an open and affirming community of faith
n open and affirming community where faith is questioned and formed, as relationships are made and upheld.
I’ve been rejected because people did not like what I had to say, or the way I said it, or to whom I was talking in the first place. I’ve preached sermons that congregations did not want to hear because I told them the truth. They were sinners. So are you. So am I. And the bottom line is that God is not going to make the world a better place for us. God doesn’t even want to change the world. God wants to change us.
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Audrey Connor
Rev. Audrey Connor is a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) minister who has served as an associate pastor and Family Life Minister in Knoxville, Tennessee and Lynchburg, Virginia respectively. She served as the Disciples of Christ national advocacy organization, GLAD Alliance’s board from 2009 to 2013. And organized the GLAD Easter Writing Project in years 2013 and 2014. Audrey is also an avid lover of problem solving and teaches math in Tuscon, Arizona where she lives with her wife, two dogs, and two cats.
Margot Connor
Rev. Margot Connor is a retired minister in the Christian Church Disciples of Christ who served as pastor to First Christian Church Bowling Green, Ohio and Karl Road Christian Church in Columbus, Ohio. She is a spiritual director, retreat leader and Reiki practitioner. She is also mother of three, grandmother of five and most important, Audrey’s mother! She lives in Columbus, Ohio with her husband Chuck and their puppy Ginger.
Saturday
Living in the Tension: What does it look like to live in the space with the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender community and the church?
10:30-12 Listening to God’s voice: Breaking down the barriers that keep us from hearing God’s call in our midst.
Noon lunch break 1:00-2:00 Listening to the Voices of the Unheard: Breaking the barriers that keep us from hearing others.
Sunday
Sunday School: Developing Strategies of bringing our voices out in the world: Breaking down the barriers that keep us from sharing our stories with others
Sermon: Do I Have to go into the Wilderness? Mark 1:9-17
Steve Knight
The real revolution of social media is that it revealed the social layer in the fabric of the Web that was always there, but was not visible before. In that sense, social media has been, as my friend Anthony Smith (@PostmoderNegro on Twitter) would call, “apocalyptic” – it has been a prophetic revelation. Now, I don’t mean “prophetic” in the sense of the Book of Revelation and “the End Times.” I’m using the word “prophetic” here more like Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann uses it in his book The Prophetic Imagination. For Brueggemann, being “prophetic” is about translating between the world as it is and the world as it might be.
So, Steve was with us this week. It was pretty cool.
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Steve Knight
Steve Knight is director of marketing and sales for Chalice Press. He is also co-founder of Transform Network and co-lead minister of Open Hearts Gathering. Steve is the former manager of the Internet division for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, who futurist Leonard Sweet once called “the Grand Master of New Media.” He lives with his three children in Gastonia, NC (just outside of Charlotte).
Come and learn about the latest social media and digital storytelling tools and how to use them effectively in whatever your context may be (business/non-profit/ministry/church). This is a free workshop, open to the public. All are welcome! Bring your questions and your ideas and let's have some fun talking Web stuff together.
The Web is only 26 years old. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are all less than 12 years old. But they've changed (and are changing) our worlds. How should we then live in the digital age? And what is the amazing opportunity we all have each and every day that the Web can enable in new and powerful ways?
Check him out on Twitter @knightopia.
Steve Knight (@knightopia) is joining Douglass Boulevard Christian Church next weekend for a 24-hour blitz of workshops, brainstorming sessions, sermons, and fun.
4:30-6:00 Using Social Media to Tell Your Organization's Story
Douglass Boulevard Christian Church, 2005 Douglass Boulevard
Come and learn about the latest social media and digital storytelling tools and how to use them effectively in whatever your context may be (business/non-profit/ministry/church). This is a free workshop, open to the public. All are welcome! Bring your questions and your ideas and let's have some fun talking Web stuff together.
6:00 Dinner and Drinks at North End Café (2116 Bardstown Road)
Welcome Steve to Louisville and continue (or join) the conversation about social media storytelling. Everyone is welcome.
9:45-10:45
During Sunday School we will explore what stories we want to tell as a church and how we might use pictures, text, audio, and video to tell those stories and connect with others online. It will be more fun than it sounds and everyone is welcome.
11:00
Worship with DBCC. Steve will be preaching a sermon called, "Tweeting the Mighty Deeds of God". Everyone is welcome.
12:00 Technology Help Desk
Want to tweet but don't know how? Want to create a Facebook event, but don't want to screw it up? Don't know how to back up the contacts on your phone to your computer? Stop by our Help Desk, staffed by young people and nerds, and up your online game.
