recovery and transformation personally and as a church

I just posted the following comment on the UCC Local Church Transformation listserve or email discussion group. I thought afterwards it was something I should post here. It is in response to two other pastors expressing their lostness in how to lead their congregations to listen and discern God's will for them and their own frustration and desire to cut and run because of all the resistance and sabotage they experience as pastors at the churches they are serving:

The first thing that helped me was 17 years ago beginning working a 12 step recovery program and learning in practical ways what it meant to have a spiritual relationship with God. After years of "talking about God and Jesus" and focusing on the "social justice agenda", 12 step led me to see the necessity of and what it meant to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I had avoided the latter for years because the fundamentalists only talked about that seemingly all the time in my opinion to avoid the question of social justice. But I began to realize I was cutting off my nose to spite my face. And that it was my way of keeping large pieces of my life from God's control or believing that I was. I kept calling it "responsibility" as if by having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and trusting God with my whole life I was somehow becoming a numbed out idiot who would never again act responsibly in the world if I "turned my whole life over to God." What I found was that I began to act more responsibly! And that my life was changing in ways I never imagined. And that listening, and prayer and Bible reflection and meditation became daily practices in my life. I couldn't live without them now. It is the only way I can preach God's Word because I know God and God's beloved Jesus Christ...rather than knowing about them.

Thus, when 10 years ago we began to look at "transformation" here at Fairlawn West...or when I began to and when I began to hear from Bruce Cole and Bill Easum and Tom Bandy and others the hard work that would lie ahead...I trusted that word because I trusted God. I shifted from being a local church service manager to being a spiritual leader. I just kept modeling personally and as the pastoral leader that role. Its what my ordination vows and my installation covenant called for anyway! Not everyone liked that. They wanted me to be more their personal social worker, to be the church manager, to be their personal "prayer", to take all the responsibility for the spiritual life of the church. I would not except that but continued to model my own personal and church pastor spiritual life. I had to trust it myself or I could never help them to see the power of trusting in their lives. So...transformation has to begin with us...personally!!!!!....first!!!!! Focus on your spiritual life. Take the time. Give your life over to the commandments! For me the 4th...honor the sabbath and keep it holy...is preeminent. Not talking about Sunday per se, but an every 7 day sabbath which is the beginning of my doing what God does. My life through sabbath observance begins to be in line with God's "weekly" practice from Genesis 1. And then...all things will follow. I need fewer if any "retreats" to monasteries or church camps, because sabbath is part of my life. If you ask our congregation now...they will tell you that the practice of prayer, Bible reflection and listening to God are much, much more clear for us. Whereas even up to 10 years ago for me it was still something "out there" I was struggling to do let alone understand it now was becoming something naturally part of our whole life...it was a recovery or a transformation...by the grace of God. Our corporate life is focused first spiritually...and the justice work multiplied at least 4x when our spiritual life became a core value and a bedrock belief of our congregational life. But it took Bruce many years ago in an email on the Easum Bandy leadership listserv when we were just starting and I was ready to throw in the towel, saying the word "persevere" that I decided to keep at.

My family took a deep wound during that time. I hit a severe depression for 6 mos in 2002. I was looking for a way to get out of here, but I couldn't find anywhere else that was as "far down the road" as we were!!!!! I would have to start over with this process at any church I read and knew about on "UCC Employment Opportunities." PLUS, my family said they weren't moving from Akron. It was home to them. The latter is what forced me to stay even when I was responding in the early part of this decade to Fairlawn West the way you and xxxx are to your congregations. I began to trust God...and the rest is history...or God's salvation history (oh, that good ole heilsgechichte)!

Love,
David

media and truth

I remember over 30 years ago hearing Marshall Rosenberg talk about not accepting the truth as coming from the "mind-numbing media." I wonder if we have expected too much from it in the recent life of the United Church of Christ. And now we feel betrayed by it with the brouhaha over Barack Obama and the former pastor of his home church (Trinity UCC in Chicago), Jeremiah Wright. I think the media is what it is. It numbs the mind into expecting it will get it right or get it the way we want it to be. Its almost if we live by the "sword" we will be attacked by the sword.

I was struck on this past Thursday which was Maundy Thursday of Holy Week the reading from the Gospel of John of Jesus washing the feet of the disciples in the lowest rung of the social ladder role of a servant, on the night of his betrayal. And then telling them there is a new Great Commandment. The 10 Commandments and the Golden Rule don't even measure up any more to this singular great one - to love one another as HE has loved us. I wonder how the UCC would be perceived if all of us who claim its identity would have spent the last few weeks washing the feet (or similar action) of other people around us?

