Wonderings & Wanderings

Chicago

Sorry that I have been "blog-absent" for the last bit. The last two weeks of August in a university town are a bit crazy. I just got back from Chicago (an Emergent meeting). Our big adventure was being under a tornado warning for a couple hours. We were driving back from dinner in Elgin, ILL and heard the sirens blare. When we got back to our meeting locale at the International Teams Headquarters — Tim Keel, Doug Pagitt, and I decided to forego the basement to walk the grounds in pursuit of a tornado or funnel sighting. No sightings — but the closest funnel touchdown was only a few miles away. I think Laci Scott will be having tornado nightmares for weeks to come!

By the way, the hospitality of International Teams was an amazing gift to us. I was truly inspired by the way we were loved, taken care of, and embraced by this very thoughtful missions organization.

It was great as always to spend time with Tim, Doug, Laci, Brian McLaren, and Jason Clark (our Emergent-UK and international coordinator). Serious work was done, but whenever I with this group I always have a heavy and therapeutic dose of laughter and return with a few media "don't miss" recommendations. Here are my post-Chicago media recommendations —

•The British sitcom "the Office." Absolutely hilarious. Doug had the first season on DVD. A few scenes from this will surely grace a sermon or class in the future. I believe an American version is being made. I don't believe it can approach the humor of the "dilbert-like" work environment the British version portrays.
•Website: A spoof of recent Presidential gaffes (Bush and Clinton) with a decidedly liberal perspective (read: Republicans without a sense of humor should pass this one by). Best W. quote — "Our enemies never stop thinking of ways to threaten America — and so do we!"
•Book (on a more serious note): Brian McLaren's "Generous Orthodoxy" arrived Amazon the day we convened. I read a few selections of a copy Brian brought. This is going to be an excellent and important book.
•Blog: I hope you're reading Doug Pagitt's blog

I returned from Chicago refreshed, thankful, and feeling truly rich and blessed by the many friendships that I have developed over the last decade in YoungLeaders, TerraNova Project, and now Emergent (which is approaching its five year anniversary).

One meeting note to report — Emergent has truly become an international movement. Jason Clark and Brian McLaren have worked so hard as observers, scouts, and ambassadors around the world. Emergent now has leaders convening and organizations forming in the UK, France, Eastern Europe, East Africa, South Africa, Malaysia, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and more. When I hear these reports, I am humbly reminded that God's is truly doing something ecclesiastical in this world and we are just trying to follow the movement of God's Spirit.

I also want to plug the Emergent Gathering in Glorietta New Mexico on October 18-21. This is our annual pilgrimage, un-convention for the emergent community. It is informal, highly relational, fun, and inspiring. There is no registration cost. Those who share their ideas do so freely without any compensation. The only costs are travel, food, and lodging (very inexpensive at Glorietta, the huge Baptist camp just outside of Santa Fe). Santa Fe and New Mexico are breathtakingly beautiful in October. The informal worship gathering we did last year to end the Gathering was one of most overwhelming visual, prayerful experiences of my life (I felt like I was in Rivendell). Consider joining us for this time of thought, prayer, and relaxation.

Celebrating with Lattimore

Mimi and I got a call on Monday morning from our friend Lattimore. He called to say that he "had just finished cutting his grass." This is not the usual cause for celebration for most us and certainly rarely merits informing others (though I do think my neighbors might want to call and celebrate when I get around to cutting my own grass). But for Lattimore (see August 2 posting), a friend who is making the difficult transition from homelessness to having a home, this is a huge celebration. Through an organization in Durham called Second Chance, he now has a home that he shares with 3 other adults.

I would love for you to join us in celebrating this wonderful news. Lattimore's friendshp has taught our family so much about difficulties and challenges of poverty. He has freely shared his pain, mistakes, temptations, and joys with our whole family. We have been utterly challenged and blessed by his friendship. We have seen the indignity that comes with homelessness through his eyes. We have seen many examples of generosity through the friendshp and support he has received in our community and in our fellowship. I have always felt that the gospel makes so much more sense in the context of poverty and pain. And I have felt that that poverty and pain provide the greatest opportunities to embody and proclaim the gospel. Lattimore's life and experiences have made the gospel real, challenging, infuriating, and refreshing to us this summer.

Congratuations Lattimore! May your grass grow continually! (And your joy in tending to its needs never cease!).

A Job Well Done — A new journey on the horizon

I want to thank a community of friends — Denise Friesen, Melinda Denton, Elizabeth Travis, Rebecca and Bill Stevenson, Betsy and Jimmy Long, Rick Fannin, Don Taylor, Ed Richmond, Andrea Turlington, Steven and Amy Nicholson, and Mimi Conder — for a job well done.

