September 2005 Archives

I found an NPR story with quite a bit about David David Hilfiker, an MD who moved his family to Washington DC to live amongst the poor with a ministry of the Church of the Saviour. (Book Review of Not All of Us Are Saints: A Doctor's Journey With the Poor here) The audio about the COS ministries is in minutes 13-20 of the audio)

Making a Home at Joseph's House, Sojourners Magazine/May-June 2001

Tucked back in the quiet streets of Adams Morgan in Washington, D.C., Joseph's House looks much like every other house on its block. Its nondescript face belies the extraordinary mission of Joseph's House: to provide a home for homeless men with third- or end-stage AIDS.

An upcoming event in DC sponsored by COS's MInistry of Money (another very unique ministry that most every church in America would not touch with a ten foot pole---talking about our problems and temptations and failures to live as God intended becuase of money)

Found another story about the Church of the Savour in Christian Centrury (2001)

Christian Century: Mission accomplished - church work transforms Adams-Morgan section of Washington, D.C

A typical "tour of the ministries of mercy , spread out across the Adams Morgan neighborhood and into the D.C. area:

I walked the streets of Adams-Morgan with Ray McGovern, who works with the Servant Leadership school. It was as if we were visiting stations of the cross--places of human suffering that had been transformed through this church's work. Columbia Road Health Services is a clinic for the district's most vulnerable residents; Christ House, a 34-bed medical recovery facility for the homeless; Kairos House, home to 37 chronically ill indigents; Good Shepherd Ministries, a beehive of education and recreation programs for children. Samaritan Inn provides crucial transitional living to help the homeless rebuild their lives and is staffed by yearlong volunteer "inkeepers." Jubilee Housing provides 284 apartments. Jubilee Jobs seeks employment for the poor. The 34 apartments of Sarah's Circle are for elderly people with limited means. McGovern says he found deep commitment and support. "You start to volunteer in these places and it just sweeps you away. You don't want to do anything else."

And a nod to the underlying "Call to Commitment" that characterizes these people.

The radical difference between this and conventional churches is something Cosby calls "integrity of membership." When a person chooses membership, he or she commits to divide energy between the "inward" and "outward" journeys. This results in a balance between the time one spends cultivating one's own relationship with God (the inward journey) and doing God's work in the world (the outward journey). While visitors are always welcome to attend liturgical services and to volunteer, there is no room for half-heartedness if one chooses membership.

"Membership is not for everyone," says Bankson. "This will always be a small movement. This kind of commitment will transform your life--but you have to be willing to have that life transformed."

A great post and thread of comments started by James KA Smith over on
Generous Orthodoxy ThinkTank: Between Hauerwas and Constantine, cont'd.

we do well to remember that the kinds of differences and tensions we’re highlighting here are finer-point distinctions within a larger agreement and concern.

Because we have an eschatological hope like that you describe, we bear the burden to constitute an alternative, worldwide kingdom that shows how this could be possible. I see no reason to hope that this is possible apart from a community of the Cross and outside the operation of the Spirit.

Most certainly. Most importantly and more pointed, I think, it is ALWAYS , IMHO, a matter of priority that the envisioning we do not be tied to the success or failure of some such vision via state-directed means. The only scenario in which I believe the state "participates" legitimately is in support of communities of the spirit; as Jamie put it, those which are "inahabited", and provide a way in which the world knows it is the world, and perhaps opens eyes to the deeper and truthful justice of the KIngdom of God; and also knowing that this is but a glimpse (eschatalogical) What I'm trying to emphasize is that we don't see "state politics" and its corrupt priorities as any kind of impetus or neccessary to "getting things done"; thier support in the work of the People of God via the church is not unwelcome, but it is not dependent upon them, nor upon their structures. To many, this sounds like "theocracy" (it IS , sort of, but of a different variety---mostly becuase it's NOT government/state, it's directed by what Clarence Jordan called "The God Movement" - his Cotton Patch translation of the phrase "The Kingdom of God". I suppose saying such things will make all kinds of people nervous)

I must say that, having been first discipled under an apolitical version of the faith which thought the only hope for the world was evangelism, and then moving to embrace a liberation-like commitment to structural transformation, I’m starting to come back to having a significant place for personal conversion as the condition of possibility for the achievement of justice. This would be a necessary but not sufficient condition: we still need just structures. But those just structures also need to be inhabited by agents whose desires and loves are being transformed by Christ.

Amen! I particularly resonate with the final phrase : those just structures also need to be inhabited by agents whose desires and loves are being transformed by Christ

Which calls upon the church to be" insanely" focused on re-forming of our desires and loves. This was talked about at some length in Hauerwas and Willimon's Where Resident Aliens Live, which I just read this weekend. I hoping to read much more of this in Does God Need the Church? Toward a Theology of the People of God which I am just beginning. In all of this, I am praying for a breakthrough in what has seemed like an interminably long period of feeling I am without a home in this sense. It's not just SEEMED like it. It HAS BEEN and IS an interminably long time. It seems as if the desire to find a place is itself almost eschatalogical; I am at a stage of HOPING for some place in which I can HOPE with a gathered people.

I am starting in on Gerhard Lohfink's Does God Need the Church? Toward a Theologu of the People of God It was a highly recommended book by Bill Cavanaugh in his speech to the Ecclesia Project meeting a couple months ago.

I'm also plodding through some rather dense sections of the middle of Betge's Biography of Deitrich Bonhoeffer. Lots of meetings of Church Councils hammering out who is going to meet with who; the rough times are about to start, though, since the section just ahead of where I'm reading (almost 2/3 of the way through the book) is entitled "The End of Finkenwalde" (Finkenwalde was the Seminary that was the training ground for the Confessing Church). The desne parts I'm about to complete now are covering some time in Bonhoeffer's travels when things were relatively quiet regarding tensions between them and the Reich Church.

After finishing up Resident Aliens, I picked up Where Resident Aliens Live from the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, which basically just picks up where they left off and intersperses commnets from others reaction to Resident Aliens.

This comment by Dave Belcher (the below is an excerpt which echoes some of what I have been writing this morning earlier) is important

Generous Orthodoxy ThinkTank: Dispatches from Spain: 3

All of this aside--which is extremely important to me--I am just baffled that most of the theologians involved in this conference make up these two "schools" I referred to above, and yet it is these two schools that are supposed to be giving us the answer to our "postmodern" and "postliberal" predicament. I mean does that sound presumptuous to anyone else? There's a time for critique and then there's a time for humility. I have yet to see humility from Hauerwas or radical orthodoxy--at least with regards to "liberals." I'm not a "liberal," offended by those who are out to thwart me or something...I'm asking that we might think about what it means to "love our enemies" within theological dialogue--*that* I see very little of in contemporary theological debate...because it's always just that, a fucking argument.

