Week 2 of Wildest Dreams is one of my favorites:  The Dream Police.

It's a fresh look at an ancient story, and I think some things emerge out of that story that will be helpful to a lot of Good Shepherd-ites.

To prepare, check out Matthew 2:1-15 and see if you can figure out where we'll go together.

This weekend also marks the one year anniversary of our Latino worship service, which takes place each Sunday at 11:30 in the Corner Campus.

The team is bringing in Aracelisz Vazquez-Haye as special singer and teacher.  The celebration begins with a dinner on Saturday evening and continues with worship on Sunday morning.  You can read more about Aracelis here.

I'll join the dinner -- and practice my Spanish -- but will be speaking in our English 11:30 service.  Either way, it's going to be a festive, celebratory time.

I recently ran across a web site that seemed to be right up my alley:  Seminaries That Change The World.


On first glance it combines two of the things I love most:  1) making lists (Top Five Tuesday - hello!) and 2) theological education.

So I dove into the site . . . and came away a bit more confused than energized.

Of the seventeen world changing schools listed, only one -- Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California -- could be called anything approaching "right of center" or "evangelical."

The rest were a mix of:

* Highly respected, surprisingly orthodox schools with strong cache simply in their nameplate (Princeton and Duke);

* Left-of-center schools with long-standing denominational ties (Candler & Austin Presbyterian);

* Schools whose small enrollment make suggest World Changer might be something of an exaggeration (Sewanee & Andover-Newton);

* Far-left schools who graduate relatively few local church pastors and relatively more academics and advocates (Vanderbilt & Chicago).

I was of course disappointed that neither Asbury Seminary (my alma mater) nor Gordon-Conwell Seminary (the best source of pastoral employees we have at Good Shepherd) made the list.

Also absent were some of the largest theological schools in the country: Southern Baptist in Louisville, Southwestern Baptist in Fort Worth, and Dallas Theological in -- you guessed it! -- Dallas.  While those schools would be a couple of steps to the right of Asbury or Good Shepherd in theological terms, nevertheless their influence on American Christianity is unmatched.

The STCTW web site describes its selection criteria this way:

The seminaries and divinity schools listed in Seminaries that Change the World represent distinguished academic institutions that have a living legacy of scholarship and a commitment to service and social justice issues.

By that standard, the list of 17 is probably fair.  And who could question a "commitment to service and social justice issues"?

Yet the site's theological perspective is most evident by what is missing from the selection criteria:  educating and shaping leaders who can boldly proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ when they are deployed in the local church.

In my way of thinking, that's how a seminary can truly change the world.

Here's the good news: the STCTW site has an application for schools who would like to be considered for the list in 2015.

Are you listening in Wilmore, South Hamilton, and even Dallas-Fort Worth?
 

Yesterday we launched the Wildest Dreams series which will take us through the Christmas season by looking at the dream communication that recurs throughout Matthew 1 and 2.

And I knew that I wanted to begin the series by talking about Broken Dreams and I also knew that I wanted to draw that message from the genealogy that opens Matthew 1.  It's a genealogy full of people whose dreams for life on this earth were rarely, if ever, realized.

Enter Fred Craddock, master orator of the Methodist tradition.


I remembered reading a Craddock sermon in which he described Matthew 1 and its genealogy as a "trip to Jesus' family graveyard."  I love the "noun-ness" of that: think how much more vividly you can see a graveyard in your mind's eye than you can see a genealogical chart.

And then I remembered hearing from some friends a few years ago that the Neely Slave Cemetery is located in the middle of SouthPoint Business Park, a mere 300 yards from the Good Shepherd campus.  And think of all the broken dreams buried in a slave cemetery!

So the idea came: film the opening of the sermon with me actually in the Neely Slave Cemetery, making the connection between that family graveyard and the one in Matthew 1.

Now: my idea was for a static video; little more than me on a screen, delivering the first part of the sermon and then reading the opening seven verses of Matthew 1 before I'd continue that reading "live" in the Good Shepherd Worship Center.

Enter Chris Macedo, master singer/band leader/web dude/video artist of the Good Shepherd family.


Chris located the graveyard, set up the shoot, hauled the equipment, and then kept me out there filming for hours.  OK, not hours, but an hour at least.  All kinds of angles, perspectives, moods, and do-overs.

Then he spent hours (yes, for sure, hours) in an editing booth, adding music, arranging the shots, creating a vibe, and actually telling a story.

So it wasn't just an opening to a sermon.  It was -- and is -- a piece of art.

Take a look:






From there I kept reading Matthew 1 "live" and moved right on to the heart of the sermon which landed on this point:  broken dreams don't break your spirit when you believe in better.

And you wonder why I like working with the people at Good Shepherd?