Thanks to Mary at Tensegrities for pointing out this wonderful video on Social Media (explained in plain English).
In Plain English
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Monthly Archives: May 2008
GTT
That’s “Gone to Texas“, y’all. I’m off this morning to Southlake, TX where I am honored to have been chosen to be the candidate for the ministerial position at Pathways Unitarian Universalist Church.
The Megachurch and the Mainline: Everything Must Change
The latest two “books” on the nightstand have been Stephen Ellingson’s The Megachurch and the Mainline: Remaking Religious Traditions in the Twenty-first Century and Brian MacLaren’s Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crisis and a Revolution of Hope.
Ellingson’s work is an academic study of Lutheran congregation in California and their struggle to hold onto (or not) the Lutheran tradition while adapting to the realities of the post-modern, market-driven, church growth industry revolution in congregational vitality and seeking to keep the numbers in the pews.
McLaren tackles the top issues of global crisis and asks, what would these issues look like in the light of the gospel? McLaren’s gospel is a liberationist gospel.
There’s more to come from the reading notes. Stay tuned.
You Call This The Future?
Why yes, yes I do. While doing a quick back to the future check-in yesterday on Carl Sagan and Cosmos for my post on Phoenix and Mars, I learned that one of Sagan’s children, his son Nick Sagan, became a writer. Nick Sagan has written for the large and small screen, television, award winning science fiction and a very intriguing recent work of non-fiction titled You Call This The Future?: The Greatest Inventions Sci-Fi Imagined and Science Promised. I’ve always thought that the most common such invention was the cell phone. Yup. I loved Star Trek as a kid and what are cell phones but the real life realization of the communicator (minus the other worldly range)? And now you can even get one Bluetooth compatible!
No more blues for a red planet
When the Phoenix landed on Mars Sunday night and began sending back images, I was thrilled. All I could think of was Percival Lowell and his quest to uncover the mystery behind the red planet’s canals. What am I, some kind of space geek or amateur astronomer?
Yes and no. I was one of the billions and billions of people who were glued to their television set every week in 1980 to watch Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Journey.
To say that I was entralled was as grand an understatement as I’ve ever applied to my life. I watched each episode at least twice because PBS repeated them. The Cosmic Calendar, the Hyper-Cube or Tesseract, the ancient library of Alexandria, The Drake Equation, Special and General Relativity, and The War of the Worlds are but a tiny sampling of the wonders from Cosmos. The universe wasn’t Sagan’s classroom, it was his temple and cathedral. Listening to him, watching Cosmos was an awakening to the romance of science, an experience that was religious in the best sense of the term.
Sagan was part of the The Planetary Society’s Visions of Mars project and recorded a message to future Martians, those of our descendants who might colonize the red planet. That message along with many others is now on Mars…
The disk will be part of a relic of an ancient unmanned spacecraft named Phoenix, which landed on the planet in 2008. Possibly preserved as a historic memento, perhaps long abandoned and forgotten, Phoenix will have kept its secret through the long Martian years. But now, at last, its time had come and its message is set to be revealed. The ancient digital format of the small disk may pose a problem, but surely not an insurmountable one for these technologically advanced pioneers. Soon the images will appear on their screens, bearing greetings from visionaries of a distant time, on a distant world.
Here’s the beginning of episode 5 of Cosmos, “Blues for a Red Planet”:
The entire Cosmos series is up on You Tube (what isn’t these days). But this week, the red planet isn’t so blue. It’s front and center and a guy that spotlighted it almost 30 years ago has left it and any future Martians a grand message in a bottle.
Food Deserts
As you can see from the photos rotating in the header of this blog, I’ve been growing an organic garden for six years now, and I plant sunflowers on two sides of it. I was not a complete stranger to healthier, organic eating habits. A son with multiple food allergies and propensity to overeating got me on the gardening and bettering eating track. Yet my diet took a radical turn for the better this past year when a ministers’ study group I belong to took up the topic of food and spirituality. Not only did I want to eat more organically grown food, I now try to eat as much locally grown and raised food as I possibly can – locavorism. My take on locavorism is that I try to eat food that comes from within 100 miles of my home, failing that from my state, failing that that comes from local farmers through just economies in other places. In all instances, I try for organic foods.
My interest in locavorism led to our family buying our first ever Community Supported Agriculture Farm Share this year from the The Food Project in Lincoln, MA – just down the road from Walden Pond. We chose the Food Project over some other CSA’s, including one in the town next to us because The Food Project is totally organic and they run an educational program that takes agriculture into the inner city and brings young people from the city out to the farm.
Today, in going through my mail, a piece of mail from The Food Project grabbed my attention and taught me a new term – A Food DESERT. A Food Desert is “an urban district with little or no access to foods needed maintain a healthy diet, but often served by plenty of fast food restaurants.” Ouch. Like many people who grew up with computers I went to that vast research library – Google – and started looking up “food desert.”
