Planting God Communities

Three New Books: Reviews on the way

2009-12-17T21:36:00.001-08:00

Coming soon: excerpts and reviews of three new books on my shelves;
Follow Me To Freedom by Shane Claiborne and John Perkins, a conversation on leadership for communities that seek to change this new world.
The House Church Book by Wolfgang Simson who wrote the classic Houses That Change the World, with foreword by George Barna; disagree about what is biblical, agree with the call for reformation in structures.
The Amost Church Revitalized by Michael Durall, wise words for Unitarian Universalist churches about the oh so needed shift in thinking of church from the private sphere to becoming a public church, what I call missional community. Much of what we do here is reflected in the ideas and spirit of this book though it is geared for more traditional communities and of larger size. go to www.vitalcongregations.com I was a little surprised and disappointed to see some of the tenor of the negative responses to Durall's book excerpt on public churches that was printed in the UU World; those who think his suggestions are radical won't know what to do with us. lol.
more to come and see below for other new posts.
End

Turning Your Congregation Inside Out: Growing Missional Communities

2009-12-17T21:31:00.000-08:00

The title of this post is also the title of a workshop I just found out I was approved to lead at the UUA General Assembly in Minneapolis this coming June. I will be joined in presenting it and in conversation with colleague Joel Miller of Buffalo, and it is hoped one or two more to be announced later. It will be a chance to present some of what we have been doing here as church, sowing some seeds for others, and a chance to hear how others are moving to missional manifestation of what we call church, a redundancy if there ever was one. More to follow and you all can help me shape the workshop.

Type rest of the post here

Advent's Unapologetic Interruptions: Church Being Christmas

2009-12-17T21:26:00.000-08:00

First, I hope this interrupts your day. Lord knows, I have had many interruptions here at our community center/clinic/library/foodpantry/givingroom cafe/kidspace/internet center today as I have tried to write it to you. And I just got back from a several days surprise trip out of town that was one of those pleasant interruptions but an interruption nonetheless. And as I get into hyper-planning mode not only for the holidays, but for a trip to Europe afterwards, interruptions are often just what I have needed.

And today I am looking at interruptions differently. I was just reminded in the new book by Shane Claiborne and civil rights activist John Perkins "Follow Me To Freedom" how the scriptures are all about interruptions, story after story how God interrupts lives, calls us in new directions, or back to the path; story after story about how Jesus was interrupted constantly, and how Jesus's prophetic actions interrupted the status quo and the powerful on behalf of and in league with the vulnerable.

And this time of the year, God how we hate interruptions, delays in our plans, in checking off our to-do lists. God how we hate to wait too. Whole industries have emerged to make sure we don't have to wait, to make our lives as full of convenience as possible. But then the interruption happens, as it always does. Something new gets added to our agenda. You will be hearing very soon about some exciting new ways we have been interrupted here with good ideas, with love and hope and big visions once again, and ways you can help us interrupt our world with our values and our presence.

Advent is the story of the Great Interruption, as God interrupts the life of Mary, certainly of Joseph, interrupting the powers that be with the greater power that another world is not only possible but it is already here, pregnant and growing, about to be born where no one would ever think to look. Advent is about the affirming spirit of waiting on that birth, on the birth of peace and joy and love and hope, waiting and letting it change us from within so we can change the world without, waiting to connect with others on the road to Bethlehem too, and the road to Egypt too, and the road back to Nazareth too, from where nothing good can supposedly come.

Let me interrupt you with the truth that Advent, Christmas, Christ, the Church is not about Metaphysical Truth but about real Trust, and that, in the words of Wolfgang Simson in his newly released The House Church Book, the church is not to "have" a message but to "be" the message. So it was that God didn't write out spiritual truths in the heavens above Israel 2000 years ago in languages all could easily get; God came in the fragile form, the mortal form, the oppressed and cast-off exiled form, of the baby that had to rely on and trust others for its life and its future. The baby had to wait. The baby was also, as all babies are, an interruption.

So how, as a church being the message of that baby, are we helping people to learn to wait and be open to what is growing within them, and how are we helping people to interrupt their lives, and the lives of those around them, with the surprising love and change that God's universal love brings?

....Last Saturday we picked up on doing the monthly community breakfasts for each second Saturday,next one Jan. 9, 8 to 10 am here but we are intentionally recreating the breakfasts to be multiracial multiethnic multigenerational times and leadership breakfasts where all get the chance to cross lines and learn what is happening in our North Tulsa/Turley area around the center. We got off to a great start. Spread the news and come to the next one. Suggested breakfast donation of $5 and we will have pancakes next time besides a range of healthy items.

...This coming Tuesday Dec. 22 at 6:30 pm we will offer our space for the wider community to gather for a Christmas party of carols and food and good times, reflecting the spirit of abundance with those around us who often live in scarcity or have a spirit of scarcity reflected back onto them.

....We have transformed our old clothing donation room into an open kidspace and gameroom cafe space and expanded food pantry space and still clothing area we call The Giving Room. It is where we have been having our Sunday Advent communion worship services. This Sunday at 10 am we will have our Fourth Sunday of Advent: Waiting on Hope worship with holy conversation and a common meal and decorating more for Christmas. We recently had a Christmas tree decorated and one of the residents who hangs out in the Center said it was the first time in his 60 years he had ever been allowed to decorate a Christmas tree.

...We have been working on community projects of public gardening and are hoping to soon own and transform some hilltop property overlooking downtown Tulsa and make it an outdoor A Third Place LivingKitchen Garden Park, a full acre, a whole city block, that ties in our two most low income areas and one incorporated and one unincorporated both multi racial but one predominantly African American and one predominantly White and American Indian. You can see a little more about this project by going to youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhgFKD6_i_w. We need to get 100 people to send us $100 or more to A Third Place Community, our non-profit, at 6514 N. Peoria Ave. Turley OK 74126 so we can help fund the transformation project. Help us launch this and add your name to the list of givers.

...We will be coordinating with OU-Tulsa to hold community leadership skills classes for all residents free of charge on the last two Tuesdays of Feb. Mar. and April here at our Center, creating the kind of skills that will help people build job resumes, grow their own businesses, help out their own churches and associations.

...We will be helping connect another group of OU students with community residents and agencies interested in developing entrepreneurs and turning what others see as weaknesses, such as our infrastructure and abandoned lots and buildings, into assets.

...We are working with North Tulsa Economic Development Inititiative on the McLain High School greenhouse project, on healthy cornerstores developments in our area; with neighborhood association development.

...And again with OU's School of Community Medicine to move toward creating volunteer community health leaders, feeding the hungry with meals, and getting residents information and assessing their health needs; and with local farmers markets to expand our existing community gardens and orchard;

In all we do, we are guided by the spiritual intersection of following Jesus and Freedom. We celebrate this each Sunday and when we gather for our other meetings, and when we share with others the power of what is happening in our lives and community.

It is why, again this year, in case there are any out in need of companionship on Christmas Eve, Thursday, Dec. 24 at 11 pm we will open our doors for a worship of communion and carols and cider and cookies to bring in Christmas morning.

You never know Who will show up when you open up and wait.

blessings, thanks, and more soon,
Ron

Type rest of the post here

An Altar in the World: Thanksgiving Message and Mission From Here

2009-11-25T00:01:00.000-08:00

Another glimpse into church life here: Locally, beyond the highlights I will mention below about our missional expression of the church here in Turley, you can get a glimpse of some of the range of what's been going on over at www.turleyok.blogspot.com and you might also want to check out the updates and various reflections over at www.uuchristian.org. And feel free to follow along at www.facebook.com/revronrobinson.

From this community where all money goes into mission, where all our volunteers, and where we are guests in our own created place for others, here in this abandoned place of empire:

Much has been going on. We took over providing a community breakfast; and though we fed 20 last Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving Day itself, this year, this past Sunday we fed 100 and included a performance for all by Johnny Cervantes and The Oklahomans classic country band; earlier in worship we had our annual Reverse Offering giving back cash to people who will put it into the world in small acts of justice and compassion done with great love to change the world, and then come back on Martin Luther King Jr. Sunday to share stories about their decisions, any partnerships they fostered with it, and what an affect it had.

I will relate from last year how one decision is still giving a year later. One family of five pooled their offerings and bought great looking and healthy standard shelves for our fledgling food pantry, which made it more professional looking and spurred on additional donations and then at the UUCF Revival the folks who came out to the Center spruced the pantry up even more, and from it we took on a whole food justice mission as a priority working with our OU graduate school partners, and that has led us to becoming one of the major partners in a whirlwind of relationships and helping coordinate community gardens, new grocery stores, healthy cornerstore initiatives, school sponsored gardens and food growing programs, all in the past couple of months with new grants underway and hope and possibilites to come. Out of this will come this Spring a focus on creating new and varied entrepeurship and micro-investment and other ways to create the gift of work to more and more in our dire economic and underserved area...In many ways this effort was propelled by that family's gift decision, and it of course by our decision to live missionally and do the reverse offering. And that story is one that we could trace because it happened in connection with our community center; think of the stories we can't trace because people's decisions on how to use their gift happened in unseen and unreportable ways at least to us.

We have celebrated All Saints Sunday, and we celebrated with the Turley United Methodist Church its 100th year in the community (I prepared and delivered the story of its history during the centennial worship service; its old building now vacant is one we want to buy and fix up and transform into a larger community center, foodjustice center; better bigger health clinic; and urban monastery with prayer and meditation chapel and even barebones lodging for people who come to volunteer and be renewed missionally; and we are partnering with them on land for one of our community garden sites now, and want to buy a whole city block across from their property for an outdoor A Third Place Center and livingkitchen and pocket park for the area that is a bridge between the two poorest parts of our low income area, and at a juncture for racial demographics as well). And we made special thankfulness cards for our windows, and lit special candles, and have been singing a lot more lately in worship, and more spirited; it is great to see our two year old member halt his roaming when he hears certain songs we sing each Sunday and come to join our circle and hold hands :)...the power of a common liturgy.

This 10 am Sunday, Nov. 29, we will have our First Sunday of Advent Worship Service focusing on Peace, with special litany and also some discussion of the biblical story based on scholars presentations on a DVD (to be followed in Advent on Dec. 6 with focus on Joy, Dec. 13 on Love, and Dec. 20 on Hope; with our Christmas Eve candlelight lessons and carols and communion beginning at 11 pm and ending at midnight).
This Sunday, following our worship and common meal, we will begin remodelling the Giving Room to get ready for expanded food pantry, for consignments, for a healthy eating cafe space, and continued clothing donation room, with a new kidspace inside it, and a new wider opening and welcoming space where Let Turley Bloom will promote itself and its garden projects. Stop by our Project Day and lend a hand. (If you don't see me there all afternoon it's because I will be getting ready for a non-heart related medical procedure early this next morning; keep me as ever in your prayers, thanks).

