Youth Ministry Reconceived

If you checked in over the past couple of weeks, you've been seeing a lot of posts about various aspects of the Duke Youth Academy. DYA ended last weekend, and I've spent this week getting caught up on life-as-usual.

In addition to the blogging I did over the past few weeks, I also put my thoughts on the Youth Academy in my new column in the UM Reporter. This is the best 700-word overview of DYA that I can muster.

As a closing word on this year's DYA summer session, I would only encourage you to think about people you know who could take part in DYA next summer. Some possibilities include:

Students - Rising juniors and senior in high school are eligible to participate. There is an application procedure, which can be found on the DYA website. For any high schooler who is exploring their Christian vocation or simply wants to live the Christian life more deeply, there is no better way to do than DYA.

Ministry Fellows - Each year we invite a number of youth ministers to participate in the life of DYA. It is an opportunity for sabbatical, of sorts. You've got no responsibilities other than to take part in the full life of the community. The Ministry Fellow component is designed for youth ministers without a theological degree.

DYA Staff - The experience of working on staff at the Duke Youth Academy is tremendous. Each year we hire a number of college students to work as Resident Advisors (R.A.'s) and a number of other folks to serve as Mentors to our students. (The Mentors are often, but not always seminary students. We've also had teachers, pastors, volunteer youth workers, and doctoral students as Mentors over the past couple of years.) If you think you'd enjoy being a part of the staff, I would encourage you to apply!

[Note: Photo above taken by DYA student Nathan Milleson]

An Overabundance of Riches

The frustration of blogging the Duke Youth Academy is all the stuff you end up having to leave out. There are just too many riches over these two weeks to be able to record it all. In the past week I've been focusing a lot on those aspects of DYA that I am directly involved in leading, such as the Arts Village and the Prayer Practice Workshops. But that is really only the tip of the iceberg.

We've heard a number of powerful presentations on our daily themes by lecturers over the past few days, including Prof. Edgardo Colon-Emeric on the Crucifixion, Prof. Warren Smith on the Resurrection, Prof. Stanley Hauerwas on the Church as Witness, and Sarah Jobe & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (of Rutba House, an intentional Christian community associated with the New Monasticism movement) on the Church as a Community of Reconciliation.

The Rev. Julian Pridgen, my colleague here who is our Ministry Coordinator in charge of service and hospitality, has also been inviting our students to consider social justice components of their Christian calling through exposure to outreach ministries in the Durham area. Katherine Smith summarized their activities on the first Wednesday of the program in the DYA Daily Journal:

"Students traveled to the Durham Rescue Mission, the Crisis Response Center, Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers (TROSA), Croasdaile Village Retirement Community, and Anathoth Community Garden to assist with projects and hear the stories of members of our local community."

Then yesterday, our students spent the afternoon on a "pilgrimage of pain & hope" through Durham, hearing local residents speak about legacies of racism and attempts to embody reconciliation in the present. That trip gave our students a way to think about their discipleship in concrete and contextualized ways, through "listening to the stories of members of this particular community and - hopefully - discovering new ways to understand the places from which we each come."

Of course, each night our worship services (planned and led in the second week by the students themselves) have been occasions of celebration and feasting. We have sung and prayed our faith nightly, while being fed by the preached word of God and the consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist.

By this point in the summer session, DYA begins to feel like it is racing toward its conclusion. That's tough in a way, because I think I'd be willing to go another two weeks (with a little extra sleep, anyway!). But we've still got a couple of great days ahead of us, and I'm looking forward to enjoying those.

Oh, and one more thing: This morning in plenary we heard once again from Prof. Fred Edie, who is the Faculty Director of DYA. His lecture was on vocation, and he framed it under the title: "Life in the Spirit - Calling." Fred drew connections between the reality of our baptism and our calling into a lifetime of ministry (whether that ministry is lived out as an ordained clergy or as a committed layperson). He posed these issues for us to reflect upon:

What is a calling? - God's specific intentions for you, both in the present and for your life in the future.

