On Lenten Sacrifice

On Facebook, the question of the day as Ash Wednesday approached was whether or not to give up Facebook for Lent. I’ve been thinking about what we are really asking about ourselves when we consider the idea of giving up something for the 40 days of Lent.

Sometimes, we seem to consider giving up something that we suspect is bad for us anyway. So the sacrifice becomes a kind of exercise in self improvement. Other times, we consider giving up something that we really enjoy, so the sacrifice becomes a sacrifice in and of itself. Perhaps it helps us understand how, why and what to do if we recall the meaning of Lent across time.

The religious meaning of Lent is connected to the liturgical cycle of the Christian year. Historically, Lent was the time of preparation for entry into the life of the church. People who wanted to begin to live as followers of Jesus were taught during those 40 days about the principles and practices of Christian faith. Presumably, giving up some of one’s involvement in things that are bad for self and others is a part of converting to a faith whose basic tenet is love of God and love of neighbor.

After reception into the church, which occurred at Easter Vigil (the night before Easter morning), Christians thereafter used the season of Lent to renew their commitment to the faith; that is, to living a life devoted to love of God and neighbor as revealed by Jesus. Giving up something was to be done in order to devote one’s self more fully to spiritual disciplines and practices, which would result in greater spiritual understanding or maturity.

So the question for Lent, it seems to me, is not only “what will I give up for Lent,” but, “with what will I replace the thing that I have given up?” If I give up food, will I utilize the money or food saved to fulfill Christ’s command to feed the poor? If I give up Facebook, will I use the time to write notes of encouragement in my actual handwriting to mail to friends? If I give up television, will I use the time to read or pray? If I give up speeding when I drive, as a friend of mine once did, will I have to give up something else in order to be on time and meet my obligations?

More and more in contemporary Christian practice, there is a turn toward adding works of mercy and justice to one’s life during Lent. That is, rather than giving up something out of self-sacrifice, to somehow model or experience Jesus’ sacrifice (as though we could), some Christian communities are taking up the work of Jesus’ love of neighbor. They are doing random acts of kindness, praying for their neighbors, feeding the hungry, visiting the sick and the imprisoned. That is, taking care of all the places where Christ still appears in our world, vulnerable and victimized, and ministering with their lives to these needs.

The thing about Lent – and all Christian practices of sacrifice – is that it is never about the sacrifice itself. Lenten discipline got very distorted in Christian history, and became about trying to enter into the sacrifice of Christ, and so became very self-mortifying, and occasionally morbid. But the sacrifice of Christ on the cross is not about the sacrifice itself. It is about the love that motivates the sacrifice.

The best question for Lenten discipline is not “how can I make myself miserable?” The best question for Lenten reflection is perhaps this one: “Where is love of insignificant, transient things still so a part of my life that I am yet unable to love God and neighbor with heart, soul, strength and mind?” Wherever, whatever, that is – that is where Christ will meet us during Lent – with his love for us. That is where the Spirit of God will work with us, moving us toward wholeness and holiness.

I’m not giving up Facebook for Lent. Of course it is a time waster, sometimes. But it has connected me with people I love and care for in ways that I have never experienced in my whole adult life. I don’t think God wants me to sacrifice that.

This year, for Lent, I’m going to renew my acquaintance with the New Testament canon. I’ve decided to reread the entire testament, but not from beginning to end. I’ll read the letters of Paul (Romans last) then Mark, then Matthew, then Luke-Acts. Next I’ll read the other epistles, then, finally, as Easter nears, I’ll read John, the letters of John and Revelation. I’m going to re-read the entire New Testament with openness, I hope, to both reflection and action. I’m trusting that something that comes a gift to me from this discipline is something I am going to need to know or possess on the journey.The question I primarily carry into this journey with the text is “what shall the thing that we know as church be and do in the 21st Century?”

I will not do this as a solitary endeavor, of course. Christianity is a communal faith, and I will do this in community, because I will be participating in worship every week and in conversation and relationship with others in my church family daily (since I am the pastor). Perhaps for others, the beginning point for this journey is not the whole New Testament, but simply the commitment to give up whatever else fills Sunday mornings to be in worship with the community every Sunday during Lent, to take seriously the biblical story of how God so loves the world.

