A Dave Foster Tribute: Chasing Francis Series

What a week for Dave Foster to die.

 He is in good company of course, this being holy week and all. Still...I talked with him just last Wednesday. That’s the day the eagles, the discussion group to which we both belonged, meets. We have been discussing N. T. Wright’s book, Simply Christian.

 Last week, like nearly every other week, Dave and I took the opposite sides of the conversation. He was the Calvinist; I was the Armenian. He was defending the need to express faith in contemporary ways; I was defending the need for roots. He was pushing relevance; I pushing the need for encountering the holy. Last week was nothing different. We have gone down that road many times. Something N. T. Wright said in his book took us there again. Last week though, Dave stopped and said, “This is something I worry about all the time. How do I bring people with whom I am trying to relate into a holy moment in which they meet Christ? I mean, all of us who lead churches must both relate to people and help them find that transcendent encounter with Jesus.”

I admired Dave. Fortunately, I told him so several times. We were just wired differently. We each felt called to emphasize different ingredients of the message we were both called to preach. But we enjoyed one another. We certainly  believed in each other.

I’m not sure if Dave ever read Chasing Francis. I just know that he lived it. Like the pastor in the book, Dave was constantly talking about people who were fed up with church but were trying to find Jesus. Dave was drawn to such people. They were also drawn to him. In Chasing Francis, the pastor finally decides to stop marketing himself. He decides to just be who he is. He decides to relate to people who are willing to relate to him; the real him. He realizes that he connects to a woman who just came through the twelve step program better than he does most of the church elders. He stops fighting with his own identity.

Dave didn’t have to go to Italy to discover that. He was himself right here in Franklin, Tennessee. After building a great church, he had the courage to begin again. After just three years, he was leading a new flock of hundreds of people, meeting in a theatre. We often talked about the differences between leading a deeply rooted congregation and one that is just starting out. I pastor a church with a rich history, which is wonderful in so many ways. The downside of heritage however, is the resistance that a deeply rooted congregation can have to making even necessary changes. I talked about this with Dave a few times. “I don’t know what to tell you brother,” he said. “Why don’t you just be who you are? The people who like you will follow you. Those who don’t,’ won’t. What more can you do?”

He made it sound so simple “just be who you are.” He dressed how he wanted to dress. He preached like he wanted to preach. Some liked him. Others didn’t. But his congregation consisted of people who liked what he had to offer. He didn’t keep trying to market himself to those whom he would have never pleased. I admired his grasp of scripture. He loved the Bible. He could always quote chapter and verse to support his ideas. But he was no “Bible thumper,” in the sense of using scripture to abuse or overwhelm people. He wanted to make the Bible come alive by wrapping its message in the language and issues of our times. He worked hard at doing that. He knew who he was. He knew what he was about. Most importantly though, he had enough courage to live and minister his own way. Like David in the Bible who refused armor because he was a slingshot sort of person, Dave Foster understood what worked for him and acted accordingly.

I am more like the pastor in Chasing Francis.  Like him, I have tried too hard to believe I can mold and market myself into a pastor that everyone will like. What utter foolishness! Each of us has a disposition, specific kinds of experiences, and particular talents and training. If we lack the courage to be who we are, we will fail trying to be someone else. Dave really, really understood that. Dave Foster didn’t want to wear a suit to church. So he didn’t. He wanted to drive a motorcycle. So he did. He preached like God gifted him to preach. He wrote what he wanted to write.  He didn’t take a poll to decide what sort of pastor he should become. He became the pastor God had made Him to be. He allowed people to honestly choose whether they liked him or not and to make a choice.

The pastor in Chasing Francis came home from Italy and told his church what he planed to do with the rest of his life. Then he left it to them to decide whether they wanted to go along with him on the journey. That is what all pastors should do. Life is too short to follow someone else’s script for your life.

So my tribute to Dave Foster is to be myself. I am going to dress in a way that is right for me. I am going to speak in a way that fits my ministry. I am going to teach what I believe. That is the way I will attract those who want to walk with me and repel those who do not.

I believe it was G. K. Chesterton who said that sinners were all cut from the same cloth; but that saints become real individuals. St. Francis was not Billy Graham. John Wesley was not John Calvin. The apostle Paul was not Phillip the Evangelist. When I meet Jesus, he will not be disappointed in me because I was not Francis of Assisi, or Dave Foster, for that matter. However, Jesus will be disappointed if I lacked the courage to become myself.

