Category: General

I think the big issue to discuss is the great irony in the fact that I ended my last post with “to be continued,” and it’s taken me a full month or more to write again. What can I say? I’m a crappy letter writer. (You wonder why all my friends tend to go crazy?) Actually the great irony is that my mom (who is never wrong) responded to “to be continued” with “yeah, but when?!” And she was right. I was planning to continue my blog in about a week, at most. I guess it seems that, while nothing can separate us from the love of God, a great deal can separate us from the love of blog.

The truth is that my “Part 2” kept changing. Originally, what I was going to write about was my further difficulties in achieving my other dream of owning a Christian bookstore. Do you know that the average cost of starting a small shopping-center bookstore runs around $300,000 (plus one year’s living expenses), because it takes a minimum of a full year before you start running a profit? For a store on the scale of Borders, the price tag goes in excess of a million. In case anyone hadn’t noticed, I don’t have anywhere near $300,000 (or a cool million) at my disposal. I don’t even have enough money to buy a new car. A loan? You want me to get a loan for that kind of money? Mister, in case you didn’t know, I just got turned down for a $250 credit card. That’s right. I figured I’d start working on my credit by getting an ultra-low balance credit card that I’d use to cover my daily expenses, groceries, etc. The response? Insufficient credit history. Crikey! I’ve got more than that in savings! Needless to say, that dream also is on hold.

For a couple of weeks, my idea was to say that I’d put both sets of dreams on hold, and that I was just going to sit back and enjoy life for a while. Well, it was what I was going to say. I really was. Then work got to be unpleasant, and all kinds of political motives among employees started showing up. And so I woke up one morning with the sudden realization that, if I was going to be miserable, I might as well be miserable with a purpose.

I just don’t have it in me to sit around indefinitely and bide my time. I took a year off once before, between ministry school and going back to college. It was fun for maybe three months. Once I got properly rested, I got really really bored. I took a dance class; I took up guitar; I took up babysitting; I read 1500 pages of history textbooks. I don’t remember what all else I did, but none of it was particularly satisfying. I couldn’t make any of it into a lifetime goal. I don’t hobby well. I tend to be on or off. This putz around stuff doesn’t do me to well. As long as it’s carrying me to a goal, I can put up with an almost infinite strand of unpleasantness, but unpleasantness that moves toward no particular goal just doesn’t cut it for me.

So I woke up one morning and it was “pick a dream and go with it.” So I picked, and I didn’t pick business. The most direct path toward owning a bookstore at this point does not involve getting an entry-level job at my local bookstore (I wish people would quit suggesting that). There is nothing about running a business that I could learn from working customer service. In fact, none of the jobs I currently qualify for would teach me anything directly about business. It would all be a vicarious, sidward process that would take years to assimilate. Or I could go to business school and basically start from scratch, because I didn’t even take macro economics 101 in college. They’d stick me in undergrad classes, because an English degree has absolutely nothing to do with a business degree. However, an English degree is practically on the fast track to high scores in seminary. Frankly, what is the difference between interpreting William Blake and interpreting the book of Revelation? Not much, I can assure you (they’re both functionally impossible J).

So I’m going to seminary. I picked Gordon-Conwell. I’ll be enrolling as soon as I can get the darn application done. I’ve got a whole other essay to write about how difficult that has been. It has been unbearably busy for a month now.

I’m sure I have other things to say, but I’m going to be late for work, and I dare not put off posting this thing another day—who knows when that other day may ever be?

Toodles.
KB

Okay. Let me begin by saying that I’m a mystic. In modern psychological terms, this means that I’m a prime candidate for schizophrenia. I have delusions of grandeur all the time. It also seems that I am the envy of those who aspire to poetry and ecstatic religion. It is only with some great difficulty that I can distinguish between present reality and my imagination. I am constantly on the verge of either changing the world forever, or losing my mind. Again, it is only with some difficulty that I am able to make a distinction between the two.

Fortunately for me, having had my skills sharpened by reason of use, I am able to process this visionary impetus quite easily. Some revolutionary idea comes, I hash it out, check it for flaws, and keep it or toss it. As a result, it usually isn’t me who ends up going crazy. It’s everyone around me. I hash out these high falutin ideas by talking about them, and when any particular vision has me, I believe in it fanatically. To anyone who is an intimate part of my life, it looks like the world is perpetually crashing down around my shoulders.

