Category: Christian Church

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Help wanted!

I got this CrossLeft request. Do it!

Seminarians! Enthusiastic volunteers! Readers of CrossLeft! Christians fed up with Pat Robertson!
Do you have any experience with writing, publishing, or advertising? CrossLeft.org, a hub for Progressive Christian networking and activism, needs a Press Director. Like all of our jobs at CrossLeft, this on doesn’t come with any money (yet), and its hours are flexible to the needs of dissertating-writing grad students, thoughtful seminarians, working mothers, stay-at-home moms, retirees, real live preachers, OR full-time paid careerists. What we need is someone whose passion is the movement and whose calling is to communicate clearly, coherently, and persuasively with the press. Progressive Christians are sick of reading in the newspaper that Pat Robertson’s calls for hurricanes represents the majority of Christian opinion. CrossLeft is determined to get out our own speakers — young, geographically and ethnically diverse Christian voices, and experienced older voices not yet heard in the media.

We need a volunteer to help us write press releases and stay in touch with journalists. If interested, please contact jo [at] crossleft [period] org. Other volunteer opportunities are listed at http://www.crossleft.org/?q=forum/49

Got a Progressive Christian organization that needs volunteers, interns, or paid staff? Post your own opportunities at http://www.crossleft.org/?q=connections !

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Church websites should have details for Sunday servers

I love churches in odd places — remote places, temporary chaplaincies, non-English speaking lands — in part because I like to see how churches deal with unusual situations, and especially small constituencies. Plus, these churches rarely have the “luxury” of sectarianism. Sometimes you get good ideas about managing small churches in more familiar locales. Anglican churches, via Anglicans Online, are the easiest to find.

I was reading through the list of churches of the Church of England, Diocese of Europe, and lighted on St. Ursula’s Church, Berne. Because I have Swiss German ancestors? No, because I love the name Ursula. (As in Andress.)

Well, the Bearnese church website isn’t super-60s-sexy (indeed, it is rather 1996 plain) but it does have a feature that a church dependent on a Sunday servers (volunteers) should have.

Note its “rota” (rotation) schedule, “Guidelines for those leading intercessions,” an illustrated and detailed “Setting up altar, credence table, and font,” and “Duty Council member’s duties” with its admonition that this duty is enough; no counting the offering, too!

OK, it isn’t often that your UU congregation will use the font (you do have one?) for keeping the Eucharistic gifts, so I’m highlighting the detail.

Have you seen any churches with similarly-detailed direction? Of course, I would really love it if such a church offered their guide under a generous licence for others to emulate and adapt.

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Lutherans without a building; keeping mission

I was a childhood nominal Lutheran. LCA Lutheran. The people who brought you Davey and Goliath. The people who provided my life insurance policy, first through Lutheran Brotherhood, and now its with-the-Missouri-Synod successor, Thrivent Financial for Lutherans. I like reading the Thrivent Magazine I get.
It has some church news. I noted the news of the fifty-year-old inner city Chicago ELCA that has a bivocational minister and takes a sometimes familiar tack to accomodation.

True to its mission, Christ the King, an ELCA congregation with about 30 members, has never owned a building. Instead, the congregation has worshiped in more than 10 rented spaces over 50 years, including office buildings and community rooms.

A short read. Interesting. “No Walls” by Sarah Asp.

Christ the King Lutheran Church, ELCA

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Bad, if candid, news from the Disciples

The last couple of weeks have been less than sunny for Unitarian Universalist bloggers, as a good number have responded to ChaliceChick’s appeal to fix Unitarian Universalism. I think it is a good corrective to the all-sunshine, all-the-time attitiude that makes hurt feelings, miscommunication, and unfulfilled hopes (I’m thinking of the bruhaha involving some of the youth at the last General Assembly) a full-bore occasion for soul searching and sickeningly sweet crepe-hanging reports. My take? Life is sometimes hard and people are sometimes bad, yet God loves us even when we’re not so sure we can stand the sight of one another. Unitarian Universalists make me the semi-Calvinist I am.

All of which is by way of preface to a report by Verity A. Jones, publisher and editor of DisciplesWorld,the Disciples of Christ’s defacto denominational magazine. It is an unhappy but candid, necessary, and sober recount of their situation, particularly in light of the bankruptcy of the Disciples service arm, the National Benevolent Association. We don’t have an analog; but the NBA had to sell almost all of its nursing homes, low-income housing, and residential program facilities. That’s shocking. And there’s other bad news, but some good news (more about that later) and a lack of clarity.

