Barnabas File

By the late 1930s, Americans were in love with the movies.   Motion pictures were part of weekly life, an opportunity to escape the humdrum of daily life but also to learn about the world (with a Hollywood twist, of course).   When World War Two began, Hollywood producers were a bit ambivalent about how to approach the war effort.   This was not true of five film directors--both established and emerging--who wanted in on the action and were willing to make the sacrifices to be involved. Directors   John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens were considered among the top directors in Hollywood prior to the war.  All offered their services to the military and found themselves involved in the war effort in various ways.  Each came back changed significantly. In the book Five Came Back, Mark Harris told their story.  I reviewed his book here about three years ago.  The book has been adapted into...

Church architecture has always fascinated me.  The spaces we create for worship and their theological implications challenge my thinking about how we try to express the spiritual through the physical.  One of the most interesting and challenging papers I wrote in seminary was on the subject “The Church and Architecture” for Dr. John Newport’s Philosophy of Religion class. In recent years, I have come to realize how easy it is to confuse sacred space with sacred presence.  Sacred space--whether constructed or naturally occurring--provides an environment where we can prepare to encounter God.  Sacred presence occurs whenever we perceive God in a meaningful way.  There can be a beautifully designed sacred space, but we do not necessarily find God there unless our hearts and minds are prepared to do so.  We have all visited beautiful spaces that were created for the worship of God, but meaningful worship no longer takes place in that space.  T...

You can do a Google search on this quote, but the results on its origin are ambiguous.   Most likely, it is a Native American tribal saying popularized by leadership gurus like Peter Drucker.   The meaning, of course, is clear.   When something no longer work, it is time to move on. This is easier said than done.  In business and industry, abandoning a project may mean the loss of jobs and capital investment.  In education, old approaches must be unlearned and new ways learned.  In the church, there may be some fear that we are giving up part of what makes us faithful when we end a program, ministry, worship service, or building.  It is not only about change, but loss as well. R. Buckminster Fuller  said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality.  To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”  So what do you do when the existing model is already obsolete?...