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From the Pastor - June 8, 2010
In the wake of
this year’s Synod Assembly, I find that one particular point from our
Keynote Speaker, Diana Butler Bass, keeps reverberating around in the back
of my mind. I think the reason that it’s still bumping around back there is
because it speaks so directly to me and a point of view I often hear
expressed at Christ Lutheran.
Diana said that many mainline congregations, faced with
fewer people in the pews, and the ever graying and whitening hair of those
who do show up, have congregational leaders who keep asking, “What can we do
to fix it?” Her question back to them is this: “What are your going to
fix? Postmodernism? Consumer-driven-technological society? Just what is
it you’re going to fix?” She helped me to see more clearly that we can’t
turn the clock back 50 or 60 years to a time when people flocked to churches
seeking stability following WW2. Vibrant, thriving congregations today,
focus not on getting more people into the pews on Sunday, but on practicing
the faith in a variety of ways, and such practice takes time.
Diana shared that she has much hope for the church, and
for how congregations today can develop the art of communal discernment and
follow the Spirit’s lead in becoming practicing communities of faith,
communities that speak to the spiritual yearnings of many who have been hurt
in or don’t find any relevance in current religious institutions. She has
hope, because, as she told us, she has seen it. I have hope, because I see
that we have laid a strong foundation at CLC for becoming an ever more
vibrant, life-giving, practicing congregation.
For example: In the last 18 months I’ve been impressed
by the impact that the Care for Creation team has made in my life and our
communal life together. Are you not more conscious of ways that we’re
called to care for the earth? Have you not participated in stewarding
creation in some specific way? I see the Spirit at work in this team, and
in everyone’s support of their projects.
This is just one way that the Spirit is moving in our
midst, and I’m pretty sure that it’s not the only way. As we seek to join
in with what God is already up to I invite you to reflect on these important
questions: “How might God be calling you to be a part of what the Spirit is
doing at CLC?” “How are you growing in faith and spiritual practices?”
“What creative ideas do you have to help CLC create ‘safe space’ for people
of all walks of life to explore their doubts and spiritual yearnings?” “Whom
might God be calling you to reach out to in love?”
Let’s not waste any more time worrying and fretting
about how to ‘fix it,’ but rather let us trust in God’s Spirit to be alive
in us and in our life together. And out of that joyful, playful, creative
space of peace that accompanies our risen Lord’s presence in our hearts, we
can practice the art of prayerfully discerning how Christ calls us to
lovingly transform the world.
Grace & Peace,
Pastor Mark
From the Pastor - April 21, 2010
The last few years I've been
intrigued by the notion that the Church has entered into a period of change
just as dramatic as the changes that happened through the Reformation some
500 years ago, a period that Phyllis Tickle calls The Great Emergence.
Change brings certain difficulties, but it also rife with new
possibilities. Part of the difficulty comes in dealing with our
differences. On a recent tweet from the ELCA I learned that 289
congregations of the 10,000+ in the ELCA have passed a first vote to leave
our denomination in wake of last summer’s Churchwide Assembly decisions.
I’m saddened by that news, yet I know that being the church isn’t about
who’s in and who’s out of any given denominational structure. It’s more
about a way of life that fully embraces love of God and neighbor.
I’ve been reading Diana Butler
Bass’ recent work, A
People’s History of Christianity,
in which she labels our current era, The River. She includes a quote from
Albert Schweitzer, a giant of the last era, imagining a new day: “This is
how the conservative and liberal forms of religion will meet, when desire
and hope for the kingdom of God and fellowship with the spirit of Jesus
again govern them as an elementary and mighty force, and bring their
world-views and their religion so close that the differences in fundamental
presuppositions, though still existing, sink, just as the boulders of the
river bed are covered by the rising flood and at last are barely visible,
gleaming through the depths of the waters.”
I don’t know about you, but I
look forward to that day, and I think that it will come as the Spirit guides
people toward images of God that are fluid rather than fixed. The one who
is mystery beyond mystery cannot be fully known and will be an eternal
source of surprise. It will be within the humility of not knowing that the
water will rise to overflow its banks.
Peter Mayer has a wonderful song
called God Is A River,
which depicts a
shifting image of God. Here’s the refrain:
God is a river, not just a stone
God is a wild, raging rapids
And a
slow, meandering flow
God is a deep and narrow passage
And a
peaceful, sandy shoal
God is a
river, swimmer, so let go
The real
challenge in this time of change within our culture for any congregation and
for the whole Church will be in creating sacred space in which people can
experience God’s love and be actively engaged in loving their neighbors. In
what ways might God be calling us to be about this mission? What might you
need to let go of to find out?
Grace & Peace,
Pastor Mark
From the Pastor –
March 4, 2010
What does it mean to be the Church? There are
multitudes of ways to answer this question, and yet it can also help us to
focus in on the core of what is most essential. Following in the path of
someone named Paul, Brian McLaren, articulates well what he considers the
Church’s one grand calling: “It is a space in which the Spirit works to form
Christlike people, and it is the space in which human beings, formed in
Christlike love, cooperate with the Spirit and one another to express that
love in the word and deed, art and action.” He’s speaking about spiritual
space here, sacred space, noticeable in the loving ways that people relate
to one another in community.
Spiritual formation, if it is anything at all, is a
school of love. It’s what Jesus was about on the road with his disciples,
and it’s what his followers all have learned most markedly at the cross and
empty tomb. Jesus gives his life for us and to us, so that we may give
ourselves away as well. I think that being a school of love is really what
our mission statement is all about. So how about making this idea of what
it means to be the church the one central thing that we do? Everything
could fall under this umbrella of being a school of love. Again, McLaren
has an enlightening description of being a school of love and the challenges
involved: “a school of love-which means a school of listening, dialogue,
appreciative inquiry, understanding, preemptive peacemaking, reconciliation,
nonviolence, prophetic confrontation, advocacy, generosity, and personal and
social transformation. Anybody who thinks this is all soft and easy
obviously has little experience in actually seeking to live this way and
helping others to do the same.”
Such a school isn’t about teaching a set ‘knowledge
base,’ but rather about practicing such a way of life in community
together. Just as one learns to dance or play a musical instrument through
practice with an experienced instructor, such is the method in a school of
love. This is a school in which we teach one another and learn from one
another. Listening, dialogue, reconciliation, and understanding require
humility and radical acceptance of one another. Learning to love also
involves doing our own spiritual work of discovering what gets in our way.
And perhaps most of all learning to love involves opening our hearts anew
each day to the one who loves us unconditionally.
This upcoming Holy Week and Easter reveals to us once
again how great is this love.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or
boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not
irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in
the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things,
endures all things. Love never ends…and now faith, hope, and love abide,
these three; and the greatest of these is love.
–1Cor.
13:4-8,13
Grace & Peace,
Pastor Mark
Christ Lutheran Church
3401 S. Dixon Road
Kokomo, IN 46902
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