Music Shapes the Soul

Credit to Dale Stultz for picture of Gospel Trumpet Company picture at Grand Junction 1898.


I found my identity in the church early in my young life. One of the ways I discovered who and what I was came through congregational singing. That was before the newer contemporary worship style came in, when congregational singing meant congregational participation.

Congregational singing focuses upon the congregation and involves participation and harmony in the music, with less focus upon the platform and on entertainment. Among the songs I sang as a child were those of Barney Warren, long known as the “Chief Singer” in the Church of God Reformation Movement (cf To the Chief Singer, Bolitho, 1942).

Barney grew up in my home community, just a few miles out of town headed East, in what is now Geneva Township. Barney’s parents homesteaded 40 acres in the Township, which is about midway between South Haven, on the Lakeshore, and Grand Junction, where the Gospel Trumpet Company rocked the cradle of the emerging Reformation Movement, between 1886-1898.

Barney encountered Christ in his life as a teenager under the ministry of Elder Daniel S. Warner, the leader of the growing religious reformation, then focused in and around Grand Junction, MI. Warner was an itinerant evangelist and wanted to form a musical group to accompany him in his travels. He needed a good bass and Barney had the ability and the timbre, but he needed his dad’s permission.

Tom Warren did not give up his son easily, but he did eventually surrender him to the ministry, as well as three other sons and himself. Barney left the growing congregation that formed in Geneva Center and began his travels for the next 28 years. That took him from the community several decades before my birth. So, while I encountered heavy influence from Barney through hundreds of hymns he eventually wrote, I never met him personally.

Barney became a successful minister and a songwriter-composer of some, finally settling in Springfield, Ohio. Barney never won a Gold or a Grammy, but he inspired a whole religious movement to find faith and spread joy. He served as the chief musical architect of the Church of God Movement until Bill and Gloria Gaither launched their career. That is not to take away from others like J. C. Fisher, A. L. Byers, et al.

The congregation that nurtured me began the winter of 1922-23. S. Michels, also from Geneva Center, had operated a home for Senior Adults on the lakeshore for nearly 25 years. In his declining years, the home began to transition, due to his age and ill health and a changing local economy. My then teenaged father, his mother and step-father took up residence with Brother Michels and when daughter Pearl visited her dad shortly after her marriage, she invited my to-be-dad to help her organize a Sunday School. With that, my family became the core of what would become the last church plant of S. Michels.

There we sang many of Warren’s songs. By then, he had become one of the primary leaders of the rapidly expanding Movement. One that we sang often contained these words:

I will sing hallelujah, for there’s joy in the Lord,
And He fills my heart with rapture as I rest on His Word;
I will trust in His promise, I will shout I am free;
In my blessed loving Savior I have sweet victory. . .2

I now know first-century Christians overcame persecution, poverty, and penury of spirit by living a contagious spirit of joy and leaving it in their wake. As their joy increased, so did their witness. They became like the sand on the lakeshore, where I played and picnicked. Their vision conquered circumstances, making their joy contagious and their beliefs irrefutable.

Following years of my own ministry, I now know Christians like Stephen became the yardstick for measuring Christ-like living. People found him gentle, steadfast, full of faith, and filled with the glory of joy. Inquirers found little social gain in becoming Christians, but Jews and Gentiles alike experienced transformation through peace, love, joy, and healing of body and spirit.

Some sang from jail cells and others endured martyrdom. We best remember them for their mutual love of each other, more than their job status, or acquired wealth. Spiritual Awakening aroused more than sentiment and emotion.

During that time the Apostle Peter experienced his radical deliverance from lifelong racial prejudice. He witnessed to a hated Roman soldier, named Cornelius, of his transformation. Cornelius was also a Gentile, which only made the deliverance more dramatic. As with Peter and Cornelius, so it was with Stephen and Phillip - “great joy in that city” (Acts 8:8, NIV).

When lashed, shipwrecked, and stoned, for his faith, Paul joyfully endured hunger, thirst, cold and nakedness. In spite of adversity, he greeted his friends by encouraging them to “Rejoice in the Lord.” “Again,” he wrote, “I will say rejoice!” (Phil. 4:4, NASV).

