Book 7 of 2012 The United Church of Canada: A History

I first learned about this book when an announcement about its release came through my e-mail a few months ago.  And at the time I knew I wanted to read it.  A month or so ago I got around to getting it (in e-book form).

IT is a good read.  As a part of my MDiv I took a course in the History and Theology of the United Church.  This would be a good book to be included in the reading list for that course, possibly the best one in years.

The first chapters are a historical sketch of the UCCan, with choices made by the authors to focus on specific issues (otherwise the task would be incredible).  The last section of the book is a series of essays on specific topics.  As one who has followed from a bit of a distance (rarely reading the full reports but staying abreast of what is being discussed at the last few General Council meetings) I found the essay on the theology of ministry in our denomination very eye-opening [I particular found it interesting to learn that until 1966 call forms, which are signed by/on behalf of the congregation, included a promise to be obedient to the clergy person.  Imagine how far such a proposal would get today!]  Given the amount of press the last several meetings of GC have received around the Israel-Palestine question (one that is coming again next month) the chapter on that issue was very helpful.  And Don Schweitzer's concluding essay about the social imaginary of the UCCan in 1925 and now was very well done.  He notes not only that we are lacking a vision but is able to point out WHY we are lacking a sense of vision.

This is a good book to read by UCCan ordered and lay folks alike.  And should end up in congregational libraries!

I Don't Understand...

Ok, admittedly there are lots of ways I could finish that sentence.  But I have one particular ending in mind today.

Yesterday we took advantage of the bright sunny weather (and the beginning of holiday time) to head down to the Street Performers Festival.  It was an enjoyable activity (although the bright sun in a crowded street is VERY hot).  Lots of poeple out for the day.  And here's the thing, dogs.

Dogs of all sizes (including a St. Bernard).  Dogs in the crowd, dogs in the food court.  But in my opinion it wasn't a dog-type activity.  Is it unusual to suggest that maybe there are places where taking your dog just does not make sense?  Same thing with the Canada Day Parade and festivities in the park.  Large crowds, people everywhere, and lots of dogs [including one I saw during the Canada Day parade last year that was muzzled, which suggest the owner has reason to think this may not have been the best environment for that particular animal].

I know pets are a part of the family.  And I know that most dogs are very friendly.  But why do people feel the need to take dogs everywhere they go?  I read on a FB page today a thank you to a local food establishment for having water dishes on their patio for customer dogs.  Really?  no one sees a problem with this?

Maybe there are times to walk the dog in another place?  

Sometimes I don't understand people's choices.

ANyone know about trailer wiring?????

In order to go tenting and not have to take bothe vehicles we needed more cargo room.  And so we got a hitch added to the van and started looking for a utility trailer.  LAst Friday we purchased this one.  Marked down and sold "as is" because one of the side lights was broken (and because they no longer carry that trailer according to their website).  The broken light was even replaced!

The only problem is that none of the lights work.  Not one.  First step will be to check with the dealership that the wiring harness on the van is working properly.  ANd then teach myself about trailer wiring................
[Then again, Trailer wiring often seems to be an issue, as I remember my father almost annually having to work at gettting all the lights to work on our utility trailer]

Someday, Maybe, When we have MOney....

Ever since we moved here we have wanted to change the back yard.  SOme of it is already done as we created a nice big vegetable garden and then late last summer we removed the sidewalk block pads at the back of the yeard and spread grass seed this spring.  But the big possible project is...

We want to change the yard right by the house.  Currently it looks like this:

But the deck just doesn't work for us.  In part it is too small for that size of a table (an effect magnified by the railing on the one side -- a railing that is not needed for safety because the deck is essentially at ground level).  Bu also the current layout leave these tiny little strips of grass/weeds by the fence, then by the deck, then over by the shed.  Since the back door is at grade level we are limited in terms of height. 

When we redo the fence we plan to move the gate from right beside the house to approximately a spot even with the BBQ in this picture.  And so we have a plan.  Take the deck right out and put a patio with paving stones (not sidewalk blocks) from the fence all the way to the shed.  The patio would come out as far as the blocks are now to give more space.  Possibly some plant boxes along the edge?

Another issue is this space between the two sheds.  Nothing really grows there anyway.  So maybe some more pavers here?  Or River Rock?  Probably pavers because it would be nice to be able to hang laundry in bare feet which might be uncomfortable with River Rock.

ANd finally there is the back corner of the yard.  With the large full canopy of the Mayday (which is very mature, I wonder how many years it has left?) nothing really grows well there either--except Mayday suckers.  SO Patty has a dream of some river rock and a few stepping stones.  Maybe a piece of yard art (I think the real dream is a small fountain)

Someday, maybe, when we have money....  But the first priority back there is redoing the fence.

