Thanks to Matt Page of http://biblefilms.blogspot.com/ for his link and promise of a future review of James Tembo, Detective. Here is the actual link.

 

I have been giving this message to bloggers in my spare time to try and drum up some exposure for the film:

 

I am marketing a film made by my church in Zambia. I am asking if you could give us some help by mentioning our web page on your site. The web page is: www.jamestembo.com. Here is a link of a review of the film:  http://gregorybeamer.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!B036196EAF9B34A8!552.entry Thanks Kevin

 

Anyone is welcome to take this note and give us a link on your site. Let me know if you do so I can give you a thanks with a return link.

I am finishing up preaching for Pastor Campo here in Cape Cod. In between this revival and my Boston revival, Joan joined me and we drove down to Annapolis for Justin Bardin’s graduation. We arrived the night before and took a tour of Annapolis with Jim Bardin acting as the tour guide. We then got up early and made our way to the stadium to make sure we got parking and seating. There were 900 + graduates with about 250 of them becoming second lieutenants in the Marines and the rest becoming ensigns in the Navy. Justin will be continuing on to Harvard for graduate studies and then he will be assigned to the nuclear sub division of the Navy.

 

The entire event makes me proud to be an American and especially proud of my own father’s service to the country as a 30 year marine. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, a 1968 Naval Academy graduate, challenged the graduating U.S. Naval Academy Class of 2008 to learn from their mistakes, stand up for what’s right, even to their leaders, and hold themselves accountable for their actions. It was an excellent speech from a man who got where he is by learning from his mistakes and having others believe in him to help him overcome after his failures.

 

Afterwards the Bardin’s treated us to a barbeque along the water. There were about 50 of us including Justin’s family with grandparents, Pastor Dave and Dianne Robinson, Pastor Ron and Bobbie Lawhon, Pastor Les and Sally Uptain, my daughters Laura Michelle and Audra Lea, Justin’s economics teacher from Wickenburg and his wife, Justin’s fiancé, Patricia and her mom and friends, along with a Wickenburg woman who is president of a scholarship committee that has sponsored Justin and Justin’s sponsoring family.

 

Jim Bardin, Justin’s dad, my friend for 25 years, rose talked to us all. He expressed his pride in his son, giving glory to Jesus, for helping them to raise their son. He then complimented his son by explaining that the idea and all of the work that it entailed to go to the Naval Academy was something Justin accomplished. He maintained a 4.0 while meeting the physical requirements. He graduated 22 out of 1037. Quite an accomplishment for a young man from our church in the small town of Wickenburg.

I am having a good revival here with Tom Connors in the Boston area, Belerica to be exact. We have had visitors each night, including a young lady rapper last night. He gave me a tour of Boston Sunday afternoon and I was able to have a bowl of Boston Clam Chowder. The Red Sox are doing well while I am here including a no-hitter the other day. The Celtics managed to hold on against the Cavaliers. All is well with Boston sports, Boston folks take this serious. Edward Kennedy is in the hospital with a brain tumor. What can God do? Tom has started this church after pastoring twice before and then running the family business for 10 years. Now at age 45 he is willing to risk all for the Kingdom in another adventure of life.

 

At home in Prescott we have been having discussions about our role as evangelists. Out of those discussions I have a stronger desire to encourage our pastors and help them get the breakthroughs that we are all praying for. Watching the course of the country tells us that we need God to move in our midst.

 

I have been reading three books this week. They are Into the Jaws of Death, Team of Rivals, and Wild at Heart. The combination of books makes me want to some combination of president, soldier and adventurer. A young man came into the church service one night who seemed to be crying for finding the adventure of Christian living. I remember years ago at a Pastor Mitchell discipleship, a young man raising his hand saying that his life was becoming boring. He was 23, and while his friends were traveling the world, he was married with kids already worried about retirement and health insurance. The answer then and the answer now is make our Christian experience an adventure, because we already know it is a war.

 

Joan should show up tonight for the last service and then we are off to Annapolis for Justin’s graduation at the Naval Academy.

I will be leaving tomorrow to preach in North Boston for Thomas Connors. Joan and Audra will be following me to the East Coast and we will rendezvous with Laura Michelle at Annapolis for Justin Bardin’s graduation from the Naval Academy. His 4.0, which he has maintained throughout High School and the Academy, should place him towards the top of his class. I will then move up to Cape Cod to preach for Pastor Campo.

 

It has been a fast week. I prepared the front lawn to lay sod on Monday. Worked on the computer on Tuesday. I drove to Las Vegas to pick up Audra from college. I was able to meet her friends. Going to a college campus has a double pull on me. One pull reminds me how old I am and the other pull reminds me of my own youthful spirit. Audra let me know that I looked more like Grandpa. I could tell she was a little surprised how old I look. I then began to meet her friends. Her cute roommate who is always on her blackberry. The Venezuelan director of films, Francisco. The computer guy who is pursuing the camera in filmmaking, Brad. Peter, the guy who wants to pursue music. The only missing ingredient is purpose. I remembered my college filmmaking days. The same group of guys and gals made films with music attacking the way things were. We all walked the campus, had coffee and juice together, with Audra texting people the whole time as she made her goodbyes. Older with a touch of youngness added to me by the visit.

 

I substituted Thursday and Friday, laying the sod on Thursday evening. We went for a late night time trip to the library, downtown High School Jazz and coffee all for the sake of our not old fogy daughter. We got home at 10:00, a late night for Joan and I, but just the start of the evening for Audra. One of my 6^th grade students asked me if I was a principal. Yes, older but still hopefully young at heart.

Here is a good article talking about the Palestinian dispersal in 1948. Very simply it was not an organized Israeli attempt to force them out (actually they were working hard to convince them to stay) but the leadership of the Palestinians who were convincing and forcing them to evacuate their homes. This process took place during the 4 months preceding the war in 1948. Worth reading.

I read "The Listening Heart" by A. J. Conyers. It was complicated reading for me but full of wonderful nuggets. Here are some excerpts with short comments. Read the last comment to bring home the deep beauty of his words.

 

To be modern is to exist increasingly in a state of distraction. Our attention is drawn away from those things that have been placed in our care, away from the center of our apparent concern to something abstractly related to that concern, and thus away from God himself who is the center of all things. To be modern is not only to find ourselves thus distracted, but to justify that life of distraction.

He uses the word “attention” to focus on vocation. Vocation being something that we are called to not something we choose.

 

In many ways talk of “progressive ideas”, or “lifestyles,” or choices—notions that supposedly require “courage,” a substitute for “right and wrong”—is the most debilitating and dehumanizing of the marks of modernity. It means little more than that one must join in or be left behind. While its rhetoric is like that of Kant’s, one of freedom and courage, it actually narrows the choices of an individual to the meaningless, renouncing his moral judgment in favor of the impersonal stream of historical progress.

This reminds me of the progressive progress I experienced in Seattle years ago.

 

Talking of “power”: It has the further advantage of not having to appeal to the affections and the will of members of society. It short-circuits the cultivation of the human spirit, and compels instead the cooperation of people through the agency (at one level or another) of fear.

The delicate balance between leading and forcing.

 

He was speaking of a certain idea of a “body” made up of living members that became, in their union with one another, a new living body. All the members in this case “participate.” Their joining together does not diminish but enlarges their life. Just as it is “not good for man to be alone” it is a very good thing for people to be joined in community. Yet that which joins them together is other than that which constitutes a law or a regulation of that relationship; and when the focus shifts too severely from the dynamic which joins them to the form that regulates them, the result is more death than life.

A great description of the tension in church over religious formalism and legalism versus the liberty of the spirit.

 

We are “called” together. That is the sentiment that recurs whenever communities come into being and whenever they abide, prosper, and develop, as it were, a beautiful life together. The church is understood in that way. And it understands itself as the type of the true community. The metaphor of “vocation,” with the same linguistic root as “voice” or “vocal,” implies that greater reality to which we respond, one of a personal nature, who summons us to a time, a place, an association, a circumstance, or to whatever characterizes a given community.