It isn’t. It just looks that way. I do have a sense of perspective. I am confident that the truly God-sent ideas will have staying power. It is only that I am convinced that we must also process the bran if we are to retain the germ. There’s a lot of chaff out there for every grain of wheat.

There have been two visions for my life that have had particular staying power: one is a call to business. The other is a call to ministry. I tend to alternate between the two. I can trace this back at least to when I was fourteen. I had this really brilliant idea that I was going to open up a series of Olympic sized swimming pools in the town I was living in. Mostly I was frustrated to that the biggest pubic pool was about the size of what goes in somebody’s back yard. The only glitch in my plan was the part where my dad got a new job and we moved about 300 miles. The next thing I can remember is trying to manipulate God into calling me to be a pastor. It went something like this: “Don’t send me to Africa.” You know the saying, if you pray to God, “please don’t ever” that’s the one thing He’ll do. The obvious solution is to absolutely convince yourself that the one thing you never want to do is the actual calling God has on your life. I’m pretty sure there’s a flaw in my logic somewhere, but at the time I didn’t catch it. I just remember that I successfully put pastoral ministry completely out of my thoughts for nearly a decade.

When I was seventeen, the summer before my senior year in high school, I came up with a new grandiose vision for the ultimate Christian bookstore. I seriously approached my parents and asked for permission to drop out of high school, get my GED, and start this business immediately. I was also seriously appalled at my parents lack of vision when they insisted that I complete my schooling.

Having graduated from high school, it seemed the most natural thing in the world for me to be frustrated that they didn’t offer a bona fide degree in theology for undergraduates at the college that I chose, despite the fact that I never for a moment thought that a theology degree implied a calling to something like pastoral ministry. I don’t know what on earth I thought I was going to do with a theology degree, but I certainly knew I wasn’t going to pastor. I was so frustrated with my academic limitations that I dropped out of the school where I had an 80% scholarship and moved a thousand miles to attend a non-accredited ministry school (a move which, though I don’t understand it, I still believe was based on the genuine leading of God).

Having moved clear across the country, I discovered that I was ill equipped to fit into the mold that my new school had established for “ministry.” Even the stuff I’m good at became peremptory failures. I just sort of sat there for two years and generally looked stupid. Nevertheless, while I was sitting there looking stupid, I received the most astounding vision for a Christian bookstore. To this day I believe that the vision I received both needs to be done and will be done, in due time.

And with this long prelude, I come to the last few months. I’m not really sure why I majored in English. Oh, I have a few guesses, but they’re in the same category as guesses why I went to MorningStar school of ministry. The bottom line is God told me and I’m a mystic, so I can say that. So Nyeaah.

So I get out, and I’m just sitting here for about a month. And I get to praying. Remember, that I’ve completely abandoned the any pretensions to ministry since it all went up in smoke at the ministry school. So I say,

“God, I’ve graduated, and now that I’m through all that mess, what do you want me to do?” And He says.

“GO TO SEMINARY!” Well, okay, it was quieter than that, but it had the same effect. So I start laughing and I says, “After I am worn out… will I now have this pleasure?” and then it turned into this big argument about whether or not I actually laughed at God.

It took a couple of days, but I talked myself out of it. I had this big deal I wrote about putting out fleeces for God to manipulate around, a bunch of hoops for God to jump through… However, the only serious test I could think of was for God to give me a straight path. If I’m supposed to go to seminary, tell me how I’m going to get through it and what I’m supposed to be doing when I get done.

Then I started looking. I researched schools, I talked to people who had gone to seminary. I sought counsel from parents and pastors and chaplains and everybody else I thought might care. I got responses everywhere from my mom telling me that I was crazy, but that if it was God, I could do what I thought was best to my pastor telling me that, if I was going to be certain of getting a job at a respectable Baptist church, I had better go to school at a recognized conservative Southern Baptist seminary, such as his alma mater, some 300 miles away.

