If I were in Nashville …

If I were in Nashville on Nov 21, or remotely close, Tokens would be Top Item to Attend.

High-fiber entertainment
-Rob Woodfin

Years ago Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland made a series of movies about a couple of schmaltzy kids who were always able to solve whatever problem they found themselves in by putting on a show. However bleak things seemed, the dark clouds were always chased away when the music started.

There are problems aplenty today, as well, and folks have an abundance of entertainment choices to help them forget about all the surrounding difficulties. But be it wartime 1940s or crisis-consumed 2010, escapist entertainment often gives us a double-caffeinated boost with the same resulting crash soon after.

Wouldn’t it be invigorating if someone could combine a dollop of music and laughter together with a dose of useful information. A song here, an interview with a progressive thinker there. You listen and learn for a moment, tap your foot for another, and enjoy a few laughs in between. Not only an event you could enjoy at the time, but an experience that would leave you smiling (and thinking) even days afterward.

There have been a handful of entertaining intellectuals over the years who have been capable of mixing these elements; a few of them even gifted enough to do it in a manner not derisive to Christian sensibilities. Now if someone happened along who could mix effectual information with uplifting entertainment and blend in a bit of Biblical oblation, wouldn’t that be a phenom worth sampling at least once?

In a small student center theatre a couple of years ago, an unpresuming college professor launched an experiement to effect this paradox. After a couple of quarterly episodes, the production had to move to the campus’ main auditorium. More recently it graduated to the school’s arena. And this fall the show will get a shot on an even bigger stage, the Ryman Auditorium, across town in Nashville, Tennessee.

Over the past two years, Dr. Lee Camp and his cast of creative cohorts at Lipscomb University have assembled their own band, interviewed some remarkable writers, activists and achievers, and helped an ever-growing audience gain new insights on a variety of issues. Guests have included Jim Wallis, Brian McLaren, Barbara Brown Taylor and many others [,including the blogger at this site].

Attending a Tokens Show is not unlike a warm bubble bath with a stiff brush. Even the music keeps your brain on its toes with the band’s “Class and Grass” segments or a host of songs by cast members and guest performers in harmony with the theme of the evening. In one show, songwriter Derek Webb scrubbed a layer of wax off my heart with his composition “A King and a Kingdom,” which concludes with the lines, “Nothing unifies like a common enemy. And we’ve got one, sure as Hell. He may be living in your house. He may be raising up your kids. He may be sleeping with your wife. Well, he may not look like you think.”

In another segment, Brad Maclean, for years a successful corporate lawyer in Nashville, talked about the epiphanous moment he agreed to take on a death penalty case for an indigent inmate. That experience led him to leave his lucrative career and go to work fulltime with death row cases. One of the factors that pushed him to this choice was an article about the pros and cons of the death penalty in which the question was raised to any who would support it: could they pull the switch themselves? Maclean said he was moved by the comment of a Jewish rabbi who responded after realizing he could answer with an enthusiastic “yes” to the query. “And that’s the reason why I must oppose the death penalty,” said the cleric, “because I don’t want to nurture that part of my soul that would want to kill somebody else out of revenge.”

The closing monologue in Tokens’ “Christmas Revolution” show is another moment I won’t soon forget. Lee told a story I had heard before about soldiers in the trenches on a Christmas Eve in WWI and how the Americans could hear the enemy singing Silent Night across the battlefield. But when he continued the story by singing the carol in German, it sent a shiver up my spine that has lingered ever since and reminds me each time I stumble across fragments of my own self-ennoblement.

Those of you anywhere near Nashville on the weekend preceding this Thanksgiving may want to see about getting tickets to this special event. You can also find downloadable segments on the Tokensshow.com website. Taste it for yourself and see if you agree that this is truly nutritious fare.