Current mood:  cynical 
Category: Romance and Relationships

Update: Link to MP3 file at the end of the transcript

This Sunday was the last week that Betsy is on staff at Killearn United Methodist Church. Now she begins working full time on the new church project in Southwood, Good Samaritan Church. I’ve worked with her since the middle of 2002 making graphics for her sermons. As a part of the goodbye, there was time during yesterday’s service for people to wish her well or speak on how their lives are better now because of her impact. Below is the transcript of my speech. Eight people got to talk, and the audio should be posted online later this week. I’ll update this post when it’s up.

Begin:
So I’m sitting in the 9:30 service one Sunday back in 2001, and we all learn that this new woman seminary graduate is going to be our new associate pastor. I think I had heard her preach one time before but I didnt know anything about her. Others at KUMC were very excited about her being here, and I guess Bob had pulled some strings to get her such a good appointment. Most beginning pastors get assignments in crappy little churches out in the boonies. The jury was still out as far as I was concerned.

The contemporary service was overflowing every week. We had to put folding chairs at the end of the aisles and in the narthexes, narthai? Whatever we didn’t have enough space. People sat in the choir loft, which I think is the greatest peer pressure ever to get people to show up to church on time. We needed another service, so at 8:30am, right here in the fellowship hall, we started a second contemporary service. I wonder what the neighbors thought at hearing Steve Taff wail away on the guitar for sound check so early in the morning.

As soon as we were done, we had to hurry out of the way for Plants and Pillars to get in and do their service. I think at our highest attendance was 62, but someone in the office can verify that for sure. Methodists are good at keeping records. One thing I do know, 8:30 am isn’t the time our core audience comes out for church, unless you do like I did and just stay up from the night before.

Then we decided to try and do this right. Spirit and Truth was born. We would do it at 11am and do church the Oprah way. Cool graphics, multimedia sermons, gimmicks taped under your chairs, and take home trinkets, like this water bottle from the first week, this bar of soap for the smelly hippies that attend this service. If any of you attended that first year you know the things we did. We did church the coolest way we knew. And I, for one, started to resent this place. Every Friday and Saturday it took at least 10 hours to get it done. Yeah, we had 300 people in here. It was the coolest place in town. But where was my walk? I was at church but not worshipping, and I started to dread coming here. Then we started to establish healthy boundaries. I started to loosen up after mistakes in the show. I wanted everything to be perfect when you came here, so that nothing got in the way of your time with God. But at what cost? Why did Zach and I have to drink pitchers of beer at lunch every Sunday? We started to relax and I decided to give myself less guilt and realize I was human. Betsy’s sermons kept getting better and better. People were starting to come here that never went to church before. Lives were changing, including mine, and for the better.

I want to point out a few things you might not remember. Ever see this powerpoint slide before?

This was the standard issue song for the 9:30 service. Because I introduced Zach to Photoshop, now our slides look like this.

We never had a video testimony or announcement until we came along and showed how powerful other media can be.

Now, of course, there were a few duds. Anyone remember this worship slide?

Yeah, I think I got too carried away trying to make trippy slides for our audience. I know we wanted druggies to come to church, but not still high.

I also got a little passive-aggressive a few times, too. It was a part of me trying to set boundaries, but Betsy used to be really bad about getting me the sermon text in a timely manner. One Saturday night I was making a slide to show how busy her week was, and got a little funny. When we reviewed the slides on Sunday morning, you couldn’t read the text. The problem is, when we blew it up on the screen she could read what I put.

For the record, Betsy doesnt get a weekly massage.

Sometimes I just had fun. Betsy told a story about how she loved to windsurf.

We’ve scanned and used a lot of pictures from her photo albums for sermon illustrations, but for the record this wasnt one of them.

Also, as one or two of you might know, I’m not the poster boy for appropriateness or hospitality. When we first started I didn’t want to do an outline in PowerPoint for the sermons. Bob is a great preacher and I love that hes organized, but it was stiff and we wanted something our audience could connect with. Betsy gave me minimal notes in her first sermons. I would read the rough, very, very rough drafts and come up with ideas. She really had to trust me to read her unfinished works and not think less of her. I remember how hesitant she was to email me the first time. I’m guessing she was under pressure as a new pastor to only turn out masterpieces. It wasn’t like I was going to post them online, well I wasn’t until I just now thought about it. Check out my new website betsysgoofs.com just kidding.

Since our intended audience was the unchurched or not recently churched, which included me, I tried to paraphrase complex bible passage Drew style. I made all the slides I thought would fit, then we would go over them on Sunday morning and she would veto half of them. But now, for your viewing enjoyment, I’ve received permission to show one of the lost slides. What is absolutely funny now is that the topic that week was the woman at the well. I made a joke once during the new church launch that Betsy was starting Samaritan woman church, not good Samaritan church. Anyways, We showed this slide what Jesus said to her,

which was fine, then her response, in Drew Translation.

Vetoed. I guess I’m not allowed to suggest that Jesus is an idiot…

One other time Betsy wanted a slide of a mother nursing her baby. I did like I always do when I’m looking for pictures, and went Google Image search and typed in “breastfeeding”. I got 81,000 pictures, and about 80,000 of them I couldn’t use here.