Whatever we take up for Lent, it has never failed to be true across the years that what I learned about sacrifice during Lent was something that was life-giving or even life-saving for me at a subsequent time. Taking Lent seriously…journeying into wilderness, and into the world, and into Jerusalem, and to the cross with Jesus can teach us how to negotiate and navigate a journey that we are called to walk someday, sometime, in our own lives.

Even Though we Die, Yet Shall We Live

It has been one of those times in the life of the congregation I serve when ministry at the time of death has been mostly what we’ve been doing. I need to celebrate, affirm, and give thanks for this ministry.

Some of our recent encounters with death have been unbelievably difficult.   A family that lost a husband and father to disease lost a daughter/sister to an accident the very next day.  A  single mother of two young sons suffered a fatal heart attack in their home, leaving them orphaned, with no surviving family members. The sheer number of losses adds to a gathering grief that leaves little time for healing. Our congregation has averaged more than one funeral a week for several weeks.

As I reflect on this time, I notice that the burden of this grief has been greater than I realized. There has been too much to take in, too much to try to make sense of.  I am supposed to have answers, and I do not. Especially not to the why questions. All I have is testimony. In the midst of it, there is marvelous grace. And that grace is mediated in a most remarkable way by the ministry of the church at the time of death.

This ministry at such times as we have been experiencing– well, it’s simply a marvel to behold.  People come to the church, speak to the families with words of comfort and appreciation for the life of the departed. We gather in the sanctuary, and usually, we begin with familiar words that remind us that we come together in grief, acknowledging our human loss. We ask that God will provide grace, that in pain we might find comfort,  in sorrow we may find hope, and in death – resurrection. And we do. We find comfort and hope and life.

Often, at the conclusion of the time, we gather to eat. Church people have prepared food, and arranged flowers, and gotten out the tablecloths. They care for the mourners with gracious hospitality, and then they stay behind to clean the dishes, and leave, weary with the effort, to go home and wash the tablecloths so that they are ready for the next time.  I sometimes wonder why we don’t, as part of our funeral tradition, remember to celebrate how many tablecloths the dearly departed washed for the church.

This kind of “church work” isn’t much in fashion among young people. The older ladies wonder aloud and often who will do this for them when their time comes. But I’m not worried. For the two young boys, the mothers of  children came to fix the meal.  I think they’ll grow into this “church work” over time. I hope so.  These tasks are important in shaping our own faith. If such tasks do not answer the questions for us, they are least become the rituals that teach us how to prepare for our own deaths.

I do not know why we have been visited by so much grief of late. I do not hold that there is any grand design here. I think the world is much more a random place than we like to believe. But I do know this–there is compassionate God who never abandons us to this randomness. And if you want to know where God is, when these things happen, you need look no further than at the gathered community.  Many will be in the pews. Some will be leading and arranging the service. More than a few will be found in the kitchen. Because what we do in the face of death is to gather our tears, and our sorrow, and our memories, and our faith.   And then we eat. Because to live, we must eat.

People always notice what the ministers do at funerals. But I notice what the community does. And without the work and the presence of the community, I would be just a clanging cymbal.  It is the whole ministry;  the conversations, the voices joined in song and prayer, the kitchen crew, the flower arrangers, the musicians, the custodians; all of it together makes ministry at the time of death a powerful witness to love and life.  For the families that have experienced this ministry, it has been hope-giving and life affirming.  I have listened to them as  they left the church, and found them equipped to live with their questions and their grief, assured that like Jesus’ disciples, they have not been left orphaned, but have a church home where they are loved and cherished and cared for.

There’s much the church doesn’t know how to do anymore – and I know there are a lot of other ways of marking the death of loved ones that don’t involve church. But when my time comes, take me to the church, and let  the church people love me into death and love my loved ones back to life. I don’t care if you use tablecloths or not, but it would be nice.

