'Beer with Jesus' At North End Cafe: Highlands
Meet us there at 6pm. If you can't, please, for the love of God, spend some time outside.
Beer with Jesus at North End Cafe
It's way too nice not to be outside this afternoon. Meet us on the patio out back of North End across from the church at 6pm.
See you there.
Who Said Anything about Deserving? (Matthew 20:1-16)
Spending our lives identifying our value by any other measure is not only pointless, it’s a distraction, verging on sinful—because we’re ceaselessly grasping for something we don’t have, thinking that possessing it will finally make our lives worthwhile, when God has already said our lives are valuable, based on nothing more than the love God used in creating them.
Subscribe to us on iTunes!
Blood Drive Tomorrow!
If you have blood in your body, and would like to donate it to someone else who needs it, you can do that here tomorrow.
The Red Cross will hold a blood drive at DBCC in the Family Life Center on Saturday, September 20th from 9:30 - 3:00. To schedule an appointment please call 1-800-RED CROSS. They also except walk-ins. Currently there is an urgent need for donations.
This is pretty important. We hope to see you around!
Beer w/ Jesus at Holy Grale this evening
Beer with Jesus has no better a destination than an old church.
Meet us at Holy Grale, 1034 Bardstown Rd, 6pm for some beers and irreverence.
Mexican Dinner & Dessert Auction next week!
In the final stretch of our fundraising efforts for our group's annual trip to Casa Hogar de San Juan, we're having a Mexican Dinner on Sunday, Sept. 21, as well as a Dessert Auction immediately following.
These dessert auctions are thinly veiled excuses for some of our members to roll up their collective sleeves and do some world class baking, so it's likely something you won't want to miss.
We'd love for you to join us for worship on Sunday morning, but if you aren't able, you're more than welcome to hang out with us for the dinner at around 12:30pm.
Bring your stomachs empty and your checkbooks open!
If you're interested in contributing a dish, call or email the office this week to ask Jennifer what to bring.
What Does Forgiveness Even Look Like? (Matthew 18-21-35)
In order for Jesus' followers to endure as a community of truth, a community that seeks first justice and peace, those followers have to learn how to forgive. When? How much? Exactly whom? These are all secondary questions in Jesus' mind. What's at stake has to do with more than my hurt feelings; it has to do with the relationship necessary to sustain a community of truth in a world of lies, a community of justice in a world in which everyone seems most concerned to guard their own feelings against the very real possibility of hurt and betrayal, a community of peace in a world always in danger of being rent asunder by our tendency to harbor violence in our hearts against those who've wronged us.
Subscribe to us on iTunes!
Beer with Jesus @ North End Cafe
It's really nice outside. Meet us on the patio behind North End Cafe across from the church at 6pm tonight for drinks and laughs.
Hope to see you there!
Irreconcilable Differences (James 2:1-10, 14-17)
In a culture that tells us to pile up as much stuff as we can, it’s difficult not to cling—to our possessions, to our longing for success, to our relentless need for respectability. But following Jesus is about letting go of those things and traveling down another path—a path that leads us through all the wrong neighborhoods, populated by all the wrong people, occupying themselves with all the wrong things, things that we’ve been taught are pointless (at best) or ruinous (at worst)—a path that is irreconcilably at odds with the available paths offered by a consumerist culture.
And that path—even though it appears to lead us through all the places our culture has told us to avoid—according to Jesus, and usually without our knowing it, is the path that leads us home.
Subscribe to us on iTunes!
The Gates of Hell (Matthew 16:13-20)
Better late than never, Derek's sermon from this past Sunday, August 31. Really good stuff.
You see, empathy . . . that’s good. We have to have some sense of how other people feel, the suffering and the indignities they undergo. But it’s not enough to feel someone else’s pain, we need to find a way to share in it, to help them confront it, endure it, transform it into a power of its own.
I think the only way to do that is to stand with those who suffer injustice, who live with the alienation of being the one to whom no one must pay attention, who know only the dehumanizing pain of constantly having to act like you’re someone other than who you are, just so you won’t get bullied, beaten, sexually harassed, or shot. We have to raise our voices with the voices of those who wield no power, who are always in danger of having their voices ignored. We who would follow Jesus must sacrifice something for them.
Subscribe to us on iTunes!
Christian Abundance (Matthew 14:13-21)
Sermon delivered by Rev. Chuck Lewis on August 7, 2014
We've been blessed with many gifts. What kind of stewards should we be?
Discipleship lives above the economy of scarcity and dares to live the economy of the abundance of God, with eyes to see those who "need not go away,” and ears to hear our mission to “give them something to eat”—and there will always be enough.
Subscribe to us on iTunes!
Camp Douglass
"Mary, get out of my way. I'm trying to showcase my hips." -- Samuel Parks-Penwell
Last weekend, a group of us went out to Red River Gorge for a camping trip. In an old church camp compound, we stayed two nights and 2 days, filling them with fun, merriment, and a little depravity.
There really isn't a lot to be said. Outside of some late afternoon Friday traffic, no wifi (savages), a cliff-diving frisbee, and the lack of gumption required to commandeer the four Ale 8 trucks parked alongside us in Winchester, I'd say the trip was a raving success.