Welcoming our guest Julie Richardson delivering her sermon, "Building ... together."
If you like what you hear, check out more of her work and see what she's all about.
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Saturday, June 20th, 10am-noon at DBCC
Join us for a workshop and conversation with Rev. Julie Richardson regarding youth and young adult ministry. Our time with Julie will include some discussion about why it is we do youth ministry at all, how it can serve as a barometer of the church as a whole, how we approach from a relational and congregation-wide perspective, and what some avenues might be for a wider and more effective reach when it comes to youth and young adult ministry in the city of Louisville. Youth, young adults, parents and church leaders are encouraged to come ready to engage in conversation, ask questions and envision a story for the ongoing youth and youth adult ministries at DBCC.
Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons
By Derek Penwell
Well, we're getting ready to head to Italy in a couple of hours. We're very excited!
I miss everyone already, even though it's only been a couple of weeks since this whole sabbatical thing started. So, I thought I'd check in to let you know how we're doing and to begin thinking with you about the craft of storytelling. Part of the purpose of the sabbatical, for me and for you, is to think more intentionally about the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. We've had a great deal of change over the past 7 1/2 years, and we need to tell ourselves a story about what all that change means, why it happened, where were we headed without the changes, and what (if anything) ties those changes together into a coherent narrative.
I've gone into some detail about the kinds of changes we've experienced, but now we need to start thinking about how we want to structure the plot of the story. And as you might expect from an Aristotelian, I suggest we start with Aristotle—which is not nearly as parochial a decision on my part as you might imagine. Turns out that Aristotle actually set down the model for plot (mythos) and plot structure that is still in use today in his seminal book, the Poetics:
As to that poetic imitation which is narrative in form and employs a single metre, the plot manifestly ought, as in a tragedy, to be constructed on dramatic principles. It should have for its subject a single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It will thus resemble a living organism in all its unity, and produce the pleasure proper to it. It will differ in structure from historical compositions, which of necessity present not a single action, but a single period, and all that happened with that period to one person or to many, little connected together as the events may be (1459a17-25).
Notice that Aristotle understands narrative plot to be different from "historical composition," because history is (at least according to Aristotle) first concerned with getting all the facts (as we understand them) put down in the order in which they occurred. On this reading, history is the listing of discrete episodes within a given period of time, concerning a specific person or group of persons—that is, sort of like making a list of all the stuff that has happened to DBCC over the past 7 1/2 years—which, I would argue, is fairly easy to do. All you need for historical compositions (at least the way Aristotle describes them) are people who know what happened and when. But plot requires something more.
Like what?
It needs to provide answers to the question, "Why did those things happen?"
One of the virtues of telling DBCC's story as a story instead of as a historical composition is that stories can be told and retold by just about anyone. Historical compositions, on the other hand, require their chroniclers to know all the facts. Congregations rarely have anyone who knows all the facts about what has happened over a given period of time, and even fewer people dedicated to making certain all the details are preserved.
But in a story, the facts (though not unimportant) serve the story, rather than existing as unconnected nuggets of experience. That is not to say that in telling a story we necessarily change the facts to suit the plot we're trying to develop. What it means is that it is possible to recount the plot of a story by almost anyone, regardless of whether or not that person knows all the "facts" of the history. This ability to "tell the story" of a congregation is important because it gives everyone an opportunity to participate in the most communal activity: storytelling, not just the people who were involved. New people, people who haven't figured quite how to contribute to the story yet, as well as people who just don't recall all the "facts" of the story, can at least give a brief recitation of the plot. Even people who don't know all of the events of Homer's Odyssey, for example, can often give a basic summary of the plot: Odysseus wants to go home to his wife, but he keeps running into trouble that prevents him from getting there.
Yes, such a plot summary is simple, but it easy to tell. And the fact that it's easy to tell is an important part of being a member of the community. In religion, for example, that's one of the most significant functions of myth. Myths provide access to a storied community, access to which community is severely limited if you don't have at least a basic understanding of the story. All communities have stories that bind them together. But until people have been around long enough to know all the stories, they need a shorthand version of the broader story to feel like they belong.
Another virtue of telling DBCC's story as a story, instead of as a historical composition, is that because stories are plotted along a trajectory, you can project that plot into the future. That is to say, having seen not only where we've come from but why we've arrived at where we are, we have a much better opportunity to think more intentionally about how that story will take shape heading into the future. Having a grasp of the story as story, in other words, helps us to know with greater fidelity what we might be situated to do next, and helps to give us more objective (i.e., mission/vision-driven) criteria by which to determine whether a new initiative aligns with our story.
