Missio Dei Breviary now available on Amazon.com

You can now buy the Missio Dei Breviary on Amazon.com for $13.95.

Please consider purchasing the breviary. Profits go to the work of Missio Dei, my community. I’ll be honest. It is a simple book with simple prayers. I continue to find typos. But it is has helped me grow spiritually. It has anchored my community in the Gospels. It drives us deeper into our neighborhood. That is what it is designed to do…to spark a Christ-centered missionality rooted in prayer.

If you’ve already bought a copy, or have been using one of the free online versions, please review it. It would mean a lot to me personally.

I’d also appreciate it if you would help spread the word about it. Blog about it. Share the link on Facebook. Twitter about it. Whatever you can do to help would be greatly appreciated.

Read more about our community here and our breviary here.

Not as much as I do (A response to Chad Ellens)

Dear Pastor Ellens,

I read your recent article...and could remain silent no more! Suburban-dwellers like you grieve me. I too was a suburbanite once. But two years ago, I moved into the city to embrace a radical life of solidarity with the poor. My hope is, that in response to my response to your article, that you too will leave your wicked suburban ways and move into the city. Jesus loves you too much for you to remain in the suburbs.

A couple years ago, I head Shane Claiborne speak. Man, he opened my eyes to what it REALLY means to follow Jesus. And so, I decided then and there to make a radical change. I cashed in some of my frequent flier miles and went to the Simple Way in Philadelphia (though people in the neighborhood call it “Philly”).

After a couple of weeks of living in solidarity with the poor, I decided to help start a new monastic community in the City so that the people of America would see what Jesus REALLY looks like. My wife and I, and some of my friends from my Christian College, bought a house in a really dumpy part of the City and began our work. We call ourselves the 23rd Avenue Radical House Collective. I’m the lead member…which is kinda like the pastor, but I don’t believe in pastors, so I call myself something different.

It has been a hard couple of years, but I think we have learned some lessons that if everyone would take seriously would radically change our nation forever:

1. Stop eating meat. Meat usually takes up a lot of space. Plants don’t need as much space. So by eating veggies, we’re freeing up a bunch of space for poor people to move into. And then we won’t need 9.2 earths per USAmerican to sustain the world.
2. Garden. Growing stuff yourself saves you money, and provides vegetables so that you can make vegan soups for homeless people. They don’t usually like the taste, but it is good for them.
3. Bicycle everywhere. Hey, when you ride a bike, you are resisting the military industrial complex, man, and its dependence on foreign oil. That helps the poor because they will have cleaner air to breath and by spending less money ourselves, it somehow translates into more money for them.
4. Wear dreadlocks. Sure, dreads are high maintenance at first…but after a while they take care of themselves, giving you more time to spend praying or bicycling or being in solidarity with people.
5. Don’t worry about smelling. Part of our problem in the US is that we care too much about grooming and looking respectable. By remaining unwashed, we stand in solidarity with the homeless, who are unable to bathe regularly. I think they really appreciate that.
6. Make things yourself. For example, I don’t buy regular coffee…even buying fair trade coffee is for poseurs. What I do is buy green organic fair trade beans and roast them myself using a popcorn popper. There is nothing the poor like better than really excellent coffee. Or other hand-made stuff.
7. Live with friends. By living together, you save money that you could theoretically give to the poor, if you have jobs. And you can pray together more from prayer books that are cool because I grew up in a church that ripped on formal prayers.
8. Do art projects with neighborhood children. We have an artist in our community, so we do art projects with kids. We believe that training young poor kids how to do art will give them hope. And when they grow up, they’ll be able to get a job as artists, instead of living a life of poverty.
9. Protest stuff. The marginalized need empowered white folks to protest stuff. By adding our powerful voices with their weak voices, we can stick it to the man, and as a result, the man may change his ways.
10. Vote for Obama. We have common ground on this last on, Pastor Ellens. You see, Obama fills me with hope too! A vote for Obama is a vote for hope. If you vote for anyone else, you don’t care about poor people.

So Pastor Ellens, I hope you can see that we offer a better way. An incarnational, radical, missional way that follows the way of Jesus. Unlike your hollow mega-Christianity.

Peace to you,

Derrick “Street Prophet” Andrews

Editor’s Note: This is a work of (self-depricating) satire. Its funnier if you happened to have read this first.

Derrick Andrews lives with his wife Anne and five of their friends in the 23rd Avenue Radical House Collective, a new monastic, neo-Anabaptist, Celtic Catholic evangelical community of resistance.

