Day 30: To Kansas!

Total Mileage: 2,739

Song of the Day: “Carry on My Wayward Son” (Kansas, of course)

Book of the Day: Freakonomics (Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner)

Alright, so it’s been about five days since I’ve actually gotten to sit down and write (and write and write and write, as is my custom).  There have been multiple reasons for this.  Part of it has been simply trying to maximize my time in Memphis with my parents and my dog, and I’ve discovered that writing nightly blog posts and owning a cocker spaniel are almost assuredly mutually exclusive.  Trying to type on a laptop becomes an exercise in futility when a wriggling ball of fur is licking your face and wanting you to throw a tennis ball every five seconds.  Don’t get me wrong: I love my dog, but she is one high energy creature.  She’s best enjoyed when not trying to get any sort of work accomplished.

I’ve also enjoyed spending time with my church family at Second Baptist as we’ve been moving through the ordination process.  On Thursday night, I had the honor of meeting with the deacons to talk about where I feel God leading me, and they asked a series of helpful and insightful questions that got me thinking about the journey behind me and the journey still ahead.  In particular, the mayor of Shelby County is a deacon at our church, and he definitely knows how to ask a question that will make you stop and think for a minute!  It was a great chance to talk and reflect in a very affirming setting.  The deacons ultimately voted to recommend me for ordination, so we’re getting that process underway, and I’m delighted to continue working with Stephen Cook as we get everything organized for August!  Of course, as excited as I am about all this, I was grateful to Stephen for his reminder that the ordination is really just the start of the journey.  It helped to put this process (including the 8,000 mile trek) back into perspective.

No clue why my GPS keeps calling me that.

On the Road Again

The drive through Arkansas was quite pretty, even if the steeply banking roads gave me white knuckles a time or two.  On the other hand, the drive through southwestern Missouri was fairly dull and flat, and I was glad to have an audiobook to keep me awake and alert.  I can’t figure out the bizarre intersections and overlappings of southwestern Missouri roads.  Looking at the map on my GPS, I was reminded of a study I read back in high school where scientists gave marijuana to a spider to see how its web would look.  The scientists were amazed when the ensuing mess of loosely-assembled threads very much resembled the Missouri highway system.  Of course, I’ve also decided that my GPS may be trying to kill me at this point.  It’s taken to shouting “RECALCULATING!  RECALCULATING!” at random times, even when I’m on the right road.  In particular, it had the hardest time grasping that I was, in fact, on HWY 13 this afternoon.  Then again, I was also on the phone with Erin at that point, so maybe the GPS was just getting jealous and wanted to make sure it had my attention.

It was a long drive.  I left Memphis around 10:45 this morning and arrived in Kansas a whopping eight and a half hours later; I definitely hadn’t realized how long of a drive it would be today, and I was a little scattered at dinner (unable even to do the math properly when asked how long my drive was).  I’m staying with my friend Luke Wetzel, who is a fellow third year div student at Duke and a former intern of Church of the Resurrection, where I will be visiting this weekend.  Luke and his family have very graciously opened their home this weekend, and they’ve raised the bar on hospitality.  The second I came in, I was shown to the dinner table and given a phenomenal steak from Luke’s dad’s hometown in Iowa.  I’m not sure whether the hospitality and exhaustion from the drive enhanced the flavor any, but even without those factors, it was one of the most delicious cuts of meat I’ve had in a while.  Of course, I’m hoping that I’ll get a chance to sample some Kansas City BBQ while I’m here as well.  Being from Memphis, I have my prejudices when it comes to food, and I’ve promised myself that I will sample BBQ from other regions of the country in as unbiased a manner as possible.  (Yeah right.)

Pastors and Behavioral Economics

One of Levitt's typical research subjects.  No, seriously.

