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Now up on YouTube, Obama’s speech to the African Methodist Episcopal Convention in St. Louis Saturday continues the theme of service that he spoke of in his earlier addresses last week. The Fourth of July could not be, he said a “passive celebration,” but had to involve “service, and sacrifice and each of us doing our part to leave our children a world that is kinder and more just.” And just as that could not be “an idle celebration,” so “our faith cannot be an idle faith…It must be an active faith.”

Beginning with the importance of helping those in need with the right domestic policies and programs, Obama went on to stress the need for African Americans not to be content with blaming its troubles on racism: “I’m not interested us in adopted the posture of victim…. [W]e cannot use injustice as an excuse. We cannot use poverty as an excuse.” His support for faith-based institutions was, he said, “how we match societal responsibility with individual responsibility.”

In the current issue of Religion in the News, Steve Warner nicely elucidates this classic black-church synthesis of collective and personal obligation, which cuts across conventional American political categories of left and right. Here Obama makes clear not only how faith-based programs express this synthesis but why they represent the moral core of his campaign.

One might add that the synthesis is not only classically black but also classically Methodist. And it can be found not only in Methodist denominations like the AME Church but also, as a kind of moral undertone, in the public culture of the Midwest. A tip of the hat to Mark Noll for this insight, which he discusses in his chapter in Religion in Public Life in the Midwest and we discuss in the Midwest chapter in One Nation, Divisible.

This article is cross-posted from Spiritual Politics.

Ministries headed by evangelists Joyce Meyer and Benny Hinn are both changing the way they operate even as a Senate probe into alleged lavish spending by six prominent ministries continues, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said Monday, July 7.

"Both Joyce Meyer and Benny Hinn have indicated that they are instituting reforms without waiting for the committee to complete its review," said Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, in an update on the investigation he began last year.

"Self-reform can be faster and more effective than government regulation."

Roby Walker, a spokesman for Joyce Meyer Ministries in Fenton, Mo., confirmed that changes are being made but could not release details on Tuesday.

Don Price, a spokesman for Benny Hinn Ministries in Grapevine, Texas, also declined to comment in detail but said "reforms and improved governance practices" were being shared with Grassley's office.

Grassley's update noted instances of "whistleblower intimidation" where former employees "have received phone calls reminding them of their confidentiality agreements and threatening lawsuits if the agreements are breached."

Jill Gerber, a spokeswoman for the committee, would not disclose which ministries were involved in such calls, and declined to elaborate on the changes planned at Hinn's and Meyer's ministries.

Grassley's update described the responses from Hinn and Meyer as "in good faith and substantively informative," but said the others are "incomplete" or "not responsive."

Broadcaster Kenneth Copeland has reportedly said his Texas-based ministry will not respond even if a subpoena is issued. Grassley's memo said staffers are "consulting with Senate attorneys about next steps."

In other cases, staffers continue to contact ministry lawyers and officials in hopes of further cooperation.

"Sen. Grassley still very much wants to avoid subpoenas and hopes that those ministries will agree that subpoenas would be an unnecessary step," Gerber said.

The other ministries under investigation are: Bishop Eddie Long's New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Ga.; Creflo Dollar Ministries in College Park, Ga., and Randy and Paula White, who co-pastored Without Walls International Church in Tampa, Fla.

Legendary philanthropist Sir John Templeton died at 95 today in the Bahamas, where he had lived for decades, according to the New York Times.

Templeton was known for funding religion and science projects, donating millions to religious leaders, scholar, and scientists.

CT wrote a story on Templeton in 2005 with comments from Joel Carpenter, former religion officer for the Pew Charitable Trusts.

“Sir John’s theology is very eclectic. He has pushed [grants] to be religiously and theologically inclusive. However, the people who are most vitally interested in the relation of science and religion are traditional orthodox Christians. No one in the evangelical world is doing faith and science in the same way Templeton is.”

