by Jason Byassee
Jason Byassee
One of the longtime values of our congregation is our deep responsiveness. When we see a need we move to meet it. We don’t make “the way things have always been” into an idol. We know we must change to stay faithful.
For example, every few years this congregation has helped start a new community of faith. In the mid-90s it was our own contemporary service–risky for the time. In the late 90s it was our move out to New Market. In the early 2000s it was the launch of FaithBridge UMC in Blowing Rock and of La Esmirna Metodista in Patzibal, Guatemala. In the late 2000s it was our own Crossroads service and our merger with Blackburn’s Chapel in Todd. We have muscle memory around innovation. In fact, we’re about due to throw off a new faith community or two again.
The thing is, we don’t often talk about this gift of innovation. We don’t speak of ourselves as a launching, founding, innovative congregation. But we are. When it comes to launching churches, we are all action and no talk.
A new opportunity for us to respond to God is in Amy and Blake Justice’s call to the mission field. The Justices are uprooting their family from Boone, selling their house, leaving a community where they have extended family, and moving to a new place, all because God has called them. They are using their gifts as educators and in health care provision and in building excitement for Jesus to lead in a foreign place.
Amy has a deep patience and joyful attentiveness about her. Blake has a frenetic energy that comes from a live wire to the Holy Spirit (he’s the kind of sermon listener who is nodding even before Vern or I get to our point). Their girls, Gracie, Heather, and Molly, have a fierce and tender openness about them. You may remember Molly giving witness in church to the fact that she had asked Jesus into her heart. Praying that prayer wasn’t enough. She wanted the microphone so she could tell the world about her new step in faith.
Blake and Amy will be going with TeachBeyond, an innovative missionary sending institution for educators. They will be teaching at the Black Forest Academy in Kandern, Germany (near Freiburg), a school whose purpose is to teach missionary children. Parents of these 280 missionary kids are serving in over fifty countries all over the world. In other words, without the Justices and BFA, hundreds of missionary endeavors around the world would come to an end, since missionaries, like the rest of us, prize the education of their children.
One difficulty of the Justice’s specific call is where they are going. Germany! A place where the church is 1000 years old and declining fast. If they were going to help starving children in the emerging world they would have tapped into a well of support already. If they were going to a risky place where Christianity is forbidden they would tap into another kind of support. But Germany?!
This is where we need to think more carefully. Missionaries helping the most vulnerable of the world’s poor have their kids in school in Germany. Others preaching the gospel at risk of life and limb have their kids in school in Germany. To support the Justices means we can support many kinds of missionaries at the same time.
As if that were not enough . . . Amy will be leading teacher workshops in the Central African Republic (CAR) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in her spare time. These are terribly fragile countries, filled with gifted people dragged down by institutions and leaders who have failed catastrophically. The CAR and DRC need countless hours of patient rebuilding from servants like the Justices.
This is the first time in memory our congregation has sent a missionary into the field. We support countless others through our support of the general church’s various boards and through Faith Promise. But the Justices have come from among us, responded to our preaching and served and led us and our neighbors and kids. Now they go forth in our name. We’re not used to digging deep to support a missionary from our own zip code.
Now is our chance to be responsive again. We’ve done it before. Let’s do it again.
by Jason Byassee
Jason Byassee
Friends, I’d like to turn my space in “Totally Byassee’d” over to my friend and colleague Lindsey Long, our pastor at Blackburn’s Chapel. Lindsey is a Duke Divinity grad and also a longtime friend of my family–she babysat my kids when they were infants and she was a kid herself! She has served in Todd for a year, and has also led our effort in the Blackburn House, an intentional Christian community for those trying to discern a call to ministry. Our community in Todd has been a laboratory, an experiment in rural ministry, in multi-site church life, in following Jesus in a place many of our grandparents moved away from but some are now moving back to.
What have we learned in our laboratory this year?
Blackburn House: How I Learned to be a Real Friend
Last week was Kristen’s last with all of us. She moved out on Saturday, off to new adventures and new opportunities. To mark her last meal with us, we prayed for her and each took a chance to speak about how our lives had been different this year because we had known Kristen. We shared how she had shaped our community’s every day rhythms and intentional practices. And as I watched these four women, together in this capacity for the last time, love on each other and share how they had been transformed by living with each other, I was struck by how far we had come together.
