Bloggy Cronyism

By now it probably shouldn't come as too much of a suprise to most of my readers that there are few things I deplore more than nepotism and cronyism. That said I'd like to point out some amazing work being done by friends of mine (some longtime, others might be more accurately described as really wonderful aquaintances):

Longtime buddy of mine Chris, who lives in Portland, writes a great blog that focuses on short form music reviews of some wonderful new music. If someone gives me a iTunes card for Christmas this year his blog will figure prominantly in where it gets spent. Show him some love here

A more recent friend (and another residant of The People's Republic of Portland) Brandon has a number of irons in the fire that I wanted to plug:
Along with his buddy Brock, he puts out the amazing Sprocket Podcast on living more simply and showcasing folks who make the most of their bikes, public transit, brewing their own beer, living cell phone free, etc.

He also writes a blog where he talks about some of the doctoral work he's been doing on how the church has been affected by a car-culture and paints a picture of what church might look like as we move out of that culture.
You can find that (including a recent Christianity Today article) here

Widening the Circle: Experiments in Christian Discipleship is a new book by another couple of more recent friends: Joanna Shenk (Author) and Mark Van Steenwyk (Contributor).
It's a collection of pieces on radical discipleship in Christian communities that have drawn from the anabaptist tradition (I've placed my order already at my local independant bookstore)

They are co-hosts of another of my favorite podcasts The Iconocast (One of my personal favorite episodes can be found here)

Lastly, from (where else) Portland, a couple of guys I've known forever (one was even in my wedding) are putting out some wonderful music as part of 4-piece called Priory. You can and should check them out here

Work

I'm feeling pretty slammed at the moment. The Olympia Film Festival is this week and I'm just one of the hundreds of people who've put in some literal blood sweat and tears into making it happen (I'd love to see a few of the films), Books to Prisoners takes up my Mon's, and there is Spanish class on Wed's, I work 40 hrs a week, try not to fall asleep in church, I'm working on putting out a slightly timely book review for here on my blog on one of the densest books I've read since college, I have to go to a CPR training to renew my certification on Fri, still trying to cobble together some of the intrest in my failed "Faith @ Occupy Olympia" into...something. There is so much crap that I need to get done. Oh yeah, and I'm sick at the moment.

In the midst of all this I have two things kinda floating through my head about the Sabath, the Biblically mandated time of rest: 1) As I decry the ways that the powers that be exploit and take advantage of me, as is the nature of the state and the capitalist system (and for that matter is a story as old as empire) I'm quick to ignore the ways I do it to myself. I'll take the overtime when it's offered, I'll overcommit myself but somehow it's not a problem when I do it to myself... I don't remember who first pointed out this tendancy but it rang very true and is particularly ringing true at the moment.
2) Ched Myers and Walter Brueggemann, two of my favorite theologians, have argued that the purpose (or at least one of the many purposes) of the Sabath is to remind us that we are not in control and the world doesn't need us as much as we'd like to pretend. My world/The World won't fall apart if I allow it to go on by itself, if I sit back for a day. I'm not even talking about my "job" per se, but all the wonderful stuff that I cram into my week. Even when it's "the Lord's work". We resist this but in a society of workaholics (like me) I think this is a very timely, even prophetic message.
3) We need to rediscover resting outside of the dominant naratives of our society; we need to discover how to rest in community appart from our (usually) unspoken civic (read: the religion of USAmerica) duty to buy stuff and consume.

What about you guys? Do you Sabbath well? Do you find it easy to relax? Really relax? To trust that the world won't fall apart without your medelling?

The three books you get in prison?

As some of you know, I have for the past 2 years been involved in the local chapter of Books To Prisoners. We get letters from just a few of the ungodly (and yes, I mean this. It's an absolute abomination) number of people that are stuffed into America's prison industrial complex. But this post isn't about them it's about you; let me explain. Many states and some particular prisons restrict the number of books a person can recieve to 3. To help keep our requests to a minimum we ask that prisoners wait 9 months between letters and then it takes another 3-6 months for us to process letters (on average). My question, one that I posed to my comrades at Books to Prisoners was this: If you had 6 months and could have only 3 books (remember, things like dictionaries count as 1) what would you pick and why?
Let's assume further that you are in solitary confinement. I'm sure you are a nice person and you weren't causing trouble but your prison wanted to cut cost/maximize profits and that means every cell is filled. So besides your one hour a day ouside of your cell you have 3 books...

I'll post some of the one's we came up with in a week or two.

