Transforming Trio: Community Edition

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Creative Commons License MyAngelG via Compfight

Last week’s trio of links focused on individual transformation. This week’s links turn to transformation of communities, with a special emphasis in a couple of them to communities of faith.

 A Caveat: Just because I link to a particular resource does not mean I completely agree with everything the author or the website says and stands for. Some links are meant to invite us to different perspectives on what it means to live.

Act 1: Recreation

 ”Transformation as Authorship” by Maria Popova on brainpickings.org

This article focusing on music looks at a major struggle within the creative community: original authorship and the remix movement. It points to an idea of recreativity that I think we need to embrace as communities of faith.

It is a source of security for us to settle into a theological safe zone that looks to a founder and creates limits based on that history. Then we use those boundaries to block and bar any sort of innovation.

I think if we took Wesley, Luther, Calvin, and even Jesus and showed them around the communities that claim their names today they would not be pleased. Any founder of a culture shaking movement had to break the mold. They had to take what was there and recreate it into something different to breathe new life into the communities they loved.

Act 2: Blocks to Transformation

Scott McKnight on “Seven Habits of a Lifeless Church”

I find Scott’s ideas to be challenging and inspiring.

As he encourages communities of faith to regain their missional calling he knows the resistance of the cultures inside and outside of those communities that get in the way of this life-enriching movement. In this article he summarizes 7 of these cultural influences from the book Missional Spirituality by Roger Holland and Len Hjalmarson.

The list is humbling.

Act 3: Do We Really Need New and Improved?

Packaging the Church, by Joy at A Deeper Church

This link has been sitting in my queue since last summer.

Joy writes about her experiencing finding a new faith home after serving as a missionary in Bolivia. She finds her self wrestling with what her heart desires about a community of faith and what many communities decide to market themselves as. Her struggle in finding a new home resonates with my struggles in caring for the community I serve.

Do we want a “New and Improved” community, or an “All-natural and Organic” one.

What do you think?

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Growing Together

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Martin Gommel via Compfight

One very important aspect of the process of renewal and transformation is that while we become fully dimensional individuals, we also become fully dimensional in community.

This development of our relationships is both the expression of our renewal and a catalyst for further transformation.

We need one another.

It is in the context of relationships that we find the push and pull to be stretched in our own development. When we insulate ourselves from others we stagnate and miss out on the challenges and opportunities that flow from our relationships. Without this dynamic in our lives we atrophy and fall into ruin.

Without relationships we lose our need and desire to communicate and express ourselves. If there is no one out there who can benefit from what we have to offer than we don’t need to do the hard work of discovering and expressing our hearts and minds.

Even the desert mystics found the time and the place to be in community and to extend hospitality. Their words of wisdom provided others the invitation to go further in their development of faith.

One of the most interesting things to me is that even in the desert, hospitality took precedence. The truly wise ones knew that when a guest was there, it was sinfully selfish to withhold hospitality even in the midst of extended times of fasting and silence.

Cassian (360-435) relates this teaching:

The holy Germanus and I went to Egypt, to visit an old man. Because he offered us hospitality we asked him, “Why do you not keep the rule of fasting, when you receive visiting brothers, as we have received it in Palestine?” He replied, “Fasting is always to hand but you I cannot have with me always. Furthermore, fasting is certainly a useful and necessary thing, but it depends on our choice while the law of God lays it upon us to do the works of charity. Thus receiving Christ in you, I ought to serve you with all diligence, but when I have taken leave of you, I can resume the rule of fasting again. For ‘Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them, but when the bridegroom is taken from them, then they will fast in that day.’” (Mark 2:19-20) (Benedicta Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, 1975, Cistercian Publications, p. 113)

In those moments of community they recognized the presence of God in one another as an occasion for celebration and for further growth.

We see this relational perspective with Jesus and the incarnation. In Christ, God took the risk of being human in order to foster and develop a relationship with us. Christ’s greatest commandment was to love.

Dear friends, if God loved us this way, we also ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. If we love each other, God remains in us and his love is made perfect in us. (1 John 4:11-12 CEB)

Love is all about relationships. When we cut ourselves off from being relational beings, we separate our selves from the opportunities of being fully alive.