We will be continuing all the other offerings--a special crafts night for all arts and crafts folks to share and learn and just talk and show their wares and wishes, Tuesday, Dec. 1 at 6:30 pm, and the same night we will host another foodjustice meeting; the next Tuesday Dec. 8 at 6:30 pm we will host a fun showing and discussion of the movie Greenfingers (we will have a holiday movie, Joyeaux Noel, later in the month); also in December on the 15th we will offer a program for parents of all ages about how to use the internet to help their children's education, not hinder it; and we will be working on many different local projects and services tied in to our ongoing events and partnerships.

And Right now outside the center on our portable electric sign one side reads: No More Stuff Give Love Instead Celebrate Friday Buy Nothing Day. We do our part by giving stuff away, as a clearinghouse of sorts for stuff, and will be again holding a big free book event for all ages, and encouraging people to spiritually declutter their lives too.

I titled this column An Altar in the World, an homage to the wonderful new book by that name by Barbara Brown Taylor. But it also signifies what we do here in our part of the northernedge of Tulsa, and why. Her previous book was Leaving Church, and we too, as church, have left church as most people have known it; now we take on the task of not only creating an altar in the midst of the world, our community center in which we worship and serve Christ by seeking to be mediocre followers of a first century carpenter, but also finding ways to help people create other alters in their worlds, of work, and of home, and in their relationships of many sorts, in their gardens, along their roads, in their random acts of kindness and beauty and blessings.

And it occurs to me that the titles of her chapters in the book also are touchstones for what we do here, and what, when we fail to do them, at least we know what we are moving toward becoming. Think over this past year's columns and accounts and dreams and surprises and see how they in their essence are reflected by these practices of how one builds an altar in the world: the practice of waking up to God (vision, seeing anew); the practice of paying attention (reverence); the practice of wearing skin (incarnation, perhaps the most important one for the incarnational church, and the most challenging); the practice of walking on the earth (groundedness); the practice of getting lost (wilderness); the practice of encountering others (community); the practice of living with purpose (vocation); the practice of saying no (sabbath); the practice of carrying water (physical labor); the practice of feeling pain (breakthrough); the practice of being present to God (prayer); the practice of pronouncing blessings (benediction).

Local folks, this book will be the annual gift for our study, for our ever hoped-for spiritual retreat away in the new year, as we inspire ourselves into surprising ourselves ever again.

To all, a Thanksgiving full of freedom, of community, of grace, of belovedness, and living for and with others into the fullness of being God's own particular chosenness You.

If you feel called to participate in the mission of the church through us, by the way, especially at this end of the year time when some are looking at end of the year deductions and/or are simply moved by the Spirit they hear stirring within them to do something outlandishly beyond themselves, checks payable to A Third Place Community Foundation, 6514 N. Peoria Ave., Turley, OK 74126 (or Tulsa, same zipcode, gets to us the same) are greatly appreciated. You can make them out to Epiphany Church or The LivingRoom Church but they will just be funnelled over to the Community Center eventually. You can always chat with me at 918-691-3223 or 918-430-1150 or 918-794-4637 too. Join the Experiment in Progressive and Missional church.
blessings, thanks, and of course more soon,
Ron

Type rest of the post here

Location and Cost and Diversity and more about Ministerial Education/Formation

2009-11-24T21:52:00.000-08:00

I really like what colleagues Christine Robinson at http://www.iminister.blogspot.com/ and Scott Wells at http://www.revscottwells.com/ have to say, again, on issues related to the system of ministerial education, and especially with Scott, on wondering about greater options to the "standard seminary approach" to formation for at least most denominational oriented church ministers. My questions run even deeper in questioning the system, I think, and proposing a shift to "seminary congregations" dispersed around the country, say 10 of them.

But let me say, as I work in part for a seminary, that I love seminaries, gained soooo much from them, and can't imagine being the kind of minister I am without them, to a large degree. In fact, my love for the seminary is why I want to see them de-centralize and be re-located missionally so more can be touched by their mission, and they can be touched more by the mission of others. The question that needs to come up for all churches, institutions of all kinds, and seminaries, and especially here for the system of liberal Protestant ministerial formation, is: given the changing new context of religion and ministry and leadership and churches, if we were starting over from virtual scratch, how would we do it? We are the inheritors of much for good and ill now, and we can't undo that even if we wanted to, but we need to at least hold forth the vision of what could be, needs to be, so that we can see what is possible and be surprised by what is more possible than we can imagine.

We are on the path to this already with more and more online courses (so faculty don't always have to be in physical proximity with students), with the plethora of non-UU seminaries educating ministers for UU churches (such as my seminary, http://www.ptstulsa.edu/), with churches and seminaries moving more toward leadership formation irrespective of ordination outcome, extending their degree programs and non-degree programs, and as churches are looking more at the old model of educating, raising up, from within. And with the great rise in community ministries extra-parish. Collaboration is the new watchword.

So, imagine the seminary libraries online more or completely online for all practical purposes; imagine a scholarship institute that cultivates the research interests of seminary faculty and others related to the work of ministry, either in a setting of its own or that exists as a convocation, perhaps in a retreat center managed by another institution already so that you don't have building costs limiting you; and this institute could be the site of offering intensives where faculty and students from around the country could meet, but it wouldn't be a requirement to do so, much as the situation is now.

And imagine 10 congregations around the country being identified and resourced as seminary congregations, with the UUA getting involved primarily to help initiate the change by setting a deadline for when it will stop its current system, and then as also mentioned at the final fellowship process end, to certify and connect and celebrate associationally the ministries produced. It seems it would connect formation and theological education into the life of the churches in a region in a new way, could help them with leadership, could spur on covenantal lateral relations and even a kind of regional capital campaign to help fund the work.

Hard road to get there, as Scott mentions in his piece, and hard to get even someplace like it I suppose (when so many UU churches reap the theological education funded and endowed by non-UUs; a lot of addiction all around to kick), but with all the changes afoot or on the horizon for UU seminaries and churches and our ministry demographics and desired settings and the economic and cultural changes, this could be the time to have change thrust upon us. And, thinking missionally or publicly, do it all in the framework not of how do we produce new leaders for our own organizations, but how do we do it to produce what our various areas need, and carry it out in collaboration with others not a part of our sphere?

These 10 congregations might enlarge themselves by using the project as a way to engage with other non-UU churches, major non-profits, and for-profits interested in the vision. Not sure but how this might bring costs to students down too in the long run as we shift the locus.

This is connected too with the sometimes stated desire for more entrepeneurial and bi-vocational ministries and how to plant in a multiple of cultures. Many seminaries in the liberal Protestant tradition just have not had the expertise or the focus or the will to engage with ministerial formation and practice in the light of entrepenuerism and church planting and organic and missional callings as the more conservative Protestant seminaries and church-based seminaries have done, not to mention as have the unaccredited non-degree but all important parachurch networks. I think going to a more local, congregation-seminary system can only help that situation by getting theological education more into the needs of the churches and able to draw on expertise beyond itself to help meet the needs.

And I would like to see the 10 congregations picked not only for their passion and mission and resources which could handle a bump in identity and mission, but also for some theological particular depth in orientation besides trying to be able to produce a generic UU minister to a generic anything to anybody UU congregation; at least some might offer to go deeper into leadership in the life of a Christian, humanist, etc. formation. Another reason, lol, besides regionalism, to shoot for ten...

Start with the congregations and what they do well already and have to offer and think how to turn them inside out to expand and grow into having seminary tracks connected to them. All of them will be in places where there are other institutions offering courses such as biblical languages, e.g., and care, and systems dynamics, and many of the other knowledge-based classes that students connected with the church could draw upon.

Let those 10 seminary-churches replace the three regional MFC subcommittees (ministerial fellowship committee); let the one national MFC be focused on the overall work of the 10 and relate with them to the UUA and vice-versa and be advocates and accountability with them, instead of being individual-minister-to-be oriented. Let the internships and student ministries be rolled into the life and work of those 10 seminary-churches. Make sure of course that there are CPE (clinical pastoral education) opportunities in the cities of the 10 sites.

Connected to the mission of this blog, in fact I think the 3Rs of missional church might be a roadmap here too. 1. Relocate the formation (responsibility, authority, and trust for it along with the physical relocations); 2. Redistribute resources (move online with library, and many classes, promoting of course to those pursuing ordination and those not and don't worry too much about that since ordination itself is a matter best left to congregational discernment, and redistribute funds by redirecting local donors and funding to the new sites); and 3. Reconcile (churches and other groups with theological education and leadership, and also promoting cultural reconciliation by creating new leaders for new or underserved areas with new groups).

Since we are just daydreaming our way along to a different kind of church.
End.

Type rest of the post here

New This's and That's: Stringfellow, Volf, new programs; All Saints; progressive Christian DVD

2009-11-03T17:59:00.000-08:00

Just got back from a few days retreat in Cleveland OH with the UU Christian Fellowship Board. We stayed in the wonderful RiversEdge Center, hospitality by the Sisters of Saint Joseph. If you need a place with a variety of good programs and resources, up to date, and yet with the touchstones of worship in the ancient styles, check it out. I include it now along with some of my favorite places for retreat: Sisters of Saint Margaret in Boston area, Walker Center in Boston area, Glastonbury Abby in Hingham Mass, Camp Allen near Houston.

Looking forward to a Christmastide to Epiphany vacation to Edinburgh, London, and Paris.

I loved being introduced to the writings of William Stringfellow, Episcopalian, lawyer for the oppressed, back when I was in seminary (thanks Gary Blaine), and on my recent trip I discovered a treasure trove of his writings in the bookstore at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in downtown Cleveland. www.trinitycleveland.org. They have created a good missional sense of place along with, of course, a beautiful worshipping space. The cathedral is open to walk-ins off the street, locals hang out on the steps, there is a common area that looked like it had wifi free and a place to sit and eat, there is a coffeeshop, and the bookstore, and probably much more than we had time to explore. But a good place with friendly people embodying the gospel.

Our church at a third place revolves around those three Rs; relocation, redistribution, reconciliation, and Stringfellow's work reflects those three Rs too; I am enjoying his final book The Politics of Spirituality, good forceful biblical spirituality that grounds the spiritual in the common life of us all, i.e. politics. I wish Stringfellow had lived long enough, as a gay Episcopalian, to have enjoyed the movement of his particular church toward the justice and radical hospitality he lived and wrote about. In this All Saints season he is one of my saints. His version of spirituality is not about individualism and feel goodism, but is one and the same with engaged action. If by chance you haven't experienced Stringfellow it can change your understanding of church, religion, and biblical imperatives.

