Eclectic Christian

Hi everyone.  My name is Tim Melton and I’m very excited about having the opportunity to contribute to Eclectic Christian.  I presently serve as an Assistant Pastor at Surfside Presbyterian Church in Myrtle Beach, SC and, yes, the weather really is beautiful here all year round, just as long as the hurricanes stay away. Mike Bell and I found each other several months ago in the Christian “blog-o-sphere” and discovered that we had a very similar heartbeat.  We both feel that North American Evangelical Christianity is losing her focus on the Gospel of Jesus Christ and as a result she is becoming grossly ineffective.  Yet, we love the Church and we desperately want her to love her husband, Jesus.  So, here we are, working together to prayerfully send out a prophetic call that the Church recover her heart and return to her First Love.  This is my highest passion.  Not only is it my pastoral desire for the church, but it is also my personal hope for my own sinful heart.  I want the Church to love Jesus, which must mean, as ‘the night follows the day’, that I want to love Jesus as well.  I pray that this desire, for the centrality of the Gospel to be evident in our churches and hearts, will shape everything that I write on EC.

However, I do have other passions.  I love my wife, Martha Jo and my two kids, Callie and Camp.  I love literature, poetry, a wide range of music, art, movies and…of course, I love football.  That should sound a bit strange. I mean, how many guys do you know who love poetry and football?  Think about it.  How can a guy love Shakespeare and Sports Illustrated?  Flannery O’Connor and John Madden? The Bible and Budweiser?  Broadway Theatre and Broadway Brett?  John Knox and John Elway.  How can a guy love Independent Films AND love football!  I can’t answer it myself.  I’m almost at a loss to explain it.  But I’ll give it a try.

The truth is, I have been forged from the fires of two powerful, cultural impulses:  I am a southern, down-home, redneck on one side and a passionate, artsy, hippie on the other.  This is a brand of human being that could only have been bred in inner-city Atlanta, Georgia.  As a boy growing up in the racially charged atmosphere of the late sixties and early seventies, I drank deeply from a strong, frothy, eclectic cultural brew; an elixir concocted and served up by iconic heroes like Hank Aaron, Elvis Presley, James Brown, Muhammad Ali, Steve Bartkowski (look him up), Martin Luther King, Jimmy Carter, and Billy Graham.  In middle school I rooted for the Atlanta Falcons and I sang in the, black, gospel choir.  I played center on my high school football team and I starred as ‘Curly’ in the high school musical production of “Oklahoma”.  Today, my DVD collection includes Hamlet with Kenneth Brannah, a copy of the 1958 NFL Championship Game, Emma with Gwyneth Paltrow, and Gladiator with Russell Crowe.  On my I-pod you will find My Chemical Romance, the David Crowder Band, Garth Brooks, REM, and a recording of Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream Speech.”

And so, this is who I am.  I am a man who feels himself to be a little black and a little white; a little bit conservative and a little bit liberal, a hippie with a goatee who believes the Bible is the inerrant, inspired word of God; I am a man who thinks that Bono and Mary J. Blithe make beautiful music together; a man who prays the Church would study with the rigor of a Presbyterian, sing with the abandon of a Charismatic, preach with fire of a Baptist, serve with the heart of an Anglican, paint and write with the imagination of a Catholic, care with the passion of a Mother Teresa and believe in Jesus like a little child.

I, maybe like you, am a bundle of seeming contradictions.  The Gospel is the one thing that brings harmony to my otherwise fractured soul…and this is why I so desperately need Jesus.  Without Him, nothing makes sense to me.  For I am a Sinner and a Saint, an ambiguous man, a fearful man, and a confused man.  A man who can find beautiful pictures of the Gospel in strange, shadowy places, while almost always struggling to trust in the Gospel that I so easily see in the clear light of day.  Because of this, I suppose you could say, I am an eclectic man…an eclectic human being; And in many ways, my being an eclectic man, who is redeemed by Christ and made alive by the Gospel; a man who is insecure and sinful, but greatly loved of Jesus; I suppose all of this, taken together, makes me a valid contributor to Eclectic Christian – for an Eclectic Christian is exactly what I am.

Thanks for the invitation Mike.  I look forward to seeing where the Spirit of Christ takes us.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 25th, 2008 at 3:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.