I learned more. I learned about suburban deserts:
The term ‘desert’ was used to describe an urban environment lacking in certain facilities as far back as 1973 when J BAINES (The Environment) wrote “The large suburban estates that are a recent feature of the townscape are epitomised by the regular rows of similarly styled houses that have earned for themselves the title of suburban deserts. They often lack the shops, churches, public houses, and social centres that allow a community life to develop”. http://www.fooddeserts.org/images/whatisfd.htm
From the same website I learned that the term food desert dates back at least to the 1990s:
Food deserts were defined, by the Low Income Project Team in 1996, as ‘areas of relative exclusion where people experience physical and economic barriers to accessing healthy food’. The actual term ‘food desert’ is quoted, by S CUMMINS (British Medical Journal, 2002, Vol.325, p.436), as having been originally used by a resident of a public sector housing scheme in the west of Scotland in the early 1990s.
The media commented on the phenomenon of food deserts during the 1990s. The Independent of 11 June 1997 said food deserts were “those areas of inner cities where cheap nutritious food is virtually unobtainable. Car-less residents, unable to reach out-of-town supermarkets, depend on the corner shop where prices are high, products are processed, and fresh fruit and vegetables are poor or non-existent”. The Observer, 13 September 1998, p.11, said ‘many poor housing estates were left as food deserts by the closure of local food shops’ and that in the few local food shops left, prices were up to 60% more than in the supermarkets. The Guardian II of 17 March 1999 said that ‘on the poorer estates of Coventry, low cost, good quality, food is not available to the poorest. These people ‘either have to shop at expensive local stores or pay for transport and lug small children for miles and back with shopping’.
I also discovered that some folks are working on an interactive Food Desert web project at http://fooddesert.net/where they define a Food Desert as “large and isolated geographic areas where mainstream grocery stores are absent or distant.” They claim:
Our research has demonstrated the statistical link between Food Deserts and worse diet-related health outcomes, after controlling for other key factors. We also developed a Food Balance Score to show the relationsihp between access to mainstream and fringe food providers (such as fast food) and correlated that to public health.
Eat locally, buy organic, and become part of the oasis, not part of the desert. Now about dessert…
Does one need God to be human? or to be religious?
Interesting post on an interesting project at the Friendly Atheist. The answer from our own humanist tradition is, of course, no. Take a look at the original Humanist Manifesto of 1933. Many of the 15 articles are things to which many people of various faiths now agree with in principle, if not in actual statements of faith.
Just One Book
There’s a great post and comment threat at Rev. James Ford’s Monkey Mind now where he writes about asking:
asking friends who are in the spiritual guidance business if they would recommend one book, just one book…Looking for one book on a spiritual theme? Something to touch the heart? Or open the mind? Perhaps it’s one of these…
My favorite was the recommendation by my friend Hank Peirce: Charles Bukowski’s Love is a Dog From Hell because it wasn’t a deep Zen text or a 19th century novel.
The list also made me think about books for spiritual direction in a different light, not just one book you’d recommend, but what was the one book, if there was one, that really turned your head or heart around? Did your ever read something and come away so changed that your spiritual life was never the same? Did you ever read something and maybe realize, even year later that looking back that one book was the one that planted the seeds that started the spiritual growth that’s been harvested since or sent you down your present path?
I have such a book. It’s A Wrinkle in Time by Madelaine L’Engle and I read it for the first time when I was about ten years old, sitting on a vinyl-covered, legless chaise lounge on the floor of children’s section of the Leominster Public Library. I even ended up writing a sermon about it for a UU RE course that I turned into a sermon preached while a ministerial intern.
All these years later, I think that’s the one that started it.
Emerging Universalism
What would an Emergent liberal congregation look like? A lot like Micah’s Porch in Chicago. David Pyle at Celestial Lands posted about it back in February. Be sure to read the comments on the post, especially the comment by David Owen O’Quill, the founding pastor of Micah’s Porch, some of which reads:
Micah’s Porch is almost less of a church and more of a nomadic tribe. Our quest is a new exodus except the wilderness we are lost in is an urban, postmodern, individualist, consumerist environment. The empire is no longer Rome, but a global corporate kingdom that promises salvation and delivers emptyness and destruction.
Right now many of our churches have grown so used to a certain liberal, academic, npr-listening, Mary Oliver-reading, religion-from-childhood-rejecting sub-culture that the culture itself is often confused with Unitarianism, Universalism, and the ever ambiguous Unitarian Universalism. For many it is very hard to see our faith outside of this context because the culture has become the faith.
The way to grow and revitalize our UU congregations isn’t going to be found in a marketing campaign because the people we are hoping to attract are sick and tired of being marketed, sick and tired of advertising. They do however surf the web, they are social networkers, and they want community. They also want communities committed to taking action in the world on behalf human need. They want to make a difference in the world.