I also recently attended a seminar at Hillcrest Hospital in Tulsa where Miroslav Volf lectured all day on Forgiveness in a culture stripped of grace. Wonderful. I rushed out and bought his book from which the lectures in general came: It is called Free of Charge: giving and forgiving in a culture stripped of grace. Volf is with the Yale Divinity School and a lot of his work and good resources can be found at www.yale.edu/faith. Sign up for their email newsletter.

Volf's lectures reminded me of the spirit of radical grace and hospitality that has guided our transformation with The LivingRoom Church into a missional faith community and the opening and operation of our A Third Place Center. He talks about the three modes of human relationships as taking, trading, and giving. So much of our culture is based on taking and trading; it is the dominant mode of living. And yet the gospel call is for life given to others because we have received life abundance, because God is a giving God in great creation and diversity of spirit. How much of our church values though are based on either a model of taking and building up of one's self and one's own community, or especially more and more on the model of trading, where there is a fee and cost for everything, all in the guise of reality. Against all that Jesus says to create relationships and communities of radical giving and forgiving, that it is the surest way toward love and real accountability and justice. Using those principles, in A Third Place we have a place where people receive health care free of charge, computer access free of charge, food and meals free of charge, a library free of charge, can serve others free of charge, create gardens, help school children, find and spread community spirit in a place of neglect and abandonment and where the culture is skewed toward taking and trading.

Finally, in light of the above, a report that this past Saturday night our group of a few "mediocre followers of a first century carpenter" organized a splendid festival party happening on Halloween night for our whole community, with close to 200 people participating. People from all parts of life, races, ages, people just getting out of jail, people struggling in many ways, but for one night pausing to come and be with others, to bring others to the party, free of charge. I know some Christians have this negative thing about Halloween, but if they would allow themselves to experience and to see beneath the surfaces of an event like our Halloween event, they would experience it as a Jesus kind of thing.

Stay tuned for much more about how we are getting involved in new ventures growing our food pantry and food and health programs, partnering with more and more schools (we hosted a great brainstorming and grant planning session a week or so ago; we are hosting a free program for info on weatherization projects for low income housing tomorrow Nov. 4 at 7 pm; we hosted a gathering on the census; we will be showing the documentary "The Real Dirt on Farmer John" Tuesday Nov. 10 at 7 pm with a meal and community gardening planning; and more to come.); partnering more with the park programs; we hosted a great OU social work class looking at how to resource some of our vision plans for our local area. We are truly a church turned inside out and upside down in the spirit of Jesus.

And our worship on Sundays has been spirited. More singing from a variety of traditions; we celebrated and lit candles for All Saints Day on Sunday to remember those famous or known only to us who have meant so much to us; we have had great conversation growing out of watching the brand new DVD on progressive Christianity, geared for young adults especially, Dream by the www.livingthequestions.com group. As we head toward the holidays the life of our small band of freely following Jesus folks is strong as we strive to make Jesus visible in the world; much more to come so thanks for walking with us even through cyberspace, or come visit and spend time with us if you are in the area.

Type rest of the post here

Being Sent: Ways of the Spirit

2009-11-03T17:56:00.000-08:00

Hi all. Recuperating from the flu this weekend I have been reading Life of the Beloved; spiritual living in a secular world by Father Henri Nouwen, and it seems to lift up the essence of our vision and mission, or why we seek to do what we do here in our time and place and context. He begins with the love; that we are Beloved, no matter what culture or our own history tries to tell us, and so our whole identity is connected to Love, comes from Love, chosen or taken by Love, and this is a Blessing that to be fully realized must be shared. Being who we are we receive this original blessing through our own brokenness, which is to be transformed in seeing it for what it is, just a part and not the whole of us, and also in its sharing. This is why we are a people sent into the world. And each of these elements or movements of the spiritual life in Nouwen's work also mirror the elements of communion of cup and plate in our weekly practice--taking what we have received, blessing, breaking, giving to others.

"Everything changes radically," he writes, "from the moment you know yourself as being sent into the world." Nouwen was a leading academic theologian at Yale and other universities and who left to find his place of being sent into the world in living in community with people with mental disabilities, but he writes that we all have our places and the radical change he speaks of can happen anyplace once the spiritual vision is understand of being chosen, blessed, broken, and given. I often talk about the three R's of the spiritual life or re-locating, re-distributing, and re-conciling, and these can happen many ways and places. Nouwen says our task is to learn to see the sacred in our daily lives and all the people we come into contact with, even with those who don't speak our language of faith for they will help us know our own faith more deeply.

So it is whenever we find ways to meet others in the world and to come together in worship and service.
Some of these times will be this Monday Oct. 12 at 7 pm at Phillips Theological Seminary, 901 N. Mingo, for Faith Matters lecture on body images and gender and theology by Sarah Morice Brubaker, and during the weekly Tuesday walking club at 5;30 pm at A Third Place, and Wednesday evening for working at the Center to clean it and get it ready for the big Community Visions event which will take place from 10 am to Noon on Saturday, Oct. 17 at the Center when our collaboration with OU Social Work students finishes up this semester with their presentations of grant possibilities for us before a panel of real foundation representatives. And for worship on Sunday, Oct. 18 when we explore our "status update' of our spiritual life. It is also present whenever our Center opens itself in service to others through the Clinic newly expanded and as we seek to expand our food pantry and other projects you have heard about and will hear more about it.
And on our own in our families and at work and other communities, the sacredness is waiting to be seen, and shared.

Blessings and thanks and more soon,
Ron

Type rest of the post here

Our Common Liturgy

2009-09-11T21:44:00.000-07:00

Feel free to print out and take with you and use for your own daily reflections, to incorporate into your daily prayer and worship.

Church at A Third Place Center

A missional community of free faith seeking to make Jesus visible in the world through small acts of justice and compassion done in great love. Join us in service throughout the week.

Our Welcome Table of Worship is open to all who welcome all, regardless of belief or denomination, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, physical abilities, economic status, or political affiliations.

Invocation
Today is the day which God has made: Let us rejoice and be glad therein. What is required of us? To do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.
This is our covenant as we walk together in life: In the light of truth, and the loving and liberating spirit of Jesus, we gather in freedom, to worship God, and serve others.

Morning Songs and Morning Prayers
Lift up your voices in celebration; lift up the names of those on your mind and in your heart, followed by the Lord's Prayer; people are free to use the Lord's prayer versions they are most familiar with.

Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day, our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.

Communion Open To All
Blessed are you poor. The realm of God is yours. Blessed are you who hunger today. You shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep today. You shall laugh. Blessed are the humble. They will inherit the earth. Blessed are the merciful. They will find mercy. Blessed are the peacemakers. They will be called children of God.
Jesus said I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you visited me. I was in prison and you came to me. They asked him, when did we do this Lord? And he replied when you did it to the least of these.
Here is the bread of life, food for the spirit. Let all who hunger come and eat. Here is the fruit of the vine pressed and poured out for us. Let all who thirst now come and drink. We come to make peace. We come to be restored in the love of God. We come to be made new as an instrument of that love. All are worthy. All are welcome.

“Let Us Break Bread Together” “We’re Gonna Sit At The Welcome Table”

Benediction

“Shalom Havyreem” “Go Now In Peace”

Type rest of the post here

Gospel of Mark reflections

2009-09-11T21:29:00.000-07:00

During this year, between now and Easter, we will be incorporating selections from the Gospel of Mark into our church's holy conversations or our communion words during worship. I will post these or many of them here on the blog.

For example, this coming Sunday I will be lifting up from Mark second chapter, how one of the first evidences of his public ministry after the baptism and time in the wilderness is reflected in the story of Jesus and his disciples eating with tax collectors and sinners. My point is not only that he associated with those who were scorned by other people, meaning that he could find God within them and through their lives and not just taking God to them but also that his eating with them was not like going to a restaurant where there are people different from you eating. In that case you might still be separate from them, just visiting so to speak, and it might be about your own self-righteousness to be seen with those you shouldn't be seen with. But with Jesus and his dinners, they were family affairs; it was about going deeper with those who are endangered, becoming truly relational with them, creating that fictive family and kind of relationship that is opposed to the kind most favored; it is about risk. That is what being in a missional community is and calls us toward. It is what communion every time we worship points us to.

And here are reflections from the lectionary readings from Mark for the past Sunday and the upcoming Sunday. Read more at http://www.textweek.com/.

First the pivotal passage of Jesus' encounter with the Syro-Phoenician mother; one of the very few times Jesus is verbally one-upped (the other also by a woman, his mother); a Gentile and a woman with an audacious spirit, risking hurt to confront him and when faced with Jesus' dismissal of her, she continues with her prophetic stance of faith that knew no boundaries of ethnicity or gender or any other way of separation and oppression. She holds up the possibility of redemption and mutual transformation to Jesus and his followers themselves; she holds up the mirror to Jesus about his very calling; she models the very way of the disciple, as opposed to so many of his authorized disciples who don't get his message and ministry, in a gospel that is about becoming a disciple of Jesus in dangerous times and ways. For those of us who find our deepest following of Jesus by being in relationship with others who are different from us theologically, culturally and other ways, and with the vulnerable, this is a scripture that highlights our very faithfulness. And then this is further revealed by the wonderful next scene Jesus' healing, our healing, comes through that wonderful word Ephphatha, to be opened, to be in a position of receiving of receiving the healing of love and truth from others, especially from those who we have been taught to turn away from and who so often turn away from us; our way of being a disciple is to live in the spirit of Ephphatha. To create systems that are open, not closed.

Mark 7: 24-37:
From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, 25but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. 26Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. 27He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” 28But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” 29Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” 30So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
31Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. 32They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. 33He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. 34Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.” 35And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. 36Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. 37They were astounded beyond measure, saying, “He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.”
This Sunday: Mark 8:27-38
But what kind of a Christ, a Messiah, was Jesus to his followers, and to us? Radically, he was seen as the Messiah through his vulnerability, his power-with others, not through his power-over others. Peter's understanding of the Messiah, of God, of the community of followers, was that of the way of the world, of the Roman Empire and temple collaboration way, not the way of the divine Jesus had been demonstrating for them, the divine relationship and compassion for the outcast, and the way that led to but beyond the cross. Jesus is rebuked by Peter for violating the norms of the Messiah and so Jesus rebukes him back, or the Satan he is exhibiting; and certainly religious leaders ever since have still not gotten it and have followed the cultural norms instead of Jesus' way of disrupting the cultural norms. No wonder :) throughout Mark Jesus calls on disciples to be silent about what they see and are told; silence until they are able to get and live it; silence beats the way we so often say and do just the opposite of what Jesus called us to say do and be. What are the crosses that line our lives today, the way the crosses lined the roads Jesus walked upon? Which ones are we called to pick up and transform as we are transformed? It is not that we seek suffering, and judge our selves based on some degree of suffering for the good cause--that is counter to the spirit of Jesus--but that we live, as this following text implies through Jesus' teaching, as if we were already in a state of resurrection and by doing so put all the suffering that may come from the world's crosses into a larger perspective.
27Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” 28And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” 29He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” 30And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.
31Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. 32He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
34He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. 36For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 37Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? 38Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

These were some of my thoughts this week.

Type rest of the post here

Community Visions

2009-09-11T21:18:00.000-07:00

Here is another updated report on what and how our missional community of faith is doing in our northedge of Tulsa.

Recent sightings of the Spirit here in our community:
we had a wonderful start of Community Visions last Saturday where we worked with OU social work students on turning some of our dreams into grant realitiies and projects in the areas of food and justice, animal justice and safety, neighborhood justice and transforming abandoned buildings and lots into pocket parks and more spaces for community gardening and community events. The overall arc is to continue with our becoming an inside-out incarnational community; we turned our church inside out into A Third Place Center, and now we are looking at decentralizing and spreading out A Third Place into a movement that can be located wherever we are called.

On Saturday Sept. 19 the next round of Community Visions will take place at A Third Place as we hear back from the graduate students on their research since our meeting. We will also on that day have a Community Volunteer Appreciation Lunch in coordination with OU. And the final presentations will take place on Saturday Oct. 17. Come see community in action where people least expect it, and how they least expect it. And Wednesday Sept. 23 at 6:30 pm we will have a planning Board meeting. Much to celebrate.

We had our Plant Rescue church without walls last Sunday; communion service at the Center followed by guerilla gardening at a site that will become a skateboard and soccer complex, rescuing native plants that will be transplanted to our new gardening project at the Cherokee School here. And we have our common meals to round out our time of sharing Sunday together.

This Sunday we will have our monthly time of holy conversation lifting up experiences of the last week or last month that have moved us closer to God, opened us up to Love and Joy and Service, moments perhaps of transformation, and also those things that have caused us to struggle with this walk of faithfulness. Next Sunday, Sept. 20, will be a chance to ask me anything about my odyssey of faith, of this community and visions, and sign up for your chance to do an oddyssey and present those things that sustain you.

The Big Garden Party and free lunch will be held at Cherokee School, 6001 N. Peoria Ave., on Saturday, Sept. 26. Come for all or only a part of it; bring youth groups, friends, the curious, etc. From 8 am we will begin transforming the landscape into a kid-friendly garden vs. a maintenance-worker friendly one. We will also have our semiannual Free Seed and Plant and Garden Exchange; bring to share, take what you find you need. And we will have a lunch at noon and tour of the school where my wife and I met 50 years ago in kindergarden. We will continue planting all afternoon. Right now the art teacher has to keep her blinds down because of the ugly view out the windows; we want to change that with a prairie garden; right now all over our north Tulsa area the landscapes at the elementary schools are abysmal, the grass goes uncut, unsightly utility fixtures are prominent in front, and we wonder why the schools are called at-risk. Neighborhood revitalization can be started at the schools and beginning at Cherokee we want to begin sowing these seeds at our other schools here too.

At worship lately we have been talking about the power of words in our simple common liturgy, how these words help us to live faithfully to a vision broader and more loving than the words we hear so much of the rest of our lives coming from the television, from work, even from our families and friends. Every Sunday we say together words of the ages such as the Lord's Prayer, the Beatitudes, Micah's admonition to live justly, love mercy, walk humbly with our God, and the Psalmist call to know this is the day which God has made so let us rejoice and be glad therein; each Sunday we break the bread and drink of the cup (by intinction) and talk about all the different meanings held for us in the ordinary act, sacrament of communion; sometimes we focus on unity, sometimes forgiveness, sometimes liberation from oppression, sometimes a theology of enough, this past Sunday on what it signifies about being a part of a Body, of Christ, of Creation, of sharing despite our differences and validating our differences and we have many. Many of the words we will be absorbing this year will come from the Gospel of Mark we incorporate into our time together this year, in small doses. I have been and will be doing some longer reflections on Mark in one of my online bible study groups and will also be posting them at Planting God Communities

These words we try to live out all the rest of the week. Sometimes individually, and so we hope that the common songs we sing and will be learning become a part of our daily lives, as do the prayer words and blessings; We try to live them our together too getting together at odd times to hang out, to do small projects, to share life and thanks. And attending community events together like the wider community association meeting Tuesday Sept. 29 at 7 pm, the upcoming Taste of North Tulsa Event at McLain High School on Thursday Oct. 8 that will be free to all, and to see all kinds of opportunities for get-togethers go to www.turleyok.blogspot.com.

We will have community breakfast and random acts of kindness this Saturday at 9 am beginning with breakfast at the Odd Fellows Lodge, 6227 N. Quincy.

We are starting a walking club called Souls and Soles you will be hearing more about; we are going to explore new transformations of the Center with times for workdays to do it; and through it all every day we offer a place well into the night for people to meet, share, find out information, get and give donations of clothes, food, books, and more. We will be starting a movie and social justice documentary times. The seeds continue to be sown. All that you have read about up to this point happens often with one or two people, sometimes four, sometimes a dozen; that's what it means to be missional minded.

Come see.

Type rest of the post here

Recent report from the church

2009-09-05T18:58:00.000-07:00

Posting a few recent reports about how we put a lot of the theories here into action.

It was good to relax this past Sunday as we gathered for conversation, to watch more of the documentary on monastic life Into The Great Silence, share communion and fix and eat a healthy lunch. It is also good to see that the garden we have planted for the community is yielding produce for our center and food pantry, and thanks for other donations of home grown fresh produce for it from others.

Looking ahead: This Sunday and next we will watch and discuss the movie Simon Birch and John Irving's book A Prayer for Owen Meany which "suggested" the movie, both as a way of launching a study and discussion of the Gospel of Mark and radical discipleship in our time, a time when it is both quite easy to be a Christian and extremely hard to be a follower of Jesus.

First Sundays of each month we will pick back up on our Church Without Walls Sundays, doing things together in the community or worshipping with other groups. Second Sundays during our holy conversation time we will de-brief our lives and bring back reports on how we are living as missionaries of love and justice, sharing stories and struggles. On other Sundays we will offer turns at doing Odysseys sharing something special from our life story, or something we have found that inspires and sustains us, or a passion we want to use in the world. Children will continue with lessons from the book Hide and Seek With God.

Special days: Saturday Sept. 26 will be a day of transforming the landscape, and lives, at Cherokee School, with gardening from 8 am to 11 am, with a special lunch and tour of the school as a gift from Bonnie and I in celebration of the day we met 50 years ago in kindergarden at Cherokee; then more gardening in the afternoon. For more and ways to help, in person or with other ways, contact Bonnie at BJAshing@aol.com. Come be our guest and help us help the school. On Saturday Oct. 31 we will host our annual big community Halloween Party at our A Third Place Center; help us keep making the celebration bigger and better; Sunday, Nov. 15 at 2 pm help Turley United Methodist Church as it celebrates its 100th anniversary; Nov. 22 will be the Thanksgiving Service and the annual Reverse Offering Sunday when we give out money for people to use for acts of random kindness beauty justice or to seed projects and causes that make a diffeerence, then on Martin Luther King Jr. Sunday we share stories of how we used the monies; On Nov. 29 we begin Advent sundays leading to Christmas Eve communion.

Stay tuned for other special days of community service through A Third Place and special fund-raisers.

Thanks and blessings and more soon,
Ron

Type rest of the post here

A new way of church for young adults? missionaries in own zip code

2009-08-21T15:37:00.000-07:00

The latest Leadership Journal www.leadershipjournal.net is focused on ministry to twenty-somethings, iGens, and there is one summary of how the seminal megachurch Willow Creek has been changing its generationally focused worship service, finally ending it, in favor of responding to the generation's desire for more missional church: It is a good model for progressive churches to follow: from Collin Hansen's article:

"equip twenty-somethings to go and serve as missionaries in their own zip code [RR: another good reason for relocating to the abandoned places of empire, too]. He launched missional community hubs, where a core group of four to six young adults move into an apartment complex or condominium unit. Meeting three times per month there, the missional community hubs focus on prayer, Scripture, and community. Keeping with Willow Creek's mission, the small group gathers must be accessible to unbelievers. They also serve their neighborhoods with justice and compassion initiatives. Outside these Tuesday night meetings, missional community hubs host social events where Christians can mingle with unbelievers. Those who want to invest even deeper can meet in gender-specific life transformation groups where two to five young adults study scripture and hold each other accountable...."

Everything Axis does today comes back to the need to build tight-knit communities in order to reach the milennial generation. 'the model must be relational. If it is based on the big event with one person teaching, I just don't think it's going to work...

We didnt come up with it but people belong before they believe before they behave.

From the interview with Matt Chandler on the New Reformed and being missional: "some people would think it would be cool if we had a coffee shop. But I don't want people getting their lattes here. I want them getting their lattes at the four Starbucks in our area so they can get to know the barristas and invite them into our body. [RR: it would be more missional if they lived in an area like we do without anything resembling a starbucks, then creating free coffee shops for the community might make sense; getting the young people to see that being cool shouldnt even be about where they live, as well as about where they drink coffee, is what it means to follow Jesus missionally. but his comment is a good first step for institutional churches].

From J.R. Kerr's good piece about open-source activism: tapping into new generation of leaders means letting go of leader having to feel the need to control and be in on everything. Boomer leadership focus on values of excellence and efficiency leads newer leaders to see those values as too corporate, too controlling, too consumerist.

From Chris Armstrong's How Solitude Builds Community: solitude is not removing yourself from service to others; it is the essential preparation for service. that preparation remains necessary today.

Type rest of the post here

ChurchMorph

2009-08-21T14:13:00.000-07:00

This newest work by Eddie Gibbs, part of the co-author with Ryan Bolger of Emerging Churches, is called "churchmorph: how megatrends are reshaping christian communities." Like Emerging Churches when it came out, this new work is a good basic introduction to why church is being reimagined, and how it is being done so in different ways and places around the globe, especially in Europe, the U.S., and Australia. It is a good companion with Tom Sine's The New Conspirators. Its breadth is more significant than its particular depth, but it would be a great book to share with church leadership if you are introducing organic ways of being church. For depth go to Reggie McNeal's Missional Renaissance (see posts below on it); but for a one book intro to get you going into more depth, start here now. Gibbs and Bolger's three major characteristics of emerging churches continues to be a good guide; 1. identify with the life of Jesus; 2. transform secular space; 3. live as community.

Good Dog-eared sections of ChurchMorph:

A key scriptural text for incarnational theology and churches is Philippians 2, the possibly pre-Pauline hymn where Paul writes about Jesus being in the "morphe" of God. This is key to kenotic Christianity, giving up temptations of power in the world in order to allow God in and to transform the world. As with Jesus, so with the church and our lives. How then are we and our communities morphing to let God in?