Ok. Enough with the egghead stuff. (Well, maybe just a little more, but not much.)
One of the first things we need to start identifying, if we're plotting our story is the backbone of the plot: conflict. Of course, I realize that the the word conflict has some bad resonances when you're talking to people who've been in church any length of time. But when I say conflict in this context, what I'm talking about is much more comprehensive than listing the fights the church has had, much more "meta."
What do I mean?
One way of thinking about conflict in plot is: Desire meets Obstacle.
In stories that we all know the Desire might be to get the boy/girl, to save the world, to hold the family together, to survive a catastrophe, to reconcile after a bad dispute, to become a hero, etc. Desire in this sense is the thing that motivates the characters of the story as they move through the plot.
Obstacles, on the other hand, are those things that stand between the character and that which the character desires: the ticking time bomb, the evil villain, her penchant for self-destruction, a horrible spouse/boss/parent, his own weakness or the weakness of someone he loves, etc. Obstacle in this sense is the thing that provides tension (i.e., the part that makes the story feel interesting to us) as the desire is thwarted.
The story flows from the repeated clash of Desire and Obstacle. Plug in Desire and Obstacle to your own favorite novel or movie, and see if it doesn't work.
In the case of DBCC, our job in writing our story is first to identify our Desire (What do we want passionately? What drives us? What makes our actions intelligible as motivation?). Then we need to identify the Obstacle that has tended to get in the way of/thwart our Desire (What scares us? What do we spend the most time trying to solve? Are there particular times when the Obstacle is more pressing?).
So, that's what we want to start thinking about: What is DBCC's Desire, and what is the Obstacle it keeps running into?
I'll be thinking about this along with you. Email me with your ideas. But if I don't get back to you right away, don't worry . . . I'm in Italy.
;)
Love,
Derek
Telling Our Story
Julie Richardson
Julie will be exploring key issues in youth ministry, how we approach it from various cultural contexts, and, most of all, how it is crucial to approach youth ministry from a place of deep commitment to relationship, first and foremost.
Prior to beginning work at LTS in the areas of development and alumni relations, Julie served for 15 years in both congregational and regional expressions of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in youth and young adult ministry. Over the course of that time, she was the featured speaker at retreats and camps in various regions, and served as a consultant for several small Disciples congregations concerning youth ministry. She has a particular passion for helping congregations think outside the box about ministry with and to youth and young adults, and in helping congregations understand the theological roots of why this ministry matters.
Julie lives in Louisville with her daughter Madeleine, and attends First Christian Church. In her spare time, she writes, jogs, and drinks copious amounts of coffee.
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Rev. Candasu Vernon Cubbage fills in this week! While Derek is on his sabbatical, she'll be filling in with pastoral care, as well as a number of socks-rockin' Sunday sermons.
Don't forget, next week we'll be kicking off Telling Our Story with our first guest, Dan Moseley.
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Saturday, June 6 - 12-2PM
Telling Your Personal Story Workshop
Sunday June 7 - 11:00 AM
Dr. Moseley's sermon: Restory Your Life:Living Into a New Identity
12:15 PM Light lunch
12:45 PM - 3:00 PM Telling the Story of DBCC: a workshop designed to encourage reflection about this congregation and project our
narrative as the body of Christ in this place.
How did we get here and where are we going?
Dan Moseley is a respected executive coach/consultant who has helped individuals and organizations navigage the changes and conflicts in life. He is a nationally known lecturer and workshop leader in issues of leadership, loss,change and transition.
Dr. Moseley has decades of experience in teaching and supporting others in their journey of life. He was a seminary professor for 13 years at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, IN. Prior to that work, he was pastor for over 30 years. His Masters and Doctor's degrees were earned at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. Moseley has served on Boards and Comittees of organizations throughout the world as an ecumenical leader and educator. He has been instrumental in the development of organizations offering Pastoral Care and Counseling and Grief Healing.
Dr. Moseley was the President of the Disciples Peace Fellowship for the Christian Church. He was the founding pastor of the Pastoral Counseling Centers of Tennessee which has seven satellite offices throughout middle Tennessee. He was the Director of the Walter Scott Preaching Society, a society for the development of excellence in preaching among Disciple preachers. He was the Director of Continuing Education for Christian Theological Seminary between 1999-2001.
Dr. Moseley was also part of the Board of the "Listening to Listeners", a Lilly funded project that was directed by Dr. Ron Allen. He does workshops on Grieving and Spirituality, Interim Ministry, Leadership and Congregational Conflict. Moseley has numerous articles and sermons that have appeared in publications including Best Sermons 3, The Disciples Theological Digest, Journal for Biblical Preaching, Encounter and The Christian Ministry Magazine.
