First Person with Wayne Shepherd

First Person: Michael Card

Singer, songwriter, and author Mike Card sits down for a conversation about discipleship and the use of biblical imagination. Send your support for FIRST PERSON to the Far East Broadcasting Company: FEBC National Processing Center Far East Broadcasting Company P.O. Box 6020 Albert Lea, MN 56007 Please mention FIRST PERSON when you give. Thank you!

Duration:: 23m
Broadcast on:: 07 Jul 2011
Audio Format:: other

Singer, songwriter, and author Mike Card sits down for a conversation about discipleship and the use of biblical imagination.

Send your support for FIRST PERSON to the Far East Broadcasting Company:
FEBC National Processing Center
Far East Broadcasting Company
P.O. Box 6020
Albert Lea, MN 56007

Please mention FIRST PERSON when you give. Thank you!

I would love for people to say, you know, at the end of my life, to say, you know, not, "Oh, wow, that was a great song," but to say, "Yeah, I engage with the Bible differently because, you know, I crossed paths with this guy. That would be a great thing." Welcome to First Person, a weekly one-on-one conversation with people who prompt us through their stories to give thanks to God for his faithfulness and love. I'm Wayne Shepard. You may have recognized the voice of Michael Card, who opened today's program with how he would like to be remembered someday. Mike Card has been a friend to me and to Joe Carlson, who produces First Person for many years. The three of us used to meet regularity in the studio at Molland in Franklin, Tennessee, to record a weekly radio program, and we'll always remember those sessions for what they taught us about God's Word, creativity, and community. But before we begin today's conversation with Mike, let me remind you to visit our website, firstpersoninterview.com. Today's program will be added to the archive. Again, that's firstpersoninterview.com. Mike Card is well known for his songs, which are steeped in biblical story and truth, and recently just before an event we both attended in Cleveland, Ohio, we sat down to talk. Mike, as long as we've known each other, which is a long time, I don't think I have ever asked you, "How do you introduce yourself? Who is Mike Card?" And I've introduced you on radio for 10 years and longer. I don't think I've ever introduced myself. Who are you? When people ask me what I do, like if I'm sitting next to someone on a plane, I'll say I'm a writer. Because in Nashville, no one's really proud of being a songwriter. That's like being the pizza delivery man in Nashville. So yeah, I would introduce myself as a writer and I write about the Bible, I guess. I don't know. But it goes way beyond that. I thought you were going to say I'm a slave of Jesus Christ. Oh, well, we all billane, you know. All you need to know about me is I'm a man under authority, the authority of God's word. I would rip that off and yeah, I'm a slave of Christ. It all starts there, doesn't it? Yeah. But I don't know. I'd almost be reluctant to even say that about myself because I'd do that so poorly. But I can, in a broad, general way, say I'm a writer and not feel too guilty about that. What did you write your first song? I wrote first song in high school, you know, probably for some girl. I think I had a crush on this girl in high school or junior high school and wrote some, you know, silly little song. The first real song I wrote though was in college for Bill. Bill gave me a sermon that he'd done on John 21, the second miraculous catch of fish. And I wrote a song called Stranger on the Shore. I think that's the first real song I ever wrote. When we first started doing radio together a few years back, Bill Lane, your mentor was still alive. And we actually got to bring Bill into the studio. So it was a wonderful privilege the last year or so of Bill's life for me to meet him and understand the relationship that the two of you had. Yeah, he basically shared the experience of dying, of knowing that he had cancer and he only had at one point six months to live. And he was really transparent in those last months. It was incredible. That was an incredible time to sit with you and Bill because you're better at questioning and sort of moving the discussion along. Well, you were always the student in Bill's process. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think? You know, PhD from Harvard, 16 languages, all these major commentaries. He reached out to me a lot of times, he would say that, you know, I was his little brother in Christ, which was an incredible compliment because it was really a father and son thing. We did get closer as the years went on. So it approached being a big brother and a little brother, but he was just so many light years beyond any of us, really, in his understanding of Scripture. I miss him every day, I don't know about you, but yeah, he was a big brother. I think of him often and I think of the influence that he had on you and you in turn now are having on others through your music and through your teaching and writing now. Yeah. Well, it all stems from something, right? It does. Yeah. Yeah. We are the, what's the right word? We're the stewards of, you know, what we receive from, you know, the older men and women of God, the people that he puts in our lives and we, yeah, we do become stewards of that. Yeah. You've experienced loss. Of course, the loss of Bill Lane, who meant so much to you. Another man, a good friend, was Denny Denson. Yeah. Denny is with the Lord now. Yeah. And you got to be close. I did. And I was with Denny about 30 minutes before he died. If I'd stayed with him 30 more minutes, I would have been with him when he died and that's it. I really regretted that. And in fact, there's a, his last message to me, I've still got on my phone message box. So when I listen to all the messages, it's Denny just barely coherent. I mean, he was kind of slipping in and out and it's, you know, he's speaking really in a broken up sort of way about, you know, just wanting to call you back. My brother, you know, call later and then he just hangs up the phone and so I hear that every couple of days and reminded of this, another huge presence. And your mother died the same day as your best friend? Yeah. And their funerals were the same day and all that happened after a two or three year process of looking at lament. So I was really teed up, you know, to say, okay, what am I going to do with this loss? You know, I've told everyone else that they're supposed to offer that up as an act of worship. So, and I hope I did that well. I hope I did that well. Just because you thought about it and wrote about it didn't make it any easier for you to do that. Yeah. And it doesn't mean I would necessarily do it. But it did prove, you know, lo and behold, it did prove to be true that that's what you do with that stuff, you know, that my loss of my mom and Denny was something that that was a gift of pain as it were in loss that I gave to the Lord in it. And in an odd sort of way, it makes me closer to the Lord because that's just one more thing we share and that only he is worthy to share those things with. It's an interesting, it's an interesting aspect of relationship that you come into. Death does something to you that nothing else does, right? In your life, it does something to you that nothing else does. And to do that with the Lord is a pretty cool thing. Yeah. You're always so good. I mean, life is hard. We all experience that and you haven't been exempt from some of those hardships, but you seem to have a way of expressing that on behalf of all of us in a way that we would like to be able to express it, whether musically or in writing, do you think in those terms? Well, I think that's part of my call. I think that's what songwriters and writers in general do. They articulate things for us. And if you're doing your job well, you articulate things in a way that people say, well, you know, I could have, if I had just had the right time or the right moment, I would have said, you know, the same thing, oddly enough, James Taylor was always that person for me. I would listen to James Taylor or I'd still listen to James Taylor, and I think I could have written that. You know, so he's this, he is a musical genius, but he's so available, right? And even someone like, I can't think of any other examples, like a Wendell Berry, who's a great writer that I really admire, same sort of thing. Now there are geniuses that are so beyond, for me, you read someone like Frederick Beakner and you think, oh, that's so beautiful, I never could have never said that. So I've always believed that there are different types of genius. There's genius that really makes you think, I can do that. And there's genius that sort of shuts down your creativity and when I hear Phil Caggy play the guitar, even though he's so incredible, I want to play the guitar, I think, hmm, if I just worked hard enough, they make us better. Right, right, instead of shutting us down, that virtue, oh, so level that everyone sort of, you know, it was always fawning and groveling in front of, I'm not really interested in that, actually. Of course, it starts with scripture, but you have a vracious appetite for just good literature. I do, I like to read, I think I got that from my mother, my mother was always reading something and always talking about it and with the iPod era, I listened to a lot of audiobooks and some of the ones that you, you know, that's so bizarre, is to have you read me a book on my iPod. Let me tell you, it's bizarre to have Michael Carter listening to the books that I read. But it's neat because it's like you're this friend, it's like we're, you know, we're sitting up and you're reading a book to me. Like, how do you discover new things to read and to latch on to? Yeah, there's just so much out there and with technology, anything you're interested