FAITH COMMUNITIES

What is a faith community after all?
I’ve always fought with what do we call ourselves. Just like Adam Copeland, author of the post and Mission Developer for The Project F-M, I want to use the word church less due to the baggage that comes along with it. But is faith communities any better? I think the word faith also holds some baggage that we are not ready to deal with. Yet we also realize that by just referring to ourselves as a community there is nothing setting us apart from any other community we are placed in or choose to associate with.

EMBRACING THE CITY

The other weekend I was present at a youth ministry retreat in Northern Minnesota. We spent five days at a camp on a lake. The camp was beautiful and very white. The buildings, the ground covered with snow, the people, and even the walls in my room were white.

While walking back to our cottage one night, one of the women commented how peaceful being in nature was for her. She went on and on and on. She had me look up in the sky as she pointed out the big dipper. And then came the moment I was dreading. She turned to me and said, ‘Isn’t this the best way to experience the love of God?’ I panicked and with some awkward tone in my voice, I replied, ‘sure.’

That was all I could muster out. Of course I thought looking at the stars in the sky was beautiful and I imagined the beauty of spring flowers blossoming around the camp, but I was not filled with the same joy that she was experiencing during our short walk.

As Randy White begins “Encounter God in the City,” he brings up those powerpoint presentations that we have all seen that bring up pictures of nature to bring us to a state of mediation. They may include the ocean or a pine tree covered with snow. Or there may be a picture of a sunset or spring blossoms. He mentioned that there is something missing. What about those other places in the world? Why do we never see pictures of the City or even civilization? Why do we assume that it is always through nature that we experience inner peace?

I agree.

I more than agree.

These images seem very much the opposite of what it means to be in the city. When I see the bare lake surrounded by trees, I think of a city pool overflowing with children. The children carry joy on their faces as they splash in the water with their neighborhood friends. When the image of a sunset flashes on the screen, I imagine streets filled as night is just beginning in the city. Some people are filled with butterflies as they are off to a first date. Then there is a group of girls that are off to celebrate a birthday. There is a man playing a saxophone on the corner looking for enough money to make it through the day. When they show the image of a sail boat moving across the ocean, I picture 30th Street Station during rush hour. Everyone looking to what comes next as pigeons swarm over them. The sides are covered with vendors that provide everything to sunglasses and newspapers to coffee and flowers to help executives and casual travels make it through the day.

Are these images peaceful?

I think it all depends on who you ask.

A dear friend of mine would have a moment of panic if exposed to these imagines. There would be fear. Anxiety. Emotions would cross his body, but peace would not be one of them.

Why is this? Why are we sacred of the city? Is it the horrible news stories we hear? Is it the diversity? Is it because it is simply different?

White makes a clear point that we attempt to take the focus off of the city. I add, we attempt to take the focus off of the city when we attempt to think about peace. We neglect the reality that, “What influences the city, influences the world.”

But why?

Clearly I am left with many unanswered questions when I think of the city. And maybe instead of questions, I am left with frustrations. But in the same way, I bet that women who wanted to discuss the beauty found in nature found frustration with me.

As I focus on what embrace means for the faith community in the city, I begin to realize that the city as a whole needs to be embraced. White shares stories of different people that would show up at his door, many of them trying to get a few dollars out of him. White soon realized that part of his calling to his neighbored was to the people. White could not be the church unless he took the time to embrace his neighborhood, which he made very clear was difficult.

In the same way I think of the churches that are found in the city that have those massive parking lots. That simple, large lot filled with cars on Sunday morning shows a very clear message. The people are not from the community. Are these people embracing the city? Are they embracing the diversity or the culture of the city?

I don’t have the answer for that. I believe there needs to be some sort of embrace of the city in order to be the church in the city. Does this change what it means to embrace the community within the building? I think so. I believe the community will be different if the faith community embraces the city.

Now how do we make this happen? Leadership is a huge part. White suggests for one to be transformed by the city there needs to be a period of experience, reflection and action. He uses this model throughout the book to show how his different experiences have transformed him. Leadership comes in to help the community have experiences, which can be in their everyday lives, and then to reflect on these experiences and take action.