It was the “be a good Baptist” speech that scared me. I like my Baptist church. It’s a good church. I don’t know, though, that I’m ready to commit myself to “being a Baptist.” Being a member of a church of a particular denomination is one thing. Stamping myself neatly into the mold of a particular denomination is quite another. Basically, the line was something about, if I went to a non-Baptist seminary, then a lot of Baptist churches would be suspicious and unwilling to give me any position at their church. What I’m thinking is, “why would I even consider being associated with any church that had those kinds of sectarian issues?” But what I mumbled back was something about not being sure about the whole denominational thing. I’m not really sure about how all these large, supra-church structures work So he went into an explanation about how basically all denominations are like that, so I’d best figure out which one I wanted before I went to school. Then he went back into the push for a good Baptist seminary.

My brakes were officially braking. I don’t want to be a good little Baptist and preach the party line. I don’t want to concern myself with making sure I’ve jumped through the appropriate hoops to get a position that pays enough to do “God’s work” and still buy a nice house. If I preach, I want to preach the Truth that needs no accreditation. Seminary was officially on hold.

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(to be continued…)

I just want to make sure that everybody knows that I’m not a blithering idiot with no plan. I had a plan. I had a very good plan. Seminary was about step 15 in that plan, not step 2. It’s the sudden shift that’s causing me irritation. As far as going to Seminary is concerned, I’m actually kind of excited. I’ve only been wanting to learn to read Greek and Hebrew for 5 years. I was very disappointed when they didn’t have it available at MorningStar

The biggest sheepskin for me is money. I don’t have any intention of going through the dirt poor thing any more. I can live off of $13 K per year. I have no desire to. If I go right back to school, I’m still going to want an income of close to $20,000 a year. That would cover house, car, food, a movie now and again, and hopefully something to pay off school money problems as well.

Another thing I want is a lot of people to tell me, “Yes, Kyle, I’ve prayed about it and thunked about it, and this is exactly what I think you’re supposed to do.”

I suppose if I was being a real Gideon, I’d ask for something extravagant, like snow in July or something, but I guess I’m not that interested in avoiding going back to school.

Yesterday I did my research and found that there were basically four seminaries in Charlotte: Two Presbyterian and two inter/non denominational. One Presby school was at Queens, and it was the liberal branch of the Presby church. I’m not that liberal. They also had a degree plan that fit neatly into six years. I’m not that liberal. The other was called Reformed Theological Seminary, and they were very impressive in their academics and mind blowingly conservative. They believe that the Bible is the absolute truth, dictated word for word from the mouth of God. I believe that all scripture is God-breathed, and that it’s all true, but word for word? If that’s word for word, then we’ve got a lot more to worry about than evolution and the ordination of women. If the bible was dictated verbatim, then He’s got major multiple personality disorder. I prefer not to believe in a God who is crazy. RTS also included a copy of the statement that every professor must sign every year. Basically if they have any misgivings about the Presbyterian creed that was established every year, they are required to notify the school immediately. I got the distinct impression that the creed was more important than the scripture. What if they found that a conservative interpretation of the bible necessarily contradicted the creed?

The third school was called Southern Evangelical Seminary, and they scared me from the get-go. Let’s start with the portable buildings for offices. Then we can move to the general… lack of affability… in the admissions staff. I got my admissions info and left. I never even looked at it. Later, a friend described them as the “fightin’ fundies.” Rigid fundamentalists. In my opinion, the fundamentalists have moved as far to the right of a plausible interpretation as the ultra-liberals have moved to the left.

The last one seems to be the zinger. Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Interdeominational, the school has students who go on to minister with Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and a whole host of other denominations. It happens to be the same school that my good friend graduated from, and he highly recommended it to me. Good solid biblical background, he says. I was a little scared when I first found them—they were in a business park. But they were finishing their actual campus to open this fall, and the interior was much more comfortably furnished than the scary school. It seems silly to judge by the furniture, but you have to wonder, if this is what they consider appropriate to welcome students, what will they do after you start attending classes? The Admissions counselor at Gordon-Conwell was also the most helpful of any of the schools I went to. He was very encouraging, asked questions, gave helpful suggestions.

It was pretty easy to pick my favorite out of the schools. What’s been hard has been obtaining advice from qualified counselors. Friends and family have given me their input (Family has stood firmly on the side of getting a job before even considering going back to school), but pastors and school counselors have not been so easy to catch. I have an appointment tomorrow with my pastor. One day my school chaplain will give me a call. I think she may be on an international school field trip. I tend to forget they have those.

I also finally got my appointment with Adecco today. Someday, I’ll manage to get a job.