Having just passed my 64th wedding anniversary (2-9-47), I also approach 59 years since ordination at Hampton Place Church of God, Dallas, TX (March 1952). From what I have seen and heard, and based on so may people I’ve known en route, I can say Barney had it right, “There is joy in the Lord.” Joy characterizes the faith of Christians as no other world religion.

Another of Barney’s songs that came out of his early years of spiritual struggle, learning to separate his emotions from his external surroundings, and questioning his relationship with God. Finally, he says, he latched on to I Corinthians 10:13, and “every doubt fled away and my happy soul began singing: ’I am a child of God.’”
I leave you with his first verse from that 1907 hymn:

Praise the Lord! My heart with his love is beaming,
I am a child of God;
Heaven’s golden light over me is streaming,
I am a child of God.
_____chorus
I am a child of God,
I am a child of God;
I have washed my robes in the cleansing fountain,
I am a child of God.

Such is the power of music in shaping the soul and in fortifying a person’s character. Thanks be to God!
From Warner’s World,
walkingwithwarner.blogspot.com

The Forgiveness of Sins

“The consequences of the past are always with us,” wrote Wm S. Coffin. He suggested “half the hostilities tearing the world apart could be resolved today were we to allow the forgiveness of sins to alter these consequences,” except too many churches don‘t discuss the sin business anymore (italic added).

Let’s go further, Coffin asserted: “all the hostilities in our personal and planetary life could be ended were we to allow the forgiveness of sins to act as a lightning rod grounding all these hostilities; if we were to say of ourselves, ‘The hostility stops here’” (italic added).

Unfortunately, not even Christians believe the words above from William Sloane Coffin Credo, Westminister John Knox Press, 2004, p. 12. The consequence is that we will continue to battle with global hostilities as we see them today, for most people choose to continue them rather than do something about them. Wars and rumors of wars you will have with you always … How unlike Jesus!

From Warner’s World,
walkingwithwarner.blogspot.com

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

BONHOEFFER, Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas. Thomas Nelson, Nashville, 2010.

How could the Church of Luther fall from grace? How involved should the church be in politics? Questions of ethics and discipleship led Bonhoeffer to leave us two written volumes which the world has since read as The Cost of Discipleship (literally Discipleship) and Ethics.

From the time he was thirteen, the young Bonhoeffer knew he would study theology. He received his doctorate in 1927 at age 21, writing his thesis on “Sanctorum Communio: A Systematic Inquiry Into the Sociology of the Church.” He identified the church as neither a historical entity nor an institution, but as “Christ existing as Church-community.” It prepared him well for the life he would soon follow and the decisions life would forced him to make.

Early in his academic career, the young Cleric preached at Berlin University from II Chronicles 20:12: “We don’t know what to do, so we look to you for help” (emphasis added). It was May 1932 and Bonhoeffer was watching Hitler rise to power. He saw warning flags that signaled danger for the church and the nation. The text reveals an uncertain Jehoshaphat seeking a word from God as to how to face the future.

Jehoshaphat followed the word of the Lord as did his father (Asa) before him and Bonhoeffer determined to walk as an uncompromising disciple of Christ, as opposed to the State’s politicized Churchanity. That text would mark numerous occasions throughout his life when he would walk in faith seeking the wisdom of Christ’s Word as he walked. At his death, his close companion, Eberhard Bethge, used this same scripture to highlight the life Bonhoeffer had lived among them.

From Bonhoeffer’s London congregation in 1933, he initiated the break with the State Church of the Third Reich, which he saw being transformed by Hitler’s Henchmen into an apostate instrument of Satan. The decade following led Bonhoeffer on a discipleship journey that found him leading the Confessing Church (born in 1934 with the Synod of Barmen). Metaxas tells the story splendidly as he chronicles the evolution of Bonhoeffer’s theological and sociological journey that defined Bonhoeffer’s biblical discipleship and led him from civil cooperation to criminal resistance.