Come hang out with us at Dundee Gastropub (formerly Dundee Tavern) at 6pm for some beers and laughs.
So, this summer Derek will be traveling to foreign lands (like Indiana and Italy) to learn how to shape the story of a faith community into a narrative--something we can share with ourselves and our future.
While he's away, we're going to be spending time deciphering just what that story is. To do that, we're going to hear from others about their experiences, using their example and expertise as inspiration for our own.
We've invited nine speakers from all over the country to do just that:
6-7 Dan Moseley Writing Our Story
20-21 Julie Richardson Youth in a Changing World
27-28 Steve Knight Using the Internet in Church
11-12 Audrey Connor LGBTQ Issues
25-26 Jon Berquist Changing Church Governing
1-2 Sandhya Jha Using Our Stuff
8-9 April Johnson Issues of Race
15-16 Brandon Gilvin Re-imagining Outreach
22-23 Phil Snider The Radical Edges of Ministry
Each guest will be here for at least Saturday and Sunday, and will be sharing both the Sunday Sermon as well as any number of workshops, seminars, dinners, and social gatherings.
We hope you'll attend as many as possible. This is a really exciting opportunity, and we're thrilled to be sharing this time.
Life, the way I’m setting it down now, is that space where God is, where God breathes into our otherwise lifeless existences, confronting us with something more profound than that which comprises the distractions of the day-to-day grind. Existence on the other hand, is that place we go to avoid the presence of God. Existence is all the distractions that anesthetize us against the suffering, against the hard uncertainties.
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Please join us this Sunday afternoon (around 12:30PM) on the grounds as we eat some awesome food, listen to some bluegrass music, send off Derek on his sabbatical, and celebrate 75 wonderful years in the Highlands neighborhood.
This is a pot-luck style picnic so we ask that you bring a dish to share. We will also be having a cake walk. If you would like to donate a cake we would be thrilled. Also we are looking for volunteers to help with setting up and various other things. If you would like to help out please email Clare Rutz.
See you there!
But there are some things we can’t keep quiet about, because to keep quiet about them would amount to deceit. Silence can be just as much a form of deception as a baldfaced lie.
The irony for me is that in the long run the vulnerability that comes with telling the truth feels much safer than the fortress we attempt to construct by our silence. Being sanctified in truth means being able to look at ourselves in the mirror. But even more importantly, it means being able to stand in the presence of the God who created and loves this world and who wants to save it with us in it—not just to save us by taking us out of it.
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Question: What are the dates that Derek going to be gone?
Answer: May 30th — September 15th
Question: But what happens if I need the pastor?
Answer: We’ve got you covered there. The Rev. Candasu Cubbage is going to oversee coordination of pastoral care with the elders during Derek’s absence. You may call the church office (502-452-2629) to notify us of a need. In an emergency you may also call Candasu at (334-549-5529).
Question: Who’s preaching while Derek is away?
Answer: Candasu will be preaching four times, Chuck Lewis twice, and Mary Ann Lewis once. The other Sundays will be covered by the speakers who will be with us throughout the summer.
Question: Yeah, about that, who are these speakers, when will they be here, what are they talking about, and who’s taking care of them while they’re here?
Answer:
Question: What will the weekends look like when the speakers are here?
Answer: Much of what will happen on the weekends the speakers are here will depend on what the speakers work out with their hosts (see above). In general, though, the shape of the weekend will look something like this:
Question: What’s Derek doing while we’re back here working our tails off?
Answer: Derek is going to be doing work too. His work is going to revolve around the craft of story construction, and will take place formally at a series of writer’s workshops. Here’s a quick summary of where Derek will be:
We're changing it up again!
Meet us on the back patio of North End Cafe - Highlands tonight at 6pm. Lets enjoy this beautiful spring while it's hanging around.
Following Jesus is scary because it asks us to go to 'even the Gentiles,' to those people who might not look like us or talk like us or love like us or dress like us, and invite them to be a part of our family.
Following Jesus is scary because it asks us to live the story about how God has come into our lives and moved us and changed us and made us into new people, even though we don’t feel near adequate to the task.
Following Jesus is confronting our fear of those people, and learning to love the people God loves—which is all people.
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When: Saturday, May 9th. 10am-2pm
What: all the things
Where: DBCC Gym/Douglass Loop Farmers Market
Be sure to check it out. Always good stuff to be found. As in the past, all funds go to our continued mission and outreach, including our relationship with Casa Hogar Children's Home in Mexico.