Butler Bass: Community

Butler Bass: Belonging, Community

“Instead of believing, behaving, and belonging, we need to reverse the order to belonging, behaving, and believing. Jesus did not begin with questions of belief. Jesus’ public ministry started when he formed a community.”

—Diana Butler Bass in Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening, (Harper One, 2011), pp. 11-64.

Diana Butler Bass tries to help us understand what is happening in the present day changing Christian landscape where religion is now no longer the center of a member’s life. She reminds us that our religion started with community, not confession. Thomas Watkins from Wilson, North Carolina also tries to explain how our church might change using the South’s love of football in an article in Journal of Preacher (“Game Day: Becoming a New church in an Old South,” Pentecost 2017, vol. 40, no. 4) “They (fans) are not asked to show their diplomas at the stadium gate.”

One of the most frequent questions of those coming for spiritual direction is “I don’t know if I believe or what I believe anymore. Maybe I am no longer a Christian.”If the person belongs to a confessional denomination or a church of orthodoxy where he or she must believe a certain set of doctrines, this can sometimes be a problem. There are denominations that are churches of orthopraxy where its members are held together because of a way they worship or practice their faith. In that circumstance, a changing belief is considered at times an asset, a sign of growth. Our relationship to God will change as our God becomes larger, as we come to see the Christ in more and more people, people who are very different from ourselves.

I often quote that line I first heard from Alan Jones at a Trinity Wall Street conference at Kanuga in the early 2000’s: “the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.”Doubting is a sign that God is working in us; our relationship is changing. Sometimes this change in relationship can feel like the movement of the earth’s tectonic plates. Sometimes it can be like a volcano erupting. If we can just take it as a good and not a bad thing and try to stay steady, a new relationship, a new life will arise.I remember a quote attributed to Catherine Marshall, “Those who never rebelled against God or at some point in their lives shaken their fists in the face of heaven, have never encountered God at all.”

This is also where community is important. In a church that is alive with the spirit, there will be many others who have experienced this awakening who can walk and hold a steady hand when the foundations that we thought were our beliefs are threatened. We come to see that these beliefs are not threatened, but enlarged, and we learn this because of belonging to a community.

Joanna. Joannaeibert.com

Purchase a copy of A Daily Spiritual Rx for Lent and Easter in Little Rock from me joannaseibert@me.com or from Wordsworth Books or from the publisher Earth Songs Press or on Amazon.. Proceeds from the book go for hurricane relief in the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast.

Charleston: We are not done yet/ community

Charleston: We are not done yet/ community

“We are not done yet. We may count our progress in inches. We may swim against the deep tides of greed and hate, but we are not done yet. Even if we do not live to see it all, we will be content to be the inspiration, to give all we have to free our world from fear.” Bishop Steven Charleston, Daily Facebook Page

Bishop Charleston gives us encouragement during difficult times when we are discouraged. This is why God constantly calls us to community. When our lights are dim, we feel we have lost our connection to God, we feel we have not accomplished anything, in fact we believe we are failures, there are others in our community whose lights are on, who are more connected to God, who can encourage and support us until we see a different picture. They are like Simon of Cyrene, briefly carrying our cross. They are like the friends of the paralytic lifting him through the rooftop to Jesus. Then in turn as we heal, it will be our turn to be the encourager.

Often people come for spiritual direction or meet with spiritual friends who indeed have been burned out or feel their life or their ministry is not accomplishing what they had hoped. That is our job as spiritual friends, to show each other where indeed God is working in our lives and how important it is for us to continue to be an inspiration to each other, remembering that we may not see the results. The results may be apparent much later, long after we have lived our lives and our names have been forgotten.

As I grow older, I seem more vividly to remember the people, the teachers, my grandparents, my co-workers and friends who encouraged me, who supported me, who never gave up on me. Most of them are indeed dead, so I can now only thank them by trying to encourage others as they did to me. So today, I share with you Jon Sweeney’s new biography of Phyllis Tickle, Phyllis Tickle, A Life, where he shares how Phyllis was a major encourager for him and myself as well as so many others, and whose birthday was March 12th.

Joanna. Joannaeibert.com

Purchase a copy of A Daily Spiritual Rx for Lent and Easter in Little Rock from me joannaseibert@me.com or from Wordsworth Books or from the publisher Earth Songs Press or on Amazon.. Proceeds from the book go for hurricane relief in the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast.

Nouwen: Community

Nouwen: Community

“Community is not a talent show in which we dazzle the world with our combined gifts. Community is the place where our poverty is acknowledged and accepted, not as something we have to learn to cope with as best as we can but as a true source of new life.” Henri Nouwen, in “March 18,” Bread for the Journey (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997).

The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament constantly reveal stories of how God continually calls us to community. This is what enlarges our view of God, keeps our God from being so small as we hear about the God of their understanding from others. In community is where we learn how our gifts are needed and how we don’t need to have all the gifts or be in control. In community, we also learn about ourselves as we begin to see that the faults we so dislike in others are often also in ourselves, and in time we see how ugly they are in the ourselves as well and finally pray to be changed.

We also learn about forgiveness as we are forgiven. In community as we attempt to live in harmony we learn about reconciliation, pluralism, connection, a different kind of living than our society often teaches us.

We live in a zero-sum world, where we are taught there is only so much food, so much resources, so many jobs, so much money, so much love to go around. If we give any of what we have away, we will lose it all, we will lose all that we have accumulated, and it will not return, so we store our things in pods and warehouses and even store up love inside of ourselves and don’t give it away. We fear if we share, we will lose what we have and not be able to have more.

I learned about the fallacy of zero sum from some of my grandchildren. I once envied their grandparents who lived nearby while we lived far away. I feared there was only so much love my grandchildren could give, and their closer grandparents were going to get most of it. Oh, me. My grandchildren have taught me that they have much more love to give than I can fathom, and how wonderful it can be that they know and share the love of so many living grandparents. This is what we learn in community. We learn about God’s love without numbers, love without conditions, love that we cannot hold onto, but love that can only grow if it continually moves and flows in and out of us.

As I meet with spiritual friends I share what I have learned in community and offer living in community as one more way to keep that connection to God which so beautifully lives in others. In return, our community reflects to us the Christ, the God of our understanding which also dwells within ourselves as well.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com

Purchase a copy of A Daily Spiritual Rx for Lent and Easter in Little Rock from me joannaseibert@me.com or from Wordsworth Books or from the publisher Earth Songs Press or on Amazon.. Proceeds from the book go for hurricane relief in the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast.