So tonight we all met at the Distillery and read the Christmas story together with songs played in between. It was a lot of fun.  The kids seemed to really get into our music and we realized that recording our music was a little bit silly this year because the camera was actually closest to the children and their hand instruments.  So we apologize for the excessive, “rhythm”, and offer to you a realistic Christmas celebration that includes our children and their hearty “rhythm.”

This post is for all you folks that like to know what we are doing at all times, but that don”t usually bother to join us.  Oh and it’s also for you folks that wish to join us.  Saturday, December the 24th 2011.  come.  Join Us.  we will have a time of advent celebration that involves music, and worship and candles and food, not in that particular order.

So come, join us at 6:00 PM until about 7:30 PM at The Distillery.

Tonight we heard from our youth at the gathering.  What did they say?  Well  a lot.  They started off lighting our four advent candles and leading us in the topic of the week.  Which is “Waiting on Peace.”

After our musical worship time and communion the Youth led us in a conversation about an organization that is actually doing stuff to help people in other places in the world who are having a harder time than we are — particularly girls.  The organization they told us about is called Girl Effect.

Girl Effect is about helping girls in other cultures who are at risk by enabling them to go after things like medical help, education, loans for small businesses and other stuff.  It is not about giving heaps of money to them, but about helping them to help themselves and ultimately their children, their communities, their regions and the world.

Here is a good video that explains a bit about why they are needed, and why we as a church have chosen to adopt this organization for this season:

We also watched this video.

Afterwards we dedicated ourselves as a community to go to the site located here: http://girleffect.org/ and learn more as well as help out. You can help out too by going to the site to learn more and then talking about it to others, sharing this post or the girl effect web site with others on facebook and twitter, or by donating money (via the web site). Take a look and see if there is some way you can assist, we will join with you.

Soooooooo, tonight was a lot of fun.   It was cool to have new friends and old at The Distillery tonight as we celebrated the third Sunday of advent together.  We started off with the lighting of the third candle of advent and the topic of advent we chose was Waiting to Belong.  Our readings reminded us that there are those folks that the world rejects and who have no place to belong, and that we are to be about these sorts of people:

The world has a habit of creating gloomy
clouds and of discarding what doesn’t fit. Our God does
the opposite. Isaiah 11 says that “He tends his flock like a
shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries
them close to his heart.”

God sends angels to shepherds and gathers in
what the world throws out. God restores people to health
and heals their wounds because they are called outcasts
according to Jeremiah 30:17 — and according to one night
in Bethlehem.

In these final days leading up to Christmas we see
angels visiting shepherds. And we remember that God cares
for us as lambs. God loves when we do not. God calls us to
love everyone, no matter what. (WorldVision Canada)

After our reading and candle lighting ceremony we went on to sing songs together Some Christmasy ones and some not.  We took communion with the kids and sent them on their way to go to the children’s gathering.

Then I opened up our discussion by reading a blog post to everyone that I had written as a guest blogger on a friend’s website.  You can read it here:  http://indiefaith.org/dog-and-butterfly

In the midst of the blog is a song from Heart called “Dog and Butterfly” and so we listened to the music and read the lyrics together:

In the song it speaks about “Just begging to go back where I’m free.” And that made me think of tonight’s discussion.

Tonight we talked about the idea that as a community of Jesus, one of our primary motivations needs to be “celebrating our freedom and the freedom of others.”  But the kind of freedom that the lyricist talks about in the song here is not really freedom now is it?  She is begging to go back where she is most comfortable, because it feels most like freedom.

There is a story in the Bible that this reminds me of. God has sent Moses and Aaron to literally free his people, the Israelites from slavery and lead them into a life of relative FREEDOM. Yet in the book of exodus, chapter 16 we read these words:

“In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites said to them, ‘If only we had died by the LORD’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.’” (Exodus 16:2-3)

So here they were, after a lifetime of bondage, they are finally free, yet they are grumbling, angry, scared, unhappy, hungry, even suicidal.  This is Freedom isn’t it? So as a community that celebrates freedom, we also have to consider that freedom may not be what we think it is. Sometimes addiction is easier.  Sometimes our obsessive lifestyles feel at least predictable. Sometimes slavery feels safe. Sometimes finally learning to love ourselves and who we are can be lonely and terrifying.  Sometimes our sickness can be embraced as our lifestyle, and freedom looks like chaos, freedom looks like danger, freedom looks like bondage.