I guess that the above expresses the same "discomfort" I feel when certain elements that I have been indebted to in my own story are seemingly "brushed aside" by comments that seem dismissive. I suppose I can relate, since my own rants tend to resort to one-liners that rarely tell the whole story. One person's entertaining one-liner is a cause for another's indignation at being so labelled or minsunderstood. I feel a bit embarassed and a bit irritated when Hauerwas does this, as well as JKA Smith. "Embarassed" about the part of me that sees what they're saying, but a little ticked at how easy it seems to relegate decades of service and hard work within Christendom to do what seems to be the calling of God upon their life , to the "dustbin" of "see, I told you so, I've been saying it for years" kind of judgment. Thus far, it seems that Hauerwas does a better job of trying to give someone their due before proceeeding to reveal his problems with their approach. But he writes so damn much that he still has scores of "quick drive-bys" on a host of people (like one I saw in Resident Aliens where he takes apart a piece on prayer by Frederick Buechener, an author of about 17 books sitting on my shelf. It is still a bit of a shock to read criticisms of one formerly beloved author by another , more newly discovered beloved author.

This comment by Marin Pastor on Eric's blog on the discussion in my previous post about theocracy is resonant with something I also said in that post, and something I learned from JKA Smith, that ALL "secular" "common sense" ideologies are , in the end, "theology"; based on and dependent upon what is REALLY important to that "community"; and there are systems in place to drive home the "natural" and "common sense" qualities of those assumptions. JKA calls it theology-1

Eric's Tasty Morsels of Thought - Blurring the lines

all organizing strategies whether the modern state or what have you are, at the end of the day, parodies of the church. In that sense, all such strategies whether they realize it or not are attempted "theocracies." The modern liberal state tries to avoid this and ends up descending into nihilism but it is still centered on an ultimate desire--even if that desire is perverted and turned completely inward--we worship ourselves.

The discussion over on Generous Orthodoxy Thinktank that got me revisiting some of my initial impressions of Radical Orthodoxy and my remaining irritiations with what I have decided, for the moment,. are signs of "impatience" and some "misunderstanding" of the "Telos" of these "Sojourner types".

ONe bit of evidennce to which I might point that seem to back up my notion that many "Sojourner types" end up as deeper RO-oriented theologians is how my own journey has led me down that path. Eric has a similar path. We were all charged up last summer and early fall about the absolute neccessity of getting Bush out (I still thknk it would have been a good idea , but it is not SO ultimately important now in the larger scheme of things. My reading of Zinn's A People's History of the United States even contributed to that in that I was given a birds eye view of the way in which the U.S. government and its ancestors have always, without fail, done and justifed precisely everything and anything it damn well pleased, starting from its driving out and murdering millions of native people, because they were there and they wanted the land and saw it as "obvious" that these backward savages were in no way suited to instigate "progress" as it was known in the Western world. So , electing Kerry would have been no "Mission accomplished" (Indeed, it would have been about as close to "mission accomplished" as the now infamous photo-op with BUsh on the aircraft carrier has proven to be)

My beef is with the tendency amongst some RO-ers to assume that the use of certain language is indicative of a faulty "telos", when I know otherwise. The difference comes in the debate over "obligation" (such as in the Steve Bush paper and the comments reacting to it. )

My desire is to see each side give the other its due "love and affirmation" as brothers (and sisters, though I haven't seen too many women involved in this--- what is there about this discussion that does this? That question just ocurred to me as I started to say "brothers and sisters" ) in Christ. I CLEARLY see in both a notion of "City of God" and "Kingdom of God"; a longing for an expression and embodiment of what it looks like for a people to see the world as one in which God is active and working in and amongst us. For me, this is an important BASE from which to deepen our theological underpinnings. When I read Hauerwas and Willimon affirm how "embodiment" is the key, my thoughts turn to The Church of the Saviour, or a people who serously pursue a radical notion of deep relatedness which goes against the grain of our "indepedence" and self-sufficiency notions of "freedom", which the church in America has fully adopted into its "event" mentality (where church is a program that feeds our ego and teaches us to how to relax about our anxieties)....and it turns also to those who seek some sort of engagement with what they see as structures polluted by the "Principalities and Powers". While I agree with RO's assesment that there is a danger that all this "activism" is based on a misplaced trust in "the process" , I can see that as a "resignation" of sorts in that the same could be said of trying to institute change in the churches of America, even the "ecclesiological" ones. From where do we start? When I look at the history of the Church of the Saviour, and their initial decision to start from scratch instead of becoming a part of an existing demoninational tradtion, I wonder how much trust or credence we can place in having our politics emanate from "worship and the eucharist", if the eccesiology underlying that "worshipping community" is ultimately in service of the state and the status quo, regardless of how "liturgical" and how "faithfully" they invoke the "Triune God".

I'm not mocking those who speak of "Triune God" at all. The point is, when the "ethos" and "communality" being expressed are based in faitfulness and embodiment is the goal, then to speak of the Triune God is an act of worship, devotion, and celebration. My sense is that the RO folks who abstain from engagement with the nation state (or any of its "vestiges" or appendages as identified by certain strains of RO) can learn from those who come back to "worship" with a load of experience dealing with the "powers that be"---- some of them may begin to sway the way of the the deepest RO proponents and repudiate activism of this sort. Others may eschew the ecclesiological (to their detriment, I might add) in favor of what they see as "more deeply engaged and more compasionate" approach to those in a place that is not explicitly religious but nevertheless "not far from the Kingdom of God" (like the Judeo-sympathizers who were involved in Synagogues in mostly port cities in the Roman empire; People who are "seekers" who see somethign attractive in the community of believers).

Is there some paralle to be drawn here between the RO-Sojo dichotomy and the issue of the "Judiaizers" which Paul addressed in Galatia? If "ecclesiology" is "the law" and "activism" is "the Gentiles", is there some lesson here? I don't know, but it seems like such a parallel could be instructive. Of course, the fact that most would assume that Paul's stance as presented or accepted is in the right, and that the Judaizers were wrong sets up a kind of a presumption that this analogy woudl reflect unfairly on RO. I'm just trying to think of precedents in theological history for handling theological controversies (although it seems that this debate is taking place almost exclusively in academia, and most of my theological teachers and contempraries have never heard of Radical Orthodoxy. I never heard a word of it since my first Seminary experience in 1978-81, nor in my second go-round in 1990-91

I will no doubt have further reflections on this, but I think it would help if there are people from a variety of traditions of ecclesia in this in order to gain some sense of how "quickly" one should be expected to "see the light" in RO's revelations and recognize how errant their path of decades has really been (I say that kind of tongue in cheek, but it is I think an important consideration in trying to learn from one another.) There ARE in this world VERY ACTIVIST "Sojourner types" who are deeply ecclesiological and also deeply skeptical of the nation states ability or willingness to really participate in what changes might be envisioned by those whose vision of the Kingdom of God won't let them "stand by", and their first reaction is to embody this in the "traditional" activist channels. I'm not sure all hope is exhausted in ALL of those channels. But I can see signs of that in many places where I admittedly once placed a great deal of trust. Likewise, the "Sojourners types" can do with a much larger dose of ecclesiological grounding. Here again, The Church of the Saviour is one which I believe has gotten it right. They just simply go out and do it, and don't start with trying to get the state to do it for them. Neither do they eschew any and all efforts to win support from the "seekers" and the concerned in the halls of government. Some government folks ARE there becuase they feel they can (MIGHT) make a difference for a significant amount of folks, and that makes it "worth it" for them. I don't want to tell them that they are engaging in "statecraft" as an initial assesment right off the bat.