Back on Jeremiah Wright - he is being portrayed as a inflammatory demagogue. Even aside from whatever is the reality of decades of his sermons, let along pastoral leadership, I was struck by his successor, whom he personally selected and mentored at Trinity for the past few years - Otis Moss III. I heard Moss on "All Things Considered" of National Public Radio this week. He is a very measured and thoughtful man. He spoke with a good listening of the interviewer AND he conveyed the Gospel in the midst of it. He talked about his wish that out of this whole thing people would know the living Christ and the saving grace of God. Powerful! And the wild-eyed Wright got him as his successor. hmm. Crafty as a fox he is!

Thomas Merton quote on God

I am re-reading Merton's "New Seeds of Contemplation". This paragraph speaks to me in a time when we are attempting to be "intellectually spiritual" and trying to work through in our minds what we will accept about Jesus and what we will discard as irrelevant or "out dated" about God.

In all the situations of life the "will of God" comes to us not merely as an external dictate of impersonal law but above all as an interior invitation of personal love. Too often the conventional conception of "God's will" as a sphinx-like and arbitrary force bearing down upon us with implacable hostility, leads men to lose faith in a God they cannot find it possible to love. Such a view of the divine will drives human weakness to despair and one wonders if it is not, itself, often the expression of a despair too intolerable to be admitted to conscious consideration. These arbitrary "dictates" of a domineering and insensible Father are more often seeds of hatred than of love. If that is our concept of the will of God, we cannot possibly seek the obscure and intimate mystery of the encounter that takes place in contemplation. We will desire only to fly as far as possible from Him and hide from His Face forever. So much depends on our idea of God! Yet no idea of Him, however pure and perfect, is adequate to express Him as He really is. Our idea of God tell us more about ourselves than about Him.

Thomas Merton

Good Fri & Easter...so what

So many people claim to believe in the Resurrection, and yet it means so little to them. It has no effect in their lives. It is not enough to celebrate Easter and say “Christ is risen!” Indeed, it is useless to proclaim it at all, unless at the same time we can say that we too have risen.

The long passage of time has brought with it a temptation to keep on speaking about Good Friday without being moved by it. We hear about Christ’s death, and we sit there bored, as if we were reading a newspaper. In fact, we would find a newspaper a good deal more interesting.

- C. F. Blumhardt in Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter (Orbis, 2005)

Thomas appears to have been a realist - reserved, cool, perhaps a little obstinate. He wanted proofs, wanted to see and touch. Then again, it might have been rebellion deep within him, the vainglory of an intelligence that would not surrender, a sluggishness and coldness of heart. In any case, he got what he asked for…in that state of unbelief which cuts itself off from everything, that insists on human evidence to become convinced. But nothing that comes from God can be proven like 2 x 2 = 4. It must touch one; it is only seen and grasped when the heart is open and the spirit purged of self. Only then can it awaken faith.

Romano Guardini in Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter (Orbis, 2005)

it's Heidelberg

Kate has decided to attend Heidelberg College in the fall. She was awarded their 2nd highest academic scholarship, Founder's Scholarship, and was accepted into the music department from her audition. She will be part of the Honor's Program which is something I would have loved to have had when I was in college. When we looked at other schools' honor programs they didn't seem to be as focused communally and offer the variety of interdisciplinary work that Heidelberg offers.

Heidelberg was not on my original list of schools when we started looking. Kate made the connection at a college fair a few years ago at her high school. She stopped by the table because her grandfather, my dad, had graduated from H'berg. (She had never met him since he died in 1977.) I have come to appreciate Heidelberg the more we visited and investigated. I think it is a good place for Kate.

She was down to St. Olaf and Elizabethtown. Great options to have.

Ohio primary election

I voted for Obama. My daughter Kate in her first election to vote voted for a woman for president, Clinton!!!! My younger daughter Molly who is a freshman in high school has been pushing for Obama since May of 2007. Thank you God!!! We have a ways to go, but you surely have guided the world to a place where my daughters are able to truly advocate for issues and ideas rather than gender and race. We pray for the day when sexual orientation and other human "categories" are not limiting factors to be able to consider the spectrum of human possibility in electing our political/governmental/legislative leadership.