Tall Monastic Guy:

« May 2010 | Main | August 2010 »

June 28, 2010

called to love the other

From Kester Brewin's, Other: Loving Self, God and Neighbor in a World of Fractures

It is easy to love what is lovely; but we are called to love what is other. Who then is this other?

It is the other within myself, the parts of me that I hide in the dark, the half-fictional parts I parade and boast. What would it mean to truly love this self of mine?

It is the other within God, the divinity I cannot fully know or understand who does not answer my prayers and does not provide comfort; the incarnate and yet ever-hidden who infects my dreams and won't let me let go. What would it mean to love this God with all of myself?

And it is the other within the world I inhabit, the neighbors who are noisy, the street-people who are smelly, the immigrants who are strange. (page 9)

Love this book so far. Just wish I had it in my hands about 10 weeks ago before the Access conversation lifted off. I'm amazed at how much similarity there is...

Posted at 08:52 PM in missional/incarnational | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

June 23, 2010

mustard seed metrics

I appreciate the perspective offered here by Mike Frost regarding how the church needs a new paradigm of measuring their impact within the Kingdom. Incarnational mission is messy, organic, and difficult to describe in one brief encounter. Difficult to explain outside the context of relationship. How would followers of Jesus, church starters in particular, be released into mission if they experienced the freedom to work beyond the old metrics of "How many attend your church?" "How many decisions/baptism this month?" etc.

After watching the video, I'd love to hear the language you'd use to describe or measure your work in the Kingdom...

Posted at 11:32 AM in missional/incarnational | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

June 20, 2010

Access Books

Once in awhile I'm asked what books have most shaped my life or which ones I'd most recommend. While so many come to mind I'm going to go with 8 for now that seem to be having a significant impact on the shaping of Access...

The Gift of Being Yourself by David Benner

Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman

Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne

Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore

Everything Belongs by Richard Rohr

Reaching Out by Henri Nouwen

Other: Loving Self, God and Neighbor in a World of Fractures by Kester Brewin

A New Kind of Christianity by Brian McLaren

Posted at 09:20 PM in Access, Books | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

June 14, 2010

just give me a sign

On a recent flight from Indiana to Colorado with my wife and son, my mind went to the story of Jonah and his time in the belly of the whale. As I fought a migraine, my wife was experiencing the discomforts of first trimester pregnancy, and my son was acting the way two year olds act. It also happened to be one of those turbulent flights into the Rocky Mountain wind currents that allow you to imagine you’re on one of the wildest coasters Six Flags has to offer.

As I sat there rubbing my temples and comforting my son in that last row of the plane I looked up the aisle and imagined that this just might be a slight glimpse of the misery Jonah experienced as he rode through the sea accompanied by the nauseating smells and juices that exists within the guts of a whale.

As much as I would have liked to have escaped those circumstances I had no choice at 30,000 feet but to sit there, ride it out, and think about the comforts and quiet of resting in my own bed in a few short hours.

The Jonah analogy is one Jesus seemed to return to as his preferred symbol for transformation in life. Both Matthew and Luke’s gospel record a scene in which an antagonistic crowd of religious folks demand that Jesus perform an impressive and miraculous sign. Jesus responded, “The only sign I freely give away is the sign of the prophet Jonah.” (See Matthew 16:4, Matthew 12:38-39, & Luke 11:29)

What did Jesus mean by this?

Continue reading "just give me a sign " »

Posted at 03:46 PM in Access | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Words make Worlds...

"It becomes so clear to me as I grow older that people who change, and keep changing, are the only people who grow up." -Richard Rohr
“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.” -Martin Luther King Jr.
"Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be." -John Wooden
"Receptivity without confrontation leads to a bland neutrality that serves nobody. Confrontation without receptivity leads to an oppressive aggression which hurts everybody." - Henri Nouwen
"Spirituality is not a formula; it is not a test. It is a relationship. Spirituality is not about competency; it is about intimacy. Spirituality is not about perfection; it is about connection. The way of spirituality begins where we are now in the mess of our lives." -Mike Yaconelli
"But that doesn’t mean community is easy. For everything in this world tries to pull us away from community, pushes us to choose ourselves over others, to choose independence over interdependence, to choose great things over small things, to choose going fast alone over going far together." -Shane Claiborne
"Nothing that we despise in the other man is entirely absent from ourselves. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or don’t do, and more in light of what they suffer." Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create." Albert Einstein
"Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." Howard Thurman
"A nation that continues to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." -Dr. Martin Luther King
"Our relationship with each other is the criterion the world uses to judge whether our message is truthful--- Christian community is the final apologetic." -Francis Schaefer
"It is not allowable to love the Creation according to the purposes one has for it, any more than it is allowable to love one’s neighbor in order to borrow his tools." Wendell Berry
"All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers. Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than the particular country in which he was born." -Francois Fenelon
"Ministry cannot be about maintenance, but it is about gathering, about embrace, about welcoming home all sorts of and conditions of people; home is a place for mother tongue, of basic soul food, of old stories told and treasured, of being at ease, known by name, belonging without qualifying for membership." -Walter Brueggemann
"Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get round to being the particular poet or particular monk that they are intended to be by God." "In order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be." -Thomas Merton
"God spoke to Balaam through his ass, and God's been speaking through them ever since. So, if God chooses to speak through you don't think to highly of yourself." -Rich Mullins
"We must become holy not because we want to feel holy but because Christ must be able to live his life fully in us." Mother Teresa
"I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self." Henri Nouwen