Unsolicited Advice to A Pastoral Search Team

Today’s Episode of The First Reece is being preempted for a personal message to the committee charged with finding a new Pastor for Highpointe Church. The usual mix of laughter, wit and inspiration will resume tomorrow.

Dear Pastoral Search Committee:

In the January 4, 2010 entry of this blog I observed that “Some board or committee or other entity is going to read resumes and interview candidates, and present me with my new pastor”. I now know who the members of that committee are. You are all good people; Godly people; people whose judgment I trust. And so it is with excitement I await your findings. Meantime, I wish to offer this unsolicited advice.

Don’t try to replace Darren & Michelle Pilcher. They are irreplaceable. If God moved them on, then God has an incredible plan for Highpointe Church. That plan is what we seek.

Don’t get in a hurry. In the Kingdom of God timing is everything. But that timing is God’s timing. At the right time he will open the right door and we will have the right Pastor. In the meantime there’s a whole ball team’s worth of able preachers and teachers to tend the flock! Fat and sassy with ministerial excellence, are we!

Throw out the man-made model. God gave a multitude of ministry gifts to the church, but somewhere along the way the “modern” church changed the plan. The term “Pastor” has been redefined to become a person of many hats. In churches all over America they no longer have Evangelists preach – the Pastor does it. He gave Teachers to expound his doctrine…but now that’s the job of the Pastor. Administrative gifts…God gave us a slew of them. But many Pastors make all the decisions, by force or desire. I don’t mean to imply that Highpointe Church has ever followed this pattern, but many do.

Oh, a Pastor may ultimately do all those things, and more. But first and foremost, he is the shepherd of the sheep. So give me a Pastor who has the heart of a Pastor. I’m not interested in how large the congregation can grow. I’m not impressed by multiple services or satellite locations. If it happens, it happens. But when it happens will my Pastor still know my name, what I do for a living, and what gifts God has placed in me? Here’s what I want in a Pastor – someone who has a picture of me in his heart!

Sound selfish? Perhaps. But remember what Paul said in Ephesians 4 – my Pastor is God’s gift to me!

So if there is a litmus test for the position of Pastor, it’s this: Would he leave the ninety and nine, and seek the one? Find a Pastor who would seek to know his sheep; who would seek to tend his sheep… and you will have done a good thing!

I know you folks already know all this. I just wanted to make it look like it was my idea!

And by the way…thank you for your service!

Sincerely, Reece

The African in the Closet

The year is 1900, or 1800…..or 1700, it doesn’t matter. The point is that it’s not current times. The place is Africa – a tribal village in the darkest depths of the jungle. The people are cannibals, feasting on the captured of other tribes, or missionaries whenever possible. The focus is on one of the natives. He’s the alpha male; leader of the pack. In modern day Sicily he would be the Godfather, but we’re not in modern day Sicily, we’re in ancient Africa. This chieftain is naked except for a breech-cloth (which is probably to accommodate modern day TV viewers). He’s tall but pot bellied, and adorned in an elaborate headdress of feathers and bones, like the bone through his pierced nose. He holds a six foot long spear decorated to match his headgear, and he’s standing impatiently in front of a large black pot over a blazing fire…waiting for it to boil.

My maternal grandmother was a sweet lady – we called her Nanny. She was a member of the 20th century, born six years after its beginning and dying 2 years before its end. Back then men went out to build something or kill something, and the wives and mothers and grandmothers made the house a home with their cooking and cleaning…and sewing and cooking… and cooking. This was my Nanny, and every summer we grandkids would take 2 week turns enjoying the fruits of her labors. Oh yeah, and she took us fishing!

I’ve introduced you to two people. Right now you are probably wondering what one has to do with the other.

I was a young adult, and had dropped by to visit my aging Nanny. She bustled around getting bedding together and making sure I would be comfortable during my overnight stay. They she said something funny…something so funny that it has been fodder for hilarity in my family for decades now.

“If you get cold there’s an African in the closet!”

Now, if I had just told you about my Nanny and what she said, you may have pictured Martin Luther King or someone you work with. But this is my story, a boy raised on Saturday Morning episodes of Tarzan. And so I painted for you the picture conjured in my mind when I was told I could warm up with the “African in the closet”! That boiling pot would have warmed me for sure!