Last week, Dave tweeted, "To give up your creativity for the promise of security is the height of stupidity." Whether our “security” is financial or the vane pursuit of human favor, surrendering one’s self in the name of ministry is a crime. Dave was right; this should never be done.

I am taking fresh courage from Dave to do what he did. By God’s grace I will be who I am.

There is no better way to “chase Francis” than that.

Who Wants To Talk To a Naked Troubadour? - Chasing Francis Series

Chasing Francis is easy to read. Although its ideas are important for everyone they are not inaccessible to anyone.  Like many good books though, we can read it on several levels. Behind its simple story and accessible vocabulary there is a world of literature, theology and social commentary. We can enjoy the story without all of that; we will just miss out on its deeper levels. 

If we will allow to, Chasing Francis opens up a door to what Mortimer Adler once called, 'The Great Conversation'.  Adler was referring to the continuous discussion among history's great minds; the people who created what we call civilization. Unfortunately, our first encounter with civilization’s great ideas usually comes through boring textbooks read by bored teachers. A shock like that can make a person learning-resistant for life.  However, it is possible to overcome the trauma of a bad high school literature class and still join the dialogue that civilizes people.  This book is a good way to begin.

Chasing Francis is a modern story about a medieval man. Its author believes that meeting a medieval man may help us escape the ills of modernity. We certainly need to do that, seeing that the modern age has crashed. We are now well into the era of post modernity. Unfortunately, no one knows exactly what that means. We do know that if we only talk about the ideas of our own culture and age, we will be consuming the same regurgitated material as everyone else. That will be about as nourishing  as it sounds! From time to time, we need to escape the provincialism of our own era in order to truly understand it. Thats what the Great Conversation does for us; it pulls us into other ways of thinking.

The Western portion of the Great Conversation begins with bits and pieces of old material passed down orally through our ancestor’s stories and songs. It moves into the ancient world, principally in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. It then flows into the medieval age, or, as some might prefer to call it, the Age of Faith. After a thousand years it explodes to become the Reformation and Enlightenment. Those movements created the social world that most of us have known. Now the Great Conversation is taking a new turn. No one is sure about where it is headed, including Christians.

At each stage of its development, the Great Conversation has impacted, and has been impacted by, the way believers think about God, community and what it means to be an individual. When the Conversation shifts, things can get really crazy for a while. “Common sense” gets challenged. Then it gets modified. Some of us adapt quickly. Others get lost. 


Christians,like everyone else, respond in different ways to the great shifts like the one we are presently facing.  

If we don’t join the Great Conversation, all we will have to work with to determine our response to this cultural change, will be that nasty regurgitated material I mentioned earlier. We will all be talking about things we already know, already believe, and already feel.That may be comforting for a while but it won't help us very much. 

Chasing Francis can help us think about what “church” means in the new era we have entered. Even if we are very traditional and conservative, we need to understand the questions people are asking now. We will not know how to respond even to our own children if we cling for dear life to the world of General Eisenhower. “Just because” won’t cut it, even for our grandchildren, much less for non Christians.


If we don’t enter the contemporary conversation, we might as well move to rural Alaska and live alone in a hut. If our church decides to opt out of the conversation, we may be able to convince the whole congregation to move with us! 


Becoming hermits in rural Alaska could delay the need to engage with the world’s questions for perhaps another generation. But things are going to become quite unpleasant for either us or for our children when our corporate denial finally shatters. Science is not going to retreat. Technology is not going away. Globalization is not going to reverse. The Great Conversation has already moved on.

So how do we enter the Great Conversation?

Cron suggests that two old guys can help us. He introduces us to Francis first, of course, and Francis has the floor most of the time. However, lurking in the shadows is Dante. He too has something to say.

Dante takes us to hell in a hand basket, literally! Along with Milton, he invents Western Christianity’s conception of both paradise and inferno. Both Milton and Dante invented their scenes of heaven and hell from the scanty biblical material available. In so doing, they probably affected the ways we imagine those places more than even scripture itself!

However, just as Chasing Francis is not really about Italy – although our dear Minister of Music and his wife evidently think so -- may their conscience not afflict them as they stroll about in Rome and Milan while we labor in the Lord’s vineyard here; Dante's The Divine Comedy is not about eternity as much as it is about spiritual life in the nasty now and now.