What is God's calling for us? - Living into the story of God's people as related to us in the Bible, over against the stories of the world that try to lay claim to our lives.

How do we live into that? - Discernment over our Christian vocation, which can come through a growing closeness with God and our participation with one another within the body of Christ.

Fred wanted our DYA students to consider these questions in light of all they've been learning here, of course. But they are questions that every Christian should consider in a deep way.

[Note: Photos in this blog post were taken by DYA student Nathan Milleson]

Images from DYA

One of our students here at the Duke Youth Academy this summer, Nathan Milleson, is a photographer. He has been taking many of the photos that appear in the slide show each day in our DYA Daily Journal.

Here are a few more examples of his work:

ABOVE: DYA students and staff congregating on the patio outside of Duke Chapel after a shared meal.

ABOVE: Prof. Warren Smith engages DYA students following his lecture to them on the Resurrection.

ABOVE: Worship leader Matthew Nickoloff and mentor Wen Reagan lead students in a jam session following the nightly Eucharistic worship service.
ABOVE: The Processional Cross in Goodson Chapel.

Praying the Rosary

"Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen."

That's the "Hail Mary," a prayer that - along with the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Gloria Patri - is often prayed using a rosary in Catholic devotional practice. Millions of Catholics around the world pray the rosary on a regular basis. And I've never met a Protestant who does so.

Why is that? I've got some ideas, but first let me tell you why I'm bringing the subject up.

I posted earlier about the Arts Village here at the Duke Youth Academy, which is one of the areas for which I am responsible as a Ministry Coordinator on staff. Another area I oversee is our Prayer Practice Workshops, which introduce our high school students to forms of prayer that they have often not encountered before. We use DYA staff members who have some personal experience with various prayer traditions to lead the workshops, and they do a great job of both teaching and leading students through prayer out of a particular tradition.

This year, our Prayer Practice Workshop options look like this:

- Praying the Psalms
- Lectio Divina
- Prayer Journaling
- Visio Divina
- Praying the Rosary

Last year we also offered workshops in Centering Prayer and Healing Prayer (w/ holy oil). Our students are generally very drawn toward exploring different forms of prayer, and it is a real joy to be able to share with them some of the richness of Christian prayer traditions.

So back to praying the rosary.

I attended our Praying the Rosary Workshop this afternoon, which was led by David Bristow (one of our mentors on staff). David is the youth minister at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Herndon, VA, and he did a great job explaining some of the history and meaning behind the rosary. He then led us in praying a complete rosary, focusing on the contemplation of five "luminous mysteries," or one for each of the rosary's decades (i.e., the baptism of Jesus, the wedding at Cana, the proclamation of the Kingdom of God, the Transfiguration, and the institution of the Eucharist).

Most of the students and staff at DYA are Protestants, so David tried to teach in such a way that the Protestants among us could relate (or at least understand). He emphasized that praying "through" Mary to Jesus is simply a way of asking Mary to intercede for us with her Son. And he compared it to asking friends or family to pray for us here on earth - something that all of us do on a regular basis, of course.

So I've got a question for you Protestants out there: Accepting that there's a lot of theology around Mary that we'd have to work out in the long run, to what could we possibly object in the short run when it simply comes to praying in such a way that we ask the Theotokos, the Mother of God, to intercede for us with Jesus Christ?

Many of us have prayed gazing at the cross to draw us closer to Jesus, or at a lit flame to draw us closer to the Holy Spirit. Some of us have prayed with icons of Jesus as a way of drawing us into closer communion with Him through prayer. So why should we not allow ourselves to be drawn to Him by praying to Him through the intercessions of the Virgin Mary? Do we not believe her to be among that great cloud of witnesses about which the Book of Hebrews speaks? And if so, is she not continually praising the triune God through prayer and thanksgiving?

