Watching our tone

Over the past two weeks’ political conventions I have watched most of the major speeches and then headed to my computer to check Twitter, the blogs, news sites, and online forum that I frequent. What has astonished me these past two weeks is the amount of bitter, vitriolic tone that has come not from the politicians (where I expect it) but from supporters of both sides.

Now, I’m not talking about people complaining bitterly about the other side misrepresenting their candidate’s positions (which both sides do). I’m not talking about people finding creative ways to describe their opponents’ apparent inexperience or lack of qualifications. (Both sides do it, and both have their share of inexperience.)

I’m not talking about people you’d expect the worst from, people like Hannity and Limbaugh on the right and The Huffington Post and The Daily Kos on the left. I’ve done my best to tune all of them out for a while now.

I’m talking about Christians. People who I know are good, kind people. The kind of people you’d want to sit down and have a beer with and discuss life. The kind of people who you’d want serving in your church, ministering to you or your friend in need, teaching your kids in Sunday School. And these last two weeks the things I’ve heard and read from these folks have surprised me. Name-calling. Making fun of candidates for their “creepy laugh” or their funny accent or the way they dress. Things that they wouldn’t ever in a million years think of saying about a friend… or a visitor to their church… or someone they met on the street. But because that person is the current representative of a political view that they disagree with or fear, there seems to be no limit to the insults that can be hurled.

Professor and author Gene Veith today on his blog asks “Why the vitriol?” He asks, in part:

We’ve discussed controversial theological points and complex moral issues on this blog and stayed friendly. Why do we lose it when it comes to politics? There may be good reasons, but I’d like us to think about what they are.

With due respect, Professor, I’m not so sure about good reasons. In fact, I want to go a little further and say this:

It’s wrong.

If it would be wrong to make fun of your co-worker’s funny-sounding name, it’s wrong to make similar fun of Barack Obama.

If it would be wrong to derisively mock your neighbor’s creepy laugh, it’s wrong to mock John McCain’s.

If it would be sinfully unloving to deride the parent of an unwed teenage mother who visited your church last week, it’s just as sinful and unloving to deride Sarah Palin’s current circumstance.

Why do we think that because there’s a presidential election on that we’re suddenly exempt from 1 Peter 3?

Finally, all of you, live in harmony with one another; be sympathetic, love as brothers, be compassionate and humble. Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing. For,

“Whoever would love life and see good days must keep his tongue from evil and his lips from deceitful speech. He must turn from evil and do good; he must seek peace and pursue it. For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are attentive to their prayer, but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.”

I’m not calling for the end of all political debate. I’m not saying that Christians shouldn’t have strong political views, or endorse candidates, or argue the issues.

But we should keep it to the issues. There are plenty to discuss and argue. If we listen instead of bluster, we might just learn something from the other guy, too.

So, friends, we shouldn’t be mocking John McCain because he has a weird smile and laugh. We shouldn’t be making fun of Barack Obama because he has (compared to recent political candidates) a strange-sounding name. We shouldn’t be deriding Sarah Palin because she sounds like an extra from Fargo. And all that jesting about Joe Biden’s hair plants? At least do it in good cheer.

How much experience have presidential and VP candidates had?

A warning to my casual readers: this post is going to get more than a wee bit nerdy, and probably a bit political, too.

OK, with that out of the way, let me note that one of the things that’s been bugging me ever since John McCain’s announcement of Sarah Palin as his VP choice last week is that while there’s been a veritable chorus describing her as “inexperienced” and “unqualified”, no one has really bothered to set down what they thought a VP’s experience should be. I had this discussion with a guy who is a big Obama supporter over on a forum I frequent, and even he was unwilling to suggest a criteria other than that it should be “the same as if they were running for president”.

I decided it was time to give myself a history lesson. How much experience, exactly, did our various candidates for president and vice president have? Geof suggested plotting that data against their presidential ratings to see how it panned out. So I did that, too. To bound the problem a little bit, I decided to limit my study to the more modern presidential era (starting with 1960). Then I headed off to Wikipedia to do some data collection.

