Matt Skillen's Blog
In the second installment of a four-week message series titled Chain Breaker, the message “God With Us” examines the boundaries and structures God established with the Israelites to reorient them as God’s people.
The audio file embedded below was recorded at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church on February 10th during the 11:00 AM worship service.
To learn more about St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, visit our website at: http://stpauls.faith.
This week at St. Paul’s UMC in Elizabethtown we started a new sermon series called “Chain Breaker,” which over four weeks will explore the stories in Exodus and Joshua to see how the Israelites were liberated from slavery to become a light to the rest of the world. This message examines the calling Moses received from God at the burning bush.
It was family worship week at St. Pauls. I love hearing all of the background noise from the younger worshipers in the room. However, I think the Rev. Dr. Joe Skillen did a much better job at family worship with a cool sermon bingo game he and his staff devised. You can hear his sermon here:
The sound of the saw cut through the silence in the large garage. An air compressor clicked on as the punching sound of nails from a pneumatic nail gun joined two pieces of pine together in a perfect right angle. I watched this wizardry as a young boy in my grandfather’s workshop. He was a master craftsman; I believed he could build anything.
Grandpa never used plans. He just knew how things were supposed to fit together. He could cut lumber with laser-like precision, and with what appeared to be very little effort he could create a masterpiece. I remember he once turned a stack of excess decking lumber into a set of Adirondack chairs. From my eight-year-old perspective, the transformation was nothing short of miraculous. Where one person saw unneeded lumber, Grandpa saw great potential, and I always admired this about him.
Humanity is God’s greatest creation. He made us all unique in His own image. While we enjoy this unique connection with God, we fall short of God’s expectations through our sins. Romans 8 says “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” However, by grace the entirety of humanity has been reconciled with God through Christ’s great sacrifice.
In the candidacy guidebook Answering the Call I read of John Wesley’s definitions of the three aspects of grace. These three aspects (prevenient grace, justifying grace, sanctifying grace) are described in the book in relationship to a house. (I’d like to go into more detail of this particular metaphor in another post. Trust me, it’s worth the wait.) While the illustration of a house is useful in understanding Wesley’s aspects of grace, I think the craftsman is a more salient comparison when discussing humanity’s need for divine grace.
Prevenient grace is the grace that “surrounds us” and “precedes us.” No matter where we go in life, no matter the decisions we have made, God goes before us and meets us at every turn in our lives. Even in times of chaos or aimlessness, God sees our potential, he knows each name and he has plan for each life—much like the craftsman sees a masterpiece in the raw materials.
For a craftsman to do his work the raw materials must go through a significant transformation. Saws cut and form lumber and the pieces are joined together to make new shapes. With each cut and adjustment, the craftsman brings the masterpiece together. Similarly, justifying grace is the grace that is present in spiritual growth. In the moment a person recognizes sin in his or her life and trusts that he or she is forgiven, he or she is once more aligned, or justified, with God. These moments, as we are cut and formed, are challenging to say the least, but these formational experiences are truly life-changing. No more are we an excess pile of lumber. A new purpose may be revealed in our personal transformations with justifying grace.
True craftsmanship is revealed in the use of smaller tools. As the craftsman sands the wood to a smooth finish and adds etching or carvings to complete the new piece, character and detail emerge. Sanctifying grace, in similar ways, reveals more of God’s image in us, and God becomes more visible in us. Because we have been forgiven, we forgive more freely. Because He is generous to us, we are generous with others. When one is able to tap into God’s beautiful sanctifying grace he or she creates a cycle that allows him or her to be more Christ-like to those he or she comes into contact with, which could encourage others to be gracious to those they meet too.
The fine sawdust hung in the light pouring in through the workshop window. Two beautiful chairs stood in the middle of the room where a stack of decking wood used to be. Grandpa smiled and asked me to take a seat. As I ran my hands across one of the arm rests, I thought earnestly about the day that I would build my own chairs because I now knew it was possible.
In July 2018 I was invited to share a sermon at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church. My talk on the foundational connection between obedience and trust, can be accessed below.
I can remember very clearly the day I explicitly used the scientific method to make a decision, and the stakes were very high.
I was a seventh grader at Davis Middle School in Columbus, OH. Mr. Verachuck was my faithful and patient science teacher who, like Mr. Jarzab the year before, guided us through the scientific method as we completed a number of experiment-based lab assignments.