I admit that I found praying the rosary to be very comforting and peaceful. It even allowed me a disciplined way to pray for family members, friends, and church members who I knew needed God's care. It also strikes me that the real ecumenical work that needs to be done within Christ's broken body might best be done when Christians of different communions come together and join in common worship of our Lord and Savior using the particularities of our different traditions.

At DYA, we certainly don't tell our students that they need to go home and pray this way or worship that way. But by introducing them to aspects of the Christian faith that they may not have encountered before, I hope that we are opening their minds to the great possibilities that exist for the church catholic through the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

And for the record, here's John Wesley's take on the Virgin Mary from his irenic tract, A Letter to a Roman Catholic:

"I believe [Jesus] is the proper, natural Son of God, God of God, very God of very God; and that he is the Lord of all, having absolute, supreme, universal dominion over all things ... I believe that he was made man, joining the human nature with the divine in one person; being conceived by the singular operation of the Holy Ghost, and born of the blessed Virgin Mary, who, as well after as before she brought him forth, continued a pure and unspotted virgin."

A Methodist doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary?

Who would've thunk it?

Into Great Silence

Sunday at the Duke Youth Academy presents an opportunity to teach our kids something about the importance of Sabbath in the Christian life.

I admit that it is a lesson I find hard to practice myself. But it is a precious gift from God - one that Jesus cared enough about to argue over repeatedly with his opponents. God the Father's desire for his creation to enjoy rest is the very reason Jesus found it acceptable to heal on the Sabbath. And it's the reason he let his disciples pluck those heads of grain.

We can only really have rest when we are whole, whether that means being healed of disease, healed of hunger, or healed of sin. And the Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath.

My own contribution to DYA's practice of Sabbath over the past two years has been to organize a showing of the 2006 documentary, Into Great Silence. Produced by German filmmaker Philip Groning, Into Great Silence is a 2 hour and 40 minute foray into the life of the Carthusian monks at the Monastery of the Grande Chartreuse in southeastern France. And it is a remarkable thing - both for the insight it offers into a rare and austere form of monasticism, and for the ways in which it can help us think about Sabbath.

Check this film out if you get a chance. It's not even that expensive to purchase. Over two-and-a-half hours of watching monks at work and prayer might not seem like you're idea of a good time. But the experience is riveting. And restful.

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Our Sabbath ended with Vespers, and the closing Scripture passage was one of my favorites:

"The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.

"For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

"Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation - if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel.

"This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant" (Colossians 1:15-23).

Looming Threats

I'm taking a one-day break from blogging about the Duke Youth Academy. In the mean time, check out my new column in the Reporter, which is on the power of looming threats.

Remember the swarm of killer bees that was down in Texas back in the '80s, ready to wipe out the entire continental United States?

(Okay, so I may be dating myself for some younger readers.)

Remember the Y2K bug that was going to bring all our computers crashing down?

That stuff was scary because it was "out there" somewhere, and we had no control over it. We could only wring our hands nervously and hope the threat didn't affect our town.

Now there's swine flu. That's the looming threat these days. The mass panic that swine flu has caused is touching my own life through the daily regimen we have to follow at DYA and at all of Duke University's other summer camps. Every camper and staffer must be asked everyday whether he or she is experiencing symptoms of a cough, runny nose, or fever. Hand sanitizer dispensers have seemingly sprouted on every door frame on campus, with earnest instructions to use them as much as possible. If a camper is suspected of having contracted H1N1 he is immediately quarantined until his parents can come and get him.

The difference between killer bees and swine flu is that swine flu is a real killer whereas those bees never did much but make honey. Then again, by all accounts, swine flu isn't near as dangerous as the plain ol' seasonal flu that we contend with every winter. It's scary because it's new, it's named after an animal, and we have no control over it. But you know what? It's still a heck of a lot more dangerous to get in your car and drive down the street than it is to skip the hand sanitizer after turning a doorknob.

I suggest in my column that our baptism should help us put all those looming threats out there in perspective. Our fears are just little expressions of the One Great Fear we all have: Death.