The Setup

A person’s experience is, in some ways, difficult to quantify, but I settled on the following categories of experience:

  • Years of college education (I also tracked whether it was Ivy League and whether they got a law degree)
  • Years of military service
  • Years in a state legislature
  • Years as a state governor
  • Years in other federal government service (i.e. cabinet or civil service positions)
  • Years in Congress
  • Years as Vice President
  • Years as President

The tricky part, then, is how you choose to sum these up; let’s just agree that, for instance, years served as Vice President or as a governor are more valuable, year-for-year, than those served in the military or in a state legislature. I settled on some multipliers to try to help even things out. Feel free to argue over these if you want to.

  • Years of college education (I also tracked whether it was Ivy League and whether they got a law degree) - 0.25
  • Years of military service - 0.25
  • Years in a state legislature - 0.25
  • Years as a state governor - 1.0
  • Years in other federal government service (i.e. cabinet or civil service positions) - 0.5
  • Years in Congress - 0.75
  • Years as Vice President - 1.0
  • Years as President - 2.0

So, for example, George H. W. Bush, in 1984, had 4 years of college, 4 years in the military, 5 years in government service, 4 years in congress, and 4 years as VP. That gives him a score of ((4*0.25)+(4*0.25)+(5*0.5)+(4*0.75)+(4*1.0)) = 11.50.

With those multipliers in place it was easy enough to get Excel to do some sums and give me some totals.

What I found was fairly interesting.

The Data

The average experience score for a presidential candidate: 16.8. The average experience score for a VP candidate: 12.9. Highest score for a presidential candidate: 28.75, shared by Bob Dole in 1996 and Gerald Ford in 1976. Highest score for a VP candidate: also 28.75, Joe Biden this year.

Lowest score for a presidential candidate: 5.25, Barack Obama, this year. (second lowest: George W. Bush’s 7.50 in 2000.) Lowest score for a VP candidate: 3.00, Sarah Palin, this year. (second lowest: Spiro Agnew’s 3.75 in 1968.)

Highest POTUS/VP combined score: Dole/Kemp in 1996 (45.75) Lowest POTUS/VP combined score: Reagan/Bush in 1980 (17.25)

So that’s a lot of data, how about some analysis?

Analysis

I did a plot of the experience ratings against some presidential performance ratings (as found here, which claim to be amalgamated from several different ratings on Wikipedia), but found that to be a mixed bag. There were experienced presidents who ranked poorly (Nixon) and well (LBJ) and inexperienced presidents similarly (Reagan ranked high, Jimmy Carter much lower). Result: Inconclusive.

Next, I noticed an interesting trend. If you throw out the few elections where strong incumbents were running for second terms (LBJ in 1964 after finishing JFK’s term, Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984), in each of the other cases, the POTUS/VP pair with the lower experience score won the election. Result: If that trend holds through this election, McCain/Palin will win.

If you want to do a little more hardcore statistical analysis,

POTUS Standard Deviation: 6.59 VP Standard Deviation: 5.82

Just for sake of argument, this means that Obama’s POTUS score (5.25) is 1.75 standard deviations below the mean, and that Palin’s VP score (3.00) is 1.70 standard deviations below the mean… which means that, per these ratings, Obama is slightly more relatively inexperienced as a presidential candidate than Palin is as a VP candidate. (Only slightly, though.)

Conclusions

Well, this is great data for us dataheads who like to ponder such things. What it really shows, I think, is that there are far more factors that play into the election (and the subsequent job performance) than just experience.

I’ll also conclude that I still haven’t answered the question regarding “how much experience is enough?”. Yes, Palin is the least-experienced VP candidate in the past 50 years. But Obama is also the least-experienced POTUS candidate. Hey, the nature of number is that somebody will have to be least-experienced. So until somebody can give me some quantifiable other measures, I think it’s still gonna come down to gut feel and politics… like usual.

