We, who are many

"so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another."  ~ Romans 12:5


Jane Redmont's When In Doubt, Sing explores ways to pray - contemplative prayer, bodily prayer, the prayers of saints like Teresa of Avila and more. Redmont, who is Catholic, approaches prayer from a fresh perspective for me (a Protestant). One of the questions from this week's Friday Five  added another layer to this conversation, asking:

"What religion/faith besides yours captures your curiosity and why?"

My answer is that I have discovered prayers and practices from Buddhism that make sense and enrich my own Christian perspective. Thich Nhat Hahn is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who writes about the intersection in some of his books. He speaks well to how we are all related and connected, and responsible for, each other.  Judaism, too, reminds me that of the spiritual ancestry that Christians and Jews share.

But Redmont and others remind me that even within Christianity, there is a richness from sharing practices. of prayer and worshiping together.

"Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household." ~ Ephesians 2:19 

Last weekend, I had an opportunity to talk with others about what it means for our denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA), to be in full communion with other denominations. The ELCA is in full communion with six other denominations: the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Reformed Church in America, the Episcopal Church of the USA, the Moravian Church, and the United Methodist Church.

While debate in our culture and society is divisive and polarizing, these relationships illustrate that it is possible to unite, recognizing common characteristics between us:
• a common confessing of the Christian faith;
• a mutual recognition of Baptism and a sharing of the Lord's Supper, allowing for joint worship and an exchangeability of members;
• a mutual recognition and availability of ordained ministers to the service of all members of churches in full communion, subject to the disciplinary regulations of other churches;
• a common commitment to evangelism, witness, and service;
• a means of common decision making on critical common issues of faith and life;
• a mutual lifting of any condemnations that exist between churches.

One participant in the ecumenical dialogue suggested that rather than mourning the differences in our denominations and traditions, perhaps God celebrates the diversity of the Church and the many and varied expressions of worship and proclamation that it brings to God's people in the world. What do you think?

Friday Five Reflection

This week's Friday Five:


1. What has encouraged you? 
Over the weekend, I began reading Jane Redmont's When In Doubt, Sing where chapter-by-chapter she talks about different forms of prayer. The short readable text and the way it engages me with Scripture and prayer has been a real gift to my mornings.

2. What has inspired you?
Watching my youngest daughter work throughout this week to try out for middle school cheerleading. She has gone into something completely unknown to her (and me!) and is having fun while she is learning and practicing. Her excitement about what she is doing is contagious. It all wraps up this afternoon with the tryouts.

3. What has challenged you?
Nothing extraordinary this week. There was the ever-present challenge of balancing work, school, family and self and the give-and-take it requires. Both time and money feel scarce sometimes but at the very same time, I hear from others stories of loss and grief and realize how much I have to be grateful for.

4. What has made you smile? 
On Sunday,two friends told me I looked relaxed. That doesn't happen often! It was my last day of a four-day sabbatical that I gave myself and my family after finishing spring exams. I have two more courses this summer and then I begin a full-time internship at St. Mark's Lutheran in downtown Asheville in August. While I still have a lot of unknowns awaiting, it is wonderful to begin to make this transition into public Christian leadership and full-time ministry.

 5. What has brought a lump to your throat or a tear to you eye in a good way? 
 On Sunday, the boarding school where I live and work celebrated graduation and the boys who arrived with us in 2008 graduated and left for college. This is one of the places along the way where I have discovered how much you can learn from the young(er) people around you and I am grateful for them even when they make lug-headed decisions as teenage boys sometimes do. They also have insatiable curiosity, compassion for one another and fire for the things they hold dear.

What about you?

p.s. I could have written a much shorter answer. One event this week generated all five of these responses: On Sunday, many members of the first cohort of Distributed Learning MDiv candidates  at Luther Seminary graduated with their MDiv degrees at Central Lutheran Church in St. Paul. Congratulations to all the graduates but especially to the men and women who began this pilot program in 2007!

Surrender

What does it mean to surrender?

Too often, I think "surrender" sounds like giving up. Giving up power. Giving up the fight. I imagine Generals Lee and Grant at Appomattox or a  tattered white flag waving in a Bugs Bunny cartoon (07:14):

In this fourth week at Willow Creek's Leadership Institute for Transformation (LIFT) in the "Leader's Soul" course, we are talking about surrendering ourselves with a daily prayer to God. In remembering our baptism, we daily die and are renewed as God's children.We can again grasp the promises God gives us and know we are forgiven our sin and made righteous through Christ. So, how does a daily practice help remember us these promises?

