This is the transcript of my commentary at the beginning of the video. I’m going to post a link to the KCU Unplugged video below – which contains this commentary. So you can go right to watching it now, or you can read the commentary here, and then skip to the 15:45 mark in the video below.
This isn’t a sermon. It’s a story time, nostalgia kind of video, that I’m uploading for purposes of archival interest.
However, it does require a bit of context.
First of all, for those of you out there, who may be watching this, and may be tempted to take offense at it – you know who you are – I am not posting this to stir up any bad feelings, or resurrect past conflicts involving Kentucky Christian University.
I’m not trying to make a statement about anything. The short documentary style video that you’re about to see was made a little over two decades ago now – a fact that will become obvious when you see the quality of it.
So, at this point, it’s merely a trip down nostalgia avenue. I have many videos like this on my channel. I consider YouTube to be something of a time capsule in a way – and it’s time to get this puppy into the archives.
YouTube allows us the opportunity to save and share videos for easy access from anywhere – including the future. Once it’s uploaded it’s going to be out there and available until Armageddon happens.
So, that’s why I’m uploading this. I have no lingering ill will toward KCU. In fact I never really had any ill will toward the place to begin with. I just had a complex relationship with the institution, and some of the individuals running it a couple of decades ago – and the complex nature of those relationships were construed by others into the perception that I had a grudge of some kind. I didn’t then, and I don’t now.
In fact, my wife and I visited the campus in 2023 for Homecoming Weekend. We attended chapel services (voluntarily), and we mostly flew under the radar, but did say hello to some friends, and enjoyed Chinese takeout, which we took to Grayson Lake. I just wanted my wife to see the place where I had spent so many years in my twenties.
The cops were not called. The authorities were not notified. Dr. Keeran exited the chapel at the same time as us, and even smiled in our general direction. I’m sure he didn’t even recognize me.
So, that’s the first thing I want to say.
The second thing I want to do, is give a little more context on the video itself.
This was, from the very beginning, always a class project. That’s all it was.
A fellow classmate and friend, Jason Stewart and I, collaborated on the project with permission from our professor Dr. Durst who was teaching Christ and Culture during the Fall semester of 2004.
During that semester, one of the centerpieces of the curriculum was a book by Randall Balmer entitled “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory.” I believe we had quizzes or tests over the subject matter of this book, or a book report. And we also viewed the PBS documentary by the same name that accompanies it.
That was really the seed that gave us the idea to make a short documentary ourselves for the final class project of the semester. The assignment was just to make an art project of any kind, that expressed a Christian worldview. We had a lot of leeway to be creative.
But, Randall Balmer’s book and documentary are structured around the idea of asking questions about the specific nature of the religious tradition we’re apart of – especially if one has grown up within that tradition.
The idea is that asking questions about what we’re doing, and why we’re doing it a certain way, and what it all means in the larger context of Christianity – outside our specific branch of the tree – is valuable.
And that idea really resonated with Jason and I, so we took some inspiration from that, and put together a documentary about the nature of our environment at the time – Kentucky Christian University.
And we decided to explore that environment through asking questions, and accumulating many many hours of interview footage with various students (past and present at the time), as well as faculty, and staff, from that time.
Along with this, we interjected our own thoughts through a variety of creative ways, mostly involving short 2-3 second movie clips. We were trying to add a bit of humor to it as well.
I would like to point out, that this was a groundbreaking task at the time. It was not easy, in terms of the enormous amount of time it took to make this 18-minute video. This was well before smartphones and the era where everyone has a high-definition video camera and editing software in their pocket.
We used old, analog, 8mm tape, filmed on cameras that were out of date at the time. And as far as editing goes, there was only one computer available on the entire campus that could do that kind of thing. It was in Dr. Charlie Starr’s office. He was the Humanities Professor back then, and he allowed us to work in his office at all hours through the night. I broke his chair during editing one evening – sorry about that, Dr. Starr. Apologies to Jason as well – he got blamed for it.
But it took a lot of time, and a lot of effort. Just rendering one single, simple, visual or audio effect could take an hour or two at times, sometimes two or three times that long if there were layers of effects. These are effects that take seconds to do nowadays on our phones.
The point is, we really busted our rears – especially Jason who was an absolute master of the Adobe Premiere software that we were using. Jason knew more about using the software than any other professor or student on campus at that time. He should have been paid to teach a class on it.
Aside from all that, Jason and I had a lot of fun, as did the rest of our group of friends who were sort of creatively collaborating with us in the background.
And regardless of what happened afterward, in the subsequent months after Jason and I left campus – we got an A on the project!