Movie: A Better Life

So in the last year or two it's come to my attention that many of the spaces I wanted to spend my time volunteering (or for that matter, places I was hoping might be willing to pay me enough money so I could afford rent) all seem to want one thing: people who habla español. So this summer my wife Rachel and I recently enrolled ourselves in a Spanish class. Being a wonderful student I've spent much of my time watching Spanish language film and TV shows (read: I like well made film and TV shows and I like self-deluding myself into believing that I'm learning).
Now just out on video, A Better Life (What does it say about our society that a bilingual film has an English only trailer?), is a troubling film that is perhaps even more troubling when we watch it through the question of what it means to love their neighbor. Our film is about Carlos, an undocumented single parent living in LA. This story feels much like a modern adaptation of an Euripidian tragedy; our protagonist isn't a bad guy, but right from the outset you know, he's screwed.
Carlos wants to keep his head down and his nose out of trouble. He works long and hard days as a day laborer doing yard work and landscaping. He has scored a regular everyday gig but now his boss has given him a kind of ultimatum: buy my truck (not just a vehicle but a whole business complete with customers) or if you don't when I sell it to someone else you'll be back on the corner fighting for one of the spots on someone else's truck. Carlos bets the farm, calls in a family favor and loses it all to an act of betrayal and then spends the rest of the film working to recover what he's lost.
This film covers a couple of themes really well that I think deserve more attention than our culture is willing to offer:
1. Victimizers are often, if not almost always, victims themselves. Elaine Enns in the 2010 Augsburger lecture series she co-delivered with her husband Ched Myers, told the story of her family in the Bolshevik Revolution in 1919 (starts specifically around 17:45 though I recommend listening to the whole of the lecture). Enns comes from a family of Ukrainian Mennonites and she describes her family history through the Bolshevik revolution. The Mennonites and the greater Anabaptist tradition has called its practitioners to see themselves as being distinct from the world around them, in the words of 1 Peter 2:9 often identifying as “a peculiar people”. As a result, when the anarchist general Nestor Makhno's and his Black Army rolled through their community they found a group of people who had cloistered themselves off from the community around them and taken care of themselves to the neglect of the greater society. What the Anarchists, mostly peasants, saw was groups of people who had accumulated more than their share of the wealth and justifiably were angry at the ways that the Mennonites had contributed to the exploitation of the working class. These Mennonites were in this way the symbol at hand of all that the Makhnovians were fighting against. The anarchists resentment of wealth inequality as represented by the Mennonites is understandable but their brutal treatment of the Enns' family transformed into bitterness and a justifiable anger that has been passed down the generations leading us to ask who here is a victim and who is the victimizer. The answers is of course “both/and”. Enns' point, that we are perhaps most likely to abuse and exploit others when we ourselves are being taken advantage of, is a reoccurring theme in this film as we see interactions between boss and employee, parent and child, those who are stealing and those who have been stolen from.
2. The other big theme that jumps out at me from this film is the nature of lives for the “undocumentable”. I'm stealing this phrase from the Iconocast interview with Anton Flores, an organizer and member of an intentional Christian community in Georgia that focuses their work with immigrants and their families. Flores talks about the systemic ways that our society has made it impossible to become an immigrant for many families. The final word in that last sentence is an important one, because this film is not so much about one man making decisions for himself, instead it focuses on a single parent who is desperately attempting to keep their head and their child's above water. Carlos recognizes that any risks he takes, even ones for the betterment of his family in the end puts them all at risk.
3. If you can't be a family the gangs can, and will, do it for you. This is a theme that I think this film dabbles in but just isn't ready to take all the way; if you are in the mood for a film that is willing to take this gritty and brutal reality to it's logical conclusion the 2009 film Sin Nombre which follows a group of Honduran immigrants and gang members is worth the watch (as a warning though, this is one of the darkest and most depressing films I have ever seen and manages to suck the last, lingering little bits of hope from the room). For many people who find family is either unwilling or unavailable to provide for very real material or emotional needs, the gang often times the only ones ready and willing to step into this void. Novelist, poet and former LA gang member, Luis J. Rodriguez fleshes out some of these ideas out in his memoir Always Running and, I think, even more powerfully in a kind of autobiographical, historical/political-economic study of gangs called Hearts and Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times. Rodriguez's is not a full-scale indictment of these gangs, but an understanding of when we fail to meet the needs of who Jesus called “the least of these” some of them will meet their own needs in ways that turn to coercion and violence (Nichola Torbett recently posted a piece here on Jesus Radicals that I think nuances this further for those of us who are trying to follow Jesus in a way of non-violence and take a realistic account of our own privilege that allows us to reap the benefits of state-based violence). Why should we expect something different from those who receive the business end of systematic oppressions when we live in world that teaches this in a million different object lessons everyday and by and large the church stands aside and offers precious little in the way of alternatives?
This film does a great job of welcoming it's audience into the situations the characters are caught up in. The pace of the film is slow enough that the audience has a chance to ask what a better choice might have been at nearly every turn and in the end we get the feeling that Carlos is maybe back where he started off, maybe a little worse off.