In case you missed it altogether, she was saying, “There’s an afghan in the closet.” Nanny wasn’t skilled in the Queens’ English, but she did crochet a warm afghan, and her love for us was even warmer! Please know it’s not my intention to disrespect Africans, or to make fun of my Nanny - but to preserve a fond memory of her as she was.

There were a few other words for which she had unique pronunciations. So next time you see my mom or my brother…or one of my sisters, ask the question, “Do you have a koop'-un so I can buy some bat'-trees for my kam'-rey? I want to take a picture of the African in the closet!”

Just watch out for that spear!

West Wingin’ It

One morning a few weeks back I was getting ready for work, and as usual I turned on the television to check the morning news, weather and traffic. I accidentally ran across a rerun of The West Wing, airing on a cable channel. My first thought was, “I could call in sick!” I really believe that if there would have been a second episode airing, I would have found a way to stay home and watch it.

While I am a man of deep convictions, I have endeavored in this blog not to talk religion or politics, lest it become just another rant from another zealot that would go largely unread, even by those who love me most. But since I brought up the subject, I will confess that I am unashamedly evangelical in my religious beliefs and conservative in my politics. If you are not, that’s ok with me.

See, while my opinions on most things political tend to align with those of the Republican Party, I am able to see clearly why Democrats believe what they do. You don’t have to agree with somebody to understand…even appreciate their viewpoint. In fact, with few exceptions I believe most of us want the same things; to feed the poor, to clothe the naked and to bring comfort to those who mourn. The difference is in the method.

When the Star Spangled Banner or God Bless America is being played, I think it doesn’t matter whether you are Republican or Democrat…your hand goes to your heart. And if you’re like me, you pretend to have a sniffle, to mask the tears beginning to well up.

And that brings me back to the show “West Wing”. I’ve been asked, “How can you watch that show? It’s a show where the liberals are in charge. The bills they support and the policies they advocate are contrary to what you believe.” And in many cases that is true. Sometimes I just have to grimace when I hear something about the outlawing of guns or making abortion more readily available. It’s those times I have to look past the dialogue and recognize the character behind it.

See, it’s the patriotism that draws me in; the respect shown the President of our United States; the love of country depicted in the characters that chose to pursue a career in politics because of their desire to see things made better. The writing is nothing less that excellent; laced with just the right amount of wit and humor. The acting, with few exceptions, is top notch. And I often find myself sniffling to mask the tears that are beginning to well up.

This evening my next door neighbor, Patrick, brought over the whole first season on DVD for me to watch. I just finished episode three and am writing this as fast as I can, anxious to get back to “my” show.

God Bless you, Patrick…and God Bless America.

The Little Blue Pill

My e-mail box at work has this feature where it diverts junk mail into a holding box. I go into that box once every couple of weeks or so, and do a quick scan for any valid messages that may have been flagged improperly. I seldom find real messages there, and when I do it’s usually one day after the deadline for the matter being addressed.

But it’s not really the prospect of finding good messages that keeps bringing me back to the Junk Mail Box. It’s the fakes that make it all worthwhile - they can be so entertaining. There are several types of junk messages that seem to be making the current rounds:

“Your bank needs updated information”. Frankly, anybody that clicks on that one probably deserves what they get! (Did I say that out loud?)

How about the “Let’s get acquainted” message – usually from a girl with a foreign sounding name, like Ingrid or Brigitte...or Anastasia. I’m supposed to think she wants to get to know me because, even though she’s absolutely gorgeous and the life of the party, she has trouble getting men to chat with her. (Hint – it’s really a 60 year old fat guy with hair growing out of his moles.)

For some reason I get a lot of junk mail wanting to sell me a watch. These are obviously from people that have read my blogs about my Rolex Watch.

What I get the most are ads to sell me little blue pills. For those of you too innocent to know, that is referring to Viagra, a medicine to treat a malady known as ED - (look it up). Please tell me you get these ads too! Surely I haven’t been singled out.

But the funniest ones of all are the messages that show my own e-mail address as the sender. Hey, if “I” sent the e-mail I would have known it. In fact, I probably wouldn’t have sent myself an e-mail at all. I would have just told myself directly, or written myself a note.

