Posted: 12/16/05

Some churches say they'll
sing no carol before its time

By Ken Camp

Managing Editor

The starting date and finish line for singing carols in church depend on whether a congregation follows the Christian calendar or the Hallmark calendar–and how constrained worship leaders feel by their choice.

Many churches begin singing carols immediately after Thanksgiving and sing as many favorites as possible before the poinsettias are removed from the sanctuary on Christmas.

Some churches that strictly adhere to the liturgical Christian calendar sing only Advent hymns–songs anticipating the birth of Jesus, such as O Come, O Come, Emma-nuel–until either Christmas Eve or Christmas day.

At that point, they continue singing carols until the Feast of Epiphany in early January–observed in some Christian traditions the 12th day after Christmas to mark the time when Christ's birth was revealed to the Magi.

Other churches straddle the middle ground–observing the four Sundays of Advent and recognizing the Christian calendar but not feeling tied down by it.

At First Baptist Church in Paris, Christmas carols begin the first Sunday after Thanksgiving, which usually coincides with the first Sunday of Advent.

This year, Minister of Music J.K. Weger has tried to group the carols and other elements of worship around the theme of the candle on the Advent wreath for that week–hope, peace, love and joy–building to the lighting of the Christ candle at a Christmas Eve service.

“Each year is different,” Weger noted, pointing to the different ways the church integrates various age groups into musical programs and worship services. But one constant remains: “We never sing Christmas carols after Christmas day.”

Similarly, First Baptist Church in Amarillo sings carols throughout the four Sundays of Advent, beginning with hymns of anticipation and hope and moving toward joy and celebration, said Minister of Music Lanny Allen.

Hymn selections, musical ensembles and orders of worship vary from one year to the next, he added.

While the seasonal decorations may remain on display in the sanctuary until the first Sunday of the New Year, the carols end at Christmas rather than Epiphany, he noted.

“We've come a long way just observing Advent,” Allen said.

Calder Baptist Church in Beaumont fully embraces the pageantry and symbolism of Advent, with worship leaders donning robes and stoles for the season.

“I love the colors, smells, bells and whistles of everything surrounding the season,” said Ed Wilson, associate pastor and minister of music.

Calder Church continues the celebration through Epiphany. But Wilson doesn't feel constrained to hold off on all carols until Christmas Eve–just the most celebrative ones.

“We begin the first Sunday of Advent and try to crowd in as many as we can, with medleys of two or three at each service,” he said. “We may get in six weeks of carols, if we're lucky.”

But in keeping with the church's commitment to the liturgical tradition, Wilson groups the carols thematically. He begins with the hymns of anticipation such as Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus, and each week begins incorporating into the service more of the carols announcing and celebrating Christ's birth.

“I follow a timeline as we move closer to Bethlehem,” he said.

First Baptist Church in Abilene generally follows the Christian calendar, observing the four Sundays of Advent and building from the prophetic to the celebrative, but exactly how that takes shapes differs from one year to the next, said Minister of Music Todd Wilson.

Often, the musical choices are shaped by sermon topics and worship emphases, he noted. For instance, a December Sunday devoted to a global missions emphasis includes carols such as Go, Tell it on the Mountain.

Whether the church ends its yuletide celebration the Sunday nearest Christmas or whether it continues into January varies from year to year, depending on how much emphasis Pastor Phil Christopher decides to make of Epiphany in his sermons, he added.

“Our church seems richer because so many of our members come from more diverse denominational backgrounds than many Baptist churches I've known,” Wilson said, noting many are more steeped in liturgical traditions than most Baptists.

“We also benefit from the influence of Logsdon Seminary professors here. And I find that very refreshing, constantly making new discoveries.”

Posted: 12/16/05

Unlikely allies defend 'Merry Christmas' greeting

By Andrea Useem

Religion News Service

WASHINGTON (RNS)–The movement defending Christmas as a Christian holiday has attracted some unlikely allies–religiously observant Jews and Muslims.

Their support bucks the assumption that religious minorities prefer a neutral approach to the season, desiring “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” at retail checkout lines or Frosty the Snowman over O Holy Night at public school concerts.

Motivations differ, with Jewish leaders calling retailers' omission of “Christmas” an ominous sign for a country that used to consider itself “Judeo-Christian.” Muslim leaders offer a more strategic reason–establishing firm ground on which to make their own holiday demands.

