an open and affirming community of faith
n open and affirming community where faith is questioned and formed, as relationships are made and upheld.
"Whenever there is extreme weather, some religious leader gets airtime for blaming someone. Whether it's a tsunami, an earthquake, a heat wave or a drought, someone will say it's God's way of getting our attention and therefore it has to be someone's fault."
For all future weather requests, please email Rev. Derek Penwell.
And don’t you think the church—among the inheritors of this promise to Isaiah—is always in danger of missing this point, convinced as it often is that the reign of God will be established only when the church gets everything right?
It’s easy to forget that the church isn’t an end in itself; it’s a tool, chosen by God to bring about God’s purposes. We find it easy to believe that God’s work will be accomplished by the force of the church’s charismatic personalities or through the power of its innovative programming—when in reality, God’s work very often gets done in spite of what the church considers its strength, rather than because of it.
Why?
Because, according to Isaiah, the glory of God shines in bruised reeds and dimly burning wicks. If you want to do the work of God, recognizing your brokenness is a good place to start.
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"But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everlasting stream" (Amos 5:24).
In the spirit forgetting just how miserably cold it is outside, you may either close your eyes and dream of paradise...
Click here to buy Mylo Xyloto http://links.emi.com/coldplayMX This video was directed by Mat Whitecross in 2011 and was filmed in South Africa and London Music video by Coldplay performing Paradise. (C) 2011 EMI Records Ltd This label copy information is the subject of copyright protection.
... marvel at how amazing and possibly delusional these guys are...
Follow Ben Saunders and Tarka L'Herpiniere live in Antarctica now on their remarkable return journey from the coast to the South Pole and back. 1800 Miles - On Foot - Unsupported The first completion of Captain Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova route and longest unsupported polar journey in history. Daily blogs.
... or be glad we all don't live in Northern Ontario.
Woke up to a balmy -41C this morning in South Porcupine, ON. Thought I'd share what happens when you mix boiling water and a water gun and take it outside for a few shots. To use this video in a commercial player or in broadcasts, please email licensing@storyful.com OVER TWO MILLION VIEWS!
Stay warm, folks!
It’s so easy for us to believe that our lives are defined by those events we call significant. The truth of the matter is . . . we live most of our lives in the in-between times.
Most of our lives are spent returning to our “own country by another road.” The problem with living from milestone to milestone, however, is that we’re always in grave danger of missing God on the way.
The magi looked up, saw a star, and launched their boats in the desert. They had their eyes focused on Bethlehem, on meeting the special child.
But once they’d finally reached their destination, they were almost immediately sent again on their way. Because, you see, for them, as well as for us, Bethlehem is not the end of the journey, but the beginning—not home, but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last.
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With everything going quickly to seed, we needed a sign of God’s salvation. We needed a God who wasn’t afraid to jump in and get dirty hands. We needed a God who wasn’t ashamed to walk the roads we walk. We needed a God who wasn’t afraid to be with us.
And that’s something I think we still look for. With the sands continually shifting beneath our feet, with the uncertainty of facing life in our precarious world, we need a God who’s not afraid to be with us.
We need a God who embraces our humanity, and not only our humanity, but a God who embraces us in the midst of each of our weak and fallen humanities.
When we cry out in the dry night of our shattered existences, we need a God who hears.
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So, as most of you know, it's going to get really cold tonight. Like, really cold. To those out there who have no place to stay tonight or in the coming days, here are some places that will keep warm:
Volunteers of America: Homeless and Housing Services
If you, or anyone you know is in need of help, give one of these places a call. No one needs to die tonight.
Wrap up. Bring in your pets. Stay warm!
If anyone has any other contacts, programs, or helpful tips, feel free to email us at douglassblvd@gmail.com and we'll add them here.
By Derek Penwell
“What do you want to do when you get out of college?” That was the question on the table. Summer camp. We were gathered together with one of the grizzled veteran counselors to talk about what we planned to do with our lives.
Having just graduated high school, we found the whole conversation a bit abstract. We didn’t know. And we certainly didn’t want to be reminded about the fact that we didn’t know.
But somebody asked the question, and we were all raised with the kind of manners that wouldn’t allow us to say what we were thinking: “I really don’t want to think about this. Ask me about the beach, or about what we’re going to do when we get to college. After college is just too far away.”
One girl said, “Well, I don’t want to have to do a job I hate, where I’m stuck doing the same thing over and over—like a factory. And I don’t want to work someplace that makes me do busy work just to satisfy some kind of Human Resources directive intended to create a ‘positive working environment.’”