In fact, The Divine Comedy has more to say about spiritual life than a hundred sermons. If you get a good translation with helpful footnotes, you will find it interesting, alarming, and, in places, even funny. Dante put the pope in Hell, for example. He didn’t do that for theological reasons – he was a Roman Catholic after all – but because the pope wasn’t living right. Michelangelo put the pope in hell too, but high on the chapel ceiling where it would not be discovered until both he and the pope were long gone.

(Michelangelo was ticked because the church was not paying the artists a fair wage. What was that pope’s name again?)

Dante has lovers in hell, rehearsing through all eternity how one nasty book overcame their sanctity and resulted in the loss of their souls. That will teach us to not read the Decameron!

I hear the voice of G. K. Chesterton in Chasing Francis too. Of course, his voice booms through a great many books and songs. He made his words out of glue and they stick on everyone he touches. But forget Chesterton. Don’t even look him up!  No one who reads him ever gets rid of him. So don’t say I didn’t warn you. Boccaccio and Chesterton, those are two voices that for different reasons seduce one’s heart. Take care!

Many people work a daily grind that makes it difficult for them to read great works. Also, people are gifted in different ways; not everyone enjoys digesting a book that requires a great deal of attention and focused thought. That’s why God appoints some people to prepare vital pieces of the Great Conversation for the general public. The Great Conversation is much too important to leave to professionals and experts. After all, the world’s greatest breakthrough once came from a carpenter.

Books like Chasing Francis connect working people to their heritage of faith and culture. Being connected to these parts of our physical life is extremely important for our spiritual life.

I say this because intellectual formation is an indispensable part of becoming a follower of Christ. St. Paul called it “the renewing of our minds.” It is the process of hearing what God's people throughout history say about the ideas and products of the Great Conversation; taking that information into our own minds until it forms our emotions, imagination and cognition; and then, learning how to make some sort of contribution to the discussion.

That’s what Dante did. As he felt the age shifting around him, he gave voice to his confusion.

“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.”

After that, life became hellish for Dante, at least for a little while. Then, with the help of Virgil, he walked through his torment until he finally caught a glimpse of beatitude ahead. Virgil could not help him then. He needed a saint. The intellect can only take us so far on this path to glory.

So with a nod of gratitude to Dante, let's look back at Francis.

Unlike Dante, Francis didn’t leave us great literature. He left a prayer, a nativity set, and a community of servants who have built hospitals and cared for the dying. He left us a great hymn: All Creatures of Our God and King. But most of all, he pointed a safe way forward through the debris of a crumbling church system.

Francis had the courage to get naked. He took off every stitch of his troubadour clothes, laughing his way into the next era of history by the light of Brother Sun and Sister Moon.

The Importance of Beauty - Chasing Francis Series

I am part of a group called the Eagles. Most of its members are hair-challenged, which is why some people, evidently unafraid of losing their jobs, think it’s funny to call us the Bald Eagles. Their impiety will not go unpunished, if not in this world then surely in the next.

For years, we have been reading books about economics, marketing, theology, and politics. We share our opinions about faith, culture and the great ideas in a spirit of...well.. brotherly love. (If you have ever seen brotherly love in action, you will know what I mean.)

A few weeks ago, one of the Eagles played a song by Leonard Cohen, called Come Healing. It begins with a sweet female voice, overdubbed and layered into three-part harmony. The first stanza is nothing spectacular but certainly interesting enough to keep your attention.

Then comes a shock. The rugged voice of an eighty-year man sings a lyric that mystifies and grips your imagination. His voice is hardly melodious.  It is, however, beautiful. An even better adjective is “haunting.” Come Healing is spooky, as beauty always is. Beauty haunts and unnerves the imagination and the emotions. It reminds us that our minds are too small and restrained.

When Cohen croaks, “Come healing of the altar; come healing of the name” your ears hurt.  Your heart aches. Something uncanny happens. All this because an old man sings a song and makes you believe he has something terribly important to say.

Leonard Cohen is a Jew; a Levite in fact. The lyrics of his song are influenced by Kabala.  And yet, at least as this one Charismatic Evangelical Christian heard Cohen’s song, he was pierced by what felt like a word from beyond time and space.

“The splinters that you carry; the cross you left behind
Come healing of the body; come healing of the mind.”