The Jesus Legend

Review: The Jesus Legend: A Case For The Historical Reliability Of The Synoptic Jesus Tradition
by Paul Rhodes Eddy & Gregory A. Boyd

I have been reading a variety of works and perspectives on Biblical authenticity and reliability, and some of my questions in this arena had been answered with pointers to this book. After reading just the back cover and the introduction, I knew why.

I’ll cover the contents shortly, but these two concepts were huge for me, so humour me. First and foremost, on the back cover it reads:

I am gratified that my friends and colleagues Paul Eddy and Greg Boyd have taken my work as seriously as they have in this comprehensively researched book. I urge any reader of my books to read this one alongside them!–Robert M. Price, Center for Inquiry Institute and fellow of the Jesus Seminar

Price is a humanist, argues against Biblical literalism and against the concept of Jesus as a historical figure. This is the polar opposite perspective of that which Eddy & Boyd admit to holding. Boyd has debated Price several times regarding the historicity of Christ. Therefore to see the mutual respect and appreciation captured by this quote certainly had me intrigued. It was far away from the all-too-common character assassination and denigrations that are hurled by opposing sides of such a dogmatic concept.

Secondly, in the introduction Eddy & Boyd lay their cards on the table. Yes, they are born again Christians, believing Jesus to be the Christ on Earth, in history, as put forth by the gospels. But establishing this is not the purpose of the book. Rather, taking a historian approach, their purpose is merely to put forward the concept that, given their methodology, it is more probable to conclude that the events transcribed in the Synoptic Gospels happened largely as they were written, than not.

What is that methodology? They call it an ‘open’ historio-critical method, distinguishing it from what is commonly know as the historio-critical method, and making explicit the idea that ANY worldview coming to look at history must be aware of it’s biases, and this includes the naturalist/humanist worldview that dominates and is often assumed in practioners of the historio-critical method as it stands. In short, let us not rush to conclude that miracles occur or that the supernatural is real, but let us not discount it outright either.

They then begin making their case, and I appreciated the means with which they did so. First, the concept was introduced (parallel myths, pagan influences in Judaism, whatever) and the typical arguments for those advocating a more distrustful view of the Gospels were stated and, when necessary, unpacked. The voluminous footnotes make any digging deeper into any of the concepts presented very simple and accessible, although the copious amount scattered throughout this volume may be daunting to the casual reader (there is a different edition of the book that is far less academic for those so inclined).

Each argument is then addressed, and sometimes countered. Many of the Gospel-specific issues are addressed in detail, such as the allegations that Paul does not refer to a historical Christ-figure, or that the Jesus legend came out of parallel mystery religions.

A recurring theme of the book and one of it’s strongest points is the introduction of many of the newest studies in orality and oral cultures, be they African, Scandinavian, Serbian, Malay, or first-century Jewish. The strict literary analysis of the bulk of New Testament study is undergoing a seismic shift as many of the core assumptions governing the field are caving underneath the weight of the realities being discovered by anthropologists, philologists, historians, and the like. Concepts such as oral history vs. oral tradition, the relationships between tradents and their communities, and the flexibility of oral narratives (and written works, such as the Gospels, intended to supplement and aid oral narratives) are contrasted with their modernist, literary counterparts. The analogy of ‘camels at the trough’ was a favorite of mine in dealing with ‘chronology problems’. The analogy goes thus; unlike traditional, modern histories and biographies which generally treat their subjects chronologically, the oral historian has a wealth of stories to choose from, any number of which occupy his or her mind at a given time. Sometimes the order in which they are remembered are not necessarily ‘in order’ but they are linked in such a way as to make sense of the person or the event.

The book closes with a closer look at the 9 criteria generally used when evaluating the historicity of ancient documents. They are:

1. Did the author write with the intent of recording historical reality?
2. Was the author in the appropriate time and place to reliably report history?
3. To what extent does the author’s bias taint the work and affect it’s reliability?
4. Does the document including self-damaging details?
5. Does the document include casual or incidental details surrounding it’s topics?
6. Is the document generally consistent in style, structure, etc?
7. Does the document record inherently improbable events?
8. Does external literary evidence corroborate what is found in the work?
9. Does external archaeological evidence corroborate what is found in the work?

While this section generally maintains the standard of quality, criteria 7 & 9 are unfortunately dealt with far too quickly and with (to my mind) meager evidences. Nevertheless, the weight of the rest of the work is up to achieving their task; the scales in my mind have most certainly tilted from a concept of a historically improbable Jesus to a historically probable one.