Megatrends: a sense of mystery, without superstition, in worship; self-critical churches reflective of the move from modernity to postmodernity; rise of grassroots initiatives reflective of change from industrial culture to information culture; becoming incarnational reflective of shift from christendom to post-christendom era; as culture shifted from production to consumer oriented, he sees church-goers shifting from conformers to consumers (I see the shift coming next with missional church away from church-goers as consumers to them being convertors, agents of change). other megatrends include from religious identity to spiritual exploration, and delayed adulthood.

I resonate with Doug Pagitt of Solomon's Porch who is quoted in the book describing their experience as "kinda liturgical church...kinda like Mennonite church...kinda like Bible church." We often in worship have our blends of elements.

Gibbs uses several markers to decribe a church both emergent and missional, and it pretty well sums up our markers here in Turley too: on his spectrum we fall mostly into his categories--external focus, independent network (vs. inherited denomination), multicultural, theologically liberal, missional, low-profile situational leader (working on that more), and engaging popular culture.

"Traditional denominations on both sides of the Atlantic suffer from a number of drawbacks. First, the model of church they are endeavoring to reproduce is a style of church shaped by and suited for Christendom.[RR: even if they are theologically eclectic oriented UU churches]; it is not a missional model...Second, the new church plants have to meet criteria set by the denomination in order to be considered a full-fledged church. This means that church planting becomes phenomenally expensive, as it is tied to real estate, meeting pay scales for professional clergy, and the purchase of furnishings...Third, traditional denominations suffer from a shortage of trained and passionate church planters. They tend to attract and train leaders who look to the church to provide security and a career in ministry, rather than ground-breaking risk-takers...Fourth, the seminaries that provide their leaders have trained their students in teaching and pastoring existing congregations, rather than in how to birth and reproduce new faith communities."

More good markers of a missionary church: 1. focused on God the Trinity [see my posts on the Trinity in progressive and still powerful understandings, as touchstones of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, how each of these needs to be incarnated in community]. 2. incarnational; 3. transformational; 4. makes disciples; 5. relational, hospitable and welcoming and "its ethos and style are open to change when new members join" [that last one is becoming increasingly important and is a challenge for most to understand that it doesnt mean the DNA changes, as new members come in and are leaders because they get the DNA, but the expression of the DNA in ethos and stlyle reflects continual evolution, and is another reason why multiple small groups helps this happen in a healthy way]. 6. reproducible; 7. globally committed.

Emerging churches are moving in an Anabaptist direction, resistance to ways culture shapes us and churches.

emerging churches reflect emergent systems: 1. open to change from within; 2. dictated by local not global circumstances; 3. learning as self-renewing; 4. distributed knowledge, no key leader seen as fount of all knowledge; 5. servant leadership that changes perception of a situation instead of announcing change.

Type rest of the post here

Recovering Rest Renewal

2009-08-13T10:07:00.000-07:00

[latest update: start cardiac rehab next week, and an updated sleep study after that; learning how good it feels on low unsaturated fat diet, still resting during day a lot, doing small good things like going to farmers market, catching up on family matters, beginning to think about trip to Europe after Christmas, looking forward to working again in a more balanced way too.]

[update: internist visit yesterday went well; basic vitals good, no effects of all the new medicines, but no extensive tests, those will wait for the cardiologist followup next month, and also I hope to make contact next week with the cardiac rehab program). It felt good to drive myself there across town (not being any hospitals in North Tulsa; whole episode brings home the lack of medical care and the food desert here; I often cite to the media the bottom line of our zip code having a fourteen year lower life expectancy difference than the highest one just eight miles away in south Tulsa, and the life affirming presence of our church here) and I did a few errands at the seminary and visited family in from out of town, but overall a low stress day that was the most "normal".

Background:
Below are a series of posts of resources and reflections that came out of leading a workshop on the organic church at summer church camp. I was only able to lead two of the sessions however as I had a heart attack during the early hours on August 5. I never lost consciousness. My wife, some of whom know is a physician, gave me some aspirin and drove me 20 minutes to the nearest hospital where the EKG confirmed the damage and I was lifeflighted to St. Francis in Tulsa. By the time I was there the medicine I had received helped to open back up the closed artery. Later that day I had two stents put in the artery. I came home Friday Aug. 7 evening and have been resting in recovery and getting used to my new medicines and diet. I go to a new internist tomorrow then go back to the cardiologist in mid September for a stress treadmill to see if another stent is needed in an older blocked pathway of the heart from four years ago.

Thanks for all the prayers that have come my way and for my family and community here and through the UU Christian Fellowship. I am on low stress schedule; not checking online much but am some; doing things that are energy boosts but not too stressful. About to drive again. But everything limited until August 26. I am feeling the seeds of renewal, and an overwhelming sense of grace and gratitude. Enjoying just being. Reading. Thinking. Caring for my body, as a part of the Body of Christ.

Blessings.

Type rest of the post here

Church of Others: Addendum: The Tangible Kingdom

2009-08-13T09:21:00.000-07:00

See posts below if you want to read these in sequence.

I would have brought this resource also into the workshop on the organic church. It is the Rhythms of Organic Communities of Faith. It comes from Halter and Smay's The Tangible Kingdom: creating incarnational community. Great overview for how to set out the touchstones of communities of faith.

Three focus areas: Community, Communion, Mission

Community: sharing friends, sharing food, sharing lifeHow are you and your community of faith doing at this?How are all of these taking place in "third places", proximity spaces?

Communion: sharing scripture, holding sabbath gatherings, creating "soulace"spaces
(Soulace spaces are simple gatherings through the week where people can be together for a more communal experience in scripture, silence, prayer, reflection. Especially in public space, maybe walking a labyrnth or stations of the cross though; experiences that are informal maybe only two or three people, a way to order the week around the spirit and also to meet and deepen with others.) I am starting to think of taking advantage of soulace spaces in my area and creating more ways to be with one or two in them for contemplation. )

Mission: benevolent action, spontaneous blessing, sacrificial giving, sending of leaders.

Halter and Smay conclude by talking about how resources of time talent treasure are not distributed evenly between these three areas, however, but are weighted toward community and mission components.Key point they remind church of: what you seed will grow. what you give money to, and leadership to, will grow. Are you putting it into those areas that need it most to live out your reason for being, and that which will help create a discontinuity with the past and help you be more responsive to our changed cultures; or are they going into more of the same salaries, building, curriculum, programs. For what you give to will grow, so be careful what you give to, what you spend your life on, the life of your community. I think their book and their three focus areas might be a good guide for church's looking to evaluate themselves, especially with the aim of becoming more incarnational. End.

Church of Others: Day Four: New Monasticism

2009-08-13T08:17:00.000-07:00

[Just updated]. Here are my notes for the workshop session on New Monasticism:

See also the books School of Conversion: 12 marks of new monasticism, and The New Monasticism, in particular for this and more.

Back in the mid 1930s, between the wars, in times of global economic depression, the term new monasticism begins not only to be used but some very important foundational expressions of it begin to take shape and continue some of the impulse toward this expression of the church that have been with us forever, particularly in protestantism through the radical reformation, the witness of anabaptists and others.

Bonhoeffer in 1935 talks about a restoration of the church through a new monasticism based simply on the Sermon on the Mount. He is a crucial part of the confessing church movement that sought to withdraw from the church going along with the Nazis and dominant culture, living in communities of resistance instead. This is something also that the life of theologian Jurgen Moltmann displays about the growth of such communities in Europe even in secular ways..

Near the same time, Dorothy Day is starting up the Catholic Worker movement with others and creating houses of hospitality. Of course in some ways the church of slaves in the south also exhibited this sense of small communities of resistance as precursors and pathfinders for us. Then there is the witness of Clarence Jordan and the Koinonia community in Georgia starting in the early 1940s. John Perkins and the Christian Community Development Association.

Pivotal in recent history was the work of Alastair MacIntyre's After Virtue where he writes that the world is waiting for a new kind of St. Benedict. Jonathan Wilson writes about faith in a fragmented world that a new monasticism is needed to point the way.

Out of this has come groups you can find more about at http://www.newmonasticism.org/: places like the Simple Way in Philadelphia Shane Claiborne writes about in The Irresistible Revolution; Rutba House in North Carolina, a Christian community named for the Muslim town in Iraq that tended to these peacemakers injured during the war; Camden House in New Jersey; Church of the Sojourners in San Francisco (and the long time wonderful work in a missional way of the Church of the Sojourners in Washington DC can be reiterated here); Communality in Lexington KY. The meeting in 2004 produced the 12 marks statement listed down below.

A few preliminary thoughts before looking at the 12 marks:

One of the questions that came up at the workshop when it was being led by my colleague and friend Jonalu Johnstone was what makes this monasticism new and other monasticism old? Good question. Off the top of my head I think that 1. this one is coming through protestantism whereas the monasticism most in our world today has come through Catholicism, with all the issues of governance and polity inherent in those distinctions; it is certainly more like the small c catholicism though, as in ecumenism and universalist. 2. A book that explores this some is Scott Bessenecker's The New Friars, talking about the difference between friars who went out into the world to serve the poor, and some monks who lived only within their own walls; in some ways new monasticism borrows from the friars more than some of people's stereotypes based on some monks; 3. they are more often coed; 4. they may not follow the Daily Office but they have it as a guide and follow daily prayer time; 5. the monastic movements with orthodox, Roman Catholic, and even Anglican communities are inspirational but these movements are also open to change so we need to be careful of thinking we grasp them.

It is transdenominational, ecumenical, and in some ways interfaith (I am curious about exploring the movements of Buddhist intentional community, ecological social justice communities, learning from all). It is anti-Imperical, seeing American government and culture as taking on empire ways reminiscent of Rome. It is non-violent, anti-racist, anti-consumerism and anti-individualism in intent. (Reminding us that the Bible witness is about God creating a people, not individuals). Due to all this one of the underlying themes is that on one level it may be easy to be a Christian in America if one goes along with the crowd and the culture, but that it is hard to be a Christian in America if one tries to be that as a follower of the Jesus way. Also, that resistance as a way of being faithful, comes through celebration. There is a pathway for people coming into community as Visitors, Guests, Nomads, Novices, Partners.

The 2004 statement:

Moved by God’s Spirit in this time called America to assemble at St. Johns Baptist Church in Durham, NC, we wish to acknowledge a movement of radical rebirth, grounded in God’s love and drawing on the rich tradition of Christian practices that have long formed disciples in the simple Way of Christ. This contemporary school for conversion which we have called a “new monasticism,” is producing a grassroots ecumenism and a prophetic witness within the North American church which is diverse in form, but characterized by the following marks:
1) Relocation to the abandoned places of Empire.
2) Sharing economic resources with fellow community members and the needy among us.
3) Hospitality to the stranger
4) Lament for racial divisions within the church and our communitiescombined with the active pursuit of a just reconciliation.
5) Humble submission to Christ’s body, the church.
6) Intentional formation in the way of Christ and the rule of thecommunity along the lines of the old novitiate.
7) Nurturing common life among members of intentional community.
8) Support for celibate singles alongside monogamous married couples and their children.
9) Geographical proximity to community members who share a common rule of life.
10) Care for the plot of God’s earth given to us along with support of our local economies.
11) Peacemaking in the midst of violence and conflict resolution within communities along the lines of Matthew 18.
12) Commitment to a disciplined contemplative life.
May God give us grace by the power of the Holy Spirit to discern rules for living that will help us embody these marks in our local contexts as signs of Christ’s kingdom for the sake of God’s world.

