LeBron is playing in the NBA Finals, right?

But is the Second Coming anything more than a marketing campaign by our friends at Nike?

Will their be a swoosh?

Or something bigger and bolder than that; something on the order of the Bang that got it all started in the first place?

And . . . what in the world does any of that have to do with my life anyway?

Come Sunday to find out.

8:30.  10.  11:30.

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Sunday also features a major announcement regarding a ministry venture that will help shape the direction of our church.  You don't want to miss it.

This story appeared in the June version of the Asbury Seminary Alumni e-magazine:

Asbury Connection

by Talbot Davis, MDiv, 1990

In September of 1987, Talbot Davis and Brent Burdick both arrived on the campus of Asbury Seminary. 

Talbot came from New Jersey, where he had attended college and then worked for three years in the tennis business, and Brent came from Oklahoma where he had also attended college and then worked as an educator.

That first semester, the two were even in the same classroom – David Thompson’s Mark class, part of what was then called the English Bible curriculum.

Yet despite their simultaneous arrival, their time together in Mark, and even their three subsequent years of study, Davis and Burdick never met while in Wilmore.  Both graduated in 1990, yet they did so without ever having spoken to one another.

Fast forward twenty-one years.  In 2011, Davis was busy pastoring Good Shepherd United Methodist Church in Charlotte, NC, where he had served since 1999.  Burdick and his family had just returned to the US following a twenty-year stint as missionaries in the Philippines with OMS.  They relocated to, of all places, Charlotte, North Carolina — to a subdivision down the street from Good Shepherd United Methodist.

The Burdicks visited Good Shepherd on their first Sunday in Charlotte, received a coffee mug gift from the church and a follow up hand written note from Davis, and so decided to return the next week.  During that second week lobby conversation, the Asbury connection was established, the Mark EB assignments remembered, and a new friendship established.  The Burdicks quickly assimilated into the life of Good Shepherd.

In March of 2013, Davis & Burdick traveled together to India (along with a third teammate from Good Shepherd, this one an alum of Gordon-Conwell!) in order to minister with two groups of pastors in the eastern state of Odisha.  Davis taught leadership lessons from the kings of Judah while Burdick shared his ministry experience and how it is that pastors on the front lines can have healthy homes and families.

That’s what the seminary means by “the whole bible for the whole world” – even if it takes over 20 years to make it happen.

If you follow this blog at all, you know that music plays a larger role in my life than film.

Now: I like movies.  Julie and I go to them on some occasions and even do this newfangled Pay-Per-View on others.

Yet the list of movies I haven't seen is maybe more, um, impressive than the list of those I have.

I'm talking about movies that transcend the film world and become cultural icons.  The kind of movies that though I haven't seen them, I still know something of their content.

The kind of movies that when I tell my friends I haven't seen them, their jaws drop in disbelief.

So here they are: five movies that through my avoidance I know I'm missing something great:

5.  Castaway.  There's a plane wreck, Tom Hanks doing his best Grizzly Adams, and a soccer ball named Wilson.  Have I missed anything?





4.  Citizen Kane.  Does anyone else think the image of Orson Welles below looks a lot like Leonardo DiCaprio?




3.   Seabiscuit.  Maybe if the name of the movie had been Secretariat, I'd have gone.  Or even Mr. Ed.  But not Seabiscuit.




 2.  The Godfather.  Speaking of horses . . .


1.  The Shawshank Redemption.  I know, I know.  No self-respecting American male should miss this one. And I even tried once . . . but my squeamishness about a) prison scenes and b) long crawls through human waste made me give up before I was 30 minutes in.

Julie and I spent this past weekend in Princeton, New Jersey, celebrating her 30th college reunion.

We made the same trip in 2008 when we celebrated her 25th, and at that time I posted some thoughts here.

We met on that college campus, got married in that college chapel, and spent the first three years of our married lives living near that college town.

This year's trip had a couple of personal highlights. And that matters because it's no big deal to celebrate your 29th college reunion . . . my bigger deal on that score will come next year.

On Friday we shared lunch with Matt Ristuccia, who is currently the pastor of the Westerly Road Church  in Princeton.  But back in the day (meaning, the very early 80s), he was one of the leaders of the Princeton Evangelical Fellowship, a campus group dedicated to the spiritual needs of students.

As a freshman, I immediately took a liking to Matt, and he became instrumental in my discipleship while an undergrad.  So it was only fitting that when Julie and I got married, Matt was the one to lead the ceremony.  Which he did.  On a 100 degree day in 1984.  In a Gothic Cathedral with no air conditioning.  Whatever honorarium I gave him that day, it wasn't enough.


So the three of us shared memories of what life was like back then and compared notes on what parish ministry is like now in Princeton, New Jersey as opposed to Charlotte, North Carolina. 

While the locales might be different, I think we realized that the dynamics of ministry are much the same: glorious highs coupled with the kind of challenging lows that make you understand why the song is Amazing Grace and not Amazing Skill.  

Later on Friday, we got together with tennis team friends Ken Katz and Steve Feinberg.   They always did like Julie more than me:


The four of us talked late into the night on the Viewing Deck of the tennis stadium -- a structure that didn't even exist when we were in school -- and swapped stories of matches we won and those we lost as well as the cast of characters who made it all so unforgettable.



So many things converged on that night:  North & South, Jew & Gentile, baseliner(s) & serve-and-volleyer, Psych major & English major, corporate financier & congregational pastor . . . yet all held together by the common thread of a small yellow ball.

And by that elusive desire to stay forever young.