What happens from there is no longer in the realms of history.

***** A must read. Not for the faint of heart [very academic] but the book ‘Lord Or Legend’ by the same two deals with the same general issues in about 1/3 the space and in must easier to read language, and may be better suited to some purposes.

Author Bio:: Jordan Peacock lives and works in Minnesota with his beautiful wife and daughter. When not playing with technology or music, heâ??s writing comic books and wrapping up a university education.

Impacting the Winds of Change

Jim Wallis can draw a pretty nice crowd for 4:00 p.m. on a Wednesday. Most guest speakers at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service can squeeze their audience into the school’s great hall, but if the ticket requests exceed capacity, more popular speakers are relocated to a room in Little Rock’s Statehouse Convention Center. Mr. Wallis was popular… demonstrably less popular than Richard Dawkins, with a less diverse audience, but enticing nonetheless.

I attended the lecture, promoting Wallis’ The Great Awakening, as both an admirer and a skeptic.

As a sociology and philosophy major at a Baptist university over ten years ago, I was introduced to the scandalous writings of John Perkins, Tony Campolo, Ron Sider and Jim Wallis. Their words helped to mold my social conscience. I had always been drawn to social activism but, when I became a Christian in high school, a wall was subtly built up between embracing Christ and engaging culture. These men took sledgehammers to that wall.

In 2006, I participated in the Emerging Leaders Track (just shy of the age limit) of the annual Sojourner’s Pentecost conference, lobbying congress for a budget that reflected a moral obligation to the poor. Already disenchanted with Washington and the political process in general, and despite the great speakers and new experiences, I left the conference feeling powerless.

In 2007, I chose instead to attend the Christian Community Development Association’s annual conference, and get a feel for the change agents at the grassroots level. I came home from that gathering with a head full of ideas and optimism, followed closely by attendance at LeadNow and a condition I have recently read described as “spiritual bulimia“.

2008 has been a year of allowing my soul to digest.

Unfortunately, 2008 is also an election year… a year for change… a year for action, and I am spent.

So it was with this spirit that I attended last night’s lecture, hoping to be refreshed or, at the very least, not overwhelmed by what I would hear.

I heard people think Christians ought to stand for the same things Jesus did (very weird).

I heard when politics fails to resolve, or even address, big issues in society, social movements rise up to change things.

I heard history suggests grassroots social movements change politicians more than politicians change history.

I heard politics is broken in America.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

In The Great Awakening, Jim Wallis is trying to make U.S. Americans aware that our political candidates can not bring about the changes needed in our world, that only movements pressing in from the outside can make an impact. Change is going to require revival and it is going to require commitment. Our revival can not be merely on the individual spiritual level, it must lead to change in society - or else it is not true revival. Getting past the individual transformation to societal transformation is going to require commitments on the personal, communal and public policy levels. All three commitments are necessary, and Mr. Wallis even went as far as to declare that if we can not make the changes on a personal level, then we need not dare lobby congress for changes on the policy level.

During the Compassion Forum last month, Senator Clinton was asked the following question:

Americans of all faiths and no faith at all genuinely believe in compassion and want to apply that in addressing global poverty and climate change. Can we do that without changing our standard of living?

She answered as any politician worthy of the title would:

Well, I believe there is so much we can do that we’re not doing that would not change our standard of living as an imposition from the outside, but which would inspire us to take action that would impact how we live. And I don’t think we would notice it demonstrably undermining our standard of living, but it would give us the opportunity to set an example and to be a model.

When the floor was opened up for questions, I took the opportunity to get Wallis’ take on the “lifestyle change” issue, asking him to expound upon what personal level commitments would look like. He reiterated that politicians respond to shifts in culture, rather than the belief that policy changes can create change in culture. He talked about changing people’s minds and hearts on a local level, and then went on to talk about many of the things we toss around here, like slow food and the monstrosity that is the Hummer. He recognized emerging generations as focusing on what impact our lifestyles will have on the world.

Finally, in response to an audience question about influences, Jim Wallis repeated something I heard him speak of back in 2006. A social activist can not be sustained for long unless they are also working to be a contemplative. He reminded us to take care of our faith, that if God wasn’t real to us personally, none of this would matter.