Advent: Waiting for a New Heart

Advent is about waiting. Advent waiting is for people who desperately need life-saving grace to intervene in their lives, which, if we are honest, is all of us. This waiting can be personal, and it can be corporate.

A long time friend of mine has spent the better part of the Autumn and into Advent waiting for a new heart. Not the figurative “new heart” that gives one a new attitude about life, but literally, a new heart to pump blood through her cardiovascular system and sustain her life. The heart she’s had for her fifty-six years of life quit working quite a while ago, and she has not known, really, from day to day if she would live. Eventually, a transplant became her only real option for continued life. As it goes with transplant protocol, a failing organ has to grow very, very bad before you are at the top of the list for a new one. A few days ago, her condition worsening, she made it to the top of the list for a new heart. And sometime between last night and this morning, a new heart was placed in her chest cavity, connected to the appropriate veins and arteries, and nursed into life by doctors, nurses and technicians. It took some coaxing, I’m told, to get the new heart going, but as of this moment, supported by the wonders of modern intensive care medicine, my friend lives with a new heart.

I can’t stop thinking about what it must mean to get a new heart. Of great significance is the unavoidable reality that someone else has lost their life in order to make this gift possible. While one family rejoices to see a steady, regular rhythm on a heart monitor hooked to their beloved one; another family is grieving. But in their grief and loss, they have found the way to give away a vital part of their beloved one’s body so that somebody else can go on living. They didn’t choose their loved one’s death. But they chose to sustain life through the event of that death.

I don’t know anything at all about the person whose heart now beats in the chest of my friend. But I am learning a great deal about saving grace from them.

Christians wait, at Advent, for God to do something to save us. We tell the story of how God’s surprising way of saving us is to send a baby human into the world. Historically, we have called the rituals and rhythms of telling this story “The Feast of the Holy Nativity.” Like all humans do, this child whose birth we celebrate will one day die. But through death, he will somehow keep on giving life to other people. Later in the liturgical cycle, we will celebrate the story of how new life came from his horrible death. We call that cycle, in the ancient tradition of the church, “The Great Paschal Mystery.”

That’s what a heart transplant is. It’s a participation in the great cycle of Holy Mystery. By people we don’t know, and by people we love. Who meet only in the heart of God. In this meeting, God’s life-giving creative spirit is expressed. In the fragile places of human life, and in the extraordinarily resilient places in the human heart, this great mystery unfolds again and again.

Wherever and whoever this grieving family is, whatever their personal faith tradition, or even if they have none at all, they have contributed to the great mystery that death can give life.

And so, on behalf of the family and extended community that has been waiting for a heart, thank you for choosing to sustain the sacred mystery that is life, wherein, even though we die, yet shall we live. If from your example, we learn how to better participate in that great mystery, you will have given us all a new heart for Christmas.

Doing Good and Doing Harm on Election Day

United Methodists are rightly enamored these days with a wonderful little book that is recovering John Wesley’s values for us. It is called Three Simple Rules (by Rueben Job), and it instructs us in these values for living the Christian Life. First, do no harm. Second, do good. And third, stay in love with God. I’ve been thinking about these rules in connection with the November 4 election.

Last Tuesday night was an amazing night. We are still hearing how, all across the country, and even around the world, positive energy and a sense of community was unleashed as people celebrated the election of Barack Obama. It was clear that there was a kind of change in the moment that went beyond political slogans or the simple truth that there would be a new occupant of the highest office in the land, or the historic awareness that we had elected an African American to the highest office in a country that had institutionalized slavery for a century, and racism for far longer.

As I reflect on that night, I realize that Mr. Obama ran an amazing campaign, that he is a unique person for this moment in time, and I am grateful that he is offering himself for what must surely be one of the most difficult leadership challenges of the age.  But the outcome of the election was not only a triumph for Mr. Obama and his character, intellect and campaign management skills. The American people did well, too. Enough of us were able to be liberated from the rhetoric of fear and become inspired by hope to vote differently. All those hateful e-mails that went around did not convince enough of us to be afraid. Good for us!