The fact of the matter is this particular community will never be replicated. Something will be missing without Kristen. And something will be missing as Lindsay, Lauren and Erin each move out throughout this summer. Each of us mean something for the DNA of the Blackburn House; for the DNA of life together. But I would be lying if I didn’t say it has been a long and difficult process learning to love the community we have and not the community we imagine. We all moved in last August with an idea of what intentional community means. As five women moved in together, five different ideas of intentional community filled the imaginary space of the house. We struggled to fit each other into molds of other intentional communities we admired, we placed expectations on each other that we hadn’t even named to ourselves and we attempted to program ourselves into the “correct” version of intentional community. We even went so far as to question whether or not we really were an intentional community.
In so doing we looked past each other to some ideal community. And to be honest, it was a lot easier to nurse our separate resentments and foster our imaginary ideals of community than to actually look at each other and ask, “What does it look like for me to love you well? What does it look like for me to be the body of Christ with you?”
Ephesians 2:19-21 is a familiar verse to many of us, “. . .you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of this household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord.” This is the ideal community: the community that becomes one household because it is built on the foundation of Christ. This is hard and messy because we are all humans, not imagined ideals. But the only way to avoid being foreigners and strangers to each other, the only way to be members of one household together, is to love each other as Christ loves us: loving our real selves, right where we are, just the way we are. Bonhoeffer puts it best in his book, Life Together when he says, “[the person] who loves [their] dream of intentional community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter.” If we want real community, we must have real love: Christ’s love that envelopes us, warts and all. It doesn’t mean we don’t strive to be better and do better together, but not at the expense of loving our real community.
As our time together came to a close, we huddled around Kristen, prayed for her and handed her a small pin in the shape of a dove. One of our commitments this year has been to be “open to the improvisation of the Holy Spirit.” As we’ve twisted and turned and been transformed by each other and the Holy Spirit working through each of us, we’ve learned to love better and be better friends. The movement of our learning together has kept us steadily, if sometimes unknowingly, moving toward each other. It has kept us steadily, if sometimes unknowingly, moving toward Christ.
Thank you, Blackburn House Ladies of 2012-2013
by Jason Byassee
Jason Byassee
One of the great longings at our church is how we can help the poor in our area. We live in a place of greater than average wealth and greater than average poverty. Many of us here at Boone Methodist are closer to the wealth end of the bell curve than the other. We know Jesus’ warning that “to whom much is given, much will be required” (Lk 12:48).
But how do we help the poor without simply lending to bad habits, like substance abuse? How can our generosity become part of someone else’s empowerment rather than increasing dependence?
Circles is one answer to this question. It works to help eliminate poverty by empowering the poor with what we middle class folks already have: social capital. If we don’t know how to do something (our taxes, say, or changing the oil, or getting a job after graduation), we pick up the phone. The poor don’t have the social capital to pick up the phone that the rest of us do. So Circles puts them in, well, circles: relationships with one another and with middle class folks who can help them negotiate the maze out of poverty. How do I make a budget? Save for basic necessities? Negotiate with a creditor? Circles works by placing folks in disciplined small groups who learn together how to get control of their lives and to take their own steps out of dependence and into a sustainable economic life. It’s beautiful.
And it’s coming to Watauga County. If we can make it happen.
Susan Jones and Nancy Reigel, one longtime leader of our congregation and one relatively new-coming leader of our congregation, are deeply committed to Circles’ philosophy and determined to see it here. They have received a grant to help bring it. They need further funding–not a ton, but some, several thousand dollars worth to start. I want to see it happen too–we need more relationships with poorer folks to leaven the loaf of our congregation’s life. We cannot rightly be friends with the poor if we know no poor people. We are all hungry for all people to find a home at Boone UMC. This is a way for us to open our doors wider to people less like us. It is also a way to balance our wonderful commitment to international missions with local mission that helps poor people in our own zip code.
But where do we get the money?
JJ and Jennifer Brown and their marvelous boys Cooper and Tucker joined our church a year or so ago. JJ is dean of students at App, Jennifer a teacher at Bethel. And JJ has trained marathoners before. We have plenty of runners at our church and JJ was willing to train them and some newbies. But toward what end? Amidst simultaneous conversation with Nancy and Susan we realized the end: Circles. Some of us will run, others will sponsor, and we will give the proceeds to launch Circles. JJ amidst a frenetic schedule has coached us to prepare to run the New River Half Marathon this Saturday, May 4. He has sent notes, coached distances, met us with Gu and gels and water and encouragement, and made our lives better (or at least more athletic) but pushing us farther than we thought we could go. This initiative is in line with some others devoted to physical fitness at our church: yoga, Monday night basketball, fitness boot camp, Western Youth Network. One recent meeting of a local community fitness initiative realized that every single board member attending was a recent joiner of Boone UMC! What is God calling us to in this area?
