Tag: community

Why I Hang in There

I hang in there for several reasons. First, if I want to be affiliated with any group of human beings, sooner or later I will be associated with bigotry, intolerance, violence, stupidity, and pride. In fact, even if I stand alone, distancing myself from every other group, I know that within me there are the seeds of all these things. So there’s no escaping the human condition.

Second, if I were to leave to join some new religion that claims to have – at last! – perfected the way of being pristine and genuine through and through, we all know where that’s going to lead. There’s one thing worse than a failed old religion: a naïve and arrogant new one. In that light, maybe only religions that have acknowledged and learned from their failures have much to offer.

From My Take: Why I support Anne Rice but am still a Christian – Religion – CNN.com Blogs.

Leaving ELCA (or not)

Out of 10.230 congregations in ELCA, 199 have already taken two votes and decided to leave ELCA due to its decision at Church Wide Assembly 2009. When this is written 136 are in the process of making the second vote to leave after having passed the first. This means that in case all of the 136 decide to leave, ELCA has decreased in number of congregations by 3.2%.

What would be an interesting statistics in comparison with this number, is the number of members that have left. My assumption is that congregations that are most likely to leave are on average larger than those that stay. This is of course only a feeling, based on only one example (UALC) and a gut feeling about the nature of congregations. Of course I might be wrong.

based on pretty good lutherans » Blog Archive » ELCA by-the-numbers and numbers from the ELCA site.

Relational Youth Ministry

Andrew Root’s article “Reexamining Relational Youth Ministry: Implications from the Theology of Bonhoeffer” is an excellent reminder that youth ministry should not be about creating a place of influence but a place of sharing. The question the church must ask according to Root is:

Will we seek to hire young, magnetic individuals who can use relationships as a means to an end, or will we, all of us (youth workers, volunteers, and congregation members), bravely take the initiative to walk into the center of adolescents’ deepest sufferings and joys, standing with and for them, sharing their place? In this way relationships are an end, the concrete presence of Christ in the world.

Word & World –  Summer 2006.

The Self Interests of Congregations

A paper called “Church Based Organizing: A Strategy for Ministry” presented be the Gamaliel Foundation, makes an interesting claim about the new focus of congregations:

Fifty years ago, the self interest of the church was to respond to the problems of poverty, poor schools, lack of health care etc. affecting its people. Today the self interest is still there; but a more powerful self interest is the very survival of the congregation.

Here is more about Gamaliel Foundation.

Ríki, samfélag, þjóð og þjóðkirkja

Óformleg samfélagshlutverk hennar eru aftur á móti mörg, þau standa öllum til boða og eru endurgjaldslaus: Þjóðkirkjan rekur öflugt barna- og unglingastarf með tvímælalaust forvarnargildi. Með sálgæslu býður hún upp á stuðningsþjónustu fyrir þau sem glíma við lífsvanda af ýmsu tagi. Með kærleiksþjónustu (díakóníu) hefur hún á síðustu áratugum veitt þeim sem standa höllum fæti aukinn félagslegan stuðning. Með innanlandsaðstoð Hjálparstarfs kirkjunnar hefur hún byggt upp vaxandi efnahagsaðstoð við þau sem búa við skort. Í helgihaldi býður hún öllum sem þiggja vilja griðarstað og griðarstund í stríðum straumi áreita og krafna daglegs lífs. Þetta eru allt gild rök fyrir þjóðkirkjuskipan. #

Í annars góðri grein Hjalta Hugasonar um Ríki, samfélag, þjóð og þjóðkirkju bendir hann á ofangreint sem helstu rökin fyrir þjóðkirkjuskipaninni. Þessi rök eru hins vegar meingölluð, því það sem hann nefnir er einfaldlega það sem trúfélög um allan heim (og ekki einvörðungu kristin) bjóða náunga sínum, og það án stjórnarskrárverndar. Reyndar er þessi þjónusta alls ekki bundin við trúfélög.

Þess utan er það fremur vondur vitnisburður um kirkjuna ef hugmyndin um þjónustu við náungann þarf að tengjast á einhvern hátt stöðu kirkjunnar gagnvart ríkinu.

Ministry to shut-ins

Few years ago I wrote an educational material for the church of Iceland, in collaboration with Guðrún Eggertsdóttir and Ragnheiður Sverrisdóttir, about how congregations can structure their ministry to those that are unable to leave their home.

I have always meant to look at the in context of the structure of Stephen Ministries here in the US. And maybe one day I will.

Gospel as a threat

As I looked through my stuff, there are lot of interesting things that might as well go here on ispeculate.net. When taking a class about Urban Ministry in Detroit, I attended few lectures by Dr. James W. (Jim) Perkinson. Dr. Perkinson was in his lectures focused on the reading of the Bible as a response to the Empire. Continue reading Gospel as a threat

Addiction

Addiction is any compulsive, habitual behavior that limits the freedom of human desire. It is caused by the attachment, or nailing, of desire to specific objects. The word behavior is especially important in this definition, for it indicates that action is essential to addiction.

