still ruminating...

As some of you know, and many of you will come to realize, I spend a lot of time thinking and thinking about things that either haven't resolved themselves in me or others, at least from how I'd choose to communicate it and be assured that I've been heard. Here are a couple summary thoughts before moving on tomorrow night to wonder what God's word has in store for us about more 'sustainability' conversation.

1. I'm not convinced or certain if a new emerging community can really ever sustain itself in the ways the modern church describes, i.e. salaries, property, etc. I really don't know, but at the same time I am willing to see if that may be the case or if alternatives may be able to be reached and thought through.

2. The reason for the last post has me wondering if something isn't lost by the mother-ship, big church, not providing support for such experimental communities like this where it isn't merely about what we're doing locally and independently, but even more so about what we're doing collectively. The interdependence that arises suggests that both parties within the relationship have something to contribute to the relationship beyond start-up and maintenance costs. My hope is that the big church can realize this and learn not to put smaller, experimental efforts under the same measurements of success controls but perhaps can look at them in a completely different category as fulfilling a completely different, yet important, role within a broader understanding of partnership from within the church.

3. ok, that's it, that's all.

4. let's move on...

Lord God, help us to know when to listen and how to hear, help us know when to speak and how to share, may your voice be from within just as much from without and may we learn the balance between them. amen.

What exactly does infrastructure sustain?

NPR did a broadcast on Tuesday at 11 a.m. highlighting social critic and author William Vollman's work about 'Poor People.' He went around the world asking the question 'why are you poor?' I caught several minutes of the program and was particularly intrigued by one of his comments. He mentioned in reference to America that "our infrastructure has become so strong we have stopped talking to each other."

This haunted me as we continue to talk about sustainability especially as it relates to infrastructure. What good is infrastructure if it only isolates people from one another creating an independent way of life? Do we really want to be speaking about sustaining the self? Does this phrase expose more about us than Gospel? Could there be another way of speaking, such as "Life-sustaining", that integrates the profoundly relational realities of independence and interdependence?

I witness these "self-sustaining" expressions most clearly in large communities of faith that are celebrated for becoming abundantly "self-sufficient." And yet at the same time their infrastructure has become so strong that they make their own choices as to who is in and who is out, what standard/rule is the most appropriate guideline for The Church, whether they will continue to participate in a bigger, more ambiguous expression of church or play in their own sandbox according to their own rules as usually defined and directed by their own leadership.

It is not a coincidence then that I drink from this cup on a regular basis attempting to both understand and develop 'the true Jesus church' in a community that is faithful to following Jesus while witnessing churches who isolate themselves from everyone else because of their superior morals, scriptural clarity and infrastructure that touts mass production.

I am interested in a community that seeks to be "Life-sustaining" according to an infrastructure grounded in a Christian ethos of keeping time, hospitality, and learning while at the same staying engaged and connected to communities beyond ourselves.

What do poor people have to teach us? Do they exist to live a narcissistic spirituality more interested in how we feel and seeing the poor as a problem and project to be overcome rather than as human beings to engage and love? Do the poor only exist for us to make them self-sustaining like ourselves improving their quality of life? Perhaps as we wonder about ourselves as church we can admit when participating in God's radical, social reorientation, that we are no longer the center, bringing good news on the white horse to a world in need of salvation, when at once we are just as in need of conversion as those we seek to convert or at least 'assist.'

I appreciate a recent email from a friend who played around with some of my words from my last sentence in 'sustaining realities' expressing much more clearly and eloquently that "church is created by God allowing us to be held and to hold each other as we live independent and interdependent lives, looking for meaning in the most obscure places and finding it in our relationships with each other." Now this is a community that I would love and be proud to participate in as followers of Jesus!

personal sharing...

Down below I've started a new category entitled "Personal Papers/Resources". Currently I've just created and attached a couple pdf files. Just wanted to share and get some feedback on them.

• Developing a Theology of the Spirit - This was our last assignment for class (my DMin. work at Luther Sem in congregational mission and leadership with Craig Van Gelder). We were asked to develop a theology of the Spirit in conversation with two books, God the Spirit by a Catholic theologian Welker and Leadership for the Common Good:Tackling Public Problems in a Shared-Power World by Crosby/Bryson. So obviously I had to draw on them in writing this paper.

• An Emerging Proposal - This proposal was give to my synod council a couple weeks ago. The bishop of our grand canyon synod asked me to put something together to help them get a sense of the emerging church...this is what I came up with.
  

Again, love to get your ideas, comments.

finally, church for the (dis)organized!

Just over a week ago I wrote a proposal for a new emerging community that was submitted to the synod council. I was proud and greatly appreciative for their openness and desire for experimenting with new church communities. Along the way it was mentioned that I should put together a three year plan...a modern paradigm and question being imposed on a different kind of community. I don't know what the Spirit's going to be doing in three years, one year, a month, one week or even tomorrow for that matter. What I do know is that there is some excitement and energy around some ideas I've shared with those who desire to belong to a new kind of church. It's hard to know really what will become of it because of the organic nature of those who will be gathered. Hopefully we will become some aspect of the 'work of the people' embodied in an ethos of faith. The specifics are difficult to determine as the Spirit works through people who are engaging in habits of faith, many hopefully for the first time, and yet who, over time, will mature with each other, the Spirit, and in their more fully engaged participation in the broader community. This lends a particular uncertainty to the future...which in some ways is scary and in many ways helpless which, of course, forces a leaning further into God.