Book Review: Wild Goose Chase

Wild Goose Chase, the latest book by pastor Mark Batterson of National Community Church in Washington, DC, sets out its’ premise in the introduction:

The Celtic Christians had a name for the Holy Spirit that has always intrigued me. They called Him An Geadh-Glas, or “the Wild Goose”. I love the imagery and implications. The name hints at the mysterious nature of the Holy Spirit. Much like a gild goose, the Spirit of God cannot be tracked or tamed. An element of danger and an air of unpredictability surround Him. And while the name may sound a little sacrilegious at first earshot, I cannot think of a better description of what it’s like to pursue the Spirit’s leading through life than Wild Goose chase. I think the Celtic Christians were on to something that institutionalized Christianity has missed out on…

With each chapter in the book, Batterson then calls the reader to “come out of the cage” of one encumbrance or another, sharing anecdotes from his own life and those he’s come into contact with in his ministry, and then finishing up each chapter with an example of the principle that he sees in the life of a biblical character.

I was unimpressed when the introduction, and indeed, the whole premise of the book, seemed to be based less on some Scriptural principle than on a single phrase from Christian antiquity. And my concerns were deepened when I looked at the chapter titles and subheadings:

  • Goose Bumps: Coming Out of the Cage of Responsibility
  • Dictatorship Of The Ordinary: Coming Out of the Cage of Routine
  • Eight-Foot Ceilings: Coming Out of the Cage of Assumptions
  • A Rooster’s Crow: Coming Out of the Cage of Guilt
  • Sometimes it Takes A Shipwreck: Coming Out of the Cage of Failure
  • Good Old-Fashioned Guts: Coming Out of the Cage of Fear

While there are some good points to be made in the book from time to time, it really feels to me that Batterson wrote the self-help, motivational principles of Wild Goose Chase and then looked to find bits and pieces of Scripture to support his points… which is a dangerous way to teach the Bible. In addition, Batterson’s style of writing is unimaginative, cliché-ridden, trying too hard to be cool and trendy. Color me unimpressed.

After finishing up Wild Goose Chase, I felt like I had just sat through one of those exercise infomercials where ridiculously-toned models and cheesy announcers hype their transform-your-life product ad nauseam for 30 minutes late at night. What I came away longing for was something more solid, stable, and reliable - something more analogous to a Ken Burns documentary on PBS. So I’m sorry, Multnomah, I just can’t recommend this book. My friends, if you’re going to buy a book on living the Christian life, get something by Eugene Peterson instead. You’ll be glad you did.

As requested, I’ll link to Amazon: you can buy Wild Goose Chase there. But I’d suggest you pick up something else instead.

Denver

OK, so bad travel plans notwithstanding, I made it to Denver on-time on Monday evening. Tuesday was spent in an all-day FAA DER Recurrent General Training class (boring), and today and Thursday I’m attending the National Software and Airborne Electronic Hardware Conference. It’s sponsored by the FAA and NASA Langley Research Center, and there are some really interesting topics if you’re into safety-critical airborne software. Which, I know, none of you reading this are. :-) So enough about the conference.

Haven’t really seen much of Denver yet, though I may atone for that this evening and travel about. I’ve just got too many things on my to-do list for this week. Sermon prep for Saturday, new Conversation Cafe website (now branded Topics On First - check it out! - but it’s still the beta version of the site), planning orders of service for the fall, updating church bylaws and membership covenants… so much to do, so little time.

Denver is a little bit frustrating, location-wise, because you think you’re in Colorado, there should be mountains… but there aren’t really any mountains in Denver. You can see them off in the distance, but they’re still too far away to get to without some more serious time driving than I’ll have. Oh well. Maybe one of these summers we can hit them for a vacation again.

Well, lunch hour is almost over so it’s time to head back to the conference. Good times.

its wisdom, who can measure?

Work necessitates that tomorrow I travel from Cedar Rapids to Denver to attend three days of FAA training. On the face of it, that doesn’t sound too bad, travel-wise. CID -> DEN is only a two-hour flight, and one US airline, when not eternally funding the estate of George Gershwin with its advertising budget, provides three daily non-stop flights from our fair city to the Mile-High.