Scholars say the ballooning controversy and the unusual alliances taking shape illustrate the challenge an increasingly multicultural society faces trying to accommodate many religious expressions.

Islamic support for Christmas stems in part from religious doctrine. While observant Muslims can follow the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad in respecting Jewish and Christian holidays, they say they have little motivation to value Santa-based winter holiday celebrations.

When it comes to Christmas, “the more religious it is, the more acceptable it is to Muslims,” said Ahmed Bedier, director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations' Central Florida office.

But there also is the issue of Islamic self-interest.

Bedier's organization recently requested a school board near Tampa, Fla., include a one-day Muslim holiday alongside Christian and Jewish holidays. When the school board voted instead to scrap all religious holidays, Muslim groups–along with their Christian counterparts–protested. The holidays, at least the Christian and Jewish ones, were reinstated.

“We would like to see one standard applied in terms of recognizing religious holidays,” said Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Muslims, he said, would welcome religious Christmas displays–for example at a public library–as long as Eid al-Adha, the upcoming Muslim holiday marking the yearly pilgrimage to Mecca, was recognized in the same space.

At a recent Washington news conference, a small group of Jewish leaders spoke in defense of public Christmas celebrations, framing the issue as a struggle between a Bible-believing culture and the dark, potentially anti-Semitic, forces of secularism.

“Jews and other non-Christians have a stake in maintaining morality, based on a Judeo-Christian ethic. The disappearance of Christmas undercuts that ethic,” said Don Feder, a former Boston Herald writer who founded Jews against Anti-Christian Defamation earlier this year.

While Jews once endorsed secularism as a safe alternative to Christian dominance, today they face a choice between “a sinister secular society on the one hand, and a society of benign Christianity on the other,” said Daniel Lapin, an Orthodox rabbi and president of the Seattle-based Jewish group Toward Tradition.

But Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, dismissed the group's effort as part of a conservative political agenda. “The overwhelming majority of Jews are wedded to the separation of church and state,” said Foxman. Jewish leaders lining up to advocate for Christmas “want religion in government, setting morals.”

That some Jewish leaders are aligning with Christians, many of them evangelicals, is not surprising, said Keith Seamus Hasson, founder and chairman of the Washington-based Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

“Observant Jews tend to be more open to religious expression in the public square, just like Christians in 'red states,'” Hasson said.

“Religious America breaks down along lines of fervency of belief, more than lines of theological content.”

Christmas is a contentious time because the secular idea that religion should be kept private collides head-on with “an essential human drive to celebrate in public,” said Hasson, author of The Right to Be Wrong: Ending the Culture War Over Religion in America.

“The question is: How do you celebrate your own beliefs, while allowing others to celebrate conflicting beliefs?”

Hasson's answer is that Christians should assert their right to celebrate in public, while acknowledging other groups the same right–the very argument that Muslim leaders advance.

When it comes to public schools, where disputes over religion often go to court, administrators and other decision-makers haven't gotten the balance right, said Charles Haynes, a senior scholar at the Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center.

“There is a trend in public schools to move away from the assumption that everyone celebrates Christmas. But sometimes the move goes too far and becomes an overreaction,” said Haynes, describing schools where nativity pageants are cancelled or Christmas carols eliminated. “The irony is that by trying to avoid controversy, (educators) have often created it.”

The same might be said of the retail arena, where marketing experts say corporations don't want to alienate non-Christian or nonreligious holiday shoppers.

Many department stores have dropped explicit references to Christmas because “it was considered safer to be neutral so as not to offend any particular customer group,” said Irene Dickey, a lecturer in the management and marketing department at the University of Dayton's School of Business in Dayton, Ohio.

Some conservative Christian groups have gone beyond voicing complaints. The American Family Association in Tupelo, Miss., said it rallied 600,000 supporters to boycott Target, because the retailer didn't use “Christmas” in advertising and in-store promotions. The group has similar complaints to make against a number of other popular nationwide retailers, ranging from OfficeMax to Sears.

Posted: 12/16/05

SECOND OPINION:
The cheering of Christmas

By BO Baker

We all need the cheering of Christmas. It seems the whole world recently has experienced the heaviness of hurt, stain marks unabated, and questions that have struck in powerful forms of aftershock. Name a nation–any one will do–that has been exempt from the clash of swords, the heavy thunder of drums announcing new vistas of crime.

Yes, without question, we need the cheering of Christmas.

