Weekend Update: All About the Dialogue

I’m writing this Monday night at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, but I’m too cheap to pay the seven bucks to buy Wi-Fi access, so I won’t be able to post this till sometime Tuesday. I’m on my way home from attending the Stone-Campbell Journal Dialogue, which met this week in Grand Prairie, Texas, outside Dallas. My layover in Chicago is almost two hours; I could have flown nonstop on American, and for a lower fare. But at the time I was booking, American was suffering from sick-outs, cancelled flights, and threats of collapse because of bankruptcy. So I didn’t want to risk not getting to Dallas on time or not getting home today at all. So I’m living tonight with the decision I made. (By all accounts, American is flying without a flaw this week.)

The Dialogue was a good experience. I value the new friends I’ve made by attending these meetings for the last several years, and I’ve gained new perspectives on the faith as well as the convictions of those in the Disciples of Christ and the noninstrumental churches of Christ.

We began the retreat with an effort to extend the possibilities and the pursuit of unity beyond the circle of 15 or so members of the national Dialogue team. So we invited Dallas-area “young leaders” from all three streams of the movement to share with us in a spiritual formation retreat Friday night and all day Saturday. We met at a Catholic retreat center in Grand Prairie, a pleasant location—clean, comfortable, and they fixed us excellent meals. It was a good experience; I felt drawn closer to God, and I made several new friends.

One of them was Brandon Groome, who accepted the invitation of the Dialogue team to welcome a guest preacher for Sunday morning this weekend. He had invited me to speak at his congregation, Southwest Christian Church in Fort Worth, and I had a great experience there.

The worship music was wonderful—upbeat and contemporary, but so well sung and played, loud but not blasting your ears off, with variety both in tempo and volume and accompaniment. I preached one of my favorite sermons, on Daniel chapter 3, and I surely received as many blessings as anyone in the service that morning.

Newell Williams, president of Brite Divinity School and
member of the Stone-Campbell Dialogue, came to
hear me preach Sunday morning. Jean and Marshall
Leggett attend Southwest Christian every Sunday.

I had the chance to meet all the church’s staff—Brandon invited me to join them for lunch after the second service. And I enjoyed the serendipity of saying hello to Jean and Marshall Leggett who have located in Fort Worth and are faithful members of Southwest Christian. (Marshall has been a friend for years; he invited me to speak at Broadway Christian Church in Lexington one Sunday night when he was preaching there, before he became president of Milligan College.)

Sunday evening we had a unity Communion service at North Davis Church of Christ—an impressive congregation with a beautiful building. Dusty Rubeck preached, and I hope to persuade him to prepare a manuscript version of the sermon for Christian Standard.

The national team met alone today, reflecting on take-aways from the spiritual formation retreat and engaging in a lively discussion about which directions the Dialogue should take, specifically next year.

The group had nominated me to lead the closing Communion service. I used the old hymn, “Just As I Am” as a framework for the time, interspersed with responsive Scripture readings, a variety of types of prayers, a reading from Isaiah 53, and the partaking of the Communion.

Most members of the team view these simple efforts at expressing unity as only an example of other such efforts that are happening among many groups in many places in the world. The steps toward understanding and discovering areas of agreement that we are taking and urging others to take seem to be significant even though they are not making headlines or involving hundreds of people.

Sean Palmer from Temple, Texas, was my
roommate the first night of the retreat.

I’m very tired as I finish this little report in O’Hare’s drafty B concourse, but I’m glad I’ve had this experience with these people.

Now home to the challenges of the week: two days in the office; attending the International Conference on Missions in Indianapolis, leaving home at about 9:00 Thursday morning; and returning Saturday night so we can be present for Tom and Kay Moll’s last Sunday of their ministry with our church. And we need to figure out what was the scratching in the wall that Jennifer heard when she stayed over with Evelyn at our house Saturday night. I don’t have time to host the exterminator this week, but I probably don’t have a choice.