Vox Dei Community is hosting a fair trade bazaar over the next three Sundays, beginning November 15. Here’s the basic idea of fair trade:
This belongs in ‘dialog’ with the last post – a vision from NP about a better way to be human: listening.
- Discussion comes from a fixed position. Dialog suspends its position.
- Discussion exchanges opinions. Dialog discovers new ideas.
- Discussion is in favor of its own view. Dialog is open to the view of the other.
- Discussion attempts to convert the other. Dialog listens to the other.
- Discussion produces agreement, compromise or division. Dialog creates a new place.
- Discussion can become more rigid. Dialog softens and opens.
- Discussion can become confrontational. Dialog is sympathetic.
- Discussion has non-negotiables. For dialog, everything is negotiable.
- Discussion will not produce deep change. Dialog invites it.
- Discussion does not require a spirit of goodwill. Dialog assumes unity.
Cable news thinking…amplifies the worst elements of emotional reaction:
- Focus on the urgent instead of the important.
- Vivid emotions and the visuals that go with them as a selector for what’s important.
- Emphasis on noise over thoughtful analysis.
- Unwillingness to reverse course and change one’s mind.
- Xenophobic and jingoistic reactions (fear of outsiders).
- Defense of the status quo encouraged by an audience self-selected to be uniform.
- Things become important merely because others have decided they are important.
- Top down messaging encourages an echo chamber (agree with this edict or change the channel).
- Ill-informed about history and this particular issue.
- Confusing opinion with the truth.
- Revising facts to fit a point of view.
- Unwillingness to review past mistakes in light of history and use those to do better next time.
“Whenever the Church is in trouble, it does three things. It fiddles with the structure. It raises new moneys, and it changes the liturgy. It gives the impression of being very busy when in truth, it is not. The church in Germany during the 1930s did all three, looking very busy. In truth, it should have been busy opposing the rise of anti-Semitism.”
- The Rev. Dr. Gerhard Krodel, Dean of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg
One of my favorite moments in the Vox Dei Community was an event we hosted in August called “An Evening of Story.” It was meant to be a space in which we could see from different perspectives and disciplines the power and essential role of narrative in the human experience. Only it was so much better than that or any other description.
Ben Jeffrey, who contributed to that evening, got married Sunday and I was so happy to be able to share in the ceremony. I told a story.
Kelly Foster was one of our very special guests for that evening as well. She is a writer. (I laugh as I write that, realizing that everything I’ve said in this post so far is a blatant understatement.) Kelly’s latest entry in her regular contribution to The Image Journal is further reflection on the power of narrative and our evening in August.
Here it is. Enjoy.
I love the gray facemasks and black shoes. I’ve been lobbying for these…my whole life. Now just get that silly-looking ink-blot off the helmet and put the arrowhead back on and you’ve got yourselves some Super Bowl uniforms.
One thing at a time.
From nakedpastor:
The one piece about being a pastor of a church that I just don’t think I’ll ever be cut out for is seeing people I love go away. I mean when good people come along, resonate with what we do, are welcomed and loved by the community, but then just never connect in a way that is substantive enough for them to grow into a collaborative member of the church-community.
Disclaimer: Now I am a mix of motives I am certain. I want to make things happen. I want people to like me. I want people to like the people I like. I want to feel ’successful’. I’m in touch with some of this in myself, and I’m quite sure there is more of it than even I know (or would admit if I knew). I’m impatient and frustrated as a result. I’m not happy about that or dismissive of it. That’s real and ugly confessional material – and much easier to condemn in others than recognize in myself.
But I also find in myself better motives, like genuinely wanting what is good for people. I’ve even helped some move on from our church because I could see it would be better for them (even when it was sad for me). And even though most who interact with our church have experienced it as a generous place to connect with God and others, not everyone has. And that remains a painful mystery for me.
I don’t mean to sound like I think everyone would love how we ‘do church’ – not at all. Vox isn’t even that entertaining. We’re traditional in all the uncool ways, and casual rather than polished. We’re low-maintenance and probably a bit unusual. People that resonate deeply with Vox are typically either recovering from hyper-church or trying church for the first time as adults. I’m quite sure we get a lot of things wrong, do some things poorly, and miss a lot of opportunities to do better. But we are intentional, thoughtful, generous, and genuinely ourselves as much as we know how to be. And you couldn’t find better human beings in any gathering anywhere, let alone in a church.
We do go to great lengths to be open and accessible without being intrusive or coercive. We overtly ask people to be accountable for their experience with our community – to take initiative, to assume they are ‘insiders’ if they want to be and then behave accordingly, going about having opinions, starting things, serving wherever they see a need, and responding to whatever they see God doing. It’s honestly really hard (from my point of view) to believe that anyone would find our church-community inaccessible.
