A Nashville weekend

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A little indulgence. This post is as much for me to remember what went on in Nashville as it is to give a holiday update. Plenty of links to follow later.

 

Phil and Tany in NashvilleAbout

Nashville is probably one of my favorite places in the world. It’s a city, so it’s big enough to have things going on, it’s also small enough to easily walk around (at least in the centre). Add to that,really friendly people and great music and it’s no wonder I’m tempted to move here every time I visit.

We arrived on Friday evening, in time for a steak dinner and to make it into the Honky Tonks on Broadway to listen to some bands.

Broadway, Nashville TNLive Bands

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

The Cory Batten Band at the Bluebird CafeThe Bluebird Cafe is a legendary venue. The place where bands and writers go to get discovered. On Sunday and Monday you can just stand in line to get in.

The Sunday we turned up the band were recording a video of their performance, so they played the same set twice. It was pretty cool but maybe not what a ‘usual’ evening comprises of.

Tany and I got to sit with a couple who had moved to Nashville from Seattle. She works as a songwriter.

Monday

Saturday also included a visit to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Studio B.

Country Music Hall of Fame

Studio B - the piano Elvis lovedThe CMHF is an amazing exhibition. It tracks the history of Country music, from Roots, through Bluegrass and the Nashville Sound to more contemporary music. Included in the exhibition are items like Elvis’s Gold Cadillac and the Gold piano he was given by Priscilla Presley. While Elvis is well-known for his connections with Memphis, he recorded most tracks in Nashville. Using the Gold Cadillac to drive himself between the two cities. Part of the CMHF is a tour of RCA Studio B, where Elvis and many… many other artists recorded. The piano he loved to play is still in the studio, and if you want you can sit at the keys and play.

Church on Sunday

Nashville isn’t just known as Music City, it’s also the Buckle of the Bible Belt. More churches than you can shake a stick at – though why you’d want to do that is beyond me.

We visited Brentwood Baptist Church. The kind of church where you need to take careful note of where you parked your vehicle (because of the size of the parking lot, not for security reasons). Two services and over a couple of thousand attendees.

I was relieved because the service was excellent. They were just starting a series on the importance of Scripture – which is good for a guy from Wycliffe to hear. What was just as good was the fact that after dropping a response card in the offering we got a personal email response from the church in 3 days!

A weekend in Nashville

So that was our weekend in Nashville. Kind of fun!


View Phil’s Nashville in a larger map

A quick holiday post

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So we’ve been gone for almost one week. Visiting Tany’s grandparents in Marco Island before moving on to Nashville for a few days, then Orlando, then home.

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You may not be able to guess from the picture, but this was one of the coldest days on record in Florida. Maybe we brought some British weather with us, but some areas got freezing temperatures! Usually unheard of this far south.

But now we’ve moved north, to Nashville, where I’d expect cold weather. However, today it’s warm and we could/should have gone out in shirt sleeves. Go figure!

Anyway, an evening’s entertainment in the bars of Broadway and I’m now back in the hotel with Tany in bed and me watching the end of the Cotton Bowl game between Arkansas and Kansas State.

Goodnight y’all

Brandenburg Concerto at St Martin in the Fields

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I love music. Any music. If its good quality and performed with passion and belief I’m happy to fight my way through howling gales and driving rain, just like last night, to take my seat.

To be honest, I wouldn’t think of buying tickets for Tany and myself to go to a classical music performance. I simply don’t know enough to be able to work out in advance if I’d like it or not. But, when my father-in-law is offering to pay there’s nothing to lose.

So last night I made my way up to Charing Cross to meet Tany after work. We met the in-laws on the Tattersall Castle for a quick bite to eat, then it was off to St Martin in the Fields for the concert.

Two things to note.

1) St Martin in the Fields is a stunningly beautiful building.

There’s been some serious effort been put in to turn an early 18th century building into something that works in central London, long after the fields that give their name to the church, have disappeared.