Listen to this scenario of a gathering from the ikon community that Peter Rollins is grooming. The quote comes from his CD jacket describing a typical gathering.

"Picture the pint glass sitting half empty. Picture a dingy bar in Belfast. Picture the tables filling with people. Drink and conversation are flowing. A DJ nods to the mellow beats he is spinning. A screen displays a confusing street scene. A slim figure walks to the microphone. He goes to speak but is interrupted by late arrivals banging through the door. He waits. He surfs the chaos and uncertainty. Then he speaks, quietly, welcoming everyone to Ikon. Everyone: Believers, unbelievers, doubters, searchers, heretics and holy. The barman nods in understanding at the mention of God. This is the Menagerie Bar after all. Music kicks in. A scene from Pulp Fiction hits the screen. The fruit machine bleeps and burps along to the liturgy that is spoken. A drunken heckler shouts for more music and less God. Someone sings about the felt absence of God, which confuses the heckler. A poem is offered into the crowd. Red wine is poured into an ornate glass long after it is full. A red stain grows on the white table cloth. Images of excess or abundance? Of foolishness or heaven? Welcome to the soundtrack of Ikon."

The modern church will experience the "church-beyond" as incredibly (dis)organized. The walls coming down from the constraints of the bricks and mortar type-church will become a metaphor for even greater walls 'come a tumblin' down.' This church in it's fluidity becomes aware of God's Spirit floating in and over against culture, holding together those as agents for change, those opposed to it and many in need of it. The (dis)organized church causes us to listen, and use our senses, differently. The experience can be compared to the 4'33'' piano work of avant-garde composer John Cage who shifts the performance from the instrument on stage to the instruments in and among the audience members. The audience ceases to exist as all become masterfully a part of the grand performance! The modern church, all the while, will more than likely experience such a liturgy as a (dis)integration and amputation from The Body rather than a re-formation of and re-connection to it.

(dis) - pref.
1. Not:
2. Absence of, opposite of
3. Undo; do the opposite of
4. Deprive of; remove

organ< [origin: bef. 1000; ME musical instrument, pipe organ, organ of the body, tool (organum mechanical device, instrument) organon implement, tool, bodily organ, musical instrument, akin to ergon work]

-dictionary.com

Lent 2: Sustaining Realities

This afternoon I went to support my local coffee house Late for the Train...one of my many coffee 'homes' in Flag. I bumped into an alum of the campus ministry I serve at Northern Az U. We sat down and I had a chance to learn of Craig's future dreams. Having spent 2 years in Nicaragua for the Peace Corps he's pretty excited to get involved in sustainable living projects. He's contemplating graduate school but just wants to get some experience in a job he loves. The conversation was of particular interest as he continued to talk about sustainability within developing communities and the environment. (I think our understanding of sustainability needs to follow these kinds of conversations!!!) He mentioned sustainability as deeply related to a sense of interconnectedness. Those within his rural community of Nicaragua knew each other so well that they knew their lives depended on one another. There was a profound understanding of community relationships which sustain each other...integrated lives that are rich and complex. He mentioned that those communities had interactions with each on numerous social and economic levels which in turn helped them to realize their mutual need for and reliance on each other.

In today's Gospel lesson we hear these words from Jesus of God's longing: "How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!"

I wonder about the importance of sustainability as it relates to God's longings to hold us, all of us...the complexity of ourselves in our burdens and isolation and the collective "us" as community in God. Perhaps sustainability is in our efforts at connecting into the lives of those in our various communities beyond ourselves rather than isolating ourselves from them and "expecting people to come to us."

I have been intentionally avoiding the sustainability question from the point of view of financing because I believe it is not the primary concern. I do not believe that the legitimacy of a ministry can be reduced to whether or not it can sustain itself economically. I am serving campus ministry and we will always rely on those outside of ourselves for the support to continue bringing God's good news to those on campus. Is this an important ministry of the ELCA? Do we want to have a presence on over 100 campus' nationwide?

There is also another expression of our church up here in Northern, AZ; Rock Point mission on a nearby reservation. This Lutheran mission reaches out to many who struggle with severe poverty, abuse and neglect. At what point should we question their legitimacy as an expression of church because they aren't able to sustain themselves? At what point does distributive justice enter into the picture? At what point is the concern not 'what are you doing in isolation from me', but 'what are you doing that is very much connected to what I am doing' and even more importantly, 'to who I am as a child of God?'

I'm afraid that the sustainability question many are wrestling with is one more interested in institutionalized self preservation that loses sight of an interconnected and integrated reality much beyond ourselves and the community life God is calling us to live. I will try my best, in a future emerging community that I will be initiating soon, to get people to share resources appropriately to sustain leadership. The reality is, the Church of Jesus is sustained not by paying salaries for ordained leaders who keep an institutionalized construct of Church afloat... although that is the mirage we are believing. Church is sustained only by God holding us and speaking words of longing for us to be gathered together even as we continue to be scattered in a variety of ways, living individually and isolated ministries that want to hang on for dear life.

more church signs...

A friend decided to play around with these signs and came up with a couple of his own. Perhaps it'll make a little more sense given the fact that he's a recovering conservative fundamentalist...if you don't mind me saying so ryan. Thanks for sharing your creatively sarcastic juices with us.

another good youtube video...

If you liked the previous one, check this out "What Happened to the Modern Church?"