And yet here we are. Too catholic for the Baptists, too baptist for the catholics, too fundie for the progressives, too progressive for the fundies. And that’s just by quoting Jesus a lot.
I jest, but on this reflective Tuesday, I wish it were different. I wish I was more of a dynamic people-drawer. I wish I could do a better job at managing expectations, or at helping people be aware of their assumptions, or at getting in touch with the source of their frustrations with their experiences of church (which is almost always a problem they brought with them and then take with them as they go: the problems ‘out there’ are almost always reflective of the problems ‘in here’).
I wish I could rescue everything. But I can’t and I know it well. People ultimately have to find their own way, their own connection, their own experience of Christ and his Body the church – just like you and just like me. I can’t learn anything without getting bloodied by it. Why should I assume anyone else would be different? Leave it to Richard Rohr:
To give people answers to questions they have not yet struggled with or suffered for makes those very answers more a wall than a window.
So I press ahead, hopefully creating more windows than walls, blessing people as they come and go, hoping to at least do no harm while they are in our company.
But God help those who ask and are denied, who search and don’t find, who knock and find the door unopened. Amen.
I believe I am a Christian, though not a very good example of one. Also, I know a lot of Christians. So I just don’t believe that how Christians often portray themselves publicly really represents what they actually believe or care about. (At least I hope I believe that.)
For example, if one were to take a random sampling of a Facebook friends feed, one might conclude that Christianity leads one
- to despise immigrants,
- to believe that the poor are lazy and the uninsured irresponsible,
- to become primarily motivated to speak out by maintaining what is good for me,
- to expect the worst motivations in those who arrive at different conclusions about how to best solve problems, and
- to generally think that anyone who doesn’t look, shop, vote, and think exactly like me is a threat and needs to be ridiculed and mocked (if not destroyed).
The dissonance between this and authentic “Christianity” seems obvious, but maybe I’m taking Jesus too seriously.
Today I remember my cousin Don Allen Clary who gave his life in Baghdad on November 8, 2004 to save others. And I remember all who loved him. He was 21.
Now to make a world where that kind of sacrifice is no longer necessary. Here’s a post I appreciate from PoaPW.
PREAMBLE: I grieve for those who lost their lives on 9/11/01, and for their families, for whom I frequently forget to pray. I condemn the actions of the perpetrators and name them (the actions, not the perpetrators) as what they are: unmitigatedly evil. As a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, I also condemn the immature “lashing out” in reaction to that evil, and I grieve for those who have lost their lives in furtherance of that lashing out, and for their families, for whom I frequently forget to pray. END PREAMBLE.
* Percentage of money spent on weapons required to put all 72,000,000 of those children in school: <1%
* Total number of people who will die on 9/11/09 from hunger/starvation: ~24,000Now here are some other numbers that we may want to keep in mind on 9/11/09, as a matter of perspective.
* Total number of people who will die on 9/11/09: 150,835
* Total number of deaths during 9/11 attacks (excluding the terrorists): 2,973
* Total number of children under the age of 5 who will die from hunger/starvation on 9/11/09: ~18,000
* Total number of people who will die of HIV/AIDS on 9/11/09: 5,479
* According to a recent Cornell University study, number of people who will die of causes directly related to water, air and soil pollution on 9/11/09: 60,334
* Total number of people who will not be allowed to live, due to their inconvenience to others, on 9/11/09: 126,027
* Total number of people who will survive on less than $2.50 on 9/11/09: ~3,000,000,000
* Total number of people who will survive on less than $1.00 on 9/11/09: ~1,300,000,000
* Total number of children of primary school age who will not be able to attend a school on 9/11/09: ~72,000,000
On September 11, 2009, let us mourn, let us remember, let us pray, let us think, let us speak, let us work, let us hope, and let us love (and, remember, the greatest of these is love). But let us do so within a proper context, within a proper perspective.
On September 11, 2009, I won’t forget to pray for that.
Join me, please.
Grace and Peace,
Raffi
I’m contributing a few songs and participating in a panel at tonights event “An Evening of Story” – hosted by Vox Dei Community. If you don’t have plans yet, why not come and join us?
Here’s the Facebook event page.
An Evening of Story
Public Event – Everyone’s Welcome
Saturday, August 1 – 7pm
At Saundra Lee’s Dance Studio
Explore five perspectives on the power of Story as a pathway to a flourishing life.
A Songwriter. An Actor. A Therapist. A Writer. A Dancer.
Artistic presentations in sound, sight and movement with an opportunity to interact with a panel of presenters.
Followed by a reception featuring local Missouri wines and hors d’oeuvres.
Featuring:
Kelly Foster – columnist, Image Journal
Ben Jeffrey – actor, New York City
Jessica Rohrer – counselor, life coach
Rustin Smith – songwriter, pastor
Heather Lancaster – dancer
Greetings, friends. Thought you might be interested in my new venture: creating a clearinghouse for a lot of my old unreleased music demos on the old trusty Facebook. I have a lot of these demos that come from 15 years of songwriting and being a rock star on the long slow climb to the middle. Years and years of joy and heartache, always on the verge, repeatedly train-wrecked, usually by me, sometimes by others.
But I have these fragments of recordings – some nearly done, most just guitar/voice scratch recordings or funny band rehearsals. The time has come (after a few years away from performing) to admit that these recordings are never going anywhere. The are just relics. Cave-paintings. And I have decided that part of my continuing journey toward being my full-authentic-self-before-people means letting all this go so something newer and truer might emerge.
Disclaimer: I am a Micheal Jackson freak of a creative perfectionist, so I am quite terrified for anyone to hear these less-than-finished tracks, unmixed, out of tune, etc…. But aren’t we all afraid (of something)? I’m done with it trying to be done with it. This music is now for you, for me.
So here’s number one of a lot more I hope to share, if I don’t freak out and get plastic surgery instead. I hope you might enjoy it:
“When You Come Down (Demo)” http://twt.fm/189912
You can get future releases by becoming a ‘fan’ of my Facebook site: http://www.facebook.com/rustinsmithmusic
Also – I had this idea while mowing my lawn yesterday. I have so many ridiculously disastrous stories from years in the music world. I thought it might make for an entertaining (and therapeutic) blog series. Would anyone being interested in reading these if I could make time to write them? If so, I’d like to hear a ‘heck yeah’ and a suggestion for a good blog-series title. Come on back.
Summer is here. Well, its not technically here until June 21. That is the summer solstice in the Northern hemisphere that marks the official beginning of summer. And yet summer is already here and everyone knows it. Students are on summer break. It was nearly 90 degrees Sunday. The yard needs mowing.
In theological terms, this time is what life in the Kingdom of God is like. The Kingdom is here. Whenever we see God’s purposes for our world being lived out, we can say, “the Kingdom is here!” At the same time we all know there’s a lot of work to be done for our world to resemble God’s intentions for it. The Kingdom is not ‘officially’ here, even if it is breaking through in all sorts of ways. The Kingdom of God has what some have called an “already-but-not-yet” quality. It is already here in that it is accessible to anyone starting now. But it is not yet here it the way it will be one day.
In between that future time and now, the church is the community that lives “as if” it were already so. We go on loving our neighbors, praying for our enemies, forgiving offenses, bearing witness to injustices, and proclaiming that God’s Kingdom has invaded earth in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Sometimes it seems crazy to do so, but that’s only because we are aligning ourselves with a future that isn’t fully here…yet.
So go ahead and live “as if” summer were here. For us it already is.
I’m a fan of what Peter Rollins does with his Ikon ‘community’ in Belfast. This section (below) of a recent interview caught my attention.
I have seen too many people I love get upset at ‘the church’ because, after they withdrew from involvement and disappeared for weeks, ‘the church’ didn’t call them. I could write all day about the consumeristic assumptions behind those kinds of sentiments that I simply don’t share. But more simply, that view lets ourselves off the hook for building authentic relationships and puts all the accountability on others.
The fact is (rightly understood) we teach others how to treat us. We actively receive care and concern from others. We communicate that we aren’t interested in receiving concern and care when we don’t participate, don’t show up, don’t take responsibility, and don’t ourselves call to show concern about others. How others treat us is often an accurate reflection of our own commitment (or lack thereof) to the community.
Here’s Peter Rollins:
Paradoxically, I say, “Ikon doesn’t care about you. Ikon doesn’t give a crap if you are going through a divorce. The only person who cares is the person sitting beside you, and if that person doesn’t care, you’re stuffed.” People will say, “I left the church because they didn’t phone me when my dad died, and that was really hurtful.” But the problem is not that the church didn’t phone but that it promised to phone. I say, “Ikon ain’t ever gonna phone ya.” Pete Rollins might. But if he does, it will be as Pete Rollins and not as a representative of Ikon. Ikon will never notice if you don’t come. But if you’ve made a connection with the person sitting next to you, that person might.
Ikon is like the people who run a pub. It’s not their responsibility to help the patrons become friends. But they create a space in which people can actually encounter each other.