He laughed at me when I handed him my book for the book signing: Revive Us Again: A Sojourner’s Story, saying he hadn’t seen a copy of the book in a long time and was sure it was out-of-print. He asked me where I got it, and I explained that I’ve had it for ten years. Every now and then, I need a refresher in the lessons I have learned through it:

Those who pursue radical discipleship, however, face another problem. It is the tendency to seek justification in our life-style, our work, our protest, our causes, our movements, our actions, our prophetic identity, and our radical self image. It becomes an easy temptation to place our security in the things we stand for and in the things we do, instead of in what God has done. It is a temptation to depend on things other than God’s grace.

Kimberly Roth is a co-editor for the Jesus Manifesto. She over-thinks and cares way too much, so she rambles on at www.barefootbohemian.blogspot.com.

New JM Feature: Video Comments

You can now leave video comments on JM (via Seesmic). It’s easy to use…you can even register without having to leave the site. All you need is a camera and mic on your computer. You can see it in action in the comments below.

Jesus and the Kids

We’ve tossed out several Bible story books in our home. In a Western world painted with pictures of Middle Eastern “terrorists,” the last thing we want is for our children to forget that Jesus looked a lot more like bin Laden than their white dad. We realized this one evening when reading out loud one such book that had been given to us as a gift. Our daughter quipped to her brother, “Maybe you’ll look like Jesus when you grow up!” Jesus did have blond hair in the cartoon, just like her brother. I quickly pulled out a news magazine with photos from Iraq. “I’m pretty sure Jesus looked a lot more like that guy than this cartoon drawing.” Their faces were puzzled. The book was in the trash by the time the kids were in bed.

In great part, my wife and I have practiced “church” the way we have due to our children. When I resigned from professional ministry, my wife was pregnant with our first child, our daughter. Around that same time, I had the privilege of interviewing author and pastor Chris Seay of Ecclesia in Houston, TX. He said something that I thought was quite profound. Out of all the interviews I’ve conducted, his words have stuck with me more than most:

We tend to subdivide the Body in a way that has no natural relationships or interaction because we’re built on felt-need models. Instead, single people need to learn from married people; young marrieds without kids should learn from married people with kids; and married people with kids should learn from married people with grown kids.
(read the article)

I don’t know if Seay would have drawn the conclusion I did from that statement, but it was as if the light was turned on for me. I realized that my Christian experience had primarily been “subdivided” just as Seay explained. As a leader of young people, I often saw the complete disconnect between parents and their children in regards to the child’s spiritual development. That was my responsibility.

Every Sunday morning, we all head in our varied directions. The elderly go to their senior’s study. The children go to Sunday School. Teenagers go to youth group. In an era of obsession with a programmatic approach to ministry, we had completely diced up the Body of Christ. No wonder our divorce rates were as high as any other groups! No wonder young people left after high school, never to return!
With my own child on the way, I wanted to do things different. Not just for my own need as a protective parent, but as a person wanting to provide a Christian paradigm that better prepared my children to be missional people and allow them to learn about life from people from a variety of stages and experience.

Since then, as we’ve met in more egalitarian modes over the years, there have not been any great “solutions” of what to do with children during meetings, worship, and prayer. A long time ago, I stopped trying to do anything about kids during our meetings. It bugs some people. Mostly young, single adults. They’ll get over it. Kids are honest. They don’t pretend to be holy when they aren’t. They don’t pretend to be interested in conversations that go nowhere. But attempting to talk over the noise or putting them in front of a movie isn’t the answer. The answer doesn’t even exist in those moments when a community meets. It is in the rest of life.

We, as parents, need to take back our right to be our children’s spiritual directors. We owe it to our children. I have told families in our community that it is our responsibility as a community to help them be more radical followers of Jesus so that they may do the same for their children. Of course, we welcome children in our meetings. We are a spiritual family. With joy, we work through each of our limitations and abilities, no matter what age or capacity. But we are conscious of the fact that we have to support and empower parents to be just that: parents.

What we discovered is that many of us don’t know where to start with our children. Other people had done it for us for generations. Christian bookstores aren’t much help in resourcing us either. They sell terrible children’s music and offer cheesy white-Jesus story books that typically pull out oversimplified moral platitudes from complex narratives.

The first time I read to my children the story of Noah and the Ark, they were appalled! I decided to read the classic Bible story–that exists on everything from wallpaper to night lights–out of the Message version. I stopped midway through the story, looked up and asked, “What do you guys think about this so far?” With jaw on the floor and eyes wide open, my son replied, “God is mean!”

This storytelling set us into a week-long conversation that we continued to come back to. Was God mean? What does this say about justice? What do we know about God’s promises to us because of this story? What does this tell us about what God thinks about Creation? Our four year old son and six year old daughter wrestled with these uncertainties and came to their own conclusions that were often different from each others and mine. Of course, I told them what I believed about this story but it didn’t make Noah and the Ark a cute story anymore!