Mr. Verachuck had a long room in the middle of the seventh grade wing. The tables were set up in rows, and I can remember inquiry being at the center of every lecture, every lesson and every learning opportunity every single day. The scientific method was the foundational concept we would apply to the questions and mysteries we encountered in class.
A project that I still think about nearly 25 years later is the egg box project. The set up was simple: Using a shoebox and any other materials you like, design a vehicle that, when dropped from thirty feet in the air, will protect three large eggs. The execution, however, wasn’t that simple. We worked in teams of two, and my partner and I tried several different approaches before we landed on a simple design using insulation foam. In all of our test cases, the design held up. On the day of the drop, however, only two of our three eggs survived.
There is a great deal of heat in the launch of a new concept. Though our trial runs of dropping our egg box from the top of the locker bays and the second floor window of my house were successful, the ultimate drop from the Genie lift 30 feet in the air in the domed gym at Davis Middle School was nearly a complete failure. To this day I still wonder how we could have improved the box to keep all three eggs safe. Obviously, I have never let this episode go. It feels incomplete. And, I have certainly used this experience to make better decisions when working with fragile materials (or transporting eggs from the grocery store).
Learning can do that. It can help you leverage failure in such a way that makes a positive, lasting impact. While two of the eggs didn’t survive, I had just worked on an extensive project that allowed me to develop and test a series of hypotheses through data collection, revision and trial and error. And that still resonates with me today.
Fast forward a few more months. I am still in seventh grade. Mr. Verachuck is still my teacher. After a long day at school I checked in with my dad via telephone once my younger brothers and I were safely off the bus and in the house. At the conclusion of the conversation he said, “Hey, listen I have two tickets to tonight’s Michigan/Ohio State basketball game. I can only take one of you, so try to sort that out before I get home.”
Could this be true? My dad had two tickets to the biggest basketball game of the year and one of us was going with him. I knew immediately my youngest brother would not be interested, so I asked him first.
“Nah.” He said simply while playing a video game.
Joe, my middle brother, on the other hand, would be a little more difficult to persuade. I really wanted to go to this game.
“Hey, Joe.” I began. Joe was shooting hoops in the driveway. Though he was younger than me, he was far superior in all matters of athletics. I can count on one hand the number of times I have ever beat him in a one-on-one a game.
“Dad has a couple of tickets to tonight’s OSU game. He asked me to work it out on who would go with him.”
I let the statement rest in the air for a moment. He was nonchalant, but I could tell he was interested.
“Cool.” Is all he said.
Waiting for just a brief moment I said, “Flip you for it.”
“Sure.” He said.
A coin was used to make several decisions in my childhood. It was a fair and impartial way to decide who would sit in the front seat on long trips, who would get the last can of Pepsi in the fridge, or who would clear the table after dinner. No greater decision was made in a given day than “heads or tails?”
As the words “Flip you for it?” left my mouth I was reminded that I had been on quite the cold streak lately with flipped decisions. I decided that such an important choice between heads and tails needed to be studied further.
I scrounged around my room to find a quarter, a dime and a nickel and ran 100 test flips to see how often heads and tails appeared with each coin. In my test, both the quarter and the nickel were almost right at 50/50. It was uncanny given my recent string of bad luck. One would think with these results I would have had a more even record. The dime, however, had a slight edge to tails.
Later that evening when dad got home he asked who was going to the game. I shared with him that Joe and I were interested in going and we agreed to flip for the chance to go with him.
“Let’s find a coin.” He said.
“Here’s one.” I said, providing the dime from my test.
“I’ll call it.” I said.
Dad flipped it up int he air.
“Tails!” I called out with what sounded like great confidence.
The reveal from the flip showed tails.
I have few memories from the game. I remember watching Chris Weber from Michigan land a 360 dunk early in the first half that sucked the air out of the arena, and I am pretty sure Ohio State lost the game. However, I clearly remember the process I used to change my fortunes, to finally win a flip decision.
Thursday, May 24th was a big day in the Skillen home. Wyatt, after going fifteen months without a haircut, walked into Purify Salon in Elizabethtown, PA and had about eight inches of hair cut. The transformation was simply remarkable to watch–but it wasn’t just a visual transformation Rebekah and I witnessed. Our boy is growing up right before our eyes and it was apparent on Thursday.
As Wyatt began avoiding haircuts we thought we were entering another “phase” in Wyatt’s life. But what may have started as a phase became a mission when about nine months after his last haircut a young girl Wyatt’s age, Sophia, lost a brave and courageous battle with brain cancer.
Sophia and Wyatt first met when they were very young. Sophia’s mom and Rebekah both attended the same support group for new mothers. Her passing was very difficult for so many involved, and several people close to Sophia’s family sprang to action in the most wonderful and beautiful ways. Moms from the original support group, for instance, signed up to serve meals at the Ronald McDonald house in Hershey, PA–the organization that supports families like Sophia’s who need to remain close to loved ones in the hospital.
Rebekah and I didn’t know how Wyatt would mourn, but we knew he would likely find his own call to action, and he did through the Pantene Beautiful Lengths program.
Here is Wyatt’s story.
Grandma Jessie Skillen passed away recently. She was 90 years old.
Jessie Skillen was a registered nurse by trade. She was one of many women trained in the United States Nurses Corps. Her career included working years for the Red Cross and in rural nursing homes across the state of Kansas. Her service to her community was nothing short of remarkable. As a leader in her community she knew that personal connections, the capital you build in your friends, neighbors and your family, is by far the greatest asset you can have in this life.
After her retirement she became a full-time grandmother to ultimately 21 grandchildren and 21 great-grandchildren. Keeping up with so many people connected to these relatives turned into quite a task when you realize that all 21 grandchildren, their spouses and their children were strewn far and wide across the United States.
She was the only grandparent of mine who was taught how to type, and the only one who ever purchased a computer and an internet connection. This is no small thing giving my grandmother’s location. She and my grandfather lived in the small rural town of Norwich, KS–located about forty miles west of Wichita. This town had no stoplights, very few paved roads, not a single coffee shop, but it had one company in the region in the early 2000s that was willing to sell dial-up internet service, and I believe Grandma Jessie was one of their first customers.
As an new internet user Grandma loved to communicate with us in her family via email, but she didn’t share much original content. Rather, she shared a stream of chain emails. Often including an uplifting poem or Paul Harvey story followed by the explicit instructions to “forward this message to ten people you love.” So, you counted yourself lucky, most of the time, to be included within the number she thought should receive the new forwarded message.
But Grandma really became the connected communicator that I most fondly remember when the internet became more social. The advent of Facebook only amplified her connections to those of us who were fortunate to know her. I can remember the moment grandma showed me how dynamic social media had become. It was 2009 and many of my siblings and cousins had made the trip home to Norwich for Christmas. My two younger sisters, still in high school in Miramar, FL at the time, came in through the front door and were immediately approached by Grandma who had all kinds of questions about their new boyfriends they had just posted pictures of a few weeks earlier. My sisters were shocked. How did grandma know so many details about their personal lives? Easy. She was on Facebook.
More than anyone in my family at that time Grandma Jessie understood the value of connectedness between people and among communities. She invested in each of her grandchildren and connected with each in her own way through the many different platforms we used through our computers and smartphones. In this way, grandma was a true digital humanist.
I have one of those basements in my home that, if one looks closely at the pockets of junk possessions stored on shelves and in the corners, stories will slowly emerge.
The other night I found the trombone I played through middle school and high school. The case is decorated with bumper stickers that I collected throughout my four years playing in the Maize High School marching band, concert band, jazz band and pep band.
As I looked at the stickers I laughed as I remembered the different stories behind each addition. And I dwelled briefly on how each sticker represents some attempt to outwardly define my personality and shifting sense of self-expression.
Take for instance these three stickers on the bottom of one side of the case. I was never really particular about my shoes in high school. I wore vans sneakers because they were wider than most than most athletic shoes and they were really durable. I wasn’t a skateboarder, but I clearly didn’t mind if others thought I was.
The Safety Orange sticker was added as if to say, “Yeah, I like local music.” Safety Orange was a band headed up by the mythic Steve “Gooding” Gooding. I “worked” for about six months with a Wichita band called Shaft. Safety Orange and Shaft played a number of shows together in that time including a CD release party for Safety O at The Big Fish–a club that was recently demoed to make room for the new Intrust Bank Arena in downtown Wichita.
When the history of Wichita hockey is written (note to self: begin drafting a proposal to write the complete history of amateur and pro-am hockey in Wichita, KS) Triple Crown Hockey will likely be listed in the footnotes somewhere. In the mid-1990s hockey was really taking off in the Air Capital. Ray Cody, a local businessman and proponent of youth hockey, launched a roller hockey league in a spare parking lot at the Wichita Municipal Water Authority building. This was a matter that eventually came before the Wichita City Council because it was unclear if Ray even had permission to set up shop in the spare lot.