Your Turn:

Who in your life challenges you to grow in patience and grace? Who shows you the faithfulness and compassion of God’s presence?

What can you do today to share God’s gifts in your life with one another?

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Come On My Soul

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I first heard about this group a couple months ago and really like this song. There aren’t a lot of lyrics to it, but the energy and enthusiasm is wonderful.

Come On, My Soul

A good reminder that worship does not need to be limited to intellectually stimulating content. When we worship we come as people with the emotions of our hearts, the connection of our relationships, and bodies that move and celebrate. Our soul is the integrated whole of our being.

When we worship as whole people, God is glorified.

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Further Up and Further In

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Trey Ratcliff via Compfight

As we approached the end of 2012, there was a lot of fear-filled talk about the Mayan Apocalypse: the supposed end of the world. Some people became caught up in their anxiety and did or said some crazy things. And this anxiety triggered a primal fear that death is the end of us.

The good news is that the globe is still spinning. The planets still circle our own star. The cycle of seasons continue. We are still here.

These ongoing cycles of life invite us to enter our future believing that the Creator is still at work renewing life. As we face each day, we express that hope by wanting to be more alive today then we were yesterday.

One opportunity of this fully dimensional life is our choice to open ourselves to the transforming power that creates and sustains all things.

One facet of this process of transformation is found in our yearning for progress.

We do like progress don’t we?

We celebrate progress at one level by equating it with success. Our economy is based on the principle that progress can and should be without end and without limit. We are driven to climb corporate ladders, scoreboards, and even mountains.

We are repelled by the idea of going backwards or losing ground.

Yet, we fear the uncertainty that comes with that change and transformation. We are torn between the fear of standing still and the fear of moving forward.

So we build monuments to past progress. We set up and visit museums dedicated to celebrating the inventors, dreamers and innovators of some by-gone day.

Even our communities of faith rally around women and men who changed the course of societies with hope, faith, and love, but we keep these founders encased in theological amber and bound in gilded frames. Then we resist the same movement of the Spirit that inspired them.

We fool ourselves into thinking that we honor growth but in reality we create blockades and distractions to that progressive energy.

So, how do we reconnect with this living Spirit?

[SPOILER ALERT] One of my favorite scenes in CS Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series is found in the last book. As the series concludes, every character we has met in the stories have died in their original worlds. Narnia itself has experienced its Apocalypse. The characters find themselves in the land beyond the sea following the mouse Reepicheep. He leads them with the cry “Further Up and Further In”

This applies to the transformational process of maturing. We are always being invited to go further into our experience of the Presence of God.

=t’s not that I have already reached this goal or have already been perfected, but I pursue it, so that I may grab hold of it because Christ grabbed hold of me for just this purpose. Brothers and sisters, I myself don’t think I’ve reached it, but I do this one thing: I forget about the things behind me and reach out for the things ahead of me. The goal I pursue is the prize of God’s upward call in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:12-14 CEB)

One way to read this passage justifies our obsession with setting goals to earn our place in God’s presence, but I don’t feel that is Paul’s point. His focus is on the process of pursuing life.

And if we believe that God is eternal and that the Essence of Creation is boundless than even eternity will not exhaust our exploration and growth in the experience of God.

I don’t believe that when we die and enter into that paradise awaiting us that we will instantly know all and be completed without anything to occupy ourselves for eternity. I have this vision of eternity being spent going deeper and higher into the vastness of the eternal One.

Further Up and Further In

We will certainly not be bored riding on clouds playing our harps or guitars (modern-day lyres, I particularly like the idea of playing a bass lyre in some heavenly band) or whatever we end up thinking we are doing. We will continue to progress in our experience and appreciation of the infinity of God.

Your Turn:

So why wait?

The invitation to be growing in our experience of the Divine Essence is now.

We are already on the journey of grace. As we open in awareness of that, and respond with our affirmation and our acceptance of that Presence we amplify and enhance the richness of the growth.

Where am I moving forward into the Divine Essence?

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