More than 90 evangelical leaders met in Denver Tuesday, July 1, and decided to support Sen. John McCain as the presidential candidate who most shares their values.

Attendees agreed that they are concerned about issues like immigration and gun rights, but determined that opposing abortion and gay marriage are so central that they have no choice but to support McCain.

“He would advance those values in a much more significant way than Sen. Barack Obama who, in our view, would decimate those values,” said Mathew Staver, dean of Liberty University’s law school, who spearheaded the meeting.

Those in attendance also reached a consensus that they would send a letter to McCain, R-Ariz., encouraging him to consider former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as his choice for vice president.

“It’s not a demand; it’s a request,” said Staver, who couldn’t say when McCain would be contacted about Huckabee, a former Southern Baptist pastor who resonated with some evangelical voters during the Republican primaries.

The meeting featured conservative Christians from various sectors of evangelicalism, including African-Americans, Hispanics and younger evangelicals. Tim and Beverly LaHaye, the couple known respectively for their roles in the Left Behind book series and Concerned Women for America, were there, as were Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly, former Christian Coalition president Don Hodel, and Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values, an Ohio organization affiliated with Focus on the Family.

But one person who was not invited was one of the movement’s most prominent voices, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, who recently blasted Obama’s politics and his theology, and has previously said he would not vote for McCain.

“I didn’t want this meeting to be centered on a personality,” said Staver, who added that Dobson was working on a book.

Burress said there was agreement to support McCain, but there were differing views about strategy. “There’s no question, everybody was on the same page that Obama was not an option,” he said.

Burress, whose Ohio group is preparing two million bulletin inserts for 10,000 churches about the two candidates’ stances, predicted Obama’s efforts to reach evangelicals will fall flat.

“The only evangelicals that he’s going to win over are those who have never read the Bible,” said Burress, who was one of a handful of conservative leaders who met with McCain on June 26 in Cincinnati.

McCain, who met with evangelists Billy and Franklin Graham on Sunday, has been urged by some evangelical leaders to increase his outreach to them. But the sentiment at the meeting was that evangelicals must speak up for him.

Staver said the gathering did not create a new organization but he expects there will be follow-up meetings and conference calls.

Staver said evangelicals are trying to unify after a “fractious primary season” during which no consensus candidate emerged as an evangelical favorite. He was also concerned by Obama’s recent meeting with Christian leaders and his plans to expand President Bush’s faith-based office.

“We will not allow our values to be hijacked by any political party, and we will not allow politics to divide us,” said Staver, founder of the Florida-based Liberty Counsel, a conservative law firm.

Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

Our full coverage of the presidential race, including the June cover story on “How to Pick a President” and a quiz on candidates’ statements about faith, is in our special section on election 2008.

An apocryphal story tells of a note of dazzling hope written on the last page of a copy of Karl Barth’s commentary on Romans. The note read, simply, “Now I can preach again.” After reading Alan Jacobs’s new book, Original Sin: A Cultural History (5 stars), I’m tempted to jump into any available pulpit, invited or not, and let ‘er rip.

Jacobs, an English professor at Wheaton College, writes what he calls an “exemplary history” of this most peculiar Christian doctrine. He wants to appeal to those with no interest in theology for its own sake, so he uses literary and historical examples to show what the doctrine means. It is not simply a description of a quaint story about a garden with an apple. It is an expression of what’s wrong with all of us, an attempt to answer the question, Whence all this evil?

If the book were primarily a defense of the doctrine (which it is not), then its attack could be summarized as two-pronged. First, original sin makes sense of the empirical evidence. Like much of Christian teaching, original sin doesn’t make sense in itself, but it makes sense of a lot of other things. Jacobs quotes Blaise Pascal to that effect: “But for this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we remain incomprehensible to ourselves.”

Second, original sin has a deeply political function. In one of G. K. Chesterton’s matchless aphorisms, only an understanding of sin can allow us to “pity the beggar and distrust the king.” It makes for what philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy called “the Christian democracy of the dead,” in which recognition of humanity’s common plight undergirds positive social relations.