You should be proud of me. Only 1 ½ pages today. J

Okay, let me tell you a story. About six years ago, I was a lowly freshman at Oral Roberts University. I have terrible habits when it comes to picking schools. ORU is a pretty well-known religious school in the area, famous among charismatics, of the straight-laced, button-down shirt and tie persuasion. I picked it because it was eight miles from my parents house. I hate moving. I didn’t apply to any other schools. I got accepted, got a reasonable scholarship deal, and left it at that. I hated it. Oh the atmosphere was great, but the rules drove me crazy.

I’m trying to avoid backtracking too many times, but we’ll start with this: When it comes to hearing God for basic direction in my life, I’m as deaf as a post. Oh when I finally get it, I’m pretty confident. I know I’ve heard Him. But it’s usually about 15 minutes before I’m supposed to be there. I started looking at ministry schools. Bible schools. There were lots of them in town. But the two that really grabbed my interest were both over 1000 miles away. One was a Vineyard school for worship leaders in Langley British Columbia, Canada. The other was the MorningStar School of ministry in Charlotte, NC. I acquired brochures for both, and instantaneously settled on MorningStar. I still don’t remember why.

Well, that’s not completely true. The MorningStar brochures said they were planning to give their students a BA in Church History or something like that (Maybe it was Biblical Literature). But that plan never materialized. And yet I doggedly stayed at MorningStar, fully confident that God had sent me, despite the fact that I have never fully learned what it was I was supposed to get out of the experience.

As I was saying, I’m deaf as a post when it comes to hearing God, especially when it comes to personal direction. I mean, the clouds could roll back, I could hear an audible voice, I could write it down verbatim, and it would still be months before I got the message.

Folks, it could be years.

So back to my freshman year at ORU…My second semester, for whatever reason, I opted to take only 12 hours of classes, which left me optimal time for prayer and fasting, and that sort of fanatical behavior. Somewhere in there I got a really clear message to hide out every night for a week in a typically vacant study hall and pray for an hour or so and write down whatever God told me. It was a pretty powerful experience. God told me all sorts of things that I didn’t listen to. There was a girl I was kind of interested in, that I thought was seeing my roommate. The Lord told me that this girl wasn’t going to end up with anybody who was living in the state of Oklahoma. That should have included me and my roommate. I ended up dating this girl for about 6-8 months. It was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life, and lo and behold, I didn’t end up with her. (Neither did my roommate.)

The big message that I got that week though, had to do who I was as a person and how He was molding me. I’ve lost my journal since then, but what I wrote down was something along these lines: The picture was of a earthenware jar that had already been fired. The potter, however, thinks that the pot just isn’t quite right, and decides to start over. He has two options. Either he can throw the old pot out and start over with a new batch of clay, or he can grind that clay back down to powder, add water, and start all over again. (Today I would make references to “a bruised reed he will break and a smoking flax he will not put out”). At that same time, I know I had been praying something along the lines of “fall on the rock and be broken, or the rock will fall on you and you will be crushed.” Except that I had the brilliant revelation that “crushed” is a more developed state of “brokenness” than merely “broken.” Since the highest state for a Christian is brokenness before God, I had been praying that He would go ahead and give me the advanced treatment and crush me down to powder.

Folks. Let me give you a tip here: Just go for “brokenness.” “Crushed” is generally more of an experience than you’re bargaining for. But no, in my pride of humbleness I was shooting for the big time. So I had a message. I was going to get broken down to powder and put back together again, completely from scratch. Yippie skippy! I don’t remember all of it, but He gave me a list of about 5 or 7 things that he was going to take away from me. Friends is the only one I can remember off the top of my head. Did I mention that I acquired almost no long term friendships my first four or five years in Charlotte?

So it’s six years later, and suddenly it’s occurring to me that those words (as best I can remember them) have been fulfilled to the letter. While the basic stuff I’m made of hasn’t really changed, everyone who’s known me will tell you I’m a completely different person. Do you know that in all the junk I went through, that prophecy never even occurred to me, to look at and say, “see, this is exactly what I’m going through!” Never. Not once.

Skip ahead a bit. Charlotte. Present day. I’ve just graduated from college. BA. English. Does anyone know why I chose to major in English? Me neither. Why is it that the only positions that have come up that seemed even remotely viable have all been ministry positions?

