An Hour With a Hero
June 30th, 2010 § 1 Comment
by Matthew Raley
This afternoon I met a man who has planted many underground churches in a closed Asian nation. He is now in exile, permanently banned from his country.
Shielded from the intense sun in an outdoor restaurant, he bounces up to greet me. He is short, muscular, powerful. He throws his arms wide when he talks, and his voice is resonant.
He tells me stories of defiance of the government, and the resulting crackdown. There were beatings by the police. When he posted on the internet the names of those jailed, the government released them, but hired thugs to beat them up again. Some were hospitalized, and one nearly died.
This veteran believes open defiance is a mistake. Christians can achieve more by planting many churches quietly. His voice tightens when he talks about “extreme daring.”
I begin to understand his attitude as he describes his church planting effort, and its results. His work is fast, driven, urgent.
He dismisses the systems of some denominations. “They make someone wait too long to be a deacon. Six months they make them wait! Six months!” Six months after conversion.
He starts testing new believers in leadership right away, giving them small tasks and training them for larger ones. He strips them down to the bare essentials of church: the Word, song, the Lord’s supper, and baptism.
He sets them in a bare room — no lights, no fans, no chairs — and says, “Okay, let’s do church!” When someone stands up to get a hymnal, he says, “No, just sing a song you know.” When someone stands up to get a Bible, he says, “Let’s study the Bible without a Bible.”
His people memorize forty passages of scripture and forty songs so that they can do church empty-handed. “What if you’re in prison and they won’t let you have anything? How are you going to keep up your faith if you don’t meet with other believers?”
This man trains believers to advance the work without any resources. They do communion with water and a cookie if they have to. To baptize, they use barrels, or holes that they dig and line with plastic, or sewers.
Over the last few years, he has planted 5 churches outside his country among migrant workers, plus 3 outreach stations that cannot yet govern themselves. These ministries gain about 1,000 conversions among migrants every year, about 250 of whom persevere in the faith. As workers have returned home, they have planted 11 underground churches inside their closed nation.
This man is waging war. How do you prevail over a man who doesn’t have to be present to advance his work, and from whom you cannot take anything because he needs almost nothing?
Simple: you don’t prevail.
First Teaching Experiences in Penang
June 29th, 2010 § 1 Comment
by Matthew Raley
On Sunday, I preached in an international church in Penang, the beginning of an intense week of speaking.
The church meets in a hotel ballroom, and is a diverse group, reflecting the variety of people who live here. I met a professor from Sarawak, on the island of Borneo, a Malaysian Chinese who had been a student in the U.S., a South African couple, and several Canadians and Indians. There was also an American student who had grown up in Penang, but is now attending Simpson University, just an hour north of my home.
It was especially encouraging to see the open communication in this body of believers. There was a time of testimony in response to my sermon that set the tone for many conversations afterward. People hung around to talk for quite a while — always a good sign for a church.
This morning, I spoke for about five hours at Malaysian Baptist Theological Seminary, with some short breaks. I did the first four sessions of my class on story-telling and biblical literature, and also preached in chapel.
My students are superb. They are Chinese, Korean, and Indian, with one American — all ages, men and women. I am impressed by their understanding of the art of teaching, of the English language, and above all of the Bible. Right away they were asking pointed, informed, and perceptive questions. I haven’t had such a good time teaching in a long, long while.
My sermon in chapel was my first experience speaking through a translator (Chinese). It took me a while to get the rhythm of it, but by the middle I felt that Miss Koh Tan Peng and I were working smoothly. The place was packed with people from all over the world, and Bridget and I were given a warm welcome.
Three things were of great help to me today: water, air-conditioning, and immediate unity with this body of believers.
Evaluating a Violin
June 16th, 2010 § 2 Comments
by Matthew Raley
So, a guy asks me to play a violin he inherited. I can’t find any information about the maker, Lee Nelms, but because the instrument exceeds my low expectations I am intrigued. I want to find out how good this violin is. My problem is that I really don’t know how to evaluate one.
Okay, I know how to play. I know what I like. But there’s an art to examining a violin that I just don’t possess.
For one thing, I have never played a great violin. It’s one thing to hear Itzhak Perlman play a Stradivarius in a hall; playing one yourself is something else entirely.
You have the sound immediately under your ear. The surface noise of the bow pulling across the string–or the absence of it–as well as the subtler overtones are all right there. Further, you gain rich tactile information from the way your vibrato warms the tone, the effect of bow pressure and speed, and the vibrations of the violin itself in your hand, shoulder, and head.