I think Dr. Durst really got what we were doing, and he thought it was funny and serious at the same time, and he rewarded us for the effort that it took to create a project that was far superior to anything the other 40 students in the class did – at least in terms of time commitment.
The unfortunate epilogue to all this, is that the President of KCU eventually got his hands on a copy of the video 6 months later – and it really angered him. Jason and I were not aware of the fact that he had received a copy. We were not aware of the fact that one of our friends who had asked us for a single VHS copy, right after we showed the video in class, had taken that copy back to his home mega-church, where his youth minister had decided to make an unknown number of copies and distribute them to other churches. We had nothing to do with that. There was no social media, or YouTube at that time! We didn’t know what other people were doing with our video. Anyhow, a copy eventually got back to Keith Keeran, President of KCU, and he was not happy.
Now, Jason and I weren’t even there by that time. Neither of us had graduated yet, because we both had a few correspondence courses that we were completing. And that gave Dr. Keeran some leverage to try and apply some discipline against us, for this video, which again – was a class project, that we received an A on.
The form of discipline the president chose, was blackmail. He threatened to withhold our degrees (our $60,000 dollar degrees which we were only a few credits shy of obtaining), unless we signed a letter (of his words) saying that we were wrong for the video we made, that we had sinned against the school, and misrepresented people, and that we were very very sorry.
We were not sorry. We did not misrepresent anyone, or anything that anyone said. And we did not consider ourselves as “sinning” against the university. We were students, in good standing, completing a class project.
Now, I should point out, that the only reason President Keeran gave us this gracious option – to disavow our hard work – was because my late father – William J. Coffman, threatened to sue the university. That’s right. The initial mode of discipline was to simply not allow us to graduate at all, case closed. But, as soon as the word “lawyer,” entered the conversation, then accommodations were made.
Jason and I didn’t argue. We signed the fake apology letter that was drafted for us. And that was basically the end of it. We both graduated not long after that, and lived happily ever after.
I guess the hurtful thing, for us, and the really confusing part about all this at the time, was the extremity of the response, and the way it came out of nowhere, after so many months had passed – months where no attempt was made to talk to us, engage us in conversation, or understand the context of the video in any way.
The knee-jerk reaction to try and trash our extremely expensive, hard-earned degrees, without a moment of hesitation – well, as you can imagine – we learned some really valuable lessons from being treated like that.
The university had a great opportunity to step in, and address the questions our documentary raised. It could have been a learning opportunity for many students, both then, and in the years following. But instead, they chose to do, the 21st century equivalent of burning us at the stake – by attempting an early form of “canceling” us.
And this is the thing that still baffles me today – the cult like response to feel the need to crush a couple of young students, just because they asked some questions, instead of trying to disciple us to a place of understanding. And it was a cult like response. That’s what cults do – they squash anything that smells the slightest bit like decent from the status quo.
True Christianity doesn’t do that. True Christianity engages with the questions, especially the difficult ones, and it does so, humbly, with the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit as a foundation for mutual understanding and agreement among believers.
There was no Scripture, and no Holy Spirit in the way we were treated. And we were just kids… kids in need of discipleship.
I’m glad there were good men, like my dad, to stand up for us, and tell the president of KCU he had overstepped his authority. I’m sad that it only took the threat of financial loss to make the president show a small modicum of mercy.
The ironic thing is, we were discipled to a place of understanding, just not by KCU.
We were discipled by others, who, in the following years, took the time to engage us on our questions, help us think through them, pray with us, and walk the path with us.
And Jesus picked up the rest of the slack. Jesus always picks up the slack.
So, anyway, that is the context surrounding this video.
It is very much a project of its time. The quality has diminished drastically over the years, because the initial mode of presentation and playback was VHS cassette. So, it had to survive the last 21 years by being transferred from VHS, to digital, and then through various computer files through many computers, and finally to a DVD that’s been sitting in a box for years, and from there, captured back into a computer file. As such, some of it has degraded, and it is no longer in color. It was originally in color, but now the file will only show in black and white – maybe that’s more appropriate given the fact that it’s now pretty old. I have added a few subtitles in my current edit, to provide the names of most of the interviewees that were not previously named in the video. In any case, I forgot that I even still had a copy of this sitting around on an old custom DVD, so my recent discovery of it is the reason for the timing of uploading it now, after so long.
So, again, please don’t be offended by this. The context that I’ve explained here is ancient history now. The video is not perfect, some of it is cheesy, and some of it is brash, but I do believe there’s still a good underlying message at the core of it – a message that is pure, and relevant to anyone who calls themselves followers of Jesus Christ.
Again, if you want to skip this commentary at the beginning, you can go to the 15:45 mark of the video to watch the original video.
The Basmati House Review 