“Ok. What kind of working environment do you want to work in?”
“I don’t want work with a lot of passive-aggressive people—you know, the kind who get mad about little things and start putting up signs about not eating their yogurt or taking the stapler off their desk.”
“You run into a lot of sign hangers, a lot of yogurt and stapler thieves in high school, did you?”
“No, but I hear my dad talk about it all the time.”
“Anyone else?”
A long-haired guy in a denim jacket and boots said, “I don’t want to have do any job that requires me to wear a name tag or be a part of a ‘team’” (his use of air quotes tipping us off to his studied use of sarcasm.)
I jumped in and said, “Look, I just don’t want to have to get up too early in the morning.” I was not particularly ambitious.
The counselor, showing signs of frustration, said, “You’ve obviously thought about this. Here’s what I want, though. Tell me what you want to do, not what you want to avoid doing. What are your dreams? What makes you excited enough to get out of bed in the morning? What do you care about so much you’d be willing to die for?”
The impression many young adults who’ve lost any desire to associate themselves with the church feel like they’ve heard ad nauseum an answer to the questions, “What do Christians want to avoid? What do Christians hate? What kinds of things are Christians willing to kill for?”
As cliché as it may sound, more people in emerging generations know Christianity by what it stands against than by what it stands for. Jesus, though he clearly had strong opinions about what people should stay away from, seemed on balance more concerned about the kind of things in which people should be investing their lives.
This full-throated commitment to doing something got Jesus in trouble. In Matthew, he is contrasted with the ascetic John the Baptist: “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!’”
It’s important to point out that Jesus drew the contrast between himself and John the Baptist to indicate that there’s just no pleasing some people, no matter what you do. However, it is worth noting that Jesus developed a reputation not for the things he avoided, but for the things he threw himself into.
In a post-denominational world the church must be aware of the widely held perception that it cares more about keeping people from doing things than in giving them the resources they need to live and flourish, and, finally, to follow Jesus. As commitment to mainline denominations deteriorates, the church would do well to think more intentionally about how it embodies its vision of the reign of God.
Justice. Equity. Mutuality. Community. Compassion for the poor, the outcast, the powerless. These are positive visions.
“But isn’t that just a rehash of the traditional liberalism mainline denominations have been trying to interest people in since the latter part of the nineteenth century? If it were such a winning strategy, why are mainline denominations dying?”
Excellent point! I realize I’m trying to thread a pretty fine needle here. What I’m suggesting, though, isn’t a strategy (I don’t think traditional liberal mainliners necessarily thought the Social Gospel was just a strategy either). Making strategic decisions about justice in God’s reign as a way to attract more people misses the whole point. Justice, equity, mutuality, etc. are what we think Jesus came to establish, not well-devised membership recruitment tools.
In a post-denominational world the church needs to quit thinking first about how to save its own bacon, and start devoting more thought to doing the right thing—because we have no other way of conceiving our lives as followers of Jesus.
Here's hoping all of your resolutions stick.
And if they don't, well...
Jai Husband is leading a new young adult class on Sunday mornings at 9:45 a.m., upstairs in the education building. The class will be exploring the Gospels and what God means in the context of everyday life.
Come on out!
By Derek Penwell
When I teach Theodicy (i.e., the problem of evil and suffering) to my university students, I start out by playing a game of hangman. I draw out a random number of blanks, and start asking for letters.
“S? No.”
“R? Nope.”
“E? Sorry.”
I doesn’t take long before I have a couple of blanks filled with X or Q. I might randomly add another space or two. This usually brings cries of protest.
Finally, the figure fills out. They lose.
Now they’re really howling. “There isn’t any set of English words with those letters!”
“Do you want to know what the phrase is?” So, I start writing on the board: Lawlessness and Chaos.
Sheer frustration. Somebody, usually earnest and sitting in the front row, someone used to school making sense, yells out, “That’s not fair.”
So, I ask, “How do you like it when somebody doesn’t follow the rules? Hard to play the game when someone keeps changing them, isn’t it?”
They don’t like it … not one bit.
But then again, nobody does, do they? We like consistency and predictability. We don’t like the thought that lawlessness and chaos might insinuate themselves into the otherwise stable taken-for-grantedness of our lives.
One of the reasons, people have such a difficult time with the question of evil and suffering is that it usually represents a deviation from the way our middle class American lives are lived.
You turn on your T.V. set one Friday morning, getting ready for Christmas, planning your last-minute shopping, when a reporter announces that some guy has walked into an elementary school in Connecticut and mercilessly slaughtered twenty six year-olds. Shock. Anguish. Outrage.
