Theology and Training in the Vineyard

I love my tribe!  I'm off this week to the 2011 Annual Conference for the Society of Vineyard Scholars, held this year in Seattle.  As I have previously mentioned, the Vineyard has been very active in creating space for engaging theological reflection, conversation and training.  Here is an update of all that I have found that has been happening globally in the Vineyard:

• Vineyard Leadership Institute: As some of you know, I am a graduate of the Vineyard Leadership Institute.  Their Partnership with Asbury Theological Seminary can be applied to the Masters of Divinity and selected Masters of Arts programs.  The Columbus Vineyard and VLI has also recently launched the KDS - Kingdom Discipleship School.
• Vineyard Bible Institute: I have also participating and completed several Vineyard Bible Institute (which originated with our friends in Vineyard South Africa but now resides in the USA) courses.  All of which were really, really great. 
• Vineyard College of Mission: I have friends who have gone through the Vineyard College of Mission in Boise, Idaho as well. 
• Sustainable Faith School of Spiritual Direction: Again, I am an alum of the school of spiritual direction under the leadership of Dave Nixon from Vineyard Central in Cincinnati.  If you’ve been looking for training in this ancient charism of the church, we’d love to have you join us in the coming year. After the training you’ll find yourself listening to people in a whole new way, one that will serve you well if you’re involved in any form of ministry where one-on-one conversation, discernment and prayer matter deeply.
• Heroic Leadership Institute: this is a new initiative of the Vineyard East Region and Pathway Vineyard, who is launching a discipleship school in Maine.
• Society of Vineyard Scholars: of course, I've talked frequently about my on-going involvement in the Society of Vineyard Scholars, and my friend Jason Coker did a post on my paper from the 2010 conference: Signs & Wonders: Wisdom and the Reign of God. 
• The Thoughtworks initiative from Vineyard Canada: Thoughtworks is the theological development group for the Vineyard in Canada to provide a workable path for theological training. Also check out the blog for Thoughtworks Ontario.
• Vineyard Training College: an initiative of our friends in Vineyard New Zealand: Vineyard College primarily offers ministry training by internship and has been equipping people like you for ministry since 1997.
• Vineyard School of Ministry: an opportunity for ministry development and training from the wonderful Vineyard Australia.
• Finally, our cousins across the Pond - Vineyard UK - have launched a new initiative: Vineyard Bible Training - UK, with resources from Derek Morphew to Juliet Barber to N.T. Wright. 

Besides these range of diverse endeavours, the Vineyard has forged historic and new relationships with these schools:

• St. Stephen's University - New Brunswick, Canada
• St. John's College - Nottingham, UK
• Asbury Theological Seminary - Kentucky, USA
• Fuller Theological Seminary - California, USA

All of this is really encouraging...be sure to check it out the plethora of opportunities!  Also, I know many of the leaders within the Vineyard have attended many different schools as well, from Yale and Princeton to Cambridge and the London School of Theology as well as from Gordon-Conwell to Bakke Graduate University...if you know of any others, share with us in the comments!

Not Out of This World

My prayer is not that you take them out of the world, but that you protect them from the evil one.

- Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, from John 17:15

the Pitt 23: Isaiah and Urban Possibility

As I mentioned last time, I have been looking into urban issues in seeking to exegete our community in Pittsburgh that we will be moving to in order to cultivate a spiritual and faith community.  I picked up my copy of Walter Brueggemann's Using God's Resources Wisely to review it again, because I remembered that it deeply dealt with Isaiah's vision of urban possibility.

I'm a big Brueggemann fanboy, so as usual, he's got some serious mojo with this insightful little book.  Anyway, I think there is so much that we can take hold of...so I wanted to share:

comments from Isaiah 58:9-12:
in verse 9b-12, the same "if-then" sequence is repeated one more time. The "if" sounds so conditional. "If you do...it will"; "if you don't...God won't":

• if you remove the yoke
• if you stop all derision and mocking
• if you practice neighborliness among those who seem least qualified to be neighbor...

