Dances with Volvos

1 comments | Aug 3, 03:03 PM | best-of-earl | by Earl Creps

Jan and I continue to travel travel the West raising support for our university church plant in Berkeley. We basically live in our old Volvo and stop in at home in Springfield to do the laundry and pay bills a few days a month.

Today we are in Utah with Trinity Jordan at Elevation Church, having come here from visiting with Brad and Julie Riley at the Origins Community in Boulder, CO.

Along the way we visited with some family who were meeting in Wyoming, giving us the chance to drive through Yellowstone and Grand Teton (and about five other) national parks. Yellowstone was a surprise in that most of the forest looks to be in recovery from a pretty major fire. The towering trees we expected were mostly not there. The Grand Teton area, however, did look like an ancient forest.

Thankfully, seeing Old Faithful spout off and watching bison feeding in a mountain meadow made up for everything at Yellowstone.

From here we head home for a day or so, then on to Fresno for a leadership retreat with Kevin Foster at LifeBridge Community, followed by a Sunday with Dave Rumley at First Assembly of God in Danville, IL, then home for a couple days before we go back on the road to Wisconsin for several weeks.

We are meeting some great people, reconnecting with friends, and experiencing a lot of ways of doing church on the road. For all the rigors, it’s been a good ride.

I am keeping a photo journal of our travels on my Facebook Mobile Uploads.

My overall observation is that congregations with an experimental bent (those out beyond the “progressive contemporary,” Ed Young Jr-ish genre) are wrestling with the same issue: how can responsibility for ministry in our communities be shifted from programming to people? How do we make ministry personal again, changing the emphasis from organizational theory to spiritual formation? In other words, how do we help people discover what it means to be Christians.

Well, that’s enough of the heavy stuff. Here are a few other updates from our travels:

1. I turned 55 on July 22nd.

2. I ate yak in Boulder. It did not taste like chicken. The restaurant was a really cool place run by actual Sherpas, the guys who guide mountain climbers in the Himalayas.

3. I did not know that the temperature could stay above 100 degrees for so many states in a row (CA, AZ, NM, TX, OK, MO, UT, WY, KS, ID…).

4. We got approval for a mortgage on a little house on the southern end of Berkeley. Looks like we will move out this fall and continue traveling from there. This is huge for us, and totally amazing in the so-paranoid-I-ought-to-be-on-meds- California mortgage market.

5. Our GPS (“Jill”) died on us in Colorado. But when I called Garmin they knew exactly what was wrong and sent a new car charger cable to our hotel. It arrived the next day and worked great. I will buy Garmin stuff for the rest of my life.

6. My new book, Reverse Mentoring, is on Amazon now with a rank of 1,080,634 (the rankings work like scoring in golf). Awesome. But then it doesn’t ship until September 26th.

7. I found aviator sunglasses that I really liked 1/2-off (hence, dirt cheap) at a discount department store in Utah!

8. Does everyone in the West have their teeth whitened?

9. We spent several days at an altitude of 8300 feet, which made my feet tingle, but also made doing the treadmill at 4200 feet seem easy a couple days later. Context may not be everything, but it is a big deal.

10. I met Brandon Irwin at Elevation Church. He makes some of the funniest videos I’ve seen. Here’s a sample called, “Guitar Hero (Easter Style)”: