The following numbers are submitted without comment. I just found them mind-boggling.

Let’s say you and your wife bring home $82,000 combined. According to this website, that puts you in the richest 1% of the world. Your income is 36 times that of the average person in the world. This site also provides giving information, so if you donate 10% of your income, $8,200 in this case, you are still in the richest 1.4% of the world (Hey, your part of the 99% again!), and you are still 32 times richer than the average person in the world.

Then I found another application that compares your annual income to Mitt Romney’s. And at $82,000 a year combined salary, how long do you think it would take you and your wife to make what Mitt made in 2010? How about 264 years. Dang!

So, I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on these numbers.

You and your significant other are vacationing in Syria (What? It could happen). And one day while strolling through the Syrian countryside you stumble into a cave, where you discover clay jars with ancient scrolls inside. You smuggle the jars back home, have the scrolls analyzed by a friend who specializes in such matters, and he tells you the scrolls date back to around 40 AD. He also tells you the scrolls contain information that scholars will use to argue against Christianity. Your friend estimates collectors would likely pay you over $300 million for these scrolls, but also warns their unveiling will be the news story of the decade, and magazines will run headlines like, “The Scrolls that Killed Christianity”.  In reality nothing will change, Christianity will be as true as it always was, and people will continue to convert at the same rate before the scrolls went public. Scholars and unbelievers will just have a new, powerful way to argue against Christianity, and you will have $300 million. Confused, you talk to a couple of pastors and they urge you to sit on the scrolls. So, do you go public and sell the scrolls, or keep them in your basement?

I finally read David Platt’s book Radical last month and it got me thinking, as I suppose it’s apt to do. Early on, Platt talks about reading a Christian publication where an article detailing a nameless First Baptist Church’s successful $23M building campaign was next to an article about Baptists raising $5,000 for Sudanese refugees. This disgusted Platt, as it would anyone not named Grinch, and later in the book he says, “…we also see no verse in the New Testament where God’s people are ever commanded to build a majestic place of worship (p. 117)”

Platt is anti-building, and in a world where over 1 billion people live on less than $1 a day, I can understand why. He also seems to be saying buildings are unbiblical, which I suppose could be the case, though using that same logic books written by pastors are also unbiblical, since they were never commanded in the New Testament either.

All this to ask, is it wrong for a church to spend money on a building? Are churches being good stewards of their money if they spend more to make their building attractive? It’s easy for me to walk into a $23M building today and say this money should have gone to the poor, but what about the Sistine Chapel? Can the building of a building be considered worship?

I think about Mark 14, and the anointing of Jesus. The disciples rebuked the woman who poured expensive perfume on Jesus, saying it should have been sold for a year’s wages and the money given to the poor. But Jesus rebuked them in turn saying the poor would always be with them, and they could help the poor anytime they wanted, but they would not always have him. I realize this passage is about the anointing of Jesus’ body for burial, but does it have application here? Can we worship through art, architecture, and building? Does it come back to our motives? I’m asking because you guys are a lot smarter than me, and I’d really like to know.

First lets give away a book from last week’s top-10 books of 2011 post. The winner, as chosen randomly by some number generator I found online is……….(Drumroll)………….Jeff Johnson. Congrats Jeff, you win one of the 10 books off my top ten list.

Do the magazines you subscribe to say something about you? Or do they just say you can’t say no whenever the Books-a-Million associate offers you 8 free issues with your purchase. We subscribe to Entertainment Weekly, because Tricia use to get it in college, and enjoyed it, so I bought a subscription for her last birthday. And we also subscribe to The Economist, because I had to subscribe to a magazine to earn some frequent flyer miles back in October, and I figured we needed something smart to cancel out Entertainment Weekly. But enough about us, what magazines do you subscribe to?

You are on the pastoral search committee at your church, and after months of searching, the team lands on the perfect candidate. He is theologically sound, a dynamic speaker, and has a phenomenal record of growing churches wherever he’s been. The pastor in turn shows interest in coming to your church, so a month of trial sermons are arranged. But it is during these trial sermons that you notice a bizarre trend. Each week, the pastor mentions the film Coyote Ugly. Nothing big, just quick passing references that no one seems to notice. Everyone in the church agrees the pastor is perfect, and the next week the search team visits his office to offer the job.  But here you realize the pastor has several framed Coyote Ugly posters, along with props from the film, prominently displayed on his shelves. You glance out the window and see his car, the tag reads COYOTE. The head of the search committee is handing him the contract, do you speak up?

This past weekend I spoke at a youth camp for three combined churches from Montgomery, and driving home yesterday I began to think about how different the Alabama they are growing up in is from the Alabama I grew up in, and especially the Alabama my parents grew up in. First of all, the camp was held this weekend because it was a holiday. The kids were out of school to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. Do you think Alabamians in the 60′s or 70′s would have ever thought one day Dr. King’s birthday would be a national holiday? And the kids – black and white and Asian – road buses to camp together, from Montgomery of all places, this time all of them wanting to sit in the back, because the chaperones were sitting in front.  

I love spending time with students, though sometimes I want to shake them and tell them not to throw away the opportunities they have to fulfill their dreams. But sometimes their dreams feel unreachable, unattainable, and that’s where we step in. Many of you reading this went to college, many of you are doing the work you’ve always wanted to do, many of you are realizing your dreams, but there are dreamers out there who need our help, and that is why I love These Numbers Have Faces.  

This week, in honor of Dr. King’s birthday, These Numbers is presenting their We Have a Dream campaign, spotlighting the dreams of their amazing scholars in South Africa. I hope you will check it out, read some of the stories, and consider helping These Numbers with their simple goal of changing the world.

Dr. King’s dream changed the world for the better.  And sure we still have a long way to go, but I grew up in a much better Alabama than my parents did, and my children will grow up in an even better one, thanks to the dreamers.

How are you going to change the world?

I read forty books last year, which may seem like a lot, but if you want to write, you’ve got to read, so you can know what to steal. The breakdown looks like this, twenty-five non-fiction books, thirteen novels, and two collections of short stories. I read six travel books in 2011, my new obsession, and six about soccer, my other new obsession. I got on a Hemingway kick earlier in April and read three of his novels, I also read the first two books in the Game of Thrones series. I read three books that I had already read, Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby, The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway, and The Great Gatsby, which I read every December. Below are my ten favorites from the year.  But enough about me, I’d love to hear from you, what was the best book you read in 2011? Let’s make it a contest, just comment with your favorite book and we’ll draw a name and random, winner gets a copy of one of the books off my top-1o.  

Of all Bryson’s travel books, this may be my favorite. Also, Australia sounds like the scariest place on Earth!

For those of you who hate words, this book has some pictures. It’s now a movie too, so you can skip words altogether if you want.

How had I never read A Farewell to Arms? I always thought it was about a guy who lost his arms.

Writer wins a fellowship and gets to spend a year writing in Rome. I’ve applied for dozens of fellowships since reading this book.

I’m not sure I even enjoyed Steig Larson’s Millinnium Trilogy, but I sure couldn’t put them down.

I’d been meaning to read this book for years, in part because the cover is really cool. One of the craziest and most disturbing true stories you’ll ever read.

Read a lot of great soccer books this year, though this one may have been my favorite, even if it is a little dated now.

A book that explores the limits of tolerance when a radical Islamist murders a Dutch filmmaker.

The story of a man in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it was shocking to learn these things actually happened in the United State.

I didn’t want to get hooked on this series of 1,000 page books, but too late, they are excellent.

Mike Slive appears to you in a vision with a bizarre offer. Your favorite team is guaranteed to win five National Championships over the next ten seasons, but you will not be able to see any of it. If you try and listen on the radio, you will only hear static. If you turn the game on television, you will only see the test pattern. If you go to games, you will be turned away. If you try to read about the games afterward, you will be beaten with a six-iron. Not only that, but when the ten years are over you still cannot read about or watch videos about the five championships.  When clips come on TV you, for some mystical reason, will not be able to see or hear them. Even the championship flags at the stadium will look blank to you. You will only know about these games through conversations with friends. If you say no, your team is guaranteed not to win a National Championship over the next ten seasons, but you can watch them as much as you like. Mike Slive is waiting, what do you say?

My Mom, celebrating Alabama's National Championship.

I’d planned to write a running commentary on the BCS Championship Game, but I ended up missing the entire thing. I gave a talk to the Baptist Men’s Association in Brookhaven, MS, and the program ran much longer than I’d thought (not my fault, I only spoke 20 minutes), so by the time I checked in to the fabulous Holiday Inn in Meridian, Nick Saban was getting a Gatorade shower.

Now sitting here watching the post-game, it’s hard not to think back 732 days to Bama’s last championship game. My nephew Jake was born that day, and Tricia and I were seeing him for the first time when Colt McCoy was injured. I remember we turned the game off sometime early in the forth quarter and began shopping online for houses in Auburn (I like to think those last two things were unrelated).

I’d just quit my day job to write full-time a week before that Bama-Texas game. God & Football was still eight months from its release, and I’m not sure even then I actually believed it was getting published. A few weeks after that game my mom and I took my Grandpa James to Tuscaloosa to see the BCS Trophy, and just a few months after that he passed away. It’s weird, because I certainly wanted Texas to win that game, but in a way that 2009 championship will always be strangely special to me. As for the 2011 Championship? Well, I could take it or leave it (mostly leave it), but congrats to all my Tide friends anyway.

And as for seeing the new trophy, mom, you are on your own this time.

click the photo twice to enlarge