the interaction between secular politics and the church should work to make both spheres more aware of the outcast and marginalized among us, to the end that they are seen as human beings. I tend to agree with that statement, especially as it relates to the most marginalized persons among us - those in the womb, who are so defenseless that they cannot even cry out in anguish.

The reason this becomes a very pressing issue in this election has everything to do with the Supreme Court. The Court's two oldest members are among its most liberal - John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. If they retire in the next four years (and it seems almost certain that Stevens will), and they are replaced with conservatives, it could be mean the end of Roe v. Wade and the return of the moral debate around abortion to state legislatures, where it belongs. There the witness of Christians can actually make a difference in the fight for life (in the legal realm).

[On the likelihood of the next president having the opportunity to appoint several justices to the Supreme Court, see this NY Times editorial. The Times is clearly not where I am on the issue of Roe v. Wade, but I agree with it on the point that the next president may have a significant impact on the direction of the court for years to come. For the record, the attitude of the most conservative justices on the Court on the issue habeas corpus has been extremely troubling to me, as we have seen in the legal twilight zone surrounding the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. In June, the Court upheld habeas corpus for enemy combatants, indicating that it viewed the right to habeas corpus to be universal rather than just confined to U.S. citizens. I agree with that opinion, the passage of which - admittedly - was dependent upon the Court's liberal members.]

In the prospect of judicial appointments lies the real issue, for me, because Obama would probably be the most ardently pro-choice president we have ever had. (For a general op-ed piece on Obama's extreme pro-choice position, see this Michael Gerson column.) Obama's role opposing the Born-Alive Act in the Illinois State Legislature in 2002 and 2003 is generally well-known, but if you aren't aware of it, read this good article written by Robert George and Yuval Levin. It is a shocking story, told with factual detail.

George and Levin explain Obama's opposition to the proposed Born-Alive Act while he was a state senator in Illinois:

"As his original 2002 statements [in the Illinois State Legislature] make clear, [Obama] sought to defeat the Born-Alive Act because he recognized that it bears at least implicitly on the larger question of abortion in America. He seemed to realize that the logical implication of protecting the child born alive after an attempted abortion is that abortion involves taking the life of a child in the womb, and that acknowledging that, even at the extreme margins of the practice of abortion, could put the legitimacy of abortion itself in question. Therefore, Obama chose to defend the widest possible scope for legal abortion by building a fence around it, even if that meant permitting a child who survives an abortion to be left to die without even being afforded basic comfort care."

John McCain might well replace Justices Stevens and Ginsburg with judges who would rightly see Roe v. Wade as a perversion of the U.S. Constitution (though I admit that is not a foregone conclusion). Obama, on the other hand, would almost certainly replace them with justices at least as liberal as they are. That means that the 2008-2012 period stands as particularly monumental in the history of the abortion issue in this country. And if you think the saving of so many human lives is of paramount importance, that has to impact how you view this election.

And that's what has got me in a quandry. I welcome your comments (and advice).

Pluralism run amuck

The Rev. Ann Holmes Redding is an Episcopal priest who announced last year that she feels called to be both a practicing Christian and a practicing Muslim and, in fact, has understood herself as an adherent of both faiths for now over two years. I first saw mention of this story a few months ago when it started making national headlines. Despite the seeming inconsistencies between identifying as both Christian and Muslim, Rev. Redding asserts, "At the most basic level, I understand the two religions to be compatible. That's all I need." Though she received a Ph.D in New Testament from Union Theological Seminary in New York and was ordained a priest in 1984, Redding insists that her draw toward Islam is "the calling of my heart" and that it is entirely compatible with being a Christian.

Unfortunately for Redding, the Episcopal Church does not agree. It appears that Bishop Geralyn Wolf, presiding bishop of the diocese of Rhode Island (in which Redding was ordained) will most likely defrock her from the priesthood in the coming months. Redding is currently suspended from all pastoral duties while she determines whether she wants to continue claiming a Muslim identity.