But Jesus has been raised from the dead, and that means that, for those baptized into his death, our own inevitable, earthly deaths do not have the final say over our lives. God has that say, and God's word is a word of life.

Livin' in the Arts Village

In my post yesterday, I concluded by mentioning that I was planning on sharing more about my own role on staff at the Duke Youth Academy. I want to do that today by offering a bit about the our Arts Village.

There are a couple of ways to think about how art and faith relate to one another. One way - maybe the dominant way in our culture - is to think about how the arts can "enhance" worship or "add to" our faith. That's not the view we take at DYA. Why? Because when we think of the arts as an "add on," we are shortchanging the importance of beauty and creativity as an integral and deep part of God's creation.

So DYA brings in a group of professional artists-in-residence each summer to lead an Arts Village. Our artists take full part in community life, including offering their gifts in daily worship. They also lead workshops for our students, which invite them to learn and practice the arts as a part of their exploration into the richness and depth of the Christian life.

Our artists help the DYA students see how theology is inherently artistic because it is incarnational. It is embodied just as God's creation is embodied and just as God the Son became embodied in Jesus.

So let me introduce you to this year's Arts Village staff. All four of our artists have theological degrees from Duke Divinity School, and all four understand their artistic gifts to be the locus of their calling into ministry with and for the church. They are:

Katherine Owen, who leads workshops on pottery-making and working in clay. She has worked with the Arts Village for several years, and when she's not at DYA, Katherine spends most days covered in clay at her potter's wheel. You can find out more biographical details about Katherine here, and you can learn about her work at her Wild Extravagant Livers of Life website.

Tracy Radosevic, who leads workshops on storytelling. This year is her seventh with DYA. She has the gift of opening Scripture up in a way that allows others to hear it as if for the first time. Tracy has been a full-time professional storyteller for twelve years and in that time has traveled the globe performing, teaching, preaching, and leading retreats. You can learn more about Tracy here, the bio page of Tracy's great website describing her work & ministry.

Ronya-Lee Anderson, who leads workshops on sacred dance. Trained in modern, tap, jazz, ballet, and hip hop, she has danced both nationally and internationally with various performing arts companies. Ronya-Lee is the co-founder and Artistic Director of Dancing by the Power Ministries, a non-profit organization that aims to transform young people through dance. She is also the Director of Youth Ministries at Annandale United Methodist Church in Annandale, VA.

Carole Baker, who leads our workshops in the visual arts. She is a Research Associate at Duke Divinity School, where she gets to employ her theological gifts in working with such theologians as Stanley Hauerwas and Richard Hays. This is her fifth year overall working with DYA. As a visual artist and theologian, Carole is interested in the way imagery shapes the religious/theological imagination. (Read about her background and work here.) Carole's latest work, "Mary: The Paper Doll Project," is an interactive work of art that looks at the way the Virgin Mary has been depicted in different cultures around the world. It is on display during DYA and will be touring nationally in the coming year. (If your church or organization would like to host the Mary Project, I would encourage you to contact Carole.)

Not all our students may come here thinking of themselves as creative people. But what we try to teach them is that each of them is the created being of a creative Creator! We are all God's creatures, and we live in a physical reality that God made and called good.

So the arts are really about learning to see the exquisite beauty of the creation and recognize how we can glorify God through our artistic gifts. And that's something we can all do with joy and thanksgiving!

The Incarnation of the Son of God

Our theme at DYA today is Christ, and Dr. J. Kameron Carter got things going at our plenary session this morning by talking about Incarnation.

He encouraged the students to think about some key aspects of God's revelation in Christ Jesus:

- The truth of the Incarnation: Jesus Christ as truly God and truly human.

- The story of the Incarnation: Christmas! Or, restoration and reconciliation (which brings to God's creation a revolution).

- The ethics of the Incarnation: Or, the freedom of the Christian. It is the freedom to be God's creature; not to be in bondage, but to be in solidarity with God and one another. The ethics of the Incarnation is the ethics of freedom!

