David's Daily Diversions

I was surfing the Net

I was surfing the Net last night and I came upon George Grant’s blog.

George used to pastor a church in Humble, Texas called Believer’s Fellowship. I spoke there once, promoting the now-defunct Texas Grassroots Coalition, which was my first job out of college. That would have been in 1985. The thing that sticks out in my mind about that particular spiel was the embarrassment I suffered when George was at the back of the church motioning for me to wrap it up and I couldn’t understand his sign language. Even then I was verbose.

I’ve seen George a few times since then. I think the last time was at one of the annual occurrences of the Appalachian Conference to Rebuild America – must have been in 1996 or 1997. He claimed at that time to remember me. I had heard through the grapevine that he had been visiting an Antiochian Orthodox church sometime after his move to Middle Tennessee, and knowing him to be very firmly in the Reformed camp, I asked him what his impressions were. He enjoyed the Liturgy, but it seems he couldn’t get past the icons. Or, I suppose I should say, he couldn’t get through the icons. He appreciated them on the level of Christian art, but did not embrace them as windows into heaven as the Orthodox do. Oh well, his loss.

Knowing the wide range of religious and political views of my Meanderings, not to mention the unknown views of those who stray into the Diversions, I should mention that George is one of the great popular writers of Christian political stewardship and history. I had no idea this is where he was headed in 1985, when I read his book Bringing in the Sheaves. It tells of how that small church made an impact during the bust after the oil boom in Houston in the early 1980s. It is a real story of conservative Biblical compassion.

Ironically, perhaps, Believer's Fellowship played a signficant role in my journey to Orthodoxy. In 1987, George had left, and I was there to see Frank Marshall, who had taken over as pastor, about implementing the Bringing in the Sheaves model at the church were I was in West Texas at the time. While I was there, Frank gave me a copy of Fr Alexander Schmemann's For the Life of the World. Apart from Holy Scripture, this is the most important book I have ever read. It took 14 more years before I was received into Orthodoxy, but it was the book that set me on the path.

So how does finding George’s blog affect you, the reader? Well, it inspired me to add a list of links to blogs I read regularly, in case you want to check them out for yourself. (George doesn’t do this, though he recently mentioned some in a recent blog entry. Interestingly, he mentions at least one that I have been reading for a while, which I came across while editing DMOZ.) And if you go to George’s blog, you will find something truly uncanny. We chose the exact same template and the same blogging site. Great minds really do think alike…