Aug. 14, 2022, column from the Amarillo Globe-News:

Billy Sunday knocked it out of the park as an evangelist

By Mike Haynes

                One of my most embarrassing moments as a Texas Tech University student – probably even more so than when the campus cops caught me and a group of fellow students from my hometown playing touch football on the new AstroTurf of Jones Stadium – was in my first freshman history class.

                I was impressed by the professor, a relatively young man who exuded passion as he told fascinating anecdotes about people in U.S. history instead of just going through a timeline of battles, laws and elections. I wish I could remember his name.

Billy Sunday, Major Leaguer

                We had to write a paper about a well-known American, then give a class presentation on it. Always on the lookout to promote Christianity, I chose the evangelist Billy Sunday as my topic.

                I suppose speaking to a class makes most college freshmen nervous, and that certainly was true of me. And it got embarrassing when I told the class that Billy Sunday’s family had immigrated from Germany and that their name had been changed from Sonntag to Sunday. I wish I hadn’t added, “I have no idea why they changed it to Sunday.”

                Another student quickly spoke up: “Sonntag is German for Sunday.”

                I had taken some Spanish in high school and was enrolled in a college French class, so I might not have looked so dumb if the name origin had been “Domingo” or “Dimanche,” but I knew nothing about German.

                I’m sure now that my paper and presentation were pretty rudimentary, but I made an “A” in the course, so it wasn’t a disaster. And I learned that Billy Sunday was quite a remarkable character.

                Born in poverty near Ames, Iowa, in 1862, Sunday was fast and agile, and he became an outstanding baseball player. The Chicago White Stockings signed him in 1883, and he played for the Pittsburgh Alleghenys and the Philadelphia Phillies. His career batting average was only .248, but he was known for his speedy base-running. While at Pittsburgh, a reporter wrote that “the whole town is wild over Sunday.”

                While in Chicago, Sunday heard street preachers who inspired him to attend church. He started speaking at churches and YMCAs, and according to historian Lyle Dorsett, he turned down a $3,500 a year baseball contract to work for the Chicago YMCA for $83 a month. From then on, Sunday was a preacher first.

                According to christianitytoday.com., a newspaper story said, “Center fielder Billy Sunday made a three-base hit at Farwell Hall last night. There is no other way to express the success of his first appearance as an evangelist in Chicago.”

Billy Sunday, evangelist

                Sunday was flamboyant as he spoke in tents and wooden tabernacles, striking dramatic poses and preaching forcefully with sometimes crude language. Reflecting William Tyndale’s 16^th century desire that even English plowboys should know the Bible, Sunday said, “I want to preach the gospel so plainly that men can come from the factories and not have to bring a dictionary.”

                One of Sunday’s many one-liners, used by many preachers since, was, “Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.”

                He fit the category of “evangelical,” ending each revival service with an impassioned plea for those present to “walk the sawdust trail” to the front of the venue to accept the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ. He opposed playing cards, attending movies, women dressing immodestly and especially drinking alcohol.

                Sunday has been called a strong influence on getting Prohibition passed in the United States in 1920. “To know what the devil will do, find out what the saloon is doing,” he said.

                But he wasn’t in lockstep with all conservative Christians of the time. Sunday backed women’s suffrage and ending child labor. He invited all races to his services, even in the South, supported Jews and considered Roman Catholics his fellow Christians. According to christianitytoday.com, he rejected the theory of evolution but didn’t go so far as endorsing “Genesis literalists.”

            Billy Sunday was to the first half of the 20^th century what Billy Graham was to the second half. He preached to millions and led an estimated 300,000 people to belief in Christ. Other than my ignorance about his name, I don’t recall what I told my history class many years ago. But I’m sure I read aloud some of his quotes like these:

            • “I’m against sin. I’ll kick it as long as I have a foot. I’ll fight it as long as I have a fist. I’ll butt it as long as I have a head. I’ll bite it as long as I’ve got a tooth. And when I’m old and fistless and footless and toothless, I’ll gum it ’til I go home to glory and it goes home to perdition.”

• “Nowadays we think we are too smart to believe in the virgin birth of Jesus and too well educated to believe in the resurrection. That's why people are going to the devil in multitudes.” 

 

July 31, 2022, column from the Amarillo Globe-News

Popular culture was once blessed with godly influence; why not now?