...the "then" verse of 10-12 is again set up as cause and effect. The poet has discerned something as old as Moses, as passionate as the prophets, as sure as the wisdom teachers. The "if-then" is a rhetorical device to assert that things are indeed connected. What you want in your life is irrevocably connected to neighborliness: no private deals, no isolated benefits, no oases of private good. Then - only then - and the poet launches into Psalm 23. The Lord, the good shepherd, will guide, supply want, lead by living waters, sustain in an arid climate...it is simply astonishing that those who care and are not self-contained but notice the neighbor are permitted to live a life of unburdened freedom; now, only now, in verse 12, our theme of the rebuilt city emerges. So consider the city: Jerusalem, or Milwaukee, or Louisville or Atlanta [or Pittsburgh!]...if you remove the yoke, if you offer food to the hungry, if you deal with the humiliated and afflicted, if you practice a human infrastructure that redefines all the needy as legitimate, eligible neigbors: "if...then"

then commenting on Isaiah 58:13-14:
"if you refrain from tampling the sabbath, from pursuing your own interests on my holy day..."If you do not trample the sabbath." "To tample the sabbath," I take to mean to reduce all life to an operation of production and consumption and to reduce the yoked poor to a useless commodity. Verse 13b sounds like Amos, when the human barrier or sabbath is overridden by the profit motive (Amos 8:4-6). The "if" is reiterated in the second and third lines of verse 13, insisting that sabbath is a barrier against exploitative self-interest. Sabbath and self-interest constitute a dramatic and sharp either/or. The "then" of verse 14 gives the promise and prospect of prosperity, abundance, and communion, the quinessential of a good life, lived fully as God intends. In these concluding verses, the poet reverts to the word pattern of verse 1-3. Again the term 'hps' is used twice in verse 13 for "interest," but this time "delight" in verses 13-14 is a different word ('ng) bespeaking an unutterable orgy of well-being, almost sexual in its sheer delight, pointing to the life-evoking blessing of God, all because of the enacted "if." Some "then."


I remind you...because the text comes up in this prospectus on urban rehabilitation given by Isaiah...these conclusions may seem obvious to you, but they are conclusions that belong to the core of our evangelical reflection:

• For people like us, it is seductively easy to confuse our self-interest with God's delight. Perhaps that is why in verses 1-3 the same word is used for both, but by verses 13-14 the poet uses two different words, in order to deepen the delight and to avoid any confusion between delight and interest. [note: to me, this is the heart of the heresy of the "prosperity gospel"!...that and they treat God like an idol, while teaching others to do the same!]
• The key issues of worship in the community are fundamentally economic. They are not liturgical, and they are not sexual, and they are not even racial. When the poet talks of the future of the city, the key issue is deployment of economic resources. That...is what the church must talk about. I dare suggest that all the smoke screens of other issues are alternative versions of religious posturing that are deceptive acts of disobediance and avoidance.
• At the core of evangelical faith are linkages in reality structured by God...the linkage is in the very fabric of creation, and there is no way out or around it.
• The core connection in the linkage is the poor, destitute neighbor without whom the city cannot rebuild. God's delight is the care that the poor neighbor receives. God's precondition for a safe city and functioning economy, moreover, is the care of that neighbor. I tell you this because it is in the text. I have no liberal ax to grind. It is the irreducible condition of the new city....

...Let me tell you what in fact this text is about. The future of the city, Jerusalem and our own town, hinges on the religious either/or: either redeploy resources according to God's large passion for the hungry, homeless and naked - or endless self-serving that yields no communion, no light, no vindication, no healing, no water, no feeding, no delight, no nothing. I am not a scare preacher. But I remind you of what we know most and best: God is not mocked. One acute mode of mocking is self-serving technological consumerism. Another mocking is self-serving religion, which traffics in vested interests. We know better. The future hangs on a slice of bread, a welcoming bed, a shared coat. The words play against these better words (Matt. 6:25,33):

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you wear...But strive first for the kingdom of God and God's righteouesness [justice], and all these things will be given to you as well."


At the beginning of Isaiah, the poet outlines what God intends for "the city" and what it has become:

• The city as intended by God is for faithfulness, justice and righteousness, for social relations and structures that work for the good of all; in other words, it is a place of rightly deployed resources.
• But the city runs amok, becoming a whore, forasking justice and righteousness, and then comes murder and bribes, disregard of orphans and widows.

What is good?

Embedded in the first reading today on the church calendar is something that has been formed in the essence of who I am becoming in Christ...and it makes my heart sing everytime.  Thought I would share:


First Reading


Micah 6:1-8


    Hear now what the LORD is saying,
         "Arise, plead your case before the mountains,
         And let the hills hear your voice.
    "Listen, you mountains, to the indictment of the LORD,
         And you enduring foundations of the earth,
         Because the LORD has a case against His people;
         Even with Israel He will dispute.
    "My people, what have I done to you,
         And how have I wearied you? Answer Me.
    "Indeed, I brought you up from the land of Egypt
         And ransomed you from the house of slavery,
         And I sent before you Moses, Aaron and Miriam.
    "My people, remember now
         What Balak king of Moab counseled
         And what Balaam son of Beor answered him,
         And from Shittim to Gilgal,
         So that you might know the righteous acts of the LORD."

    With what shall I come to the LORD
         And bow myself before the God on high?
         Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings,
         With yearling calves?
    Does the LORD take delight in thousands of rams,
         In ten thousand rivers of oil?
         Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts,
         The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
    He has told you, O man, what is good;
         And what does the LORD require of you
         But to do justice, to love mercy,
         And to walk humbly with your God?

Sherlock marathon

I'm not much for watching a lot of shows, but I did a marathon of the BBC One Sherlock first series  this weekend - three 90-minutes stories! - and it's brilliant, I'm hooked, absolutely loved it...can't wait for more!

Truth shall rise again

Truth crushed to earth shall rise again,

The eternal years of God are hers;

But Error, wounded, writhes with pain,

And dies among his worshippers.

- William Cullen Bryant

the Pitt 22: Urban Legend

Back in October 2010, I had the privilege of facilitating a workshop on Justice and Human Trafficking at the Vineyard Missions Conference.  At the conference, I got into some great discussions, but the one that has provoked me the most was a few conversations with Roy Conwell and his encouragement and direction in how to exegete my community.  This has been reverberating in my mind as I actually put into practice some of what Dr. Conwell (way to go Roy on earning the Doctorate!) illuminates. 

A particular piece of God wooing us toward Pittsburgh is that we feel called "into the city".  Warnings and conversations with our parents and good friends aside, I sense something bigger going on in all of the "warnings" and fear of the "city". 

So I've been poking and digging around, doing some initial research (i.e., exegeting my community).  In their study regarding religion and sociology, Divided by Faith, Michael Emerson and Christian Smith express the ways in which the fruit of evangelical spirituality and practice seem carried along by an underlying prejudice that seems deeply engrained, which engenders an environment that deepens racialization and segregation; thus making many evangelicals into the kinds of people who are captured by their culture rather than prophetically being God's "peculiar people" in a counter-culture kind-of-way...in many aspects we have merely become trend-followers of the dominant American cultural bias.  I know, this is very controversial for many out there, but I think we must address their well-founded research. 

The Spirit is calling us to push-back and discern, as this prejudice is at such odds with our common "future-focus" in scripture describing the redemption of a diverse community made up of "every nation, tribe, people and language." (see Revelation 7:9)  This is extremely discouraging to me and it makes me want to run screaming, but I can't.  We've heard the call of the Father.  I've felt it.  And this impacts what has all ready been set into motion in terms of what we are going to do in cultivating a faith community in urban Pittsburgh.  We want to participate in the on-going redemption of Jesus Christ, His Mission, which includes redemption and reconciliation whether it be racial, social, environmental, urban or suburban or rural, etc. 