I think it is vital that the number one mark is relocation. Once that happens, then the rest seems to fall into place often as a response to taking that first action. Every person and every church can ponder this and find ways to relocate into these places in their own wider communities; it is part of the internal to external shift with the added focus on where that external focus should be located. Simply think of what all happens in your church on a typical week, and now think about how it can happen in an abandoned place of Empire. I love the stories happening of churches that are moving, and people in them moving, from suburbs to urban areas, to apartment complexes, to under bridges, etc. reforming themselves in the process.

Lifting up the power of downward mobility in an upscale world. Living out the Theology of Enough.

Hospitality to the stranger turns into becoming the stranger, the guest.

Check out the Relational Tithe network. Consider differences between common purse community and common standard for discretionary spending communities. Think of ways to create lending networks, eat together more, pray together more, work together more, and extend your concept of more to include more than you think.

Humble submission to the church; of course enlarge your idea of church too, but contemplate how much you are learning from and connected and honoring those who have gone before, how much of the past in the church is still being drawn upon; also how as you may find it necessary to separate in ways from churches that are not missional and have surrendered to cultural, empirical ways, how to still be in connection with other expressions of the church, to be accountable with them. Form relationships; look for ways to connect with all streams of the church.

Celibacy in singlehood? Monogamy? Use it to discuss community values of sexuality, resistance to culture. What is the challenge single people face these days regarding their sexual lives? I don't think we incorporate this enough into our church lives, which might be one small reason why so many young adults look elsewhere for connections and meaning and guidance; celibacy's merits might be good to ponder. I might not come out with the same place that the 12 marks have; I tend to extend hospitality and participation and leadership with others regardless of single celibacy (though I uphold monogamy) but in general I love this mark included for the transformative conversation and sense of grace and resistance to culture it can raise before us.

Finally, I add here the guide for deepening spiritual life in community that I use and commend to others: daily prayer and meditation, weekly worship, monthly spiritual accountability and direction and deep sharing, annual retreat/revival/special time, lifetime dedication toward a pilgrimmage; always open to random acts of kindness and beauty.

End.

Church of Others: Interim Notes

2009-08-13T07:51:00.000-07:00

[updated]
I found my off the cuff notes during the workshop so before getting to new monasticism in this series, I want to slip these perspectives in. These postings lol have something of the quality of the workshop itself which went off the beaten path from time to time. See posts below for the first in explaining this series and posting the resources.

carryover conversations:

One of the best questions that came up, and is common anytime this topic is raised, is: how can ministers do this and still get paid? Great idea but how to make a living at it?...This is really worthy of a separate post and I will do that later, but basically I said that ministers who were doing this were usually finding ways to be tentmakers, bivocational, to get their money from various other sources, sometimes so-called secular is actually preferred, sometimes in a field that might be able to draw on their specific skill sets from ministry. I told about the churches in the suburbs who are folding up, selling their possessions, and many of the families are moving into the poorer urban areas, the abandoned places, and living there transforming their neighborhoods and becoming organic churches without a central building (see Christianity Today article I will try to find and link to). We often ask our church members to have fulfilling careers but to give so much volunteer time to our churches, and it might not be a bad idea for ministers to consider doing the same thing, especially if they are being burned out by church as it is; like the churches they lead they need to have discontinuity with the past, and consider making big steps, revolutionary instead of evolutionary. We talked about what constitutes a church and if a minister is essential in our history and we talked about how even the Cambridge Platform of American congregationalism set out that the church exists first and then elects from its own a pastor and teacher; and how there might be many different forms of ministers as coaches, mentors, helping the various organic cells to think and act theologically without having to be present and leading each cell. Polity issues will be taken up I think in a later separate post but this was an area covered in the workshop. It is an important challenging but also revealing question.

Why name organic?
Our ancestors didn't garden with chemicals; they just grew food; it was organic because it made sense and worked; they didn't know they were doing something that others later would find avant-garde. The focus of organic gardening is on the soil; if that is right, and carries naturally such a diversity and richness of life in one clump held in the hand, then growth of the plants will happen; if soil is not right, or if it takes chemicals and constant work because of them or if you are trying to grow things that are not native to your place, then you will be fighting and losing against Nature and using up more and more resources in the process. Sound like church too often? You bet.
Organic church focuses on soul preparation as gardening does soil preparation. Let the plant DNA then thrive and be sustainable. Church DNA is the mission, vision, value that creates the church, frames it, gives it shape and propels it forward.

Another of the organic church's heresies, not endemic to it but foundational: We must always be failing at something. This means we are always risking co-creating with God something new, but also means that we live spiritually in a state of humility, blessed imperfections, and know that no people no system is perfect (lord knows the best organic gardening must still suffer from drought flood illness of gardeners, etc.), that we are human, will break each others hearts.

In trying to explain organic or missional church expressions, I love Reggie McNeal's story of trying to explain it to someone who finally said, you mean when two Christians are tutoring some kid in math that that is a church? To which McNeil replied, no, I don't mean it is "a" church but that the church is present.

Worship is response to mission, not other way around.

People can be engaged in many different forms of church at the same time, and will be more and more I believe; be a part of a missional faith community but that also goes, together or apart, to be with big church dynamic worship events, and to multiple faith traditions. Transdenominational.

We also spent some time talking about how any church can begin down this road by focusing, as my posts on McNeil's book Missional Renaissance earlier this summer showed, on his three main shifts: internal to external; program to peope; church to kingdom or world. End.

Type rest of the post here

Church of Others: Emerging Small Groups, ie. the church, the Jesus Way, Day Three

2009-08-12T16:00:00.000-07:00

See earlier posts in this series. Here is a compendium of reflections and resources that were part of the background for the workshop. They were first used in my program at General Assembly on emerging small groups the Jesus Way. Substitute church for small group if you like; it fits my definition.

We were scheduled to discuss this on the fourth and final day of the workshop but I want to put it here in the series.

In my next post we will pick up on what we can learn from the new monastic movement, or join it. And then some perspective I was going to share at the workshop from the new book by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay of Adullum community in Denver and missio.us. The Tangible Kingdom: creating incarnational community, the posture and practices of ancient church now. I might not get to it right away, but soon. In meantime, here is excerpt from Emerging Small Groups the Jesus Way resource.

Purpose: To consider ways that our small groups in the 21st century, particularly in the context of the “American Dream Marketplace/Entertainment Empire”, can be shaped by the experiences of the first century Jesus Way, a way that used small group community spiritual life to eventually over 300 years transform much of the culture of the dominant Roman Empire.
Despite many obvious differences between the eras, there are many parallels for the religious landscape: changing communication cultures, crossroads of diversity, pre-Christendom and post-Christendom. Epidemics and death ravaged the world of the early followers of Jesus, time and time again. There was great commercialization and increasing urbanization and ecological damage and resulting dislocation of peoples from families and from the land and traditions. There were constant wars and militarization. There were many new religious faiths intersecting. Old religious structures were destroyed. Women and widows and children were particularly marginalized and oppressed and abused. Ethnic cultures dominated and competed and if you weren’t in the right ethnic group you were endangered.

1. “Where two or more are gathered….”: Significance of Small Groups
In the first century, “small groups” were not considered a program of a church, a secondary dispensable optional component of a spiritual life; they were the primary manifestation of “the church” or the way those following the Jesus Way participated in the spirit of God moving in their world. Many of the followers may have attended at the same time a synagogue or pre 70 the Temple in Jerusalem, or for non-Jewish Jesus followers some other larger gathering, but the primary experience was a gathering of two or more; and it could be two—that’s enough. To God the meeting of two, regardless of “believer or follower status”, is as vital as the meeting of the largest church or of an entire religious tradition; which is in keeping with our Unitarian polity that there is no “higher” or more important authoritative church than the local one. Regardless of affiliation standards a particular tradition might have (say 30 members for a UU church) two or more meeting create a part of “the church.”

Advantages of Two or Three up to Five in an intentional Group: Flexibility, Depth, Response-ability, Maximum Use of Minimum Resources, Multiplying is easier. A Resource: The Organic Church, and Search and Rescue, by Neil Cole of Church Multiplication Associates who pioneered Life Transformation Groups. Cultural Marker: Small as the Next Big Thing.

2. Markers of the early Jesus Way groups: From The Rise of Christianity: how the obscure, marginal Jesus movement became the dominant religious force in the western world in a few centuries, by Rodney Stark. Consider how our small groups today can focus on these characteristics:
A. Inclusive ethnically, gender, social and economic status.
B. Relationship oriented; “fictive families” creating social networks and multiplying through extended field of family and friends;
C. Practice God’s love for the world by loving one another, caring for them, particularly the sick.
D. Located in urban areas of great unrest and instability; met in homes, in marketplaces, in public spaces.
E. They were willing to sacrifice their fortunes and life for others; take place of others condemned; passionate to practice and demonstrate their “witness” the Greek word for which is martyr.
F. Counter-Cultural communities in high tension with the dominant culture in which they lived. They were missional communities, mission meaning sent out into the world to live lives of difference. How can our small groups be places living counter to the American Empire way of living and valuing; even how can they be counter to dominant church culture.

3. We Tend To Make It Hard; when it is really Simple
Three Spheres To Keep In Mind and Dancing Between in your small group; this can shape what you do, or you can focus on being a small group that explores one of these paths together and create other small groups for the others then come together every so often for joint party and celebration and worship or trip somewhere: 1. contemplative, 2. communal, 3. missional; or I, We, World. Let your group move from one focus to the other, neglecting none, drawing energy from one for the others. These can be the overarching themes that shape your group time together: (see Finding Our Way Again: The return of the Ancient Practices by Brian McLaren)
And here are easy steps from Brian McLaren’s appendix in his book The Secret Message of Jesus.
Here are the three major activities or plans for such a group:
1. Gather for Conversation
2. Launch Experiments
3. Plot Goodness

Gather for conversation: He reminds us that the "kingdom" of God was originally explored in a group of twelve, and yet you don't need even twelve, for Jesus says "where two or more are gathered" and small groups can do big things. In fact the smaller, the easier it is to act. Begin by gathering for conversation. Who? Friends at work for breakfast or lunch. Friends from church or neighborhood to meet in your dining room or living room. Maybe to meet regularly at coffee shop or pub. What to converse? Might pick this book by McLaren or another and agree to read a chapter a week. When you meet share reactions to the week's reading, presenting favorite quotes, raising questions or disagreements, or relating the ideas in the book to your life. "What did you like best? What didn't you understand? What didn't you agree with? What seems most relevant to your life/ What questions are raised for further study or discussion? You can converse over the Bible too. Read through parts of it, using the following questions as a guide: What does this passage tell you about God? What does it tell you about the kingdom of God? What does it tell you about Jesus? What does it tell you about yourself? What does it tell you about our mission in the world? What questions does it raise for further study and discussion?You might want to sign a simple covenant with each other to stay with the group for a certain amount of time, and agree to common respect rules. As new people hear about it and want to join, you might want to create subgroups that meet close by, even groups of four meeting in different parts of a house or restaurant.