The crypt now holds a large food court and church shop, while the church building itself makes a good performance space. Not sure I’d want to have to sit on the pews for two hours, but we had chairs which wasn’t so bad.

2) All six of the Brandenburg Concertos are stunning.

I guess proper musicians will have their favourite pieces, but I liked it all. Given a more comfortable seat I could have leaned back and listened to it for hours. Maybe I’ll just have to pay out for the CD.

Boxing Day: Liverpool v Blackburn Rovers and meeting Alan Kennedy

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It has been a few years since I’ve been up to Liverpool to watch a game of football. When I was a student in the city I seem to remember going most weekends, but now, living in the south, there are fewer opportunities to go and it’s even harder to get tickets.

This Christmas though, Tany managed to get her hands on a ticket for me so I spent Boxing Day morning driving north to watch a game of football.

Got to say, the game wasn’t anything special. Liverpool should have won, but not because they were brilliant, more because Blackburn are really poor.

The real highlight though was meeting Alan Kennedy in the pub after the game. Not an official thing, he was just there and so were we. He scored the winning goal in the 1981 European Cup Final, and was kind enough to shake our hands and spend a couple of minutes talking about the game.

Of course a visit to Liverpool wouldn’t be complete without a trip to the Tavern Co for breakfast. This used to happen quite regularly when we were at university, but back then it wasn’t with the kids.

Bible translation in the news

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If you have been keeping tabs on the media this week, you may have noticed Bible translation coming up in a couple of places.

It began with BBC news talking about the Jamaican Bible.

Just a couple of days later and Eddie Arthur (kouya.net), Executive Director of Wycliffe Bible Translators in the UK, got to write a piece for the Guardian in Comment is Free.

If you’ve got a bit of time and would like to know some more about the Jamaican Patois (Creole) Bible, a partnership between the Bible Society, Wycliffe Jamaica, the Seed Company and the local church, it’s worth watching the following video. It also gives a good overview of what’s involved in Bible translation today.

Festivals present Christianity as belonging to the white, western and wealthy

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Every year I receive a pile of invitations (usually phrased as ‘offers’ or ‘opportunities’) to take a stand to a Christian event to tell people about Wycliffe Bible Translators and what we do around the world. To decide whether it’s worth going or not I’ll look at the programme to see what’s happening as part of the main event and see how geared it is towards mission.

So, I’ve just done a very quick survey of the speakers booked for some of the bigger Christian festivals due to take place in 2012. Here’s what I found out from their websites.

  • New Word Alive – six main speakers over one week. All white, mostly male, from either the UK or US.
  • Spring Harvest – Four speakers, all from churches in England.
  • Keswick Convention – One main speaker for each of the three weeks. All male, from Australia, England and Scotland. Although, listed under ‘Other Speakers’ is Calisto Odede from Kenya.

I tried to find out about Soul Survivor, but they haven’t released their 2012 programme and I couldn’t easily find anything from 2011.

Maybe I could make a special mention of Greenbelt. Whose lineup at least includes a smattering of people from ethnic minorities and non western educated. But then, artists are better at not conforming.

After looking at the list of speakers I did a quick search for the part that world mission plays in these events.

New Word Alive

Their vision and values statement says…

With a huge variety of gifts from preaching to personal relationships, or childrens work to world mission, we will open up possibilities, provide examples and encouragement and seek to motivate and equip Gods people to serve him and his world.

If you type ‘mission’ into the search box the top 13 results are a product from their shop, then there’s a link to their vision and values before giving a link to how an organisation can exhibit.

Spring Harvest

SH state in the header to their Beliefs page,

Within our stated aim to ‘equip the church for action’ we seek to encourage Christians to think about their faith, to be transformed through the renewing of our minds and to engage in the mission of God in the world.

Their website shows that they give money to support good causes. With the exception of Bible translation that was supported as part of Biblefresh in 2011, there’s nothing that has a primary aim of sharing the gospel.

Mission is mentioned, intertwined with the theme of ‘the Church‘ for 2012. There’s also the prospect of something multicultural on the last day.

Day 5 – God’s brilliant idea: ‘Make them one!’

The church the New Testament foresees is multicultural, multi-national and multi-lingual. The name given to this people in the Bible is the Bride of Christ – beautiful, sparkling and deeply loved by God. We will explore the joy of our diversity; embracing the call of God to reach every tribe and culture and escaping cultural captivity to express love for the ‘other’.

But, I wonder how that gets dealt with when there’s only speakers from the UK.

Keswick Convention

It was less easy to find out about Keswick’s approach to mission because their website isn’t as searchable as the others. I know that they have a fund to support those involved in mission who want to come along to Keswick, but like most other events, the main place for a mission profile is in the exhibition space.

Conclusions

Maybe I’m being overly simplistic, but I do believe that actions speak as loudly as words (even if we aren’t as conscious of the message when it’s delivered in non-verbal ways). So, I could read into these events that…

  • Senior Christian figures are usually white, male and from the west.
  • Music and sung worship is the most important part of your faith after the main speakers – just have a look and see how important ‘worship leaders’ are to selling events.
  • Mission is about improving the physical condition of those living in poverty or those that are abused and is mostly supported by giving money.
  • Mission exists in the exhibition space, where organisations pay a great deal of money for a small plot, travel to and from the event and accommodation for one or two staff. It does not play a part in the main event.

Cynical?

What me? Maybe… but honestly, I’m more than a little tired of being told about a ‘great opportunity’ from the organisers of one event or another, who want mission agencies to come along and exhibit so that they can tick a box and say they’ve ‘done mission’. If world mission was important it would get more than a drafty tent hidden somewhere in the vicinity of the main hall.

Look, I am aware that these events do a lot of good. There are great speakers and leaders who are white and male and deserve to have a platform. I know how great it is to sing praise songs with a good band who’ve prepared in advance and can stay in tune. I also believe that it’s important for Christians and the church to lead the way in bringing people out of poverty and give them hope. And, believe it or not, I understand business well enough to know that great events cost money and you have to bow (just a little) to public pressure and give the audience a bit of what they want to get bums on seats.

However, I think there’s a danger that events like these can become so focussed on breaking even that doing what’s right comes further down the agenda. We feed people what they want to hear, rather than the truth and we allow people to consume what’s safe and fun. Maybe that’s also symptomatic of western Christianity… and maybe that rant is best left for another blog post.

Also…

Simon Cozens has also written on a similar vein on his blog (HT Kouya)

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Mission resources and video

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The audio from last week's Global Connections conference, 2020 Vision - Mission in times of uncertainty, is now available on the GC website. Personally I'd direct you to Eddie Arthur's opening message and presentations by Richard Tiplady and Gerard Kelly. Not that they were necessarily better than any of the others, it's just that they presented in ways that particularly engage me. Personal taste and all that.

I also know that Wes White was quite brilliant, but I think I'm going to have to listen to him a few more times for it all to go in.

It was truly an excellent conference, although, my personal highlight came in the evening discussions in the bar. Wisely, we didn't record these times, I'm not sure the jumbled mess of our conversations would be editable, but the relationships, understanding and insight that these times generated were well worth losing extra sleep for.

LICC have shared a video of Alister McGrath's lecture Why God won't go away on their YouTube channel. It's a response to the New Atheist movement and worth a watch when you have 90 minutes going spare. The video is at the bottom of this post.

Finally, OSCAR, who provide support services to the UK mission community, have set up a group on LinkedIn. If you're on the social networking site and have an interest in mission you may want to take a look.

The apologetics argument

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A few days ago I posted about the research I had done into the authority of the Bible. But, yesterday I was challenged about the reasonableness of always looking for the logical answer.

The big-name Christian apologists are, basically, modernists. Their method of apologetics is to show that belief in the God of Christianity is entirely compatible with human rationality. In other words, they are accepting the proposition that human rationality is the standard against which God is judged. This may not be particularly glorifying to God but it certainly glorifies human rationality.