in, you know, you Google it and there's, you know, any number of books and I just find this endlessly fascinating. I'm sort of backed up really with, I was just in Singapore, one of my favorite writers is a guy named Oliver Sacks who writes about the brain. He was the guy that the movie Awakenings was all about. And there was this man in Singapore who was a neurosurgeon and I said, oh, you know, do you like Oliver Sacks? Oh, yeah. He goes, have you read any name, two or three other guys I've never heard of? So I've got all their books sitting on my shelf now waiting to read and you don't seem to be a casual reader. No, I'm, I read pretty serious. I don't read anything boring. I don't have time for boring, you know, I read very little fiction. It's got to be, you know, it's got to get me in the first two chapters or I'm out. My wife Susan is this diligent person who if she starts a book, she'll always finish it and I go, no, if they don't get me in the first two chapters, I'm out of there. And when you tackle a topic, you really dig deeply into research. Try to, yeah. You've done that. I've seen you do that in a number of projects. Yeah. Try to. And I'm doing the Gospels now and that that's a great fun. Just reading commentaries because there's a, there's a mode that you get into when you read commentaries. You can read commentaries actually very, very quickly, at least if it's stuff you're already familiar with because you'll hit, you'll hit a paragraph or two and you'll go, okay, I've heard this. I've heard this. And then, then, ooh, you'll hit something new and then you slow down. So yeah, I enjoy reading commentary. And one thing leads to another, you have to follow the thread, don't you? Yeah. And there'll be some reference or some article and again, Wayne, that's what's so great about technology now. There'll be some article in a journal. What I don't have access to, which I wish I had better access to is journals because all of the new thinking is in the journals, but you know, there's software that you can get that has a lot of the journals or you can go online and get some of them and yeah, it's fun to run down topics. Yeah. We'll have part two of today's conversation with Michael Card coming up in just a moment here on First Person. My guest next week will be a man who witnessed the revolution in Romania. 1989, in December of that year was the Romanian Revolution. And yeah, we were on the streets I got for the first time in my life. I got the machine gone, you know, in my hand and people were fighting on the streets and it's just an experience of life and death. Now more than 20 years later, he serves as the pastor of a growing church in Romania, a life transformed by Christ. We'll meet Christian Barboso next week on First Person. Let's pick up our conversation with Michael Card on First Person. I ask Mike, how do you approach studying God's Word? I think it's a mistake to ever say, well, I'm going to read it just for devotion or I'm just going to read it just for, you know, scholarly purposes. And I think this is something that Bill taught both of us Wayne. He always talked about this idea that you bring all of yourself to Scripture, all of your heart and all of your mind and you have to engage with your imagination. So that's what's in my mind when I read Scripture is this idea. And again, this is Bill's idea that I'm really, I'm going to engage with it and interact with it. I mean, it's a voice, Scripture is alive, right? It's this voice that's sort of speaking into your life. And so you realize that you have the freedom to ask questions, you have the freedom, you know, to be disturbed and unsettled because the Bible does that to you. Should. Say more about biblical imagination. I know this is something you're really spending a lot of time with, started with Bill Lane. You've got conferences now. What do you mean by biblical imagination? Yeah. For me, really the direction of probably the rest of my life of what I'm going to do is going to be focused in terms of encouraging people to read the Bible with all their heart and all their mind and to ask the right questions. And Bill did that. That's Bill's statement. You know, you must engage with Scripture at the level of the informed imagination. That's straight out of Bill Lane. And I was with him for 27 years watching him do that, but he never told us how, he never developed, you know, developed. I think he just wanted us to, I guess, come up with our own approach. And so I was forced to do that. Some people might be uncomfortable with imagination thinking that we're adding something. You said the informed imagination. Yeah. And I've already, we started this biblical imagination page on Facebook and I've already got some angry people who quote, you know, the only place the Bible especially King James uses the word imagination, it's always negative. When men and their sinful imaginations, right? And so there's this line of