By Mike Haynes

            The column below appeared in this newspaper on June 26, 1997 – 25 years plus a month ago. It was the first Faith column I wrote, and it focused on a speech by Philip Yancey. A quarter of a century later, Yancey has written many outstanding Christian books, and other creative people have taken his message to heart. I had hoped to hear him speak in person again this week at a C.S. Lewis conference in Oxford, England, but I’m settling for seeing him live online at home. Since 1997, I’ve written another 474 of these columns. Here’s the first one:

Somewhere in a backyard storage shed in the Texas Panhandle are the notes I took on a June 1979 morning in St. Paul, Minn.

Philip Yancey

The young speaker that day so impressed me that I don’t have to find my notes to recall the exhortation he gave to a group of fledgling Christian writers.

“Christians usually settle for less than the best,” was the gist of Philip Yancey’s remarks.

Yancey, who already had written a couple of best-selling books, must have struggled to avoid offending some of the sincere people in his audience while not white-washing his criticism.

He left the whitewash in the bucket.

Writers, musicians, painters – anyone attempting to do something creative to advance the gospel of Jesus Christ – too often churn out mediocre work and, consciously or not, pass it off as excellence.

Christian artists, Yancey claimed, don’t attract the attention of people in the general culture because the quality of their work doesn’t compare to the efforts put forth by talented people whose motivation is far less divine.

What if the innovation and “coolness” of the Beatles had come not from an admittedly fab four who nevertheless were wandering in their personal lives, but from a band of lads whose purpose was to glorify their Creator?

 What if a novelist with a Christian world view put words together as compellingly as Hemingway?

Actually, popular culture has been blessed with godly influence in past centuries more than it has in our own.

From my college art history class, I know that the subject matter of many master painters through the ages has been biblical. Art experts praise the Sistine Chapel for Michelangelo’s vigorous brushstrokes at the same time Christians admire it for its depiction of the Last Judgment.

Much great music also was inspired by Christian muses. How else do you get a piece called “The Hallelujah Chorus”?

So what happened? Yancey said modern Christians typically are satisfied with good intentions. So what if a short story is predictable and has stereotypical characters? If those characters quote scripture, isn’t that all that matters?

So what if a praise chorus sounds almost like “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and repeats “I love Jesus” 14 times? Isn’t it the thought that counts?

Well, yes, and people worshipping in simplicity can be a pure, admirable act. It’s the creators of the lyrics and the tunes and the artwork and the paragraphs for whom Yancey had a swift kick. 

Since 1979, Christian creativity has made much progress in quantity and maybe some in quality. Customers can mine a Christian bookstore for a profusion of musical styles and book topics. Sometimes they even find gold.

Even assuming that artists are achieving more, however, how much of it is preaching to the choir? One of Yancey’s coups 18 years ago was getting a story published in Reader’s Digest. That’s a small example of a Christian influencing U.S. culture rather than vice versa.

Bob Briner used his 1993 book, “Roaring Lambs,” to tell Christians they can’t spend all their time lounging in their own bookstores when there is a whole culture out there drifting, drifting away from the foundation in which they believe.

Briner urged church members to focus less on choir practice or usher training and more on stirring the salt of the Christian message into the cultural stew.

“Certainly, there’s much in this world that is alarming,” Briner wrote, “but I believe there’s a better way to do something about it than simply preach against it. The best way to stop the spread of evil is to replace it with something good.”

   And according to Yancey, artists must inject into our culture not only a good message, but a message presented in such a creative way that the public will be enticed to notice.

            People committed to God should be marketing movies that rival the attention of “Jurassic Park.” They should be pitching TV shows that become as acclaimed as “NYPD Blue.” Someone should be picking up where C.S. Lewis left off, Briner wrote, making the best-seller list of the New York Times, not just that of the Christian Booksellers Association.

            Yancey got my attention that morning in Minnesota in part because he didn’t look like the then-typical Christian evangelist. He wasn’t much older than me, and he had bushy hair reminiscent of a hippie.

But he has a place in my storage shed because he didn’t repeat phrases I had heard from preachers a hundred times before. He was intellectual in that he talked about poetry, philosophy and art. He was sensitive in that he talked about beauty.

And he didn’t think Christians, of all people, should be producing drivel.

 

 July 17, 2022, column from the Amarillo Globe-News

Touring some of God's gifts around the world brings gratitude

By Mike Haynes
                It started when I Googled “Beatle tour” in 2002, a search that took my wife and I on our first international trip. That guided visit to Liverpool and London still is the most fun Kathy and I have had outside the country.

