To think about…

To think about…

Ponderings

I’ve been out in the mountains backpacking for several months and just caught up with printed-on-paper reading that had been stacking up for me since April 29 including my local newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, Newsweek, Christianity Today, and a dozen other magazines I take to keep up with the world ranging from PlayStation2 to Men’s Journal. Beside this reading I’ve been thinking too. Though I don’t write anything down while backpacking I remembered some of it and these leaked into this list too. Mostly these are just personal pondering and not an attempt to persuade you of anything—I haven’t even persuaded myself of some of these. Who knows, perhaps they trigger some of your own pondering. Thoughtful pondering is a good thing and in an era of shouting and posturing we could use more of it. Here is what I’ve been thinking about:

Is the Democrat party dead? Have they lost their base and no longer have enough base to win elections except as an alternative to a Republican people dislike?

Will Evangelicals completely take over the Republican party? It is far easier to take over a political party than to start a new one.

What would a “Christian party” platform include beside being anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage? If evangelicals take over the Republican party what will be the other [Christian] planks in the platform?

I like Arnold-of-California’s idea to have California’s voting districts drawn up by a bipartisan panel of retired judges instead of legislators standing to benefit from screwy lines. I hope the idea spreads.

Hillary & Bill Frist teaming up??? Holy end times Batman! They actually got together on a bipartisan bill to turn the medieval way medicine keeps records into modern electronic records? Gee, what will happen next--Hillary on Fox news?

Air force Academy becomes Rocky Mountain Bible College? Has it really become that coercive to non-evangelicals? Is the Air Force Academy now the “Evangelical branch of the armed forces?

“No wonder people want to move to California.” (thought repeatedly during two long hikes in the California’s mountains & desert).

“Gee, Texas Hold ‘Em is so fascinating?” (while watching several sequential shows of it in a motel on a day off while hiking the Appalachian Trail across New Hampshire.)

Holy Cow! Matthew Scully argues for animal rights and George Will agrees! What’s happening to conservatives? Pat Buchanan publishes Skully’s essay “the Case For Compassionate Conservatism—for animals” Conservative columnist George Will says amen. Will the conservatives rob lefties of even the animal rights issue—who will remain to vote for Hillary?

The Internet has changed the rules for release of information. I saw it this summer with the announcement a GS in my denomination was resigning, and again when they announced the new President-elect at IWU, my own institution. The old way was to release news in sequential orbits. For instance a GS resignation would be announced to the BGS, then other officers at headquarters, then the GBA and DSs and only finally to the masses, usualoy by snailmail. Same with a new college president—the old way tried to release the information in expanding orbits of “important to lesser important people.” That model collapses today in an era of live and hot Internet connections. The moment a secretary at the headquarters gets back from the announcement she writes her friend the news and within six minutes the news has ricocheted to a thousand “lesser important people” and they find out before their DS (who in some cases is still on a dial-up connection). Within 30 minutes from the inner circle hearing the news several thousand folk at the outer circle have the news—especially younger folk more comfortable with the Internet. Leaders have to change their strategy from sequential release through the “power orbits” to simultaneous release of information to all levels at once. Once more the Internet has proven to be an empowerment tool—it empowers people at the bottom of the food chain who live in the outer orbits of power. It isn’t just a church problem though—consider Donald Rumsfield’s headache with his soldiers now having cell phones, email and instant messaging connecting immediately to people at home and to their friend’s parents and girlfriends. Guess how people are hearing their son just got blown away in Iraq?

This new candidate for the Supreme Court, John Roberts, will be hard to demonize -- he seems innocuous enough. If confirmed he could tilt the vote to a traditional constructionist view a bit, but that shouldn’t please evangelical moral conservatives—most evangelical moral conservatives wish that abortion were nationally outlawed—they’d shouldn’t be satisfied with the notion “the states should decide for themselves” which is essentially a “pro-choice for states” position. I believe if abortion is actually killing a person and depriving the unborn of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” it should be condemned nationally and not left to states to decide as if it were the color of license plates. The taking of life is certainly a “civil rights” issue. But then, hey, I think there should be a national driver’s license and the notion that each state can decide who can drive on America’s roads is antiquated!

I should have spent $1000 buying Google stock last year for $85 a share like I thought of doing but was too busy to pull the trigger. If I had I’d have an extra few thousand dollars to show for it. When Google went over $100 pretty quickly I sighed that I had missed my opportunity to get in. Now that it is over $300 I should have gotten in late! Well, I’ve missed it now. Haven’t I?