Why do I share these stories? Because we need to be deliberate about sharing ideas, stories and resources with each other as parents trying to raise kids that are growing up in a globalized, post-Christendom world. Because we need to root our kids in the fact that biblical narrative is supposed to inform reality today in every context. Because we can’t depend on programs and products to do it for us anymore (not that we ever should have). Because when we’ve dissected ourselves into age-specific quadrants, we’ve been prone to make the biblical story no more than feel-good solutions for minor life problems, rather than an over-arching story that we form our entire lives around. Chances are, your children are more prepared for this than you are.

Jason Evans, along with Brooke and their two kids, are a part of an intentional community called the Hawthorn House. He is a co-founder of the Ecclesia Collective, a group of people committed to nurturing grassroots expressions of the Kingdom in San Diego, CA. Before the EC, Jason and Brooke helped start Matthew's House, a cluster of house churches at the north end of San Diego county.

Deadline Extended for Pentecost Writing Contest

We’ve gotten some great entries for the writing contest. So far, about 20 articles have been submitted…not quite as much as we were hoping for, but not bad.  Unfortunately, the submissions have been “lopsided.” Most of the submissions have been for the doxis, praxis, and culture sections. That means we’re short for satire and aesthetics.

So, we’re extending the deadline. By 10 days. So, if you were working on an article (or intending to work on an article) but ran out of time, you’ve been given 10 more days to put something together.

If, by some chance, you’d like to submit something either a work of satire or poetry (or creative fiction) or a work of art, we’ll cut the entry fee to $3 (just change the amount in the submission form).

So, help us get the word out about the extension.  I know that many folks that were intending to write something haven’t submitted yet…so now is your chance.

You can submit your article here.

A Take On An Evangelical Manifesto

Apparently “radical” Christians are not the only ones getting in on the manifesto love. A committee headed up by Os Guinness has recently published a document entitled An Evangelical Manifesto. With the emphasis being on the “An” (because one has to have a disclaimer on anything one writes now a days), the focus of the document is on recovering the essence and definition of the term “Evangelical,” particularly in the public square. So far the watchdog bloggers have been kind, but it is probably only a matter of time before Os and company get grouped in with Marx and the Unabomber for using the word manifesto.

Despite the unwanted baggage the term “Evangelical” has picked up over the last several decades, this manifesto is a declaration that that label, if properly understood, still conveys “all-important truth.” This is the twenty first century Evangelical’s attempt at doing what John Wesley did with his sermon The Character of a Methodist: distinguish what a true Evangelical really is in light of recent public questioning and counterfeit productions. This delineation comes in three mandates, written in the first person plural:

1. We Must Reaffirm Our Identity
2. We Must Reform Our Own Behavior
3. We Must Rethink Our Place in Public Life

There is as much to love in the document as there is to loathe, and everyone will have their favorite targets. The early responders have focused on who was and was not invited to be charter signatories, and then drawing conclusions from the snubbed list as to the true intention of the manifesto. Among this crowd is Warren Smith (who wonders where the conservatives are) and the Emergent Village blog (which briefly notes that Brian McLaren, Tony Jones, and Doug Pagitt were not asked either).

Please brace yourself for my next statement…but…I actually agree with Al Mohler’s take quite a bit (wow, that felt good to get off my chest!). The prime definition of “Evangelical” given in the manifesto is the sort of lowest common denominator approach that doesn’t really say anything at all. I realize the goal is unity and consensus, but the question of “what is an Evangelical” is tied up in history that makes the whole “Evangelicals are people who simply define themselves according the ‘good news’ (from the Greek word for gospel)” a little too a-historical for me. The authors insist that while the term “Protestant” has lost its usefulness, “Evangelical” still endures. They assert that the essence of “Evangelicalism” is pre-Protestant. Am I missing something in my reading of history? Then again, Mark Noll– a Christian historian of the top shelf– signed it, so what do I know.

James K. Smith has made these connections as well and has thrown one more in there that really gets at the heart of the issue. In response to the first mandate’s identity markers, Smith writes:

“…such definitions define “Evangelical” by what evangelicals THINK and BELIEVE, rather than what they DO. That, I think, reflects just the sort of modernism that gives us evangelicalism (and fundamentalism) in the first place. In contrast, what defines Orthodoxy or Catholicism is liturgy, the practices of the faith.”