Launch Experiments: So often our small groups start and stop at number 1, gathering for conversation. This part of the McLaren Model is vital for nurturing the Spirit. He says the message of Jesus is not meant just to be studied, but to be practiced. As a group, he says, decide that each person will launch certain personal experiments to practice "some facet of Jesus' teaching over the next week and then report on your experiences--your successes, failures, surprises, reflections, and conclusions" the next time you gather.For example, he suggests, turn the other cheek for a week, pray for and bless people who mistreat you; don't judge; forgive people so that "your holding of a grudge becomes more serious to you than whatever the grudge is about,." care for the least of these by seeing and serving needy or vulnerable people as if they were Christ himself. Try spiritual practices such as silence and solitude and mindfulness, giving to the poor (keeping a sum of money in your pocket to give to the first person who needs it, or raising money for some good cause). Fast for a mealtime or a day; consider non-food fasts, such as media fasts; include the "Lord's Prayer" in your daily life, maybe two or three times a day. Be grateful. Share meals together, and invite unexpected people to join you.

Plot Goodness
Do something as a group for others who are not included in your group. Collect clothes or food or toys, etc. and give to a family(ies) suddenly one day. Make a picnic and show up to eat it somewhere where the homeless gather and invite them in to join you, eating with them and not just fixing food and serving them. Become the opposite of a terrorist cell, he says. Throw parties, visit hospitals, give out flowers, plant gardens, fix houses, clean homes, fix cars, babysit for single parents, clean up trashy areas, etc. Or, he adds, take on an issue together, global like Darfur.One of my favorite paragraphs in the chapter:"You might wonder what a group like this should be called. Some might want to call it a study group, a fellowship group, a faith community, a missional community, a lay monastery (a group of laypeople gathering around spiritual practice and mission), a spiritual formation group, or a spiritual conversation group. Some people might eventually want to call a group like this a church--perhaps a microchurch, a minichurch, a house church, or maybe a liquid or organic church. After all, it is a group gathered around Jesus and his message.

Ways To Form Small Groups and Make A Difference in the WorldThe Natural or Organic Development Basic Outline (best done in this order, the way you would follow a recipe. If you try to do them in a different order don’t be surprised that what you cook up goes flat. Check out online sites for Natural Church Development or natural church planting)

Find ways to grow personal relationships. (party, eat together, trips, conversations) and always invite others and provide hospitality. Help people connect with one another. Know each other’s birthdays, for example. Remember that where “two or more” are gathered in his name, the spirit of Jesus will be present and alive. Don’t worry about numbers or programs. Refresh yourselves in the Spirit of God for service to and with others in the Spirit. If this is the stage your group remains in it may not be as full a group as needs to be to be living fully in the spirit of Jesus, but it will also be a seed of that Spirit. If you don't do step number one, you will more than likely find that efforts to do the other steps can not be sustained.

Share Spiritual Passions (do spiritual autobiographies of defining or transforming movements in your lives of faith, and each person’s top three issues of commitment and how they see their own gifts they might bring to these passions.)

Service Together in your immediate area, within your church, to another church, Random Acts of Kindness (outside church and inside church). Ideas at Kindness.
Small group worship, communion, singing, sharing joys and concerns, prayers and blessings. The UUCF has the special issue of the UU Christian Journal, the red one, for Communion Sermons and Services, and consult the website for more links to resources. Sometimes just share bread and cup and what it means, share prayer concerns and blessings, say The Lord’s Prayer together.
Study Together. Your group may want to begin with the collection of essays entitled: Christian Voices within UUism by Skinner House Press, or one of the UU Christian Journals or an issue of the Good News periodical or a book by Marcus Borg or Brian McLaren or other contemporary Christian writers. Consider studying the books of our recent or speakers at UUCF events, such as Jim Mulholland, Gary Dorrien, Kathleen Norris, John Dominic Crossan, or John Dear. Bring in favorite spiritually-themed web sites to share. Explore hymnals together. Do Bible Study with the Bible Workbench or from the resources at The Text This Week. Bring in favorite sermons or blog entries and have a discussion. Have a video series on how Jesus is portrayed in the movies.
As you grow, Spin Off/Create Multiple groups. One size doesn’t fit all. Let the spirit of abundance work. Different groups evolving to focus on some of the particular areas above; just schedule a time, like your own regional revival, when people can be together.

Depending on your local area and church culture and policies, you may be a group that exists just of the people connected with a single UU Church, or become a group attracting people from different UU churches, or an ecumenical area progressive Christian group with people from different faith communities. If you are a single UU church group, be sure to consult with church small group leaders and ministers.

Whether you meet once a month, twice a month, or weekly, intentionally do these: Socialize Together, Study Together, Serve Together, Celebrate Together, Take Care of the Structures of the Group together, be that with established or rotating duties. See McLaren’s ideas for simple covenant above.

4. Going Even Deeper: Life Transformation organic Groups (see posts in the series below); New Monastic Groups

Church of Others: Day Two: ChurchAtAThirdPlace

2009-08-12T15:28:00.000-07:00

See below for earlier post in this series.

The second day of the workshop we went over the three part essay I wrote a year ago that was published in Small Talk. You can go to http://www.spiritoflifepublishing.com/ and click on newsletters and then go to volume six and download the three essays published in the fall on The Living Room Church, The Inside Out Church.

In addition, we discussed again a series of "church heresies". The Mission Has A Church not the other way around. The church exists for transformation beyond ourselves beginning with ourselves. Not being visitor-oriented. Not being worship-as-primary oriented, but worship as sustaining of the primary focus on mission.

And updates on the essays were presented, such as my new understanding that we are not so much to be looking for other places to go do what we have started in Turley as helping people in their own indigenous neighborhoods and places, such as apartment complexes, or in public spaces, etc. to learn from us, and partner with them, not trying to replicate what we have done from above but help them emerge their part of the church right where they are; and ways that we have found to focus, our 3 Rs and 7cs:

Three R’s of Spiritual Community Life
Relocation
Redistribution
Reconciliation
(from John Perkins and Christian Community Development Association and civil rights movement)
Seven C’s that make up our progressive understanding of Christ:

Communitas—missional relational community
Conscience—Freedom; we don't give out theological tests to any at any level of being with us.
Commitment—differences for Participants, Partners, Leaders, Planters.
Compassion---focus on the least of these, Matthew 25 sets agenda
Contemplative---balancing interior life with social action
Celebrating—at least weekly worship, plus celebrations in and of and for others in community
Creative---err on the side of chaos, be chaordic, permission-giving, trusting creation spirit

Some other background stories and information shared included:

“In our first year, we began ten new churches. In our second year, Church Multiplication Associates started 18 new churches. The next year we added 52 new starts. The momentum was beyond our expectations. In 2002, we averaged two churches a week being started and had 106 starts. The following year we saw around 200 starts in a singe year. We estimate that close to 400 churches were started in 2004 but counting the churches has become a daunting task. At the time of this writing, there have been close to 800 churches started in 32 states and 23 nations around the world in only six years.” (average 16 people each; simple format reproduces easily). Lower the bar of how church is done and raise bar of what it means to be a disciple. Organic church is simple so it is informal, relational, mobile.Smallest group in the organic church is the Life Transformation Group, two or three people (non-coed) who meet weekly to challenge one another to live an authentic spiritual life.Church Is…Living Organism (learn from farmers not CEOs). Not in buildings or mindset of buildings. More than one-hour service one day a week. Meant to be decentralized. Meant to be in and through everyone.

Where to go to form relationships? Middle class wealthy educated suburbs? Cole says you will have a hard time planting organic churches there. Good soil often found in the “fear factor zone” where you are afraid to go and be….Starting not in your own home but in the home of anotherMultiplication doesn’t mean splitting up groups intentionally. It is natural byproduct of intimacy. Multiply healthy disciples, then leaders, then churches, and finally movements. Scripture instructs to make disciples who make disciples not to make churches.

DNA = (D)ivine Truth [RR: Jesus reflects God’s loving freedom]. (N)urturing relationships [RR: Go deep together]. (A)postolic mission. [RR: Go out in teams]

Neil Cole, author of The Organic Church among others, has a new book out called "Search and Rescue: Becoming a Disciple Who Makes A Difference". You might know that he is at Church Multiplication Associates and has been for years promoting organic churches of 8 to 16 people based on groups of 2 to three people in "life transformation groups." He has a lot of wonderful stories in this latest book, based on metaphors gleaned from years of being a lifeguard, and I will try to post some in the future, but now I want to focus on the practical tips at the end of the book as resources for people seeking to start small groups of Christians or Jesus-seekers, followers, etc.
First, the summary: the groups, and they can go by various names, meet once a week for approximately an hour. Two or three only, with the fourth person coming in as the start of the next group). For him, the groups are not coed (I can see those advantages, the same as having traditional women's and men's ministries in organizational churches; but for my purposes here I don't think they have to start out that way, but as your groups multiply you can have some that are that way, and I think a lot will become that way organically, but then I'm a liberal; I do think there are advantages to trying to go with same-sex groups);

there is no curriculum, workbook or training required; there is no leader needed in the group; only three tasks are to be accomplished: sin is confessed to one another in mutual accountability, scripture is read repetitively in entire context and in community, souls are prayed for strategically, specifically and continuously.In the book he provides a series of different questions that have been asked as part of small groups from John Wesley on up to various ways people are adapting the Life Transformation Groups. Let me repeat again my belief in the generalization that liberals tend to not be comfortable confessing personal sins, and conservatives tend to not be comfortable confessing, or even knowing, about their involvement in social sins. His book again focuses too heavily on personal holiness for my taste, not because that is not important, since it is important for liberals who have ignored it often in public discourse, but because the questions don't tend to allow for the social self to be explored and while the whole point of the organic church and LTGs is to stress community over individualism, the questions as mostly prompted to be asked seem focused on the individual.

