Monthly Archives: May 2009

Consortium on the Emerging Church

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Rev. Howard Bess discusses the sociological impact of the Emergent Church movment on Cosortiumnews.com.  Rev.  Bess gives a nice summary and introduction for those who might still be new to the Emergent movement. He raises the question of whether the Emergents are truly a subsection of the Evangelical movement or a new entity on the American religious landscape.  I think the latter and I have to edfa agree with those who think the days of Evangelical Christianty’s hold on America is slowly coming to end.  Emergents and other similar movements will replace it.

A film analogy for pastoral leadership

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Next Reformation blog shares an interesting analogy for pastoral leadership from Reg McNeal’s  Missional Renaissance that compares contemporary ministers to film producers whereas in the past ministers were movie directors.

Quotes are pulled from McNeal:

“Hollywood Directors are project managers. The work with all phases and components of filmmaking to produce a movie. … Very little happens without the director’s attention.

“Producers play a different role. They find great stories, recruit talent, raise capital, negotiate with studios, and hire directors to bring ideas to life.

Directors,  aren’t bad, the post/book says, but this ministerial role limits the reach of the church.  Yes – and No.  McNeal’s analogy seems (and I confess to not having read his book yet) to over look the dynamics of church size to ministry.  In smaller churches, ministers are involved in everything out of necessity, yet as a church grows, out of a family size church (5o active members / Sunday attendance or less) into a pastoral size church (50-150) and then into a program (150-500) and corporate size church (500+), it will only do so by having a “producer” ministry that finds “directors” to help bring ideas and various areas and parts of a congregation’s work and mission to life.

So, it’s circular in a sense.  The ministerial role limits the reach of the church, but the size of the church usually has attendant internal dynamics that limits (in the sense of setting boundaries) the ministerial role.  A classic chicken or the egg situation.

A Change of Theme and Perspective

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Since you are reading Sunflower Chalice, you’re noticing the new WordPress theme. It’s called “mondo-zen.” It seems every year in the summer I get the urge to change the theme on this blog.  I left it alone last year, but this year I had to do it.  The blog had gotten too “busy.” I had too many widgets, and it was fun to play around with them and keep up with what I was reading and what movies I was watching from Netflix, but like my life in general the blog had become, well, cluttered.  It was time to do some spring cleaning.   I had spent a good month or more away from my own blog here at the Sunflower due to a project with a ministers’ study group that also involved blogging.  That caused me to focus on a paring down. I worked a simple theme with that blog in content and color and when I was able to return this blog, I knew the overstuffed closet atmosphere of the Sunflower Chalice was going to change. I will miss my rotating header and the photos I had there, but not too much.  I am trying to be less attached. It’s time for electronic as well as spiritual pruning.

Last week our church staff went on a staff outing to the Fort Worth Botanic Garden. I will be returning soon, and often.  It is a refuge in the middle of the north Texas urban sprawl.  I discovered that you can learn a lot by walking through a garden. You can learn a lot by both walking quietly and mindfully and sitting mindfully.  You can also learn some interesting things from the signage.

I’ve always been drawn to waterfalls.  There aren’t a lot of them where I’m from in central Massachusetts, but I have jumped off and over some of the ones that can be found – reckless and rather stupid from the perspective of my adulthood – but perspective is something a waterfall will give you when you travel around it.  When I encountered this one in the constructed rainforest at the Botanic Garden’s massive greenhouse, I knew from my experience as a tourist at other falls such as Niagra that I wanted to get shot from the front and back.  I spent time looking at the water fall from the front and then looking at it fall from the back and watching it blur the view of where I’d just been.  How differently we see when something is in the way.

Front view

Front view

Fall behind

Fall behind

On the way to the Japanese Garden we had to pass the Rose Garden.  The only time in life you are promised a rose garden is when you go to a rose garden.  We skipped the roses that day to spend time, or actually suspend time in the Japanese Garden. Just being there was a zen expereince.  I sat for a while.