But people die all the time, right? Even children. What’s so different about this?
The difference is that we don’t want to live in a world where it’s possible for grade school kids to be murdered in the sanctuaries we’ve built for their education. Too scary to contemplate.
So, what do we do? We start looking for someone or something to blame.
Inadequate security. Proliferation of weapons. Poor mental health care. Violent video games.
We’ve got to find some culprit, since the thought that sometimes awful things happen and that, no matter how well we prepare, we can’t prevent those awful things is just too horrifying to ponder. So, we look to see where the rules have been broken.
The problem of evil raises the issue of anomie (lawlessness). We feel as if no one is in charge, as if there are no rules, and therefore, no meaning. Even the way we phrase it (“the problem of evil”) implicitly suggests our belief that something has gone wrong—that something isn’t as it should be. It suggests that evil is somehow unnatural, a breakdown in the system.
But, even more than evil, the real culprit is anomie. Even if the outcome doesn’t amount to evil and suffering, human beings generally don’t like surprises. We like predictability. The idea of change is enough to set our teeth on edge. If I put the toe-nail clippers in the medicine cabinet, I want to know that the next time I need them, they’ll be right where I go to look.
“Well, did you look in the cupboard?”
“No. Why would I look there? I put them in the medicine cabinet.”
“You’ve got to broaden your field of vision. You can’t just look in one place and expect to find something.”
“I can expect to find something where I put it, because that’s why I go to the trouble of putting it there in the first place—so, I don’t have to have a conversation with a fifteen year-old at 7:45 in the morning about where my dang toe-nail clippers are!”
Stable. Predictable. Is that too much to ask?
Unfortunately, stable and predictable are much harder to find than we realize. The world is changing … rapidly. Things are growing more complex, less predictable all the time. It’s scary.
And communities are just as likely as individuals to look for stasis in a world undergoing constant transformation. In fact, for a lot of reasons, communities are often less open to change, more resistant to playing by a different set of rules than individuals.
I’m thinking specifically of churches—both congregationally and denominationally.
Seth Godin wrote an interesting blog post the other day about paracosms. Paracosms are highly detailed and absorbing imaginary worlds—think Middle Earth or Narnia. One of the notable differences with paracosms is that they operate under a different set of rules from the ones we live under. Talking animals. Dragons. Magic. Invisibility.
These paracosms are useful to child developmental psychologists in helping them to understand how children confront the anomie represented by a death or tragedy experienced in early childhood. Paracosms help people sort out and understand their loss.1
Paracosms, elaborate and detailed worlds that allow for a rearranging of constituent parts into new possibilities, are particularly helpful in allowing children to orient “themselves in reality.”
With Seth Godin, I find the idea of paracosms to be an interesting notion for creatively attacking the uncertainty of a changing world. The church, which has undergone its own share of tragedy and loss over the past forty years, might do well to begin to play with paracosms.
What would a perfect world look like?
How would the church contribute to the shaping of such a world?
If all the old rules about what church should look like were no longer in place (e.g., buildings, Sunday mornings at 11:00, denominational headquarters, Sunday School, parking lots, copy machines, bulk mailing permits, etc.), how might congregations and their denominational counterparts on the regional and national levels embody the reign of God in ways designed to inhabit a new world?
Let’s get really crazy:
Would ordained clergy still look the same? Would we even have clergy?
How about the laity? What if the laity were the radical ones pushing to respond to the demands of the new world?
Would this paracosm require that the bulk of the people who spoke for God be male, middle class, and white?
What if this new world were so upside down that because of the population make up, middle class white guys were the last ones seated at the trough instead of the first ones?
What if worship were conceived as something we did on our feet, searching out people where they live—and not on our butts, waiting for people to come to where we live?
What if this new world required that we have no assets at all? How would the church live out its witness?
I know, all that stuff is fantastical. You start screwing around with the rules and the hoi polloi get reeeeeally anxious. Anomie. Lawlessness. Chaos.
“You can’t have a church without all that stuff!”
Why not? Maybe the future that’s unfolding, this new world, requires a whole different set of rules that render the old assumptions about what’s necessary obsolete?
Seth Godin writes:
The most effective, powerful way to envision the future is to envision it, all of it, including a future that doesn’t include your sacred cows. Only then can you try it on for size, imagine what the forces at work might be and then work to either prevent (or even better, improve on) that future and your role in it.
We’re followers of Jesus, given the responsibility of proclaiming a new world—one in which God reigns, and not the powers and principalities of this present age.
