Donald Miller is far more popular than I realized. I've been a fan of Donald Miller's writing for a while. I like his biblical worldview, and I like his preaching, and I like his style. It caught me off guard that he wrote Blue Like Jazz into a screenplay, and I don't know when the movie will be out, but I'm curious to see what happens when it debuts. I was even more suprised to realize he's writing/creating a TV show that takes place in Powells book store. I think it could be quite interesting. So this is a little ditty about Don Miller, another author I admire, at least as much as Jack Handy. If your are highschool age to post college, you gotta get your hands on some Don Miller, thank me later... and start with Blue Like Jazz. If you are a parent of teen/college age kids, get those kids some Don Miller... without further ado:
Donald Miller is in a room of 500 or 600 people, all waiting for him to speak. But as he steps behind the podium and begins, his voice seems more suited to a small group of five or six.
"Okay," he starts, "what are some of your favorite movies?"
A murmur of response—"Come on!" Miller encourages—and then people start shouting out titles. The Matrix! A Beautiful Mind! The Straight Story! Finding Nemo! The audience oohs and aahs at each other's choices. Little Women! Napoleon Dynamite! It's a Wonderful Life! The shouting goes on for a while; they forget this is a workshop.
"Okay, great," Miller says, bringing attention front and center. "Now, call out your favorite parts of the Nicene Creed."
Awkward giggles throughout the room—they know they've been had. Then one man pipes up: "It's a wonderful life!"
Miller laughs along with, maybe louder than, everyone in the room. He's enjoying that his point was made for him: We know our movies better than we know our creeds. And now self-help banalities—Your life can be wonderful—compete for our attention with the classic truths of the Christian story.
In the next half hour, Miller delivers a variation on a theme ascendant in evangelical Christianity: Truth is rooted in story, not in rational systems. The Christian mission is not well served when we speak in terms of spiritual laws or rational formulas. Propositional truths, when extracted from a narrative context, lack meaning. "The chief role of a Christian," he says, "is to tell a better story."
In keeping with the movie theme, Miller quotes at length from Robert McKee, the Hollywood screenwriting guru whose book Story (1997) is at once a detailed guide to the principles of narrative and a primer on the principles of meaning. Miller says that the criteria McKee instructs writers to use in editing their stories—Is there conflict here? Does my protagonist have a purpose?—are the same criteria we can use to edit our understanding of our lives and the Christian faith.
The Donald Miller speaking at this conference workshop—casual, yes, but also focused, deliberate—is perhaps not the Donald Miller people expected to see. Best known for Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality, a youthful, angsty collection of personal essays that has sold more than 800,000 copies since its publication in 2003, Miller has refined his craft and his range of interests. At 35, he is a maturing youth—freshly shaven with short hair, plain blue jeans, and a beige sweater over a white button-down shirt. He has no pretense of hipster chic, or much pretense of any kind. When bumping into old conference circuit acquaintances or making new ones, he likes to talk of music and film but also college basketball and Hey, how is your wife feeling these days?
Miller, often described as "irreverent" or "bohemian," is a frequent speaker at mainstream evangelical events just like this one: a mid-winter conference at the Hines Convention Center in Boston's Back Bay, a gathering of evangelical church and parachurch workers in New England, with the usual buzz of platform speakers and ministry workshops. Miller is comfortable here, which, apart from his book sales within the Christian industry, doesn't seem quite right, given his countercultural evangelical image. Other recent gigs for Miller include the Women of Faith national conference and a Mothers of Preschoolers (MOPS) convention. He is likely the only speaker at such events who has launched an online literary journal, the Burnside Writers Collective, and whose book site includes links to politically liberal organizations such as MoveOn.org and Greenpeace.
But he manages to fit in just fine. He is not an evangelical interloper. He is an evangelical insider. "They love him," explains Jim Chaffee, Miller's booking agent. "He's progressive but not pissed."
He is also neither irreverent nor bohemian—at least, not much. But for mainstream evangelicals today, Miller is a bridge to an irreverent, bohemian world. His work is framed with bohemia—a road trip, a pint of beer, an occasional curse word—but filled with explicit longing for Jesus. He never takes on basic Christian tenets or evangelical priorities such as biblical authority and spreading the gospel, but he asks just enough questions, with just enough gravity, to attract readers who have similar reservations about their faith culture. He's a sotto voce critic of evangelicalism, telling anxious audiences that it's okay to question the faith, yet keep it.
At the conference in Boston, attendees hear from a lineup of evangelical celebrity teachers: George Barna, Henry Cloud, Bill Hybels, Jack Hayford, Joni Eareckson Tada, Sheila Walsh, and more. Topics range from "Your Role in Jesus' 'Dream Church'" to "How to Lead a Person to Christ: The Simple Basics."
Miller's talks—a morning keynote address to about 4,000 people, plus the afternoon workshop—are short on how-to's and long on critique. During the keynote session, he takes the crowd through a history of paradigms for church ministry. He objects to overconfidence among evangelicals. "If your mind is not constantly being changed," he says, "you're not following Christ." Miller believes sharing the gospel should be like setting someone up on a blind date, not like explaining propositions. He takes aim at the corporatization of evangelicalism, detectable through such evangelicalisms as, "Be profitable for the kingdom of God." He lampoons teaching series with titles like "Three Keys to a Biblical Marriage."
"It seems to me there are a million keys to marriage," Miller teases, "and they change depending on what kind of mood she's in." The joke kills. All his jokes kill. Miller is embraced every bit as enthusiastically as his celebrity speaker elders. Or more so. "Yours is the only talk so far where people stood around and talked afterward," one woman tells him. "So refreshing. So real."
At the book-signing table after his keynote address, Miller is handed copy after copy of each of his four titles: Blue Like Jazz, Searching for God Knows What (2004), Through Painted Deserts (2005; a reissue of his first book, Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance), and To Own a Dragon (2006). But mostly, he is handed copy after copy of Blue Like Jazz and offered testimonials about the book's effect:
"I've been a Christian for over 20 years, and I've never been so excited about a book."
"Your book was the only thing that got my daughter through college."
"I love Blue Like Jazz because it's, like, a Christian book, but it doesn't make you feel bad about yourself."
A 40-something woman approaches Miller with two plastic grocery bags filled with copies of his books. "I've already bought Blue Like Jazz 13 times," she gushes. "But I gotta have all these to give to people. I'm a Jesus girl, but I also like to go out and do tequila shots with my friends. This is a book I can give to those friends."
At the end of the day, Miller and I walk through the February chill to a pub and grill in Boston's South End. He tells me that comments like the ones at the signing table are par for the course when he speaks at events like these. He feels he must be meeting some great need that exists for evangelicals today. "You feel confident because you know that this is actually a refreshing message for people," he says. "They don't feel accused. They don't feel hurt or offended by what you're saying. There's a sense of, 'Hey, we have lost meaning, haven't we?' "
He compares his experience to Paul speaking to the Athenians on Mars Hill. Paul understood Greek culture, he was winsome, and he could make an appeal for truth in a way that Greeks would receive. I point out that in that scenario, Don Miller is Paul, and evangelicals are the Greeks.
Miller nods. "I actually believe that I'm setting people free from something that is frustrating them."