This community has served as a vision community for the emerging culture initiative that I have been leading at the Chapel Hill Bible Church. As a community, we have been meeting together for seven months to listen to God's voice and offer a recommendation to our leadership about a ministry initiative related to the emerging culture. Our times together have been filled with prayer, personal vulnerability, honest declarations of hopes and dreams, and respectful listening to each other. What a pleasure and a privilege. When we first convened, we expressed a huge diversity of action preferences for this initiative. I have experienced God's presence as our path moved to that of an excited consensus of action.

On Wednesday evening, we presented our dreams, heart, and plans to the Elder Board. (Several of us were in dual roles — Don and I as current elders, Rick and Jimmy as former elders and former elder chairs.) I was so pleased by this presentation. Rebecca was our primary spokesperson. She spoke eloquently and passionately. Every one in our community offered powerful and appropriate personal comments throughout the presentation. I don't think this team could have done a better job.

We have some very exciting dreams. We hope to foster an authentic ministry to the emerging culture while staying in a mutually influencing, reciprocal relationship with an existing church. This type of relationship is quite rare in the church life in a America. We are excited about forging some new ground that others can observe. Our efforts to minister to the emerging culture could also be stated more precisely. We understand that the church has much to learn from the emerging culture in our society as well. Ancient Christians passions of contemplation, the celebration of beauty and utilization of artistic creativity, wholistic spiritual formation, understanding the role of community in God's redemptive work, justice, ecology, and so much more have reawakened in the emergence of this new culture. We hope and dream for a reciprocal relationship with an emerging culture that informs and refines (rather than compromises) our telling of the grand metanarrative of God's redemption of humanity and all of creation. We look forward to forging many new partnerships in this endeavor understanding that this is "not about us" but it is about participating and joining what God is doing.

Perhaps the strongest words in our presentation to the Elder board on Wednesday came from Elizabeth Travis. She was responding to the question, "What do you think this initiative and specifically this proposal will prevent us from doing (i.e., other programs the church could resource)?" Elizabeth responded, "I can't speak to other plans, but I can testify that God is doing something here!" Great words. I do believe God is doing something.

We look forward in the very near future to sharing our proposal with you. We look forward to dreaming with you. We look forward to new communities living in missional submission to the God's ongoing narrative of redemption is a changed and changing world.

Paul's Awkward Gift: Philippians 4:10-20

In the comedy "Analyze This," Billy Crystal plays a therapist who is employed by a mafia boss (Robert DeNiro) to help him deal with his repressed anger. Crystal's patience with one his client's temper explosions prompts DeNiro to send him a gift. And what a gift it is — a huge stone fountain (it's so large that it almost is taller than Crystal's two storey middle class home and takes up much of his front yard)! You can imagine the dilemma — how can you accept such an overwhelming gift that might bring you under suspicion from others (why would a mafia boss be so happy with you?) and how can you afford to appear ungracious to a giver with such a violent history.

The apostle Paul finds himself in a similar situation (described in Philippians 4:10-20). The Philippians generously send such a large financial gift that Paul is prompted to say, "I'm now well supplied," and imply, "Please don't send any more!" The gift is awkward because it challenges his ministry principle of paying his own way as he preaches. He wants no one to be able to accuse him of profiting from his calling. But how can he turn down or even rebuke this amazing example of sacrificial giving? In this text, he walks a tightrope of businesslike detachment from the gift (at one point he states that he has received the gift using a Greek term that denotes "receipt" — giving the Philippians a businesslike "bread and butter note" acknowledging their gift formally and stiffly) and effusive praise (comparing the gift to the pleasing aroma of an acceptable sacrifice offered to God in the Israelite temple).

This is my text for my August 8 sermon. This was a fascinating text to consider with so many thoughts about gifting, receiving, community, and worship. If you study this text, I think you'll quickly see a broad understanding of gifting and receiving as acts of worship — that worship (a life posture of dependence on God) demands that we give sacrificially and receive with discernment and humility. The communal nature of worship and the spiritual life are also affirmed. Giving and receiving are essential acts of community (when done as Paul suggests they require community involvement). Hence, a strong link of community to worship is made in this text.

I found some other significant points of theology to consider from this text...
• The text touches on the mystery of God's response to our material needs. I don't understand why God doesn't alway intervene in legitimate material needs — Paul seems to affirm that the conditions of our lives (our finances, the quality of our lives and relationships) do not always seem to line up with the spiritual reality of our lives.
• Paul seems to emphasize the role of vision/values on our giving and a life of simplicity (living beyond our circumstances, enjoying a vibrant communion with God regardless of our life situations).
• Paul challenges us to live in a manner that fosters a dependent, organic union with God. This is the core principle to shape both our giving and receiving. This is also a sharp challenge to our tendencies to be dependent, entitled persons or to be radically independent persons.

For those of you who heard my sermon (and any others), I would be honored for you to use this space as a place for public dialogue about gifting and receiving and a place for sharing your own narratives on this subject (for first-timers there's reply box at the bottom).