I was reading (re-reading ) a post this morning from Eric that was from an interview with Milbank, and Eric linked to this post by Bruce Prescott of Mainstream Baptist, where some comments in defense of Hauerwas and the "Ecclesiological Fundamentalists" , a term coined by Theo Hobson. Eric was one of the commenters, and he made the same defense of Hauerwas and the "EF" label as I would have. Especially this part:

Those indifferent to whether religion is imposed by the power of the state, undermine the credibility of the gospel. Nothing in the New Testament suggests that the gospel can be extended by force of civil law

Mainstream Baptist: On Ecclesiological Fundamentalism

I am wary of all who are eager to jettison church/state separation. They cannot guarantee that the next generation of church/state "accomodationists" will retain their light-touch. Frankly, even light-touch theocracy is too heavy-handed for those who reject religion.

What's interesting here is that ultimately, you are trying to defend the secular. What Milbank and the rest of the Radical Orthodoxy project argue, is that there's no such thing as the "secular" -- it's merely pagan or just really bad theology that tries to fit inside of an ontology of univocity as opposed to an ontology of participation in God. Again, your definition of "theocrat" whether heavy or "light touch" does not work in your critique of them.

Those indifferent to whether religion is imposed by the power of the state, undermine the credibility of the gospel. Nothing in the New Testament suggests that the gospel can be extended by force of civil law.

If you are talking about Hauerwas and Milbank here, then you are again badly mistaken. I'd say start with James K.A. Smith's Introduction to Radical Orthodoxy, and then if you can stomach the bad writing (but profound ideas), take a crack at Milbank's Theology & Social Theory opus. It's great stuff.

"By force of civil law" implies that the State is strong-arming a particular theology. On the one hand, the State ALWAYS does that, regardless. It's just a "theology" (which Smith calls theology-1) that is a "secular" ideology, but it is "theological" through and through. It's just a deeply embedded philosophy that we have been taught to accept as "common sense" (a word the Bush administration seems to like).

On the other hand, here is where Precott's distinction between "light-touch" and "heavy-handed" theocracy is REALLY important. Hauerwas and his sort of "ecclesiological fundamentalists" have a much more sophisitcated sensibility to theological difference than Prescott and Hobson imply, and express concern over. After all, Hauerwas is a very dedicated proponent of the importance and role of Judaism ----and I would add that if one really pays attention to the gospels and the gospel visa vi Hauerwas and the "EF's" of the RO-stripe, the notions of Biblical justice are primary, which immediately sets them in an entirely different category from the Mohlers and Falwells of the world.

It seems to me that "separation of church and state" tends to become a fundamentalist dogma, and anything which , on its surface, seems to want to qualify that with detail is immediately jumped on as transgressing "what has always worked". We have to be careful that these vestiges of liberal democracy do not become too easily accepted as "divinely inspired".

My Last 3 Posts come to me today as a reaction and a further thinking about the issues raised in this post from Steve Bush, and the comments it brought about. I had set aside this stuff for a while in the interest of focusing on the matter of finding a church, or what to do while NOT finding one. This has to do, as I said earlier, with the ability and willingness of a church to stand against the culture where it needs to, and enabling discipleship and an intense devotion to sharing life and knowing one another.

The issues raised by Steve, and the ensuing comments, raise some concerns I have expressed before about the way those who engage in some activity considered "statecraft" by the RO-ers, but considered "working to ease SOME burdens" and "make things a little easier for those who need some breaks". My contention is that both groups share a lot concerning the realization that the U.S. is not the "friend of the faithful" they (the government) make themselves out to be. In fact, the notions of Empire and Constantine are discussed at length in both activist and RO groups, and both groups share in common much of the vision of a "transformed" or "redeemed" sense of justice and freedom as embodied in the Kingdom of God.

The matters of who is "ceding too much to the state" and engaging in "statecraft" is moot, in my view, up against the issue of whether or not these same Christians are involved in the kinds of churches that DO the kinds of things that are needed; and that activist types are often seeking to get embodied into law or state action/aid. I want to encourage both; but I would say that the church is first in line, and that seeking to get the state to recognize this is "after the fact", or a "bonus". But , the best "canvassing" is embodiment, as I explored a little earlier.

Generous Orthodoxy ThinkTank: Between Hauerwas and Constantine

Anthony commented to James KA Smith something I wanted to affirm as well:

Jamie,

I really appreciate your honest reply. I in no way have dismissed RO. As a matter of fact the more I read your book the more I become convinced of how important this kind of discussion needs to take in other areas of the church.

I really do asppreciate and value this discussion as well. With a little bit of patience with one another and toward those who may be relatively new to such ideas as "statecraft" and the notion of questioning how and when and where we "engage the state on its terms" ----and not ignore how many Christians are sincerely concerned about "witnessing to the state" and advocating for arrangements which ease the burden on the poor. The more cynical or the more wise need not be so hasty in their remarks that "you're just playig into their hands" kind of talk. Even though that often proves true, the efforts often bring that lesson home to the activist, and they learn by experience to place more trust and hope in the church and less in the constructs of state. I keep reiterating that it is the "telos" that counts (the ultimate goal-- I learned that from RO) -- and that the telos of "those Sojourner types" and many of the RO-types are very similar. Perhaps both of these would learn quite a bit from one another that woudl help the both of them if they were to be in a real church together and be devoted to one another in love. We've too much to do to counteract the real enemies of truth than to fight over what our motives are in seeking a truth we both affirm: that history belongs to God, a nd that we are all called to be in God's story.

The previous three posts concerning some of those matters involving "activism" and "ecclesiology" all brought to a head by my simultaneous reading of Stanley Hauerwas, James KA Smith, Deitrich Bonhoeffer, and Jim Wallis (a little earlier this year, in God's Politics) are all on my radar because of the resonation I have felt , especially over the past 9-11 months, with the ideas and notions of church and our relating to the world. I love so much of what each of these has to say to us. I do not register 100% agreement with any of them, but they all place before me the importance of and the nature of what the church is to in the world and with the world, or in spite of the world. I sense a deep congruency with all of these men concerning the way that the Kingdom of God as proclaimed by Jesus is central to what they write, say , and do.

It seems that in the Church of the Saviour, I have what amounts to as close to a "model" of what lkiving as a colony, as Resident Aliens, is all about. They seem to embody in and of themselves an an affirmation of the emphases of each of the writers with which I have been conversing in my heart over the past year, and more recently, in the past 4 months or so. My sense of desperation about not having found anything that seems to promise some sort of serious effort to live faitfully as a community is sometimes overwhelming. At those times I tend to turn off, and retreat into work or entertainment. But I can nnever do that for long (although I see now that I've developed this pattern over the past 30 years, since I first encountered the people and the stories of those people that make up The Church of the Saviour.