So Saturday a gaggle of us will be out running at Todd. You can support us and Circles with a check to Boone UMC, memo: “Marathon.” The money will go to help poor people help themselves and to pushing our church further toward a health both physical and mental. We’d love your presence in Todd Saturday as well. More thanks than I can count to Susan, Nancy, JJ, and to all of you. Our church is only as strong as your prayers, for these initiatives and in all things.
by Jason Byassee
Jason Byassee
One of the great strengths and great tensions in our wonderful church is that many groups think their thing is the church’s only important thing. I love this! The folks who run the Bazaar, our Sunday School classes, the UMW, our Disaster Relief Team (this list could continue) all think their activity is the most important one in the church. And here’s the little secret: they’re all right! All tied for first, that is.
The missions committee has a similar fire in its belly for the gospel and to change our church and our world. I am so proud of the work its coordinator, Luke Edwards, and this committee have done in preparation for this year’s Mission Celebration. In the committee’s decade or so of expanded work at Boone Methodist this group has come up with a way to raise serious funding for missions here in Boone and around the world. It can seem gimmicky to some, manipulative to others. I saw it as a challenge and an invitation to participate more deeply in God’s quietest and most important work in the world. Here’s the way to view it I think: a passionate group wants to share its passion with others. I’m so glad they do. Here’s why.
Mission is usually stereotyped as a “conservative” interest in the church: they are spreading the gospel, trying to convert people and grow the church on its edges. Fictional accounts of missionaries like Michener’s Hawaii (with its blatant inaccuracies) and The Poisonwood Bible (which raises more accurate and troubling questions) made this view common, almost commonplace. But this reputation is unfair. More balanced scholars have shown that it is missionaries who have preserved local languages by the hundreds. Why? Because they want to translate the bible into folks’ mother tongues. International business has no interest in preserving local languages spoken only by a few thousand people. For the church, those few thousand people are inestimably precious to God, their language a fitting vehicle for the Word Made Flesh. Missions has also been an empowering agent for women and children around the world. You could hear this last year in our mission celebration keynote speaker, Peter Pereira, describing his work in India. It is often women, children, and the poor to whom Christianity has special appeal. Jesus’ good news to all (Mt 28:20), Pentecost’s promise that the Spirit is poured out on all flesh (Acts 2), Paul’s promise that baptism makes us all one (Gal 3:27) is especially good news to those relegated to second class status in their societies.
When I worked at Christian Century magazine I realized the category-bending quality of missions. The Century is a flagship liberal Protestant publication, but its news coverage is almost entirely focused on America. Christianity Today, by contrast, is a flagship conservative Protestant publication. But its coverage is consistently global. Why? Because they have the missions emphasis. Evangelicals have to be concerned about, say, banks in Cypress, because they affect mission in Cypress and beyond, whereas liberals’ humanitarian interests often don’t push them to be as internationally minded.
Last Sunday at the 11 AM service as we watched the video promotion for Word Made Flesh (https://vimeo.com/63405926) I started to tear up. It’s not only that I’ve come to love All Sons and Daughters’ music. It’s that I love Chris Heuertz. He is a friend I got to know while working at Faith & Leadership at Duke. I traveled out to Omaha to write this feature on Chris’s work: http://www.faithandleadership.com/features/articles/the-side-hope I fell in love with Word Made Flesh’s combination of Wesleyan evangelical zeal with Mother Teresa’s work among the most vulnerable of the world’s poor. Seeing the faces of children WMF works with on our screen at BUMC, while sitting beside Madeline Hays and Julia Handley and giving thanks that their lives are not like that, imagining Chris preaching from our pulpit to my church here that I love so much, almost overwhelmed me (I’m glad the sermon was over!).
I cannot beg you enough: come hear All Sons and Daughters. Come hear Chris Heuertz and our other speakers, including some of our own dynamic and creative missional leaders in our Saturday afternoon sessions (Dale Williams from Samaritan’s Purse and Eric Heistand from Campus Crusade for Christ, among others). This is a feast of a program, a delight for the heart, please do not go spiritually hungry next week!
Another local connection to Chris Heuertz is our own Wade Grimes. Wade quickly became my closest friend when we moved to Boone in 2011. We ran together, joked around, dreamed big dreams, watched our wives and children play. My worst day since I got to Boone was the day I learned Wade and his family were moving. I still think about and grieve his move daily, even as his family thrives in Charlotte.
