It’s Time
In an earlier post, here, I suggested a creative re-reading of the first chapter of Mark that was part of my sermon on Epiphany 3. What I was trying to do in that narrative was to highlight the context in which Mark frames Jesus’ announcement of the Kingdom.
Notice,
Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:14-15).
The challenge facing pastors week by week is serious. I’m deeply concerned that most congregations are hearing the texts only in ways that prop up the reigning social imagination; in my case, the consumer capitalism and militarism (among other things) of the United States of America. But we need scripture to subvert our imaginations and sow the seeds of a new world. This can never happen while pastors simply offer scripture as a way of learning how to live well-adjusted lives in whatever society we find ourselves.
So, the hermeneutical and homiletical challenge facing me each week as I stand before my congregation is, “How is this text, by God’s Spirit, evoking a new imagination among us? How is it calling forth a new way of being human for God’s reign in the time and place we find ourselves? And how is it calling us to do this communally, as the image of the Trinity?”
Gordon Crosby & Church of the Savior
I came across this article in the Washington Post titled Activist D.C. Church Embraces Transition in the Name of Its Mission. It is a wonderful tribute to the missional life and work of Gordon and Mary Crosby at the Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C.
The Church of the Saviour was never a conventional church. It has no pews, no Sunday school, not even a Christmas service. Instead, for 60 years this small, unusual group based in Northwest Washington has quietly fueled a revolution in faith-based activism.
Thousands of people are served by dozens of organizations started by the church, part of the intense social justice work mandatory for members. One of its programs found jobs for 800 people last year. Another provided 325 units of affordable housing. There’s Columbia Road Health Services. Christ House medical services for the homeless. Miriam’s House for women with AIDS. And on and on.
But now the grass-roots orientation that has animated the church for decades might lead it to disband. The church always has favored small groups over large and has been wary of entrenched institutions. So as it loses two of its own bedrocks — its founder and its longtime headquarters — and opts, for now, not to replace either, the church is asking itself questions about its very existence. Read More…
Memory Loss
There was a very famous football match here in Melbourne in 1970*. (Note: fear not if you don’t like sports – this is not a piece primarily about sport). It was a Grand Final and the favourite team (my team) lost to the challengers. Actually the favourites were up at half time by 42 points and still lost!
Anyway 38 years later journalist and historian Martin Flanagan want back and interviewed all of the key participants… players, coaches and umpires. And some very interesting things emerged with some questions I have included to help us reflect into our own contexts…
1. The losers remembered more then the winners
Flanagan went and interviewed all of the key participants and surprisingly the winners could actually remember very little about the game. One player couldn’t remember anything except that he had to turn left to get to the change rooms! Whereas, the losers could remember every painful detail! It seems that when times are good we forget things more easily. Perhaps pain has an important function for us individually, communally, nationally and as a faith community. What areas of pain might indeed be a blessing for us?
2. Myths became truths
Alan Roxburgh - Vlog #2
In this second VLog entry, Alan Roxburgh updates from the road with a quick 4½-minute video from a hotel room in Indianapolis. He has a few thoughts sparked by sociologist Rodney Stark’s book, What Americans Really Believe. Stark has a few surprising but significant facts to report from his research — and a challenge for the missional conversation.
Leave a comment below — have you noticed first-hand some of what Rodney Stark is reporting? If his findings are surprising, do you agree or disagree?
“spaces between” 2 - entering the narratives
Bill Rose-Heim comments in the first post on this subject that it seems as if after eight years in his community he is only now discerning the rhythms of life that exist. Apart from that kind of seeing, we are not likely to discern the ways in which the Spirit is at work in our communities.
What Bill’s comment evokes for me is a growing awareness of my own investment in the life of my community. It takes more than time and an occasional conversation with neighbors to begin to deeply enter the narratives. It takes something more like “presence,” and sustained presence. It touches on something akin to covenant faithfulness. We have shared much about missional orders in the past year. Perhaps we need to reconsider the Benedictine vow of stability. Belden Lane opines,
“We experience no inescapable link between our “place” and our way of conceiving the holy, between habitat and habitus, where one lives and how one practices a habit of being. Our concern is simply to move quickly (and freely) as possible from one place to another. We are bereft of rituals of entry that allow us to participate fully in the places we inhabit. ”
spaces between
This morning as I was driving to an appointment I listened to Diamond Schmitt on CBC radio, a world-class architect, talking about the difference between architecture as an event and architecture as ethos (my language). He stated that when an expert is parachuted in to do a project his focus is primarily a single building — to the neglect of the spaces between. When the project is complete it may attract a lot of publicity and impress many people. Yet the person located and inhabiting the community, walking the spaces between, sees only an anomaly… something disconnected from the root life of the community. You can imagine a lot of lights going on in my small brain!
Schmitt was describing not merely a process that infects cities, but a process that infects churches within our cities. Churches and church leadership tend to exist in siloed ministries divorced from the life of the communities they inhabit. This is a result not merely of the pace of life lived within our leadership cultures, or even the transient nature of church leaders, or even of our inherited dualism of sacred and secular, but a result of our leadership paradigms, rooted in the Enlightenment, which tend to gaze inward and which tend to employ specialists with a narrow range of interest and expertise. Inevitably, abstracted from life, wider connections and implications are neglected, just as success itself is narrowly defined and usually with institutional measures.
navigators, not map readers
Eddie Gibbs writes, “The Church needs navigators tuned to the voice of God, not map-readers. Navigational skills have to be learned on the high seas and in the midst of varying conditions produced by the wind, waves, currents, fogbanks, darkness, storm clouds and perilous rocks.” (Leadership Next, 66).This is a significant insight. While we have generally located ourselves on maps based on a predictable rate of change to the surrounding landscape, we are now in a time where the pace of change outstrips our ability to locate ourselves. Moreover, the increasing fragmentation of western culture makes context king - adaptive responses must be local. (Perhaps this was already true twenty years ago and the universalizing tendency of modernity simply made us blind to the fact.)