It seems as if the only way to do such a thng is to start from scratch. It doesn't seem that such a church can come into being from out of an existing institiutionor community , with its own set of expectations and understandings. I consider that and I am utterly floored by how incapable I see myself in rallying such a community. I fear my external self has become too protective and dependent upon approval to properly lead. What I heard Stanley Hauerwas say in a response to a question during his talk at Baylor stuck with me. He said that it is an opportunity for the church in our age to show the world what true friendship is all about. It is wrapped up in this idea that a particular people , at a particular time, is called to be an outpost of the Kingdom of God, and that this requires a commitment ot a life that is not what the world offers anywhere. I have spoken of my intention to travel to D.C. and seek out some people so formed by such an exemplary alternative life (in the Church of the Saviour, and perhaps seek out some friends who live there and long ago involved me in their own exploration of the kind of life The Church of the Saviour was suggesting and demonstrating was doable, only as a people dependent upon God).

So plans are still being explored as to when and how and via what route.

Jim Wallis' sense of the locus of that adventure being in the church has been built out from an initial sense of outrage at racism and the injustices perpretated by the US in Vietnam. The church experience he initially received was that of accomodation to all that injustice, whch drove him away. HIs experiences of reading the gospel again with new eyes came through such people as Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King. He came back to the church, and Sojourners has emerged from the call to let some OTHER stories be told, and then to help those who wanted to do something about that express this in terms of church and misison (Inward and Outward).

This has had a HUGE impact upon a nation of people who have hirtherto dismissed the church as irrelevant and unsympathetic. To be sure, MORE needs to be done, and more churches need to recognize the boundaries between church and "the world", not only so that as Hauerwas says: "The world can know that it is the world", but so people in the church can learn what is the world, so they can go about being the church. Indeed, James KA Smith, an outspoken critic of Wallis, even acknowledges how Wallis "woke him out of his social slumber", but now it seems that Smith is all too happy to announce how he has advanced beyond and above that, and franlkly, it comes across as too judgemental to proclaim that Wallis , " whatever [his] earlier stance might have been, he's really just ended up as a humanist. " (from here). Such attitudes disturb me coming from obviously intelligent folks, deeply committed to the church as Smith is, and who also attributes much of their own "awakening" to the "social issues" and how they are relevant to the church to the activity and writing of Wallis. I don't understand why it seems to difficult for him to see such "awakening" and "bringing to light" as a calling and a role of value to the church in America. What makes that even stronger for me is that Sojourners and Call to Renewal have always been closely aligned and supported by ecclesia, and constantly erncourage its supporters to find a communal home in some local expression of church; in a people "called out" and called to discern together where they will join God's activity.

I almost think that this statement in Resident Aliens speaks to RO as well:

As we have said often, the fundamental challenge before us is ecclesial. Clever new theologies may keep seminary professors from being bored, but they will also distract them from their central mission as seminary professors and they will certainly not renew the church. The roller coaster of clever new theologies has subjected clergy to one fad after another and has misled pastors into thinking that their problem was intellectual rather than ecclesial

(even though RO claims to be centered on church, it becomes "intellectual" when so much of their criticism of "activists" seems highly "specialized"; which doesn't make it wrong or untruthful or even prove them wrong, but it takes a certain level of education and then, within that, a certain "strain" or brand of education, and a certain schoolng in liturgical traditons, to even occur to the majority of folks in the church. And it seems that sometimes the RO proponents blind-side the ones they accuse of stepping over the line. For me, with two Seminary degrees, these options really hadn't been explored in two very fine theological programs. For the RO folks to expect the Wallis's and the "peace and justice" people within Christendom to joyfully abandon their language and emphases as mistaken and misguided and ignorant of how far they had fallen into "statecraft" is not something that most would take too very kindly when confronted so matter-of-factly as some RO theologians seem inclined to do (even Hauerwas is often guilty of this, I think)

Enactment is truly the final test. This is why the most valuable theology I have ever read is that which is witnessed to by The Church of the Saviour. It is out of their life together and the sheer faitfuleness and amazing impact they have with such "small numbers" (this is the observation about them from a world of people who have been trained to see the largest churches as the most effective and "successful") that their theology gains currency, and makes me seek out the ways and means of formation they have followed. Their modus operandi of assuming that God has gifts to bestow upon the people, and that God calls them to mission, and that mission derives from and arises out of life together; from a people devoted toone another in love. And not just this "nice" "how are ya'?" and "nice to see you" we get Sunday after Sunday (although there's not neccessarily anything wrong with uttering those words, of course). But as Bonhoefer bemoaned the "thousand fold hullo" that is somehow seen as a substitute for discipleship and the demands of life together, it is not the extent of the kind of friendship we are called to embody. We are to act and live as if we truly belive that God has something very adventurous and demanding and something which will shake us to our very depths. It is with such a people, who show by their very structures of being church that there is something powerful and holy about what God is doing amongst us, and into which we are called to particpate on that Journey Inward, and Journey Outward.

I end with this further quote from the idea quoted above in Resident Aliens:

In Resident Aliens, the authors Hauerwas and Willimon implore us in the ministry/theological/churchleadership professions to set as priority one the evoking of an exciting sense of adventure. The quote about theological writers making us feel "too dumb":

Alas, too much theology today seems to have as its goal the convincing of preachers that they are too dumb to understand real theology. Before preachers buy into that assumption, we would like preachers to ask themselves if the problem lies with theologies which have become inconsequential

brings to mind the question of whether all this debate back and forth about the level of faithfulness in this "activist" approach vs that "ecclesiological" approach, and who engage in "statecraft" vs those who "participate in true worship" is not just another pitfall to getting on with it.

The question Steve Bush asks in his latest comment to the range of comments on his paper re: when are Christians obligated to support a "movement" or an initiative thaqt just so happens to have widespread support for the sake of some sense of justice that just happens to be both moral and "widely supported" by lots of people who are moral-seeking people. Yes, I believe that the church is rightfully the representatives, the "colony" which is called to rightly embody this "otherwordly" morality; a "Biblical people", a people formed by the workign of God in their midst. But there are, I believe, paths of growth at various outposts of those people who are seeking to embody church; paths which range from the ones who do not "notice" how Constantinian they are, or how accomodating they are. Do we "abandon" them? If the proponents of RO say no, I would ask what "formation" strategy we are to employ? What kind of "correction" and "teaching" do we encourage? Does it help our worldwide communion to be harshly dismissive of "activist" Christians by lumping them with "leftish politics" and accusing them of "ceding to the state?" There are certainly elements of truth to those observations, but how does the Church instruct and form rightly those who have entered into conversation with her through the invitation of those who are politically active as an expression of their faith, which has been instilled in them via the passion for feeling involvement in the alleviation of injustice and violence?

Bonhoeffer involved himself in the plot to assasinate Hitler. Many have said that this "betrays" his "practicality" in agreeing to "do what it takes" to stop Hitler; that this justifies the "just war" , "long-term" view for Christians. Bonhoeffer himself did not take this view. To him, he was being "disobedient" for the sake of others. I wonder whether or not we in the church are not called to our "activist" brothers and sisters to encourage activity which has at its impetus the alleviation of injustice via works of mercy and appealing to the state for concessions which help to alleviate SOME suffering and loosen SOME oppressive restrictions.