Freedom can be really scary.  So as a community, we must celebrate our own freedom and the freedom of others regularly together. We mustn’t abandon others in their freedom.  Nor must we ever forget the things that once held us captive and how we were before God began to change us.

So, I closed my message with this.

“I have given you a few things to consider here.  One is the way that God delivers us from death many times looks like a butterfly.  Many times we don’t even see the butterflies calling us to… something better.”

“Then if we think of this “something better” as a type of freedom, the kind of freedom that God calls us to, then we can see that God IS in the business of freeing the captives — us.  Looking back as far as Isaiah in chapter 61, we see that Jesus in fact:”

“…came to proclaim freedom for the captives, release from darkness the prisoners, bind the brokenhearted and preach the good news to the poor.” (Is 61:1)

“We are the poor…   Likewise, freedom does not always look like “freedom.”  We sometimes completely overlook freedom in lieu of things like “appearances, circumstances, behavior change, success, progress, etc.”  Freedom rarely even looks like those things.”

“Sometimes freedom and healing mean that nothing shifts on a circumstantial level, but our hearts, relationships and view of God and ourselves somehow do. Captivity and bondage produce death, while healing and freedom produce life.”  (Escobar 213)

This launched us into a wonderful conversation on how freedom itself is scary at times, many times it lacks the kind of structures that we have grown to depend on.  We find that as free individuals we are no solely in charge of dictating the structures we use to be safe, secure and healthy,

Freedom is HARD.  It is harder then slavery, obsession and addiction.  We talked about the phenomenon of people who cannot live outside the walls of prison, because freedom is THAT hard.  We also agreed that we cannot accept a community that pretends that everything is okay all of the time.  That freedom looks a lot like, asking someone for help.  Freedom has a lot to do with moving on to the next thing, the next step, the next milepost.

Though freedom is certainly attainable through a transformational relationship with Christ, complete and total freedom does not seem achievable this side of the Kingdom.  So in lieu of total and complete freedom is a community of people who will not condemn our baby steps.  Who will go on this journey with us.  Who will admit to us and each other when they are in trouble, when they are begging to go back to what they thought was freedom, but was really comfort.

A new community contributor, Mike gave us these lines from a Nine Inch Nails song that seemed rather appropriate:

slave screams he spends his life learning conformity
slave screams he claims he has his own identity
slave screams he’s going to cause the system to fall
slave screams but he’s glad to be chained to that wall (Happiness in Slavery, by Nine Inch Nails)

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Escobar, Kathy.  Down We Go: living Into The Wild Ways of Jesus.  Folsom: Civitas Press, LLC.  2011.  Print.

We had a lovely time tonight at The Distillery.  It was our monthly mealtime, where everyone brings food and eats together, but with a little bit of Advent mixed in.  This being the second week of Advent, we celebrated with the traditional lighting of the candle, and the customary reading from the Flanagan Ladies.

It was lovely, and a good reminder of what the Christmas story is all about.  The ceremony closed with our copastor and friend Linda leading us in this prayer:

Let us pray,
Dear God,
You are our heart’s home. Your home is safe, loving, and
eternal. But, so many of your children are trapped in homes
that are not safe. Or they are forced to leave homes that
are — for nightmares they barely escape.
You chose to incarnate yourself into a family that had little
else but love on the night you were born. Rescue us from
the danger of being obsessed with ourselves so that we can
see the needs, and the hope, around us. Draw us closer to
your light as we draw closer to Christmas.
In Jesus’ name we pray,
Amen.

After a blessing over the food, we all migrated to the kitchen area and proceeded to hang out while preparing the food for eating, then we took turns getting food, getting seated and eating to our hearts content.  Along the way, there were many good conversations to be had and many happy faces both small and adult size.