In fact, we, the American people didn’t just do well in choosing the next President, we did good. We unleashed real goodness in the world, in my view, with our choice of Mr. Obama for the Presidency. Of course, there will be some politics as usual. But we chose someone who articulates hope, who values life and embraces the ambiguities and nuances that shape human experience, and who applies both rigorous intellectual skills and real compassion to the work of problem solving and policy shaping. We elected someone, who, despite campaign rhetoric to the contrary is a lot like us. He owns a single home in a residential area in a Midwestern city. His family and Mrs. Obama’s family appear not to have used solid American family values as a campaign platform so much as they have used them to form and shape their family life across a couple of generations.

One could not help but wonder how long this euphoria would last. Would it carry us through until the inauguration, when surely the sight of this remarkable man, woman and their beautiful black family on the steps of the Capitol will again enliven us with the awareness that, indeed, in this election, the American people did good?

For me, it only lasted, really until Wednesday sometime, when I began to be aware of the consequences of the passage of Proposition 8 in California. And then I knew – we had forgotten the first rule. We had done good by electing Barack Obama. But we had done great harm to some of our fellow American Citizens. I don’t vote in California, but as a progressive Midwesterner, I look to California for leadership. California, you let me down!

As the first week has worn into the second, I see that the issue of the right of Gay and Lesbian persons to marry is in fact, not defeated. First there was disappointment, and then tears, and then anger. And now there are protests. Good. That’s good.

Something in me has shifted. I am tired of this argument. I am tired of the bigotry and lack of compassion and failure to love and do good when it comes to our brothers and sisters who love and want to build a life with persons of the same gender. I know that I am a pastor and supposedly the Bible condemns these people. But I tell you, to make that assumption is to misuse the sacred text of scripture – and that’s a sin in and of itself. Using scripture to condemn people is using one sin to commit another. That is no way to stay in love with a God of love.

As soon as I have time, I’m going to put my theological education to use and do a more thorough study of marriage in the Bible, but I can tell you now that any casual reading will reveal that marriage in the Bible doesn’t look one iota like Ozzie and Harriet or whatever ideal the so called “family values” people are lifting up. In ancient culture, when the Bible was written, marriage was largely a property transfer. A woman, who had no legal standing of her own, was transferred from ownership by her father’s household to ownership by her husband’s household. Sometimes it was business merger. Moses got to tend his father-in-law’s flocks as part of the deal for his marriage.

Jesus didn’t say anything about it – except to condemn divorce (which could only be obtained by men) and set an adulterous woman free when she was about to be stoned to death. I wonder – have these people who are standing on biblical values actually read the Bible?

I try to follow Jesus. And I’m trying to follow him in this way: Love God and love my neighbor. Those are the commandments which Jesus claims are inextricably intertwined. Doing no harm, doing good, and staying in love with God are ways to evaluate how we are doing when measured against those commandments.

Here is how I know we did harm last week with the passage of Proposition 8, and in every place where we have denied the right to marry to gay people. I am a pastor. I have people in my congregation who are gay. And who are married (albeit not “legally” in our state). And they are hurt and hurting. That’s all I need to know. My neighbor is wounded. We did harm. Failed to love them. And thereby failed to love the God who loves them. Because this is the other thing our faith teaches us: God’s love is unconditional.

But how will they ever know that if people who claim to love God can’t show unconditional love?

One more thing. I’ve been married for 35 years. I know what marriage is. It is an economic arrangement, for sure. It is a legal arrangement. We can share insurance benefits, and pension, and joint ownership of things, easily, as a given. If someone has to make a life and death call about me in an Emergency room or an Intensive Care Unit, my partner can do that, no questions asked.

And it is a covenant built on love and mutual trust. It is living with someone in such a way that you learn what it means to give up your life for the well being of another. That’s how the gospel of John has Jesus describing love. What is it to me if others want to build that kind of life partnership with a person of the same gender? Why would I deny them that?

Oh, yeah. I haven’t talked about the sex and procreation thing. That’s because I think that’s not the main point. Enjoyment of one another’s bodies is God’s way of giving us real sensory experience of sharing the joy of another human’s life. If two people, of any gender, want to say that they will limit their sexual activity to one person with whom they have a covenant for a mutually supportive life partnership, why would I not bless that?

