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…

U Turn

I started in Richard Foster's book "The Celebration of Discipline" and realized I needed to set the book aside. I had a difficult time connecting with Foster. Things got off to an amazing start. I appreciated the sentiments Foster captured through words such as, "We have only one thing to do, namely, to experience a life of relationship and intimacy with God" (4). In fact, he went so far as to note that the spiritual disciples "are central to experiential Christianity" (1). Given my passion for creating experiential, participatory worship experiences this seemed right up my alley. I was even transfixed with many of Foster's words in his second chapter on meditation. "In meditation," Foster noted, "we are sinking down into the light and life of Christ and becoming comfortable in that position" (19). That image worked for me given my interest in centering prayer. By the third chapter on prayer, Foster had largely lost me. He admittedly defined prayer one-dimensionally. He only discused intercessory prayer. As a panentheist, I also had difficulty connecting with Foster's transcendant theology. He also used evaluative words that judged certainly expressions of prayer. While Foster began positively by stating "God always meets us where we are and slowly moves us along into deeper things", just 2 paragraphs later Foster is establishing a standard for "correct prayers" when he noted, "certain things will happen in history f we pray rightly" (35). He later asserted that "real prayer is something we learn" (36). Much of this approach seems to negate the honest and passionate cries of the soul that are not "learned" but rather felt. In his section titled "Learning to Pray", he added, "I saw that when praying for others there was evidently no room for indecisive, tentative, half-hoping, 'If it be thy will' prayers'" (37). While I can on some level appreciate what he was trying to get at (i.e. enter confidently into God's presence with the Spirit's leading), I felt like Foster's approach was one that could actually backfire and discourage folks from developing their prayer life out of a fear of "not doing it right". I may come back to Foster's work at a later time, but for now it was clear that his book was not the place for me at this juncture in my spiritual journey. On a side note, after not having a spiritual director for the past 3 1/2 years, today I finally found a wonderful spiritual director with whom I'll work (Thanks Joanne for the wonderful recommendation). It seems as if my new spiritual director is a God send as she (Sharon) also shares a passion for the mystics. I also have a heart-felt desire to spend the next month delving deeper into my practices of centering prayer and the lectio divina. I feel good about the directions the spirit is leading me as I tend to my own spiritual state. Tomorrow, I'll begin to explore Doug Pagitt's book "Preaching Re-Imaged" which I ordered a few weeks ago. It finally arrived! I know this will take me off on a slight tangent from my recent explorations of spiritual formation. It will be exciting to explore yet another dimension of the worship from an emergent perspective. Til next time...