Oh, here’s one of many quotations I could pull to suggest that we’re not alone with our problems

It’s not so much the lack of a cohesive theological outlook that worries me—our churches can be, in fact, quite attractive to seekers and thinkers, because we don’t tell people what to believe.  And I say, Amen to that!.  My concern is that we can’t seem to move beyond tolerance to real dialogue and engagement with our diverse beliefs. We disbanded the one general body that was given the task of helping the church think together theologically years ago. Now we live in this place of just knowing that lots of Disciples disagree about who Jesus is and what Jesus did and how we should follow Jesus today, and so we seethe with frustration and sometimes anger about what others believe, and rant and rave to like-minded folks rather than actually engaging in substantive theological conversation about our different beliefs.  It’s as if we are afraid to talk about our theological differences because if we do we might split, but the reality is that because we don’t talk about our theological differences, those differences just become more entrenched.  Might real theological engagement actually bring us closer together?

I’m bringing this up because I wonder if we could take the same word if and when we need to hear it.

Verity Jones’ address: The state of the church

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Progressive Christian Brunch remembered

Jo Guldi blogged about the brunch that she convened, and that Hubby and I attended. (The drinks pictured are ours: Hubby’s bloody and my decaf.) There were a few small factual errors — Hubby’s name, the fact that I’m not a Unitarian, and that Philocrites isn’t clergy — but none more than calling conversation with another brunch attendee (over the utility of demonstrations like the one were a number of clergy were arrested in DC a few weeks back; I think they are dated, useless, over-staged political theater) furous. She ain’t seen me in a furious debate.

All in all, though, a useful way to organize.

Report from Progressive Christian Brunch

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CrossLeft brunch

Hubby and I had brunch with five others here in Washington around the CrossLeft.org — “organizing the Christian Left” — action (movement? organization?) to meet and help form networks.

So start by reading CrossLeft.org

I’ll see how I can get the news aggregator on this site, and work up directions for others.

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Pagans, Christians, and the cost of temple administration

The 1998 PBS series, From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians continues to impress me, and I’ll still point people to the legacy website. Good to keep bookmarked if you study theology, teach in church, or preach.
A particular page called Why Did Christianity Succeed? The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Considers History — excerpted from Rodney Stark’s 1996 The Rise of Christianity — stands out because he questions the wisdom that Christianity became dominant over pagan cultus because of Constantine’s establishment. Rather, Christianity seems to have won a popular place that Constantine consolidated. Also, Stark contends it wasn’t miracles or martyrs that made people Christians but a kind of administration that people could up hold (he cites the ruinous costs of pagan religious exercises), a leadership that was close to the common people, and the claims that Christianity (and Judaism) made towards conversion rather than mere adherence (itself a product of how deity is understood.)

It don’t lift the article up in a “look at those silly Pagans; their religion fell apart” way, but because the same thing could very easily happen to Christianity as we know it in the United States. When the faith takes on a corporate (as in business) gloss, a reputation for high costs and endless fund-raising, and a pandering uncertainty about where it stands, the future doesn’t look good.

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Big Gay Question

What else could I call this post, in which I follow up to Peter J. Walker’s gracious comment? For context, see the article he wrote on his blog, worldspeak.

The Big Gay Question with respect to Christian faith might be the biggest question Christians have to face in our lifetimes; it isn’t the most pressing (mission, perhaps) or important (poverty?) issue, but because it wraps up issues of individual autonomy, the creation and dissolution of family and community, primal issues of safety and sex, Christian authority and liberty, and the use of political power in human relationships — it is hard to find a more deeply knotted issue. Add two well-organized and resolute “sides” and you get the makings of a fight.

And I don’t want to fight because I’m Christian and gay, one’s not going to go away at the expense of the other. As a Unitarian Universalist Christian, I’m already used to being thought an ontological impossibility. I don’t like that either, but better to be clear, if sometimes uncomfortable, and engage in respectful, measured speech.

But here’s the thing: gays and Christians — at least those with a vocation — are both likely to make a lot of other people uncomfortable. Neither is going to “go away.” Neither has a perfect track record of doing right by themselves, or truthfully (on the whole) of the other.