Mission Work in Maryland

During 2005, my wife Heidi and I lived on a farm in Western Maryland, serving as stateside Christian missionaries.

Our primary work revolved around the planting of an Alpha (Christianity 101) Course at an Episcopal Church in Hagerstown, and at a Lutheran Church in Baltimore. Charles Waring, the publisher of The Mercury, asked me to write a column of thoughts about the experience, and the things we learned. As much as I’d like to accomplish this in one column, I’m afraid it will take two. In this column, I’ll explore some of the broader issues.

Here you go:

1) If you invite someone from Western Maryland to your home for a reception, and tell them it starts at 7pm, they will arrive at 7pm. If you were to invite, say, forty people who were potential recruits for an Alpha Team, all forty would arrive between 7pm and 7:04pm. Male hosts think this is funny, because they’ve been ready for 45 minutes. Female hosts in curlers cutting up vegetables in the kitchen don’t find this funny at all.

2) Modern insulation is under-rated. When the temperature is one degree, and you can see through the floorboards of the 275 year-old house you live in, you find yourself having long and in-depth conversations about the beauty and majesty of pink fiberglass fibers.

3) Contrary to popular belief, Charleston, SC does not have true seasons like the states to our north. What Charleston really has is early summer, summer, late summer, and next summer.

4) The well water on a dairy farm is something less than Evian. After all, cows have to use the potty like everyone else, and, well, gravity does work in Maryland, too… so down it all goes (along with the fertilizers and pesticides) into the water supply. I point this out because brushing your teeth out of a Dixie cup three times a day for five months can test your faith-- in the importance of daily dental hygiene, if nothing else.

5) Car dealers in places other than Charleston claim that they, too, have the lowest prices in the nation during their sale-a-brations. Someone may be stretching the truth.

6) Charleston is not, in fact, the home of every insect in the country. Maryland has a locust called a cicada, which hatches every seventeen years and parties like it’s 1999 for about a month. Needless to say, this is the year for the once-a-generation cicadapalooza in Maryland.

7) The Greater Charleston Area does not have a traffic problem- yet. If you want to see traffic, try driving around DC or Baltimore. When it takes 2 ½ hours to get to the grocery store during non-rush hour, that’s traffic.

8) Presidential candidates do advertise on television. In South Carolina, we don’t see it because the candidates know the state will go Republican, but they really do run ads. We are not, however, missing anything. Believe me.

9) When most of the nation thinks of South Carolinian culture, they do not think of Charleston—they think of Myrtle Beach. If you want to get depressed, let that sink in for a few minutes.

10) People who attend the 8am church service are stoic everywhere. Ministers should not attempt humor with this crowd. In fact, Jerry Seinfeld and Robin Williams shouldn’t attempt humor with this crowd.

11) Cows are, in fact, much like they are portrayed in The Far Side.

12) If The Cracker Barrel went bankrupt, attendance at church could drop as much as 43%.

13) The United States does have voting citizens in other states who will say with a straight face, “I support bigger government, and I’m willing to pay higher taxes for it.” (Why these people won’t just band together and donate all that extra money to the government remains a mystery)

14) Farmers don’t get paid enough. If they did, milk would be $22 a gallon, and sweet corn would cost way more than sushi.

15) If there were true economic justice in the world, the guys who invented Mapquest would be much richer than Bill Gates.

16) Joining a gym does not necessarily improve your physical fitness. You actually have to go to the gym for that to occur.

17) If you live in a farmhouse that is haunted, it is a really bad idea to bring home from Blockbuster movies like Amityville Horror and Children of the Corn. It is even a worse idea to tease your wife into watching them, unless you like the idea of escorting her everywhere she goes for the next week or so.

18) People from South Carolina aren’t the only people in the world who understand the NASCAR point system, discover cars while mowing the lawn, or attend family reunions as a way to meet chicks.

However, if there’s one primary thing I’d say we’ve learned, it’s that Jesus Christ has the power to change lives. We were amazed at the questionnaires our Alpha guests filled out at the end of the course- and not just the ones written by the people who became Christians on the course. There were dozens of people who wrote about how their faith came alive for the first time… about how they were excited about their new level of knowledge and understanding… and about how they’d connected with complete strangers who were now trusted friends.

This is not to say these courses produced rooms full of people singing their lungs out and signaling for touchdowns—there’s nothing wrong with that, but it isn’t required to be a Christian. What I mean here is that these two Alpha courses took a very diverse group of about 150 people, and got them to commit themselves to living as Christians. And simply by choosing to believe, these people began to receive the fruits of the Holy Spirit, and over a 12-week period they professed to becoming kinder, more generous, more peaceful people.

Don’t think we need more faithful Christians in this nation? Just watch the news: Corporate thievery, a judicial system that’s completely out of control, accelerating violence and drug use, the breakdown of the family, terrorism, racism and hatred in every direction—these things are so common we hardly even notice them anymore.

I’d say we do need more Christians… so invite a friend to an Alpha course near you.

Now, more than ever, we need God to bless America.