Change ought not to frighten us; that’s what we’re here to announce … for Christ’s sake.
Morrison, Delmont C. and Shirley L., Memories of Loss and Dreams of Perfection: Unsuccessful Childhood Grieving and Adult Creativity. Baywood, 2005. ↩
This year we have adopted individuals from The Family Scholar House.
The Family Scholar House is a program in Louisville that gives single-parent students the support they need to earn a four-year college degree.
The angels will be placed on the tree in the Gathering Area on Sunday, December 1st and all gifts must be returned to the office no later than December 10th.
If you would like to pick an angel this Sunday please see Jennifer Vandiver.
"From the very beginning, Jesus indicated that the reign of God he was going to inaugurate would be different—upside down. Notice, he didn’t say, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to . . . . those who are already pulling their weight. He has sent me to proclaim future political stability after we kick the pagan Romans out of our homeland, to give those who were once powerful back their power, to make sure the rich get their fair share, to knock down the Roman pecking order and reestablish the Jewish pecking order, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor for the folks at the front of the line.”
"No. Jesus brings good news of the coming kingdom to those who know they need it—the poor, the prisoners, the blind, and the oppressed."
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"And for my part, I like to think Isaiah’s singing a song about a new day, a new world where the hope of God’s people will be met by the power of God’s saving hand—where those who’ve been cast aside, abandoned, 'othered,' left to die alone with no one to speak terrible and beautiful words over their lifeless bodies will 'come to Zion singing'; and 'they shall not hurt on all my holy mountain.'
"In a gray place where hopelessness seems to rule the day, in a flattened and dry land where walls are built, and where even in church, we often can’t see our way to welcome one another—we wonder how our perseverance in the struggle to follow Jesus, to live together faithfully makes any difference.
"Standing on tiptoes we peer with the eyes of hope into the darkness, awaiting a word from God about the dream of our deliverance from the desert."
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"Take courage and work. Keep building even though not all of you will see the completion.
"Keep working even though the future is uncertain. Because the future is uncertain only to you; I know where you’re headed.
"But that’s the hard part for us, isn’t it? Sure, we believe God knows where we’re headed. At least in our best moments we’d like to believe we believe that God knows where we’re headed. But when it gets right down to it and the bills come due and we’ve got to figure out how to find Sunday School teachers, it’s harder to see how God’s going to accomplish God’s purposes."
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I received a call from someone I’ve known since we were kids. Caesar, lived in the children’s home my grandparents established in San Luis Potosí, Mexico in 1964. I’ve also known his wife, Sophie, from the time she was a baby. She grew up in the home, too.
Some years back, Caesar came into the States illegally to work as a painter in Atlanta, leaving Sophie and their son, Caesar, Jr., in Mexico. Hard life, living in one country illegally, while your family lives in another country. Lonely. Anxious. Scared all the time you’ll be discovered, and sent back.
Out of the blue, Caesar called me and asked if I could send him a little money via Western Union, so that he could help bring his family to Atlanta. He explained to me how difficult it is living without the people you love the most next to you; how uncomfortable it is living in a country that takes every opportunity to tell you how much they wish you’d leave … “after you finish that last job for me”; how painful it is to contemplate having to return home to a country where you’re afraid the violence will swallow your family, leaving nothing behind but shattered lives and spent shell casings.
What’s a man to do? He’s got a wife, a son. All he cares about is keeping them safe, and making enough money to create a future he’s sure is unavailable to them back in their homeland.
Where does one start when speaking of illegal immigration?
It strikes me that the best place to start is with people’s stories, and, if you can manage it, with the pictures of people’s faces in your mind. Numbers, ideas, abstractions are a poor substitute for the thick description necessary to make another human being’s fears and anxieties, hopes and dreams intelligible.
But if numbers and abstractions are necessary to discuss illegal immigration, then o.k. Let’s talk about numbers and abstractions for a moment.
Of course, we must contend with the “illegal” part that presumably makes the “immigration” part unsavory to so many.1 “Why,” the thinking goes, “should we embrace people who’ve come to our country in contravention of our laws? That only encourages more lawbreaking, after all. After they get here, why should we expect them to pay attention to the other laws? Moreover, it sends a signal to our own citizens that we as a country don’t have the courage of our convictions about this being a ‘nation of laws.’”
This objection has the virtue of coherence. Incentivizing law-breaking requires us to walk down a fairly dangerous road—or, if you prefer, take a step down the metaphorical slippery slope. We would hate to wake up one day to discover that we had become a nation of outlaws.