I have written a few times in this space on related issues (July 7 and July 8). I know that a significant portion of my journey involves an essential challenge to my strong tendency toward independence which can make me awkward in gifting and receiving. My path to worship seems to run through these challenges.

Gospel and Poverty

We're back from a week's vacation in Ohio — a full week without my normal "online oxygen."

I wanted to share some thoughts about poverty and the gospel that I didn't get out before we hit the road. Two weeks ago, our family had a series of experiences related to poverty in Northeast Central Durham — Durham's most notorious and impoverished neighborhood.

The Saturday before we left for vacation, I had the pleasure of helping move Denise Friesen into a home she has recently purchased in this neighborhood. Denise has been a teacher in Durham city schools for seven years and now has just begun a job at the Center for Documentary Studies as a resource person helping educators utilize photography and other arts as tools for literacy training. Denise has been a wonderful friend since her days at Carolina and has not only inspired the mission of our family but also models missional living in so many ways. She has so often taught us that even our most noble discussions about incarnational ministry (in short, taking to whole gospel into the contexts of the lives and communities of others) can be paternalistic. So often we operate incarnationally to transform others without being fully open to learn from and be transformed by those we engage with the gospel. Denise has taught us that embodying the gospel to the poor is so much more complicated than seeking out the poor with noble and simplistic hopes of empowerment and change. Poverty is a system that grips people in a manner where change is slow and in many cases improbable. The gospel compels us to seek the poor as friends, neighbors, recipients of our resources — and as teachers and guides of what it means to follow Christ in our very complicated world. We had a couple other experiences two weeks ago that reinforced these lessons — the powerful grip of poverty and the importance of our presence in the lives of the poor.

The first experience comes from our family's experiences the Antioch Baptist day camp two weeks ago. Antioch Baptist is a church located in Northeast Central Durham. Our church has been forging a partnership with Antioch and has targeted this neighborhood as an area of intentional and reciprocal ministry. Antioch had graciously invited a team from CHBC to lead a week of their educational day camp. Mimi volunteered to attend daily, lead the arts component, and to help with coordinating some other speakers. Our kids attended each day and campers and helpers. The week was a marvelous success. Our fellowship is so blessed with caring, innovative, and experienced educators. But there were, as expected, some difficult moments. The most difficult involved observing interactions of some of the camp counselors (teens who regularly lead the camp) with the campers. On occasions these teens used intense and condescending language with quick threats of expulsion to manage the kids even in circumstances where the kids were being attentive and engaged. I realize this was a cross-cultural situation that we didn't fully understand, but in these interactions it was easy to see the long tentacles of poverty — kids being told that little was expected from them except failure. Poverty breeds a language, tone, and expectations of failure that are hard to escape.

A second experience involves Lattimore, a homeless man from Chapel Hill that our family has befriended this summer. I want to write so much more about Lattimore — we are learning so much from him and being stretched in some many ways by this friendship. Lattimore grew up in Northeast Central Durham. His story is very complicated. He has been a marine, a cook in a highly respected restaurant in the area, and a successful vocalist on the blue circuit over the past three decades. He has also been drug dealer on the streets of Durham. He was incarcerated for thirteen years and shot on four different occasions because of this vocation. He is now dying of AIDS which he contracted from sharing needles as an IV-drug user. He is also a man with a vibrant and deep Christian faith.

Over this summer, we have had so many new experiences with Lattimore. We've watched him be mistreated by restaurant owners while eating with us for simple requests (like wanting more ranch sauce with his chicken wings!) while our kids seemingly endless requests for drink refills are met with smiles. There are also some merchants and restaurant owners that take a good care of him on Franklin St. (Chapel Hill's main street). But his efforts to get housing have taken him back to Durham, which is threat to his safety — he has explained to us that he is an OG ("old gangster") in Durham where there are many scores that could be settled. While in Durham for the Antioch camp, we spent some time with a variety of social workers and case workers to help with Lattimore's housing. The system is so complicated. One afternoon, while shuttling between case workers, Lattimore took us on a driving tour of the neighborhood. The tour included the places he grew up, places where he fought and was shot, and even an interpretation of the morning's newspaper (There had been a drive-by shooting and murder the evening before and Lattimore knew the victim and the suspects). As Mimi and I debriefed this day, we were both overwhelmed with almost inpenetrable power of poverty — a system which demands energies and resources that the poor do not have, living conditions that make crime a hard choice to escape, shattered dreams, and marginalized expectations.

I'm thankful for friends like Denise who know these realities yet forge ahead and who teach us appropriate expectations as we seek to embody the gospel with the poor. I'm thankful for friends like Lattimore who offer an amazing humanity to the tragedy of poverty. I share these experiences without answers. But I continue to realize that faithfulness to the gospel demands greater thought and more courageous efforts to be in community with the poor.