trucker frank
met my good friend Trucker Frank (finally in person) tonight for tacos and beer.
great stuff!
we talked about God, life, church, #twurch and much more – even had to pick up the conversation and continue it in the morning over breakfast.
snapped this photo before the night was over with my blackberry.
“The joy is the journey not the destination”
Listen to more of Frank’s story on the Something Beautiful Podcast.
I don’t normally plug our podcast here too much (at least I don’t think so) but thought I’d give you a heads up on some great interviews we’ve had recently and a few that are upcoming.
Be sure and check out somethingbeautifulpodcast.com to listen to all our past, present and future shows.
This week on the show we have the first part of my interview with Greg Garrett. Garrett’s an English professor at Baylor University and also a lay-pastor at St. David’s Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas. He recently wrote a great book – “Stories from the Edge A Theology of Grief” based on the summer he spent as a chaplain in Austin, Texas. I talked to Greg about how he dealt with his own personal “demons” and how he was led into the chaplaincy and some of what he learned in the process. Great stuff.
Also, last week we talked with Mark Batterson, pastor of National Community Church in Washington DC. Batterson recently released his second book, “Wild Goose Chase” and we talked about the book, the adventure of chasing the Holy Spirit and how Batterson has seen it play out in his own life.
Coming up we have the second half of my interview with Greg Garrett, as well as an interview with Frank Viola and a two part interview with Trucker Frank (aka Frank Schutzwhol).
I think they’re all stories worth talking about (whether you agree or disagree with the particular story) so be sure and check them out and let us know what you think.
Also, if you have a story, poem, or message that you think our listeners would love to hear — send it to us. You can send it as text only or if you’d like to record it in your own words you can send an mp3. Send all your submissions to :: somethingbeautifulpodcast (at) gmail (dot) com.
Those marbles in my head are rolling around this morning. Lots of thoughts swimming around. Good thoughts I do believe. Maybe heritickle thoughts.
Watched 4 episodes of Tony Jones’ trek across america with Trucker Frank early this morn. Really makes me want to find Jones’ new book, “The New Christians
In the videos Jones rides along with and talks to former pastor turned trucker and home church leader Trucker Frank along with a number of other individuals across the countryside. (As a side note – Jones talked with Frank and another pastor turned truck driver in the videos. Andy Stanley also used a story of a trucker/evangelist/pastor in his book (“Communicating for a Change
Trucker Frank and Jones talk a lot about the importance of church community and the importance of sharing our faith and ideas with each other – no matter how heritickle they may be.
Reminds me of the “Wiki effect” (as in Wikipedia). The Wiki effect is the idea that you can take 5 top geometry experts and put them in a room to figure out how many marbles are in a jar. The geometry folks will use specific formulas to figure their answer. Then bring in several hundred “average joes” to guess how many marbles there are. If you take the average answer of all the “average joes” it will almost always end up closer than that of any of the “experts.”
So if we applied this to our faith, the idea is that a true community sharing faith will be just as likely – if not more likely to come to “correct conclusions” about God than someone who’s spent 10 or 15 years studying scripture as a member of the clergy.
Doesn’t mean you don’t study and use church libraries and commentaries and other resources to build on and strengthen your faith – it just simply means that we should all be doing this and then sharing our thoughts, experiences and truths with each other.
And when you have one or two people throwing out “outlandish” ideas they can be tested and approved by the body as a whole.
So these thoughts are swirling through my mind… and then I get on the bus this morning and pick up Rodney Clapp’s “A Peculiar People
Clapp writes:
…the near-identification of Christianity with the nation-state has been nothing short of disasterous… I want to argue that American has so eagerly and thoroughly been Constantinian that it does have a true “old-time” and civil religion, but this religion is not Christianity. It is instead that eminently interiorized and individualized faith called gnosticism… what Americans have long been interested in is the gnostic type of religion, the tendency to believe and act as if faith and salvation were essentially private, acultural and ahistorical.
As Philip J Lee notes, “The gnostic escape, in the last analysis, is an attempt to escape from everything except the self.” The world, history and community are ultimately viewed with suspicion. The gnostic believes faith is a solitary affair between himself or herself and God. As Harold Bloom puts it, “Salvation, for the American, cannot come through the community or congregation, but is a one-on-one act of confrontation with God.” The American Jesus, Bloom suggests, “cannot be known in or through a church, but only one on one.”
As N.T. Wright notes, once we grasp a distorted and overemphasized “pro me of the gospel, the idea that God is ‘being gracious to me,’ we no longer need Jesus to be too firmly rooted in history.” Indeed, concentrating on the self and its individual salvation, we do not want a Jesus rooted in history, for that would be a particular Jesus who might reveal a particular God with a character and purpose different from our own. Nor do we want a Jesus who might be known in community or through the activities of a culture. All this runs against the American grain of discovering God within the self, a direction set at least since the early 1800s.
Hmmmm…. this brings me back to…..
I’m thinking this all ties in with some of the thoughts Lindsay Cofield shared in our interview this week about the “organic church”….
“I’d rather have a church of 12 people who can replicate the DNA of the Kingdom of God than a church of thousands that will infect people with something less. Take time to build the real thing, not watered-down, lukewarm look-a-likes. If we’re going to be the church at all let’s be the real thing. Build the church God’s way! As an organic movement of unpaid servants.”
– Michael Slaughter, unLearning Church
You can look for that interview on the Something Beautiful Podcast on Friday.
Related ::
SSL: Heritickle
The New Christians
Tony Jones’ channel on YouTube (with the Trucker Frank videos)
Tony Jones’ website
Boston Globe article on the Wiki Effect
About Wikipedia
A Peculiar People
NT Wright on the Colbert Show
everywherechurch.com
something beautiful podcast