thought that the imagination is bad and, you know, and that it's wrong to use the imagination when you approach Scripture. Well, I definitely agree with the Bible that men have sinful imaginations because I've got a sinful imagination, but that doesn't mean that I'm supposed to abandon that. I think that's one of the things that God is reclaiming and recreating by the Holy Spirit. And so I'm beginning to be convinced that the imagination is this link in that God has created in all of us between our hearts and our minds and that if I'm going to come to the Bible with all my heart and with all my mind, I use my imagination to do that. Give us an example of the use of biblical, the informed imagination with a biblical passage. Okay. Well, you take a passage like Luke 7 where Jesus is in the home of a Pharisee named Simon. In the first place, Luke, Luke is a companion of Paul, correct? We know that. And that's just a fact, right, that I know, but then I ask myself, what does that mean? What does it mean that Luke is a companion of Paul, a Pharisee? What impact does that have on his writing? And lo and behold, when I look in Luke, I realize that the Pharisees aren't bad guys necessarily in Luke. In fact, only Luke shows Jesus having meal fellowship three times with three different Pharisees or groups of Pharisees. And one of the meals goes pretty bad. Jesus ends up pronouncing the woes and, you know, it doesn't go well. But the first and the third time he has meal fellowship with Pharisees, he goes actually very well. And Simon in chapter seven is, that's when the woman comes in, the sinful woman weeps in Jesus' feet, and Simon is there. And he's thinking, people who think things to themselves tend to be bad people in the gospel. Simon thinks to himself, well, if this man were a prophet, he would know what kind of woman is touching him and that sort of stuff. And that's a great example, a great story where you engage with your imagination and you realize, okay, here's this Pharisee. If I've done my homework, I know that Luke is not anti- Pharisee, but he paints a very realistic picture of the Pharisees. And so I understand that Simon is a good man. Simon is a good man. And Jesus is there to be graceful and to love Simon well. And so Jesus doesn't condemn Simon. He just says, Simon, I have something to tell you, and very cordially Simon says, tell me teacher. And then Jesus goes on and tells this little parable and helps Simon to realize that he's never really seen this woman. And the operative, the moment, is when Jesus is looking at, and here again, you're using your imagination, but Luke says, looking at the woman, Jesus said to Simon, so you don't read past that. You realize Jesus is looking at her, but he's talking to Simon, and he says to Simon, do you see this woman? And I think a lot of people just read right past that. But if you engage with your imagination, what you realize is, Simon had never really seen her. And so I ask myself, are there people that I don't see, you know, it's a great example. Yeah, I love that. The imagination is always held and checked with the facts of Scripture, obviously. Yeah. It's the informed imagination. I think that's a good point when it's not, we just don't go off half-cocked and every now and then you'll hear a preacher do that and you know, you kind of roll your eyes and they go, come on. So it's fictionalizing the Bible. Right, right. And no, no, it's always when then the confines and the constraints of Scripture and the facts, but it's also a wonderful opportunity to do what Bill did, and that is to do your homework and understand, I mean, let's do some work. Let's find out who Luke is, you know, how is Luke different from the gospels and that sort of thing. And doesn't that make the Scripture that much more rich to us, that we have to invest something in? Yeah, it should. Right. You're engaging there. There's the word engage. Yeah. You're, you don't just, I think too many Christians in America, we have this idea of the, oh, well, there's the expert Bible teacher, I'll, I'll listen to them, you know, or I'll buy their books or whatever, and then I'll agree or disagree with them. That's, that, I think that's very irresponsible. I think a good Bible teacher should do what Bill did and encourage you, you know, I'll give you the facts and I'll give you some of my ideas, but then you engage and create an appetite. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And so the, the commentaries for me aren't the end, they're the beginning. That's where I, I start with commentaries. And then when I read the Scripture, then when I read the Scripture, I engage on my own. Yeah. What are you working on now, Michael? I just started Mark, I finished Luke, the book that's coming out in January, and I'm, I'm actually still working on the album on Luke, but study wise, I'm, I'm, I'm working on Mark now, which, which is wonderful because Mark is a person that we, we know, you know, we know something about Matthew is next and we don't know a whole lot about Matthew. So that's, that's going to be harder. But Mark is this, you know, companion of, of Peter and the gospel of Mark is basically Peter's story and I'll, you know me, I love, I really love Simon Peter. So it's also interesting to me that like, for instance, I know that ancient faith is about to be re-released by the time this is aired, has been re-released. Yeah. That's got to be gratifying. It is. I'm really thankful that Sparrow is willing to do that and they asked me to write a new song. So I never did Malachi. I didn't, I never made it quite the way to the end of scripture. And so I spent a couple of weeks and just had a wonderful time in the book of Malachi. And again, sort of engaged, you know, engaged with the book of Malachi, which I hadn't really ever done before. And interesting that the last book in the Bible, you know, God opens the book by saying, I have loved you. I never seen that before. So like at the end of all this that he's been through, you know, with the children of Israel, he starts out by saying, you know, I have loved you. You're a strong language. I have loved you. Yeah. Yeah. And that is remarkable. I know you get this question a lot from, from young people who want to do, who admire what you've done, want to do what you do or take it even in a different direction. But creativity, how do you answer the question of where do I start and how do I get as creative as you are? Well, I don't want them to be as creative as you want me better. I want them to be better, yeah, because that's a, it's a struggle and a burden. You know, I don't know. I know you want to mentor people. I want to encourage people. I want to mentor the people that God brings kind of within my reach as Scott Rollie would say. Yeah. I'd like to, you know, walk with, with those, those guys. Yeah. I don't know if there's a specific one thing that I say to those people because everyone's different, some people, a lot of people are really discouraged because I think some people don't have, they haven't determined whether they're really called to do it or not. It sounds like it'd be fun. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I always encourage them to go back to their community because I, you know, me, I believe that your community helps you determine your calling and, but there are people. I mean, I walk pretty closely with Andrew Peterson and phenomenal, you know, got more creativity in the dirt under his fingers that I have in my whole body and a tremendous admiration for his work. Yeah. Great guy. Well, I think your best years are ahead and I really, as your friend, you mean that because I see how God is using you and I see he was a mentor, not just in music, but in how to approach the scriptures that, and ultimately that's going to serve people far better. Well, that, I'll tell you, I mean, thanks, thanks for saying that and, and I hope that's true because that would be, you know, at the end, you know, because I'm closer now to the end than I am the beginning. Oh, let's not get modeling here. Well, well, it's, it's very mug, muggerage, muggerage, you know, Malcolm muggerage had this sort of preoccupation with death. He talked about it all the time and I've, I've read too much muggerage to not been impacted by that, but that would be, I would, I would love for people to say that at the, you know, at the end of my life to say, you know, not, oh, wow, that was a great song. But to say, yeah, I, I engage with the Bible differently because, you know, I cross path with this, this guy, that would be a great thing. Be encouraging. Michael Card in a reflective moment and we've learned much through his music for many years. Now it's not only his music, but his Bible teaching that's feeding our soul. The best way to learn more about Mike Card in this latest CDs and books is to visit our webpage, firstpersoninterview.com and follow the links to his website. You'll also learn about his biblical imagination conferences and since our conversation, Mike has written a book on Luke, the gospel of amazement with an accompanying CD and is now working on a book about Mark's gospel along with ten more songs. Well this interview and all of our programs are archived on our website, firstpersoninterview.com. There you can also learn about our podcast available on iTunes as an automatic download each week to your computer. Subscribe online at firstpersoninterview.com. When you join us for next week's conversation, you'll hear the testimony of a young Romanian pastor, Christian Barboso, who grew up under communism. Now he's the pastor of a growing contemporary church in Romania, which has already established many other churches in that country and is even sending out missionaries. Now for my friend and producer, Joe Carlson, I'm Wayne Shepard. I hope you'll join us next week at the same time for first person. [Music]