But there is one set of questions offered in the book that I really like and can use. They come from Phil Helfer, pastor of Los Altos Brethren Church in Long Beach, CA. Here are the questions to be asked each week of one another:1. How have you experienced God in your life this week?2. What is God teaching you?3. How are you responding to his prompting?4. What sin do you need to confess?5. How did you do with your reading this week?(I like these because they can easily incorporate the social self)Often there is a variation of another question focused on how you have shared God with others this week. LTGs, as Cole points out, are different in focus from accountability groups because they are designed to multiply as participants tell others about their life and its changes.In many ways these are spiritual direction questions and spiritual direction styled groups, but in a prophethood and priesthood of all believers sort of way in community rather than focused only one one individual. I think they tap into that deep longing that the rise of spiritual direction has done also.The questions he even boils down to two simple ones to encounter and share with one another week after week: 1. What is God telling you to do? What are you going to do about it?

Type rest of the post here

The Church Of Others: reports and resources: Day One

2009-08-12T13:24:00.000-07:00

Here are some recent observations leading up to the workshop I led on the organic, missional, monastic expressions of church earlier this month. I will divide them into different days.

Bottom line observation is that the default position for many people still seems to be that church is for people who are like us, or will become like us, or who benefit from what we do. Everything seems to fall out around that one engrained belief. Even what we call outreach and mission is too often done with the framework that it is what "we" "do" "for others" improving our lives and their lives often and even the world. At its best this form of church helps grow God's presence. There will be people for this form of the church, and all forms of the church that root themselves in mission can learn from one another. As years are going by we need more forms of the church though, for the resources needed to keep creating and growing even the most healthy of these forms of church will be harder to come by, and the results they realize will be harder to come by, though they may stay dominant throughout the next generations.

Everything that I write about and point to in the following blogposts is about envisioning and reporting on other expressions of church--not necessarily new by any means, but which seem to be shaped by a belief that there can also be Church Of Others. Not just for others or even with others, but of others. We will come back to that.

First I want to simply begin posting some of the resources and ideas that I used in the recent workshop; for those who were there you can get access to them beyond the hardcopy you received (sorry I didn't get a chance to make CDs for all as I had hoped) and there is some new stuff that you didn't receive because of my illness that cut the workshop week short. For those not there I hope the resources, summaries, observations that are at times pulled from this blog itself will be useful wherever you are in your own ways of becoming the church.

Day One Overviews

Spectrums:
Organic To Organizational: becoming part of “the” church, not “a” church
Missional/Incarnational and Attractional: becoming church not attending church; church is created in response to mission, not church having a mission. The mission has a church.
Monastic and “Collection of religiously-oriented Individuals”

Natural Church Development (see later posts for more on this in the essay on emerging small groups the Jesus Way)
Life Transformation Groups

Why Now?
An expression of larger Postmodern Emergent Church focuses (EPIC standard of Experience, Participation, Image, and CommunityConnection). Challenge for Catholicism is Modernity; challenge for Protestantism is Postmodernity; Progressive/liberals are hyper-modernists, meta-protestants, so the challenge is more acute for us.
Small is the next big thing; post-boomers;

Breaking dualism of Sunday Spirituality vs. rest of life; of sacred and secular places; beyond creedalism

Does It (organic, missional, monastic, emergent etc.) Have To Be Christian? Yes and No. Many people/churches that say Lord Lord all the time but have no sense of incarnation still won't get it; many people/churches who are not Christian-centric may be able to incarnate Christ even easier, and I believe if you follow the way of Jesus even without calling it that that you will eventually meet and embrace Jesus; but churches without a theological point of view who have replaced it with a sociological point of view will find it harder to have what is necessary: a transcendental calling beyond themselves that makes being missional part of the bloodstream. People need to reflect on the question of why do we have the purpose or mission of our church that we have. Let those responses guide them. If it doesnt lead them to something transcendent and into a different life than likely all efforts at renewing church will run aground.

Organic Missional Stepping Stones (a recipe that should be followed step by step, from Hirsch and Frost's The Forgotten Ways handbook)
1. (Jesus) is Lord: have a meta-narrative that creates mission; see above for why Jesus is in parenthesis; I have no interest in trying it without Jesus; I don't know if it can be; but I am not vain enough to think I have a handle on that, and in Jesus' own spirit of generosity, and in the ways some of this I believe has been present in ways unknown yet to me in other cultures and faith communities than I am leaving that open. But the meta-narrative? Yes.
2. Discipleship/Formation: how is no. 1 reflected in your life?
3. Missional-Incarnational Impulse: how is no. 1 reflected in being seeded in the world and serving others; communitas, not community
4. Apostolic/Multiplying Leaders
5. Organic Systems to support steps one through four

End.

A couple of new books missionally focused plus a coming teaser on The Jesus Manifesto

2009-06-23T23:36:00.000-07:00

I have brought a few books with me to use in a presentation I am doing on Saturday at GA on "Emerging Small Groups The Jesus Way" and thought I might mention them now and reflect on them later (I have brought others but they have been commented on here before; the new monastic books; brian mclaren's finding our way again: the return of the ancient practices--if I haven't reflected on it I will). The newer ones are: The Tangible Kingdom: creating incarnational community by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay; and ReJesus by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch.

And stay tuned for a full posting of Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola's new The Jesus Manifesto, and why I like so much of it, why I think they protestest too much on some accounts or forget some inherent idolatry of neo-orthodoxy just as they point out the inherent problems of liberalism; why I like that they link a kind of cultural evangelical conservatism that only talks about Jesus without walking the Jesus way with the folks in the social gospel but don't talk about Jesus crowd; you will probably google it now and find it but I will try to get back to making it its own post some time this week.

Type rest of the post here

At General Assembly

2009-06-23T23:31:00.000-07:00

Working but will try to update with thoughts and reflections when I can. Most likely to do so through www.uuchristian.org and home page links to General Assembly which begins later today. I tend to in the past look for any signs at GA that people are talking about, even indirectly, anything related to serious talk of planting church planting churches in the UUA, embracing a many-models approach especially, and will try to do so again. If you see anything I miss let me know. I will broaden the scope this year to look for anything that could be construed as planting missional communities or endeavors. End.

Type rest of the post here

The Liberal Christian vol. 3 online journal just published

2009-06-23T23:27:00.000-07:00

Go read Scott Wells' www.liberalchristian.net Vol. 3 just published online. Good stuff. Particularly liked Derek Parker's take on growth and extinction; readers here will find resonance there I believe, and I liked Scott's diagnosis of the UUA in the lens of the presidential election. Go to www.boyinthebands.com too. End.

Type rest of the post here

Letting Go of the Past, Forgiveness, and Planting

2009-06-11T21:03:00.000-07:00

Welcome Kristen Robertson and her virtual book tour on the blogosphere. Check out www.kristenrobertson.com and all the wonderful spiritual resources there, especially regarding the Forgiveness Journal which I first read during the recent UU Christian Fellowship Revival in Tulsa.

There is so much forgiveness opportunities in our lives, especially with those who have come into a place like the UUCF healing from earlier in life exposures to harmful forms of Christian spirituality, and those who follow Jesus in our pluralistic congregations who form right relationships with people who, for several reasons, are not in right relations with Christians either in UU churches or in the world. I often tell UUCF members that one of our callings is to be present in Jesus name and spirit with those who have been harmed in Jesus name.

I am also in my earlier life a Faulkner avid fan (even having received a Faulkner award for my fiction) and so I know, as he wrote, that the past is something not often, if ever, past. And yet I have also been formed theologically by immersion in the works of process-relational theologians Charles Hartshorne and Alfred North Whitehead (just occurred to me that for much of the 80s I was immersed in both all Hartshorne wrote and all Faulkner wrote; interesting parallels to explore later) and so I understand the approach that God is working in our universe and in our lives in helping to make the past the past, helping to co-create the future in freedom; as Whitehead says God is that factor in the universe that relates the what is to the what is not yet. Forgiveness, then, radical and endless grace and accountability, is a key characteristic of that spirit of God that grounds us in the process of becoming more fully human. When we work against that spirit, against forgiveness, when we give the past an ultimate power over us, we are making an idol of the past, and like all idolatries (taking something that has good within it and twisting it into a force for suffering) this keeps us from growing spiritually into fuller finite and blessed human beings.

Finally, given the thrust of this blog on planting new communities, let me just say that letting go of the past forms of church (re-integrating forms from before the Empire and much of the Reformation) does not often come without an emotional cost; does not come without some sense often of severing ties, betrayal, and fear of our new communities acting and behaving as the ones we have not found fulfilling of God's mission. Personal liberation, living healthy spiritually developing and grounding lives (see posts below about new forms of leadership needed) are all crucial to being agents of transformation today.

Repairing personal relationships, coming to terms with churches in our past, all is vital to leading the church into its new life too.

Communion, Caring, and Celebration: Final Thoughts on Mission and Church by Reggie McNeal

2009-06-10T14:37:00.000-07:00

1. Disinterest in institutional cultural Christianity will accelerate. (Even if you don't have a Christian church, how is this true of your church as an institution that is as traditional and as caught up in cultural values as any other dominant culture institution?).

2. Churches that thrive will become more externally focused in their ministry agenda and more intentional in developing their people. (see all the posts below)

3. An explosion of missional communities will occur. These will be groups of believers and nonbelievers who will operate in noninstitutional settings. They will range in size from a handful of participants to a few dozen. Gathering will take place in homes and restaurants, bookstores and bars, office conference rooms and university dorm rooms, hotel meeting areas and downtown Ys and yes even churches. Leadership will emerge from within. technology will assist teaching......These communities will order their lives around Communion, Caring, and Celebration. [Ron: These three C's are a part of what we do with The LivingRoom Church at A Third Place Center, just as are the 3 R's I have posted on before, as Relocation, Redistribution, Reconciliation.]

4. Increasing numbers of Jesus followers will live out their missional expression in the context of their family and work environments...they will attend worship on special occasions but their tribe will be those in close contact helping them live missionally. churches and clergy who get this can help them as one way of being church.

5. Many new leaders of missional movements will not be clergy, though many clergy will learn to transition into mission, and find ways through grants and other ways to be paid; but many will not be able to make this shift.

6. The current dominant affiliations based on doctrinal agreement and denominational polity will be replaced by those of common compassion and life orientation. The spiritual agenda will be less issue-oriented and more centered around loving God and loving others as the core attitudes and actions of genuine Jesus followers.

7. Spiritual literature (including the web) will increasingly focus on helping people beome more intentional Jesus followers in their natural habitats.

8. Some of you reading this will lead the missional church movement.

Thanks to Reggie McNeal for his book, for his workshop that changed and charged me up for visiioning the transition that has been chronicled through the posts of this blog. Again much of this post and those that follow quotes McNeal, paraphrases him, and adds my comment. Now add yours.

Type rest of the post here