New Column From Norris Burkes

Subject:
Last column of April 2018


Column:

Pastor, Get Your Gun

The very first time anyone ever called me, "Pastor" was during the early eighties at First Baptist Church of Hopland, Calif. For 52 Fridays in 1981, I left my seminary classroom in the San Francisco Bay area and drove 100 miles with my wife, Becky, to my weekend pastorate.

Parishioners often hosted us in their homes, but eventually they converted a Sunday school class into a kind of bed-minus-breakfast room for their newlywed pastor. The church ladies strove for a homey feel, covering our poster bed with doily pillowcases and a homemade quilt. They welcomed me as their faithful, fun and fearless pastor.

Fearless, that is, until I wasn't.

Our clapboard church building was wedged between an interstate highway and a railroad track, a highway for drifters. Late at night the building moaned with unexplained noises. The empty building proved to be an unsettling place for a young couple when the lights were off.

There were summer nights when the wide temperature swings caused the floors to mysteriously squeak. Sometimes the winter wind harmonized with a thundering train and we'd jerk from our sleep in fear that God's wrath was coming through the walls.

One Sunday afternoon, I raised my "security questions" to the deacons.

"Who do I call if there's a problem at night?" I asked, "Especially in the absence of a police force."

"Well," suggested one older man, "If you're a-scared, how's about I loan you my .22 rifle."

I thought a minute about the NRA youth course where I'd qualified as a Marksman 1st Class. I accepted his offer, reassuring Becky I could revive my skills.

I put my borrowed rifle under our bed and pulled it out at night. That's when I'd walk the inside perimeter of the sanctuary looking for nonexistent intruders, swinging that rifle like some sort of third leg.

I remember one "dark and stormy night" a man came pounding on our church door. At first, we played possum and tried to ignore him.

However, his knocking grew too intense. He seemed determined to break the door rather than retreat. We imagined a stowaway who'd jumped from a train in search of someone to harm.

Becky egged me out of bed and I ventured down the darkened church aisle with my flashlight. I stopped inside the vestibule, rifle at the ready and loudly demanded to know the man's intentions. From the other side of the locked door, he said only that he needed food and money.

I tightened my grip on the rifle. I had a new wife to protect. I wasn't inclined to entertain a stranger, even if it might be an angel, as suggested by scripture.

I recommended he go elsewhere, but made no mention of my Remington argument. Gratefully, he heeded my prompting.

In the years that have followed, I've done serious soul-searching about rearming. I've had to ask myself, "What am I really afraid of? Who am I "a-scared" of? Can a pastor really practice a gun-toting faith?

Hopland taught me that my desire to carry a gun only fanned the fears that I'd conjured up myself. That kind of fear can suck the meaning completely out of life. When we succumb to those anxieties, we become the little boy afraid of the dark, imagining all kinds of no-good things.

But at the end of the day, I don't like where those fears put me. So I lock my doors, keep reasonable vigilance and take comfort in Paul's words of 2 Timothy 1:17: "For God has not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind."

By the way, several weeks after our late night disturbance, someone broke into our unoccupied church. They tore though our locked bedroom door and stole my trumpet, our pillows, and the deacon's rifle. Apparently, guns don't protect themselves.

Thus marked the end of my gun-toting days.

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Reach Norris Burkes through email at comment@thechaplain.net, by phone 843-608-9715 or on Twitter @chaplain.

 

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New Column From Norris Burkes

Subject:
Column for third week of April 2018 - third in series


Column:

Norris Burkes
689 Words
Text or call 916-813-8941
Immediate release

Editor's note: If you need to shorten this column, remove the 16th graph that contains the Texas Monthly quote.



De-Churched Pastor finds Meaning Again

In the early 1980s, Becky and I had only a passing acquaintance with fellow student Benjamin "Scott" Allen and his wife, Lydia.

However, we had much in common.

We were all preachers' kids who'd met our spouses in elementary school. Scott and I both graduated from Baylor University and then entered seminary together.

Along with our studies, we took part-time pastor positions. My little church was in the rural backcountry of California. Scott was blessed with a small, but affluent, church in Pacifica, Calif., southwest of San Francisco, overlooking the Pacific.

At the time, I imaged Scott as privileged pedigree. His father, Dr. Jimmy Allen, was president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Both father and son were highly intelligent, sharply handsome and natural-born leaders.

Our wives both worked in San Francisco. Becky taught school and Lydia was a psychiatric nurse.

As newlyweds, we were already planning our family, but Lydia and Scott got there first. Her pregnancy developed normally for several months, until suddenly it didn't.

Toxic shock sent the couple to St. Mary's Hospital emergency room where Scott ran inside, shouting, "My wife's in a coma---please help me!"