I love how Mark Mulder and Jamie Smith explain how suburbia and exurbia can be just as corrosive a setting as anyplace else, and in fact, recent studies in social research point to "the unique possibilities for community in urban settings."  That's really, really encouraging to us as we seek the peace and flourishing of the city God sends us.  Of course, that brings us to today and the fact that we are also wrestling with another fruit of evangelical practice and spirituality raised by Emerson and Smith: a prejudice that engenders fear of the city.  Their study seems to bring to the fore the fear of urban environments inherent in the mostly suburban and exurban evangelical subculture. This 'anti-city' bias again seems to run counter to our Reign of God hope that locates redemption in a city (Revelation 21:2). 

Now, of course, I own up to being part of a tribe that is mostly evangelical and suburban.  But they're family, and even now I see that we are working on it, seeking to change the trajectory and embrace and cultivate diversity.  I'm headed off to the Society of Vineyard Scholars conference in Seattle in a little over a week, and I know my acquaintance Steve Schenk up in urban Buffalo is taking us to task for our primary suburban-orientation and possibly getting into some of this "fear of the city" that I have been discovering myself.  I look forward to the conversation, because we know that there will still be challenges and bias from the 'burbs to overcome...and we city-folk come with our own bias as well. 

In fact, maybe nowadays - at least according to Becky Nicolaides, an urban scholar - change is perhaps all ready afoot.  She even goes so far to say, "...hell moved from the city to the suburbs," in her survey of urban studies, How Hell Moved from the City to the Suburbs: Urban Scholars and Changing Perceptions of Authentic Community.  This sentiment is also captured in a recent Cutting Edge article: Death by Suburb?  So perhaps its become an "urban legend" that the city is 'hell' incarnate, as the Suburban and Exurban life are being cast in the same role previously given to City life in the American cultural imagination as we speak...

[to be continued...]

Power, Justice and Love

Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.

- Martin Luther King, jr.

surrounding silence

restive is my reality perceiving a penetrating Presence

veiled but not void is the Voice valiant

uttering speechless sounds

speaking respite and renewal;

receiving reprieve and rest

are my tangled, tattered thoughts

hushed but not hollow is Your weighty Word whispered

a solace in my soul found in the Surrounding Silence

I became silent

I found I had less and less to say, until finally, I became silent, and began to listen. I discovered in the silence, the voice of God.

- Soren Kierkegaard

Guarding the Fire Within

I am reflecting on silence this morning, as I enter this new day, and as a light snow continues to fall outside the window.  I have beaten dawn to the morning, and there is a comforting hush in the midst of it as I peer out the window...a silent work that opens the depths and makes my solitude tangible.  In the hidden darkness, God is at work, as the silence of God gives birth to the Word.

Just as the first rays of the morning reach out to illuminate what has lain quiet in the stillness of the night, so too the Word reaches out in this silence to illumine what has been still and quiet in my own depths.  Henri Nouwen once wrote that silence protects and stokes the inner fire, this inner heat - the living Holy Spirit within us.  Silence is a discipline in which we tend to the inner fire.  He speaks of the passionate insight of Vincent van Gogh:

"There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passersby only see a wisp of smoke coming through the chimney, and go along their way.  Look here, now what must be done?  Must one tend the inner fire, have salt in oneself, wait patiently yet with how much impatience for the hour when somebody will come and sit down - maybe to stay?  Let him who believes in God wait for the hour that will come sooner or later."

That we stoke our fires and wait to gather with others to warm ourselves with comfort and consolation and laughter is such a pleasing thought to me.  Thus, perhaps this tending and faithfulness to the inner fire is the silent preparations that lead to the ministry of hospitality.  I also find this silence, as it deepens, to be rather radical.  I want to embrace its revolutionary nature in this moment.  I live in such a verbose culture, where everyone is sharing all of the surface things, random thoughts tweeted and retweeted, blogged about, and Facebooked out.  How utterly subversive is this silence that guards the Fire within. 

 

I want to imbibe deeply on the ancient desert spirituality of my spiritual forebearers, gather the wisdom they pass on to tend my inner Fire, so one last fragment of wisdom today from the spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, this one from Diadochus of Photiki:

"When the door of the steambath is continually left open, the heat inside rapidly escapes through it; likewise the soul, in its desire to say many things, dissipates its remembrance of God through the door of speech, even though everything it says may be good...[i]deas of value always shun verbosity, being foreign to confusion and fantasy.  Timely silence, then, is precious, for it is nothing less than the mother of the wisest thoughts."