Okay, so I won’t really be able to weigh in fully on this subject until I finally get to Dan Ariely’s book (Predictably Irrational, which is sitting in my passenger seat begging to be read), but in the meantime, I listened to Freakonomics on the drive.  Even though Freakonomics is technically a study in microeconomics, the book’s sociological/behavioral overtones are probably the main source of its appeal.  I’ve read it before, but there was a story from early in Steven Levitt’s career that I had been thinking about lately (where he was gaining entrance to the Harvard Society of Fellows), so I decided that I needed to give it another look.  The book is ultimately a study in incentives and in why people behave the way they do in certain situations.  Can a realtor actually make more money by having sellers accept lower bids?  Is sumo wrestling rigged?  Are teachers in failing schools helping kids cheat?  Do parents sometimes give their children names that will doom them to failure?  Why would people join gangs when you might have to pay dues for years before every reaching a position of power, profit, and influence?  The book explores all these questions and the series of incentives that might motivate people toward these actions.  If there is one unifying theme to the whole book, it is that all actions result from a complex series of incentives and that you can find some very interesting trends underlying our society if you’re willing to look hard enough.

Of course, as someone preparing to enter ordained ministry, I want people’s motives to be altruistic.  I want people to be motivated by faith in God and love of neighbors.  I long for a society in which love, not economic competition, is the core value, so I find the talk of incentives reassuring in some ways but very troubling in others.  Alluding to Adam Smith, Levitt makes the point that morality reflects how we want our society to function, while economics is the study of how our society actually does function.  Morality establishes the ideal; economics examines the reality and its shortcomings.  While Levitt’s findings are fascinating and great fodder for conversation, I feel like there’s a certain subtle cynicism behind this mindset.  Behind every decision is a set of incentives which we don’t understand or don’t perceive or choose to ignore-- that’s a pretty scary concept, and I think it becomes even scarier when translated to the religious world.  What is the incentive to come to church?  Is it a genuine love of God or a fear of God’s wrath or a fear that your neighbors will notice your absence and judge you if you sleep in?  Some of the most chilling words I’ve ever heard were spoken to me by a pastor friend one day when he posed the rhetorical question, “Do you really think people pick a church based on God?”  He began naming off families in his own congregation: “The Johnsons are here because their daughter plays on our soccer team.  The Scotts are here because their parents came here.  The Smiths are here because they like my sermons. . . .”  The list went on and on.

How many other incentives are we trying to provide to get people to come to church?  We hold up slick and polished worship services, artful sermons, the feelings of acceptance into a community, the sense of satisfaction that comes from a good deed, and none of these are bad things by themselves!  Still, when these incentives for church attendance are allowed to eclipse God, then we as the Church have a problem.  One of the questions I was asked last night was what I thought of the state of the Church in America and whether I think we’re at a time of crisis.  Frankly, I surprised myself with my own kneejerk answer: “I think we’re all so caught up trying to plan the next big revolution that we aren’t willing to turn over the reins and let God do it organically.”  We’re creating so many incentives to go to church.  I wonder what would happen if we just told people, “Don’t come because you fear Hell or because you want to make a difference or because you grew up here or any of that.  Come because you love God, and no one will judge you if you don’t.”  What would that look like?

Okay, more on Freakonomics some other time, but that was freshly on my mind this evening.  Of course, the most hotly debated stats presented in the book (which imply a relationship between decreased crime rates and increased number of abortions) are something which I don’t have the background to discuss at this point, but I’m definitely going to be thinking about that ethical dilemma for a while.  In the meantime, I’ve been up a long time, and much of that time has been spent behind the wheel, so it’s time for some sleep.  Tomorrow, I’ll be looking around Church of the Resurrection, America’s largest United Methodist church.  The church offers a bevy of mission and worship opportunities, and Luke and I will be packaging health kits to go over to Joplin, MO, after which I’ll be doing my usual poking around and asking questions.  This is only my second denominationally-affiliated mega (the first being Summit back in North Carolina), and this church too has adopted a multi-campus model.  The church’s pastor, Adam Hamilton, has definitely attained celebrity status but seems to have retained his humility, and his servant mentality may be one of the main reasons the church has grown so much.

Alright, sleep time.

Peace and Blessings,

Tom

PS-- Just looking around Church of the Resurrection's website, I'm already impressed with all the ways church members can plug into local missions efforts.  Of course, they also have four worship services in four different styles every weekend at the Leawood campus alone.  This would easily be a new record for me, but I'm sort of thinking about trying for all four.