But the biggest bungle on stocks I made was in 1986. In the spring of 1986 my good friend Nathan Birky said to me, “Keith you should go out and borrow $5000 and purchase stock in this new unknown company writing software for IBM.” If I had listened, that $5000 investment in Microsoft would now be worth $1.4 million. (Actually I pretend that I listened… with splits in the stock since I would have purchased the stock at an equivalent of 11 cents a share—so when I read stock prices in the newspaper I pretend I own 50,000 shares of MSFT and I realize that if I’d actually acted on that tip my life would be no different anyway. What good is $1.4 million anyway? The guy with a million dollars can only eat one steak and wear one suit of clothes at a time. The difference between the joy I get form a steak I can afford and the one the millionaire eats is minimal. Same with cars, travel and clothes. The big difference isn’t between people like me and the millionaires—the bog differential is between people like me and the poor and starving. Once you’ve got $50,000 income a year you have just about everything a millionaire has—only his is fancier. The millionaire has a $200,000 HumVee and I have a $10,000 rusting Suburban, but either of the vehicles gets the driver there just as good. So pretending I bought MSFT in 1986 is just as good as having really bought it. Even if I had I’d still drive the 1990 Suburban not a HumVee—so in both cases I’d be left reading the stock quotes and the money wouldn’t have done me any [real] good much anyway.

The best investment I made was in family. While I may appear stupid at missing these financial plays I was a genius at investing as a dad in my family—and that investment has beat Microsoft and Google 1000 to one! I’m glad I messed up the lesser investment and played the right one when it came to my wife and kids.
While I was hiking in the high Sierras Ken Taylor died. Gee I remember when his “Living Letters (to become The Living Bible) first came out. Evangelicals (the term was new then) had totally rejected the RSV in those days and were strict KJV people. Then came Ken Taylor’s paraphrase of the epistles (later the Gospels and Old Testament) and evangelicals had “one of their own” they could trust. It didn’t matter that he merely paraphrased the KJV and stuck in lots of his own ideas that were far from the original meaning—Evangelicals didn’t care about the original text so much as having the text say what they thought it should say. His real contribution was opening Evangelicals up to non KJV translations so that when the NIV came along they were ready to jump ship from the KJV and embrace this “Evangelical translation” of the Bible. But, of course as a writer I love his personal story. Here was a guy paraphrasing the bible on his trainride home from work—for his own kids. He decides it might be worth publishing but no publisher will touch it. So he self-published it in 1971 and sold 40 million copies—take that mainline publishers! Of course the story is familiar—his self-publishing enterprise became Tyndale House Publishers (yep, the Left Behind people) that now has 250 employees and produces more than 100 books a year. For a writer the three lessons from Taylor’s work to me are (1)Write for real people even if it is your own kids (2)write even if nobody will publish it (3) If you can’t get a publisher publish it on your own.

I wrote too many books this past year. In the coming year I want to do more reading than writing books. And I want to write more columns. Apparently Unveiled Faces is going strong if my mail is any indicator. Many say it is my best book yet. We’ll see. Got to get the companion book into final format in the next three weeks, then knock out the Romans Bible Study book by October before I start my break from writing-to-reading. (I have the books bought I want to read… mostly on the Apostle’s creed—more on that later in the year)

Will Evangelicals become the new liberals? Evangelicals are more inclined to leave orthodoxy than “mainline” churches are. If a person is liberal theologically (and not politically) the Evangelical church is where they should reside—for in the next 25 years evangelicals may become the new liberals. Why? Because evangelicals are adaptive—they change easily—mainline churches are rigid and resist change, especially in core things. Evangelicals are market driven and will chase the market more than mainline churches. The American market for religion will increasingly want “openness to other ways to god besides Jesus” (as George Bush puts it)—evangelicals are better at “finding a market need and meeting it” than persuading people to classic orthodoxy which is a “hard sell” in today’s world. Evangelicals generally dismiss the creeds and have opted for “the Bible” instead of a creed. Thus if a person can find a verse anywhere in the Bible it can be elevated to a central truth—without the creeds evangelicals have no narrow core of truth to defend. Since practically anything can be proven from the Bible, evangelicals are the most open to novel theologies. But perhaps the greatest reason is evangelicals have such a weak ecclesiology that they have no authority to crack down on them when they gravitate from the Christian core. The Catholics have the papacy and a system of Bishops to blow the whistle. What do evangelicals have? We have a scattering of churches, many of them completely independent of any denomination. Even denominational churches (if they are large) can thumb their noses at authorities. Evangelicals are becoming big-tent people. We have room for Jerry Falwell and Rob Bell. And we’ll have room for a new generation who starts “churches for unbelievers” or churches for people who reject fundamentalism, want to drink beer, have abortions, and say, “some of the best Christians I know are gay.” We’ll make room for these among evangelicals. And even if we didn’t want them among us what can we do if they plant new churches full of a thousand followers and call themselves evangelicals? Who would “crack down” and excommunicate them? As a new generation of “emerging leaders” comes along they may plant churches that will reject various core doctrines the church has recited in the Apostle’s Creed for generations. And they’ll get away with it (as long as they attract a crowd.) The currently conservative (politically) evangelical church will recover its social conscience in the coming decades and we will see a rise of “old liberalism” from the newer generations (they won’t even be aware that it is “old” liberalism-they’ll think their ideas are novel). In short, if a young person is a liberal and questions core issues of the faith they may be less comfortable in a mainline church in the future than among evangelicals. The mainline folks will still be reciting the Apostle’s Creed every week. Who knows what evangelicals will be reciting?

So what do you think?

Keith Drury 7/21/05