It is finally May and our much anticipated start date with Tierra Nueva - check them out at http://www.tierra-nueva.org/. It has been an adventure getting here and the adventure continues. We moved out of our house in Ballard at the end of April still having found no place that feels like home in Bellingham, so we are being hosted by Susan's mom (thanks mom!) in Snohomish for a few weeks. Bob thinks that we are supposed to live in Skagit somewhere closer to TN. I have to admit that being closer to the community appeals to me, while the intent to build connections in B'ham toward future ministry there also calls to us to be rooted there.
While our call to Tierra Nueva has been clear, our sense of what we would be doing there has been vague. Things stirred up among the staff over the past two weeks and revealed a desire for more hands on direction and mentoring, so it appears that we will be "pastoring" the staff in the process of our being immersed in the workings of TN. The directors, Bob and Gracie Ekblad, welcome this and I think would appreciate the support themselves.
So, our first few days have been connecting with some of the staff - Chris, Amy, and Ryann. The group have fascinating stories of how God brought them to TN out of a deep dissatisfaction and pain in their experience of the Evangelical Church. One pointed out their depression over the emptiness of their experience with the world's solutions for social justice issues and the denial and complacency of the church. Much of the main stream reading of scripture, Bob has summed up as being moralist, heroist, exemplarist and domesticated. (For more on these read Bob's book, Reading the Bible With The Damned)
I find myself a bit of an alien among this group. I have so much to learn about a world view from the margins, so I am new on that front. But my dissatisfaction with evangelicalism has not led to a break with it but a longing to see the Spirit poured out more and more so that it would no longer have a form of godliness but denying the power therein. Susan and I had dinner with some friends weeks ago - the husband listened to our stories of what God's Spirit had been doing and said he realized that his faith had settled down to wishing/praying good thoughts for people and hoping to get something out of the sermon on Sunday.
So, here we are, stepping out more and more into the MORE that the Spirit of God is calling us into, praying that the eyes of our hearts would be opened to the Presence of Jesus in all we are doing. Today we walked with the Farm Workers Solidarity March in Skagit Valley.
More later...
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2 comments:
I wonder - is the issue with the Evangelical church per se, or is it with the culture in which the Western church (american, European) has developed and grown over the past two centuries? I find the categories you describe (from Reading the Bible with the Damned) as indicitive of the society around us as the church. I am not saying the the critique isnt valid - and down right prophetic! - but the target should be the transformation of the culture, not merely the church. Remember that the Parable of the Sower is actually the parable of the soils - what the condition of the soil is determines what will or wont grow. In this way TN is uniquely suited - the social justice questions transcend the church and spill into the larger Kingdom of God.
I should have known I'd be in trouble with such categories when you read this! Good points. I don't think you can separate the Church from the culture - which one influences the other...
I am particularly struck by Bob's use of "domestication" which results from an "inbred" (my term) reading of scripture - where we read it simply with others like ourselves who agree with our world views. One of the results is that our understanding of scripture is then based out of our experience which is reinforced by other's experiences. Yet no matter where we are reading from, the Kingdom is bigger and stranger.
I see the challenge already at TN. While the reading of scripture there is much wider (and truer) than any I have done, it is still a particular lens.
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