Redding herself is unrepentant. According to this news story from the Seattle Times, Redding said, "'I'm saddened and disappointed that this could not be an opportunity' for the church to broaden its perspective and talk about what it means to adhere to more than one faith." She feels that the calling she has received to practice both faiths is a gift to adherents of both.

This case raises questions that should be equally troubling to both Christians and Muslims. After all, what does it mean to be a confessional Christian or a confessional Muslim at all? The sacred texts and belief systems of the two religions are clearly mutually exclusive. I cannot speak with any authority at all on the positive theological affirmations of Islam, but I can say with certainty that the Christian belief in a triune God and the Incarnation of Jesus Christ as the fully human and fully divine Savior of the world are non-negotiable tenets of what it means to be a Christian. Insofar as Muslims are not willing to claim those beliefs (and they are not), they are can simply not be Christians.

I was born and raised a Protestant Liberal in a denomination that, over time and probably from a lack of a strong theological tradition, largely adopted a Protestant Liberal identity. Over time, I have come to reject that dominant stream of contemporary Methodism for exactly the kind of problems we see in the case of Redding. This is pluralism run amuck. It does violence to the integrity of both the Christian and Muslim faiths by respecting the distinctive claims of neither. And worse, it posits a third alternative (call it secular humanism, cultural relativism, or whatever) that seeks to trump all other religious identities with implicit claims of a kind of sophisticated superiority that regards religious exclusivism as simply not "progressive" enough.

But what, then, does it claim as the theological authority that allows it to make such a bold claim? Help me out, if you can. I admit I am mystified.

Home, sweet home

I'm home again after being away for a few days to preach a sermon series for my friend Alex Jackson at his church, McKendree Memorial United Methodist Church in Portland, TN. Alex and I had been talking about me coming to preach a revival series at his church since Emily and I moved to North Carolina, but we had never been able to make a time work until now.

My series was called, "Commitment, Community, and Power," and it looked at the way in which we are called to live our Christian lives within the body of Christ. I preached - and firmly believe - that the Holy Spirit's power is always poured out in the context of Christian community first and foremost. That's a hard thing for us to remember in our overly individualistic, consumerist culture. And in that sense, it is probably as hard to truly be the church as it has ever been. But it is what we've always been called to do - all the way back to Acts 2.

There's a lot I've wanted to blog about, but I didn't have much time on the road. Thanks for everyone who responded on the blog and through e-mail to the Winnie-the-Poohcharist satire. That was a piece I originally submitted to a magazine that didn't get picked up, so I decided to adapt it for the blog. And for the record, there is no Amazing Grace UMC and no Karen Teasely. There's also no such thing as Winnie-the-Poohcharist (and hopefully, there never will be!).

My brother, Barkley Thompson, is the pastor of St. John's Episcopal Church in Roanoke, VA, and his church recently launched a new website. It comes complete with Barkley's own pastor's blog, too. Enjoy.

Getting up to speed

After the hacking incident on my site a week ago, we had to wipe all my auxiliary pages clean. But it also gave me the chance to update those pages, which I needed to do anyway. I'm getting up to speed on that, so you can now see accurate information both in my 'About Andrew' page and my 'Contact' page.

What I am really excited about are some changes we have made to the 'UM Reporter Columns' and 'CDQ Columns' pages. These are the pages we originally set up so I could archive all the column work that I've done for the United Methodist Reporter and the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly. In the recovery of the site over the past few days, my webmaster has changed those pages so that I can sort the articles by year. If you visit them now, you'll see that you can choose a year from which to view articles, instead of just having all of them listed on one page. That allows you to scroll through the titles and descriptions of each article in chronological order.

Since there are fewer articles for the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly, I went ahead and did those first. I'm working on the columns for the UM Reporter, and so far I've got all of them posted for 2008. I'll try to have the ones from the years 2005 through 2007 added in the coming days. Enjoy the archive!

Christians amidst economic chaos

With the financial sector in crisis and the stock market in a tailspin, our nation's economic outlook is as gloomy as it has ever been in my lifetime. Just today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted another 678 points to fall below 8,000 for the first time since 2003.