Clarity

What an amazing week this has been: a week of profound growth in my self-awareness. As you probably know from my earlier posts, this past week began with a sense of serious angst as I grappled with whether or not there was a place for a non-creedally oriented person such as myself within the emerging cultures. I thought I arrived at a place of personal understanding and acceptance yesterday via my electronic conversations with Karen Ward. Today, however, within two conversations (one with Richard Foster via his book "Celebration of Discipline" and one in a face-to-face conversation with my friend Laurene) I had a much greater understanding of my place. Let me take a moment and let you know how I found this place. Several years ago I began to struggle to find a location for myself within the modern, mainline culture. Much of this had to do with the sense that the defining piece of their spiritual experience seemed to lie in their intellect. As a person who had been seriously marginalized by the modern, mainline church; I began to seriously grapple with whether the God-given intellect could - in and of itself - really provide the kind of deliverance it espoused (i.e. overcome the various -isms and oppressions). What I found is that in reality such an intellectually driven model often settled for simply exchanging excluded groups (i.e. "Now we'll accept gays and lesbians but drive out those with a different theological understanding than we have such: translation Evangelicals and/or Republicans"). Needless to say, as a person who had experienced and known the devastating pain of exclusion first hand, I was not a big fan of this approach. So I dug into my theological explorations from seminary and began to explore the historic traditions of evangelicals. The initial appeal was that in their early days in the United States, the evangelical community was among one of the most progressive presences on the continent! Their efforts to embrace the dynamic workings of the Spirit caused them to push aside many of the traditional practices that excluded folks like women and people of color - both within the church and the larger society. In the 19th Century, the evangelical community was light years ahead of most folks within the Christian community in envisioning what the Reign of God might really look like. Their participation in the Social Gospel movement was theologically and culturally revolutionary. "I want to be a part of such an expansive and visionary faith movement," I thought. There was only one problem with that notion, however. We no longer live in the 19th Century. The more I explored aspects of the contemporary evangelical communities, the more I found that many 21st Century evangelicals tend to define faithfulness largely by adherence to a particular interpretation of the Scriptures and through allegiance to the historic creeds. While I respect the earnest and faithful attempts for folks to live out their faith within such communities, I realized this movement is not where my heart lies nor where the Spirit is leading me. Today, I realized the essence of my spirituality lies primarily within the tradition of the mystics - a tradition that emphasizes the first hand experience of God. The moment I came to this realization following a 3 hour conversation with my amazing friend Laurene, there was an amazing sense of peace and joy that washed over my soul - to quote John Wesley, a "warming of the heart". It's not that I no longer want to use my intellect. Far from it. It's just that I want to spiritually balance the role of the intellect with the other ways in which we experience God. Nor is it that I will be dismissive of the sacred writings of our tradition or the historic creeds. I will, however, see them as expressions of others' experience of the God of Jesus - expressions that invite me further into my own first hand experience of God. The implications on this for my unfolding ministry? I realize that the role of a pastor is to join individuals on their spiritual paths and walk with them on their journey. I believe my increased self-awareness will allow me to better do that. I can walk with folks from a variety of mainline and evangelical perspectives and celebrate their experiences of God without feeling pressured to adopt their driving/defining values as the basis of my own ministry. I know this probably sounds like old hat for many of you reading this entry, but for me this location of myself within the tradition of the mystics was truly an epiphany. Ironically many of the things often identified as postmodern (i.e. aversion for labels, an understanding of God that transcends the individual, etc) have been defining features of the mystics for millenia. It only took me my first 40 years to figure this out :) Thank goodness God is patient with me. While I've read the first three chapters of Richard Foster's "The Celebration of Disciple", I'll save those reflections for tomorrow so as not to overwhelm you. Thanks for allowing me this space to process important insights that will guide me through the last five weeks of my sabbatical and well beyond. Til next time...

Finding My Place

What a great weekend sabbath I had in the midst of my sabbatical! I had an amazing time of rest and renewal with one of my closest friends, Andrea, in Scottsbluff, NE. The best part of the weekend was that I was able to do some important personal work in finding my way in the midst of my spiritual explorations in the emerging communities. A huge piece of this started with an email exchange I had with Karen Ward. I expressed my frustration about my failure to find a non-creedal branch of the emerging movement. I finally asked point blank: "Is there a place in the emerging cultures for those of us who are non-creedal." She said, "Yes", and then encouraged me to start a UCCmergent site through the http://www.facebook.com website. I don't know much about this form of electronic communty, but I immediately created the website as a sort of hook in the water. Karen also referred me to a UCC pastor in Scottsdale, AZ. We'll see if those of us non-creedally oriented emerging folk can find each other. This whole experience has raised a red flag for me about the emergent movement. It seems - like many of us including myself - that their rhetoric about authenticity and commitment to dialogue and narrative is much more limited than you might first realize. The movement has been so dominated by white, middle class, heterosexual males who come at this from a place of privilege. I'm still wondering about their ability to connect with marginalized communities. I am so thankful for Karen Ward's presence because she brings an awareness to the movement (i.e. gender and race issues) that would probably otherwise gone unaddressed. Anyway, it feels like I am finding my way into some form of authentic emergent community. I thank you readers for wrestling with me on this issue. I'm sure there are times when you would have liked to say, "Move on, Craig." I feel like I finally am. I just had to work through these issues before I could move on. This week (and probably next week as well) I'll spend most of my time exploring the work of Richard Foster regarding spiritual formation. I'll start with his book "Celebration of Discipline". I have lots of wonderful meetings this week with a variety of folks who will add many things to my journey. I'm particularly excited about the possibility of finding a spiritual diretor this week. I've been without one since 2004. We'll see Wednesday if the spirit is leading me back to this important form of work. Til next time...