Asking For Help -- A Newspaper Column

15 years ago I was working at Kids Kottage, the crisis nursery program in Edmonton. Every day we interacted with families in crisis. Every day we talked with parents asking for help. Prominently posted on the wall of our intake office was a poster which read “Asking for help is a sign of strength”.

Another memory. It is my first year of University and I am taking a Canadian History course. My professor grew up during the depression. While we were studying that dark period he told us how hard it was for his father and many other men to give in and go to the government for support. There was a shame involved in admitting that they could not support their families on their own. Rightly or wrongly, many people thought it was better to struggle and scrape and remain independent than admit that they needed help.

Similar stories are told whenever and wherever people are struggling. There is something in our culture that leads people to think that they need to always be able to provide for themselves and their families. And for many men and boys this is even more pronounced. Cultural definitions of “manliness” generally don't allow much room for seeking help.

But the reality is that none of us goes through life without help, sometimes a little help and sometimes a lot of help. And here is the best thing. That is how God wants it. God didn't create us to be independent, self-sufficient islands. God's hope for Creation is that we remember that we are all inter-dependent, responsible to and for each other. God wants us both to offer and to accept help at various times in our life.

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. (John 13:34-35)

He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself. (Luke 10:27)

Countless sermons have been preached and books written and songs sung about what it means to love each other as Jesus loved his friends, on how to love our neighbour as we love ourselves. But surely one of those ways is to be ready to help. One way we love our neighbours (friends or enemies) is by being there to support them when they struggle. But look at the last two words in that Luke quote. We are to love our neighbour as we love ourselves.

There are many people out there willing and able to offer help, willing and able to work to ease the pains of the world. But we (and we all need a hand at some point in our lives) need to be able to ask for and accept the help if it is to be of any use. If we truly love ourselves we will be able to recognize that sometimes the most loving thing we can do for ourselves is seek the help we need. I am the first to admit that this is hard. Sometimes it is easier to offer help than to accept it. But I'll say it again. God wants us to move past our pride and independence. God wants us to be able to seek assistance when we need it.

In Grande Prairie and area there are people who are hurting. There are people who are struggling with various things in life. Some are children, some are teens, some are adults, some are seniors. In Grande Prairie and area are people and agencies willing to offer help, living out God's command to love neighbour. Turning to one of these people or agencies is not a sign of weakness. Asking for help is not a failing. It is a sign of strength, it is a sign of loving ourselves as God loves us.

In the end, we all need the strength both to offer help to our neighbour when we can but also to ask for help when we are in need. May God's blessing rest on all of us, those who struggle and those who are out there to provide assistance.

When the Pain is too Much?

This week I have a funeral. Nothing unusual about that of course, but this one is a bit different.  A teen suicide.  ANd while such a service is a challenge for any clergyperson, I found myself with an additional piece of work.  Processing/revisiting memories.

You see 28 years ago it could easily have been me.  In fact it was closer than I truly want to admit a couple of times in my life.  And I know that there are things that could possibly take me back there, they would have to be fairly horrific/major/tragic things to be sure but I could see mtself on the verge again.

From grade 4 til 9 school was a most uncomfortable place for me, with grades 7-9 being worse and grade 9 being pretty much unlivable.  I did not feel like I fit in (and really in retrospect I didn't really fit in, for a variety of reasons) but I kept feeling like I should be fitting in.  I was unmercifully bullied by many (most days it felt like ALL) my classmates.  And my poor work habits just added to my stress and my feeling of being a disappointment.  On top of it all I had a feeling that no one understood me or how much I was hurting, or really wanted to make it better,  For years I have told myself that I was borderline suicidal for the last half of that school year.  But this week I realized that was need to be honest and name that I was over the border.

I have a memory.  One day I found myself in a closed locked bathroom tying a housecoat belt around my neck.  Had I thought of taking the next step and tying it to the shower rod....

The fact that I didn't tells me something (other than suggesting a lack of creative thinking).  I never fully got to that point where life was something I had given up on.  In hindsight (and to a degree I knew this even then, although I may not have been able to name it) there were 2 or 3 things that kept me from that place.  One was the church.  For several months in Grade 9 our confirmation class met every Thursday.  The church was always a place where I was at home, a place where I had friends, a place where I was safe.  Another was the local theatre.  I was part of groups called the Arts Renaissance Troupe and St Albert Children's Theatre (the membership of both was pretty much the same).  The theatre was like my second home some weeks.  Again it was a place of safety, of friendships, of comfort.  The third was the knowledge that I truly wasn't alone, even if it felt like it at times.  I had supportive parents (who were at a loss about how to improve my scholastic habits), and that year I was blessed with a life-changing teacher.  She actively cared about her students and used the subject (English/Language Arts) as a way to teach us life lessons.  But without those three things....