I believe in a diversity of gifts that God gives the people , to be put together into structures for ministry which address the world at some point of need. I also believe there is a role for the "activist", IF this activism is grounded in misison and emanates from church. Jim Wallis himself testifies to the neccessity of a church home; a church base from which all this derives; the reason de etiere. That also does not mean that to merely acknowledge the "source" insures that we will not be lured into the "world's way" of "getting thiings done". As long as the world is the world, this allure and temptation will always be there. This is why the Church of the Saviour continues to emphasize and order itself as a "Journey Inward, Journey Outward".

Back to that original quote from Resident Aliens about pastors being made to feel "too dumb" to be truly faithful. I associate some of this RO-based arggument with that tendency. I can and do agree with much of what RO observes about the church and the world, and how liberal democracy has subverted so many expressions of church into Constantinian outposts and operations. I also deeply identify with their emphasis on ecclesiology and that all TRUE justice and freedom and "values" are formed in the church, and that , as Resident Aliens observes, the church is a "Colony" set apart. But do we then use these stances as quick and easy delimiters of who is "with it" and who's not? As if that approach is going to have much hope of transforming or "converting" anyone who has found that "seeking to speak TO" worldy structures has an impact or an effect for the better, to join with those who with them affirm that the city they seek is one whose builder and maker is God, and yet who speak of their "activist" members as if their whole agenda is separated from their "true home".

I found Jamie Smith's "I'd prefer Wallis to Falwell" less than endearing. I'm not saying Wallis is as "eccesiological" as I would prefer. But I also know that Wallis deeply believes in the Journey Inward, Journey Outward as expressed by the Church of the Saviour. IN fact, Sojourners and Wallis constantly lift up ministries and examples of the Church of the Saviour as logical outcomes of a proper balance of both inward and outward journeys, and that there may well be times that our activity that presents itself to the public eye will look to be occuring on the "stage of the State". But it is also likely that any rootedness or locality of such efforts in the church are going to be the story which gets the headlines in society. I do believe that more needs to be said by those who "seek to influence" andf "seek to participate in and call for change" of their source of motivation, their source of mission, and that this acitivy IS mission. It is NOT the ONLY mission, nor do they claim it is the ONLY mission. I belive that there are some who are gifted for and called to some sort of "conversation" with the powers that be. But I believe that their reasons for being there are to be rooted in the church, and that testimony to that fact should be more forthcoming.

The "sense of adventure" of which Willimon and Hauerwas write should emanate from the Biblical witness to the Kingdom of God. THere WILL be those touched by that good news who will naturally take that and seek to "infiltrate" the structures and halls of the powers that be, since it seems natural to belive that it is through present structures that the message will "get out" that the people of God believe that something should be done to "tell a story" that needs telling so that the works of darkenss can be exposed. Some of these works (not ALL of them, just SOME) , if only they can be brought to light, could be dealt with. Even if it is true that this is making the world only "a little less unjust" , this is a direction preferrable to its opposite. Neither is this all that 's required; that if we can only get this or that bill passed, then the Kingdom would be ushered in. Of course not. But even to those who are "sucked in" by relying too much on "worldly structures" and "results" (as the world sees them), they need to be "welcomed in" by the church who represents the gathering center of God's acitvity, and restored, and constantly formed by an ultimate hope in God's Kingdom, no matter how dimly that may be refelected in the harsh "realities" (as they SEEM to be) of "the world", ....."out there" . There is that eschatological hope which sustains us in our strivings which constantly seem to get rejected and subverted and seem to get nowhere.

I wonder sometimes how many RO-ers have come to that place out of "burn out" with the promises and escahtology of activism, and seek a new, more "who cares what they think" stance. I see the validity of that, and avenues for how that can be an approach that is a more effective forming structure; to listen to and participate in the liturgy and the Scriptural focus of the church, and seek to respond to call. I actually DO belive that. This is why I continue to read Hauerwas, Smith, and the critiques of "Liberal Democracy": becuase I belive they're right. Where I find myself holding back is in the style of critique they level at "other" approaches and theological sensibilities which are formed in them from other approaches. I just feel that are OTHER more serious enemies for the church to fortifyand "armor" against than those they criticize. The "peace and justice" folks in the Church may well include amongst them tendencies identified by RO, but they also include many who have found the church's proclamation of the Kingdom as testified by Jesus and embodeied by Jesus to be good news, and they are seeking to tell the world, however naively and however "accomodationist". The role of the church for these and all of us is to continue to lovingly embrace us and encourage us to bring us together to hear God's word, and to wait for the visitation of God's spirit and the gifts and call that result. I belive that the adventure that is the church is experienced a few "adventures" at a time. One adventure leads to and deepens the next one, and to a large extent, determines the next.

With things really busy at work of late, and at home, I've had precious little time to read this week. I'm about 2/3rds of the way through Resident Aliens, by Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon, who posted on his blog today these words about the narrowing of vision to single issues (sounds familiar).

A Peculiar Prophet: Thinking Like A Christian

It is so hard to think with the expansiveness that is demanded by a God who is fully human and fully divine, completely gracious and scathingly judgmental, wonderfully accepting and extravagantly demanding. I know why there are Muslim “fundamentalists,” for I have tried to read through the Koran, the holy book of Islam. I am not surprised that the style of the Koran tends to produce a kind of monism. But for the life of me -- as someone who works on a weekly basis with the living, elusive, peripatetic Christ and the Trinitarian God who is rendered in the complexity of Holy Scripture -- I can’t figure out Christian fundamentalists. Those in our church who jump on one issue as the one, absolutely essential, undeniable test of fidelity to Jesus seem perilously close to fundamentalism.

Let’s keep pushing one another to thinking that’s worthy of the gospel and as fully faithful to the full gospel as possible. I’m not asking for tolerance, for broad mindedness or some other limp, liberal, secular virtue. I’m talking about thinking that’s as thick and complex as Jesus.

Just one more bit of truth from the previous article on The Church of the Saviour:

Although that Life which you are talking about isn’t an other-worldly heaven, the way some people would think of it?

Gordon Cosby: No, no. This life is preparation for a birth into another level of Reality. And I’ve got a responsibility to do what I can to help it be a good birth. We are here to get to know the Living Reality that brought everything into being, that is sustaining it now, and into whose Reality we are going.

We are here to get to know God. The best way to know God is through his Son who was sent to us to help us know that nature. That is my job, the Church’s job. That’s quite different from what the church normally prepares people for—dealing with the vicissitudes of this life, and how to be a little more successful.

So here we are. What is life for? Life is to get to know Jesus Christ, really know Jesus Christ, and be formed into the image of Jesus Christ. To be formed into servants, servant leaders—not successful leaders. Therefore, I’m caught in a deepening mode to get to know the servant Jesus and become like him. The Church is that body of
people who are on that same journey, who are trying to corporately embody the being of Jesus in a broken world and with our broken, sinful selves.

Our verbal evangelism and our structures for evangelism must come out of the inner work. If we are still living in the world’s culture and haven’t begun to break from our addiction to power and money and influence and “upward mobility,” and we are talking to people about Jesus out of that place, well, that’s the Jesus that they hear.