This passing year has been one of “saying goodbye” to many friends and loved ones of a lifetime. We grew up together with the treasury of the church around us. We have fought lest it be mocked, left in need of redefining. Far too many of our fellow travelers have exchanged the promises of God to provide “shoes of brass and iron” (Deuteronomy 33:25) for roads impassable … untenable. Millions of the fear-filled would gladly exchange their mechanical toys, their “wagons without wheels” for the promise of a cheering Christmas.

Heaven knows we need a divine visitation, a word from God. We need Jesus to make the difference–and oh, the difference he does make! It is true that the Master of Heaven and Earth does care, that he proved it by the nativity and offered his grace by way of a cross full of forgiveness. All this caught the listening ears of the World Maker, and Jesus turned to walk head-high out of the waiting place; then he brought it all tied together and loosed it on a lost world at Christmastime.

Let us call it the cheering–the cheering of Christmas.

If honest confession is “good for the soul” (and with that I most surely concur), then it is this cheering Christmas the believers most fervently desire. Pray tell, where else may we turn to find depth enough, power enough, hope enough and the strength of hands strong enough to hold us in the anxious anchoring of the soul? Come floods untamed, unsalvageable homes, rising water, the dread of family wakes has put the whole world on storm alert.

Apart from the Christian faith, there is little worth holding on to help us find a heart for tomorrow. Nothing save the holy gift of God–the cheering of Christmas.

BO Baker, a longtime Texas Baptist pastor and evangelist, has written a Christmas reflection for the Baptist Standard 30 consecutive years.

Posted: 12/16/05

DOWN HOME:
A long walk into the future

The Big Day is nigh upon us.

By the time you read this, Aaron Britt Kahler, otherwise known as “The Most Fortunate Young Man in the Universe,” will have married our oldest daughter, Lindsay Michelle Knox.

Due to the persistent demands of publishing schedules, I'm writing this a few days before the big wedding. Still, I'm looking ahead, anticipating that day.

As Lindsay and I take our stroll down the aisle, I'll be thinking–sappy daddy that I am–about other walks we have taken.

As soon as we brought Lindsay home from the hospital, I enjoyed carrying her in my arms at bedtime, walking her to sleep. Any experienced parent will tell you that's a bad idea as far as swift movement to slumber goes. But it's a wonderful idea as far as getting to know that snuggly, cuddly bundle of joy who has just changed everything.

Later, her mother, Joanna, and I took other walks with Lindsay:

Stooped over for hours, her tiny hands grasping our forefingers, we walked above her as she learned to walk herself.

We walked 'round and 'round the fountain in our favorite mall in Nashville.

Early, early one morning, I walked with her in my arms as I deposited her with friends just before her baby sister was born.

Jo and I walked into class with her on her first day of school.

We walked beside her as she learned to ride a bike and rollerskate.

One Sunday morning, I walked with her into a baptismal pool.

We walked together on Florida beaches and in New Mexico mountains.

We walked to the car after ballgames.

We walked into church together.

We walked up the stairs to her bedroom to say goodnight.

A little more than three years ago, we walked Lindsay to her dorm room as she entered Hardin-Simmons University, just a few days before she met Aaron.

Jo and I have taken many of the best steps of our lives at Lindsay's side. I'll be thinking about all those walks as she and I walk down that aisle. And I'll be thanking God for all those walks, and this one too–for blessing me with the privilege of being the daddy of a young woman of grace and faith and warmth and intelligence and humor. With her, I'd walk anywhere.

Now, God has guided her to the man with whom she wants to walk the rest of her life. Sometimes, their path will be smooth and sometimes rocky. Often, it will be winding and uphill, through heat and rain and winter chill. But the splendor of vistas they will see from that path will, by God's grace, take their breath away.

And as they walk, I'll continue praying for them, as I've prayed for them since they were children (long before I actually met Aaron): That God would guide and guard them, and bless them with joy and health. More importantly, that God would infuse purpose and meaning into all the days of their lives. That they would see themselves and their world as God sees them.
–Marv Knox

Posted: 12/16/05

EDITORIAL:
Have a Merry Christmas this year

This season may be remembered as the time when Christians went ballistic over Christmas.

In the good old days, a sign proclaiming “Merry Xmas” would send many folks huffing. The abbreviation, infamously substituting “X” for “Christ,” prompted pointed-yet-benign counter-slogans, such as “Let's Keep Christ in Christmas” and “Jesus is the Reason for the Season.”