Mataxas suggests “Bonhoeffer thought of Ethics as his magnum opus” (468), a work he never quite finished, a work he tweaked throughout his prison years, finally at Tegel.

While making his journey, Bonhoeffer wrote his friend Bethge describing life in Christ as being less about avoiding sin and more about actively doing God’s will. Death, he told his friend “is the supreme festival on the way to freedom” (486).

Henning Van Treskow spoke to Schlabrendorff just before committing suicide (to prevent betraying fellow plotters against Hitler under torture) and concluded “a human being’s moral integrity begins when he is prepared to sacrifice his life for his convictions” (487).

Regarding death, Bonhoeffer wrote, “In life with Jesus Christ, death as a general fate approaching us from without is confronted by death from within. Those who live with Cshrist die daily to their own will. Christ in us gives over to death so that he can live within us. Thus our inner dying grows to meet that death from without, Christians receive their own death in this way, and in this way our physical death very truly becomes not the end but rather the fullfillment of our life with Jesus Christ. Here we enter into community with the One who at his own death was able to say, ‘It is finished’” (384).

Death for Bonhoeffer became an intentional act after the arrest of Admiral Canaris and the disclosure that Bonhoeffer was involved in the espionage to rid Germany of Hitler. On Saturday night of 4-8-45 Canaris, Oster, Dr. Sack, Strunck, Gehre, were tried, with Bonhoeffer tried in absentia when officials discovered they had left him at the Schonburg School (prison).

Dispatching two men to Schonburg to bring Bonhoeffer on to Flossenberg, he had hardly finished his last prayer for a service he was conducting at the school for other prisoners when to evil looking men in civilian clothes came in and said “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, Get ready to come with us.” Before the Monday morning sun, Bonhoeffer hung from the hangman’s noose.

Payne Best describes the parting this way: “Those words “Come with us” for all prisoners had come to mean one thing only - the scaffold. We bade him good-bye - he drew me aside - “This is the end,” he said, “For me the beginning of life.” Bonhoeffer also asked to be remembered to Bishop Bell.

H. Fisher-Hullstrung the Flossenberg prison doctor, and a doctor of almost 50 years experience, described the final moments. “I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer kneeling on the floor, praying fervently to God … so certain that God heard his prayer … I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God” (237).

Bonhoeffer’s biography is more than a life-story; it is a journey of faith. Following WWII, I read Martin Niemoller’s story and was happy to further update on Bonhoeffer. I found this volume greatly worthwhile, but I do not recommend it for the faint-hearted, or the frivolous minded. Bonhoeffer’s story calls us to mature spirituality, deeply anchored in Scripture, and singularly focused on Jesus Christ as God’s revelation of Himself.

This is Warner’s World,
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How Would Jesus Re-shape Our National Budget?

I am currently completing Eric Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas. This newest
Bonhoeffer book challenges me to renewed spirituality. I am fascinated with Bonhoeffer’s exemplary resistance to Adolph Hitler and the German Socialist Party of the broken cross (Swastika).

Bonhoeffer, Niemiller, et al led the confessing church after Hitler high-jacked the institutional German Lutheran Church. He deepened his own spirituality in that the Bible became his word from God as revealed through Jesus, a faith by which he obeyed the teachings of Jesus 24/7 365 days a year. As Hitler took his institutional ministry from him, he practiced his faith subversively, supporting the confessing church and the pastors he trained.

He even became involved in the German Resistance that assisted via espionage, which leads me to believe that we must do more than talk about our religious convictions; we must act upon them. So, when I learn that Congress will be voting on a 9% budget cut in discretionary domestic funds, while increasing military spending by 2%, I join Jim Wallis in asking the question, “What would Jesus cut?”

The question is a valid question, especially in view of the fact that Military related spending encompasses 57-59% of our national budget and we far outspend the rest of the world for military armaments that do not increase our national security one iota.

Therefore, am sending the following letter to our Michigan Congressional delegates (Levin, Stabenow, Walberg) and requesting them to vote in a manner compatible to what Jesus would do.

As a person of faith, I believe that the moral test of any society is how it treats its poor and most vulnerable. Our federal budget should reflect our best national values and priorities, so in regard to your upcoming budget vote I ask myself, "What would Jesus cut?"