I find both of these tacks debatable. But neither should keep us from reveling in Jacobs’s deep pool of wisdom and occasionally breathtaking prose. John Milton tried to imagine the unimaginable: What was it like to be unfallen? Or, in Jacobs’s words: “How can we, the fallen and the fearful, even guess what it might be like to have the easy freedom of sinlessness, to go to one’s bed at night anxious for nothing, never suspecting peril in any rustling of the leaves or of the mind?” Amid yeoman’s work with historical and literary sources, Jacobs’s prose often sings&#mdash;and as this sentence suggests, it’s not because he’s showing off.

His light-hearted defense of Augustine’s fascination with men’s inability to control their libidos rests on Dante’s notion of contrapasso&#mdash;as Adam rose up in proud disobedience, “every man knows” what part manifests our original disobedience and subsequent punishment. Jacobs positively exults in the story of St. Martin of Tours telling the Devil that he, too, could repent. Origen and others may have been anathematized for holding this hope, but Jacobs rests his case with, “Better to hope too much than too little.”

These are just highlights of Jacobs’s engagement with premodern sources. His dealings with modern utopian efforts to act as though original sin were not; his provocative description of America’s original sin (racism really doesn’t qualify for him); his criticism of Bill Buckley and friends for missing Edmund Burke’s underdeveloped sense of original sin&#mdash;they all delight. And this English professor is not too tweed-coated to dip into pop culture&#mdash;the Hellboy films and George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone” come in for sympathetic yet critical exegesis, too. Careful when you open this book&#mdash;it could keep you up at nights.

My disagreements with the book are two: First, is original sin really an objectively verifiable doctrine, as Chesterton, Reinhold Niebuhr, and, it seems, Jacobs hold? Certainly we Christians, on this side of baptism, see its effects everywhere. Jacobs is also right to say that utopian experiments that attempt to act as though humans are reformable tend to collapse, often violently. Yet Barth tried to correct Niebuhr by pointing out that the doctrine of original sin is different from the claim that “people do lots of bad things.” Who would uphold original sin if they didn’t already know the cure? Jacobs makes much of his loving engagement with Rebecca West, who held something like this doctrine without its correlative grace. But in her hands it still seems to me a deeply Christian belief, rooted in revelation not less than other parts of our faith, knowable only to us who are already in the know.

My second disagreement is about Jacobs’s even more attractive political point: that original sin has a leveling effect. He notes an English aristocrat’s revulsion at George Whitefield’s preaching: “It is monstrous to be told you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth.” And he points to Whitefield’s own record of coal miners’ response to his open-air preaching: “[T]he white gutters made by their tears &#hellip; ran down their black cheeks.” Original sin is a good word to the poor, bad news to tyrants, and a prescription for a politics more radical than any we’ve seen: a genuinely Christian democracy, inclusive of all the living and the dead, each equally bound up in a plight we cannot solve ourselves.

Jacobs thinks original sin does this leveling work in a way that other points of Christian anthropology do not. God’s good Creation, humanity’s crafting in the image of God, the charge to tend the Garden and to multiply: such prelapsarian pronouncements don’t lift the luggage politically. They “should do so, but usually” do not, he writes. Somehow it works better for us to “condescend” than to try and lift up others to our level. Jacobs may be right, but I need more evidence for the claim than “the feeling most of us have, at least some of the time.”

Jacobs offers loving exegesis of Augustine’s running feud with Pelagius and with the heretic’s even more clever successor, Julian of Eclanum. For Augustine’s opponents, the Scriptures command holiness. Therefore it must be possible. Augustine sees in the apostle Paul a damning critique of this false optimism: What need, then, of divine grace? Further, Jacobs argues, Augustine’s defense of universal depravity is “curiously liberating.” Pelagius’s call would result in us all being monks. Augustine’s God, for Jacobs, “gives hope to the waverer, the backslider, the slacker, the putz, the schlemiel.”