We were all very excited to meet some new folks tonight as well as hang out with good friends and family.  Folks present tonight, in no particular order were Martin, Carolyn, Mirri, Bethy, Evan, Linda, Cassie, Emily, Hannah, Jennifer, Silas, Jemma, Me, Tammy, Johnathon, Vinny, James, Jess, Mike, Sarah, Mikey, Zach, Maude, Alana and Joe.  I think I spelled all the names correctly, if not please feel free to correct me.

All-in-all it was another nice night at The Distillery.

I swam across,
I jumped across for you
Oh what a thing to do
Cos, you were all yellow

Tonight was another awesome night at The Distillery.  We started off gathering together around the advent wreath and lighting out first candle of Advent.  This week we celebrated the fact that we were Waiting for Love.  Love in the form of a savior born to earth from a simple human being.  A savior who would show us what love truly means.  A savior that would speak to us about love and live love out for us in the low places, where most of us fear not go.

We continued the evening with celebratory music with our children, communion.  The communion story was told mostly verbatim from the lips of little Beth Turnidge (7 years old) who had the story memorized down to the fact that Jesus said “…For I tell you I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.”  (Luke 22:18)  It was refreshing to hear the story from the mouth of such a young person, and truly a delight to us all.

The children went on to be with their caregiver in the children’s area and we continued with this song:

Song:  Yellow
Artist:  Coldplay

Look at the stars,
Look how they shine for you,
And everything you do,
Yeah, they were all yellow.

I came along,
I wrote a song for you,
And all the things you do,
And it was called “Yellow”.
So then I took my turn,
Oh what a thing to have done,
And it was all “Yellow.”

Your skin,
Oh yeah your skin and bones,
Turn into something beautiful,
You know, you know I love you so,
You know I love you so.

I swam across,
I jumped across for you,
Oh what a thing to do.
Cos you were all “Yellow”,

I drew a line,
I drew a line for you,
Oh what a thing to do,
And it was all “Yellow.”

Your skin,
Oh yeah your skin and bones,
Turn into something beautiful,
And you know,
For you I’d bleed myself dry,
For you I’d bleed myself dry.

It’s true,
Look how they shine for you,
Look how they shine for you,
Look how they shine for,
Look how they shine for you,
Look how they shine for you,
Look how they shine.

Look at the stars,
Look how they shine for you,
And all the things that you do.

In our following discussion on Justice, this song seemed to speak to us about standing up for others that we love, knowing others, loving others and crossing the line when necessary to be with others in their pain and fear and helplessness.

We sang two more songs and moved on to discussion.  Tonight’s topic (as said earlier) was about “Pursuing Justice.”  Our conversation was very lively as we talked about what injustice looks like, what our response should be to it, and what the costs are to each of us that delve into pursuing justice for others.

Simply put:

At the heart of justice is the fundamental assumption of human dignity. Each human being bears the image of God and has inherent value. When that dignity is stripped, ignored or oppressed, there is injustice. (Escobar 183)

I related a personal story of how I have had to fight against injustice for the community over a recent dispute with our landlord and how in the midst of the conflict I had to remember that even the landlord, who at points in the conflict could have easily been seen as “the enemy” — even the landlord deserved justice in the way I chose to handle the situation.

This was a hard, messy frustrating story that does not have an end (yet), but it was a necessary one to tell.  Far too often words like justice and particularly social justice get tossed around in the form of sending money to a good cause or doing a quick and easy charitable deed one weekend or one day a week.  Churches and people see it as a duty, as opposed to just who we are supposed to be in all situations.

As Christ-followers, we are supposed to model the image of God to the world, in order to restore the world. In Micah 6:8, God expresses what is required of us: To seek justice, love mercy, and to walk humbly. I love the words “seek” and “pursue” because they imply something very important: they won’t come naturally. We will have to work, advocate and sacrifice for it. Part of life on the journey down is pursuing justice on behalf of those being treated unjustly. In seeking justice and fighting for it, we give it meaning and value. (183-184)

We each gave input on the subject and many good things were said in regards to our pursuit of justice, not just in the story I related to the group, but in our reflection of everyday life and how we are to model Jesus in this downward journey and stick up for those that cannot stick up for themselves.  We agreed that we are to use what power we possess to defend and speak on behalf of the powerless among us.  We also agreed that the costs of this pursuit could come at our own personal risk of life, liberty, economics, and happiness.  We acknowledged that following Jesus does not always mean a happy go-lucky care-free life for us.  Often times this pursuit can be hectic, hard and anything but fun and joyous.  Sometimes, you just want to run away screaming and find a nice docile life living in a cave somewhere.