Moreover, I am asking my Michigan Congressional delegates (Levin, Stabenow, Walberg) to vote in a way that would express the teachings of Jesus … as follows:

As a person of faith, I live by the moral code of Jesus that tests society by how it treats its poor and most vulnerable. Therefore, as your constituent, I ask you to oppose any and all budget proposals that increase military spending while cutting domestic and international programs that benefit the poor, especially children.

Programs we need to invest in during these tough economic times include:

1. Critical child health and family nutrition programs
2. Proven work and income supports that lift families out of poverty
3. Support for education, especially in low-income communities
4. International aid that directly and literally save lives

In Great Britain, Prime Minister Cameron made the choice to delay a costly nuclear submarine program, while also increasing life-saving funding for international aid. The U.S. Congress should not only follow this example but it should greatly reduce our total military spending that equals the total of the next 23 nations.

We are a military economy and must return to an industrial society producing peaceful products rather than instruments of violence, war, and mass murder (italics added).

We need to join forces, stop bickering over big government, socialism, anti-Obamania and begin behaving as if we took seriously the words and teachings of Jesus. That is the only way we can exalt Him and His Word, for He is the Word (John 1:1...)

From Warner’s World,
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Impossible Journey

“You will live three months--not more than a year.” My bride was just learning to live at twenty and the doctors said she was ready to die. Their cautious words exploded all hopes of the baseball team she wanted to raise and left no hope for a normal marriage and family.

I was a lowly Air Force Corporal awaiting reassignment from Tech School. We spent my furlough in Oklahoma, a place I had never been, and reported for duty at Kelly AFB, San Antonio. She was still recuperating from emergency surgery with Pete Lamey in Anderson and we knew her health was fragile, so she continued her post-surgery care.

One day she boarded San Antonio transit and headed for Fort Sam Houston on the north edge of the city. I had no permission to accompany her so she went solo and passed out en route. The bus driver fortunately remembered her from a previous trip and delivered her to the right building in a semi-conscious condition.

When her doctor, Captain Vann, called in his superior, the Colonel called my Langley Field Wing Headquarters and requested immediate discharge for me. “We call men home from overseas for less than this! He said, “Cancer in the last stages.” This was her introduction to her diagnosis.

Captain Vann also demanded to know where I was and why I did not accompany her. When she told him I had been refused permission, he called my CO and chewed on him, an AF B25 pilot named G. I. Poole. Demanding to know why I had not accompanied my sick wife, he learned I had been shipped overseas “a week ago.”

When Captain Vann asked why she had not told him I was gone, she informed him that she had breakfast with me at home that morning. It turned out that I was AWOL--unbeknownst to me--lost in AF bureaucracy. They thought they had shipped me, yet I was working everyday as a temporary clerk typist, awaiting shipment to Japan.

Meantime, Tommie was told the most humane thing she could do was go to the Cancer Institute in Chicago. They would take good care of her as long as necessary and would provide work for me.

We had moved onto the Highland Park Church Campus, in rooms vacated by Sister McNeil, a pioneer pastor’s wife. We were right off the back door of the parsonage occupied by Robert and Alta Bowden. Although we had planned to enter pastoral ministry, it had not occurred to us to ask “Brother B” for special prayers. We did pray ourselves, and Tommie’s prayer was very simple: “God, if my life is to be taken, I’m ready. But if you have yet a task for me to do, with your strength, I’ll do it. Just please stop the pain.”

We tied a knot in our prayer rope and held on for all we were worth, probably not realizing the full impact of what we were doing. When my discharge arrived, we boarded a Greyhound bus headed for South Haven, MI. Somehow, we failed to stop in Chicago, choosing rather to cling to a murky faith that held us through five miscarriages, including the loss of twins, and saw me graduate from Pacific Bible College in 1951.

Six weeks prior to graduation, Tommie delivered a 5# 2 oz preemie that seemed normal at the time. Later we learned of complications related to her mother’s health The morning after her delivery, the top gun at Portland San came to see her. This kindly old Adventist doctor seated himself on her bed and gently informed her, “I just want you to know, this baby is God’s gift to you.”