Prof. Carter spoke about the body of Jesus Christ as pointing to a social order, which we become part of through our baptism. We exist in a number of social orders, of course: our family, neighborhood, city, nation, university, fraternal organization, political party, place of employment, etc. But the social order that Jesus creates seeks to supersede all other social orders.

And particularly since so many of our social orders treat someone or something other than Jesus as Lord, our calling into the body of Christ ultimately calls those social orders into question. Remarking on the incompatibility of those earthly social orders that represent idolatries and false gods with the social order of Jesus, Dr. Carter said, "The social order that is Jesus Christ kills all false social orders. And the name for that is Easter."

It was a fascinating presentation on the meaning of God's Incarnation in Jesus, made more so by Dr. Carter sharing stories and pictures of a recent trip he took to Sao Paulo, Brazil, where he was able to study ways in which the history of that country shows how the Church actively cooperated with anti-Christian political, social, and military forces during the Portugese and Spanish colonial periods in Latin America.

But, as Dr. Carter argued, the very way of life offered to us by the gospel of Jesus shows us that the Christian faith is not destined to be allied with those powers and principalities that would corrupt it beyond recognition. Jesus always calls us to himself. And that is good news.

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In the next couple of days, I'll try to write more about my own role at the Duke Youth Academy. I am the Ministry Coordinator for Christian Practices here, and my main duties are to oversee our Arts Village and Prayer Practice Workshops. These are ways that we try to help our students "live into" their faith by understanding that the salvation God is bringing to us involves our bodies and that theological reflection is inherently aesthetic and corporeal.

And so we invite them to study with professional artists who are also committed Christians, as well as to engage in forms of prayer with which they may not be familiar.

More on that to come!

The DYA Daily Journal

If you've been reading my posts over the past few days, you know that I am writing about happenings at the 2009 Duke Youth Academy for Christian Formation. If you'd like to know more about DYA, check out this post or this website.

One of the creative ways that DYA keeps parents, pastors, and friends back home 'in the loop' about what our students are doing each day is through the DYA Daily Journal.

This year the Journal is a bit different than in years past. Before, the Journal was narrative in form with a picture or two posted beside the text on each day (like in the 2008 edition, which you can see here).

But the 2009 edition is a little fancier - we've incorporated a slide show for each day that shows photographs of lectures, the arts, fellowship, and worship. And the text is still there too, which gives a rundown of the theme of the day together with highlights of the activities in which we're engaged. The slide show for any particular day will start automatically when you click on that day's Journal entry. So far we've got entries for our first two days, on Baptism and Creation.

Click here to check out the 2009 Journal.

And for any pastors and youth ministers reading this post, leave comments if you have any questions about anything I share related to DYA. I'm focusing on this because it is what I'm doing this summer, but it is also a program I believe in very much. There's just nothing better to help high school youth learn to live deeply the Christian life in a holistic way. I hope you'll think about directing some of your own kids to DYA next summer!

In the beginning...

"In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram..."

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth..."

Our second plenary lecture at DYA today is on creation. The speaker is Prof. Ellen Davis, who is a biblical scholar here at Duke Divinity School. My own doctoral work has not included biblical studies per se, but I have heard from colleagues and friends how popular Prof. Davis is both as a teacher and a scholar. I could see that right away as she engaged the students on the creation story in Genesis 1:1-2:4a.

Prof. Davis spoke to our students about the solidification of Torah within the experience of exile in Babylon in the 6th century B.C. Faced with military defeat, deportation to a foreign land, and forced labor, the message given to the Jews was that the god of Babylon - Marduk - had overcome their petty god of Zion. And yet, through fidelity to the law, the practice of Sabbath, and the divinely-inspired organization of the holy scriptures, the Jews' faith in YHWH as Lord of creation was preserved and even strengthened.

And that faith was the faith we proclaim still: that the 'god' of Zion is God Almighty, the creator of the heavens and the earth, who has made the universe and everything in it and who has called his creation good:

"Dixitque Deus fiat lux et facta est lux, et vidit Deus lucem quod esset bona..."

