Last January I was scheduled to do a full-day DE Seminar at the United Church in Los Alamos, NM. As some of you may remember, the winds shut down the Albuquerque airport and I got temporarily stuck in the other L.A. (Los Angeles, vs Los Alamos) until I found a flight back to Reno. The rescheduling of that event resulted in me speaking at their All-Church Camp at Ghost Ranch this past weekend. It was a sweet upgrade, for sure. We got to live and play in the location that one of my favorite movies was filmed: City Slickers (the early scenes when they start in New Mexico). Spectacular place. A 21,000 acre ranch, now owned by the Presbyterian Church (USA) and operated as a conference center. We took pictures galore, including one of each of us standing on the porch of a log cabin built for the movie…the only remaining indication that it was filmed there.

I have never done the Doable Evangelism material at a weekend camp before, so I had to tweak the normal presentation (which usually runs from 9am to 4pm on a Saturday) into three separate hour-and-a-half sessions. This was harder than it might seem, but it worked out pretty well. I did two sessions on Saturday and one on Sunday afternoon. I also gave the message at the Sunday service under “The Big Tree”, which was something this church has done on Labor Day weekend for over 50 years.

My sweet bride, Sandy, got to come along on this one, too, which made this an even more fun experience. We met some really wonderful people who have been instrumental in shaping the United Church over the past few decades, and they were enormously warm hosts for us. We got to tour the city of Los Alamos (which, as most of you know, is where the two bombs America dropped on Japan at the end of WW2 were developed and manufactured), hosted by Georgia Strickfadden, who actually owns a tour agency there. So we got a private tour of the city and the massive lab area and heard a LOT of the history of how it all came together into what it is today.

We then met up with Irene and David Powell, who became our weekend angels, and we drove up together to the ranch. Irene has the energy of at least two normal human beings, and she kept us on schedule and even got us signed up for kayaking Sunday afternoon. We fell in love with the entire United Church family, and got to spend a couple of the most amazing star-filled evenings around the campfire with them. Somewhere during the weekend one person suggested that it was likely we would never be surrounded by such a large number of scientists again in our lives! I was a little intimidated by the staggering percentage of Phd’s in the room (more than 22%), but I never once got the feeling that anyone was anything but warm, kind, eager to learn, and gracious.

The United Church is quite a story all by itself. It is affiliated currently with six different denominations, with a mission to demonstrate the unity of the Christian family to the world. They started on this mission just after WW2, and they continue this way today. This makes for a really interesting family with diverse backgrounds. And yet, despite the difficulties that you might imagine with this salad bowl of doctrine and theology, they have lived and grown and worshipped and served together for over five decades in this little town in northern New Mexico. It’s really quite special.

I also felt very honored to find out that I am in a long line of guest speakers at this annual camp. Such notables as Brennan Manning and Phillip Yancey have made the journey to Ghost Ranch and stood beneath the Big Tree on Sunday morning to speak. I’m not sure what they were thinking when they invited me, but I’m deeply grateful to be included in this great tradition. Thanks again, United Church family, for making Sandy and I part of your rich heritage. May Doable Evangelism help you step courageously into the next phase of your story as you continue to impact the community of Los Alamos!