Earlier, her pediatrician requested the privilege of examining her with some other doctors--16 in total. Afterward, she learned they could see where she had had cancer (and he showed her), but the examination revealed she was cancer free--almost four years after her death warrant and my discharge.

Bible College in Portland introduced us to 45 years in pastoral ministry (1951-1996) mentored by the likes of A. F. Gray, O. F. Linn, D. S. Warner Monroe, Irene Caldwell, et al. Our second child (D. S. Warner) arrived in 1952 in San Angelo, TX, the Wool Capital.

By the time we had been married 39 years and had given up hopes of grandchildren, we had a grandson, Dakota Scott W_ now preparing himself for some kind of Ministry. A Second grandson, Austin James, followed Kody, and they now bless our lives.

We have now been retired more than 14 years, 6 of which I spent driving up and down the State of Michigan preaching in UM Churches, and others, working with Michigan Interfaith Council on Alcohol Problems (Micap). The past 10 years I have been a volunteer at Reformation Publishers of Prestonsburg, KY serving as Archivist, Editor, Author, Customer Service Rep, and you name it.

When Wednesday arrived this week at 43 New England Avenue, we celebrated it as a day that we were never supposed to see--64 years together. It is a record these days. It didn’t come easily. In fact, there were days we were nearer failure than success, but we survived. I have been the caregiver since June 2005, when I lost her several times, according to Dr. John Bradley, then in ER at BC Health Systems.

I haven’t yet forgotten that summer of 1964 when I prepared the children for the loss of their mother after her first heart attack (and other complications). That was the year she knitted 27 sweaters in excruciating pain, trying to avoid the loss of her hands from Rheumatoid Arthritis (She succeeded too, with a lot of tears!)

It was bitterly cold the day we married in St. Louis, MO, 2-9-47. February 9, 2011 was impossibility for us, according to the doctors, but then they do not know everything. V. Ray Edmans, former Wheaton Chancellor wrote a small book called But God. The lesson seems to be “But God!” Things that remain impossible with people are, nonetheless, still possible with God.

From Warner’s World, (The top picture shows us ten years into ministry; at bottom we are at home, New England Avenue) ...
Walkingwithwarner.blogspot.com

One Man's Journey Toward Pacifism

Called the biography for this generation, Eric Metaxas has written the most recent scholarly account of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The following lines are a worthy detail in the journey of this popular theologian toward pacifism. I quote …

“Following is the reporting of The now-classic antiwar novel All Quiet on the Western Front exploded across Germany and Europe in 1929. Its publication was a phenomenon that had a hugely significant effect on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s view of war, which in turn determined the very course of his life and ultimately led to his death.

“It was written by Eric Maria Remarque, who had served as a German soldier during the war. The book sold nearly a million copies instantly, and within eighteen months was translated into twenty-five languages, making it the best-selling novel of the young century. Bonhoeffer likely read the book for Reinhold Niebuhr’s class at Union in 1930, if not earlier, but it was the movie more than the book that would change Bonhoeffer’s life.

“With a rawness and power unheard of at the time, the film pulled no punches in portraying the graphic horrors of the war. It won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director, but for its aggressively antiwar stance it caused a firestorm of outrage across Europe. In the opening scene, a wild-eyed old teacher exhorts his young charges to defend the fatherland. Behind him, on the chalkboard, are the Greek words from the Odyssey invoking the Muse to sing the praises of the great soldier-hero who sacked Troy.

“From the old teacher’s lips comes Horace’s famous line, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (It is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country). The glories of war were for these young men a part of the great Western tradition in which they were being schooled, and en masse they marched off to the mud and death in the trenches. Most of them died, and nearly all of them cowered in fear or lost their minds before doing so.

“The film is antiheroic and disturbing, and to anyone harboring nationalist sympathies, it must have been at times embarrassing and enraging. It’s no surprise that for the budding National Socialists, the fil seemed vile internationalist propaganda, coming from the same places--principally Jewish--that had led to the defeat of Germany in the very war being depicted.