John Harrison, a maker in Redding, CA, once told me that he had made a violin decades ago for a Chico State professor. While he was trying the new instrument, Harrison was closeted with the professor’s Strad, examining, measuring, and above all playing. It’s experience like Harrison’s, repeated many times, that I would consider reliable.
To play a truly great instrument is to learn why the sound in the hall is so powerful. Never having had the experience, I feel that my standards are unreliable. I did once play a selection of contemporary Italian violins, each worth a fair amount of money. I didn’t like any of them. Part of me says that my coolness can’t be right, that my thirty-five years of playing instruments in the yuck-to-good range has messed up my taste.
I also don’t really know what I’m looking for in terms of craft. An orchestra colleague of mine, Abraham Becker, once looked over my instrument from various angles, and said, “That is a well-made violin.” Since Abraham is vastly experienced, playing everything from classical to Broadway to tangos from his native Argentina, I was gratified to hear his judgment. But I have no idea why he said it so confidently.
I can spot an atrocious varnish, or other obvious failings. An awful violin passed into my hands only two weeks ago, on which the varnish obscured all the grain of the wood, the purfling around the edges of the top and back was painted rather than inlaid, and the strings were unevenly spaced.
But the finer points of excellent craft I only pick up informally.
Still, The Nelms violin has piqued my curiosity. So here’s what I’m looking at.
Lee Nelms, 1979, top
Lee Nelms, 1979, back
The Nelms impressed me in the case as a beautiful piece of work. I love the color of the varnish, and the grain of the split back.
Here is my own violin:
Johann Georg Lippold, 1790, top
Johann Georg Lippold, 1790, back
You can see it’s a different model from the Nelms, slightly narrower and longer. You can also see the wear of its two-century history, like the spot where the varnish has worn away on the back by the neck. (The left hand often rests there.) The wood itself has many qualities that I prize, like the unusual grain, and the single-piece back on which the grain is slanted.
I have owned it since high school, when I bought it from my teacher. It hung in his shop for years, and I used to stop in just to play it.
In my next post, I’ll compare the sound of these two instruments, and see if I can’t diagnose the things that bother me about the Nelms.
Mystery Violin
June 11th, 2010 § 5 Comments
by Matthew Raley
In 1989, the first year I was a student at Willamette University, the oldest building on campus, Waller Hall, had just been renovated. While workers were demolishing the interior, they had made quite a discovery under the floorboards of the attic.
Wrapped in newspapers from the 1920s was a violin.
The instrument was appraised as 18th century Italian (the label said 1789, but that’s far from decisive), maker undetermined, worth about $10,000. To those used to guitar prices, that may be a jaw-dropping sum, but in the violin world, such a value is more like an entry fee. The violin was restored to beautiful condition, and advertised all over the country in an effort to find anyone who could lay a plausible claim.
No one did.
It’s a terrific violin mystery. Was it stolen? Why was there no record of an investigation? Who would’ve abandoned such an instrument?
Even better for me, since I was a violin major, I played it for four years. It had a dark, rich tone that carried well in a hall, though it was not loud. It was an easy-playing instrument, responsive and reliable. Most of all, it had character. There were all sorts of colors available to me depending upon bow-speed and pressure.
A few weeks ago, I got another mystery violin.
A local guy had been telling me for years that he had a violin he wanted me to play. One learns to have very low expectations of these things, though I’m always curious.
At last, he brought the violin over and left it for me. What I lifted out of the case was a quite lovely piece of workmanship. Red-brown, dark varnish, a two-piece back with dramatic grain. But the sound?
Well, the strings were really poor. The tone was bright, which to my ear often signals a cheapo, in certain places it sounded a bit nasal. Yet . . .
The tone was even across all the strings, and all the way up the fingerboard. Once the sound was established, the violin was capable of blossoming, or becoming louder and more resonant. There were some sweet overtones that promised more character. And it was quite responsive.
The guy had told me the story. His uncle had bought the violin from an American maker for a few thousand dollars, and the maker had won awards.
I looked at the label. “Lee Nelms, 1979.” Google turned up exactly nothing, which just made me more curious. Even if it isn’t a del Gesu, this instrument isn’t the work of a novice either. He must have other violins out there.
So I’m going to put in some time this summer to find out about this violin, and deepen my own education about violin-making. Check back for updates.
Audio: Restart Your Life
June 3rd, 2010 § Leave a Comment
by Matthew Raley
"Family," Varvara Stepanova, 1920, Museum of Modern Art
Our families often make us crazy. In this final study of the themes in the Gospel of John, we look at how John describes the new birth. By his death and resurrection, Jesus has created a new family that makes us whole.