Words like "fear" and "panic" are regularly being used in headlines to describe the worries of investors.

Even worse, it is starting to look like the financial meltdown is having a serious impact on the economy as a whole. The New York Times reports that 159,000 jobs were cut last month, the worst job loss rate in years. While our nationwide employment figures are still relatively healthy, statistics like that are not a good sign for what is to come. And that's just in the United States. Worldwide, the drying up of capital due to the subprime mortgage fiasco is raising the spectre of global recession - meaning that our sloppy banking practices here at home could end up hurting a lot of people around the world.

So what are Christians to do in this time? I think the first thing is for us to keep everything that is happening in perspective. A few weeks ago, I wrote a post a few weeks ago about a friend who reminded me of a central tenet of John Howard Yoder's theology - that it is, in fact, Jesus Christ and his church who are driving history. No king, nation-state, or economy can usurp what he has rightfully claimed for his own. It is a basic Christian affirmation, but in such a time as this (when we are tempted to think of the economy and presidential politics as having much greater ultimate importance than they really do) it is really important.

And second, I think any situation where Christians know that their brothers and sisters within the household of faith are going to suffer is an opportunity to help them in tangible ways. In my current column in the UM Reporter - "Hope in the midst of economic chaos" - I suggest that the current economic climate can actually help to teach us what it means to love one another. Now I know that isn't easy. Middle-class people have an almost pathological fear of others finding out that they are hurting financially. But self-sufficiency is a myth, and it is one that we should get past. In the generation after Jesus, the early church shared so that no one went needy (Acts 2:44-45, 4:32-35). If our current economic situation gets as bad as many fear it might, we will find ourselves with the same opportunity.

[November 8th update: This report by David Goldman of CNNMoney points to two troubling current developments in the economy: an unemployment rate that has risen to 6.5% nationally and a loss of 240,000 more jobs in October. The unemployment rate is the highest in the country since 1994.]

I've been hacked!

Yesterday morning I was alerted to a hacking incident on this site that was pretty serious. The administrator function of the site had been broken into, which basically allowed anyone to make changes to various pages on Gen-X Rising. Predictably, someone started putting links to very nasty websites on my 'About Andrew' and 'UM Reporter Columns' page.

My webmaster was able to determine that the problem was with our web hosting company (not Blogger). We made some changes to tighten up security and cleaned out all the trash.

If you were navigating around the site over the past couple of days and came across any of this stuff, I sincerely apologize. And for the person who first alerted me to it, I want to say thank you. Fellow bloggers, let my experience serve as a warning to you. I rarely visit pages on Gen-X Rising like the 'About Andrew' page, so if no one had alerted me, my site could have been infected for days on end.

For right now, the pages that the options on the left-hand sidebar link to have been cleaned out. I'll be re-adding information to them over the coming days. The one piece of good news is that this is allowing me to do some updating to the 'UM Reporter Columns' and 'CDQ Columns' pages that I've wanted to do for some time - basically, inputting all the columns I've written, sorted by year.

If other bloggers have experience with hacking incidents and could offer helpful preventative advice to the readers of this site and myself, feel free to share.

Winnie-the-Poohcharist: The sequel

This is the follow-up to the remarkable Winnie-the-Poohcharist worship experience I had at Amazing Grace UMC in Rockville, VA, not long ago. If you haven't read part one, you can scroll down to yesterday's blog post or just click here. And if you've never taken part in a Winnie-the-Poohcharist service, you're not going to believe this...

What I encountered after Associate Pastor Karen Teasely led me into the sanctuary almost defies explanation. The packed worship space had been decorated to look like the Hundred Acre Wood (think Vacation Bible School set on steroids). The "hymns" consisted of A.A. Milne's sing-song poetry straight out of the Pooh books, only set to music by a high school praise band. And let's just say that Rev. Teasely wasn't the only one wearing a costume.