“In 1933, when they came to power, the Nazis burned copies of Remarque’s book and spread the canard that Remarque was a Jew whose real surname was Kramer--Remark spelled backward. But now, in 1930, they attacked the film.

“Their newly minted minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, leaped into action … As a result, the film was soon banned across Germany and remained so until 1945.

“In the United States, however, it was on screens everywhere, and one Saturday afternoon in New York City Bonhoeffer saw it with Jean Lasserre. It was a sear indictment of the war in which their countries were bitter enemies, and here they sat, side by side, watching German and French boys and men butchering one another. In perhaps the most moving scene of the film, the hero, a young German soldier, stabs a French soldier, who eventually dies. But before dying, as he lies in the trench, alone with his killer, he writhes and moans for hours.

“The German soldier is forced to face the horror of what he has done. Eventually he caresses the dying man’s face, trying to comfort him, offering him water for his parched lips. And after the Frenchman dies, the German lies at the corpse’s feet and begs his forgiveness. He vows to write to the man’s family, and then he finds and opens the man’s wallet. He sees the man’s name and a picture of his wife and daughter.

“The sadness of the violence and suffering on the screen brought Bonhoeffer and Lasserre to tears, but even worse to them was the reaction in the theater. Lasserre remembered American children in the audience laughing and cheering when the Germans, from whose point of view the story was told, were killing the French. For Bonhoeffer, it was unbearable. Lasserre later said he could barely console Bonhoeffer afterward, Lasserre believed that on that afternoon Bonhoeffer became a pacifist.

“Lasserre spoke often about the Sermon on the Mount and how it informed his theology. From that point forward sit became a central part of Bonhoeffer’s life and theology, too, which eventually led him to write his most famous book, The Cost of Discipleship. Just as important, though, was that as a result of his friendship with Lasserre, Bonhoeffer became involved in the ecumenical movement, which eventually led him to become involved in the Resistance against Hitler and the Nazis.”

Of course, it was this resistance by Bonhoeffer to Hitler’s National Socialist Party, and the secularizing of the German church, that Bonhoeffer's premature death as the war came to an end. For people whose theology is informed and shaped specifically by the teachings and ministry of Jesus, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s example provides a startling contrast to the self-described Christian discipleship of much of our current pop culture, especially as related to issues of war and peace.
From Warner’s World, this is
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The Church of God and Eastern Europe

.

Much of what happened in World War II seemed to mock the faith so deeply treasured by the Church of God believers from Eastern Europe, as researched by Walter Froese.With that thought in mind, Dr. Froese, distinguished Professor of Church History Emeritus at the Church of God School of Theology in Anderson, Indiana, introduced his newest volume at the Anderson-based North American Convention in June 2010.

Froese, a German Canadian of solid Mennonite stock came to the Church of God through the influence of the girl he met and married. He dedicated his volume to the loving memory of his now deceased Church of God-born wife, with whom he spent his adult life and through whom he came to fully appreciate the heritage and history of the Church of God.

In his history of the Church of God people in Eastern Europe, Froese, describes these people as People of Faith in Turbulent Times (p 187). He concludes that despite such difficulties, the Church of God lived on. With the nose of a true historian, he notes the overall political developments, especially in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Froese finds the emphasis on racial differences, the desire for domination of one country over another, and the rampant hate propaganda towards other human beings required for fighting and killing in a war–all this posed challenges to many believers in their faith in God as Lord of everything and in their conviction that God's will for all of God's children is love towards everyone (emphasis added).

Growing up in southwestern Michigan, as I did, brought me into close contact with Church of God people of German descent. Twenty-five miles to the south was First Church of God, St. Joseph, which served as a German-speaking Missionary Home in the early 20th century. They finally became an English-speaking congregation following WWII, when their Anderson College graduates began returning home as English-speaking adults.

Benton Harbor-St. Joseph became a strong center of German influence. Walter Butgereit, pastor in Benton Harbor for four decades, visited in my South Haven home in the late twenties or early thirties. I later attended AC (mid-forties) with the Macholtz brothers, as well as Dottie Koroch, who came out of the Benton Harbor German church, before investing a lifetime with Weatherall Johnson, founder of Bible Study Fellowship.