Japanese Garden

Japanese Garden

I walked for bit, very slowly, as I in the last days of my heavy walking boot with my broken foot, and I even joked around about not being able to stay on the paved walk ways (because some of them were made out of wood).  It was so peaceful we had to drag ourselves away to lunch and only because my healing broken foot was getting sore and tired and it was still a long walk back to the car.  A healthy foot and there’s a good chance you’re not reading this and I’m still there living off the fish in the pond.

Fountain

Fountain

I loved this fountain. I reminded me of a baptismal font.  I began to think of how UU Churches could incorporate moving water into sanctuary design.  Water has such a calming effect.  Some of our older churches still have big stone baptismal fonts.  Some of these have been turned into sand recepticles for candles of joy and concern.  We have fire in the chalice flame and candles of joy and concern. Water would make a nice elemental balance.

Cultivars

Cultivars

This sign about “cultivars” caught my attention.  Some plants can’t survive without human intervention and attention. Hmmm.  Reminded me a bit of congregations, human relationships, and human being in general.  We just don’t do well in isolation and untended.

Pathway sign

Pathway sign

Whatever your path, it’s important to stay on it.  Spirituality is a discipline.  The spiritual life doesn’t “just happen.” I had my first meeting in over ten years with a spiritual director this past week.  The last time I was in formal spiritual direction was in a specifically Catholic setting. Now I am a Unitarian Universalist and my spiritual director is a mainline Christian. We spent our first session getting to know each other.  It’s hard sometimes, but you have be up front in Texas about where you’re coming from spiritually.  We got along well and I am looking forward to journeying for a while with this person. I have had a difficult time this year making it to the zen sitting group I wanted to practice with here and this is renewing my energy to schedule my time around that as well.  Getting settled in and then my broken foot really hampered my efforts in this area (not to mention that it’s an hour each way to the Maria Kannon Zen Center), but I am comitted to recommitting.  I have never stopped sitting every day, I just haven’t been able to make it to a sangha or dokusan and it’s beyond time to get back.

I am taking my time with a thorough reading of the Tao Te Ching again for the first time since the early 1990s when I bought a copy upon arriving at divinity school.  I read it while preparing for the UU Ministerial Fellowship Committee, but it wasn’t a soul reading, it was a content reading and with something like this, that really doesn’t count.

I am also reading Riding the Dragon: 10 Lessons for Inner Strength in Challening Times by Robert Wicks. Wicks has been one of my favorite spiritual writers since I heard him speak at an in-service training for Catholic high school teachers during my first year of teaching back in 1994-95.

The Dallas Principles

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Like a lot of things these days, I learned about it through email even though it happened in my own backyard.  The Dallas Principles were drafted just over a week ago by activists from around the country here in Texas as a manifesto and call to action for GLBT rights without delay.  It’s time to put up or shut up, America.  Bold, decisive, is everyone equal or not? No religious reasons for inequality in the civic arena, no reasons about waiting until people can get used to the idea, just lay it on the line – it’s time once again for America to decide if it’s going to live up to its rhetoric. Nice.  I like it. I signed on as a supporter.  It was also pretty cool to see former Massachusetts State Senator Jarrett Barrios as one of the authors of this declaration.

Here are The Dallas Principles:

1.Full civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals must be enacted now.  Delay and excuses are no longer acceptable.

2.We will not leave any part of our community behind.

3.Separate is never equal.

4.Religious beliefs are not a basis upon which to affirm or deny civil rights.

5.The establishment and guardianship of full civil rights is a non-partisan issue.

6.Individual involvement and grassroots action are paramount to success and must be encouraged.

7.Success is measured by the civil rights we all achieve, not by words, access or money raised.

8.Those who seek our support are expected to commit to these principles.

Support the Dallas Principles by signing the pledge here.


I don’t know when I first became such an advocate for GLBT rights. It was probably in divinity school, when I first came to understand the injustices faced by the GLBT community and realized the importance of being an ally.  Until all are equal, none are equal.  All injustices are intertwined.  Where I stand now, where I live now, and how I live now as a person of faith – I am called, invited, compelled to work and live in such a way that a world is created where there is no lesser person.

Birthday poems

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Every year on my birthday, for the last decade or more now, I read two poems.  They have become anniversary presents to myself.  Prayers of thanksgiving for life.  They are reminders of my past and at the same time a call to stay in the present moment and be grateful for the chance to be here yet again in another year – each moment, each year a precious gift.