As things exist now, after 50-some years, how hopeful do you feel about the Church?
Cosby: That’s a difficult question, because from what I see of the institutional, organized church, that which calls itself the Church, I’m not hopeful. As far as what God is committed to, what Jesus died for and rose for…nothing is going to stop it. It’s going to come into true fullness of being in God’s time and in God’s way. He is going to accomplish his purposes. Hope, then, which is rooted in God and in God’s being – I’m seeking to keep my hope rooted there. To root hope in observable progress is always ephemeral. The deeper we go into life, the more disappointed we may be, because we are seeing how slow it is to us. It’s not happening. We are up against principalities and power at deep levels. I would try not to root hope in the seen; I would try to deepen it always in the unseen, in the nature of God and of Christ who is the pioneer of our faith.

Doing my periodic search on all things Church of the Saviour, I found this article:

NextReformation.com

He pointed to an article in a publication of The Vineyard called "Cutting Edge", Fall 2001 (PDF here)

Pages 10-17 of that issue deal with the Church of the Saviour.

You talk a lot about the need to “detox from the culture.” What do you mean by that? It’s a way of describing sin. Sin has very little meaning to the average modern mind, so I use the expression, “Detoxification from the culture” to describe what we really mean by sin—sin being the inability to transcend ourselves and to live for others. What the Bible really means by sin is that we are addicted to the values of the world, the systems of the world. Jesus said that if we stay with the world’s systems, the way the world views life, it leads to death. The realm of God which Jesus embodies and which he describes in the Beatitudes is the way that he says leads to life. We are so addicted to the culture that we don’t even know it. We don’t even know that we need detoxification. We don’t know that we need an intensive recovery program! So if you were to counsel someone who came to you and said, “I want to de-tox; I want to enter into whatever it takes to begin to change,” what would you say? First I would try to recover myself to keep from fainting! Almost never does that happen. But we have developed structures through the years. We have praxis classes on prayer, on Christian ethics, on servant leadership. Or, for example, we take wealthy people to Bosnia, to Haiti, and to India (with Mother Teresa before she died). We get them into situations where they can begin to see how unjust, how un-Christlike our world is. We use the School of Christian Living to introduce people to the poor. In one of our early Ethics classes, I had a little group that met in the Potter’s House, and one night I said, “Now what we are going to do is to close this formal part of the meeting. I want you to go out into the neighborhood and talk to people, get to know them. Then come back, and we’ll talk about that.” One of our folks, Don McClanen, who founded Athletes in Action and who has worked with people of wealth as much as anybody we’ve had, was introduced to life in the neighborhood that night. He went down and found a little church where there was a black woman who was a bishop and got to know her. He started spending one night a week in the neighborhood for a year. Then he started working with groups of disenfranchised African-American youths. That’s what we do; we use whatever structures we can to get people into those things which are unfamiliar. Sometimes in my class I’d say, “I want you to visit with one homeless person on the street this week., and write up an account of being with that person.” Some people have had their lives change just by hanging around with homeless persons instead of just passing them by. It’s a matter of getting to see life in a different way.

There’s a lot of talk around Church of the Saviour about the inward and the outward journey. Can you talk more about the inward journey in particular?

Our feeling is that each of us has developed a false self through the years. We have not become what
we were intended to become. We are not the embodiment of love which Jesus intended we should become. We have developed false patterns of happiness which develop out of this false self. We seek happiness in ways which do not deliver it. We are idol-worshippers. The inward life is going down like Jesus told us to do, and—rather than covering things up—letting the false self die, and let the true self emerge. The inner work is the work of letting the false self go and becoming what we are fully intended to be. We feel it can only emerge in Jesus because he’s the one who created our true selves.
We’ve repressed earlier experiences, we’ve been hurt and covered those hurts, we’ve been violated, we’ve
stopped our growing at certain points. When the true self begins to emerge, especially in the context of the small group, we begin to see things emerging that we couldn’t see before, as to what the outer work should be. We depend on Christ to help us with that outer work because we know we cannot do it ourselves. But all of us are seeing life differently because of the inner change. God has opened our eyes and let us see. Being able to see
clearly doesn’t come without the inner work.

Here's a quote from Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony by Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon

Salvation is not so much a new beginning but rather a beginning in the middle, so to speak. Faith begins, not in discovery, but in remembrance. The story began without us, as a story of the peculiar way God is redeeming the world, a story that invites us to come forth and be saved by sharing in the work of a new people whom God has created in Israel and Jesus. Such movement saves us by (1) placing us within an adventure that is nothing less than God's purpose for the whole world, and (2) communally training us to fashion our lives in accordance with what is true rather than what is false.

I just acquired a Library card for Vanderbilt Divinity School, which I could get as a "local clergy" status by virtue of working for a church agency. Getting a copy of Gerhard Lohfink's "Does God Need the Church?" was the impetus for my looking into Vandy's Divinity School library, in addtion to the other goodies like Hauerwas that I can find there. So when I was checking out Lohfink, I also looked to see what Hauerwas books were there that I had in mind to read and had not read yet, so I found "Resident Aliens" which he co-authored with Will Willimon in 1989. As I got in to it, I wish I had found this in 1989, and that Hauerwas had been one of the oft-quoted authors in my theological education, so that I would have been exposed to this "eccesiological" emphases earlier. It would have attracted me then as well, since The Church of the Saviour had already prepared the ground for me on such matters since 1976 when I first began reading Elizabeth O'Connor. I know that 16 years ago was not such a long time ago, and Hauerwas was not exactly a young man then (he was the same age as I am now), but I was thinking I was going to be reading some "early Hauerwas", but it sounds to me as if even with Resident Aliens, he started right in on the problem of liberal democratic nation states as carrying on the traditoon of the post-Enligtenment project of the State's seduction of the church with a promise of power in its "chaplaincy" role.

The theme from the above quote, on "the journey"; the role our story has in a larger story, the story of God and a People of God, this is also significant. The realization that I, that we are coming into that story "in the middle" is both a reminder that we are siginificant onlyu in the context of the story we inhabit, and for your part in that, and also that what comes after is a continuance and a building upon.

We argue that the political task of Christians is to be the church rather than to transform the world. One reason why it is not enough to say that our first task is to make the world better is that we Christians have no other means of accurately understanding the world and rightly interpreting the world except by way of the church. Big words like "peace" and "Justice," slogans the church adopts under the presumption that, even if people do not know what "Jesus Christ is Lord" means, they will know what peace and justice means, are words awaiting content. The church really does not know what these words mean apart from the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth

"words awaiting content", to be supplied from the Church's vision of the Kingdom of God, as preached by Jesus. As a peculiar people; a "colony" as Willimon and Huaerwas describe it, there is much for which to hope as we await a call and a prescence to sustain us in that call. The stories confirm a past history of God's deliverance, and a present-future promise that God will go before us, to a land that he will show us.

I began looking into and reading about Bonhoeffer immediately after the elections last November. I was tired of feelig all the "partisanship" and thought I should apply my energies more sepcifically to the church and the kind of people we are called to be. I bought the DVD "Bonhoeffer", got "A Testament to Freedom" (Essential writings of Bopnhoeffer) and a few other collections and explorations of Bonhoefer's theology. This past month, I've been reading roughly 500 pages of the 1000 page Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography. IN these I have been learning about the extent to which the German church was predominantly behind Hitler as a "solution" to the renewing of Germany, still reeling over its defeat in World War I and suffering under the agreement of the Treaty of Versailles.