For me, speaking out loud or giving voice to a prayer that re-establishes me each day is helpful; otherwise, the noise of the world can begin to hum and buzz, kind of like mosquito's wings, and I get distracted by it.

Fortunately, unlike Bugs and Yosemite Sam, I know I am not surrendering to an enemy or opponent. When I am asked to consider how I can daily stay in a place of surrender to God, I know I am surrendering to Creator God, Life-giving God, Mother God. (These are just a few of the nurturing metaphors in Scripture that describe who God is.)

Surrender here doesn't leave me defeated. Instead, yielding my life to God means letting go of my human instinct to plan, map, control and execute life. It means stop being an obstruction, stop hesitating, and stop tuning out God's calling, Yielding to God's leading, yielding to God's timing, yielding to God's direction, I can rest in the promises that God gives each of us. Amen.

Do you have a prayer, poem or practice that you use regularly to reconnect with God?

Friday Five (and it's still Friday!)

So this week's FridayFive asks:

1. What does the Lord's supper/ Eucharist mean to you?
2. How important is preparation for this, and what form does it take?
3. What does baptism mean to you?
4. How important is preparation for baptism and what form does it take?

When I began the conversation with my church about being called to rostered ministry, the question of how central to my call was being able to administer the Sacraments was *the* question that made all the other questions fade into the background. The presence of Christ in the bread and the wine and the living-ness of God’s promise of forgiveness and new life sustain me.

One of my favorite descriptions of the sacraments comes from Dirk Lange and Christian Scharen, two of my worship professors at Luther Seminary:

Baptism brings you into the family of God and coming to the Table teaches you how to live in that family.

(Hopefully I haven't butchered the paraphrase)

It's a question others may debate, but for me, infant baptism is one of the ways we witness the depth of God's grace and understand that it a gift freely given by God to each of us. An unearned gift. We are forgiven and it does not come from any merit or worthiness of our own at all.

What I want for adults and for families though is for the catechumenate process of learning what God promises and how we are called into life, to renew our lives daily and live into the fullness of life in Christ, to be transformational.

Similarly, I want people to grasp the joy of being welcomed to the Table and of being loved despite our brokenness. For my congregation, part of preparing to come to the Table is participating in the order of confession and forgiveness where we hear our sins are forgiven. Even on my ugliest, most bitter day; my most despairing or exhausting day; my grief or anger. Even then.

How about you?

p.s. Sally also asked whether we had a quote, poem or song that helps us come before God in a sacramental way...will you share yours?

Friday Five (Yes, it's Sunday!)

RevGalBlogPals is a network of women blogging about ministry and life and on Fridays, we play Friday Five where someone chooses a topic and we “play” by blogging our answer. I didn’t make Friday’s deadline but I'm posting anyway.

Inspired by increasing movement from wired devices and even laptops to mobile devices, this week’s questions asked how we’re using the internet. (Here’s a snapshot of the trends from Pew Internet)

You can play along too and leave your comments with your answers.

Here are the questions:

Q1. Do you use social connections, like Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in or whatever else there is? Describe how you use it/these.
Q2. Do you text on your cell phone? Work, friends, family?
Q3. Do you play any games? Which ones?
Q4. How do you predominantly use the various electronic devices you possess?
Q5. How do you feel about blogging? Are you as involved in blogging as when you first started? What facilitates your blogging?

A1: Social media opens the corner of my world, forging connections with people in other parts of the U.S. and even across the pond.

On Facebook, I am friends with people I can recognize on the street but I can interact in groups or on pages with people with whom I share something in common – parents at a school or club where my children are involved, classmates at seminary or alumni from my high school or university. A decade ago, we might have been connected through a bound paper directory but social media keeps us up-to-date in real time.

Twitter makes conversations possible with an even broader group of folks. Often, I have not met the people I talk to on Twitter, and most of the time, physical geography makes it unlikely that we ever will meet in real life. We might talk about churches and social media (#chsocm), climbing (#climbchat), or Asheville (#avl). We might have a Lutheran connection or a ministry connection or they might be associated with someone who does. Beyond niche topics, Twitter delivers breaking news as quickly as Google News or traditional broadcast channels. While I don’t look at what’s trending on Twitter, but, unfiltered, Twitter reflects a pulse of what is getting people excited, angry or otherwise engaged with the world around them.

For the ways I use Twitter, Hootsuite  lets me create streams that I can follow for any topic I want to follow and when I’m in a chat, I can see the thread of conversation in a single column, making it easy to keep up and contribute. Someone recently joked with me that researchers say if you’re over 38 you cannot manage social media multitasking; I answered I would go and crawl back into my cave then, but I won’t. I like hearing voices from different corners of the world and hearing opinions I might miss if I was only in conversation with locals.