"And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light, and God saw that the light was good..."

Realizing the profound depth of the mystery of God's revelation to us is only increased when we read those first few verses of Genesis again. And in them, the gracious and merciful character of our God is displayed.

By the way, our themes each day follow what Fred Edie calls the "theological alliterative C's." I'll highlight those each day, but here's a sneak preview:

- Creation
- Covenant
- Christ
- Church
- Calling
- Coming Reign of God

"Remember your baptism"

This morning we had our first plenary lecture at the Duke Youth Academy. The topic was baptism, and it was presented by Fred Edie (who is also the faculty director of DYA).

Dr. Edie invited our students to consider creation by thinking about images of water - that life-giving substance that all plants and animals depend upon. And from the water of creation, he went on to talk about the water of redemption. Christians cannot think about who we are without thinking about how God has adopted us and named us as his own. That happens in the waters of baptism, where our creation becomes a re-creation.

Dr. Edie lectures in a very invitational style - he asks students to respond to biblical themes that he throws out, and at various points in a lecture he will ask his audience to turn to one another to engage in active reflection. This works great for a high school audience, and they seem to really connect with the interactive style.

In his lecture this morning, Dr. Edie remarked, "You need to stop thinking about baptism as only a moment in time. Baptism is a way of life."

He explained: Through anamnesis (re-membering and re-presenting) and prolepsis (anticipating and expecting) the entirety of God's salvation is offered to you in your baptism - past, present, and future. And because of that, baptism is where we begin in the Christian life. It is from there that we begin to discern our vocation, our calling in life & ministry. And in baptism, we also receive our identity.

Baptism tell us who we are. We are God's chosen children, and the stories wrapped up in baptism - Creation, Noah & the Flood, Moses and the Israelites passage through the Red Sea, and finally the life, death, & resurrection of Jesus Christ - these become our own stories, and they point us toward our future destiny with God.

"Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his" (Romans 6:3-5, ESV).

All of this makes me think of those wonderful words I am blessed to speak to each person who comes forward to the font during a baptismal renewal service:

"Remember your baptism, and be thankful."

Thankful, indeed.

Gearing up for DYA

Tomorrow the Duke Youth Academy for Christian Formation begins here on Duke's campus. This is my second year to work for DYA as one of the Ministry Coordinators (essentially an administrative position that helps to organize and resource one of DYA's program areas).

DYA's website describes it this way:

"The Duke Youth Academy for Christian Formation is a two-week summer program for selected high school students to live in an intentional Christian community on the Duke University campus ... Days are patterned by worship through word and sacrament, reflection on scripture, study, service, play; practices ancient and modern that nourish the life of faith."

That's an accurate statement, but it doesn't do justice to the richness of the DYA experience. When the website overview goes on to say, "You will leave the academy challenged to consider your baptismal vocation, confident that God is shaping your future in radical and exciting ways," it's getting closer to the mark. To put it simply, I've never seen anything like what DYA offers to 16 and 17-year old youth.

As the outgrowth of Dr. Fred Edie's theological vision for youth ministry, DYA is centered around living an embodied Christian faith as part of a community of other young disciples of Jesus. That life is ordered around the symbols of book, bath, table, and time - with the book as Holy Scripture, the bath as Baptism, the table as Holy Communion, and time as the Patterning of Time in Christian Community. The high school students who come here each summer commit to living a semi-monastic life.

And get this: they love it.

I'm going to post a lot about DYA over the next couple of weeks. If you know of a youth who will be a rising junior or senior in high school at this time next year who might be interested in this experience, I'd encourage you to point him or her to what I post. In the meantime, here are some previous links you might find interesting:

A post from last year's Duke Youth Academy, which was my first as a member of the DYA staff. In the post I offer a little bit of an overview on the program based on my experience of it as a first-time staffer.