However, the rhetoric doesn’t appear to be borne out by the facts. If you take 1986, for instance, the year that Ronald Reagan championed amnesty (“legalization” is the preferred term) for three million undocumented workers, as the base year, you find that crime didn’t increase dramatically in the aftermath. In fact, the following year (1987) saw an overall drop in violent crime—both as a percentage (i.e., number of violent crimes as a percentage of population–.61%, down from .62% in 1986), as well as, more importantly, total number (1,483,999 down from 1,489,169 in 1986). In other words, we had more people in the United States in 1987, but fewer violent crimes–all while working to assimilate three million “illegals” into American life.
In the twenty seven years since the 1986 immigration reform, the country has seen a dramatic decrease in crime–total crime in general, and violent crime in particular. The crime rate in 2011 (the latest year reported) was almost half the 1987 rate (3.29% vs. 5.57%). And the violent crime rate shrank from .75% at the high water mark of 1991 to .38% in 2011.
Now, someone might object that “just because crime fell after amnesty doesn’t mean that there’s a causal connection. They might be totally unrelated.”
True. Admittedly, there are a lot of moving parts in any analysis of why crime grows or declines. Recessions. Gun Laws. Lead paint.
However, if you wanted to make the case that issuing amnesty to those people who came here illegally didn’t make crime go down, you would certainly be forced to say that the argument that allowing “illegals” to “cut to the front of the line” undermines the rule of law, making the prospect of following the law less likely, doesn’t hold much water. It’s hard to take seriously the complaint that if you do X that Y will surely follow, when after doing X, you don’t get Y, but the opposite of Y. Not only is there no bright line of causation between amnesty and a rise in crime (either because of those who are undocumented themselves, or because the “rule of law” has been subverted by “turning a blind eye” to their law breaking), there isn’t even a correlation.
So why all this handwringing about amnesty as a “back channel [way] to reward illegality?” For people who came to this country and displaced whole nations, our talk of illegal entry as the ultimate barrier to citizenship betrays either a short memory or a stunning lack of irony.
More importantly, for Christians, an inability to figure out ways to talk about immigration that sound more like Christian reflection than a cribbed statement from the Minutemen Project is cringe-worthy. Reading Jesus say in the judgment of the nations that one of the criteria for adjudging faithfulness is the way foreigners (xénos) are treated (Matthew 25:35,43), then turning around and saying, as 63% of White Evangelicals have said, that illegal immigration “threatens traditional American customs and values,” betrays a debt to partisan politics that transcends the priority of Christian commitment.
Look, if you love Jesus, you better love the people Jesus loved And it’s difficult to modulate the imprecation to “Get the hell out of my country” into anything that sounds even remotely loving to the stranger.
After all, we’re not screaming at abstractions, we’re not dehumanizing numbers; we’re screaming at real live human beings who want nothing more than a chance to drag themselves out of poverty and keep their children safe.
Christians ought to be taking their cues on immigration from Jesus rather than from Caesar … unless, of course, it’s a painter from Atlanta, trying to borrow a few bucks to reunite his family. That Caesar’s got a lot riding on it.
This article originally appeared on The Good Men Project web site.
I don’t have time to go into the “Yeah, but they take good American jobs” argument, or the “They sponge off the largesse of the American welfare state without contributing to it.” ↩
"Yes, Jesus loves Zacchaeus even though Zacchaeus is a horrid human being. But a part of that love includes accepting not only Zacchaeus’ unworthiness, but also his offer of that unworthy self in the service of others who are struggling not just with guilt . . . but with trying to find enough food to eat.
"God doesn’t need much . . . a few otherwise sorry folks, working assiduously to hide their true identities, but willing to come when Jesus calls, and ready to lay it all down for those whom Jesus loves. God can turn the world inside out with a few Zacchaeuses."
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Ben Carter's at it again! This time he's on an episode of Mac Power Users, talking about the best Mac software, workflows, and business solutions for small business owners.
The great reversal. Is that good news or bad news? I guess it depends on where you’re standing when you hear it.
If you're one of those folks who's always coming up roses, if you’re relatively certain you’ve got this whole God thing pretty much nailed down, if you think when God goes on a recruiting trip, God’s looking for somebody pretty much like you . . . watch out. This parable suggests that God’s fixing to mess up your world.
If, on the other hand, you happen to be one of those folks just trying to make it through the day, one of those folks just trying to stay one step ahead of the man, one of those folks that the vagaries of birth seemed not to bless . . . pay attention. You're just who God has in mind.
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