Steven Martin's production "Theologians Under Hitler" focused on three prominent German theologians who supported Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emmanuel Hirsch. I was able to attend a screening of it at Immanuel Baptist Church in Nashville on Tuesday this week. MY friends at the Baptist Center for Ethics hosted the event, and Larry Hollon of UMCom moderated a panel discussion afterwards.

Even though the film was focused on the kind of "theology" which developed into a "rationale" and "support" for the Nazi German state, I was a bit surprised there was not more coverage of Bonhoeffer's perspectives on the work of these theologians. Bonhoeffer was basically mentioned only one brief time, when the Confessing Church was mentioned when the Barmen Declaration was written in response to the widespread association of the German church's best hope with the Nazi regime.

But the coverage and analyses of these theologians under Hitler was in itself fascinating. I suppose I'm getting the best of both worlds as I can read of the Confessing Church and Bonhoeffer's ideas in Bethge's Bonhoeffer bio.
I plan to purchase a copy ASAP. I'd also like to find the book it is based upon.

It was announced that the film will also be shown on PBS on the 68th anniversary of Kristallnacht (November 9) ("The Night of Broken Glass") when Synogogues wsere burned and/or ransacked, and Jesish businesses vandalized and destroyed, which has historicaly been recognized as the first obvious outward signal of the brutality of the Nazi treatment of the Jews.

The constant topic of conversation in the film in interviews and after the film in discussion was the questi on "How could such a thing happen, and how do such things become "excusable" and "undetectable"? The major theme was the sense of pride in the people; the Volkskirche, which was a deeper concept than what is attached to "the people" today. It was more of a "unit spirituality"; loyalty to which was given a God-like status. This appeal to the Volkskirche was a constant theme of the Reich, and the "German Christians" (Deutsche Christen) was widely assumed to be the only legitimate mode of religious expression. I know that many "American Christians" who absolutely hit the roof when it is suggested that they may be treading dangerously close to the path of Nationalistic Deification. After all, "in this day and age, such things couldn't happen". The question is thus: Even if a Replay or the same "such things" may not be forthcoming, exactly what kinds of things are possible, given the right amount of fear, disinformation, appeal to "control" and to "common sense" that can be used to justify ever more extreme and harsher measures to combat some perceived evil; this is the eery paralllel that I draw between the Radical Nationalism of today's American church, and the "Reich Church" and its "Deutsche Christen theology", which Gerhard Kittel , Emmanuel Hirsch, and Paul Althaus help to craft.

MOre good stuff from Pastor John, this time on what constitiutes "happiness".

The "Therapeutic in contemporary culture" says Pastor John, has been separated from the True God. Not seeing this , this "culturally approved therapy" is a substitiute that is utterly lacking.

Pastor John Wright

Being formed by this cultural expectation puts us into continual dramas and struggles with ourselves and others for our contentment, and thus, ensures that we never genuine experience contentment, but always sustain our status as victims. Always looking for the greener grass, we live unsettled in trying to achieve settledness. In this way, we are shaped to keep in the cycles of the consumption, if not of leisure provided by wealth, consumption of experiences, "worship experiences", "experiences of the other" whatever gives us the fleeting fix of happiness.

As many times as wwe are reminded of our utter dependence upon God for all that is true and good and "worthy", we find ourselves without "structures" in which to "be the church" , which is neccessarily, WITH others; others who are being formed in the ways of true happiness. The life of fellowship; of discipleship, is eluding us because we seek gatherings that bring to us the culturally palatable form of "healing"; which is "feeling good about ourselves". Deitrich Bonhoeffer hinted at his disdain for this, calling it the "thousand-fold hullo"; the "niceties" without any exopectation of the deep relatedness to which we are called as members of Christ's body.

As liberal polity begins with the autonomous individual seeking one's own self-fulfillment, defined in the terms of the individual, the state then takes over the regulation of the "public" sphere so that the individual can pursue "happiness". In so doing, we are wrestled out of our proper place beginninng and ending in God, and instead, become caught in our own self-pursuits.

" caught in our own self-pursuits." That is a troublesome description; troublesome because I see how many YEARS of this one can just "slide through", without the kind of "life together" in which "abundant life" is found. Not "abundant" as the world sees it and in which it seeks to shape us, but in the life of the people being formed and so formed by the body of Christ. Thanks, again, John.

Pastor John Wright

The enemy is not the church that has been secularized, but the modernist state and its advocates that has with a passive aggressiveness managed to present their ideology as "natural". More accurately, this (w)rant is a means of penance for how deeply I have been formed by this cultural situation from which I need delivered so that I might live a holy life, acceptable to God, my reasonable service.

Ah yes, what is "natural". The Bush -team credo like sto call this "common sense". What is "common sense" usually is synonomous with whatever gives unfettered capitalism the most free reign.

As we go on (w)ranting, we will have to discover how this moralism is a distortion, perversion of the ethics of the church, that has become very indistinguishable from the life of the church. It shows the difficulty that we must embrace to regain a language of holiness and sanctity that is much, much more true, beautiful, and good than the moralism described by Smith that dictates so much of my life.

Yes, it has become very much indisitingusihable from the kind of "Christian" society wants us to be. And in most churches, this is what rules. It rarely is compared to any kind of radical notion of friendship, discipleship, or relationship. It is all about being "pleasant"; and that usually translates for most people into being "so thankful" for "our freedoms" here in America. Thiis is a major reason why I DIDN"T go to church anywhere yesterday. I think I would vomit if I heard a preacher say that. Of course, if I knew of a place where they take the life of discipleship and Christian community and CALL seriously, I woudl be there in a second.

I'm going to try to put together a pilgrimage for the Fall Break week for the family, and most preferrably to the DC area, so I can visit with some people of the Church of the Saviour and friends who live in that area. Maybe take an East coast route due East of here to the Carolina coast, and then up into DC and back to Cincinnati. That's the outline. That's for the first week in October. We'll see how it might come together.

Thanks John, for the (W)rant!

When I upgraded to MT 3.2, all seemed well, but my notification emails I used to get when a new comment or trackback was received is now no longer working.

(Update: Monday night....it works now! they had a power outage at my host ---first time that's happened! Maybe that VERY HARD reboot is what did the trick, or there's also a good chance that the dudes fixed it. Whatever the case, I'm stoked!)

My mail setting is the same it has been since I first started using MT almost 2 years ago. My host provider said I should be using the IP adress instead of mail.mydomain.org in my SMTP setting in the mt-config file setting for outgoing mail , but I've had that same setting for the whole time. I switched it to use the IP (which my host suggested) instead of mail.mydomain.org, which is what I have been using for the past almost 2 years. I don't know what has happened. Any ideas out there?

It is a day when so many in our churches will feel compelled to address somehow the topic of the attack four years ago. I did not go anywhere today. I was up super late, got up late, had some physical difficulties that took even more time this morning, and also, hidden away in all of those "external reasons" for not going to church , there is the urge I had to stay away today. So frustrated am I at the seeming inability, unwillingness, or refusal to acknowledge the truth of the cross, that the church in America exhibits today, that I am apalled and embarassed.