Linked In creates connections to people in the workplace. Again, I generally know everyone in real life – we have worked together in nonprofits, on projects in seminary or they are alumni from the school where I work. Through our shared relationships, we have opportunities to again engage more voices in conversation, whether I need advice about a solicitation strategy, best practices or researching a new vendor.

What surprised me is that as active as I am in these channels, I usually use them from a desktop computer in my office or from my laptop at home. Mobile for me remains the domain of texting, email and phone calls. I think that has as much to do with my eyesight as my age, but I guess those could be related. The notable exception is when I need information quickly. For googling information and maps, my phone is the most convenient device and is indispensable for finding out a store’s hours, what a word means, or discovering where I missed a turn.

A2: I rarely text for work or socially, but it’s the primary mode of communication for our immediate family. I think one of the reasons I don’t use it for other interactions is that I have email synced on my phone, so I can silo external communication on email accounts and preserve my privacy. That’s another sign of my age – I think privacy is being redefined, or maybe deconstructed, by youth today. Opinions about what belongs in public conversation are widely varied,

A3: Games are great time sinks for carpool lines, and I am easily addicted to backgammon and bubble games while my daughters like Temple Run and Unblock Me, but if we get tired of those, here is a top 50 list. What are your favorites?

I’m out of space and time so I’ll save the other questions as food for thought and hope you share how you’re using social media and devices to enrich your learning and life.

Living Souls

With spring bursting open across our mountains, the image of a living soul as a part of our being finds company with other images of new life, blooms budding, grass greening and trees leafing. I am not talking about my soul as something metaphysical that exists apart from my body, but as my heart, my center, my core – what drives me.

In the first week of The Leader’s Soul , we were asked how we recognize soul health and soul neglect, and we began by listening to Jesus’ words in John 15:5:

“I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.”

As Willow Creek Association’s Mindy Caliguire reminded us, vines know how to live. They know how to take the nutrients they need from the soil and how to harness the sunlight for new growth. The branches are extensions that grow and are strengthened because the vine is firmly rooted. Severed from the vine, the branches wither and die. They cannot live apart from the vine.

And, as Christians, neither can we. We cannot live the lives God intends for us apart from Christ. But we try. We forget this very clear teaching by Jesus and, instead, we try to live by the strength of our own energy and willpower. And then we are surprised and even hurt when we hit the wall, encounter obstacles, or simply fail. Thankfully, daily, we can confess our brokenness, receive God’s mercy and forgiveness and abide in God’s promises, as we hear them in Psalm 145:16-19:

¹⁶ You open your hand, satisfying the desire of every living thing.
¹⁷ The Lord is just in all his ways, and kind in all his doings.
¹⁸ The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.
¹⁹ He fulfills the desire of all who fear him; he also hears their cry, and saves them.

Partnering with the LIFT Project

A few weeks ago, Willow Creek Association tweeted out to folks looking for partners to collaborate with them in the next round of classes being offered as part of their LIFT Project. LIFT (Leadership Institute for Transformation) is teaching ministry leaders to learn and lead in ways that are intended to be transformational for ourselves and our ministries. Class began today with introductions and I will be blogging about my experiences as a participant in the LIFT Project.

One of the reasons the project attracted me was because it was a new model for how churches can use social media to talk to people they might not see inside their buildings. Willow Creek is based out of South Barrington, Illinois and I’m almost 700 miles southeast of there, so I don’t think I’ll be darkening the church’s doors this Sunday. While some of my classmates are in Illinois, several more are on the East Coast and in Canada and one is on another continent. Through social media (#chsocm), faith communities can join in conversation about ministry and leadership despite the distance, and it widens that conversation so that we have larger group of us talking asynchronously about the challenges and joys we encounter in ministry.

Another reason I dove into the project is because Willow Creek offered a class called The Leader’s Soul that is focused on caring for ourselves as ministry leaders, recognizing how our health and wellness affects our leadership. Throughout the four years of my seminary education there has been a consistent emphasis on the importance of balancing the emotional, spiritual, financial, physical and intellectual demands and passions in our lives and achieving, or at least pursuing, wholeness in these areas. It remains a challenge and I am excited about the accountability and structure that being part of a class provides.

Last but not least, I like learning! As a distributed learning student at Luther Seminary, I’m comfortable in online learning environments but this course provides me with a new experience in a system other than the one we use for my MDiv studies.  I enjoy the opportunity to think through the elements that strengthen the educational experience and the new perspectives that are brought to the table when you bring people together from different parts of the country and the world.

If you'd like to join the conversation, I hope you'll share how you care for yourself so that you can both listen and lead, too.