Wade and I realized the day we met we had a common friend in Chris. “No way, you know Chris Heuertz?” he asked. “Way,” I responded (sorry, we grew up in the 80s). Wade had traveled to India with Chris, where WMF opened the first pediatric AIDS care clinic in all of South India. Wade spent months there working with the destitute and dying in Mother Teresa’s famous Home. Wade actually met Mother Teresa and seriously considered staying in India to do that work. At the same time, Wade had met a young woman named Jen Hill at Asbury College. In these pre-email days Wade and Jen were faxing letters back and forth to one another. One kind of love won out over another, thankfully, giving us the Grimes family and their bevy of redheaded kids, Sarah, Molly, and Elliot. Just to bring things full circle, Jen’s parents, Dan and Lavonne Hill, soon moved to Boone and began the Mission Celebration at one Boone United Methodist Church.
See how things come full circle? Please come this weekend, hear Chris and All Sons and Daughters, and be changed. Jesus has something special in store for us.
by Jason Byassee
Jason Byassee
Our lives are run by a series of different schedules. These are sometimes conflicting. As a parent, the school year runs my family’s life: when is spring break? How long is summer vacation? These questions determine our lives. As a sports fan our lives are run by games. I love it, especially this time of year. Those are two powerful schedules that determine who we are.
The church also has a calendar that determines who we are. And this week is the height of that calendar. Holy Week is the summit from which we look down on and evaluate all the rest of the year. And do we ever have a Holy Week planned for you. I want to encourage all of you to take part in all of Holy Week. It’s the week where we walk with Jesus down a lonely road to Golgotha, called “Skull Place,” to die. And yet that death is not the end.
All week please be specially attentive to scripture and prayer. One approach to Holy Week would be to read the passion stories in all four gospels. It will take a while, but it will help you live into what Jesus experienced with his betrayal, arrest, torture, death, and his end-that-was-not-the-end. As a church we will gather on Wednesday of Holy Week at 5:30 p.m. in the chapel during the time when we normally celebrate the Eucharist. This week we will celebrate a foot washing, where Jesus, the greatest, takes the role of a slave. Please wear shoes you can remove with relative ease (hard this time of year when it is not yet warm, I realize!). We will remember who our Lord is, and what it means to serve him, as we wash one another’s feet.
Thursday we have our dramatic representation of the Last Supper, “Is it I?” directed by Paul and Diana Haas. This has become a mainstay here in the High Country. We invite you to experience it again or for the first time. Twelve men in our church become the disciples on the night of Jesus’ last meal. We learn what each is thinking when Jesus announces that one will betray. And we learn a bit about each of the twelve and how their lives ended as powerful witnesses to Jesus. It has been said that the best “proof” we have of the resurrection is this sorry lot of losers transformed from deniers and betrayers into those who would give their lives in martyrdom for what they had seen and heard. The best “proof” Jesus has now is your and my life. Sobering thought, isn’t it? Enough to make you and me get ourselves to church, isn’t it?
On Friday we will begin our celebration with The Stations of the Cross, portrayed by Dr. Cynthia Taylor, followed by the seven last words that Jesus says from his cross: “Father, forgive,” “I thirst,” “It is finished,” and more. Our preachers are seven of our leaders at this church and beyond: Carrie McClain, our own pastor Jeff’s wife, herself a seminary graduate and aspiring pastor; Caitlin Tremper, a graduating senior at App bound for divinity school; Renee Choate, longtime leader at our church and at others; Eric Heistand, campus minister with Cru at App, Austin Eggers, seminary graduate and from a long-standing family at our church; Chief or Buddy Price, longtime pastor of Banner Elk Christian Fellowship (now in his 90s!); and from my staff Dana Holden, director of our preschool, and a seminary grad and leader in the church herself. Each preacher gets all of 3 minutes, 180 seconds (we won’t go over an hour!), to illumine her or his portion of scripture. These are some of the most gifted preachers we have, people who love our church, please come and support them and worship on Friday night at 7:00 p.m.
On Holy Saturday we will have an Easter Egg hunt and other children’s activities at the church from 10:00 a.m. to 11:30a.m. All the world waits on Holy Saturday for what’s to come.
Easter Sunday will begin early, 6:30 a.m., while it is still dark (John 20:1), when the women first came to the tomb. We will worship in the chapel. Our first sunrise service in some time will include music, preaching, communion. Our regular worship services at 8:45 a.m., 11:00 a.m., and Crossroads at 10:55 a.m. will be full of visitors. As we worship the newly risen Lord that day be sure and greet and welcome and speak to those not normally in church. What a gift that God sends us angels in the form of visitors on these holy days.
And what a gift to serve a crucified and risen Lord together in these mountains. Blessings for Holy Week.