But wait! This is no ordinary travel planning. This is corporate travel! Per the guidelines of our corporate travel policy (its wisdom, who can measure?) I have been routed on a different airline from Cedar Rapids first to Dallas-Fort Worth, and only then to Denver. For those scoring along at home, that’s 850 miles and two hours south-by-southwest to DFW, a 90-minute layover, then another 800 miles and two hours northwest from DFW to DEN. Which is quite obviously far superior to the 700 miles and two hours directly west from CID to DEN. To ice the proverbial cake, the forecast for both CID and DEN tomorrow calls for nothing but sunshine. DFW? 80% probability of thunderstorms.

Two years ago when I attended this training travel was a mess and I ended up driving through downtown Atlanta at midnight searching for my hotel; last year DFW gave me delays heading to New Orleans and I was trying to avoid the bayou and find my hotel after even The Big Easy had fallen asleep. Even with this year’s circuitous routing I am scheduled to arrive in Denver before 7 pm MDT, so it will take some serious delays if I am to achieve the three-peat. Still, with travel plans like this, anything is possible.

Beautiful quote from a friend today

…after I declared I was socially stunted because of my intense dislike for calling people that I don’t know on the phone :

“Social stunting is God’s way of keeping engineers from ruthlessly running roughshod over society.”

Thanks, Geof.

Finding the right Saturday-night service time

One of our challenges at Imago has been figuring out the right time to hold our Saturday night service. Pick a time to early, and folks find it hard to attend because they’re still wanting to finish their Saturday activities. (Especially during the summer.) Pick a time too late, and you’re running in to evening plans (which is bad if you’re trying to attract college students), dinner schedules, and small children’s bedtimes.

When we started back in January we decided on holding the services from 5:30 - 6:30pm. The reasoning went something like this: it’s early enough that people can eat afterwards, even go out to dinner with someone else from church after the service. It’s early enough that people with small children won’t run into trouble with bedtimes. It’s late enough that people should be able to make it and still have been able to put in a good day of work on Saturday. And really, for the past 7 months, that’s worked pretty well. For our volunteers, it means something more like a 4:30 - 7:00 commitment, but that’s still not awful.

Now we’re approaching fall and we want to add a couple of adult Bible studies on Saturday nights. We’ve tossed around all sorts of service times, from starting earlier (5:00?) with classes afterwards, to having classes first, then the service, to moving everything later… Even though we’re talking about at most a two-and-a-half hour block of time, for some reason it seems a lot more difficult to fit it in on a Saturday night than it would be on a Sunday morning.

Tonight at our core team meeting the elders are going to propose the following schedule:

  • 5:00 - 5:15 prayer for the service
  • 5:30 - 6:30 worship service
  • 6:30 - 7:00 fellowship and snacks
  • 7:00 - 7:50 adult Bible classes

I think it’s probably the best option we’ve got right now. The other challenge is what to do with the kids during the class time given that we’re struggling with having enough manpower to do kids ministries. But we’ve got to do that somehow, to make the opportunity available. We’re trusting that God will provide the workers to teach the kids He brings in.

Wrestling with ideas about church membership

One of the things we’ve been wrestling with as elders at Imago is the concept of church membership. Now, we all agree that membership is important, both for accountability for folks who are a part of the fellowship, and to provide accountability for the church leadership. But most of us come from Baptist churches where “membership” is too often considered a ticket to gripe and cause trouble at business meetings.

Our objectives for “membership” and the “membership process”:

  1. Provide a way for people to feel like they are a part of the congregation
  2. Provide a process whereby people can understand Imago’s distinctives, including doctrinal statement and leadership structure
  3. Create an environment where people come to think of “membership” as having responsibilities and commitments rather than “privileges”
  4. Keep the voting base limited to the core planning/leadership team, rather than the standard Baptist congregational democracy.
  5. Oh, yeah, and the end result needs to be church members, committed to service and under the authority of the church.

We have pretty well settled on a set of three “covenants” that might be looked at as “tiers” of membership, though we’re trying hard not to call them that.