My younger friends today include Mike & Carol Stadelmayer, pastors at Mio, MI and Dr. Georg Karl, pastor at Vincennes, IN and author of Six Stages of Forgiving Others (pictured below). Mike’s dad and mother, Rudy (now deceased) & Elsa, came from East Prussia (Poland) and number among my decades-long friends. I have long attended Camp Meeting with Georg’s dad, Julian.

Once much revered by the church, and especially by pastors across the Church, is the name Ewald (E. E.) Wolfram. Dr. Wolfram came from East Prussia to Benton Harbor, finished AC just as I was beginning, and became the church’s preacher’s preacher, working primarily out of several Agency positions in Anderson. It was a great loss to the church when the Wolfsdram's were killed in a flaming auto accident on south Florida US27.

These names shared off the cuff barely scratch the surface of our church family. Our founder, D. S. Warner, preached in German on numerous occasions. Many later emigrated here during the WWII years. Benton Harbor-St. Joseph, MI became a center. Another was Edmonton, Alberta. Families like the Ratzlaff’s and Butgereit’s migrated further south to rural areas like Marion, South Dakota, and southwestern Michigan, and elsewhere.

Dee Padgett, now retired in Kentucky, is part of the Dan Ratzlaff clan from PA. Dr. Leslie Ratzlaff, founding Dean of Warner Southern University and former Dean at Warner Pacific College, came from the Marion, S.D. clan. Another of my favorites, Dr. Albert Kempin, came out of Lithuania to Philadelphia, then spent his life in Oregon-California.

So you understand why I found Walter Froese’s history of the Church of God in Eastern Europe so fascinating. Many of their descendants became my teen friends, peers, and lifelong friends, brought together by a great World War. It was a tragedy for all of us, but it provided an opportunity to transform a tragedy into blessing.

While I remember the fear I felt in our community when we heard rumors of the German Bundists in training in our southern Lake Michigan dunes, I look back and see the profound impact of the German influence upon the Church of God Movement. They greatly influenced who and what we are today.

After meeting Dr. Froese and selling numerous copies of his book at NAC, I regretted not sitting in his Church History classes, although I took my history classes under some respected historians. I found Dr. Froese a delightful friend, a historian with a reformer’s zeal for detail, a warm and enchanting human being.

Church of God readers will be especially blessed by reading this volume about a specific segment of our ethnic influences. It should enlarge your understanding of some of your friends, of whom you may have little or no awareness of the struggles of their forbearers. It should expand your appreciation for their contribution to our present church life in America, as well as cause you to better appreciate the great diversity we have in the Church of God, Anderson.



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The Silence of Grace

H L Mencken defined hope as a pathological belief in what is impossible. That may be the case for Michele Norris, author of THE GRACE OF SILENCE.

Michele Norris is a pretty girl (younger than my daughter, so I can safely call her a girl without denigrating her). She is an enormously talented investigative journalist of two decades, a woman of faith, and the recipient of an electrical engineering degree. Norris is also black, black and beautiful! I raised a “daddy girl” and Michele Norris fits the description,capturing my heart with her between-the-lines undying devotion and love for her father.

She purposed to write a definitive book about racism, a subject in which I am deeply interested. It is a subject I am not sure will ever be resolved. After some thought, as well as meeting dead-ends to meaningful questions she had regarding family issues that helped form her, she ended up writing a personal memoir of her immediate family.

Author Toni Morrison described this volume as “an insightful, elegant rendering of how the history of an American family illuminates the history of our country.” Morrison could have added that Norris illuminates ways in which racism has expressed itself, and continues to express itself, in America.

Racism has been an interest for me throughout my adult years, especially because I continue to see it in the institutions of our society. I was raised in an integrated northern community that enjoyed outwardly acceptable black-white relations but enjoyed anti-semitic intolerances.