The call of the Christian to "accept" death rather than "deal death" , for whatever "just cause" (and the "just" definition is , in itself, inaccurate if one includes all the people of the world; all those silently considered as "expendable" such that we do not acknowledge that our country deals in thew currency of the "culture of death", and those who seem fond of using that term are themselves quick to defend the acceptance of a nation-state's taking upon itself the mantle of "inifinte justice" (a name they first ascribed and then quickly withdrew under immediate protest, but telling in ithat this was the intiial idea that leapt forth as a name for our "mission" after 9/11.

That this has not been an occasion for churches (except for those who are , well, the exception) to speak the truth about war and the idea that "justice" is ours to impose, is an opportunity lost. It is a lost opportunity; a call that has gone unheeded to be a light to the nations (that is, the church is that light, not "our nation" among the others who "do not see the light as we do"). There will be more in the days ahead on this, but I am not of a mind or have no urge to write. I simply long for an experience of having a community to which I can do nothing else but "be there" and to anticipate being confronted with truth. From where does such a people and such a time to come?

I have been trying the Movable Type Style Generator. It's getting me closer, but I still suck at design, and suck even worse with CSS. MY style Sheet is here, if anybody has any tips on how to

1. Make the content area (left column) fill in the whole white area, like it does in my IE6, for Firefox as well (which is what I usually use) (update: I seem to have fixed that one)

2. Make the right sidebar move up to thebottom of the orange banner.(update: I seem to have fixed that one too)

(Update: Numbers 1 and 2 are no longer visible. I went back to my old style--but still under 3.2) I'm trying to figure out how I can make a "test home" index page (I did it here) so I can piddle around. Maybe I'll do that next)

3. Tip me off on a "Styles and MOvable Type Templates for the "CSS-Design impaired". (Update: Here I still need help. I still suck.)

I'm having a hack of a time trying to get StyleCatcher working. Anybody know what directory needs permissions? My StyleCatcher Plugin is under my /mt/plugins/StyleCatcher

the themes folders are under /mt/mt-static/themes

whenever I try to apply a selected theme in StyleCatcher, I get this error: "Could not create theme-april_showers folder - Check that your 'themes' folder is webserver-writable"

Update: I think I got it.

I finally got up and running with Movable Type 3.2 , after getting a test run set up as an "alternate". I made the switch today by renaming directories and changing the mt-config settings. I've not received one Spam trackback since! Awesome. I'm trying to figure out the StyleCatcher plugin now. It lets you change themes quite easily (that is, when you get it working, so they say) Something with my permissions is not quite right yet. I'm workin' with my host provider to get it set up right.

I just posted that I have switched to 3.2. Then this post disapppeared.. I'll have to check into that one. I set up a test copy of my blog and upgraded it to 3.2. When all looked well, I flipped the switch. We'll see how it goes. NO trackback spam so far. That's a plus.

(Now it's reappeared again, but has a post number of http://theoblogical.org/movtyp/archives/000000.html.....the very next post is http://theoblogical.org/movtyp/archives/004409.html .......what's that about?)

I finally got up and runing with Movable Type 3.2 , after getting a test run set up as an "alternate". I made the switch today by renaming directories and changing the mt-config settings. I've not received one Spam trackback since! Awesome. I'm trying to figure out the StyleCatcher plugin now. It lets you change themes quite easily (that is, when you get it working, so they say) Something with my permissions is not quite right yet. I'm workin' with my host provider to get it set up right.

My previous post about the unique structures of the Church of the Saviour ended with my mentioning of THe Servant Leadership School. In this post, Gordon Cosby tells

Every structure in which you work can feel the impact of your presence within it. You might want to begin questioning most of the fundamental assumptions operating within that structure. At the same time the Church of Jesus Christ ought to be creating literally countless alternative institutions of power incarnating some portion of a Kingdom vision and corporately embodying a more human way of ordering life. There are very few of these radical alternative structures pointing the way to a new society, and saying this is how as a biblical people we live while waiting the coming of Jesus Christ. This is why the Christian church in so many areas of our diseased society has little impact upon the quality of life in America.

This is a taste of the BE THE CHURCH emphasis of the Church of the Saviour; the expectation that all of God's people are engaged and emmeshed in the process of seeking, supporting, and enabling call, and then discerning the structures from which and in which this call "comes into being". This is the language of the stories of this community's history of responding to the call of the church in Adams Morgan neighborhood, in Washington DC, and as a light to the nation and the nations.

The above quote is pulled from the following extended section from Servant Leaders, Servant Strcutures pp.85-89

(included, with permission given by the author in 1995, at this link:
Movable Theoblogical: SLSS Ch3: Greater Things Than These)

A description from Elizabeth O'Connor about the beginnings of the Servant Leadership[ School

Movable Theoblogical: SLSS Ch3: A Place of Dialogue, Reflection, and Affirmation

In the midst of our own communities a Servant Leadership School has emerged to work with all the issues involved in servant leadership. Located in the Adams Morgan area, the School is surrounded by nine of the missions of the church. The tower building is gracious in design, but the streets themselves and the missions are its extended classrooms. The deepest learnings of our church communities have come from their intermingling with the oppressed of the world, so it is natural that we would want to make that same opportunity available to other church communities.

A central understanding of the School is that participants are committed to being in ongoing relationships with oppressed people. In one sense the School is an ecumenical undertaking by Christians from many places who have awakened to the pain and oppression in their own situations, and been given a vision of a more merciful world. They want a place where they can struggle with others for the renewal of their individual lives and institutions. One can imagine that in time the School might become a think tank and a feel tank where Christians from all walks of life will come together to dream and plan and engage in the struggle of the abused and suffering of the earth, and to ask what it means to pitch our tents in their midst.

The Servant Leadership School is not unlike our own Schools of Christian Living except that it is -wider in scope and will draw upon the leadership of the larger church, as well as our nine faith communities. The core curriculum is composed of five dimensions: Servant Leadership, Community Building, Spiritual Grounding, Call or Vocation, and Personal Response to Being with the Oppressed. Other courses will help us to work with equally profound areas of our lives, concerns that we did not worry about before we became grown-ups. They include such vast and varied subjects as money, authority and power, social and economic justice, growing old, death and dying, addictions, the education of our feelings and sensibilities.

Servant Leaders, Servant Strucures, p. 91

Few things are as important to the issue of formation as that of the shape and expectation and demands of membership. This is an area where many a church has been impressed with what COS has accomplished, and seek to duplicate it, but are unwilling to start from scratch. The idea of a "commitment" to memebrship is anathema to our "numbers game" oriented culture. It also seems to "sectarian" to expect from "normal people", and so the resulting "normalcy", and the miraculous life of radical friendship, seeking and waiting and journeying toward call, and deep relatedness to each other (to the effect that the church and its concerns become number one over EVERYTHING. Over cultural "attractions" and diversions which the world tells us are signs of success. So, the below segment from Chapter Two, on The Integrity of Church Membership from Call to Commitment is something not often heard: