Fremont Baptist Temple’s Christmas Cantatas in the 80′s and 90′s were big.  Big everything.  Big drama.  Big music.  Big crowds.  Big hair.  Practice for the choir started in the fall on Sunday evenings a few hours before the Sunday 6pm service.  From the age of 13 I sang in the choir, first as a tenor, then sometime after puberty when I didn’t sound like Charlotte Church anymore, bass.  I loved getting to sing with guys like Steve and Bill, and contributing to the production as a whole.

Sheltered isn’t even the word to begin to describe who I was in those days, because it wasn’t just that I was actually sheltered, but I embodied my parents desire to shelter me.  That is, I never really fought it.  I so wanted to not disappoint them or even impress them at times that I did my best to tow the line when it came to all things “worldly.”

So one Christmas our church performed a production entitled, “Born to die.” The story and song told of a young man who walked away from his family’s Christian tradition to go live with his friends in “the world” and no doubt do some pretty monstrous things like listen to AC/DC  and smoke and get to 2nd base and beyond with his worldly girlfriends.  Eventually our young protaganist loses his job and has no money, which is right about the time all his friends leave him for better concerts (Poison perhaps?) and his girlfriends  go looking for hotter guys with money.

Eventually he gets to the place where he gets evicted from his apartment, and has nothing but a desire to return home for Christmas, a very few dollars, and a gold watch his grandfather had given him years earlier.  So he goes to the bus station trying to get home and attempts to talk the ticket guy into giving him a cheap ticket since he doesn’t have enough money to get across the street much less back home.  A conversation ensues and the guy ends up feeling bad for the repentant hero, and barters with him to trade a ticket home for his grandfather’s gold watch, which also happens to be the last remaining worldly possession the young man has.

I remember sitting in the choir during the rehearsals and the performances refreshed to know that I would never end up like that guy, stripped of everything because of his stupid decisions which could have been avoided had he just listened to what the Bible taught.

Years later I found myself in Christian college, still towing the line and making my parents proud of me for what I was not doing, when I became a floor leader (the rest of the world calls it an RA, but the “tattle tale” structure was different there).  One of my responsibilities was called “shadowing”.  “Shadowing” was necessary when a young male or female college student didn’t tow the line via the rules of the college, and when they got caught (if it were a big enough crime, like going to the movies or talking to the person they were dating on an unchaperoned sidewalk), they would have to go through an appeals process to stay in the school.  During the appeals process, the person being “shadowed” would have to follow the floor leader around their classes or to their rooms and they couldn’t talk to anyone else besides administration or floor leaders.

I remember “shadowing” several of those people during my junior and senior years in college, and feeling sorry for what they were going through, but also encountering a certain happiness that I was glad I would never go through that situation or be like those people, having lost many of their college friends because of one or two bad choices they made when they could have just followed God’s advice.

Then I graduated from school and moved to Atlanta to become a high school history teacher.  I really loved it, but working at a christian school I got paid enough to eat and sometimes pay the rent.  My real life had started, away from the rules and the people telling me what to do and towing the line.  I remember one beautiful September day walking on the school campus feeling like I could take on the world, having put myself in a great situation, loving the co-workers and students with whom I was constantly  surrounded.  And I thanked God I was not that guy who would sell his soul and his family out for a good time, or those people who messed their life plans up by some stupid choice to go off campus and visit Hooters or other people I knew who did bad things.  I towed the line.  I did the right things.

And then, just like that, I became that guy/those people and I would never be the same.

Marty Holman, Scott Michael, and Wesley Keegan

Baptism is a symbol.  A symbol where I as a child, a teenager, or an adult make a decision to publicly identify with Jesus Christ.  I was baptized as an older elementary student with two other guys and three other girls.  But it was my decision.  I love it that whenever we have a baptism at the FC, we have kids, teens, and adults that stand up and say, “I’m committed to this Christ thing.  Thank you Jesus for saving me!”  It reminds me of the day 25 years ago that I jumped in the water and told my church in Fremont, Ohio that…

Jesus is my Savior!

I wanted to share with you about this crazy phenomonon that’s taking place for me on Facebook.

About 6 months ago I started this new group called “I went to TCA of Fremont, Ohio.” TCA is a small Christian church/School (actual title=Temple Christian Acadamy) in Northwest Ohio where my dad used to pastor from 1975(the year I was born) to 1993 (the year I graduated).  Facebook didn’t recognize it as a school and I really wanted to connect with people from my past.  Being an avid fan of history, I recognize that “those who don’t learn from history are indeed condemned to repeat it.”

So after about 5 months, this Facebook group grew very slowly.  There were about 10 people in the group, basically hanging out and saying things like “Go TCA” and “The rules sucked” – not exactly the kind of connecting I envisioned.  I had basically written off the group as a failed experiment in relational connectivity.

Then for some reason about a month ago, I connected with some old classmates from elementary school, and I noticed that one of them were friends with another person from TCA, to which I befriended and invited them all to my failed experiment.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, “Tipping Point” tells that an idea takes off when three kinds of people get involved, and it appeared this idea had finally brought these three kinds of people:

Connectors
Mavens – (databank, information processors)
Salesman

So anyways, our group has cruised over the last month, reuniting old friends, looking at old pictures, and sharing old memories, in a way that has been so refreshing and positive for me looking back to the world I used to live in.  My dad even made his way to the group, after an hour of teaching him how..  Crazy!

I’ve been wondering the value of Facebook, and now I know.

I wrote this recently in a topic discussion of a facebook group I’m in for those who attended the church/school in which I grew up.  The topic is my dad, who was the pastor of the church, and who now pastors a church in Indiana.  So here goes:

“It’s taken me quite a bit of thought to write what I’m thinking about my dad.

One of the things I’ve learned in my 10 years of ministry here at Fellowship Church in Massachusetts is that “everything rises and falls on leadership.” (thank you John Maxwell)  We have all learned this through examples like the office of the presidency or through what happened at TCA when it closed down, not to mention how close the church was to closing.  And the reason this was, was because of poor leadership at the top.

As a pastor, one thing I know now is that at the end of the day, there is a monstrous difference between being a part of something and being the leader of something.  Someone who is a part can quickly choose not to be a part.  Or even to undermine that which leads.  The person who leads must take the ultimate blame for each failure and give praise to others for the good things that have happened.  This is what makes a leader a person of character.

So here is my dad, a 23 year old man, who walks into a situation where everyone’s older than him, yet he must lead them.  Then years down the road he has three kids (who were all selfish if you ask me), and whose wife ends up having, what we now call “Bipolar disorder.“  Of course people in the Independent Baptist movement didn’t really believe in mental disorders at that point, so it was much easier to think of her having some sort of sin on her life.  (which by the way, they were told, more than once)

So running this home, and the church, and spending time with the kids, and going to every funeral, wedding, and church event, coupled with the way he was trained as a fundamentalist (Have I mentioned that I can’t believe these people get to call themselves “fundamentalists”?) was all certainly more than I could have handled.

Then there’s the pain of friends who turn their backs on you, typically because of someone else’s wrong doing (though not always).  They get mad.  They walk away.  And years of investment in the life of friends is wiped out by someone getting pissed off.  This too is leadership, and something which every leader must deal with.  I don’t speak of these things by the way, because they are what my dad told me.  My dad never said an unkind word of anyone in Fremont.  In 18 years of being there, he still feels like this was one of the greatest times of his life.

Then the truth is that my dad was at home who he was at church.

We hear stories all the time of pastor’s kids living badly because their parents were hypocrites.  This is absolutely not true of our household.  I’m sure that Amie and Brooke and I made some poor decisions in our lives, but none of them had anything to do with the character of my dad.   In fact, when I went into college, I wanted nothing more than to stay away from the church.  Not because of my dad, but because I knew the sacrifices it would lead to.  Later on,  the example of my dad was one of the big reasons I chose to go into ministry.  We saw at the house who you saw at the church.

The smile.

The occasional drifting away look like some big decision had to be made.

The immediate desire to help someone who needed his help.

As a pastor I’ve seen a dozen men in ministry run from their families if things weren’t going well.  But not my dad.  He was called to a ministry-at home, at church, in life-and he was going to accomplish those tasks.

He still is accomplishing those tasks.  And I’m proud to say that although I have a lot of pastoral mentors in my life, there is none more important to me than him.

Thanks Martin F. Holman