Back to the Wild
I’ve been dying to get back to my discussion of Tony Jones’ book The New Christians as I think it’s one of the most important books on religion in America to come along in some time. UU’s and other religious liberals have much to learn from and discuss with the Emergents about how to do church in the 21st Century. Before getting back to those issues, I want to get into some of the areas where Unitarian Universalists will differ with Emergent Christians.
My two biggest theological squabbles are the divinity of Jesus and dogma of the atonement. Emergents believe “Jesus is the crucified and risen Savior of the cosmos and no one comes to the Father except through Jesus.” I disagree.
I do not believe Jesus was divine, any more or less than you and I are and or could be divine. (Be careful with this statement, though we are creatures capable of great depth.) I do believe Jesus was great religious and spiritual teacher.
I do not believe that God required Jesus to die to make amends for his sins or yours or mine. What kind of God would? Think about it. Jones dismisses too easily the feminist critique (shared by many) that his amounts to child abuse. Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock handle this well in Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us, also see UU World Article (http://www.uuworld.org/2002/02/feature1.html).
I much prefer Universalist Hosea Ballou on the Atonement. UU blogger and minister Daniel Harper has kindly made Ballou’s Treatise on the Atonement available online here.
The essence of Ballou’s treatise:
As finite creatures, he argued, human beings are incapable of offending an infinite God. Therefore, he rejected the orthodox argument that the death of Jesus Christ was designed to appease an angry God, and replaced it with the idea that God is a being of eternal love who seeks the happiness of his human children. It is not God who must be reconciled to human beings, but human beings who must be reconciled to God. Ballou was convinced that once people realized this, they would take pleasure in living a moral life and doing good works. (http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/hoseaballou.html)
If any Emergents read this I hope they read this the spirit of Tony Jones’ Dispatch #7 (from the Emergent Frontier):
Emergents believe that an envelope of friendship and reconciliation must surround all debates about doctrine and dogma.
I think that UU’s would do well to adopt that stance because although UU’s don’t have doctrine and dogma, some individual UU’s adopt theological positions that approach dogmatic stances about their own views, whatever they may be. Whoever you are, you’ve probably been on the receiving end of a diatribe for being a (fill in the blank). What if we were all more conscious about being theologically welcoming and surrounded our theological discussions with an “envelope of friendship and reconciliation?”
I also have trouble with Tony Jones’ biblical scholarship. At times he does some great stuff. He does a fantastic bit of fictional dialog between a “relativist” and a “Biblicist” where the relativist shows the biblical literalist that by picking and choosing between available translations, the literalist is also a relativist. Yet, he often points to what Jesus “says” in the Gospels without ever once going into a discussion that Jesus may not have said it at all, but the Gospel writer may have put the words into Jesus’ mouth to make a theological point or promote a theological point, especially Jesus’ identity, especially in John’s Gospel, which has a lot of bearing on statements like “no one comes to the Father except through me.” We won’t even get into Goddess and Mother, that’s a whole other argument. Like I said, I like these guys and I think they’re really onto something about how to do church well in the 21st century. We just have theological differences. But I also think are Emergents out there who are UU’s – (pause for effect) – they just don’t know it yet!
Why do I think that way?
“I’m humble” an emergent might tell you, “because I don’t know what I’m wrong about today. I’ll speak with confidence, and I’ll speak with passion, I won’t speak with certainty.”
Dispatch 10: Emergents believe that theology is local, conversational, and temporary. To be faithful to the theological giants of the past, emergents endeavor to continue their theological dialog.
The moment that we have all the bolts screwed in tight and all the nails hammered in, it’s at precisely that moment that we cease being faithful.
What can they teach us about what church needs to be in the 21st century:
Dispatch 16: Emergents believe that church should function more like an open-source network and less like a hierarchy or a bureaucracy.
I like it when Tim says “People experience God emotionally, intellectually, relationally, and aethetically and this church aims to make every one of those experiences available to people.”
Rethinking the church as an activist organization means fundamental changes in the way the church is run. For the church to be responsive to the rapidly changing world, it must be light and quick on its feet.
Failures are a natural consequence of innovation and adventure.
Dispatch 17: Emergents start new churches to save their own faith, not necessarily as an outreach strategy.
Some of the new churches they have started meet in bars, lofts and church buildings abandoned by mainline denominations. Of course the first thing the emergent congregation did was to take out the pews and the pulpit and put in sofas and chairs for worship in the round.
The best analogy Jones makes about the Emergent Church is in his Epilogue. He compares the emergent Christians to feral animals, animals once domesticated that have returned to the wild. “Attempts to redomesticate them will fail.”
If one takes the Christian-only barrier off the emergent movement, Unitarian Universalists may have found both the reason why congregations haven’t been growing by leaps and bounds and some answers as to how to achieve that growth. It’s not so much about the theology as it is about a way to be a religious community in the new century. People of faith are not tired of faith, spirituality and community. They are tired of church, hierarchy, and bureaucracy.
The most striking thing the entire emergent universe is how much the already existing UU world resembles it and at the same time how much we can still learn from what is going in these congregations.