Dylan Thomas’ Poem in October reminds me of growing up not only in Massachusetts, but spending summers in Mattapoisett on Buzzard’s Bay, just before Cape Cod juts out into the Atlantic.  There were more swirling seagulls than herons priesting shore, and what birthdays I spent there were in Spring not Autumn, but this poem has always felt like it sprang from a similar vein from a familiar heart.  Poem in October helps to slowly count the years as well.  It is now my 43rd year to heaven.  I began the tradition of reading this annually on the morning of my 30th birthday.

Mary Oliver’s The Summer Day is my great prayer to stay grounded.  That in itself is enough work on most days.  Sit down, be quiet and pay attention.  The Summer Day reminds me of the scale of the very great and the very small and that they are one and the same and that they are both within me and surround me.  I too will eventually die at last, and too soon, whenever that happens to be, although hopefully many years from now.  All life, including mine, is precious. What will I do with it? What am I doing with it? Good questions to ask myself, at the very least once a year.  Have I knelt down in the grass lately? Today is a good day.

It's all about branding

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I was sitting here reading dailyKos, waiting for my family to be done with American Idol, so I could watch the end of the Celtics play-off game, when I noticed something different about the GOP elephant next to the stories about Republicans. It wasn’t an elephant, it was a dinosaur. I’ve been reading Kos for a couple of weeks now and not noticing the change, which speaks to how well, the image plays off the old logo, to how little attention I look at the pictures, and how amazingly creative this is. Kos calls the image and the party it represents the GOPosaur. Read the kick-off post for the image here.

Goposaur

Goposaur

Sing all the verses

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Bruce Springsteen (who else, America’s theologian laureate) giving his introduction at Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday party recently and noting that while rehearsing for their performance earlier this year at President Obama’s inauguration, Seeger made sure to mention he wanted to sing “all the verses” of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” including “the two that always get left out.”

I preached a sermon about “This Land is Your Land” once on a July 4th weekend and how I thought it should be the National Anthem, specifically because of those two verses.

Bruce’s intro is sharp. Seeger is a man who truly has never let America forget all its verses.

National Day of (Interfaith) Prayer

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This evening I will participate in the inaugural event of the North East Tarrant Interreligious Association.  We will hold a National Day of Prayer Service on Southlake Town Square in Southlake, TX. Many National Day of Prayer Events are related to the National Day of Prayer Task Force and associated with folks like fundamentalists such as Shirley Dobson and right wing groups such as Focus on the Family.  It is primarily a Christian event.

Our event seeks to be an interfaith event and have a broader theological and more inclusive scope.  Showing that prayers for our country and even concern for the military don’t just come from the right wing, our even will contain prayers for those concerns as well.

Because many events in our area are prayer breakfasts for the more widely known and conservative event, our event is in the evening.

Here is the program for the event.

And here is my prayer from near the beginning of the program on Respecting Differences:

Spirit of Life, we gather in this place at this hour to bear witness that love knows no lesser person. Gathered here in one strong body we are the living presence of a right and freedom of spirit as old as America, as ancient as the land, and still waiting to be born-the right for each soul to know and worship ultimate reality in its own way, the freedom of every heart to search for truth and meaning without fear of ridicule or reprisal. Source of compassion, open our hearts and minds, and help us create an even more diverse and tolerant tomorrow where sexual orientation is no barrier to love and acceptance, where theist and atheist work together for love and justice, where the dreams we dream together for a more peaceful future are more important than any religious, ethnic, racial or other difference.

Spirit of Community, help us to banish otherness, to look inside ourselves at what we fear in difference, to understand those fears and anxieties and to overcome them. Help us to overcome hatred based on ignorance. Foster in us a desire to genuinely know and understand our neighbors and to accept them as they are, not as we want them to be.

Bless us with kindness. Bless us with courage. Bless us with compassion. Bless us with community.

Bless us with the fire of commitment to walk through difficult times together, even when members of our own communities say we should not befriend others who are different.

This we ask in the name of all that is light and love, glorious and good. So may it be and Amen.