We closed the evening in prayer and I felt relieved to have shared my story and my heart with others on the subject.  A good cup of coffee later found me giving hugs to the children and agreeing to see folks next week.  This was a good night for me and The Distillery.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________

We had a nice time tonight at the Distillery.  We continued our discussion on the downward journey of following Jesus by talking about power.  In our discussion on power we started off by watching a video.

After the video we took turns reading through the following scripture in Matthew:

¹ Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, ² and he began to teach them.

He said:

³ “Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
⁴ Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
⁵ Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
⁶ Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
⁷ Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
⁸ Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
⁹ Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
¹⁰ Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

¹¹ “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. ¹² Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matthew 5:1 – 12)

These are the words of Jesus spoken to a large group of people prior to launching into the rest of the Sermon on the Mount. After watching the video someone commented that “wow, John I really should have listened to you when you said churches in the South are different than up here.”

I smiled and said “well yes churches are different in the south, but this next example comes to us from the Northwest. A pastor in Seattle, Washington named Mark Driscoll was being interviewed by Relevant Magazine when he was asked the following question, “What do you see as the greatest challenge for young Christians in the next 10 years?”   He responded by saying the following:

“There is a strong drift toward the hard theological left. Some emergent types [want] to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a pride fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up. I fear some are becoming more cultural than Christian, and without a big Jesus who has authority and hates sin as revealed in the Bible, we will have less and less Christians, and more and more confused, spiritually self-righteous blogger critics of Christianity.”

So all kidding aside, Mr. Driscoll is a highly influential and respected pastor of a very large church and network of hundreds of churches known as the Acts 29 Network.

When Jesus positioned himself above the crowd of folks to speak in Matthew 5, he was preaching against power.  He was telling the crowd that the folks who are blessed are the ones who have given up on using power to control, manipulate, threaten and coerce others.

The rest of the sermon on the mount tells a much different story and sheds a much different light on who Jesus actually was than does Mr. Driscoll’s comments.

Kathy Escobar defines power in the church like this:

“When I use the word “power,” I think of these words: leadership, value and voice. One of my dreams is that we would learn what it means to diffuse power – to give away leadership, value and voice as much as possible, and as deeply and creatively as possible” (Escobar 153)

So while there is no innate evil in power – in other words there really is nothing unusual or wrong about the use of power in the world — in fact it is often times necessary, this is NOT the way of Jesus.  The idea of mixing power with Christian community is something that Jesus seemed most against from the very beginning.  It is the reason he ran the money changers out of the temple, it is the reason he chooses to wash the disciples’ feet as opposed to making them clean his feet first, and it is the reason he refused to use his “power” against other men who were about to do physical harm to him.  It is the reason he allowed them to crucify him.

Unfortunately in 330 AD when the Roman Governor Constantine chooses to adopt Christianity as the national religion, that very thing begins to happen to the church.  One could easily argue that power and Christianity have been less than enemies since the time it was placed in the hands of men, but it really started to become an issue when the national government adopted the faith.

So, today the way that looks is that the church…

“…inadvertently adopts the world’s thirst for power into our culture, our homes, and the fabric of our lives. The upside-down message of Jesus then is radically lost and we are sucked into the same fuel the world thrives upon.” (152)

So what do we do about it? We become a community that is all about diffusing power, which means, we give it away to others.  We give our power to those that are less powerful.  That is what Jesus did,

“Genuine power diffusion means giving it away to people who aren’t typically influential. The least. The last. The marginalized. The oppressed. The not quite as pretty, talented, educated, or socially accepted individuals.” (153)

When we first planted this church I had all of the power.  Not only was I the Senior Pastor, I was the President of the Board.  The bylaws were written in such a way that the board could not fire me.  I was in charge of leading the board to make financial decisions and I was in charge of the spiritual doctrine and practices of the church.

