Finding God In The World: Interview with Diana Butler Bass - Patheos

Nothing short of a spiritual revolution is afoot. This revolution is happening not within the walls of the church, but outside of them, in nature, in neighborhoods, in the home, and in the global commons.

The environmental language and the language of the web from technology has conspired to create a new spiritual language for us and it’s been very powerful to me.

Nothing short of a spiritual revolution is afoot. This revolution is happening not within the walls of the church, but outside of them, in nature, in neighborhoods, in the home, and in the global commons.

Where is God? "Right here," Butler Bass says, in the dirt, in the water, in the air we breathe, and in the face of our neighbors. And this makes a world of difference in how we live as people of faith.

This spiritual revolution is really about a shift or a transformation. It really isn’t about institutions or the church. It’s about the way in which we understand and experience God. And yet our churches and institutions are still locating God in the very same place they did 500 years ago, in a far away heavenly realm.

Lots of people are now looking immediately around themselves, and saying, look at this! God is in my garden! Who knew God cared about tomatoes? Or, God is in the air I breathe, or in the face of my neighbor. The direction in which we are looking for God has really shifted.

God is with us here, in the web of life — not beyond it — and we live here, and the rest of nature is here, this whole amazing system of the world, and this planet we inhabit, its all interrelated.

This is a God who is interested in how we live now. It is so challenging to me. It’s a realization that is turning not only my spiritual life, but also my ethical and moral choices, inside out and I’m personally on a path of re-imagining my entire understanding of what it means for me to be a Christian person.

The full article is available here

Reflection and Renewal: Do Justice, Love Kindness (based on Luke 18:18-23)

adapted from Service Sunday
by Beth Merrill 

God, we must admit that we can no longer feign ignorance.

You have indeed shown us what you require:

• to do justice - seeking peace & reconciliation, standing with the marginalized and forgotten 
• to love kindness - showing compassion and unconditional caring for those in need 

God of the oppressed, protector of the poor, liberator of the unfree,
help us to live our lives in service to our neighbors and so in service to you.

Amen

Benediction: Overflowing, Extravagant Love (based on Luke 18:18-23)

adapted from Blessing of Balm
by Jan L. Richardson

When we see brokenness in this world which God created in goodness and loves, may we meet it overflowing grace and pour ourselves out with extravagant love.

Responsive Call To Worship: God Welcomes All (based on Luke 7:36-50)

adapted from Call to Worship: Luke 7: 36-50
by Pastor Seth A. Normington

Reader: God, you welcome all of us as honored guests.
All: You welcome us all - even though we don’t always get things right, 
even though we don't always show love like you do.

Reader: You forgive our failures and give us a seat at your table.
All: For this amazing gift, we give you worship and praise.

Listening For Lent - Timothy Murphy at Progressive Christianity

Use this Lent to grow in listening and learning from those that are experiencing mistreatment and injustice by practicing solidarity.

Lent has come again (quite early this year!), and we should use it to start developing some of our atrophied spiritual muscles, like practicing solidarity.

Doing so is necessary if we are to break out of the mold we so often find ourselves caught in when it comes to relating to the suffering of others.

Most often, we fall into one of two ditches. On one side is anesthetized numbness. Either because of unfamiliarity or unease, we remain separate from the suffering within our wider communities.  In this ditch, we feel nothing, making the pain of another’s injury bearable. 

On the other side is the ditch of benevolent rescue. We see oppression and our hearts are rightly moved. Who could blame another for the instinctual desire to help? But we err when we act as if we are saviors for the downtrodden, that they are merely waiting for us to rescue them. 

The middle path, the narrow way, is one of solidarity. This means that we support the work of those directly affected by oppression, but as partners we take our guidance from those closest to the situation.  This is a humbling position, one that many of us are unaccustomed to. 

I invite you to make use of this Lenten time to grow in listening and learning from those that are experiencing mistreatment and injustice. What are they asking for? How can you and/or your faith community support the work they are already doing? Listen to them.

The full article is available here

Love and Welcome Someone The World Hates - CRC Office Of Social Justice

#BlessingNotBurden

God-Given Dignity of Immigrant Neighbors - CRC Office of Social Justice

#BlessingNotBurden

Responsive Call To Worship: Trust and Seeking (based on Luke 7:1-10)

Reader: God, we come today wanting to believe in many things but trusting very few.
All: Our faith in you may be ragged and worn around the edges ...

Reader: .. but you’ve promised that you don’t brush aside the bruised and the hurt.
All: Instead, you welcome all who come seeking; so meet us where we are.

Reader: You're a God of limitless love, creativity and compassion.
All: For this, we give you praise.

God In All

Spiritual Revolution: Relationships & Renewal - Diana Butler Bass in Religion Dispatches

A shift in our conception of God is at the basis of a cultural reorganization, a cultural rebirth. The boundaries of religion, the architecture that we built for the old world has failed.

Religious historian Diana Butler Bass is a preeminent narrator of the decline of traditional religion and the emergence of progressive and spiritual-but-not-religious faith in the 21st century.

Her newest book, Grounded: Finding God in the World, A Spiritual Revolution, turns to contemporary science, both physical and social, for evidence of ongoing “Incarnation,” what the ancient Hebrews called Emanuel, or “G-d with us,” or what religion scholars call “panentheism”—God in everything.

Bass seeks out God in soil, water, sky, and in fellow human beings and their communities. “A shift in our conception of God is at the basis of a cultural reorganization, a cultural rebirth," she says. "The boundaries of religion, the architecture that we built for the old world has failed."

"As an institution, (the church) has failed to ask us to address the questions of poverty and class and color and ecology that really do advance the privilege of some at the expense of others."

"We need to have something that is better," Bass says. "[W]hat we have now doesn’t allow us to be who we need to be in order to save the planet, or an economic plain where people can have dignity across the world."

"One hopeful thing that I see," said Bass, "is the rewriting of theology in a new generation; people who are not afraid to ask questions that we’ve needed to ask for a long time."

"Institutions naturally do two things really well, and that is rules and rituals. They do relationships really poorly," says Bass. "That's the heart of this spiritual revolution (we're currently experiencing). We are developing a new relationship with nature and with one another in new patterns of human community."

"The question that I have is this: Can we build relationships and networks that are more about relationships and renewal?"

The full article is available here

God Listens To ...

God Bless Those We Deem Unjustified - Kayla McClurg at inward/outward

Reflection and Renewal: Turn Our Hearts Towards Love (based on Matthew 22:39)

God,

You ask us to love others as we love ourselves.  But sometimes our eyes don’t look beyond our own little part of the world. Sometimes we feel so overwhelmed that we don’t open our hands to help those we see that need it.

And sometimes we are guided by what we’ve been told to fear by voices other than yours.

Turn our eyes toward your presence, your action, within us and around us. Open our hands to act as yours in your world. Soften our hearts so that we welcome the stranger, the refugee, the outcast.

Forgive us for when we ignore or shun you in the form of others. Keep us on the path of your kingdom which sets things right by renewing and restoring life.

Amen.

God Is Everywhere Present - Jan Richardson

My Emancipation From American Christianity - John Pavlovitz

It's getting harder and harder to love all people and still fit into what has become American Christianity, so I am creating distance between me and a system that can no longer accommodate the scale of my God and the scope of my aspirations. 

All those times when I felt like an outsider in American Christianity, I used to think that it was just me, that it was my problem, my deficiency, my moral defect.  Something rose up from the deepest places within me and shouted, "I can't do this anymore! I can't be part of this!"  These moments once overwhelmed me with panic and filled me with guilt.

What I've come to realize is that I have simply outgrown American Christianity.  I've outgrown something that simply no longer feels like love, something I no longer see much of Jesus in.

If spirituality is worth holding onto, it should be a place where the marginalized feel the most visible, where the hurting receive the most tender care and where the outsiders find the safest refuge.  It should be a place where diversity is fiercely pursued and equality loudly championed; where all of humanity finds a permanent home and where justice runs the show.

It's getting harder and harder to love all people and still fit into what has become American Christianity, so I am creating distance between me and a system that can no longer accommodate the scale of my God and the scope of my aspirations.

In my heart and in the hearts of so many like me, the Spirit is boldly declaring this emancipation from the small, heavily guarded space that wants to contain it and taking us out into the wide, breathtaking expanses of unfettered faith.  There is something much greater beyond that is worth heading toward; something that looks more like God and feels more like love.

The full article is available here

The Business of Worship Music - Leonard Vander Zee in The Banner

There’s an old saying that Christians absorb more theology from what they sing than from most other sources. If that’s the case, then, considering the CCLI top 25, we’ll soon be in a theological desert.

Contemporary Christian musicians are not any more immune to the lure of money than you or I are. And they can make lots more by writing songs that are like the ones in the top 25, with similar emotive words and chord changes. The logic of all this is that the songs will begin to sound strangely similar. From there it spreads to Christian music and hymnal publishers.

I fear the same thing may be happening in many local churches. There’s a strong urge to model our worship on what we see as successful and what we hear on Christian radio. As a result, what many congregations sing in worship is overly influenced by a business model rather than what’s theologically rich and spiritually healthy for the life and worship of the congregation.

I’m not saying that all the songs and artists in the top echelons of the CCLI world are shallow or imitative. But I’ve heard from talented songwriters who produce theologically robust and musically inventive music that there is enormous pressure from publishers and distributors to go with what sells. And the results are plain to see.

So what’s the answer? We first need to acknowledge the problem, and it’s not trivial. There’s an old saying that Christians absorb more theology from what they sing than from most other sources. If that’s the case, then, considering the CCLI top 25, we’ll soon be in a theological desert.

Once we recognize the problem, pastors and music leaders in congregations need to be much more careful about what their congregations are singing. It may take some work, but I know of contemporary-Christian-music-singing churches who carefully plan worship music with musical and theological sensitivity. The material is out there, and sometimes it comes right from budding artists in their own congregations.

The full article is available here

Jesus' Agenda - Nancy Rockwell at Patheos

So many of our candidates profess to be Christian evangelicals – it would be a welcome wonder if one of them were to have the courage to stand up in an ad on TV and read Jesus’ agenda.

In Luke 4, Jesus makes his public announcement of his ministry. He said that he was sent by God's Spirit to bring good news to the poor, release to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the acceptable year of God, the year of Jubilee.

Not much of this is being focused on in the campaigns this year.

One or two candidates are focusing on the economy and how it effects the poor, but most have a focus on terrorist aggression.

There is more emphasis on keeping the oppressed out of our nation than on helping them go free. And as for the Acceptable Year, which biblically is a year of redistribution of wealth and land; that's a non-starter.

Jesus’ words challenge us to choose to hear that the good news is not for us individually, apart from one another, or privately, through our personal belief.  Rather, the good news is for all, and is revealed in us and through us, as we reach out to embrace one another’s needs.

The full article is available here

Donald Trump & The Travesty of Christian Tribalism - Rev. Dr. David Gushee at Religion News

The early church, moved by the Holy Spirit, became a post-tribal community that brought together Jews and Gentiles, rich and poor, people of every language and tribe and nation.

There is a great word for the kind of faux religiosity trotted out by Donald Trump in his visit to Liberty University, and not only by him. That word is tribalism.

The particular tribe that Mr. Trump was ham-handedly courting was white evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. He is not alone. Every Republican candidate courts this tribe, which constitutes a substantial share of GOP primary voters.

Tribalism thrives on us vs. them thinking. Our tribe is better than your tribe. God is on the side of our tribe and against your tribe. This land has always belonged to our tribe. Other tribes are outsiders; perhaps we will tolerate them, but they do not belong here in the way that we do. We will muscle them aside and let them know who is in charge here. And if an obvious member of another tribe dares to come into one of our tribal gatherings we will let them know that they are not welcome.

Of course, it should go without saying that Christian tribalism is a complete travesty. The Christian faith is centered on Jesus, who taught love of all, including stranger and enemy, and who died for all. The early church, moved by the Holy Spirit, became a post-tribal community that brought together Jews and Gentiles, rich and poor, people of every language and tribe and nation (Galatians 3:28, Ephesians 2:11-22).

Anyone who offers or falls for “Christian” tribalism separates himself from the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

The full article is available here

#BlessingNotBurden on the Campaign Trail - CRC North America

We want presidential candidates to tell the truth: immigrants are a blessing.

Why? There is a false understanding that people who immigrate to the United States are a burden. Belief in such a myth perpetuates the brokenness of our immigration system.

The truth is that people who immigrate to the U.S. are a blessing, and our broken immigration system often causes their families pain and prevents them from fully flourishing as God intends. We need you to ask candidates to speak publicly that immigrants are a blessing to the U.S.

To learn more about how to participate, view this Blessing Not Burden on the Campaign Trail info sheet.

Productive Dialogue on Immigration - Onward for Sojourner's

Immigration has always made America stronger.

In today’s climate, when discourse seems increasingly polarized and our communities are ever more global, it’s particularly important to understand how our immigration policies affect those around us.

Whether a child who's separated from her parents because of their legal status, a promising young student determined to study physics and robotics, or an elder seeking care at the end of life, our immigration policies are at play.

Onward's goal is to encourage productive dialogue – in places of worship and book clubs, at the kitchen table or in the blogosphere – about what we can do to make sure that everyone is treated with respect and compassion, wherever they are from.

Drawing on stories about real people (as well as an occasional animated short or a feature film), we hope these resources can help shine light on what, together, we can do to make sure our systems are consistent with our democratic values and our quest for a shared and prosperous future.

View the website and all of its resources here

Responsive Call To Worship: God, Help Us To Be Open (based on Proverbs 19:11)

Reader: God, the noise in our lives is loud.
ALL: Open our ears to your still, small voice.

Reader: God, the darkness within and around us feels threatening.
ALL: Open our eyes to the light of your presence.

Reader: God of overflowing mercy, we cling tightly to so many things.
ALL: Open our minds and hands in generosity and joy.

Reader: God of all people, we're often told that we need to fear those who are “other.”
ALL: Open our arms to the stranger, the refugee, and the oppressed.
Open our hearts to the expanse of your love.

Reader: God, replace our anger and fear with your peace.
ALL: Open our souls to receive your grace as we give you thanks and praise.

5 Things to Know about the Paris Climate Agreement - Do Justice!

The Paris Agreement is a big deal, and the Christian Reformed Church knows it. 

You’ve likely heard a lot lately about the Paris climate talks that wrapped up a few weeks ago, and you’ve likely been left wondering what it’s all about. The follow up from Paris has seen lots of high talk from government officials and lots of complicated jargon, but little plain-English explanations of what the agreement actually says and what it means.

The Paris Agreement is a big deal, and the CRC knows it. That’s why we sent a delegation to be present at the negotiations in order to provide a public witness and to report back on the proceedings.

The work of turning the words of the Paris Agreement into action is already underway in the CRC.

So in case you’ve been wondering what this whole Paris Agreement is all about, here are five things you need to know:

1. It is monumentally historic
Never before has every nation of the world adopted an agreement on climate change. Rather than prescriptive demands imposed upon nations, the Paris Agreement is based on nationally determined commitments that each country submitted based on their individual circumstances.

2. It sets a clear long-term temperature goal for the world
The Paris Agreement committed to keep “global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.” This new goal is a big deal and took most experts by surprise. It is a testament to the advocacy of low-lying vulnerable nations and NGOs that pushed hard at the talks for a more ambitious long-term goal as a matter of survival for their people.

3. It calls for net zero greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the century.
“Net zero emissions” simply means that by the end of the century, the world will have reduced its greenhouse gas emissions significantly, and what is still emitted will be sustainably offset by things like forests and oceans which absorb greenhouse gases (especially carbon dioxide--the most important greenhouse gas). The UN panel of expert scientists (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has said that the world must reach net zero emissions by 2070 to avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change.

4. It mobilizes billions of dollars for poor and developing nations
The Paris Agreement commits funds to be provided by developed nations to assist developing nations in the transition away from fossil fuels and in adapting to the effects of climate change that they are already experiencing.

5. It is the starting point, not the finish line
The agreement is a framework; a mutual agreement on how the world will move forward in the coming decades to address the challenge of climate change. Governments, lawmakers, and advocates (that’s you!) will now need to do the hard work of following up the important words of the Paris Agreement with even more important action.

The full article is available here

New Year, New Conversation about Immigration - Blessing Not Burden

"Scripture teaches that immigrants are made in the image of God and that a faithful response to a stranger is to extend welcome.

In the Bible, strangers are often used by God to bring blessing.

We have experienced the blessings that immigrants bring to the U.S., our communities, the economy, the church, and our lives.

So when we hear immigrants described as burdens, we're committed to change the conversation -- whether in our homes, churches, or congressional districts.

We commit to speak the truth: Immigrants are a blessing, not a burden."


Add your voice to the millions calling for just and sensible immigration policy that reflects that immigrants are a #BlessingNotBurden.

Join in changing the conversation about immigrants in the U.S. by signing the pledge at blessingnotburden.org/#sign

The Miracle of God Comes Through Us - Eberhard Arnold

From Charity to Advocacy to Deep Solidarity - Joerg Rieger in Patheos

Deep solidarity puts us in mutual relationship, helping us realize how much we share in common.

Charity, though widely appreciated, is neither the only nor the most faithful response to the problems of the world.

Jesus preached good news to the poor. What is good news to the poor? Is it that they can expect to be the recipients of handouts and donations? Or is it that they will no longer need to be poor?

Charity, however, is a place where we can start addressing the problems of the world when the eyes of those who engage in charity are opened to the causes of the problems they are trying to address.

Charity that is tied to a deeper understanding of the problems of the world often leads to advocacy, which means speaking out against the injustices at the root of our problems.  Such advocacy is solidly grounded in many religious traditions, including Hebrew prophets and Mary's Magnificat.

Jesus preached and embodied the good news to the poor by engaging in what I have been calling "deep solidarity."  It is a matter of understanding that nothing will change for the better unless we are addressing the problems of the world together.  Deep solidarity is the recognition that we are all in the same boat.

The ever-growing need for charity should make us aware of the extent of the problem of injustice and that there is no easy fix.  Those of us who still enjoy positions of privilege should begin putting them to use for the community and those who are struggling rather than solely for our own personal benefit.

The full article is available here