Over the next hour, hospital staff worked to save mother and baby. Doctors recommended a life-saving transfusion that made all the difference. Six weeks later, Scott and Lydia took baby Matthew home to recover.

I lost touch with Scott after our 1983 graduation. He took a church in Colorado Springs, and I found one in the rural California town of Brentwood.

Becky and I had our first child while the Allen family added another son, Bryan. Both mothers followed medical advice to breastfeed. Breast milk carried life to our child, but not so much for the Allen children.

For you see, Lydia got a phone call in 1985 from the blood bank that had supplied her transfusion in 1982. The caller said the blood had come from an HIV-positive male and Lydia and her family should be tested.

A week later, tests returned positive for both mother and children.

The Allen family took the stoic approach their faith recommended. Lydia resigned her nursing job rather than expose patients to unknown risks. Scott shared the news with his supervising pastor seeking support and understanding.

Scott was fired on the spot. Their HIV-infected son, Matthew, was booted from the church preschool.

In a 1993 interview, Scott told Texas Monthly, "That's when I realized that for all their talk about unconditional love and caring, many Christians are terrified by people who face this kind of suffering,"

Scott's parents invited the family to join them in their Fort Worth townhome. Four months after their Texas homecoming, baby Bryan, who'd been born with a heart defect, died.

In their grief, Scott explored the length and breadth of their church support system, approaching five pastors about attending their church. All declined.

"My case proves that you don't have to be gay to be kicked out," Allen said in a Sept. 1992 New York Times interview.

"I used to see bumper stickers in Dallas that said, 'You're Welcome in Our Church.' Every time I saw one I got angry and felt like suing them for false advertising."

Nevertheless, in the years that followed, Scott and Lydia turned their anger toward constructing something new in their lives: Bryan's House.

Before Lydia died in 1992, her story inspired the still-thriving facility. According to their website (bryanshouse.org,), "The house serves more than 15,000 children, easing their suffering and helping the families lead fulfilling lives…."

Matthew passed away in November 1995, at 13.

I found Scott this past week in Lake Tahoe. He's remarried and is using his first name Benjamin. He speaks internationally about grief recovery and has written a well-reviewed book in 2015, "Out of the Ashes - Healing in the AfterLoss." (www.theafterloss.com)

In YouTube videos, he expresses remarkable grace for the churches that shunned him in the 80's. He sees their reaction to AIDS as typical of the institutional ignorance that sometimes produces the fruits of fear.

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Reach Norris Burkes through email at comment@thechaplain.net, by phone 843-608-9715 or on Twitter @chaplain.

 

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New Column From Norris Burkes

Subject:
Column for second week of April 2017 - second in series


Column:

Norris Burkes column
627 Words
916-813-8941
Release 13 April 2018




Dinner Guest Becomes the Meal

In 1980, my wife, Becky, and I were living the idyllic newlywed life on the sheltered campus of Golden Gate Seminary in Mill Valley, Calif.

The campus spilled onto a pine-wooded hillside adjacent to Richardson Bay. Our view was so breath-stopping that the guest speakers in our chapel were often rendered speechless in the beauty of the moment.

We knew few problems in paradise. Occasionally a curious child wandered too close to a skunk. Or a student, like myself, strayed into poison oak. Or someone forgot to set the emergency brake and lost their car off the steep hills.

But across the bay, headlines screamed about a deadly virus brewing in the San Francisco bathhouses. Some students called it "God's judgment" on the homosexual community, but most of us felt "called of God" and therefore immune from AIDS.

By 1981, my thoughts centered on my new position as a student pastor of a rural church in Hopland, Calif., 90 miles north of my seminary Shangri-La.

On any Sunday morning, my church drew 40 parishioners. According to my deacons, those numbers materialized only by the fulfillment of two conditions: "If the Good Lord's willin' and the 'crick' don't rise."

On one Sunday, when the creek was particularly calm, Mrs. Black invited us to her home for a fried-chicken lunch. Somewhere during dessert, Mrs. Black mentioned how she'd recently evicted two men from her rental house.

"Didn't they pay their rent?" Becky asked.

"Yes," she said. "They tried, but I wouldn't let them. I discovered they're homosexual, so I kicked them out," she announced.

"God don't approve of that sort of thing. Just look at all the gays getting sick in San Francisco, right pastor?"

I pondered how my reply might shorten my employment, even my Baptist career. I quenched my discomfort with a long swallow of sweet iced tea, wishing it were the beer Hopland was famous for.

"Pastor?"

"What would Jesus do?" I asked her, looking for the safety of a cliché.

"Jesus said it's a sin." She answered.

Honestly, Mrs. Black's question made me realize how I'd parted from my denomination's company line. I might've said it was a sin, but I couldn't go along with the eviction part.

"Did he?" I asked, knowing that Jesus never commented on the subject.
I continued, ignoring her glare. "Would Jesus want them to be homeless, destitute, and outcast?"

"It's their choice," she replied, spearing her unfinished dessert with a fork.

"I'm not sure God wants Christians to cause anyone to suffer." I said. "I think these men deserve homes, jobs and happiness."

Back in the 80s, even suggesting that gays might be in the heart of a loving God was a liberal statement. Southern Baptists had just fired a missionary after he claimed, "God affirms all loving relationships."

I don't remember all that was said, but I did suggest that Mrs. Black compare her actions to the biblically inspired words of the Declaration of Independence.

"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…."

As you might guess, she didn't take that well. I felt like the dinner guest who'd become the meal. A few months later, she tried to block my ordination by recounting my views to the ordination council. The council was unmoved by her attempt.

Ninety miles south of that dinner discussion, my seminary classmate Benjamin Scott Allen, son of our Southern Baptist president, brought his pregnant wife, Lydia, to a San Francisco hospital for a blood transfusion.

The Allens would soon know the tragedy that comes with the shameful shunning of their church. Their story follows next week.

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Reach Norris Burkes through email at comment@thechaplain.net, by phone 843-608-9715 or on Twitter @chaplain.

 

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New Column From Norris Burkes

Subject:
Column for first week of April 2018


Column:

A BAPTIST GOES TO BEER TOWN

If it's true that one never forgets their first love then perhaps it's also true that a pastor never forgets his or her first church.

In 1980, I was a 23-year-old divinity student living on the campus of Golden Gate Seminary. Sheltered from San Francisco sin, the school was nestled into the famed Sausalito Peninsula.

Early in my first year of the three-year program, I became convinced that I knew enough to become a full-fledged pastor.

So, I made some networking calls to several area missionaries, the closest thing Southern Baptists have to a Bishop. My last call that January afternoon/morning was to Jimmy Warren, father of the not-yet-famous Rick Warren. Rick currently pastors the largest church in America – Saddleback Community Church.

The elder Warren answered with the southern drawl that sometimes merges two names, "Jimmy-Warren."

I prompted the aging missionary to recall that he and my father were seminary classmates in the 60s while his daughter, Chandelle, and I were kindergarten peers.

Jimmy pronounced my call "fortuitous" and asked if I could help a local church by filling the pulpit of their pastor who had just retired.

As quickly as I said yes, he cautioned me that I was only pitch-hitting until the church found a real pastor.

Like many of his peers, Jimmy didn't consider ministerial students real pastors. He worried we were opportunists who might use rural churches as stepping-stones to Rick-Warren fame. Nonetheless, the arrangement often provided the student with valuable on-the-job training while the church received cheap labor.

Assenting to his caveat, I obtained directions to Hopland, Calif, a town 90 miles north of my seminary.

"By the way," Warren concluded, "The town takes its name from the beer hops it once grew, so it's pronounced 'Hop-land,' – not Hope-land."

As a Baptist born-and-bred, I didn't know what beer hops even looked like. I'd downed only one beer in college, but I don't count that one because it didn't stay down.

Two weeks later, on a foggy Sunday morning, I drove into Hopland with my newlywed wife, Becky. Like the community, the hops had shriveled long ago. All that remained, was an aging company town populated by out-of-work lumberjacks on government assistance.

We made a quick turn off the highway, almost missing the church, and our tires spit gravel as we skidded into the parking lot. We turned off the engine and stared at the narrow building. It was circa 1940s, topped with a tin roof that drained rust down the church's peeling clapboard sides.

A sign proudly predicted, "New Baptist church coming in 1980."

"Sounds like Hop-land is Hope-ful," Becky said. "They seem a bit late and many dollars short of that goal."

"Well, it's the only church in town of 800, so maybe I can help it grow." I countered.

"Doubtful."

"Hey, my preaching professor says I sound like Billy Graham."

"First of all, I don't think he meant that as a compliment. But mostly I think you and Hopland suffer from illusions of grandeur."

Even from our beginnings, Becky saw it necessary to deflate my ballooning head.

Nevertheless, we went inside, made our introductions, and took a seat as the service began. I preached my sermon and afterwards assumed a pastoral position at the exit, shaking hands like a flight attendant thanking everyone for flying today.

Soon, a deacon approached me and began pumping my arm. "I think we got us a Billy Graham," he said, "You're hired. You're our new pastor!"

"New pastor?" I asked, "I thought I was just filling in."

At that moment, my head reinflated. Despite my conviction that I was light years away from the academia of graduate school, I sensed the place could teach me things I wouldn't learn in class.

I took the job.

In the upcoming weeks, I'll be sharing some of what I learned.
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Reach Norris Burkes through email at comment@thechaplain.net, by phone 843-608-9715 or on Twitter @chaplain.

 

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