A little over a decade later I danced with the precipice again.  For a year after my first internship crashed around my ears -- and while it was crashing -- I moved back and forth.  There were days when I was moderately at ease.  There were also times when I remember standing looking over the railing at the floor several levels down.  But still I never got there.  Still there were enough other forces around me that pulled me back.  And it wasn't me pulling back, at least not consciously.  I was pulled back from the edge.

In retrospect I would guess that I was plausibly suffering from depression (situational more than bio-chemical in nature) at both those times in my life.  But they have left their mark.  I have no problem understanding how people can get to that point of thinking there is only one way out.  Some people find that an impossible thing to understand.  I remember years ago when taking suicide intervention training that I seemed to be coming at the discussion from a totally different place than some of the people in the group.  I am no longer any where close to the precipice.  YEars of life, and eighteen months of work with a counsellor, have seen to that.  But I still remember, even if only sub-consciously tying that belt.  I still remember looking over that railing, or the temptation to turn the steering whel sharply as I crossed the bridge.  And because of that I simply can't look at suicide the same way as others do.

This week reminded me of that.  This week made me work through it again in a new way.  And I really think that is a good thing.

Book 6 of 2012 -- Any Day a Beautiful Change

Over the years the blog by this author is one that I have read from time to time.  And so, when I saw one of my FB friends noting that this book had been published I went looking for it.

In fact just reading this book was a change for me.  When I went looking at chapters.ca it was (and still is apparently) only available as an e-book.  Since I had just the day or two before set up a Kobo account [although I do not actually have an e-reader, just the virtual one for the computer] to get a resource I may need for an upcoming meeting [nothing exciting, I agreed (God help me) to be Parliamentarian and so wanted a copy of Bourinot's Rules of  Order] I thought it would be a chance to try reading something in that format.

This is a great book.  Sort of memoir-ish in feel.  Sort of reflection on life.  I often wanted to engage the writer in dialogue about various parts of it.  I was touched by the stories shared.  I heartily encourage others to read this one.  In fact I will likely go back and re-read some of the stories and reflections.

Book 5 of 2012 -- Not Your Parents' Offering Plate

I picked this one up at a book display last year, read a bit in the summer but then got distracted.  Today I picked it up and read it (which shows that it is a fairly easy read). 

The subtitle is "A New Vision for Financial Stewardship".  My thought is that a better subtitle would be "HOw to Fund Raise in the Church". And that speaks to one of my main objections.  This is a how-to of fundraising, cometimes (but not always) couched in stewardship language.  There was no discussion of a theology of stewardship other than saying that a pastor has to have one.

There are many helpful things in those hints.  THere is much in this book that I can utilize (though much of it was a restatement of things I had read elsewhere).  THe book is well worth working with.  BUt it is also flawed.

In addition to the flaw mentioned above, I found myself vehemently disagreeing with Christopher's understanding of how the church actually operates.  The church he describes has not been the church of my experience.  Certainly we can learn from what other non-profit organizations.  But the church is NOT just another non-profit organization, no matter how many times he wants to intimate that we should act the same way.  And part of that is the role of the clergy.  I am not "in charge" or the CEO or the person best able to make the congregation's vision come to reality.  I have a dream for what this congregation could do.  I play a major role in helping them work out how they will live their vision.  But I have little actual authority or power (beyond being persuasive).  In fact in some  congregations the clergyperson has the least authority in these things.  Some of that may be due to the fact that there are radically different models and understandings of church polity between different denominations.

OTOH, I agree that the clergy should be acquainted with the giving patterns in the church -- but not nearly to the degree he suggests.  ANd his words about the clergy needing to be involved in preaching stewardship, in taking a lead role in addressing monetary questions in the church need to be required reading (or at least words like them) for all in ministry.

I also take issue with the claim, made repeatedly, that a person who does not give monetarily to teh church is spiritually sick, that the soul is jeopardy.  My objection to this goes along with the assumption that we can assess the giving capacity of an individual/family merely by looking at where they work or live.  We do not know, unless it is shared with us, what the real financial situation of anyone is.  We also do not know, unless it is shared with us, where else a person may be directing their giving.  At the beginning of the book Christopher does a wonderful job of explaining that churches need to do a much better job of re-learning how to convince people to give or else they will be convinced to give elsewhere.  The church does not "deserve" people's money.  SO to turn around and say that they are spritually sick when they give nothing (which they may literally not be able to afford, or they may give elsewhere out of a sense of mission, or they may give anonymously [yes that happens, in amounts big and small], or they may not feel they can give "enough" to make it worth while) seems contradictory.  THis is where a better explication of a stewardship theology would come in helpful--particularly a theology of stewardship that is far more inclusive than money raising.