Something Betsy said to me during my divorce has stuck with me to this day… “Let me know when you are ready to date and I’ll introduce you to some women I know” Well, besides that, “Drew, I’ve seen you change, and thats what this whole thing is about, life change.” This service was the start of how my life changed for the better. When I started coming here I had been burned by church. By pastors who are perfect and sit up on the stage on a throne and preach down to us lowly scumbags. Who yell and scream about the day of judgement and the fires of hell. It’s like telling a woman shes fat. She already knows so don’t bother. I know I’m not good enough. Not that I want to deny it, but instead of focusing on conviction, lets focus on the solution. I’ve seen by example here how to live the Christian life. What grace is, and forgiveness. What patience is and how we are all in this together as a community of faith. Betsy has slowly revealed in her sermons that her relationship with Christ wasn’t always what it is now. She isn’t perfect, and while that is obvious about anyone who brings God’s word to the people, she’s never represented or pretended to be anything different. She and Bob have taught me it is okay to be scared, to be unsure, to be flawed and broken, to question, to wonder, to feel, to know, to be secure, to rest, to experience peace.

When I first came here, it was all about how messed up churches were, and how I was going to change it. But the blessing is in how messed up I am, and how this service changed me. To Betsy and all the others of you here who have walked with me on this journey, thank you.

End:

Click here to open a new window to listen to the MP3 audio file.

Current mood:  irritated 
Category: Life

Click the comic to go to dilbert.com

Current mood: contemplative
Category: Religion and Philosophy

As I have written previously, I went on a rafting trip last weekend. A few things came to mind as I was floating, rather flailing helplessly, downstream that seemed to have greater truth. After hearing a friend share the truths she learned from her dog, I now present the truths I learned from whitewater rafting.

Participate In Your Own Recovery:
During the ‘safety’ briefing from the guide, they stressed how important it is to actually try to help save yourself. If you fall out of the raft in the rapids, you will need help to either get back into the raft or to swim towards the shore. Just because you can’t do it yourself doesn’t mean to just give up and let the current take you. Do your part! Swim towards the help. Grab the rope that the guide tosses your way. Reach towards the oar being extended from the raft. It is a shock when you fall overboard, but wake up and do something.

In recovery, once we have the realization that “okay, I can’t do this myself” there might be a tendency to say “I can’t do this at all,” which isn’t true. I have to study, talk to friends, share, take a class, go to meetings, and try. Yes, I can’t do it without help. But I don’t want to be the kind of person that asks you over to help them build a deck and then expects you to do all the work while I watch. Helping me is different from doing for me.

Quit Trying To Steer:
This was my first trip whitewater rafting. I sat in the front of the raft, since I was the heaviest. It was my job to do three things: paddle forward, paddle backwards, or stop paddling. The guide said when to do those things, and it was my job to do them. I couldn’t see in the back which way the guide was steering the raft. We learned that the safest way to go over rapids was straight ahead, not sideways. But sometimes we got turned sideways. In a panic, I had the tendency to try and paddle to get the raft turned straight ahead. The guide had other plans, though. He allowed the raft to keep turning so that we went over straight, but turned around backwards. If I had tried to steer while he was trying to turn us around, we would have cancelled each other out, gone over sideways and capsized. I had to trust that the guide knew what he was doing, had been down this river before, could see what I could not, and actually had my safety in mind.

It is a shame that I had a much easier time trusting this lunatic (see the pictures if you disagree with my description) than I do trusting God or others who care about me. I knew this guy five whole minutes before we got into a raft and went down the river.

Leave Behind What You Don’t Want To Lose:
Come to find out, people take their car keys, cell phones, and other valuables on these trips. The rafting company warned us to leave this stuff in lockers, because if you go swimming or capsize, you’ll lose this stuff in the river. Pop-A-Lock does great business up there. We were all issued gear to use for the trip, and you didn’t need anything else.

What do I need to leave behind? What am I dragging with me on this trip that is holding me back, keeping me from enjoying where I’m going, or really not that important?

and lastly,
Use The Right Equipment:
From the waiver we had to sign, whitewater rafting involves “inherent risks, dangers and hazards” and may result in “injury or illness including, but not limited to bodily injury, disease, strains, fractures, partial and/or total paralysis, death or other ailments that could cause serious disability” So, before we left, everyone was given a helmet, a flotation device, and an oar. Plus, because I knew that I would be outside, I used half of a pound of sunscreen and wore sunglasses. The guides told us how to use the equipment before we even got on the bus to go to the river. I’m a good swimmer but I knew I needed a life jacket in case I got knocked unconscious. I could see it was cloudy but I used sunscreen anyways, and I’m glad I did because the sun came out later.

How many times have I gone places I knew could be trouble? We are exposed to all sorts of tools and materials that can help us in our journey, but how many do we really use? How careful are we? Do I make my phone calls? “It’s okay, I can miss one meeting…” You know the clich, but it is overused for a reason.

Thanks for letting me share.