Fellowship Covenant

  • I will support the ministry of Imago Christi Church with my regular attendance at worship services and other events sponsored by the church.

This one is pretty basic. This allows people who want to feel like they’re a part of a fellowship to say that yeah, they’re a part of the fellowship. I have really wrestled with whether or not this covenant should include a statement of accountability to the church. I am thinking maybe it should.

Ministry Covenant

  • I will support the ministry of Imago Christi Church with my regular attendance at worship services and other events sponsored by the church.
  • I will support the church with its financial needs as the Lord so directs me.
  • I will use my spiritual gifts in ministry opportunities of the church.
  • I will become better acquainted with ministry opportunities and strategies by attending planning and evaluation meetings of the church. I understand that I am able to contribute to the discussion at these meetings, but do not have the right to vote.
  • I will submit myself by being accountable to the leadership of Imago Christi Church.

Part of the commitment at this level would require completion of a membership class, which would include a review of the doctrinal statement. At this level we wouldn’t require that the person agree with the doctrinal statement 100%, but we’d ask them to identify any differences they have and discuss them with the elders.

People committed at this level would be able to assume responsibilities such as teaching children, assisting in (but not leading) ministries, and would be welcome to participate in business and planning meetings of the church, but would not have a vote.

Leadership Covenant

  • I will support the ministry of Imago Christi Church with my regular attendance at worship services and other events sponsored by the church.
  • I will support the church with its financial needs as the Lord so directs me.
  • I will use my spiritual gifts in ministry opportunities of the church.
  • I will attend and participate in the discussion at planning and evaluation meetings of the church and have the right to vote on any church business as prescribed by the church bylaws.
  • I will submit myself by being accountable to the leadership of Imago Christi Church.

At this level, we would require that folks agree with our doctrinal statement, have been baptized by immersion, and have completed the membership class. This level would also require the approval of the elders.

We’re still not sure when we’ll institute this process - I’m guessing probably in January. A year is plenty long for us to run with no members.

Bullet points for a Monday Morning #3

A week without a blog update + lack of creativity = desperate measures. Hence, the bullet points.

  • This past weekend felt far more like autumn than summer; this morning when I woke up it was 53°F outside and 63°F in the house. Beautiful sleeping weather. It’s gonna warm up a bit this week, but nothing too bad.
  • I thought it felt like I ran into a strand of web as I walked into the dining room this morning. A few minutes later I felt something on my neck. Becky, you can thank me later for killing that spider. :-)
  • My sermon on Saturday night went pretty well. I intended to link to it here but didn’t get it uploaded last night. It’ll have to wait.
  • Now I need to get my backside in gear for my next sermon, only two weeks hence. How do I focus all I want to say about worship into 30 minutes?
  • Next week I’m headed to Denver for some training and a conference. I think it’ll probably be warmer in Denver than it will be at home while I’m gone.
  • Nick & Allie led worship Saturday night at Imago and did a fantastic job. Allie wrote a new tune for the hymn Under His Wings that has been stuck in my head all weekend. Thanks a lot, Allie. ;-)
  • My poor backyard is being overtaken by crabgrass. Gotta do something about that.

Well, now, that was random, eh?

100 Books

Being the voracious reader that I am, I was happy to steal this from Kari and Roger. The story is that apparently the National Endowment for the Arts estimates that the average adult has only read six of these books. Here are the markup guidelines:

  1. Look at the list and bold those you have read. 2) Italicize those you intend to read. 3) Mark in red the books you LOVE. - I’m skipping this step. 4) Reprint this list in your blog

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - This sure seems like a duplicate to me!
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - I’ve started this one three times and can never seem to finish it.
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie - Started it, but just can’t get in to Rushdie’s writing style.
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So, looks like I’ve read 28 off the list, which barely puts me ahead of Roger, but finds me far, far, behind librarian Kari’s 50. I do enjoy this, though, because it gives me a list to work from. Now if our library could ever get their online catalog back online after the flood, I could start reserving some of these. :-)