Sometimes a book is beautiful in this way. It’s not always beautiful because it is destined to become a literary classic. It can be beautiful simply because it opens the soul. It contains what Cohen calls the “solitude of longing where love has been confined.”

That’s why I thought Chasing Francis was beautiful. It opened me up to wonder and grace. It moved me to become a better person.

There is one part in the book where the troubled pastor discovers that Francis of Assisi invented the nativity set. Francis wanted to make the story of the Lord’s birth fresh for the people who came to hear him preach. Soon, everyone had to have one. Today, you can buy plastic nativity sets. Or, you can buy expensive sets made of mahogany and ebony. You can even walk into nativity scenes filled with real people, a live camel and a dog that urinates on the straw.

In their own way, each of these nativity sets is beautiful.  The all exist because one saintly person was compelled to create a means of opening the soul. The reason he felt compelled to do that was because he wanted to share his joy with others.

Francis did many things, but inventing the nativity set would have been pretty impressive. How many of us will leave behind something so delightful?

Last year, a plastic donkey in our family crèche caught my granddaughter’s attention. She wanted to know if baby Jesus liked the donkey. Then she wanted to see a baby donkey on my iPad. For weeks after that, she would shout “DONKEY” whenever she saw one on TV or in a book.

In her mind, donkeys must be special because Jesus liked donkeys. Anyway, she was delighted with the donkey and I was delighted because she was delighted. God was delighted because grandfathers and grandchildren ought to delight one another.

Francis did something that helps us show love and wonder. That is no small thing. Ian Cron helps us remember Francis. That is no small thing either.

Art affects people differently. However, it always calls people out of the familiar and into an encounter with some part of reality we have not noticed before.

Mozart’s Ave Verum does that for me. So does Rachmaninov’s Vespers. And Shirley Caesar’s rendition of Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down. And stained glass. And Salvador Dali’s The Sacrament of The Last Supper.

All of these particular pieces of art speak to theology and the spiritual life, although some theologians might not think so.

For years we have been separating theology from beauty, turning theology into an intellectual quest for geeks.  But Shirley Caesar has something to offer theology that Karl Barth missed.  The fact that she makes her contribution with a simple melody and lyric does not disqualify it. Otherwise, the tabernacle and temple would have nothing to say about the theological quest.

We cannot separate beauty from theology. More people experienced God by going into the tabernacle, smelling the incense and eating the lamb than by reading the Book of Leviticus. I received more from Chasing Francis than I have from most sermons. Actually, it is a very effective sermon.

Beauty can safely express ideas not to our liking. The Ave Maria always moves me, so I can enjoy hearing it with a Roman Catholic. That doesn’t mean that we will agree about what the lyric signifies for each of us. It does mean we agree there is something about it that is beautiful, irresistible, compelling and spiritually meaningful.

I think that is why Plato wanted to banish music from his Republic: beauty is uncontrollable.



The problem with pragmatism and functionalism is that we have needs much more crucial than just sitting in a comfortable pew or listening to a balanced sound system. Beauty is one of those needs. We must have things in our lives that wound our soul and awaken it to eternity. If we don’t have them, our soul will grow numb. We may keep on making a living but may lose our reason to live.

That seems to be the problem Chasing Francis wants to address.

The book is important because Leonard Cohen is right. We desperately need “the healing of the altar.” The question is, how can the altar get healed if our minds remain preoccupied with small things? Beauty shatters the boxes in which we think and converse. It forces us to invent new words, new thoughts and new concepts.

As Ian Cron puts it in Chasing Francis,

“Beauty can break a heart and make it think about something more spiritual than the mindless routine we go through day after day to get by. Francis was a singer, a poet, an actor. He knew that the imagination was a stealth way into people's souls, a way to get all of us to think about God. For him, beauty was its own apologetic. That's why a church should care about the arts. They inspire all of us to think about the eternal.”

There was a day when Francis of Assisi leapt beyond pragmatism. He took off his clothes. He walked out of his father’s house. He started preaching in a cathedral not made with hands. The Sun became his chandelier. He formed his pews from knolls of grass. He praised the glory of roses. He sang about the divine origin of nature.

People still ask whether he was entirely sane.

I do not know if he was sane or not. I only know he was beautiful; beautiful like the croaking old voice of a octogenarian Levite, struggling to sing a lyric that can break our hearts. The voice is stained and weathered. It cracks and groans under the weight of glory that opens souls and saves the world.