Don Miller thoughts...

I am here in the Regent Library studying up on college Home Group tonight. We are talking about Faith tonight, using Don Miller's book Blue Like Jazz to spark some discussion and following it up with Scripture. I highly recommend that book to everyone.

Don Miller came to Bellingham this past week to do a book reading on the campus of the college here. It was definitely not what most people were expecting. Usually when you get a Christian speaker to speak at college, he or she talks about their version of how to do Christianity better than what you are doing now. Miller gets up and says, "I was just talking to the sound girl before I came up and told her "Christians are goofy, huh?" Man, we Christians are goofy as hell." He said, "Don't worry. I'm not going to talk about Jesus tonight." That was an eyebrow raiser - and someone asked about it later at the Q&A time. He said that he felt too often we try to bring "the church" into the university and he wanted to approach the university as a university, to speak its language. Usually when an author gets asked to speak at someplace, he or she does a book reading. So that is what Don Miller did - a book reading.

At the same time, you could sense the Christian undertones throughout what he was reading. he also later clarified that he felt Christianity is the most beautiful, mysterious thing you could be a part of that makes the most sense of what it means to be human. It gives the best picture of how to do humanity.

I liked it because it was subversive, artistic God-talk.

One interesting note as I was talking with Don backstage - his former youth minister was David Gentiles. He had been in Houston with Don and then moved up to Plano to be at Hunter's Glen Baptist Church where one of my high school friends went. David was then person who put the writing bug in Don's ear.