Much of the manifesto is dedicated to repenting of behavior unbecoming to a true “Evangelical,” but most of the attitudes and actions listed seem to be aimed at the more Fundamentalist side of Christianity. This leads me to believe that one major aim of the document is to place further separation between Evangelicals and those political Fundamentalists that are still getting all the press. This group of “Evangelicals” has little to do with Colorado Springs, and they want to make that clear without resorting to finger pointing. The major question that many of us should ask is whether or not this group of “Evangelicals” is simply falling into the trap of creating a Religious Left to battle the Pat Roberton’s of the world. Not to say that you are guilty by association, but Jim Wallis’ signature should be in all CAPS. He might as well have taken a few of his articles from Sojourner’s, smashed them together, added a few more devotional phrases, and Os Guinness could’ve written his bit about “civility” and taken the rest of the year off.

But as mentioned above, there are good things that need to be said of the manifesto. The document is highly Christocentric, something that has been sorely missing in Evangelical public engagement in the past few decades. The constant focus on the person and work of Jesus should make us all shout out an “Amen” or two. There is also call for constant renewal and reformation that strongly denounces any falling in love with the status quo. Of particular interests to the Jesus Manifesto crowd, coming byway the section entitled “The Way of Jesus, Not Constantine:”

“We Evangelicals trace our heritage, not to Constantine, but to the very different stance of Jesus of Nazareth. While some of us are pacifists and others are advocates of just war, we all believe that Jesus’ Good News of justice for the whole world was promoted, not by a conqueror’s power and sword, but by a suffering servant emptied of power and ready to die for the ends he came to achieve.” (18)

So what are your thoughts?

Have you read this Manifesto? Would you sign it?

Where do you place yourself in the spectrum–are you an “Evangelical?”

Michael Cline is a co-editor of the Jesus Manifesto. He considers himself a freelance pastor and and over-employed learner who currently attends Bethel Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. When not snuggling with his wife, he’s blogging at www.reclinerramblings.blogspot.com

Find Yourself In The Faces Of Others

Who are you? What makes you who you are? How comfortable are you with the person you are becoming?

These questions grow ever more urgent in a world where the media and society seem determined to form and shape us according their ideals, their demographic categories and their fashions. Increasingly, it seems, who we are is defined at the surface level – body fat percentages, smoothness of skin, awards on shelves, zeros on bank statements. I can’t help wondering, though, how we can really know ourselves without giving attention to our souls. And how we can know our souls if we focus only on ourselves?

In South Africa we have an indigenous word that has become somewhat overused since the birth of our new democracy in 1994. This word is Ubuntu and it means, “I belong, therefore I am” or “I am a person because of other people”. Ubuntu affirms the connectedness of all human beings with one another, and acknowledges that individuals can find little meaning or truth in isolation. It reminds us that we can only really find ourselves in the faces of others.

This truth lies at the heart of Christian spirituality. We proclaim that our God is both One and Three, that God’s essential nature is community, is relationship. God has never existed in some isolated, divine individualism. The essence of God is love expressed and received – diversity brought into complete unity. The challenge of worshiping this Triune God is to live out what we pray and sing in relationships. We cannot love the Trinity without also expressing God’s nature and purpose in communities of love, service and shared life.

And if we will embrace this call, we discover a hidden gift of immense and eternal value. As we join with others to love God and live out our faith, we discover that we are truly connected – that the universe and everything in it is an expression of God’s Word, and is filled with God’s breath. And, as we gaze on all these ‘others’ – God, people, creature, thing - we find our place, we discover our souls, and we learn to know who we really are.

So, let me ask again – who are you? Who are the people that help you to know the answer to this question? And what would happen if you expanded your community to embrace those that you might prefer to exclude? Let me encourage you, in the weeks ahead, to seek God in your community. Not just your church community, but that of your town, your country, and even the world. Seek God in those that you disagree with and those you are afraid of. Seek God in those you consider your friends, and those you consider your enemies – for they are all created and loved by God. And as you find God in these others, as you discover your connection with these others, you may experience a surprising thing – you might just see yourself looking back from their faces.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning is now and forever shall be. Amen!

Author Bio:: John van de Laar is a Methodist minister, liturgical consultant and the author of the book Food for the Road – Life Lesson from the Lord’s Table. He holds a Master’s Degree in theology and is the founder of Sacredise.com, an international worship training and resourcing ministry. John is married to Debbie, and they have two sons.

Fighting With Forks: The Food Crisis Battle

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