I endured the insulting bonds of segregation in the Old South, before and after Martin Luther King, in my early years as a pastor. I still identify strongly with the feelings of the Civil Rights Movement and I have enjoyed some wonderful minority friendships, Afro-American,Hispanic, et al. I live purposefully, intentionally pursuing a global vision, while remaining aware of the prejudices even among white Caucasians that grapple with ethnic and national differences.

When I saw Ms. Norris and a colleague leading a racism conference on C-Span and she mentioned her book, I immediately sought to obtain her book at the library. It came last week and I have now read it. Her title intrigued me, THE GRACE OF SILENCE. and only at the end did I more fully understand her insight.

Her father found grace in not burdening her with the problems and prejudices of his earlier experience. I perceive that he chose to instill in her that drive to pursue her own dreams rather than add unnecessary garbage for her to process. “There is grace in silence,” she suggests, “and power to be had from listening to that which, more often than not, was left unsaid” (174).

As the book flap says, Norris traveled from her childhood home in South Minneapolis to her ancestral roots in North Alabama to explore the reasons for the “things left unsaid” by her father and mother when she was growing up, the better to come to terms with her own identity. Along the way she discovered how her character was forged by both revelation and silence.

A very warm and readable family memoir that also lends understanding to both sides of a highly sensitive issue in American life. She expresses herself with consummate skill; she writes with Christian grace, and seasons it with a sprinkling of elegance.

Recognizing my own reservations about how far we have progressed with integration and civil rights legislation, I will leave you with this quote: All the talk of a post racial America betrays an all too glib eagerness to put in remission a four-hundred -year-old cancerous social disease. We can’t let it rest until we attend to its symptoms in ourselves and others. Jimmy Carter talking about white voter discomfiture with Barrack Obama’s race; Eric Holder suggesting that Americans are more often than not cowards in their refusal to address the subject candidly; Harry Reid surmising that Obama’s advantages are his skin tone and lack of a ‘Negro’ dialect: all have been subject to immediate and loud public censure by people more interested in excoriating them for daring to bring up the subject of race than willing to examine whether their statements bore hard truths (168).

From Warner’s World,
I recommend Michele Norris for your reading _ The Silence of Grace (NY, Pantheon, 2010).
walkingwithwarner.blogspot.com

The Best Biblical Translation

“I am a Christian” wrote Phillip Yancey, “not because Jesus’ way benefits society but because I believe it is true. If true, it should create the conditions in which human life works best, as E. Stanley Jones suggested.

Studies by Chinese sociologists reveal, according to Yancey, that, in rural areas of China where traveling evangelists introduce the Christian faith, opium addiction goes down, crime drops, and Christian families grow wealthier than their neighbors.

At the time he visited China in 2004, Yancey believed China’s leaders to be pragmatic politicians rather than believers, and in visiting there he thought he found them “looking more favorably on religion for the simple reason that it can serve their ends by improving social behavior.” (Yancey /What Good is God/60/Faith Words/NT/2010).

Mort Crim tells it this way (WITNESS/LIKE IT IS by Mort Crim, Warner Press, Inc. 1970).

Mort says one Sunday his pastor issued this challenge from the pulpit, asking, “How would you communicate the gospel to someone who was deaf, mute, and sightless?” Then he urged us to think of new and creative ways for witnessing.

Most of the people around us are, indeed, deaf to our message, unresponsive, mute to it, and blind to its significance. Somehow, we’ve got to find effective ways of translating the powerful and relevant love of Jesus into positive, contemporary terms.

Years ago, I heard about a man claiming his mother’s translation of the Scriptures was the best he knew. Since there are many different linguistic translations, the person hearing this expressed surprise on learning that his friend’s mother authored a translation. The question naturally arose, “Which translation did your mother produce?

His mother was not a scholar, nor had she produced a linguistic translation. The translation his mother wrote was the day-by-day interpretation that she wrote with her life. That was what the man remembered best, as he watched her live-out the Scriptures day after day. Thus he could say, “She wrote the best translation of the Bible that I ever read.“

It remains acutely true today that the best advertisement for Christianity is a life well-lived.
From Warner’s World,
we are walkingwithwarner.blogspot.com