I just recently joined a Baptist church. This is pretty strange for me. I come from a very de-structured religious background so all the procedures inevitably attached to any kind of denomination always gave me the sense that I was bound to up and break a rule. But I joined for a number of reasons. The first one was that I pretty much decided that non-denominational churches on the east coast were too flakey for me, while most moderate to conservative denominations seemed to be about what I was used to from the midlands. It isn’t just in politics that they get more liberal on the coast. The second reason was that I have a friend that I love very dearly, and I’ve dragged her already through two churches that have zero order in the service whatsoever. I figured I owed it to her to try the Baptist route for a while. Mikey tried it, Mikey likes it, and that’s the life for me.

Immediately upon joining the Baptist church, my school chaplain starts handing me letters from Presbyterian churches pretty much begging for full and part-time youth ministers. With much prayer and thought, I decide not to apply, despite a promised glowing recommendation from the chaplain, because I just joined a church and I’d hate to immediately leave it. So what happens? The music director leaves and our church decides to replace him with two positions: A part-time choir director, and a full-time associate pastor position. I look at the job description for the associate pastor, and it fits me perfectly in all but two points: they want a Masters in Divinity and 3-5 years full-time ministry experience.

Nothing is catching my attention like these ministry positions, despite the fact that I know that pastoral work is the hardest and most underappreciated in the universe. Despite the fact that, after MorningStar I practically swore a vow never to return to any kind of attempt at public ministry. Despite the fact that I’ve been talking about getting a job in the business world for three years now.

I had a big long piece that I was going to do, discussing my charismatic non-denominational background and how it compares with the Presbyterian and Baptist denominations (the only two I’ve had any kind of real first-hand experience with). Essentially, the typical charismatic non-denom church has the government structure of the Presbyterians (plurality of leadership!) with the theology of the Baptists (no infant baptisms!). There’s a Methodist influence as well, but we won’t get into that. We’re getting close to my self-imposed 3-page limit, and I think I’m going to end up going over it this time.

My original point was to mention that I was actually considering going back to school for a theology degree instead of joining up the workforce like a real man. I was then going to point out that there were a total of 3 accredited seminaries in the greater Charlotte area, none of which are Charismatic. Then I was going to hash out all those details for your reading pleasure. But at about the 3rd paragraph of this essay, my hands started to shake. By the 10th paragraph, it was so bad, you’d a thought I was a strung-out addict. I had to stop typing. I thought maybe I had low blood sugar (you know, it happens all the time at 1:30 in the morning), so I got up and made me some toast. I could barely get the bread in the toaster. The more I tried to frame how I was going to say that I was looking at going to a seminary, the worse it got. The more I worked at it, the more it became less of a “how to discuss the issue of…” and more of a “Lord, do you want me to…” And then I started to cry.

I’ll be honest with yuns. It’s been years since God and I had a serious man to man. You know that whole “crushing to powder” bit? Incommunicado. That was His deal, not mine. By the time I got to college, I think I had given up, it was so rare. I was basically praying, “If you don’t like this one, just stop me, okay? Hello? Anything?” Every once in a while I’d see Him from across the room and he’d wave at me. Real friendly like.

And then tonight. 1:30 am. “Hello, God, are you—WHOA.” It was, uh, pretty intense.

I won’t say I’m really happy about it. I did have myself set on not going back to school full-time for a while, if ever. I also happened to have myself set on getting some business experience under my belt. I’ve always planned to go on to seminary, but I was thinking sometime around when I turn 50. As it is, I’ve probably got three months to figure this out, and I’m still pretty scared about it. I may be a mule, and only half a horse, but I know a hard road when I see it. Not to mention Somebody could have given me a little heads up about it. I spent a lot of time tonight saying “If this is the way you treat your friends, it’s no wonder you have so few of them.” Then I’d start crying again. He may seem capricious at times, but His presence is so good.

As far as I’m concerned, for the next little while, my name is Gideon. You will not believe how many sheepskins I’m going to be laying out. Before I start to do this thing, I’m going to know it’s God. I’m also not going to be flying it blind. As I mentioned before, there are at least three schools in the Charlotte area I could go to, and none of them are the same background I grew up with. I’m going to be talking to a lot of people.

As it is, please pray for me. I’m kind of scared, and I’m tired of this.
KB