Back then, “X” marked the spot for “Christ,” retaining the word, if not spelling it correctly. Now, many folks would gladly accept the occasional “Xmas” sign or advertisement. At least when people say the word, they pronounce it right: “Christmas.”

This year, “Happy Holidays” and “Season's Greetings” have become fighting words for many Christians. They're bound and determined other people, particularly merchants, better acknowledge the reason for this season and, by God, say, “Merry Christmas.” As you might expect, leaders of the Religious Right have jumped on the “Merry Christmas” bandwagon–or maybe they're leading the “Christmas” parade–boycotting stores that fail to post signs that include the word “Christmas” or forbid employees from saying, “Merry Christmas.”

All this isn't new, at least for people who live outside the Bible Belt. Twenty-five years ago this month, I made my first Christmas-season visit to New York City. I cheerfully went about wishing people a “Merry Christmas.” That's what folks from Borger, Dalhart, Perryton, Wichita Falls, Abilene and Fort Worth–all the places I'd spent Christmas–said this time of year. In return, I'd often receive a condescending look and a sneering “Season's Greetings” that told me I'd committed some sort of social blasphemy. Finally, I realized these people were Jews, and while I was celebrating Christmas, they were celebrating Hannukah. To them, my greeting excluded or belittled a significant event in their faith. And while I never understood why they didn't respond to my fervent “Merry Christmas” with a robust “Happy Hannukah,” I came to appreciate their religious convictions and my need to show respect.

This year feels different, however. Christians seem more on edge about “Merry Christmas.” They're cramming cyberspace with angry, in-your-face “Merry Christmas” e-mails. They're talking boycott. They're waging protests.

If you think about it, you know the tipping point in this “Merry Christmas” Fracas of '05: “Holiday Trees.” When some major stores changed the name of “Christmas Trees” to “Holiday Trees,” they pushed political correctness to its extreme yet logical conclusion–silliness.

This whole “Holiday Trees” phenomenon has been promoted by an illogical intention to avoid offending non-Christians. The reasoning goes like this: Christmas is for Christians. Many consumers are not Christians and might be offended by overt Christmas celebrations. Therefore, merchants should secularize the season so that it doesn't confront non-Christians. Ironically, key Jewish and Muslim leaders have sided with Christian protesters. They instinctively understand the importance of religious celebrations. And they affirm Christians' observance of Christmas, just as they seek protection for their own holy days.

While separation of church and state is proper (the First Amendment prohibits Congress from establishing religion and from interfering with the free exercise of religion), the separation of faith from life is absurd. Almost 400 years ago, Baptist Roger Williams established Rhode Island as the first religiously free colony in the New World. He guaranteed religious freedom for everyone, from Baptists to Catholics to Quakers to people with no faith whatsoever. Consequently, Baptists should be the first to wish others a Merry Christmas while also embodying the spirit that protects and affirms them when they wish upon us a greeting peculiar to their faith.

That said, I must admit I've been embarrassed by the behavior of many Baptists and other Christians this Christmas. While they have been correct on the point, they have been wrong in the practice of it. An angry, militant proclamation of “Merry Christmas” isn't very merry–or Christlike, for that matter.

At Christmas, we celebrate the birth of the One who came to seek and to save lost and hurting people the world over. If we observe Christmas with contentious, combative spirits, we undermine the central reason for God's Incarnation in Christ: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

–Marv Knox is editor of the Baptist Standard.

Posted: 12/16/05

Howard Payne launches new graduate degree

By Laura Johnson

Howard Payne University

BROWNWOOD–Howard Payne University–the only Texas Baptist school to offer an undergraduate degree in youth ministry–will offer a master of arts in youth ministry beginning in fall 2006.

At the annual meeting of the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, the university learned the accrediting body had granted Howard Payne approval to add master's degree programs to its degree offerings for the first time in more than 30 years.

“Howard Payne University has an extensive network of youth ministers among its alumni. Our institution has a rich heritage in youth ministry, and this new program will provide us with opportunities to expand ministry initiatives to youth in our state, nation and beyond,” said President Lanny Hall.

“This will be an innovative and practical master's degree program with great potential.”

The master of arts in youth ministry will consist of 42 hours, including courses in biblical and theological studies, as well as practical coursework in youth ministry. To make the program accessible to youth ministers around the state, residency in the Brownwood area will not be required.