Shortly after I began as the Senior pastor, I felt that God was telling me over and over again to “give away my power.”  Give it away.  God’s voice spoke to me trough books I was reading and through my closest friends, He spoke to me through the words of Jesus we read earlier and through church history.

I had only been in power for a short time before I started giving my power away to more and more people.  Today the church’s power is diffused.  We have given our power over to it’s members and the team of copastors we now have work together towards the common goal of safe community here.  I am no longer a lead pastor, nor do I have any more power over what happens here than anyone else.

I am still president of the board, but the board makes very few decisions about what happens here and it must exist to satisfy the federal government’s understanding of what a church is.

What we did as a community over the last few years is classically known as “shooting the Sherriff.”  By shooting the sheriff we took the leadership, value and voice of ONE individual and we put those things into the hands of the many. In what ways do you have power?  Again, it is no sin to be powerful.  Each of us have power by the positions we hold in public, by the positions we take on in our family and at church and at work and school.  Some of us have power in our influence over others or simply the fact that we have a full-time job, or an education or a keen intellect.

Think about the ways that you are powerful and how you have wielded that power in the past, also think about ways that you have yielded your power to the less powerful.  Think about ways that you too can “shoot the sheriff.”  Remember that when it is possible we should all be trying to give away power to those that normally do not have it. So, yes, Mr. Driscoll you could probably beat up Jesus.  Just remember that you can not take Jesus’ life away from him, because he chooses to lay it down freely on behalf of each of us. (John 10:18)
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Escobar, Kathy. Down We Go: living Into The Wild Ways of Jesus. Folsom: Civitas Press, LLC. 2011. Print.

Tonight’s gathering was fun as usual.  We started the evening with some good conversation around the bar with old and new friends.  Then we migrated to the couches and chairs and sang some music together as led by Martin.  It was a good time of kids dancing and playing hand instruments and adults singing and worshiping together.  After worship, we started our evening off by watching two videos.

Each video told the story of two different 9/11 survivors from NYC.  Each of the survivors had different perspectives and each took something different away from the tragedy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f7QWFwXtb4
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=668471351232 

Our conversation began with a question.  First question was “Was there anything about the videos that bothered you or that struck you?”  Later we asked “Do we as Christians sometimes miss the big picture because of our assumptions about what ‘God’ is trying to do here?”

This launched us into a good discussion on doubt as it relates to faith in God.  We agreed on several things regarding doubt as detailed below:

• Doubt is a fact of life and one of the ways that God speaks to us
• The presence of doubt is not the absence of faith.
• Faith without doubt is an untested kind of faith
• Doubt is one of the ways that God reveals to us just how big he is
• Whenever someone in our lives expresses doubt, we should honor that doubt, not try to stop the person from doubting.
• God does not always do the things we expect him to do for us.  we will not always be “protected”, bad things will happen to us at times and there is will be no good explanation for it.
• Some things can not be explained with pat answers.
• Some things we will not know why they happened or be able to explain in terms of “God” this side of Heaven.
• In the mean-time we have reason to hope and dream and live in exploring the possibilities together.
• If we can not agree that doubt is something that happens to all of us all of the time, we will not be able to embrace others who struggle with doubt regularly.
• We tend to make most traumatic experiences in our lives about us.  Often we try to explain those things in terms of why they had to happen in relation to our individual experiences rather than see them as an event that happened to many others and that really had nothing to do with us as individuals.
• God is not responsible for many of the things that happen to us, but he is known to always be with us even through the hardest times.
• When we honor doubt we begin to preface the things we say with phrases like “in my opinion…”  and “the way I see it…”
• People who have a lot of certainty about things and believe they are right all the time can be hard to embrace and converse with.

“As we get more comfortable with the idea that the presence of doubt is not the absence of faith, we can help people learn to live in the tension along with us. We can affirm that real people have a wide range of feelings, emotions and responses that shift and change over time. A beautiful gift we can give to others is the space to be wherever they are and trust that God is at work and doesn’t always need our two cents added to the mix.” (Escobar 146)