They might say that they are accepting this proposition as a starting point because it is the mindset of those that they are going up against, and hey, we’re into contextualization and starting from where the other person is coming from, but you can’t be a Christian and leave that starting point unchallenged. The Christian starting point is that God is the standard against which everything, up to and including human rationality, is judged.

This is why I have no interest in debates between prominent atheists and prominent apologists. They both place their ultimate faith and authority in the human capacity for reason and logic and in the need to make rationally defensible choices. In that sense, they’re both arguing the same side.

Worse, if you do go down that road, what kind of a God can you end up with? A God who is rationally defensible may be the clockwork god of the Deists but not the surprising, challenging and sometimes confusing God of the Bible.

From the blog of Simon Cozens

HT Kouya

For a moment I questioned whether I was barking up the wrong tree and whether the research I had done was relevant to a generation that questions truth and authority anyway. Well,

1) Knowing that there is accurate and reliable evidence for God, creation through intelligent design, Jesus and his death and resurrection is important for me, even if it has no real bearing on my conversations with others.

2) My belief in the rationality of the evidence for God does not necessarily mean I believe that God is rational. In fact, I think I believe God to be totally irrational. Rationality would probably have put paid to the world at the point of the flood, even if it had been allowed to continue that far. I wonder even, if a rational God would have given us free will.

3) It’s too easy to assume that times have changed and that we now need to adapt our communications to a postmodern audience. The problem is that audiences are very rarely made up of just postmoderns, and even when they are, there’s a sliding scale with some postmoderns looking very like modernists. Although, I agree that debates aren’t the most effective form of communication. Were they ever?

Surviving without e-mail

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The BBC website is carrying a story about the boss of an IT company Atos, banning all internal e-mail.

Thierry Breton caused a sensation last week when he told an interviewer that he planned to ban internal email at the information technology services giant, Atos.

Read the full story here

Let’s be clear from the outset, he’s not planning to ban all e-mail. If you’re trying to get in contact with someone inside the business you will still be able to e-mail them. What Mr Breton is stopping is the stream of e-mail that goes from one desk to the next.

Personally, I reckon this is a brilliant idea.

In the last year I had to review my e-mail using habits. I wasn’t getting work done as well as I should have been because every five minutes there was another e-mail that would need replying to. Just that little envelope icon was enough to cause a distraction. So, I now have a plan.

For the most part I only open, read and respond to e-mail first thing in the morning and last thing in the afternoon. In cases where I think that the e-mail I’m sending will illicit a response that will require more of my attention, I’ll schedule it to be sent towards the end of the day, meaning that I won’t need to deal with any response until the following day at the earliest.

This may sound a little cheeky, but there are days when conversations can start by e-mail that are no help to anyone. While I’m not a great fan of meetings either, I can see times when it makes sense to get five people in a room to discuss and issue rather than attempting it by e-mail.

I should also say that there are occasions when rules need to be broken. Dealing with external clients and customers, I’ll try to respond more quickly. Coming back off holiday, I’ll sit for a morning or a day to clear the backlog. I’ll even deal with messages on my phone when I’m travelling and there’s not much else to do. But, in general, the principles above still hold true.

So this is currently how I manage e-mail, but I’m willing to learn. So if you’ve got any tips or tricks I’d love to hear them.

“Turn in your Bibles… I mean phones!”

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What happens in your church when the minister tells you to reach for your Bible and turn to a passage? It seems, at mine, there’s a few of us who reach for our phones!

What happens in church when the minister asks you to reach for your Bible?

This is by no means the death of the printed Bible, but it’s certainly a sign of our times when the Bible has become an app on a phone.

Of course, it’s not just in the west that Bibles are appearing on mobile devices. Many African countries are seeing an explosion in mobile phone use. These aren’t smart phones necessarily, but even basic phones can handle text reasonably well. So, in these situations Scripture is being encoded in files that can be shared across mobile devices.

The only downside that I’ve experienced from this growth in electronic communication was the Sunday that I got to church to find that the battery in my Bible was flat – that never used to happen!

 

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