interview with hannah

Hey everyone! I am currently writing a series on my blog in which I interview my friends. My last post was an interview with Hannah! Here's the link!

Blanket and Sock Drive

Per Adam's suggestion, I'm putting up this friendly reminder about the blanket and sock drive that my Jr. High girls group is organizing. The plan is to collect donations through Dec. 12th or 15th and then take them out to Tempe to simply hand them out to anyone who wants or needs a way to keep warm this winter.

This is something they came up with on their own and it makes me proud. I love their hearts and really want this to be a success for them. It'll go a long way towards their confidence in starting their own non-profit "ThisSocks".

So, if you all have any old blankets, socks, etc., hanging around the house, please bring them the next couple of Sundays and I'll gladly take them off your hands.

Peace and Love

Christian

Life In Abundance Benefit Dinner...

Attention everybody:

As some of you may know, Life In Abundance International will be having a Fall Benefit Dinner here in AZ on Sunday, October 11th. Some folks from Emerging Desert pooled some funds to help sponsor the event, and accordingly there are seats available for anybody that is interested!

It will be a great night, so please contact Adam ( adam [dot] bamford {at} gmail [dot] com ) ASAP if you'd like to attend. Here are the details:

Sunday, October 11th

5:30 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.

Phoenix Zoo

Stone House Pavilion

455 N. Galvin Parkway

Formal invitation below...

Paradigm Crash

Just thought I'd get these passages of the book up on the blog... to me, these words of Siljander's really resonate with the orientation of our cohort:

- excerpts from pgs 16-19, A Deadly Misunderstanding by Mark Siljander

--------

We chatted for a few minutes, and then he got to the point: if I didn't mind his asking, as a follower of Jesus, what was my strategy in relation to other people in my travels around the world? I replied without hesitation: it was to convert them to the Christian faith. He nodded thoughtfully, then asked a deceptively simple question: "And why is that?"

I was taken aback. Why would he ask such an elementary question? "Well," I began, "of course, converting people to the Christian faith is the basis of Jesus's teachings. It's our duty as Christians. It's...what we do. You know this, Doug." Silence. "I mean, it's in the Bible."

"Really." He paused and fixed me with his gaze. "Would you name one verse?"

Now I was baffled. Was he serious? This was first-grade Sunday school stuff! "Doug, come on. What are you driving at?"

"No, really," he pressed gently. "Go ahead. Just one."

Okay, I thought, if you insist. Let's see ... And a moment later I was stunned to realize that I could not bring a single verse to mind -- not one. I felt humiliated.

...

After Doug left, I began combing through the Bible, determined to find the answer, and I continued to comb, not for an evening or a week but for a solid year. I searched the entire New Testament high and low, looking for personal vindication, until I finally arrived at the disturbing conclusion that it simply wasn't there. The strategy of converting people to Christianity, a strategy that I had so fervently held as a God-given, biblically based mandate, was never mentioned in the Bible -- not once.

...

... Following Jesus, according to Jesus's own disciples, was not a matter of religion; it was about the revelation of God's truth as conveyed by Jesus's influence on the human heart. As I continued poring over the text, I came to an inescapable conclusion: the teacher from Nazareth never intended to start a religion. What he was creating was a movement, a relational revolution of the human heart.

So where did this leave Christianity? Where did it leave me? I thought of myself as a devout Christian--but what did that really mean? Was it an illusion? Had I been brainwashed? I felt a victim of my culture, heir to a long tradition of assertions by countless articles and books, teachers and preachers, about truths they all insisted were in my holy book. I had accepted what I had heard.

An even more unsettling thought occurred to me: if I had been misguided on this critical strategic point of my faith, were there other areas where I was just as misinformed? Was my personal mission in life based on erroneous information? Was my faith based in truth--or was it a blind faith? All at once my belief system felt incredibly fragile. It was as if the ground I stood on was crumbling under my feet. As devastating as it had been to lose my reelection campaign, this was worse.

I thought of the phrase "paradigm shift," which had been coined by social scientist Thomas Kuhn in the 1960s and was just starting to enter popular usage at the time. But the term seemed to pale next to the intensity of the experience. This was not a paradigm shift. This was a paradigm crash.

Getting Down to Business!

*Photo Credit - The Blackbird on Flickr

Okay, tomorrow we're going to be spending our time digging into more of the details that have been raised in Claiborne & Haw's, Jesus for President. Economics, politics, patriotism, creative non-violence, cultural interaction... you know, the usual stuff you talk about within spiritual community;-)

Our reading of the book currently has us through page 102. Here are some questions to get our thoughts going...

- What are some examples of political imagination in our current context and culture?
"God put in place other beautiful initiatives to awaken the Israelites' political imagination and ensure that they didn't default to old ways of living" (56).

- How do we/should we view the "Sabbath laws" today?
"The Sabbath laws were put in place not just so people could go to worship services on Sunday (or Saturday) mornings but to make sure that the Hebrew people didn't revert to the exploitative economy of the empire from which they were saved" (57).