Does it make sense to go into Seminary?

In the last month or so there has been a question floating around some of the blogs I read: How do seminaries need to change in the coming years to meet the needs of the future church? Given the current state of the church in North America a prospective seminarian is faced with on the one side racking up thousands of dollars in debt to pay for an M Div and on the other side knowing full well that there are more folks coming out of seminaries than there are churches that are able to support a full-time pastor and his thousands of dollars of debt. How about if I, or other prospective clergy, want to work in smaller churches that are more rooted in their communities? That debt may prevent me from doing so in the same way the bill from law school may force new lawyers away from things like civil rights work or labor law and into a firm that pays six figure salaries. David Fitch and Tony Jones (among others) are calling for the transformation of these institutions from their end.
They have each pointed out that these institutions are, as they saddle folks like me with insurmountable financial responsibilities, largely failing to teach their students how to lead a church in a post-Christendom world. In a recent blog post Fitch argued that seminaries have failed us by:
teaching one person to do everything in the church as a professionalized clergy person. It is heavily cognitive. It trains people to be experts. It takes leaders out of their context to learn information. None of this works when the church is largely disestablished...
he continues by arguing that seminaries must break with the model of grad schools that are training folks for high paying jobs and start training folks in a way that looks more like the National Guard “one night a week/ plus a weekend a month (to name one option).”
Both of these fine gentlemen are professors at seminaries (Fitch at Northern Seminary in the greater Chicago area and Jones as an adjunct faculty here there and everywhere) and are making these sorts of calls from their end but I wonder what it might look like to make a similar sort of demand from mine. Or are there ways to preemptively avoid the debt altogether?
Before I get in too deep I want to acknowledge that I am currently not in any sort of staffing or leadership position in a church. I've given a few sermons from the pulpit over the last ten years as an intern and as Joe Congregation stepping in as the pastor was out of town. I don't handle the money and to be quite honest I think I'd have a panic attack if someone asked me to. That said...
Apprenticeship positions: the apprenticeship as a model has fallen out of favor in just about every line of work in this country. As of the 2007 National Census 40% of farmers were 55+ and on the rise, and though a quick glance through the want ads just about anywhere is likely to find you a opening or two for a journeymen carpenter or plumber every employer wants someone with experience and how you go about getting that experience with out already having it seems to be anyone's guess. The American church seems to me to be in a similar bind, with a aging congregation and an inability to support a freshly seminaried young pastor, their debt and their family. What would it look like if instead of hiring one full-time pastor more churches instead brought on, let's say two seminary students and agreed to share the financial burden of their schooling? What if we didn't ask them to go to a traditional accredited seminary at all but instead encouraged them to audit a class here or there and learn on the job? But I can hear some of your reservations already around a kind of pastor quality-control and to be perfectly honest, you may be on to something there. But at the same time I think this kind of a model has the potential to do exactly what both Fitch and Jones are arguing for, creating “tent makers” not superstar celebrities who wow the congregation from the front. We cannot compete with the entertainment industry and when we try and beat them at their own game we will loose. The only people that we tend to attract is the people who go to the church that's a little less flashy than our own. If I wanted to be entertained basic cable is cheap and HBO puts on a better show than you any day of the week (besides I don't have to interrupt my sleep schedule to catch up on Six Feet Under or The Sopranos)
What I'm proposing has a few things going for it:
1. Many hands make light work. Instead of asking one pastor to meet all of the needs of that local body we are spreading the work between more two or three (or more) people. Not only would this reduce burnout among staff but it would require staff to get jobs outside of the four walls of the church, get pastors interacting with people they currently don't and at least for my money that is a positive in and of itself. I'd like to think that my pastor understands the stresses of having a job, that he, just like me has a boss that can be a real pain in the alter, if you get my drift.
2. This kind of a model could encourage a rooted theology and praxis. Let's use an already established church as means of example (church plants will clearly be different): the pastor and the congregation who is already there is going to get to participate in the teaching of the new pastors. Obviously this already happens, this is the function that internships serve and any new pastor should be getting to know the folks in the church. It is, I think, a little different to imagine pastors in training as being actively taught by community elders and to say that this isn't an annoying part of seminary but this could be some of the real meat and potatoes. Also studies on eco-theology or social justice for instance, are no longer necessarily abstract but can be rooted in a concrete place with all of the knitty-gritty particularities that come with it. The church my wife and I attend has in the last few years, among other things, worked extensively in combating human trafficking as it exists particularly in the I-5 corridor. What I'm proposing would, to use my own church as an example, would have pastors-in-traing looking at social justice as a whole through the lens of human trafficking particularly here in Olympia.
3. This model can keep the church's money local and can avoid debts that hurt the community as a whole. By moving to an on the job training model the church keeps seminarians in the context they will be working in and in turn keeps their dollars working there too. Many of my friends from college have thousands of dollars in debt that they pay each month to folks like Bank of America and Wells Fargo. I know no one talks like this but I don't think it should be too crazy for us to say that the church is about the Reign of God. That's our business. Furthermore, like many of the people who are involved in the #OccupyWallStreet, I think the big banks like Bank of America and Wells Fargo have been lousy for America. From there I don't think it's a stretch at all to say that the banks purpose is not the Reign of God. Why should the church encourage their up and coming leadership to take out loans from them? Furthermore freedom from these kinds of debts allows people to be more daring and, God forbid, listen to the Spirit when She calls us to say things that will be wildly unpopular and maybe even cause them to lose their job (be they clergy, teachers, or activists of any stripe).
4. Opening up the pulpit a little allows for some new voices and fresh readings of texts that have become stale. Once we have widened the circle of who teaches this could create the potential to allow us to encourage parishioners to become active participants not just passive consumers always waiting for cues from up front. In a two part interview (part 1 here) Tim Conder and Dan Rhodes talked about how their church in Durham, NC does a group discussion between some of the leadership about the next Sunday's topic and then “Pub Night” once a week where they see lots of people who would never darken the door of a church come to discuss the Bible and sometimes bringing readings to the texts that enliven words we've come to take for granted.

Ok, so that's a lot and I suppose there are some who would argue that I'm being naive and that this can't work for any one of number of reasons. That said, it seems clear to at least a few of us that these antiquated models are running out of gas and if we don't find a new and more sustainable way of teaching the next generation of leaders, then the Church is in trouble.

You can find the complete series Jones has been doing on the future of seminaries here.

Pre-packaged vs. Pretty good

So my wife Rachel and I just got done doing Unprocessed October and I mean this in fairly...uh...flexable terms. Church potlucks don't count (going out to eat only counted a little). So it ended up being perhaps not Unprocessed October, but probably the healthiest I've ever eaten in my life. This was made easier by the fact that we'd gotten our first ever CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) this year and we have more fresh veggies in our house then maybe I've ever seen on a consistant basis. The sad part of this is what to pack for lunch. November has arived and I can pack whatever I want and it is certainly easier to pack whatever can be found in the house of a prepackaged variety. I settle for a lunch that has some diversity in it Salt Water Taffy nails down the junk-food end and to Rachel's supprise and my own I toss in all the ingredients to make some vegie-stir fry. I'm sure in a month or two I'll have slipped back into my familiar rut but for now it feels good to resist to Siren's call of the pre-packaged.

Becoming Weaker: Jean Vanier helps me remember why I started this jobin the first place...

So I can't talk to much about what I do for a job because of confidentiality laws/agreements/etc. I can speak about what this job has meant to me and has shown me about myself:
I am a privileged and downright selfish person.
I work with adult with developmental disabilities in a capacity that has an extrodinary turn over rate. The stress is at times near maddening. Jean Vanier, a Catholic priest has been one of the voices that has been in the background, so to speak, for the last 2 years as I've been doing this work. I work in a company that reflects what I would describe as the better end of status-quo social servies for the disabled. I help clients with things they aren't able to do for themselves. That's not a bad thing, but as I regularly feel burnt out I try and think of the standard that the L'Arche communities (and others like them) have strived for: a blurring of the line that separates those doing the caring and those being "cared for". I don't live with my clients and there are fairly clear power relations layed out here...and yet... Vanier (and more recently Richard Beck) has been one of the people who has reminded me of all this job has to teach me, having a college degree does not elevate me above whiping bums or giving supositories or being asked to assist with helping someone rearange their CD collection for the 4th time today (all just hypothetical examples and aren't meant to describe any particular person I do, or have worked with in the past) and I'm meeting Jesus in "the least of these"

Become Weaker from The Work Of The People on Vimeo.