                The most meaningful trip has been the visit to Israel in 2019 when we joined a church group to walk where Jesus walked – and where he died outside the Jerusalem walls and rose from the Mount of Olives.
                We’ve been to a few countries now, and this summer’s tour of Scotland confirmed again that the good gifts God gives us come in lots of shapes and sizes, some of them human.
                After we got off a train in Stirling, Scotland, we couldn’t see the historic castle there even though it sits high on a hill overlooking the city. We were on a street that felt like it was on a 45-degree angle, so we knew we were going on the right general direction – up – but as first-timers in the country, we still were a little lost.
 

               Kathy asked a young man walking by if he could tell us how to get to Stirling Castle. In a Scottish accent, he said something like, “Aye, just follow me,” and he went out of his way to lead us through a couple of turns until we saw signs pointing to the thousand-year-old structure.
                It was the same in Edinburgh, in Inverness and all through the Highlands. We decided that the Scots are friendly and helpful people.
                The other gift we weren’t expecting was the overwhelming beauty of the countryside. Not that we thought Scotland would be ugly, but its green mountains, its long, blue lakes such as Loch Lomond and the famous Loch Ness, its yellow gorse shrubs – flowering brightly everywhere in June – its shores and rocky islands put it among the loveliest countries we’ve traveled through.
                And animals: sheep everywhere plus cows, including a few Highland cattle, or “hairy coos.”
                Add centuries-old castles – some in ruins and some renovated for tourists – to the landscape, and you can’t beat “Scotland the Brave.”
                That’s the name of possibly the best-known bagpipe tune, along with “Amazing Grace,” and I truly believe good music also is a gift from God. At Dunrobin Castle, a young girl stood

outside the front gate playing the pipes for tourists. And at a ceilidh (a gathering, pronounced cay-lee) at the Old Smiddy Inn, a brother and sister duo, ages 14 and 12, entertained our group with bagpipe tunes they were preparing for a contest that week. Of course, all the pipers were outfitted in kilts.
                We got to stand on the iconic bridge at the St. Andrews Old Course, where The Open (Americans call it the British Open) golf tournament is ending its 150^th edition today.
We weren’t fans of everything – such as the infamous national dish of Scotland, haggis, made of sheep’s insides – but the delightful outweighed the yucky by far.
                We visited cathedrals in Edinburgh (they say it, “Edinborough”) and Glasgow and a little chapel on one of the Orkney Islands built by Italian prisoners of war in 1943-44 from military huts, which brings to mind the murals done by Italian POWs at the church in the Texas Panhandle town of Umbarger.
                Like much of Europe and now the United States, church attendance in Scotland has dropped the past few decades, according to the BBC. The primary denomination is the Church of Scotland, which is Presbyterian, but our bus tour included only two brief mentions of John Knox, considered the founder of that church.

                We did see signs for the Free North Church and the Pentecostal Church in Inverness, but another old church building in that “capital of the Highlands” now is the Leake Secondhand Bookshop. A stately stone structure was identified as Stirling Baptist Church.
Attracting more attention from tourists than churches were the standing stones of Scotland, some older than England’s Stonehenge and much less crowded. On that Orkney Island, we visited the Ring of Brodgar, at least 4,000 years old, and the Standing Stones of Stennis, about 5,000 years old. Those stones have been especially popular since 2014, when the TV series “Outlander” featured a similar one that enabled the main character to travel in time from 1945 to 1743. Tourism in Scotland has skyrocketed as a result of the “Outlander” books and series.
      

          We had read up on Scottish history before our trip, so we were appropriately appreciative of two sites that are important to Scots. The beautiful valley of Glencoe was the location of the horrible 1692 massacre of 38 MacDonalds by British government troops led by members of the Campbell clan.
And like visiting the Alamo, we were reverent as we walked on the Culloden battlefield near Inverness. The 1746 battle also is a key plot point in the “Outlander” books and TV show, which explains why Kathy volunteered to take a photo of two women with a memorial stone – and why someone took our picture there.
The government army wiped out the Highlanders, led by “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” at Culloden, and the aftermath was prohibition of Highland clan culture, including tartans, bagpipes, weapons and the local Gaelic language, for more than 100 years.
                Learning about other cultures can be fun and richly rewarding, and I believe all that richness and fun is included in “every good gift and every perfect gift” that James says in the New Testament is “from above.” 
                Kathy and I don’t include haggis.