Some great hikes, some great meals, some great campfires, some great new friends.
If you'd like to check out our collected photos from the trip, we've compiled a number of them into a photostream for your enjoyment.
Camp Douglass on Social Media
Due to some traffic difficulties, we’re taking in some of the local cuisine.
#Winchester
#win #chester
#campDouglass pic.twitter.com/bgOhKAphDI
— geoff w (@probablyGeoff) August 23, 2014#dadhat smells of campfire. #campDouglass
— Ben Carter (@notbencarter) August 24, 2014
probablygeoff's photo on Instagram
probablygeoff's photo on Instagram
notbencarter's photo on Instagram
#CampDouglass pic.twitter.com/BAy7zH7McE
— Derek Penwell (@reseudaimon) August 25, 2014Why the Church Needs to Quit Reading the Box Scores
![By Steveboerger (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/503cfb8ce4b0344ab3470b5d/1409246438388-X9SG1KGWYT3YQD05QMLR/image-asset.png)
By Steveboerger (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
By Derek Penwell
Patience is not a purchasable commodity.
And if you think it is, you’re both–probably in the market and unlikely to find it.
"Well, that’s just dumb. Of course, you can’t buy patience."
Ok. Maybe that’s a bit of a straw man. After all, nobody’s under the misimpression that you can go to Wal-Mart and pick up the econo-size box O' patience.
On the other hand, there are plenty of people willing to part with the money to purchase things that they think will make patience irrelevant, people willing to buy stuff that promises to do for them what only patience and hard work can actually accomplish.
Why do you think people buy Thigh Masters and soon-to-be-lapsed gym memberships in January?
I remember years ago, just after I quit smoking, thinking, “I wish I had years of non-smoking under my belt, right now.”
It doesn’t work that way, though. If you want to be an ex-smoker, there’s no shortcut, beyond just piling up time not smoking.
Patience is difficult, just to the extent that it's an admission that some things lie outside the realm of our control. It would be nice to think that engineering outcomes through cleverness or sheer force of will is always a possibility. Alas, some things can’t be planned into submission, just because we really want them.
That is not to offer excuses for not planning, which is usually an integral part of achieving one’s goals. It is, rather, a caveat to remind us that no matter how passionate or how well organized, success at some things cannot be achieved absent the bone-crushing passage of time.
The need for patience is no less necessary when it comes to congregational transformation.
As with diet and exercise, there’s a whole industry that has made a lot of money playing to people’s impatience when it comes to healthy congregations. Now, I don’t want to be misunderstood to be saying that all commercial efforts to help churches heal are cynical attempts to aid the process whereby churches and their money are soon parted. I’m not necessarily questioning anyone’s sincerity who makes a living telling congregations how to get healthy. I think there can be no denying, however, that it would be much tougher to sell books and seminars in this industry without the obdurate cultural belief that something can be had for nothing–or at least, if not “nothing,” then very little in the way of an investment in time and hard work.
Here’s the thing: Healthy turnarounds in diets and congregations are measured in unsatisfying increments of time–which is to say, time that extends beyond people’s initial enthusiastic expectations. There’s no healthy way, for example, to lose 25 pounds in a week–except, perhaps, with the excision of a particularly rare tumor or some such. Likewise, congregations, which often measure health in purely quantifiable ways (membership, budget, worship attendance, etc.) pay too much attention to the box scores, thinking that–given the recent visioning process, or the new youth minister hire, or the addition of a “praise band”–increasingly large numbers must surely be just around the corner.
Box scores, while a helpful metric for judging performance in baseball, don’t always tell the whole tale in the church (or necessarily even in baseball). Eagle-eyeing the box scores is a symptom of impatience, of believing that congregational health is reducible to numbers.[1] The goal of baseball is winning, not piling up impressive statistics.
The truth of the matter is, though, impatience in the case of congregational transformation can be deadly, because it continues to place unrealistic expectations on systems incapable of living up to them. Practically speaking, it is neither realistic nor healthy for churches to expect steroidal box scores tomorrow–or by the next time we draw up the budget. Living life by box scores is a recipe for despair. Believe me. I know. I'm a Chicago Cubs fan.
Not only is impatience a practical problem, though; it’s a theological one. Patience is a theological virtue for a reason. Christians are an eschatological people–which is to say, Christians are a people caught between the “now” and the “not yet,” between the “promise” and the “fulfillment.” We live with the paradox that the war has already been won, when all signs seem to indicate that the battle is still being waged. We are called to a radical hope that can only be sustained by a patience that allows us to say, “We can’t quite yet see how God is working out God’s purposes, but we will continue to live as though those purposes are already accomplished.”
Impatience, when it comes to congregational transformation, from a theological perspective, is the damning admission that our hope in God has been supplanted by our confidence in our own resources to produce the results we think are most important–that is, box scores. That’s the rub: Our impatience is not only a statement about who we are and what we think we’re capable of, it’s also an implicit assertion about who God is and what God is capable of—or, perhaps better, what God is incapable of.
A people shaped by hope cannot but cultivate patience as the very virtue that most clearly articulates a belief that our lives (and the lives of our congregations) are not our own–they are a gift. And there’s no way to quantify that gift in such a way that it will fit in a box score.
____________________
- Yes, I realize keeping an eye on those numbers is important. My argument is not that those numbers are unimportant, but that they’re not definitive. ↩
Our Friends at Freedom House Doing the Lord's Work among Mothers in Recovery
If you want to know how difficult it is to be in recovery from substance abuse and try to have a baby and try to hold your family together, read this article. We're proud of our friends at Freedom House, and all the work done by Volunteers of America. They truly are doing the Lord's work among Mothers in recovery.
Book signing at the Farmers Market
If you missed Derek's book signing on August 17, it may well not have been the biggest mistake you've ever made.
Derek will be signing books again this Saturday, August 30 @ the Douglass Loop Farmers Market from 10am-2pm.
There will be copies of the book to purchase on the day of the signing. But if you'd prefer to purchase one of your own beforehand, you can preorder one at chalicepress.com.
If you'd like to find out more about Derek the author, or read a few excerpts from the book--you know, just to see if it's worth your time--check him out on his website, and on his author page of Facebook.
Hope Floats (Exodus 1:8 – 2:10)
We're proud to welcome Rev Candasu Vernon Cubbage to the pulpit. Speaking truth to power, y'all.
We can't save the whole world, but we can do something. And if we look hard enough, there is usually more than one way to respond when those in authority over us are wrong.
Subscribe to us on iTunes!
Bake Sale!
What: Bake Sale!
When: Sunday, August 31 (after worship)
Where: In the Gathering Area at Douglass Blvd. Christian Church
Why: Because you need the sweet goodness of homemade baked wares (and to raise money for the Mission Trip).
How much: You're just going to have to bring your check book and find out.
DBCC is giving
Last Sunday, Douglass Blvd. Christian Church voted to approve a gift of $15,000 to New Roots--a local non-profit charged with making fresh produce available in food deserts here in Louisville. With this contribution, as well as money they've already raised, they will be able to open a market in Smoketown, making fresh, local food available and affordable to a community that traditionally has had few options.
Along with this proposal, the congregation voted to earmark an even larger sum of money for future gifts. These funds are all part of the development of what we're (for now) calling an outreach initiative. With the funds that we've set aside, those who have been named to the Outreach Task Force, along with leadership, will be emphasizing the importance of community giving as a part of our mission, as well as seeking out and vetting potential recipients and partners in our journey.
It's all pretty exciting.
We at Douglass Blvd. have been truly blessed. But we see our responsibility as a community of means to make sure we're doing our best to be good stewards of that blessing.
We hope you'll continue to walk with us on this journey.
Prayer of the People
Delivered by Brian Cubbage on Sunday, August 17, 2014.
Merciful, loving, and gracious God,
We come before you today to confess that we seek to be the whole body of Christ in our own right. We seek to be self-sufficient islands, complete unto ourselves. But you remind us that we are only who we are within community. We are, therefore I am. Help us to remember that we are members of one body, borne upon one another's joys and griefs, struggles and victories; hurt by injustice done to any; liberated only by justice done for all. Help us to learn which member of the body we are. Help us to do and be well at being the part we are called to be, whether we be a hand to help; a mouth to speak; a leg to move; an ear to hear; a heart to feel; an eye to see.
This day we pray for all those members and friends of our community of faith who have need: Beth Eilers, James Knox, Raymond Philpot, Vicki Land's father, John Cutsinger, Craig Schroeder, Margie Moody, Kristina Peters, Max Chancellor, Jack Pittenger, Clara Cruikshank, Roger Geeslin, Richard Nash, Millie Rott, Harold Lindsey, Norman Harrison, and Hazel Wintzer
We pray for our community of faith as we reason together about our outreach into our neighborhood and our city.
We pray for the families of Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri; Ezell Brown of Los Angeles, California; Eric Garner of New York City; and for the families of all others who have died at the hands of police in our country.
We pray for the entire community of Ferguson and St. Louis, for those who protest for justice and for those sworn to uphold it, that honesty and a desire for truth guide all their, and our, words and actions.
We lift up in joy today all those, both within our community and without, who prepare to start a new school year. May your blessings be upon the learning and discovery they and we experience this year.
We pray for all those who struggle today with unemployment; with burdensome debt; with foreclosure; and with poverty and homelessness. We pray that, in a land of plenty, all may find a place at the table; and that we may know the favor of your jubilee.
We pray for all of those who endure the hatred and oppression of others on account of their race; their ethnicity; their nationality; their gender expression; their sexual orientation; their religion.
We pray finally for all those whose joys and woes and needs are known only to you, God, that you may shelter those deep within your heart.
It is in Jesus' name that we pray.
Amen.
Beer w/ Jesus at Haymarket Whiskey Bar
Tonight @ 6, Beer with Jesus will be gathering at Haymarket Whiskey Bar, 331 E Market St in Butchertown.
We're relocating for three reasons:
- We assume Jesus would like whiskey.
- Samuel Parks-Penwell's band 'Souls of Lycanthropy' will be playing there later this evening.
- We assume Jesus knows how to rock.
See you there!