…

There is a vast difference between doing these things because we freely choose and doing them because we are compelled. In the first case, the motivation is love; in the second slavery.

From Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

The Religious Landscape in America

Here, I will look at few issues addressed in the book After the Baby Boomers and/or the US Religious Landscape Survey. Those issues caught my attention when I read those originally two years ago, but it is not an attempt to represent either reading, far from it. I decided to write them down randomly as an invitation to further speculations rather than trying grasp them in any fullness. Continue reading The Religious Landscape in America

The Hidden Lives of Congregations

Israel Galindo’s book, The Hidden Lives of Congregations: Discerning Church Dynamics, is in three parts. The first two address the congregation and the forces behind it. The third part is about being a leader in a congregation. When reading it in one setting Galindo seems to repeat him self somewhat when it comes to the third part, as he tries to apply the first two parts to the function of pastoral leaders. Continue reading The Hidden Lives of Congregations

First Call Congregations

The emphasis of the new project, “Vocation of First Call Congregations,” was to study the characteristics of congregations that do a good job supporting first call pastors as they start their ministry following completion of their seminary education.

via Vocation of First Call Congregations – Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Finding our way into the future

Unless we are able, as Christians, to discover ways of conducting our life and our mission that differ radically from the Christendom form of the church that has dominated throughout most of Christian history, we shall be doomed in the future to be part of our world’s problem, and not its solution.

…

Perhaps if ecumenism was less concerned about the union of tired, old institutions and more concerned about the calling of the Christian movement in the world as a whole, ecumenicity itself would be more vital to all who take this faith with some degree of seriousness.

…

We Christians, who have imposed ourselves and our faith on so many, for so long, must now earn the right to explain the reason for our hope.

Finding Our Way into the Future by Douglas John Hall.

Religious Life

In her article “Creating a Spiritual World for Children to Inhabit,” Karen-Marie Yust talks about children’s formation and the role of practices, rituals, and ideas. She addresses especially how repetition enforces learning. She takes a helpful example.

An African American toddler boy who repeatedly watches cartoon videos in which the “good guys” with light-colored skin always beat the “bad guys” with dark-colored skin concludes from this observation that light-skinned people are good and dark-skinned people are bad. (A Caucasian child comes to a similar conclusion.) When he is four or five and becomes aware of his own skin color, he will likely experience a tension between his sense of himself as good and his cultural observation that dark-colored skin belongs to bad guys. His white peers will also be more likely to label him as bad when trouble erupts on the playground.

This also applies to gender-images. As part of the childhood culture those experiences that they see in “the adult world” are then “played out” or “tried on.” And here comes the connection to the Religious Life.

When adults act as if religious education is mainly a tool for children’s moral development, children quickly catch on to the irrelevance of religious culture for the grown-up world. They have no incentive for committing themselves to a particular spiritual identity on adolescence if faith is portrayed by adults as something one shed with childhood.

(The Article appeared in Family Ministry, Vol. 18, No. 4, Winter 2004)

Contract or Covenant

In When Moses Meets Aaron: Staffing and Supervision in Large Congregations one of the many issues that are addressed is the difference between contract and covenant. The difference between the two can be helpful in addressing employment in the church.
In the book the focus is on employment contract as an utilitarian in orientation, while covenant attempts to protect the least of these. The covenant focuses on protection by the more powerful and cocreation, rather then maximization.

Benedictine Women of Madison

The welcoming reception, uncluttered space and natural environment offer you a place to discover more about yourself, God’s place in your life and your connection with the world.

Our ecumenical community also invites single Christian women of any denomination to visit the monastery and explore a call to monastic life.

It is our privilege to share our life of prayer, hospitality, justice and care for the earth with people of diverse views and cultures. We invite you to join those who say, “When I come in the door, it feels like coming home.”

via Benedictine Women of Madison.

When Teammates Raise a White Flag

Paul W. Mulvey, John F. Veiga, and Priscilla M Elsass address why teams don’t work in this well known article. One of their findings is that a lack of status symbols inside a team, increases change of success. Similarly, the right size of a group is important, and team members have to be aware of why they are part of the team, if they are to succeed. There is more to it, mostly obvious, but someone has to say it.

JSTOR: The Academy of Management Executive (1993-2005), Vol. 10, No. 1 (Feb., 1996), pp. 40-49.

Is ‘Mainline’ becoming Mainline again?

Total membership in the seven largest mainline Protestant denominations — United Methodist, Evangelical Lutheran, Episcopal, Presbyterian Church (USA), Disciples of Christ, United Church of Christ and American Baptist Churches — fell a total of 7.4% from 1995 to 2004, based on tallies reported to the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches.

Meanwhile, the total membership count for Roman Catholics, the ultra-conservative Southern Baptist Convention, Pentecostal Assemblies of God and proselytizing Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) reported to the Yearbook is up nearly 11.4% for the same period.

via Some Protestant churches feeling ‘mainline’ again – USATODAY.com.

An article about St. Mark Evangelical Lutheran Church in Yorktown, that is for sure a mainline denomination but is still growing. It does not use PowerPoint or a Praise band, but offers food twice a week for those gathered.