The graduate program will include courses such as church and personal financial management, ministering to youth and their families, researching youth culture and communicating with youth audiences.

In lieu of a thesis, the degree will require an internship.

“One of the strengths of the program will be the balance of biblical, theological and yet very practical instruction,” said Gary Gramling, dean of the School of Christian Studies.

“We believe that youth ministers must have a good grasp of biblical teaching and a solid theological base from which to minister. Yet they also need instruction and experience in practical areas such as youth culture, legal issues, church and personal financial management, and conflict management.”

Because of the varied expectations churches have regarding youth ministers, students training for ministry to youth need an educational option with balanced content, accessible delivery and practical application, Gramling noted.

“For example, they are often expected to understand the world of teenagers, be a team player on the staff, spend time with students, plan and execute youth ministry events, coordinate weekly youth Bible study and discipleship meetings, provide recreational opportunities and even drive the church bus,” he said.

“We are excited about what this degree will mean for the university, but we are especially hopeful that it will meet a need among Texas Baptists as an educational opportunity for those who feel that God has called them to youth ministry.”

Posted: 12/16/05

Louisiana College retains accreditation

By Brian Blackwell

Associated Baptist Press

PINEVILLE, La. (ABP)–Louisiana College will remain fully accredited, school officials learned recently, after the Baptist school rescinded several policies critics said impinged on academic freedom.

The Pineville school had been on probation since December 2004 following a visit by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, during which association leaders cited concerns about academic freedom and governance.

Since then, the school has worked to address concerns and has involved administrators, faculty and trustees in the process. A decision on whether to lift the school’s probation or take other action was made at the association’s meeting Dec. 6 in Atlanta.

If SACS had not removed the college from probation, the school would have either undergone another year of probation or had its accreditation removed.

President Joe Aguillard said steps were taken during the past year that resulted in the college’s removal from probation.

Trustees rescinded a hiring policy, adopted in September 2004, that allowed trustees early involvement in the hiring process for new faculty members. Some saw the policy as trustee encroachment on the responsibility of the school president to hire faculty members.

Trustees rescinded a textbook-screening policy, adopted in December 2003, that required all classroom materials to be approved by department chairs and the vice president for academic affairs. Previous policy had given responsibility for selection of classroom materials to faculty members. The change elicited protest from faculty members and others.

The school established task forces to address the areas of academic freedom, the faculty handbook and the selection of textbooks and curriculum materials.

Trustees approved resolutions on the board’s commitment regarding accreditation findings, on undue influence of the board, on the faculty handbook, on textbook policy and on academic freedom.

The college held a faculty workshop under the guidance of a national consultant regarding the role of the faculty, board and administration in the accreditation process. A particular focus was academic freedom within a Christian institution.

The Louisiana Baptist Convention Executive Board adopted a resolution spelling out the relationship between the convention and the college.

Aguillard, who was not president when the school attracted SACS criticism, said he believes the institution will be much healthier, stronger and focused as a result of the probation.

Posted: 12/16/05

Boggs selected for Louisiana paper

By Greg Warner

Associated Baptist Press

ALEXANDRIA, La. (ABP)–Trustees of the Baptist Message of Louisiana, who last month were rebuffed in an effort to dissolve their independent board, unanimously elected conservative Oregon pastor Kelly Boggs as editor.

Boggs, 45, pastor of Valley Baptist Church in McMinnville, Ore., for the past six-and-a-half years, is also a newspaper columnist in Oregon and frequent commentator for Baptist Press, the Southern Baptist Convention's information service. He replaces Lynn Clayton, who is retiring.

Under a plan proposed by David Hankins, new executive director of the Louisiana Baptist Convention, the 119-year-old newspaper would have been merged into the convention structure as part of a newly formed communications team. The paper's trustees initially rejected the idea but then approved it a few months later as part of a package deal that would have made new Communi-cations Director John Yeats editor of the newspaper as well.

The plan to dissolve the board, which required a two-thirds vote by messengers at the Nov. 14-15 convention meeting, was defeated by an estimated two-to-one margin. Messengers who spoke against the move complained the newspaper would lose its journalistic freedom. The board has been independent of the convention since the 1960s.

The newspapers' trustees, who reportedly deadlocked earlier between Boggs and another candidate, then offered the job to Boggs.

Boggs is a Texas native married to the former Mindy Lee Slack. They have four children: Torrey Wynn, 15; Karis Leslie, 13; Hannah Lee, 11; and Parker Micah, 9.

In presenting Boggs to board members, Baptist Message Chair Larry Thompson cited his experience presenting a Christian worldview through newspaper columns in one of the nation's less-evangelized areas.

Boggs holds a master of divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. Prior to that, he earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton.

Posted: 12/16/05

Narnia movie prompts
renewed debate about Lewis

By Karen Long

Religion News Service

WASHINGTON (RNS)–At a desperate moment in the book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as the lion's tortured, lifeless body lies on a stone table, the writer pauses over the stricken child characters, Lucy and Susan.

Then C.S. Lewis turns to the reader directly: “I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been–if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you–you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again.”

Something in that passage–its directness, its knowingness, its complete lack of irony and its kind regard–conveys why both the books and their author still matter to millions of readers.

Now this children's story from the pen of a childless, middle-aged Oxford don, whose characters say “By crikers” and “Bless me,” is the fodder for a $200 million film. Narnia has entered the maw of Disney, and a whole cast of stakeholders–book lovers, Lewis despisers, evangelical Christians, Lewis acolytes, academics and cultural commentators–are twitching with dread and expectation.

“There are rooting interests,” said Bruce Edwards, a Bowling Green State University professor and Lewis scholar. “And as in all important contests, … you not only want your team to win, but win in a certain way.”

The new movie, therefore, arrives at a culturally pregnant moment.

Detractors are hoping it tanks. Some believers are praying the bliss Lewis found in Christianity–he was the last century's most famous convert from atheist to Anglican–begets a new come-to-Jesus momentum.

Both outcomes are unlikely, but anxiety about the place of religion in public life has fired up the chattering classes.

No less an institution than the Times of London describes the movie as a referendum on Christianity, while “C.S. Lewis Superstar” blazes across the cover of the current issue of the evangelical magazine Christianity Today.

Meanwhile, the New Yorker derides Lewis as a fellow who took “a controversial incident in Jewish history as the pivot point of all existence, and a still more controversial one in British royal history as the pivot point of your daily practice.”

Pity the man baptized Clive Stapes Lewis, who, like his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, was a tweedy, pipe-smoking Oxford professor, literary critic and lover of old myths.

More than a half-century later, with Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings pressed into cinematic form, it is Lewis' turn. But unlike Middle Earth, the Narnia that Lewis drenched with Christian themes has propelled its creator smack into the culture wars, circa 2005.

At least that's the opinion of Alan Jacobs, author of the new book, The Narnian.

“Disney is marketing separately to the Harry Potter people and to the Christians who love C.S. Lewis,” said Jacobs, a professor at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill.

“This arrives on the heels of the contention over The Passion of the Christ, the worry around the role of evangelicals in the last presidential election and the furor over intelligent design. It makes it hard to talk about Lewis.”

The divisions are so pitched, the movie soundtrack comes in two versions–rock-tinged music for the secularist and Christian-influenced tunes for the believer.

So far, the clear loser is Macmillan Publishing, which calculated 20 years ago that Lewis had sold about as many books as he ever would. So HarperCollins stepped in to buy up the copyrights. Today, it owns 170 different titles from and about the titan of British letters.

The publishing house expects Mere Christia-nity–a paperback edition of radio essays Lewis dashed off while riding the train into London–to ring up more than a million sales since 2001. And the seven books of The Chronicles of Narnia, available in 35 languages, should surpass the 90 million mark by year's end.

HarperCollins has no monopoly, however. Wiley has rushed to print 50,000 copies of C.S. Lewis and Narnia for Dummies in the series' familiar yellow-and-black cover.

Behind the commercial whirl are the spiritual and intellectual ones.

Philip Pullman, an arch anti-Narnian, has called the chronicles loathsome and their emphasis on an eternal life in Narnia to be a form of death-dealing. Yet Pullman, creator of the compelling children's Dark Materials trilogy, begins his story with a girl in a wardrobe.

Likewise, elements of Lewis are evident in the work of J.K. Rowling, who has acknowledged the influence, and Neil Gaiman, who has satirized him brutally.

Lewis has amounted to something of a thorn in intellectual history for decades now–partly because his contributions were formidable in two fields often at odds–literary scholarship and Christian apologetics.

Lewis' direct, accessible and winsome writings about Christian questions landed him on a 1947 cover of Time magazine, a year before he began scribbling a few pages about Narnia.

Born into a prosperous Belfast Protestant family in 1898, little Jack was a clever and precocious boy, deeply attached to nature, who spent hours alone with books.

The major hemorrhage in his life occurred when he was 9. He was reading Paradise Lost and jotting his reflections on Milton in a diary that summer when his mother died of cancer. His father shipped him off to a British boarding school, a place of beatings and rages so hideous the headmaster eventually was carted off to an institution for the criminally insane.

In counterpoint to those grim months were the weeks spent in a refuge that Jack and his older brother, Warnie, called “The Little End Room.” The two escaped for many hours tucked far from adults in their Belfast home sanctuary. Part of their play featured an imaginary world called “Boxen,” for which Jack–smitten by Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows–provided the talking animals.

In 1944, just as Lewis was becoming famous in America, Macmillan Publi-shing asked the author for an autobiographical sketch. The professor responded that he had no interest in the “rot about 'self-expression.'”

But Lewis finally gave in, tossing off a paragraph that he assumed Macmillan would edit: “I gave up Christianity at about 14. Came back to it when getting on for 30. An almost purely philosophical conversion. I didn't want to. I'm not the religious type. I want to be let alone, to feel I'm my own master; but since the facts seemed to be the opposite, I had to give in. My happiest hours are spent with three or four old friends in old clothes tramping together and putting up in small pubs–or else sitting up till the small hours in someone's college rooms talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics over beer, tea and pipes. There's no sound I like better than adult male laughter.”

The nature of that conversion, at the elbow of Tolkien and another friend during a long walk in 1931, is important to Doris Donnelly, theology professor at John Carroll University.

“For him, conversion was a struggle,” she said. “That carries a note of authenticity for me. He wasn't knocked from his horse; he wasn't visited by angels. His conversion happened slowly, thoughtfully, and carried forward throughout his life.”

Lewis' relation to some evangelicals remains uneasy. Lewis' years were well-marinated in drink and tobacco, and his ecstatic, late-life marriage to a divorced American was accomplished in defiance of the Anglican bishop of Oxford.

Still, no less a fiery fundamentalist than Bob Jones–who once described Billy Graham as a limb of Satan–met Lewis and pronounced him a Christian.

Jacobs credits the writings of Lewis, alongside the Graham crusades, for bringing the various wings of Christianity closer.

Nearer the concerns of everyday life, however, are the many thousands of bereaved readers comforted by Lewis' beautiful book A Grief Observed, written in the wake of his wife's cancer death, just four years after their marriage. Joan Didion, no devotee of the Christian afterlife, refers to it in her own The Year of Magical Thinking.

One woman who had a challenging childhood mentioned in a discussion that reading Lewis' book The Screwtape Letters was the first time she can remember wanting to be good.

Such testimony makes sense to Lewis admirers. Detractors see Narnia as the man's escape from a pinched Christianity. One who scoffs at that interpretation is Bruce Edwards, the Bowling Green professor who maintains a well-regarded Lewis website.

“Lewis was profoundly influenced by Tolkien, who saw fantasy not as escape, but a recovery,” Edwards said. Lewis had a rare capacity to write in a way that made goodness desirable, even radiant. Arguments about the uneven Narnia books–whether they were imperialistic, racist or sexist–showcase the preoccupations of the times.

For the long haul, folk as diverse as Mormon theologians and John Updike will continue to claim Lewis as their own.

Karen Long writes for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland.

Posted: 12/16/05

Narnia movie echoes books' themes

By Ted Parks

Associated Baptist Press

Whether viewers find a distinctly Christian message in the new movie The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe depends on whether they found one in the C.S. Lewis fantasy novel it's based on, the movie's creators insist.

“The film is the book,” said Micheal Flaherty, president of Walden Media, the company that partnered with Walt Disney to make the movie.

“We wanted to make sure that we successfully captured everything that was there in the book. (For) all the reasons Christians love the book, they're going to love the film as well. This is something that's going to be universally adored.”

Scholars debate the overtness of Christian themes in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as well as the other Narnia books.

“Lewis was a Christian, and his story treats events that are central to Christianity,” said Alan Jacobs, professor of English at Illinois' Wheaton College.

“But you do not have to see and understand the Christian message to enjoy the story,” added Jacobs, author of The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis.