A book review of mine in the UM Reporter on Fred Edie's Book, Bath, Table, and Time: Christian Worship as Source and Resource for Youth Ministry. This is an excellent theology of youth ministry. A companion volume that will offer practical curriculum based off of Edie's vision is currently in the works.

Here an update, there an update...

... everywhere an update.

That's what I've been trying to do little by little on the blog, anyway. I sometimes fall behind with archiving my United Methodist Reporter columns. But I got caught up on that tonight, so you can scroll through all of them up to the most recent one by clicking on the "UM Reporter Columns" tab in the left-hand sidebar (or by just clicking here). The columns are archived chronologically, with the most recent one at the top. You can also use the drop down menu to look at different years going back to 2005.

I've also been trying to enhance the blog a little bit by attaching topic labels to the end of each post. That's something I just never did before, for some reason. But it is a nice feature to include, since I tend to write about recurring topics again and again. So for instance, if you find a post with the label, "Young Adults," you can click on it and get a page with all the posts I've written pertaining to young adults in some form or fashion. Or if you see a post with the label, "UMC," you can click on it to see what I've written about the United Methodist Church. It's a bit of a tedious process to go back and add the labels after neglecting that feature for three years, but so far I've got about 1/3 of the posts labeled. This is my 315th post (in a little under three years of blogging), and I hope to have every post labeled within the next couple of weeks.

While I'm on the subject of blog housekeeping, let me say that I'm always open to ways to enhance this site either through content or presentation. So feel free to leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail. I'm limited by both time and money as to what I can do, of course. But I am always eager to get feedback from readers about what works and doesn't work.

Our Independence Day

The Fourth of July was always one of my favorite holidays growing up. The City of Paragould hosted a municipal fireworks display on the grounds of Paragould High School, and we'd always head up there with the rest of the town to wait until dark so the show could begin.

Like any other holiday, the traditions surrounding the day itself could sometimes obscure the reason you were celebrating in the first place. But all it took was one replay of Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A." to remind me that I should be "proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free."

I take seriously the liberty that we enjoy living in American society. I've had the opportunity to travel some in my life, and I admit I wouldn't want to live anywhere else - at least not on a permanent basis. And I think there's some truth to the old saw by Churchill that democracy's the worst form of government, except for all the other forms of government. As a pastor, I particularly appreciate the way I am able to gather my flock for worship and preach the gospel as I am called to do without any fear of government persecution. Not all Christians have that same privilege.

But then, I also agree with theologians like Stanley Hauerwas, who argue that liberal democracy is dependent on an essentially violent mythos. It defines a peace-loving and democratic "us" over against a depraved and totalitarian "them," which must occasionally be engaged militarily in order to remind "us" both why we need to stick together and why our way of life is superior.

But on an even more intimate level, liberal democracy also posits property rights as one of the fundamental liberties on which society is based. This means that consumer capitalism has to be allowed to flourish in as unfettered a form as possible, which as an economic philosophy encourages us to disregard the good of others in our own individualistic "pursuit of happiness." And if you doubt the violence of that particular modus vivendi, you only have to look at the suffering of hardworking people at the hands of large corporate employers, the suffering of unborn children in the womb at the hands of abortionists, and the suffering of the environment at the hands of all of us in our chronic overconsumption.

So, is there a way we can celebrate a kind of freedom that is not freedom against tyranny, but rather freedom for something good and holy? We see evidence of such a freedom in Galatians, where the Apostle Paul says, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free" (Gal 5:1). This freedom teaches us that we are neither bound by our sinful nature nor by the law that would serve ultimately to convict us in showing us a holiness that we cannot achieve.

But it is also more than a freedom from these things. It is also a free for something wonderful.

"The only thing that counts," Paul says, "is faith working through love" (Gal 5:6). And to that end, he encourages us to "live by the Spirit," which we can know we are doing when our lives - as individuals and as the church - are bearing fruits of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Such a life is a life of freedom.

And that life was offered to us on our true Independence Day, which didn't occur in 1776 but rather in 33 A.D.