The senior pastor (who would not go on record for this review) looked confused through most of the service, but he did get up and preach at the appropriate time. I noted that this seemed to be the least meaningful part of the service for the congregation, and many of the younger couples - "formerly unchurched" Karen later told me with a knowing expression - got up during the sermon to refresh their donuts and coffee with a quick trip to the Holy Grounds coffee bar.

The real celebration started when Karen herself went to the altar and uncovered piles of cinnamon rolls and little clay pots with "Hunny" written on the side. She sort of skimmed over the Prayer of Confession and went straight to a tailored Great Thanksgiving. It looked like this:

Celebrant: We don't much mind if it rains or snows,
'Cos we're gonna have some honey on our nice new nose!

People: Sing Ho! For the life of a Bear!
Sing Ho! For the life of a Bear!

Celebrant: We don't much care if it snows or thaws,
'Cos we're gonna have some honey on our nice clean paws!

People: Sing Ho! For a Bear!
Sing Ho! For a Pooh!

The lyrics seemed vaguely familiar, and I had to admit that the praise band played a nice tune to go with them. All the words were helpfully projected using PowerPoint, with scenes of Winnie and his friends juxtaposed against images of Jesus and the Twelve.

Jesus himself did make a brief appearance in the liturgy when the words of institution were said, and then Karen went on at length to talk about the sweetened elements in front of her: "Some churches use unleavened bread, and others use leavened," she said with a shrug. "Some use wine, and others use grape juice."

"When you come forward today, you'll receive a cinnamon roll and your own little pot of honey-sweetened juice. Here at Amazing Grace, we think the Spirit is what is important."

As I sat in my pew munching on my Poohcharist, I thought about how meaningful and relevant the whole service had seemed. Stodgy old traditionalists might quibble with some of the things Karen's church is doing, but the service had been packed with young people. And Amazing Grace is obviously not going to let outdated concepts like "tradition" or "orthodoxy" or "the Bible" stand in the way of a postmodern feast for the senses.

And besides, maybe we all need to sweeten up the sacrament a little bit. With hunny. Just think about it: Who can't relate to Winnie and the gang down at Pooh Corner? If other churches follow Amazing Grace's lead, all the poignant lessons we learned as children from philosophic Winnie and his ragtag group of friends can finally be put to use for the Grand Pooh-bah himself: Jesus Christ.

And maybe, just maybe, we also need somebody a little less cosmic than the Second Person of the Trinity for the sacrament to make sense in this day and age. Someone who can really help people think about what God's grace looks like in the world. A rock star? Perhaps. A Pooh Bear? Even better.

Winnie-the-Poohcharist: A liturgical review

I've got a remarkable story to tell:

Liturgical renewal in contemporary Protestantism is taking on a number of surprising forms: Emergent worship settings where weekly Eucharist comes in the form of mulled wine and sweet bread. Or U2charist services in formerly button-down Episcopal churches where the sacrament is received to the sounds of Bono's theologically-inspired vocals.

But neither of these comes close to matching what I saw during a recent trip to Amazing Grace United Methodist Church in suburban Rockville, Virginia.

After a friend told me about Amazing Grace UMC's own foray into Eucharistic renewal, it only took a quick phone call to put me in touch with the Rev. Karen Teasely, the church's Associate Pastor in charge of Innovation Ministries.

I could feel Karen beaming over the phone. "I heard that the Episcopalians came up with U2charist," she said. "Now Episcopalians are nice folks. But I wouldn't exactly call them cutting edge. But heck, 'cutting edge' is on our marquee!"

Karen invited me up for the following Sunday to see what the church was doing for myself. "Just come on up and worship with us," she said. "We've got something that'll knock your high church socks off."

The "something" is a liturgical experiement that the folks at Amazing Grace are calling "Winnie-the-Poohcharist." Aimed primarily at children, youth, and the unchurched, Winnie-the-Poohcharist combines the sacrament with poems and imagery from the popular A.A. Milne children's books to offer - according to Teasely - "a more relevant sacramental experience."

