Blessed Time w/ Others

I switched gears this week in my studies. Instead of spending the bulk of my time with my nose in a book, I spent the bulk of my team talking with folks about issues related to my sabbatical studies. Let me tell you about three meetings I had yesterday. As you might remember from my earlier posts, I had been desperately searching for a non-creedal voice within the emergent communities the last several days. Karen Ward had referred me to a UCC pastor named Scott Elnes in Scottsdale Arizona earlier in the week. Scott serves the Scottsdale Congregational United Church of Christ. Well, out of the blue Scott called yesterday and we talked for nearly 30 minutes. Scott’s community is the group that produced the Phoenix Affirmations (which you can find at http://www.crosswalkamerica.org/pafull.htm). Scott has written a few books exploring both worship (“Igniting Worship: The Seven Deadly Sins” and the article “Incarnational Worship” in the book “From Nomads to Pilgrims”) and theology (“The Phoenix Affirmations: A New Vision for the Future of Christianity” and “Asphalt Jesus: Finding a New Christian Faith Along the Highways of America”). We talked about a lot of things during our conversation (i.e. our experience as non-creedal people feeling outside the bounds of the emerging movement, our commitment to experiential worship, our desires and efforts to help co-create inclusive worshipping communities). Needless to say, the conversation was an answer to prayer. I’m feeling much more connected. In the afternoon, I had a wonderful 2 hour lunch with John Fiscus. We spent the time exploring how we might be able to bring enhanced spiritual formation efforts into the local church. Through the conversation we envisioned wonderful things including a rough model for a spiritual formation group, a Advent/Lenten study, and a structure to support worship teams in the attempts to be more spiritually aware of the components of worship experiences. It felt good to flesh out some of the ideas I had been kicking around regarding spiritual formation in postmodern times. I ended the day by attending the Theology Pub downtown. This was my second time at the Pub. There again were about a dozen of us. There was just one other person who had been there last month, so I got a taste of the fluidity of the community. The special guest for the evening was Dr. Ann Brock, a scholar on Mary Magdalene. The conversation and the community was wonderful. I especially appreciated the talk about how we as spiritual leaders can bring information to our faith communities in pastorally sensitive ways that can foster excitement and growth rather than pull the rugs out from individuals. While this of course is an ongoing challenge, I felt an amazing sense of commitment to this issue from the group. Some of you might be wondering why I’ve spent most of my energy in my postings responding to ideas within the written pages of books as opposed to reflecting on specific conversations and worship experiences I’ve had. I’ve done this for two reasons. First, I want to honor the confidentiality (and the integrity of our face to face conversation) by not trying to represent all that occurred. I feel it would be unfair of me to try to capture the essence of the other person without his or her participation. I feel like when I respond to written information that’s been obviously made public, this doesn’t violate these concerns. Second, I’ve held back talking about the worship gatherings I’ve attended out of fear that elements of the services I mentioned might be treated as models – or ways of doing things for our community. To me, this approach would violate the very spirit of the emergent communities that are based around authentic, communal expressions of the individual and group’s spirituality. I’m hoping that my larger thoughts will motivate and inspire our community at Mountain View to explore our own ways of creating worship. I’ll follow my stated intentions to do a better job taking a Sabbath in the midst of my sabbatical, so I won’t post again until Monday. Grace and peace to you all during the weekend and beyond. Til next time…