Like its textual source, the movie tells the story of the Pevensie children–two boys, two girls–sent to live in the English countryside in World War II to escape the London blitz. Bored guests in the home of an old professor, the children accidentally discover that, brushing aside the clothes in a wooden wardrobe, they can magically enter a mythical world called Narnia.

As war rages in the nation they leave on the other side of the wardrobe, the Pevensie kids find themselves swept into yet another epic struggle inside Narnia, whose creatures groan and shiver under the domination of a witch who has usurped the throne and frozen the land in an unending winter. Their participation in Narnia's drama will test the family of four children as they battle foes from without and betrayal from within.

And “epic” is the operative word for the new screen version of Lewis' beloved novel.

The new movie's director, Andrew Adamson, underscored the large-scale perspective he attempted to give the film version of Lewis' novel.

“This is the story about four kids, disempowered by the war in their own world, World War II, who enter this land where they're not only empowered but they're ultimately the only solution to war in that land,” Adamson writes in a Walden Media educator's guide to the movie. “We're taking the story of a family and exaggerating it to the level of the battle between good and evil.”

Accompanying the heroic fight for justice on the battlefield in the Lewis tale is another key theme, experts say–the power of redemptive sacrifice.

“It's really a twofold story–the rightful king of Narnia returns to re-establish his kingdom and bring peace; and that same king sacrifices himself to save a traitor,” Jacobs said. “So kingdom and salvation are what the story is all about.”

In the movie, the good laws of Narnia cannot ignore wrongdoing. Betrayal demands justice, and justice a penalty. But the price can be paid by someone willing to die in a wrongdoer's stead.

And in the magical world of Narnia, death itself is powerless against unselfish love.

“The deeper magic is all about redemption, it's all about reconciliation, it's all about healing, and it's all about … death being swallowed up in victory,” said Stanley Mattson, president of the Redlands, Calif.-based C.S. Lewis Foundation.

“The film just has an extraordinary range of messages that deal with … how we are to engage evil in ways that really are redemptive and ultimately promise victory in the best sense of that word.”

Posted: 12/16/05

On the Move

Byron Ayres has resigned as student minister at Mildred Church in Corsicana to serve a church in North Carolina.

Lance Bishop to First Church in Buffalo as student minister.

Mickie Chitwood to Ephesus Church in Jewett as music minister.

Frank Dudley to First Church in Harlingen as minister of missions and administration.

David Duggan to Lane Prairie Church in Joshua as minister of music.

Ben Griffin to Mildred Church in Corsicana as music minister.

Wade Hood to First Church in Harlingen as pastor from First Church in Hope, Ark.

James Jackson Jr. to First Church in Munday as pastor from Field Street Church in Corsicana, where he was minister of community ministries.

Peter Marshall to Calvary Church in Harlingen as pastor from Bella Vista Community Church in Bella Vista, Ark.

Greg Martin to Mobberly Avenue Church in Longview as minister of business administration from First Church in Grand Prairie, where he was minister of education and administration.

Louis Neyland to Ephesus Church in Jewett as associate pastor/youth minister.

Bill Oliver to First Church in Seagraves as pastor from Central Church in Blooming Grove.

Robert Whitefield to Proctor Church in Proctor as pastor.

Posted: 12/16/05

Baptist women knit scarves,
bake cookies for exotic dancers

By John Hall

Texas Baptist Communications

ROUND ROCK–Cindy Stokes is making the Christmas season a little warmer for a group of women who work in sexually oriented businesses.

Stokes joined several of her friends at Central Baptist Church in Round Rock to participate in the Magdalene Project, an effort where volunteers knit scarves for women working in 'gentlemen's clubs' in the area.

Stokes originally committed to create 25 scarves, but found she could not stop there. After she used the budget she allowed herself, she wanted to do more.

Other people connected to the church who could not knit gave her some more money to buy more supplies, and she continued putting together scarves.

In all, she created 33 scarves, with each taking as long as two hours. She prayed over each one after making it.

“I was thrilled,” she said. “It was something I enjoy doing. It blessed me.”

Volunteers put together about 400 scarves that will be paired with a batch of homemade cookies and given to exotic dancers. For some of the women, this will be the only gifts they receive for Christmas this year.

“How could you not want to help these women?” she said. “Many of them are young. They're like babies. They're someone's little girls.”

Stokes wants to connect these women with a relationship with Jesus. Each scarf brings a silent message that someone cares for each woman, she said.

“It's exciting because I hope every time I knit a scarf I see it again,” she said. “I see it in my church.”