I'll end with a piece of verse I am working on, I'm calling it rest in awe for now:

in quietness

your strength is laid bare

toiling with regard to every detail until

like the stillness after  a winter’s overnight snow

you rest in awe from your endeavors

a sacred bath for sustainable faith

Although I've been working on this piece of wordcraft for a while, it came to me again as I was absorbed in the ordinariness of a sacred bath this morning.  I'm currently on a personal week-long retreat at the Convent in Cincinnati; an urban getaway from the pace of my own life, I have relished every retreat I taken here and found rest for my weary frame in the heart and hearth of a welcoming community.

I'm a big, tall guy, so when I have the chance for a nice soak in a very large tub: I take it for all it's worth.  I let my bones soak up the heat and my muscles find a deeper relaxation.  As I entered the steaming-hot water of my fragrant bath, I had set-apart this ordinary thing as a ritual this week to soak and rest and reflect with God.  I could feel God's Presence batheing me as I slipped gently into the piercing hot water.  I'm still reflecting on some of the exchange of that time, but during it I recollected the wordcraft I had been forming and reforming below.  I think it took a more final shaping in the depth of an experience of my sacred bath.

Friends who I have shown this piece of poetry to have asked me why is it that this ends on such a down note emotionally.  My answer has become threefold:

1. The Ache of Beauty.  There is a beauty to the tragically felt not-yet of the present, that I can feel so intensely God's Presence at one moment and feel bereft in His felt Absence at another moment.  It keeps me acheing for more of Him, and related to #2, it keeps me humble.  
2. Posture of Humility.  The up-and-down of God's Presence and Absence keeps me in a posture of humility.  Whatever God gives, I give away and then He fills me back up with good things.  I must never mistake myself as the Giver.  This posture of humility actually plugs me into the deeper dynamic of perceiving what the Father is up to, because I am actively looking for His Help(er)! 
3. Related to number two, I need to remember that - just as Abraham, there go I - I am blessed to be a blessing.  I fill up with God's Presence in order to be present to others and give away what I have graciously been given.  There is great gifting and reciprocity in this mission of Jesus - I forgive because I have been forgiven; I am merciful, because mercy has been showered upon me; when I join Jesus, I am sent out for the sake of the world. I am the conduit, the ambassador, the sent one.  But my status as a sent one keeps me coming back to the Wholly Other One who has sent me.

and now: a sacred bath

bathed in a sensuous stillness

rushing deep through my labyrinth

-a cavernous interior-

the profound, cleansing silence

even now scouring my soul

while my spirit succumbs

as i find myself

suffused in an unknowing

arising from the compelling Mystery

through which a hidden Craftsman

patiently labours

in the waiting waters

of a sacred bath

this fertile womb of the silence of God

gives birth to His Word

an invigorating that engenders

the impossible

Immanence and Transcendence woven together

which emerges from the ground of my being

meeting that which arrives

[breakthrough from a distant horizon]

the attendant recognition of the Sacred One

pervades my depth

like the awareness of the Holy

filling the earth

while a peace that surpasseth

all understanding

calms the anxious façade

which barely reflects the serene intimacy 

buried beneath this broken ewer

New Vineyard Spotlight series at Justice Response/VAST blog premieres

I don't usually cross-post a lot of the material that is going on over at the Justice Response/Vineyard Anti-Slavery Team blog, but I wanted to make sure everyone knew about the new "Vineyard Spotlight" series.  The new series interviews pastors, churchplanters, ministry leaders and activists who are involved in Justice minsitries.  Our hope is that their stories, ministry-ideas and wrestling with the difficult issues of engaging in Justice ministry will help others to engage.  The new series debuts today with part 1 of our interview with Vineyard churchplanter Tom Camacho.

Better to illuminate

"Better to illuminate than merely to shine."

- Thomas Aquinas