That’s Jacobs’s Augustine, awake to the tragicomedy of our situation&#mdash;in dire circ*mstances as we are, guilty prior to any fault of our own, with no answer except the one God has already given. We need more books like this one.

Jason Byassee, assistant editor of The Christian Century and an affiliate professor of theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.

Related Elsewhere:

Original Sin: A Cultural History is available from ChristianBook.com and other retailers.

More reviews are in our books section.

“Believe it or not, he’s the good guy.”

So proclaims the tagline for Hellboy II: The Golden Army, opening in theaters this week.

Well, he definitely needs explaining. With his horns—filed to stumps or not—as well as his red skin, goatee and tail, Hellboy overtly embodies universally recognizable cultural iconography of the enemy of mankind in the great war of powers and principalities.

This imagery isn’t limited to Christianity. George Lucas claimed to have included Hindu and Greek mythology in researching the look of the similarly demonic-looking Darth Maul. (“A lot of evil characters have horns,” Lucas told Bill Moyers in 1999).

Still, Hellboy’s world—like those of other recent supernatural-themed films including Constantine and Ghost Rider—seems significantly shaped by Christian culture. (All three of these films are based on comic books; other recent comic-book movies lacking supernatural themes have offered similar instances of religious imagery, including Daredevil and X2.)

Hellboy himself is a Dark Horse Comics character, created in 1993 by Mike Mingola. In the comics, Hellboy is a demon brought to earth as an infant by Nazi occultists, who intend to use him for evil purposes. But after being rescued by Allied Forces, he ends up being raised by the USA’s Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD), and grows up to be large, red-skinned, with a tail, horns (which he files off), and a giant right fist of stone. He’s one of the good guys, fighting the occult and demons as one of the BPRD’s special agents.

As a “good demon,” Hellboy may be a walking oxymoron, but he’s the singular exception to the rule. The first Hellboy movie establishes the occult world as a distinctly unfriendly place; the title character aside, demons are creatures of pure evil, existing only to destroy and consume. Moreover, those who battle them use crosses, crucifixes, rosaries and other recognizable emblems of Christian faith.

Heir to a movie tradition

In this regard, Hellboy is heir to a movie tradition going back to the B-movie Hammer horror films of the 1950s and ’60s, particularly those directed by Terence Fisher (The Devil’s Bride, Horror of Dracula), a high-church Anglican. Fisher’s films depict demons, vampires and all creatures of evil helpless before the inexorable power of the cross.

Bela Lugosi’s Dracula in 1931 may have cringed from a crucifix dangling from a potential victim’s neck, but Fisher turned the cross into a weapon capable of damaging and even destroying evil. (The Christian worldview of Fisher’s Hammer horrors has been explored at some length by Presbyterian clergyman Paul Leggett in Terence Fisher: Horror, Myth and Religion.)

Fisher’s “weaponized” portrayal of crosses, crucifixes, holy water and the like has greatly influenced the portrayal of evil in pop entertainment, from Hellboy and Constantine to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The Church also has some sort of role combating the powers of darkness in films like Van Helsing and John Carpenter’s Vampires, even if crosses and other Christian symbols may not have the power they do elsewhere.

At the same time, the Christian influence originally so significant in Fisher’s world is often vestigial at best in these later stories. Too often, notions of faith and God are nearly or entirely absent, the Church is little more than an eccentric world power, and the cross little more than a talisman or magic charm.

Relying on faith

In other films, though, real Christian belief and the Church as an institution relying on faith against the gates of hell comes to the surface, perhaps most obviously in The Exorcist and more recently The Exorcism of Emily Rose. These films depict spiritual warfare in a less stylized but also more ambiguous way, with the tide of battle not so black-and-white as in a Hammer horror film. (Emily Rose director Scott Derrickson, a Christian, has discussed how horror films can be a good medium for pointing to God.)