- Should we/can we entertain the idea of Jubilee economics [debt cancellation] in our present culture? If so, how?
"Just like the Hebrew people were supposed to refrain from working every seventh day so that their land, animals, & servants could rest (a marked contrast to their overworked life in Egypt), every seventh year, the Hebrew people had a celebration called the Jubilee..., during which they would take the whole year off from work. During this one-year break, all the food that continued to grow in their fields was free for the taking for families who were struggling to get by (Exod. 23:10). And any debt that folks had incurred during the past six years was erased" (59).

- How does (can?) national patriotism coexist with our pursuit of Jesus' way?
"Jesus was urging his followers to be the unique, peculiar, and set-apart people that began with Abraham. He didn't pray for the world in order to make governments more religious; he called Israel to be the light of the world - to abandon the way of the world and cultivate an alternative society in the shell of the old, not merely to be a better version of the kingdom of this world" (71).

- What can the "Third Way" (creative non-violence) look like for us today?
"Jesus' listeners would have understood the Romans to be the weeds sown among the wheat. How to rid the world of their evil? But Jesus redirected this and insisted that #1 You cannot easily distinguish the weeds from the wheat. (It's not so easy to say, 'We are all good and they are all evil.' Sometimes only God can distinguish.) #2 Destroying evil might destroy good" (97).

last chapter

Hey friends,

The last chapter of the book talked about persecution around the world facing people particularly but not exclusively those who follow Jesus. The book gave suggestions of things that we could do to make a difference. The one that really stuck out to me was writing letters. I've been a "Christian" my entire life, and never once have I done this. I want to remedy that. I want to give you all the opportunity and the resources to do this. Whether you want to write an encouraging letter to a prisoner or write a letter to a government to create awareness, please consider taking the time to do it this week. Maybe even tomorrow?

I think we all have a lot to be thankful here in the land of religious freedom, and what better way than to spend some time on behalf of those who don't have what we do. Perhaps this is a way to bridge some gaps with friends and family who think we may be losing our faith.

Please visit PrisonerAlert.com to get all the information. They really have it all set up for you. You can write a letter as an advocate or directly to the prisoner and they will translate it for you. It's amazing. The format gives you phrases to use and translates it, so you could rewrite it by hand if you wanted or just print it. They also provide the address. If you wanted to use your own words, you could also probably use Google Translate.

Upcoming Gathering: A Heart & Mind for Social Justice

Hey all,

I just wanted to give everybody a quick heads-up regarding next Sunday's gathering. A number of weeks ago, Justin Narducci (a very close friend to me and many others in the cohort) asked if there would be a date in October that he could come spend some time with our Emerging Desert community to talk about ideas surrounding social injustice. Justin and his wife, Erin, (both AZ natives) moved their family to California last year as Justin took the USA Country Director position for the non-profit organization, Life In Abundance International [LIA]. To put it simply, LIA's work centers on addressing the physical & spiritual needs of the poorest and most vulnerable communities across Northeast Africa.

I thought it would be a great fit, given the nature of many of our cohort conversations over the

past months, for Justin & Erin to come back and join us in wrestling with these issues... so we targeted October 26th. Coincidentally (providentially?:-), the next chapter that we will be discussing in Frost's Exiles just happens to be chapter 9, Restless with Injustice.

So, that's the scoop. I'm looking forward to building on the sentiments behind the recent posts & comments made by many of you here on the blog as we collectively seek to become more informed, and ultimately more loving as we try to build the Kingdom.

sunday mornings

I just wanted everyone to know that you are more than welcome to join us any Sunday in Tempe to feed the hungry.

A few years ago, my neighbor Paula invited me to join her and others from her church as they met at a park for "outreach". Basically, we'd all bring food and someone would bring donated eggs that we'd scramble over a camping stove. Clint, a former homeless man/drug dealer/addict, would share a sermon, and we'd serve the food. Since then, we've moved to other sites including a long stint at the Salvation Army, and now we are located at 2051 E. Apache at a working man's halfway house.

Basically, the format's still the same. We show up anywhere between 8:15 and 8:45(? Adam, help me out here), Clint shares his message to whomever wants to hear, then we serve eggs, potatoes, and hot dogs. Clint has wrangled Starbucks pastry donations, and I think he makes the coffee and punch himself. The whole thing is his baby; a dream of reaching out to people with whom he really identifies.

It's not super organized; there's plenty of chances to get to know the homeless and the hungry. You can sit and talk, you can serve, you can do dishes, clean up trash...the opportunities are endless. I don't need to know if you are coming or not, and you don't have to come every single week. For awhile we were shorthanded, but currently we're doing okay, so anyone else is icing on the cake.

I've always felt safe, and other volunteers have brought their young children. The biggest dangers are scraped knees and explaining why that man smells like gin.