March madness

March makes many mad: it’s springtime in Nashville, and love-crazy birds are fighting over mating rights and nesting sites.
Then there’s NCAA basketball. “Confident Purdue Ready For Florida” CBS News headlined on Sunday, just about the time we left church, and before the day was over, it was Florida 74, Purdue 67. Vanderbilt? Vanderbilt! And UT, and Memphis, and if I didn’t mention your team (Go Kansas! Sorry to see you go, Winthrop), consider it part of the madness.
And the church: The place is humming with activity. CROP walkers raising money for Church World Service’s ministries that battle hunger and poverty (CROP Walk, April 1); kids in capes practicing their lines for the musical (Extra! Extra! Good News for the Daily Planet, April 1); the chancel choir inhaling additional singers for a glorious Easter sound; and on top of it all Vine Street’s very own variety of 3M, the mother of all things mad and March – March Ministry Madness! Piles of people together in one room, sitting at round tables, eating and talking, dreaming and planning, developing ministry ideas, creating groups and teams and task forces. And there will be booths, I’ve heard, mostly magnificent ministry booths: membership, music, (there will be an official, anecdotal, statistically challenged, yet ultimate Men’s Group survey; can you think of more ministries that start with an M? Send me your ideas – the winner will get a bag of M&M’s and a pair of free tickets to next year’s Souper Bowl. ), community ministry, education, communication, worship…
We called the event March Ministry Madness, playing, of course, with basketball’s March Madness, but the sad fact is that high-energy activitiy can easily turn into uncentering busyness. Japanese Theologian, Kosuke Koyama writes about our three-miles-an-hour God, a God who moves at a human walking pace. And this is where the madness turns, slowly but deliberately, into a Good Friday meditation.

“Jesus Christ came. He walked towards the ‘full stop’. He lost his mobility. He was nailed down! He is not even at three miles an hour as we walk. He is not moving. ‘Full stop’! What can be slower than ‘full stop’—‘nailed down’? At this point of ‘full stop’, the apostolic church proclaims that the love of God to man [sic] is ultimately and fully revealed. God walks ‘slowly’ because [God] is love. If [God] is not love [God] would have gone much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is ‘slow’ yet it is lord over all other speeds since it is the speed of love.”
Kosuke Koyama, Three Mile an Hour God: Biblical Reflections (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1980), p. 7

I want to move at the speed of love, and I believe that, during March Ministry Madness, love will dance.

Extra! Extra! Good News for the Daily Planet

The little super hero is carrying the CROP Walk sign because our little super heroes are excited about ministry!
On Palm Sunday, April 1, the Vine Street Children's Choir will perform their annual spring musical. The title, you guessed it, Extra! Extra! Good News for the Daily Planet! The musical was written by Andra Moran, who is also the Director of the Vine Street Children's Choir. Our singing super heroes will be part of the 10:45 AM worship service, dressed in their finest capes, and if you want to hear them, you better come early, because the sanctuary will be packed!

Together We Walk - Together We Change the World

Nashville CROP Walk

Sunday, April 1

We walk to raise money

for hunger relief

• in the US and around the world


• through emergency food programs, as well as through education, seed and tool programs, advocacy etc.


• provided through Church World Service

I will be walking with the Vine Street team, and I ask for your support.

Workshop for Couples

Create the Marriage You Want

Join Rev. Dr. Joy Samuels as she guides you in a motivating workshop designed to celebrate your commitment & renew your friendship

Vine Street Christian Church, Fitzpatrick House
Saturday, April 21 – 10am-3pm

Please register by email or by calling the church office at 269-5614. The workshop is free, but attendance is limited. Lunch and childcare will be provided.

For more information about the workshop, write me a note.

Stories of faith

Tennesse isn’t California, and Nashville isn’t Santa Barbara, but there are scenes and reflections in Nora Gallagher’s Things Seen And Unseen: A Year Lived In Faith, that resonate with what I hear from people in and around the church. Commercially, the book is old news; it was a bestseller in the late 90’s. But that also means you can get it really cheap from used book sellers.

When I returned to church in 1979, I did not know why. I was and am an ordinary person with ordinary concerns. I’m an ordinary member of my generation. But I am almost always the only practicing Christian at a dinner party, often the only “religious” person, certainly the only one who attends a church regularly, believes in God, prays, has a denomination. Throughout much of the eighties, I knew this about myself in secret and never mentioned it to anyone outside the Church, as if I were gay and still in the closet. (p. 64)

As far as being in the closet is concerned, Nashville is probably the San Francisco of United States Christianity, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into high comfort levels of talking about our relationship with God.

The cause of my secrecy was largely embarrassment. I feared being thought of as fundamentalist or stupid or both. From the time I started attending church again in my late twenties to my middle thirties, I kept my secret. While my friends (…) knew I went to Mass, we rarely spoke about it. To be fair, I didn’t know how to speak about it. My faith at the beginning wasn’t coherent: what words came out were sentimental, defensive, distorted, like bulbs that bloom too early are bitten by frost. (p. 64-65)

Are you afraid of embarrassing yourself talking about how your faith shapes who you are and what you do? I used to, until I became more comfortable with who I am and who I am becoming (which, of course, has been a result of my faith shaping my life). The hard thing is to simply be honest, because honesty makes us vulnerable. On a work trip to New Orleans, back in December and early January, we (ages ranging from 6 to 82 years old) told each other stories every night, simple, honest, beautiful and moving stories. All of them were our responses to a simple question, “Where did you see God today?” You can ask yourself that question every night, and write your answers in a journal. Or better yet, you can ask your spouse, your child, your best friend; it’s a much better invitation to deepening your relationship than “How was your day?”

And if you want to learn from a woman who tells her stories with honesty and beauty, I recommend that old bestseller by Nora Gallagher.