But then I remembered the movie “Sybil”. So I guess there is the possibility that I have multiple personalities, and am trying to communicate with myself. So far I haven’t answered myself. I keep deleting my e-mails. I’m probably pretty frustrated with me by now.

But then…I’ve got to wonder…why would I want to sell myself Viagra? Do I know something I don’t know?

Time for a Social Check-Up?

Somebody once said “no man is an Island”. Actually it was the same guy that said not to ask “for whom the bell tolls”. That sounded like good advice to me, so I didn’t ask. Anyway, I’ve seen “It’s A Wonderful Life” so I know “whom” the bell tolls for. That’s how Clarence the Angel got his wings! But back to the island thing – the point is that everybody wants to belong.

When you’re a kid you see a group of kids hanging out, and you gravitate to them. Usually they look at you funny for a minute, and then invite you to play. And before you know it you’re the new 3rd baseman for the sandlot team.

But the older you get the harder it gets to fit in. In my high school we had three distinct groups - hippies, jocks and goat ropers. I was in the fourth group…everybody else. See, my hair wasn’t long and I didn’t do drugs so I didn’t fit in with the hippies. And while I had as much athletic ability as the next guy, I wasn’t on the team. And I didn’t own a horse…or a goat! So I muddled through - one of the nameless, faceless.

By the time you’re an adult there’s a name for this whole belonging thing – cliques. Cliques are socially driven, and by their nature, exclusive. That’s all well and good, as long as you’re not the one being excluded. Cliques are everywhere…like that group at work that goes to lunch together. By the way, your suspicions are well founded. They are talking about you behind your back.

And you know where these cruel and heartless assemblages seem to really thrive? At church! Now, you may be thinking, “there aren’t any cliques at my church”. That means one of two things – either you’re too blissfully ignorant of such things to notice, or you’re in the clique!

So, if you find yourself waiting for “certain” people to walk off before deciding which restaurant “everyone” is headed to; if you have to talk in code to keep from hurting someone’s feelings... you might want to do a social gut-check, maybe even a spiritual gut-check. The humility will do you good.

But don’t expect to start hanging out with me!

Rocket Science Comes to Edmond

Ever been arrested? The closest I ever got to a jail cell was in Edmond, Oklahoma in the summer of ‘71. For all I know there may still be a warrant out for me.

If you are on Broadway and you drive straight north through Edmond, you will run smack into a cemetery. Now, behind that cemetery there used to be a drive in movie theatre, The Woodstock. It was small and showed 2nd rate movies, but it was close and it was cheap, and the local kids hung out there.

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Calculating the angles and trajectories needed, factoring in the speed of the car and the length of the fuse… Rocket Science had come to Edmond...

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Across the road from the drive-in was undeveloped land. Oh, it’s all houses now, but back then it was untouched by human hands…or at least by human bulldozers. Several hundred feet back from the road was a tree line, and what we referred to as “The Black Forest”. And that’s where it happened.

Three or four of us decided to camp out in the Black Forest one Friday night. So we pitched our tent and laid out our sleeping bags, and got all settled in for the night. Then we went on the prowl. First we went to town on our motorcycles and watched a movie at Edmond’s only indoor theatre. Then we grabbed some food and headed back to the tent. But we were bored, and it was still early, and… we had fireworks!

We were innocently popping our firecrackers and shooting our bottle rockets when one of the rockets strayed over in front of the drive-in movie screen, and exploded there…big as Dallas. Cool! So, what was at first an accident became a mission. We started firing our bottle rockets at the drive-in screen like four kids without a single brain cell among us.

Then I was stricken with a flash of genius. “Let’s shoot ‘em at cars!” Yeah…I know…it took a whole kettle of stupid to come up with that one.

Being a distant cousin of Johannes Kepler, I started calculating the angles and trajectories needed, factoring in the speed of the car and the length of the fuse… Rocket science had come to Edmond! And now a car turns onto Broadway headed north. Hold it…wait a second…not yet…not yet…NOW! I lit the fuse! The rocket shot out of the bottle, straight for the car, and in what must have been the most perfect mathematical calculation in the history of science, that rocket exploded just as it hit the windshield of that car…on the driver’s side!