White’s model can also be easily adapted for anyone, Christian or non-Christian. I wonder can we take this formula further in order that it carries our Christian calling to the world. My proposal is — As we experience God’s on-going activity in the world through our daily lives, we are called to prayer and reflection as we continue to discern our calling to be of the World. It is through prayer and reflection that we are able to respond to the needs of the community and ourselves.

Therefore, in order for us to experience embrace, White’s formula or my adaptation need to be part of our lives. I also believe that  these processes are already subconsciously part of our lives. The next step is taking these processes and ask, ‘What does it mean to be a Christian in the city.’

FACES OF EASTER

“When you look at this side (crucifixion), you know that the other side is there (Easter). When you look at this side (Easter), you know that this side (crucifixion ) is there, and you cannot pull them apart. This is the Mystery of Easter, and that makes all the difference…” 

Faces of Easter—Volume 4 The Complete Guide to Godly Play

CAN WE LOVE THE NEIGHBOR?

I think embrace is hard. Okay, I know embrace is hard. I’m also fairly confident that Miroslav Volf has changed my idea of embrace. I think I thought that embrace was easy. Maybe it is easy to say that you love the neighbor. I am beginning to think that embrace is more than loving the neighbor. And this is not because I want to make it more difficult, but there is simply more to it.

This changing identification of embrace reminds of when I was sitting at Youth Workers Round Table Meeting earlier this year. There was a small group of us present. Josh, the paid-staff person of Young Life, challenged us that why we do youth ministry is because we love kids. As he continued to proclaim that we do what we do because we love kids, it turned in to a broken record. As we looked for ways to challenge Josh, he bundled it all up into an understanding that we do what we do because we love kids. We knew there was more and we knew that we could not bottle our calling into a simple phrase. When I begin to understand embrace through the philosophy of Volf, the same thing comes to mind. There is more to the phrase “embrace the other” or “love the neighbor.”

Yes, all of that is part of it, but not the final equation. In the same way, we saw our ministry as more complex than just loving kids. Should we move about from the complexity? And in the same way can embrace return to the idea that we simply love the neighbor? Maybe? Yet I do not think that is something that I will see occur in my lifetime. I do not think the humanity is able to love the neighbor in its simplicity. Volt’s four step process shows the difficulty of embrace —

1. Repentance

2. Forgiveness

3. Forgetting (making room for the other)

4. Healing memory

Embrace, like much of our lives, has been linked to a process. I don’t think Volt is completely out of line. There are things that we try to simplify and the very idea of embracing the other is one of those things.

Volf brings his process into reality when we think about the ministry of Christ. Christ’s ministry begins with repentance and moves to reconciliation. Christ does not instantly make right, but seeks for peace as he brings communion with his former enemies. And it is not until God meets us, the enemy, on the cross that the ‘process’ has made it’s full circle. When we think of embrace in this way, it makes real that embrace continues to happen for we know that God continues to meet the enemy on the cross. It is not a one time communion, but a continuous process.

So, I live in this difficult reality of what does embrace really look like. Am I really embracing the neighbor, or I am stuck in the reality that I think I do because I can say that I love the neighbor. Volf writes, “reconciliation [step two in embrace] with the other will only succeed if the self, guided by the narrative of the triune God, is ready to receive the other into itself and undertake a re-adjustment of its identity in the light of others alterity” (110). This shows that embrace is not easy. Reconciliation is not easy. How are we able to move past our identity to make room for the other. The opposite of reconciliation and embrace is revenge. Revenge is our very nature to fulfill something or substitute something in our being. Why is it that we choice revenge over reconciliation? Why is it so hard to love the other?

I was recently part of a conversation at a congregation about the reality of welcoming a Spanish Speaking congregation into their building. They used language of ‘those’ people and what will this mean for our worship and our building. My initial reaction is that they are not ready to embrace the other. They first needed to see that they are not those people. Maybe currently they are the enemy, but how can that not be the case. How can one move past that idea? What will it take in our culture to be able to say, ‘Yes, we embrace the other.”