But on the whole I would recommend this book.  THere is a lot to use here.

Book 4 of 2012 -- Still

A while back there was a post on this blog inviting members of the blogring to put their name in for a free copy of this book. And since a free book is always worthwhile...

I am glad I put my name in.  This is a hard book to describe.  It isn't a narrative.  It isn't an academic book or treatise.  It is a collection of "bits".  Yeah that seems to be the best description.  A collection of bits about working through what Winner calls a "mid-faith crisis".

I am not sure what it was about this book that grabbed me so strongly.  I think it is because I know what it feels like to live in the "middle".  Near the end there was a piece about the middle tints, the colours that are neither really bright or really dark but which make up the majority of the picture.  Winner suggests that thisis where life is lived.  I would tend to agree.

If you get a chance take a look at this book.  Not something I would say "you should really read this!" but something that I think many people might resonate with.

Biblical Assumptions....

We all make them.  And they can cause "issues".  As is proven quite regularly in this forum (most recently for me in a debate about whether there are 2 separate Creation stories or not).

Do we assume that the words we read in Scripture are direct from God or another person's (people's) account of their experience of God?
Do we assume that we are interpreting as we read?  Do we assume that our interpretation is the only way to see the passage?
Do we assume that everyone has the same assumptions about the nature, history, and content of Scripture that we have?  Or at least that they know what our assumptions are?
Are we willing to be open to the assumptions others make as we attempt to see where they are coming from? (whether we agree or not)
Do we read the passage for itself or do we carry understandings from other experience of Scripture with us?

And perhaps most telling....do we ourselves know what our assumptions are?  Can we explicate them to others in the interests of clear communication?

A memory surfaces that deals directly with assumptions we bring to the reading of Scripture.  And how those can radically change what we see.

In my first year introductory course on the Christian Scriptures we had a mix of students.  Some of us (maybe 2/3 of the class, likely closer to 1/2) were seminary students from the United Church and Anglican colleges.  The rest were Religious Studies students from the University--some of whom, it became obvious as time went on, had little or no background experience with Scripture.  The task in the first class, once we went through the syllabus and the list of required texts etc, was to read and discuss the letter to Philemon (a good choice because it is so brief).  There was an extra limit though.  We were to read and discuss as if this was the ONLY piece of Scripture we had ever seen.

That was a challenge.  It is harder than you would expect to forget everything you "know" about the story(ies)  of Scripture, about the background from which Paul is writing.  One person in the class, who honestly had no background but was very eager to learn, took the "brother" language as referring to actual blood relatives and the "slavery" language as purely metaphorical.  And in fact you can make sense of the letter with that reading.  It was a great way to begin the course because it showed us how much we assume we "know".  The next realization was that some of that needed to be unlearned, or at least challenged as the course progressed.

We all make assumptions.  But we are often better at naming the assumptions we see others making than the ones we make.  ANd that can get in the way of open and clear discussion.  Refusing to
acknowledge that there is more than one valid approach to Scripture also get in the way of that discussion -- and people on all sides of the Christian spectrum can be guilty of that.

Some of the assumptions I bring to Scripture are:

• it is impossible to read Scripture without interpretation, none of us simply takes the words of Scripture as they are and applies their plain meaning (all the more so since we are reading translations and every translation includes interpretative choices)
• there are things we can learn from historical, source, redaction and literary criticism/analysis of the Scriptures--even (or perhaps especially) if that analysis causes us to rethink how Scripture came to be in the shape we now have it
• Scripture does not tell one story, or one version of the same story.  It sometimes contradicts itself, it sometimes offers mutiple versions of history (even in the same book), it sometimes offers theological visions that appear mutually incompatible (the passage in Ezra where foreign wives are to be put aside in the name of cultural purity and the genocidal passage in Joshua vs a book like Ruth or Jonah which are openly welcoming of foreigners being part of GOd's community.)
• there is no one proper interpretation of any passage.
• what we see in Scripture is shaped by our background:  what have we been taught before, how widely have we read within Scripture, what life experiences do we bring, what are our political opinions, how do we understand God, how do we understand human nature, what is our understanding of this collection of books we are reading

Those are some of my assumptions.  On specific passages there will be specific assumptions.

What are some of the assumptions you bring to Scripture?