Among The Exorcist‘s most vivid moments is the scene in which two priests stand side by side holding crosses, shouting in unison, “The power of Christ compels you!” as the possessed girl hovers several feet above the bed. In a Hammer horror, that would have been the end of the struggle; here this spiritual warfare seems to leave both the demon and the priests depleted, with the girl sinking to the bed and the priests retiring to catch their breaths.

Hell’s more visible role

Whatever the balance of power between good and evil in these films, there’s an obvious sense in which nearly every film in the genre portrays a world in which the powers of hell seems to play a far more active and visible role in the world than the powers of heaven. Demons and other unholy things may or may not be checked or destroyed with crucifixes and the like, but seldom if ever is there any hint that angels also are active in human affairs.

The imbalance isn’t just in horror or comic-book movies. The Passion of the Christ includes several instances of satanic imagery, beginning with the appearance of the Tempter in the garden—but of the angel that strengthened Jesus in the garden (Luke 22:43) there is no sign.

Even when a movie like Constantine happens to offer a few angels, they make hardly any difference. While demons run amok, angels seem to stand passively on the sidelines; in one scene demons slowly murder a priest right in front of an angel, who can only comfort the man as he dies. Constantine‘s angels seem neither as powerful as the demons nor as good as the demons are evil. In fact, in most of these movies, including Hellboy, there’s little or no suggestion that demons are fallen angels in the first place.

Is God too powerful to depict?

Why is there so much hell and so little heaven in these movies? Partly, perhaps, it’s because filmmakers simply don’t know what to do with God—not just theologically, but for the sheer dramatic difficulty posed by omnipotence. It’s the Superman dilemma times infinity: Against that much power, how do you make the enemy a credible threat? Even Gandalf’s power was ultimately too intimidating for Peter Jackson and company; once it became clear the wizard could drive off the flying Nazgul, the filmmakers feared the enemy might seem too diminished. (This was the rationale for the problematic scene in which the Witch-King shatters Gandalf’s staff.)

Another reason for the neglect of heaven is simply that heaven is harder to do. C. S. Lewis noted this point in his preface to The Screwtape Letters, in which he regretted being unable to offset Screwtape’s diabolical perspective with a parallel heavenly correspondence presenting “arch-angelical advice to the patient’s guardian angel.” While the task of twisting his mind into a hellish perspective was for Lewis oppressive but not difficult, assuming an angelic voice seemed to him all but unachievable.

While Lewis did later achieve some success in dramatically depicting the outskirts of heaven in The Great Divorce, the general disparity of depicting heaven and hell in art and drama has been felt by many. It’s not hard to see why. Beauty is more elusive an effect than grotesquerie; misery and wretchedness are far easier to inflict, and therefore to imagine and express, than joy and beatitude are to bestow or evoke. Even biblical or cultural images of hell (unquenchable flames, demons with pitchforks) are more immediately persuasive than biblical or cultural images of heaven (thrones and crowns, halos and harps). Every sinful impulse in us is hell in miniature, while our best impulses fall infinitely short of the glory of heaven. In a word, God’s absence is easier to imagine than the fullness of his presence.

Like the familiar narrative dilemma of the colorful villain who makes the hero look pale by comparison—think of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, Dorothy and the Wicked Witch, Clarisse Starling and Hannibal Lecter—the remoteness of heaven versus the imminence of hell seems a not unnatural creative side effect of our limited perspective as finite and fallen creatures.

Simone Weil argued that since real evil is boring and real good is fascinating, fiction that makes evil seem more interesting than good is immoral. That might be too sweeping and absolute a judgment, but at least it’s an issue to be aware of. A similar point could be made regarding the imminence of heaven and hell in movies like Hellboy.

Evil itself points to God

Even if such movies give us no more than evil to fight against, evil itself is a signpost of sorts pointing to goodness and God. A world without God is a world in which good and evil are meaningless concepts, in which there are no monsters or demons, only differences and misunderstanding. The moment you contemplate that the Devil hates you and has a horrible plan for your life, the jig is up.