Now I didn’t stop to think what effect it would have on the driver of that car. That would have been grown-up thinking – something I wasn’t capable of at that time. But what happened next was something I certainly didn’t anticipate. I mean, the forces of the universe just couldn’t be this cruel. Red lights started to spin. I SHOT A COP CAR!

The cop flipped on his spotlight and aimed it at the field. Remember, the tree line is several hundred feet back. Thankfully the field had some high grass in it, and when the spotlight came close to us we hit the ground, flat on our bellies. Then we got up and ran. Running and dropping - dropping and running... it was a scene out of "The Great Escape". Finally we made it to the trees. We scurried into our tent and zipped it up. We crawled inside the sleeping bags and zipped them up. But first we hid the fireworks and matches…inside the tent! Like I said… not a brain cell among us.

The cop never found our tent. Maybe he was afraid of the evil spirits in the Black Forest. But more likely the movie manager had called him to come out and run us off…and he accomplished that task. He DEFINITELY accomplished that task!

Apparently shooting a cop car isn’t so serious if you just do it with a bottle rocket. But I won’t be doing it again. I can’t run that fast any more.

Bottle rockets are illegal in Oklahoma now. It's known as Reece's Law!

Photo courtesy of NASA

All Out War

Did you catch the movie “American Graffiti”? It’s a rock-n-roll and hot-rods flick about one evening in the lives of a bunch of high school seniors in Southern California. The tagline for the film is the question “Where were you in ’62?”

I know exactly where I was in ’62. Dad and mom had purchased their first house, a quaint little tract home in a modest neighborhood in south OKC. It was a young neighborhood and it was full of first-time homeowners and renters, with small children like my brother, my sister and me. When the school bus stopped in the middle of our block it seemed like three hundred kids poured out, ready to play in the street until dinner call.

A few houses down lived this family I'll call the Sandersons (not their real name). The Sandersons were a different breed than us…in fact, different than most. The dad was kind of a shifty-eyed type; short in stature and grimy under the fingernails. And he was always swiggin’ a brew. The mom had a cigarette butt hanging out the side of her mouth and a perpetual snarl tattooed on her face…classic caricatures! And they had three kids close to our age.

Two of them were ok I guess, although I seem to remember the oldest being in trouble all the time. But their boy, Ricky, (not his real name) was the very definition of a juvenile delinquent! This boy was trouble with a capital T. If anything happened in the neighborhood the cops knew where to look. He threw rocks at windows, kicked dogs and went out of his way to make children cry. If someone was riding their bicycle down the street, he would run out and shove a stick through the spokes…just to see what would happen I guess.

And we were frequently the butt of his mischief. Time after time one of us would run in the house crying or angry about something Ricky Sanderson had done to us. And time after time dad would tell us to just shake it off. But then one day… one terrible and glorious day, dad had enough. And for as long as I live I will never forget what happened next.

Dad asked us to leave the room because he had a phone call to make. But being in the next room didn’t make any difference. We could hear every word dad said. I expect the neighbors could hear every word dad said. In fact, the Sandersons just lived down the street. I don’t know why he bothered to use the phone at all.

Ring-Ring. “Hello.” “Sanderson, this is Kepler. Sanderson, things are about to change. Either you start controlling that boy, or we’re gonna have ALL OUT WAR. Now Sanderson, your kids are bigger than my kids and they’ll probably whip my kids. And your old lady may or may not be able to whip mine. But I’ll tell you what, Sanderson, when you come out of your house in the morning to go to work I’m gonna be standing there and I’m gonna stomp you’re a-- through the driveway! And when you get home from work I’m gonna be waiting, and I’m gonna stomp you’re a-- through the driveway! And then, just before I go to bed, I’m gonna come over and drag you out of your house and stomp you’re a-- through the driveway. And I’m gonna do it three times a day, every day until your kids quit picking on my kids!” … and he hung up.

A few days passed, and our phone rang. “Mr. Kepler”, he said…this is “Mr. Sanderson”. Have my kids been behaving themselves ok?” “Yes, Sanderson, things seem to be better”.

Not too long after that the Sandersons moved away - and the neighborhood rejoiced! I think we threw a block party and danced in the nude! Maybe not.

Have you ever heard the saying, “Truth is stranger than fiction”? Well, a few days later a guy at my dad’s work told him, “Joe, you wouldn’t believe this family that moved in next door to us….!”

Honest!