Are we shopping for a church or responding to a call from God to be a part of a church?

 

Natural law that arose from and was strengthened by a natural theology gave rise to human rights that were eventually seen as secular. These secularized rights freed the individual of obligations to any natural association—the family, religion, friendships—only to hand him over to the will of his benefactor, the modern State.

Its all about me, divorce is OK if it benefits me.

 

The life-forming question is not “What shall I make of myself?” or “What do I want out of life?” It is more nearly, “how shall I enter wisely and profitably into the life in which I find myself?” It is natural, of course, that this view of life should take on a religious character….When it is expressed in religious, or even theological ways, it is expressed in terms of “vocation.” No other term so well captures the sense that we are bidden into a world that we did not make and cannot therefore fully comprehend. It resists the delusion that we are “masters and possessors” of even the infinitesimally small portion of the universe that we happen to inhabit.

To see God’s hand on me much as Joseph did despite the unfavorable circumstances he found himself in, yet he chooses to “serve” in Potiphor’s house and the prison.

 

In truth, individuals, even children in a family, feel liberated from the restraints of family and local institutions, and they are all the more subject to manipulation by markets and government agencies who often find the authority of families, for instance, to be highly inconvenient in the pursuit of a given agenda.

The destruction of the family as an end times ingredient.

 

So the dissolving of institutions once considered essential to social order (and by most people they are still likely seen in that light) often proves to aid in larger designs to “organize” commercial and governmental enterprises. And the larger aim, then, is still that of undergirding and strengthening the organized, over against the natural.

The biblical future is: one world government, one world economic system and one world religion.

 

The term “vocation” stands for all of those experiences and insights that our lives are guided by Another, that we are responding not to inert nature that bends to our will, but to another Will, with whom we might live in covenant relationship, and to Whom we will be ultimately accountable.

Vocation is linked to hearing from God.

 

Instead, attention means the overthrowing of “vain imaginations,” the disposal of a self-centered view of existence. “To give up our imaginary position as the center (of the world), to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of the soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence.”

It’s not about my will, but His will.

 

A certain school of medical thought, I understand, teaches that pain relieving medicine actually retards the body’s capacity for dealing with pain. If that is true, it certainly parallels the social effects of not facing painful truths. Society prefers the narcotic of refusing to face painful situations believing that, by refusing reality, it is affirming life. The post-Christian West has been, for half a century at least, binging on “life-affirming” philosophies.

“He whom the Son sets free is free indeed.”

 

Quoting Walter Percy: It is the century of the love of death. I am not just talking about Verdun or the Holocaust or Dresden or Hiroshima. I am talking about a subtler form of death, a death in life, of people who seem to be living lives which are good by all sociological standards and yet who somehow seem more dead than alive. Whenever you have a hundred million books about life-enrichment, you can be sure there is a lot of death around

Life on the outside death on the inside.

 

Those in Christ are “one” in that they receive differences as gifts in the overall unity. They are not “the same” in the sense of a democratic leveling that instinctively fears that differences will inspire envy or suspicion. But they are one in that they all have a transcendent loyalty. They are each called to a higher destiny, and that is altogether different from finding unity in a lower common denomination.

Responding to God’s call on our lives allows us to live the abundant life that Jesus has for us.

 

Only when members of a community understand life as a response to a large and generous world, created by a great and merciful Providence, will the possibilities of life together become more fully realized. Otherwise, without this spirit infusing and animating a people, existence is reduced to competing forces, clashing at twilight, grasping whatever is left of power, fame, and fortune, before the darkness descends….But with this spirit of vocation, this conviction that we are not, after all, our own, but belong to Another, the world opens up, becomes a place for others, and is illuminated by a spreading and abiding hope.

The author, A. J. Connors, wrote this book while dying of cancer. He died a few days after submitting the final manuscript of this book to the publisher. This last quote was read by his brother at his funeral. Reading this at the end of the book added so much weight to the words I read in the book.

I returned home from Tucson taking the long way through the Papago Reservation. Beautiful country this time of the year. Drove out to Sells and then up to Casa Grande and then through Phoenix and back up to Prescott.