In the end a lot of people think about same sex relationships and go “yuck.” That’s a learned response. Like not liking broccoli. So don’t eat broccoli.

I believe in the American people, in the body politic, and more than that, I believe in the Body of Christ. And more than that, I believe in a God of love and justice.

We did good. And we did harm.

And so I’ll protest. And I’ll pray, “Lord, forgive us. We have failed to love you with our whole hearts, and we have failed to love our neighbors as ourselves.”

Extravagant Generosity Day 31

There is an image in today’s text that I’ve been trying to live with for a while in my life. It is the image of “getting on the balcony.” I first saw it used in literature about the model of leadership development that is taught at Harvard by Ronald Heifetz. He advises that adaptive leaders have to be able to be in the midst of the dance, and still get onto the balcony and observe what is occurring on the dance floor.

The questions that occur to me when I think of that metaphor are: Where are the patterns? Who is playing what role? Where is the movement? What is the rhythm?

Today, Bishop Schnase suggests that we sort of get on the balcony and look at our own lives, asking similar questions. On what am I expending my effort? Where on the dance floor do I spend most of my time? With whom do I interact? Who is left out? What is getting my attention? What is being neglected? I think we can use this metaphor to help us steward our lives. Don’t we all need some evaluation and adjustment from time to time?

Stewardship season for the church is a time that invites us to this evaluation. Today’s text invites us to make some income calculations. At our house, we use Quicken, a very simple spreadsheet program, to manage our checking account. Each time we use the debit card, pay a bill by automatic payment, or write a check, a category is assigned to the expenditure. We can easily call up a report that tells us where we spend our money.

It is a very interesting exercise to calculate this. We’ve all heard that if we want to truly know what we value, we ought to look at where we spend our money. I’ve learned some things about my values over the years doing this exercise. One thing we know about our family is that we value education. There were years when we spent more on education than any other category.

But I also know that I value instant gratification more than I value saving for the future. I am working on doing with less today so I can have a better retirement fund. I am not into delayed gratification, and this is a struggle for me.

In fact, it surprises me to see the high percentage we give to the church.  I never thought we’d do it. We give about 8.8 percent of our gross income (before taxes) to the church; and about 1. 5 % to other charitable causes. So, when I look from the balcony, I see that my life is contributing to the lives of many others who share the dance floor with me. Some of them are close and important to me personally. Some of them are far, far away, working among the human family in the name of Christ. Some of them are children who come to school at North Broadway. Some of them are working in Cambodia, and Russia, and Mexico. I just stand there on the balcony, and watch myself put that envelope in the offering plate every week – and then, if I pay attention, I see that God has taken it back, and is using it to work God’s purposes all around me.

Do I really need another sweater? That adorable little pillow for the sofa? An extra set of dishes? How much is my stuff crowding out the dance? Could I make more room in this dance of relationship with less stuff and more generosity? I’m thinking about that.

Extravagant Generosity: How To Learn to Tithe

It seems that the daily routine and the excitement of the closing days of the political campaign pulled me away from the discipline of writing here even more than last week! I don’t know if anyone is still reading or not, but I do want to think this week, especially as we face an uncertain economic situation, about what it means to be extravagantly generous.

Gary and I have always tried to give regularly to the church, since the early years of our marriage. I think for me, it really began with me wanting to “belong,” to do my part as a member. I can remember when we gave about $20.00 a month. Gradually we tried to increase what we gave, but were often in debt, and living from paycheck to paycheck and couldn’t keep up with our pledge.

Over the years, we got better at budgeting. We began to try to increase our pledge by 1% of income per year, until, only a few years ago, when my seminary debt was finally paid, we reached a 10% tithe. A small amount of our tithe goes to causes other than the local congregation – all of them church or education related. When we moved to Columbus, we both made a higher salary than we have ever made before (well–since I left pharmacy, anyway), and so a tithe got to be a pretty significant amount of money. At the end of the year, when I see what we’ve given I think about what I could have bought with that money!

But here’s how we do it. Money that we save is withheld from our paychecks and deposited into retirement accounts. The next thing that happens is that the check to the church gets written. We have not missed writing that check in the week we get paid more than a few times in the past 10 years. I don’t say that to brag, I just say it to bear witness to how a habit of giving can really be cultivated. And we don’t miss the money. It’s just not money that we consider ours. It’s the church’s before we even get it. So it doesn’t matter what we could have bought with it.

We have the power to choose what to do with 90% of our money.  But 10% isn’t ours. It’s just that simple.

Although, if God told me it was okay to use it for a four week vacation in Europe, I’d be okay with that

Risk Taking Mission and Service Day 23

In the life of North Broadway, there are two stellar examples of outreach programs that truly seek to reach people at places of brokenness and suffering. One is the relationship with the Community Resource Center, where so much is done to serve the hungry, and to meet the needs of children, families and older adults. It is easy to see how much difference we make in lives by assessing our commitments to the CRC.

A second outreach is the relationship with the Family Center at the YWCA. This outreach to homeless families with children is clearly a necessity in the community, and NBC has made a difference from the very beginning.

One of the things I notice about North Broadways’ outreach ministries, is that we have a way of noticing what needs to be done, and beginning to do it, and then giving it away to the larger community. From a few congregations doing Interfaith Hospitality, the Family Center now has broad based community investment. From the beginnings of CRC to now, the same is true. It almost seems as if there is less opportunity for us, because so many others are involved.

But maybe we should think about what our place is in the larger community. Maybe we are best at beginning and then building and giving away ministry so that it can be sustained. If that is true, then today’s question is a relevent question for us. If there is a critical need in the community now that is unmet, we have a new beginning point!

I think there may be some of those needs out there. What do you think? How would we find out?

Risk-Taking Mission and Service Day 22

Though posting this a day late, I am reflecting on the question “What is the most unexpected place to which your faith in Christ has taken you in order to make a difference in someone’s life?”  In 1997, I went to Russia for three weeks with a group of seminary students and a faculty person from United Seminary. The faculty person was a Russian religious scholar,  and the trip was planned in conjunction with the Russian Orthodox church, which was struggling to regain a foothold in the former Soviet Union. Officially outlawed during the years of Communism, the church had survived “underground” and in exile. Because we were sponsored by the Russian Orthodox youth movement, we stayed in every basic accommodations. This was not a luxury trip. And, since I inadvertently left my cosmetic bag in the car at the airport, it wasn’t very glamorous either.

(People who know me can hardly believe that I traveled for three weeks with one suitcase, including my bedding, towels and personal supply of toilet paper–much less that I went without make up and hair dryer for three weeks! But I’ve got the pictures to prove it. )

The bulk of the trip was spent working at a monastery on an island north of Moscow. The island was in the middle of a lake (which is where we bathed) and was accessible by an old WWII era bridge or by ferry. The ferry only ran on the days there was gasoline. But a few monks were in residence, seeking to reclaim the monastery from its years as a Soviet Army hospital, a prison, and a place of refuge for disabled men, widowed women and orphaned children.  We were there, not ot convert people to protestant Christianity, but to help adherents of this ancient faith – Eastern Orthodoxy – reclaim one of their sacred places.

We weeded a gigantic garden filled with potatoes and squash, which would be pretty much the sole source of food over the long, brutal winter. We scraped layers of grime off ornate iron work in the church, and discoverd gold leaf underneath. We watched as artists began to restore the frescoes inside the church – glorious paintings of blblical stories.  We learned  a great deal about Orthodox practice and worship. And we watched as the “babushkas,” the Grandmothers, tended to their devotion in the church, expressing their love for God through the habits of the faith that had so long been denied to them.

I don’t really know what has happened to this monastery in the intervening years, but I’d like to think that there were more potatoes because I spent nine days pulling the weeds from around the vines. I’d like to think that there is a community there today, still, worshiping and praying and sustaining their lives together.

I grew up during the Cold War. I was taught that Russians were bad.They were, to quote Ronald Reagan, “the evil empire.”I wrote an essay in third of fourth grade, which my mother saved, where I talked about the Russian people as though they were our enemies. Of course, that is not what I believed when I went to Russia, But I really knew nothing about Russian people. I had to encounter them to know them – and that is what risk taking mission is about.

I found the Russian people to be very demoralized, sad, and a bit hopeless about their earthly life. For them, the Orthodox faith rehearses their anticipated participation in God’s reign. They have too much violence and abuse of power in their history to believe that this could happen to them in this life –except in church. So they go to church to get a “foretaste of the glory divine,” as the hymn puts it.

Russia was way out of my comfort zone, and every time we arrived in a new town and had to turn our passports over the former KGB, I was nervous.  The point is – none of us know what another’s life or circumstances are truly like unless we leave our comfort zone to encounter the “other.”

Intentional Faith Development Day 20

Thinking about practices that shape us makes me think about physical fitness.  Every time I’ve moved from one church to another, I’ve failed to integrate self care and fitness into my new place from the very beginning – then I have to play catch up.

I’ve thought about it for two years. I’ve researched the gyms and the fitness classes and I’m well aware that a pair of shoes and a walk through the park would work wonders for me. But, as our author points out, “Practices are the ‘doings,’ not just the good intentions, the thinking and theory and hoping and planning that occupy our minds and hearts.”

Nothing will change my fitness level until I participate in fitness activities. And this is just as true for our spiritual fitness as for our physical fitness.We have to participate, in order for practices to shape us.

I guess I can take solace in the fact that my faith formation practices have improved recently. Reading the Three Simple Rules book really helped me refocus and improve my practice of spiritual disciplines. Maybe the physical fitness practices will soon follow!

Faith development is not much more of a mystery than physical fitness, really. Generations of saints who’ve gone before us have shaped the practices of the faith. All we really have to do is join in.

I don’t know what keeps us from practicing what we value. It’s a part of that pesky human condition with which we must live.

But I do know that we can help each other – that all of this, including physical fitness, is easier when we’re involved with others who share our goals and values. So I’m glad to be part of a faith tradition that already knows how to do faith development, and provides a community in which I can participate while I struggle to remain faithful.

Intentional Faith Development Day 19

I have been part of the same clergy fellowship group for two years. This past summer, after we’d been together for two years, one of our members decided to leave the group. Her comment was that she had never felt like a part of the group. Her comment took me by surprise, because I thought we had done a good job of incorporating everyone into the group. We had shared spiritual autobiographies and been very appreciative of one another’s stories. We had shared ministry experiences, and supported one another. Sometimes, a group is just not the right fit. The focus or interests or communication style of a particular group are not right for everyone. I really think that was the case here. And in this circumstance, it is an act of hospitality to send the person off to another group with prayers and warm wishes and blessings and gratitude for the time that has been shared.

Of course, that meant out group had the opportunity to receive another new person, and then it was a question of hospitality. We have two years of shared experiences. We have our code words and our internal vocabulary. It will take intentionality to show hospitality to a new person.

When I think about how groups work together in the life of the church, I always go back to my earlier science education. I think about basic (very basic) cell biology – and the degree to which cell walls exist to protect the integrity of the cell. Groups of cells have specific, specialized functions, and together they support the whole system.  When cell contents are lost to the interstitial or “in-between” places, there can be a loss of integrity in the whole system. Cell walls have permeability, however, so that nutrients can pass into the cell, and metabolic products can pass out of the cell and travel to other places in the system.

In the church, I have always believed that the boundaries of our fellowship groups need to be “permeable.” People need to enter and leave groups as they feel led to do so – and our groups need to have the capacity to both welcome people and let people go with grace and attention.  There needs to be permission for newcomers to enter, and permission for people to leave. But there needs to be something more. There needs to be a way of making sure that when people leave one group, they find another place for fellowship and faith formation. People get lost in the “inbetween” spaces — and that’s never a good thing for them, or for the life of the church.

Groups need to develop the capacity to notice who is “inbetween” and “draw the circle wide,” as we sometimes sing, so that no one stands alone.