Crosses and rosaries and such, even when seen as no more than talismans, are likewise signposts, tacitly attesting the historical hegemony of Christianity in Western culture. We may live in a post-Christian civilization, but it is still post-Christian, and the place of Christianity in the collective imagination remains unique. Americans may increasingly be sliding vague “spirituality” to organized religion, but crystal skulls and sankara stones don’t do it for us like the ark of the covenant and the Holy Grail—or the cross.

You won’t find the gospel in the Hellboy movies. But what you may find is signs of a world that has been touched by the gospel—a world that retains some awareness of sinister forces to be avoided or resisted, of evil that cannot be overcome by therapy or education or communication, that calls for a response from another realm entirely.

Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

This is a highly unscientific observation, but I stand by it: In my scouring of bookshelves in pastor’s studies and church libraries, I regularly find volumes from the corporate world about how to be an effective leader and efficient administrator; studies from the humanities about human psychology and sexuality; and manuals from the financial and legal sectors about budgeting, zoning, and liability issues. What I seldom, if ever, find is fiction. And I think that’s a shame.

For much of their history, many evangelicals have considered novels to be either immoral or simply a waste of time. (To be fair, there are a good many novels that are both.) But good fiction (an entirely subjective category, I admit) can help a minister better understand the people to whom he or she is ministering – people struggling with doubt, addictions, or questions about calling and vocation. Here’s a list of a few novels I think every minister should read, along with a few reasons why.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde – a great look at how a person’s spirit can be tormented by secret sin.

Wealthy and conceited Dorian Gray wants to be young forever. He commissions an artist to paint his portrait. Then wishes that his portrait would age and bear the evidence of his dissipation and loose living, but that he would stay young forever. He gets what he asks for. His struggle with sin is powerful (and never explicit, by the way).

Continue reading at www.OfftheAgenda.com.

The Home School Legal Defense Assocation said today that it is dropping plans to sue Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign over the name “Joshua Generation,” according to Rebecca Sinderbrand at CNN.

Obama’s campaign created the new program to reach evangelical and Catholic young people but told HSLDA it will rename the initiative.

The organization sent the Obama campaign a cease-and-desist letter last month after the campaign announced the “Joshua Generation Project.” HSLDA launched the group “Generation Joshua” in 2004 as a way for teenagers to become involved in politics.

Leaders in the worldwide Anglican Communion (numbering up to 70 million) were anxiously awaiting today’s vote in York on the ordination of women bishops.

Read the BBC report here

A large number of traditionalists left the 26 million-member Church of England back in 1994 after the church’s ruling synod approved the ordination of women to the priesthood. The other shoe has now dropped with the synod’s approval of women bishops.

In recent days, there have been persistent reports than hundreds of Anglican/COE clergy were prepared to bolt from their parishes and presumably migrate to Roman Catholicism. That may still happen. It all depends on the level of accommodation that the synod offers.

Of course, these events are a precursor to the once per decade Lambeth Conference, which opens in Canterbury on the campus of the University of Kent next week.

Many Anglican women leaders may press for limited accommodation since they believe this kind of action is discriminatory against their ministry and creates a de facto two-tier system for clergy.

The UK Press Association reports:

The synod members voted to approve work on a national statutory code to accommodate those within the Church who object to women bishops.

The synod rejected compromise proposals for new “super bishops” to cater for objectors – and also their preferred option of creating new dioceses.

The decision to go ahead with work on the code came after more than six hours of debate by the General Synod which saw extraordinary scenes, with one bishop in tears as he spoke of being “ashamed” of the Church of England.

The Rt Rev Stephen Venner, Bishop of Dover, who is in favour of women bishops said: “I have to say, Synod, for the first time in my life, I feel ashamed.