 

I want to thank Chaplain Sam for linking to our film site.

I want to thank http://bobperson.spaces.live.com/default.aspx for giving us a link for our Tembo film.

I want to thank Elizabeth at arkswayministries for linking to our James Tembo web page on her interesting, prophetic, end times blog.

 

I am in Tucson preaching for Gordon Porter. He and I took a trip to a local used book store. While looking at the different books I came across a book by Hugh Huitt entitled:

"In, But Not Of". I had read his book "Blog" after I started my blog here. I was attracted to one chapter entitled: “Either a Player or a Pastor be, But you can’t be both”. The book is aimed at helping Christians have influence in the world we live in. His advice to pastors is to concentrate on being pastors and not trying to be pastor/politicians. He used this analogy: you Christian pastor, how do you feel when a Mormon uses the Book of Mormon as evidence to back up a point they are making? That is how most of American society feels when a pastor is on the air trying to make a point and using the Bible as evidence to back up their claim. Ouch!...but probably true.

 

Our job as pastors is to feed the sheep that Jesus gave us. In that calling is also the job of doing the work of an evangelist. Getting the Word of God out of the church and into the world is one of our most difficult challenges. Hugh’s point is that to present the gospel to the world as part of a political or social movement will not have the same effect as presenting the gospel as the bread of life, the only answer to the problems that are destroying men’s souls.

 

I worked for Jim Gilbertson at Biblesoft for 10 years as a working pastor. He treated me very well allowing me great flexibility in my dual lives. But, his one piece of advice to me that I knew was true was that a man could not do his best doing two things at once. Many pastors have to make the choice between being successful in the world or laboring as a pastor without getting the perks of worldly affirmation that come with normal successful living in this world. The issue becomes one of calling and vocation, something that every pastor must have, or else he just acts as a hireling, holding out for the highest bid.

I think this link will work for Gregory Beamer's review: http://gregorybeamer.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!B036196EAF9B34A8!552.entry 

I just read a fantastic review by Gregory Beamer at Stop Making Sense of our film "James Tembo, Detective". Our marketing program being instituted by the guys in Zambia and myself on this side is to try and make contact with different people about the film. One of my searches led me to a movie review that Gregory had done and I made contact with and he went the extra mile, bought a copy and gave us a review and not just a link.

 

Gregory takes an honest look at the production quality: “If you are looking for a slick Hollywood film with professional acting, this is not your vehicle”. That something special about the film allowed him to get into the film. “Regardless of the acting, sound, lighting and script, I still found myself intrigued. A bit of my history might reveal why this statement is "profound". I have a degree in film and video and generally pay attention to all aspects of a film”. The fact that he had film experience made his comments that much the sweeter. “This film should have been a fertile ground for criticism, but I found myself going deeper instead”.

 

“Perhaps it is the rawness that had me looking for shining moments rather than tearing the film apart. It may also be a change in perspective due to my own adversity (Miranda's battle with cancer)”. Gregory, searching for a reason for his being drawn into the film, concludes that it is linked to his own battle with diversity. This is the perfect description of what should happen to an American watching some young, third world folks try and succeed in putting together this film.

 

Gregory was able to appreciate the subtle depth of the Christian message in the film. “a Christian who is looking deeper at the film can learn some new information about how God works. There is something refreshing in a simplistic display of the message, especially one presented so genuinely (unlike our kabuki theater style presentations on Christian television in the United States”).

 

He lets us know that for this film to be successfully marketed without a budget will take some help from God: “I am not sure they will reach this goal, at least not through human means”. I like to think that Gregory and his actions are a part of God helping us market the film.

 

“I must say this is the first film I have ever viewed from Zambia, much less anywhere in Africa other than South Africa”. The reason you have never seen a film made in Zambia is because this is the first one. While we made this film on a budget of about $3000 another film was being made (in its final editing now) for a much larger budget. The film is "Bad Timing". Many thanks to Gregory for not just the review, but the feelings that came through with the review. Please read his full review and leave him a comment if you have a Windows Live ID.