Intrigued, I drove up from my home in Durham, NC, to Rockville the next Sunday. Pulling into the parking lot, I saw that 'cutting edge' was, indeed, on the church's marquee (it reads "Amazing Grace - we worship on the cutting edge." In tiny letters at the bottom of the sign it reads, "A United Methodist congregation").

Karen was supposed to meet me before the regular morning service, but I didn't recognize her at the front door because of the Tigger costume she was wearing (think of a college team mascot). She spotted me right away and started bouncing in true imitation of Tigger himself. She was clearly eager to talk and, it seemed, a bit over-caffeinated. Amazing Grace has recently shut down its food pantry ("lack of volunteers," Karen explained) and transformed the space into a cutting edge coffee bar ministry called Holy Grounds. We headed there for a couple of venti-sized, double-shot espresso lattes with seasonal pumpkin spice and a conversation.

Once settled, Karen and I chatted about the pros and cons of Winnie-the-Poohcharist. "I admit we've gotten a little creative with the liturgy," Karen confessed. "But you should see what Winnie-the-Poohcharist has done to our numbers on Sunday morning."

When I suggested that some might see Amazing Grace's new project as copy-catting the well-known U2charist movement, she turned slightly combative.

"Look, this is all about updating the sacrament to give it relevance again," she said. "And Winnie-the-Pooh obviously makes a better messiah-figure than Bono."

"I mean, Bono's all about fixing poverty and getting rid of AIDS, but he still parties like a rock star."

When I asked Karen what exactly made Winnie a Christ-figure, she was ready with a laundry list of answers. "For one, Winnie wandered around the Hundred Acre Wood doing good, just like Jesus in Galilee."

Hmmm, I thought, that makes Winnie a good person, er, Pooh, but not exactly Jesus-like, right? Wrong.

"And just look at his friends," Karen went on. "Eeyore, Piglet, Tigger, Kanga, and Baby Roo. What do you call them?"

"Uh, talking animals in a children's story?" I ventured.

"Outcasts and marginalized! Think about it. Eeyore is clinically depressed. Tigger's got ADD. Kanga is a single mom trying to raise a kid. And Piglet? The ultimate playground wimp. Those critters are as lost as any leper or blind man in the gospels!"

Karen gulped down the last of her latte.

At this point, my jaw was laying on the table. "Just wait till you see the service," she said with a wink, before donning the head of her Tigger costume. "Come on!" And with that, we bounced into the sanctuary.

[I'll conclude my experience at Amazing Grace in a post tomorrow. Stay tuned. You won't believe what comes next.]

Civility in political dialogue

In a recent interview with Christianity Today where he talked about his global PEACE Plan, Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren commented on the recent Saddleback Civil Forum that brought Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain together to discuss issues of faith and politics. In the interview, Warren says that he was happy for the way that the two candidates were able to come together to demonstrate their potential leadership. And he says he was interested in trying to "out-think and out-love unbelievers."

This evening I watched almost all of the vice-presidential debate between Gov. Sarah Palin and Sen. Joe Biden. I watched the debate with an eye to how each v.p. candidate would characterize the other (and the other's running mate). Of course, the two pointed out the differences with their opponent's ticket - as they should have. But I also noticed that Biden complemented John McCain on a number of issues; it seemed clear that he respected McCain as his long-time Senate colleague. And I noticed that Palin complemented Biden personally on a number of issues, some of them for her own political points but others for seemingly altruistic reasons.

The current campaign - by both parties - has not won high marks for basic political civility. Do you think the debate tonight continued that, or do you think the two veep candidates showed restraint? Is this a superficial concern I'm raising, or does the tone of political discourse in the campaign have real importance for larger national politics?

[Postscript: The post-debate analysis amongst pundits last night seemed to suggest two main things: First, that Biden won the debate and demonstrated a greater knowledge of the policy issues at hand. And secondly, that Palin did a better job than expected, particularly in the wake of her less-than-stellar recent interviews. I agree with both those points, as does David Brooks of the NY Times in his column today.]