“We have talked for hours about wanting to give an honourable place to those who disagree.

“We have been given opportunities for both views to flourish. We have turned down every, almost every realistic opportunity for those who are opposed to flourish.”

Since the format at the Lambeth event will be geared toward conversation, not debate, amendment, and passage of resolutions, it is also murky whether women’s ordination will be subject to significant discussion at all. Conservatives are not in unity of women’s ordination. But I can’t find a single truly conservative woman bishop in the entire Communion. Can you?

In the world we pay athletes and CEO’s the big bucks. But it’s the educator who contributes most to society. And, similarly, in the church there are some preachers who get all the praise and recognition. But it’s the discipler of no more than a handful who builds saints.

This truth was reconfirmed for me today. From a box of family memorabilia has come a bundle of report cards that chart my passage through public school from kindergarten to 6th grade. I read them this morning for the first time in 60 years.

The cards dredge up a lot of past unhappiness for me. In kindergarten (PS 33 in Queens, New York) children received grades for such things as sitting correctly, using a handkerchief, ability to dress alone, working and playing well with others, and ability to express oneself. I got all S’s meaning satisfactory. I should have stayed in kindergarten.

4th and 5th grade (Fairfax School in Cleveland Heights, Ohio), were another story. My grades in arithmetic and spelling were U’s for unsatisfactory. I received acceptable grades in geography and English. In the section called “note to parents,” were these words: “Gordon would do much better if he applied himself…he is careless in doing his work and loiters away his time.” In another report card, “Gordon still takes too long in getting started in his assignments. He is quick to find excuses for not getting his work done.” Months later: “Gordon needs firm handling…his greatest failings are his inability to follow directions and lack of concentration.” Boil all the comments down, and it comes to this: Gordon doesn’t fit into the system.

As I said, I felt a fresh hurt from deep inside myself as I read these report cards. They aroused memories of a generally unhappy childhood where members of my family struggled to be civil to one another. More than a few times I remember leaving a contentious home and walking or biking to school alone, crying all the way. It was a poor way to start most school days.

Each report card has the signature of either my father or my mother showing that they once read them. I remember a student or two who tried to forge their parents’ names. I wasn’t as daring. I always feared my parents’ reactions. “You should be ashamed of these marks. You are better than this.” Or they would say, “I don’t understand it; you have such potential.” Ever heard this one? “You’re not keeping your mind on your work; you’ve got to apply yourself.”

Each morning during the two-week turnaround time I would count down the days remaining until I absolutely had to get one of their signatures. On the final day, just as I was headed out the door for school, I would shove it front of the nearest parent and say, “Could you sign this?”

The bad report cards would result in losing radio privileges (no TVs yet), after-school play time, and promises that my homework would be carefully, parentally monitored—which rarely happened because my parents were too involved with church work. Their stick and carrot philosophy rarely worked.

Truth be told, I rarely did well in any of my organized educational experiences. I simply did not fit the overly regulated, highly programmed classrooms. My temperament was that of an artist with his own agenda, his own way of seeing, and his own internal schedule.

Then in the 6th grade, the teacher’s reports change. “Gordon works fairly well under pressure.” Mid-term: “Gordon has been so much more helpful this period. He is beginning to grow up.” End of the year: “Gordon is usually manly and thoughtful of others…. It delights me to have him accept responsibility so well.” My grades in citizenship, math, history, and geography were all S+.

Growth! The onset of maturity.

I remember my teacher that year, Mary D. Barbour, with fondness. She was tough, serious, demanding. But she was also quick to affirm progress and reward initiative. She must have intuited my uniqueness because she chose to teach into it rather than against it. I responded by giving her my best.

Every once in a while in the course of my education—both my Christian and my public education—along came a teacher (like Mary Barbour) who sensed my complex ways. Somehow she or he knew how to redirect me and cause me to give my best. They were the true teachers, the real disciplers, and I remember every one of them by name. Their fingerprints are all over me to this day.

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