Being in an urban setting, the need to embrace the other is so clear. As I travel to worship I pass a American Indian welcome center, a Salomi mediation center, and a synagogue. To be part of a ministry in the city we cannot look at this other institutions as the other, because their needs to be that communion of embrace. But what does communion with one another look like? And how do we move past this reality that it is only us? How do we make room for the other in our identity?

BELONGING WITH DISTANCE

Who are we fighting against? Are we fighting against a god that allows for there to be the other? Are we fighting against those who embrace us? Are we fighting against the world that excludes us? Or are we fighting against them? An undefined group that pushes and pulls on our identify.

I have always lived in this reality that it is not just me. All of my children’s books growing up dealt with this idea that there is harmony in the world. We like to break away from our mother, but she is the sky, always watching over us. We want to hide from the sun, but the sun is our father and will not allow us to hide from his warmth.

I understood that I belonged to something greater than myself, but I didn’t know what that meant. How can we belong to the world as a whole when we hate the neighbor? How can we claim that “We Are One Human Family” if we seek revenge over love? And if we move past revenge, is love even enough? What does it mean to belong? What does it mean to have identity as ourselves, but also with the neighbor, with “them?”

Dr. Andrew Root suggested in a class that we often spread the Gospel with empty promises, like God is with you or everything is going to be okay. I think the same thing occurs when we think about belonging. Is it really comforting to hear “You are not along, you belong to others, too” (Volf 51). Because do we want to belong to other? The other is what has abandoned us. It is what has drawn us further away from embrace. Yet is this distancing necessarily negative. Is it harmful to society, and our identity? And do we find comfort in such a phrase?

I am ready to accept that we live in a world that will always have the “other.” Yet I do not think that is a bad thing. I have to agree with Volf that the other does not mean something negative and something to be hated. There needs to be this distance from the other and at the same time there needs to be a distance from our identity.

Volf goes on to share the story of Abraham. Abraham was called to leave everything. The Abrahamic Revolution shares that Abraham had to break cultural and families ties and leave. His identity was in Christ and not other things like family, country and culture. He became a stranger in all that was to come (38-40). Since Abraham took this step and left everything, we do not need to. Abraham took that step for us, but this does not mean that we are to go on with our identity untouched.

We need to be able to distance ourselves from that which defines us. Our identity needs to be examined. It is when we look at our humanity, we are able to see what divides us. It is the next step that seems almost paradoxical. We are to depart from that which binds us without leaving just that. How do we allow this to be a reality?

I am left thinking that this very idea can lead one to pride or disappear as we look to our inner being. But what needs to be understood is that it is not until we belong without distance that we are able to listen. Volf says that as Christians we must take a departure for Christ is not just living within our culture, but Christ is living among all people.

In this matter we are not losing our identity. What we are seeing is the very effect society holds on us. For we will begin to see that, “The blood that binds us is more precious than the blood of language, customs that divide. (54) For we have become too comfortable with the culture that surrounds us. Our own identity has made us blind to the injustice of the world. Our responsibility is to step outside that culture without abandonment in order that we allow ourselves to see. We are able to see that the neighbor is suffering, and maybe we too are suffering as we look out with compassion to the other.

It is through this process of belonging with distance that we begin to see that community gathers at the cross. For as we look at the other, we begin to see that the cross of Christ is there for others. Yet we are also the other. We too look for embrace from society as we begin to understand that it is the blood and the cross that unites us. Boyarin states “In the process of baptism in the spirit the marks of ethnos, gender, and class are all erased in the ascension to a univocally and universality of human essence which is beyond and outside of the body” (qtd in Volf, 46). Yet those distinctions are not erased. But as we are joined in the blood of the cross, we have an identity that goes past cultural distinctions.

Now I wonder what happens next. As we look to cultivate the proper relation between distance from culture and belonging to it, how do we allow Christ to be a part of this journey. When we begin to examine culture it is often easier to abandon this connection. We need to be reminded that in the midst of this despair we see the promise. A promise that is still unfolding around us. A promise that gives us an identity that surpasses that given to us by culture.