Before the city of Wichita got involved Triple Crown Hockey, a national youth sports organization hosted a weekend-long tournament that attracted teams and players from entire central plains region. What was cool about this tournament is that the local teams from Wichita had a chance to really compete with players from other parts of the country and we found that we could actually hang.
The other side of the case seems less exciting, but I’ll note the KICT 95 sticker. I know I went through several “favorite” radio stations in my youth, but T-95 still stands as one of my favorites that I listen to whenever I’m back home. I remember once calling in to the station–OK so I called in more than once–to play “name that tune.” I lost to another caller, but the thrill of hearing my voice on the radio was simply electric.
Ghosts exist. I don’t necessarily mean floating figures stuck somewhere between life and death haunt us mortals. But the ghosts of our past do amble around us, and it is interesting to take a closer look to see who we have become.
The idea of getting up on a Saturday morning to attend a writing workshop doesn’t appeal to most people, but most people are not members of the Elizabethtown College Business Department Living/Learning Community. I’d like to thank the Business LLC for inviting me to share a little bit about language and writing today, and I hope everyone finds something of use in today’s workshop.
I once served as a writing tutor for high school students. One student stopped by the writing center in my school and asked for consultation on a writing project she was working on. We made small talk while I read her work. She planned on becoming a veterinarian. I made several recommendations and offered to help her later if she needed it. To my offer she said, “That’s OK. This is the last English paper I’ll be turning in before heading off to college. Thank God I’ll be done with this nonsense.”
“Won’t you need to continue working as you go through college and start your career?” I asked, knowing that even veterinarians need to know how to write.
“No,” she said. “I’ll have a secretary for this stuff someday.”
With that in mind, it is important to note that I later learned the student failed to gain admission into veterinarian school on her first try… and then again on her second try. On her third attempt she was finally admitted to a school in the Caribbean–not an American institution. While at college, however, she met a professor who was able to communicate the importance of written communication to her and tutor her on academic writing.
In our pre-college education we were all taught to write in the same way. In just about every high school and middle school classroom students are guided through a personal essay writing process and an academic research paper writing process. If you are able to master these two types of writing during high school It is our understanding that when you decide to attend college you are saying, “I have a desire to be a better writer. I want to move beyond the basic writing I’ve always done.”
I don’t know if you will ever have a moment where writing becomes more important to you, but I do know that we often encounter a number of challenges as we try to improve our craft. What seems unknown or mystical about academic writing to you?
In my experience, I often hear the following answers to this question:
The English language derives from a variety of Germanic, Romanic and Latin roots. If you were to study the history of the English language you find that at certain points in the history of England the language spoken by the common people, now the most widely spoken language in the world, nearly collapsed several times. But it survived and is still growing rapidly throughout the world.
The words in our language serve 8 different roles:
These different parts of speech can be assembled to build sentences. The 10 patterns in the English language that codify nearly 98% of all sentences in the English language are:
When you understand how these pieces are parts can bring together the simple sentences, you also begin to understand how other parts can be added correctly. With practice you begin to build confidence with the language and your communication across all platforms begins to improve dramatically.
The best book I have read lately on academic writing is They Say; I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing by Graff and Birkenstein. Now in its 3rd edition, They Say, I Say shows how the parts and pieces of a well-written essay can come together for just about any college-level writer… or his or her professors.
Graff and Birkenstein give equal emphasis to the development of each critical section of an essay, the introduction, the body and the conclusion. They also provide a roadmap, of sorts, for writers to follow when making decisions about their writing.
The book illustrates how a writer can reasonably and persuasively respond to other writers without glaring and obvious bias. Take for example this segment from Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous letter he wrote in response to his fellow clergyman critics while he was held in a Birmingham jail.
You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.
In this one segment, King accurately summarizes what his critics convey in their letter to him. His response is to appeal to their common sense in saying that while the critics are not pleased by the demonstrations being carried out in their town, they should be equally displeased by the conduct that has initiated the demonstrations.
This is clearly a sensitive and important topic to write about and King’s response is one of his more well known pieces of writing. Writing about important, and sometimes divisive, topics with multiple points of view may be part of your college writing experience. The template below shows some moves one can make when one begins to talk about a controversial or divisive topic.
A good example of this approach being used in the real world can be found just about everyday on websites like the Huffington Post. Consider this example on a timely issue, how collegiate athletes should be better compensated. And take a look at this opinion piece posted to the Cedar Rapids, IA Gazette asserting that college athletes are already paid enough.
This is a big deal. Have you heard about the scandal that surrounds top executives at the Adidas company and major college basketball programs?
What if you worked in a professional capacity (accounting, marketing, finance, etc.) for a company tied to college athletics and your supervisor assigned you the task to write a response to the New York Times article linked above? Could you do it? In this scenario, I ask that you partner with one other person seated next to you to write a response to the article as representatives from a particular discipline (i.e. accounting, marketing, finance, and the like) and a specific company or organization (i.e. Nike, Under Armor, Octagon Talent, Gatorade, or the University of Kansas). Write a response that might appear in an opinion section of a news website discussing a point of view on how college athletes are paid and what should/could be done about it–if anything at all.
Use the template to help you get started, but apply some creative license to make the rhetorical “moves” work in your favor.
On of my lasting impressions that I hope to leave is that your writing does matter. You never, ever know how the things you write will impact your legacy. I have seen throughout my short life the amazing insights left behind by our most prominent and most forgotten historical figures. The handwritten notes of John F. Kennedy, the etchings of a final thesis in the rock walls of the Tower of London.
I was once walking down the aisles of a grocery store back home in Wichita, KS and a woman stopped me. She said, “Are you Lynn Skillen’s son?” I was a bit shocked by the question–my dad hadn’t lived in Kansas for at least 15 years. “Yes, I am.” I said. Then, with her hands shaking, she fumbled through her wallet to find a small note written in my dad’s handwriting. It was simply a word of encouragement in a very rough time in this woman’s life. She wouldn’t let me leave the store without knowing how much that note meant to her.
Take time to write every single day. The cognitive/tactile connections that need to exist in order to make the action of writing possible are quite complex and they can only be strengthened through routine practice. The more practice time, or mental reps, that you give to yourself will only strengthen your efforts to become a masterful communicator among a population of struggling writers.
Keep a journal, sketch ideas for your academic projects on a napkin, type an email to your parents. They will love you for it.
The most important writing I do every day are the handwritten notes I send to my grandmother who recently lost her husband to Alzheimer’s disease. Watching the slow, methodic and inexplicable decline of a person’s cognitive abilities has a lasting effect. She writes me everyday in order to strengthen the cognitive connections that remain for her.
You have everything to say. Your experience is unique compared to the person sitting next to you. Your perspective, if honed and properly researched, can be the very explanation that someone needs to solve a problem or see a better solution.
Writing takes time, and it is time well spent.
The key figure caught up in a Project Veritas exclusive on CNN’s coverage of President Trump, a series named American Pravda, is a senior producer named John Bonifield. As the story has unfolded online and in pockets of the mainstream media, I find myself laughing a little.
John and I first met in our sophomore year of high school in Maize, KS. My initial impression of John at that time was that he was smart. School came very easy to him, and he was very well spoken. We enrolled in drama classes and performed in a couple of shows together. We were acquaintances, maybe friends, for a short period of time. After high school our paths never crossed again.
John was a proud member of the school newspaper staff. He had a keen sense for journalism even in high school and it certainly doesn’t surprise me that he is a producer for a major cable news organization. I remember John once wrote an editorial for the school newspaper encouraging students at Maize High School to broaden their college searches beyond Kansas. In his mind, if you were going to really make it in life, you needed to get out of Kansas. He was probably right, but his editorial was so cynical condemning, and so well written, that a building principal thought it necessary to write a response to John’s editorial that appeared in the next issue of the paper.
The American Pravda series attempts, and succeeds in many ways, to reveal some truth behind so much news coverage that seems to be going nowhere. In several instances everyone, from John to former Obama Administration official turned CNN panelist Van Jones, has admitted there is nothing behind the Trump/Russia collusion story. Yet, CNN, and other networks struggling for relevance, continue to talk about conspiracies without any substantial proof.
As I watched the first video featuring several minutes of conversation between John and the Project Veritas reporter, I noticed that John mentioned that he, and many of his colleagues, are quite cynical. They believe journalism ethics are “cute” and they have declining opinions of their viewers. The search for higher ratings, it would appear, has replaced the pursuit of news.
Something else I noticed in the short video clip is that John mentions he “loves” the news business. So, for all the cynicism he has shared I am hopeful that my once and former friend will one day find joy in his work again. Maybe this undercover shakedown of CNN will encourage the top brass at the network to let creative, intelligent and hardworking people like Mr. Bonifield to produce news worthy of the once revered reputation of the worlds leading name in cable news.
