Dear God...

Christmas "Letter"

I have always been skeptical of 'Christmas Letters'. I don't know why, but it seems in some intuitive way that I'm not getting the whole story. Christmas letters allow the writer to control the drama; only the scenes that they want revealed are played out in even brighter colors and sweeter smells. Surely your life isn't as rosey as what you speak. Nevertheless, as a source of impersonal information they seem to do their trick. But here again the skeptic in me does a double take and I feel the uneasiness of either lying or being lied to. The last temptation is to do the right thing for the wrong reason. To speak about little Susie's grades, piano recital and bug project, or big Ryan's karate prowess, academic awards and soccer MVP, can easily be informing for the sake of 'blowing your own horn.' Letters like that are more trouble than they're worth. And I for one can skim with the best of them. I want to read about how you are, what you're thinking about, what you find yourself daydreaming about, what decisions were good ones from the past year, and which were bad. I'd like to know how you managed to make it through another year without serious injury, divorce, disease or insanity...and if you didn't, I'd like to know how you managed today. I have a dear friend whose husband went to paradise ahead of her almost exactly a year ago to this day...I feel honored to be yelled at, cried on, and talked to with destiny searching despair. Am I glad to know what your kids are up to...sure, absolutely, but tell me why they're amazing people who frustrate you, make you laugh, and swear- all in the same day.
Anyway, here's my attempt at a 'Christmas Letter'...which won't be exactly true because this is public forum and, well, I also believe in safety, so...you understand.

Looking back over the year brings joy (not the Christmas caroly kind), and relief, confusion, clarity, determination and courage. The long road of recovery from an ethic of performance to the reality of being was hard and amazingly worth it. God tapped me (and a few other people) on the shoulder and invited me/us to nurture a spiritual community- BREATHE, for people who connect with God in a more intimate, rooted-in-life kinda way. It's not always easy (but then again, why do we expect things to be easy or transactional?), in fact 'easy' isn't the word I would use. It is communal, it is frightening, it is truthful, it is authentic, it is frustrating, it is raw, it is deeply spiritual and intensely enjoyable. We pray (as with Walter Brueggemann) for ourselves and for God's whole church--courage beyond our easier timidity,
vision beyond our present tense,
restlessness beyond our ready settlements, and
yielding beyond our will to manage.
If you would like to support this ministry (spiritually, creatively, financially), please visit this page on our site. (and, thank you!)

As a family we are becoming closer friends. It is deeply satisfying to be a good friend with your children (this is not bragging, because I often suck at such virtue, but forgiveness is real). Our girls are now in grade 10 & 11 (sophomore & junior for friends and family in the USA). Learning to drive, fashion, boyfriends, tattoos, telephones, they're all more a part of our lives presently. I often tell my kids that it's wiser to settle for a lesser grade in favor of a better education. Good decisions were made: to go to camp in Colorado in the summer, to find a part-time job, to tell the truth, to set standards for dating, to exercise and to leave the party. Neutral decisions were made: to color their hair, to get a tattoo, to watch Survivor... And bad decisions were made: to skip classes, to spend too much time on the phone and to eat that expired yogurt.

Kay is still an amazing teacher, who truly cares about her students. She loves to paint (rooms in our house), read (mind-boggling fast fiction reader) and do crossword puzzles. She really does have a sharp mind. She's in great shape too, runs regularly and did another half marathon (Vancouver) this year!

We still have our two pugs (Mai-Ling & Ebony), our small car still runs, and we're learning to garden (we get by with a little help from our friends!). Sometimes I don't know how one can stay sane in such a moronic world, and at other times I can feel the sun, and am reassured. To me, running continues to be a spiritual experience. I've got (as usual) about 6 or 7 books on the go right now--it was a good year for book reading! God has literally given a vision this year for a different kind of ministry enterprise which myself and some friends are pursuing. We are excited about inspiring the imagination, refreshing the soul and nurturing the body all within the context of deep, interdependent relationships and a warm, inviting setting. We'd sure appreciate you saying a prayer for us. Snow is still better than rain. Music is more fun if you dance to it. Most movies are crap. Tattoos hurt. Cod liver oil will keep you from getting a cold.

I hope your Christmas will be a time to remember the simplicity of Jesus' birth and magnitude of his purpose.

Dangerous People

as seen in ChristianWeek December 16, 2005 • Volume 19 Number 19
or at: http://www.christianweek.org/stories/vol19/no19/story3.html

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Experience key for emerging church

Some Christians are abandoning structure for
“a spirituality that is very rooted in life.”

Frank Stirk
BC Correspondent
bc@christianweek.org
bc@christianweek.org

RICHMOND, BC—One Tuesday evening in November, nine people met at a local pub and spent two hours in a lively conversation about social tolerance. Guiding the discussion was Phil Harbridge, the leader of Breathe, a new “emergent church” community in Richmond.

Previously, Harbridge ministered for about 12 years to youth and young adults at First Baptist Church in Vancouver. That ended in late 2004 and his family decided they needed a deeper and more spontaneous worship experience than the traditional Church was able to offer.

“It seemed more like a choreographed sort of show,” he says. “It didn’t speak to us and we didn’t feel like we were connecting with God much.”

In its place emerged Breathe with its two components—Inhale and Exhale. Inhale gatherings take place on Sundays at the Harbridge home. The time is devoted to discussing and applying a passage of Scripture, plus various opportunities for worship with no set format.

“People can go and read a passage and interact with it themselves. They can go and have communion or quietly pray. There’s a spot where they can tithe and commit to God in other ways. They can go on a walk and just listen to God’s voice in nature,” says Harbridge.

Another key element, he adds, is “the sense of spiritual connectedness” that comes from sharing a meal together.

The second component (Exhale) comprises the Tuesday pub gatherings.

“It’s not overtly Christian. Probably the majority of people that come are not believers at all,” says Harbridge. “But it’s an opportunity to interact with people and at least in a casual sense be people of faith.”

While Harbridge insists he loves First Baptist and still has “deep friendships” there, he believes the attraction of Breathe is that it “allows people to experience a Christian spirituality that is very rooted in life.”

Murray Moerman, director of church planting with Outreach Canada in Delta, B.C., says the Breathe phenomenon is part of a much larger quest or restlessness within the North American Church for an “authentic expression of communal life in the gospel.”

“There is always risk in the questioning,” he says, “but to the degree that it causes the Church to become missional—more focused on understanding and meeting the needs of the unchurched community—then that restlessness is helpful.”

Across western culture, Moerman adds, a historic re-evaluation of church structures is underway.

“There are some who would suggest it’s a reformation of ecclesiology parallel in significance to the reformation in theology in the 1500s and the reformation in mission in the 1800s, and this is a third component of necessary reformation,” he says. “I think that is true.”

At the same time, Moerman doubts this spirit of reform will move forward in Canada as rapidly as it seems to be in the U.S. There, researcher George Barna projects that numerous new ways of expressing faith, including emergent churches, will cost the more traditional Church roughly half of its “market share” by 2025.

Harbridge does not disagree, but he also believes significant changes are already taking place in Canada.

“Quietly,” he says, “people are gathering in groups like [Breathe] across Canada. I don’t think it’s as sweeping yet as it is in the States, but it’s a lot more prominent than we think.”

Whatever the outcome, says British missiologist Martin Robinson, “a new kind of creativity is emerging onto the scene” that deserves to be encouraged and applauded.

“You’ve just got to constantly look for the spiritual entrepreneurs, who often get shut out of the church, because they’re risk-takers and they’re dangerous people,” Robinson told ChristianWeek during a visit to Vancouver last May.

“Fortunately, our backs are so up against the wall that we’ve got no option but to take the entrepreneurs on board.”

I am therefore I think

I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it.

Steven Wright (1955 - )

History on Sale

Benjamin Rush was one of the founding fathers of the United States; He was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, he was also a physician; in fact he was one of that countries’ first psychiatrists. He gave himself to what he called the curing of the diseases of the mind. Perhaps because he was a psychiatrist, dreams played an important part in Benjamin Rush’s life. In fact in the year 1785, he had a dream that changed the course of his life completely. He imagined that he was in the city of Philadelphia, standing with a large crowd beneath Christ Church. On the steeple of the church was a man clinging to the weather vane, his legs wrapped around its ball. When Benjamin Rush asked somebody what was going on there on the steeple of the church, he was told that that man was able to influence the weather. In his hand, the weather vane not only indicated the weather, it directed the weather. But somehow the weather was not cooperating. The man called for the sun to shine, and it began to rain torrents. He demanded that the wind would blow, but the streets of Philadelphia were strangely calm. At first the man was agitated, and then he fell into a deep depression. Benjamin Rush said, “The man is mad”. And suddenly there came from the steeple of the church, a messenger dressed as mercury, carrying a banner in his hand, and on that banner, scribed in Latin were the words, ABOUT YOU A STORY IS BEING TOLD.

It takes a great degree of genius for a man to interpret his dream within his dream. And when Benjamin Rush awoke, he realized that that man on the steeple of the church was none other than himself. He had been trying to influence the course of history and he realized that it was like commanding the wind to blow. And as a result of that dream, Benjamin Rush left political life.

That dream is startling in its breadth, its depth, its myth, its legend. It is the dream of a physician who gives himself to the healing of disease and discovers that the power of cure often lies beyond his grasp. It is the dream of a politician who seeks to influence the current of his time, only to discover that he is caught up in the currents. To influence his day is like trying to capture the wind in his hand. And a city like Washington DC or Ottawa Ontario, when all is said or done, infinitely more is said than is done.

It could also be the dream of a Christian leader or any Christian, who wants to influence her nation for God, to turn it back to righteousness, and discovers that there are powers at work in the world that are greater than she can command. We live in a strange and perverse time.
And there are times when you want to quit. Times when you want to settle for a cheap doctrine of election and decide that if God wants to win the world then he can do it himself, you’d rather not get involved.

When that melancholy of the soul comes over me, I have taken some inspiration from the life of the apostle Paul. I know that for some, Paul is a kind of patron saint, but that has not always been true for me. It seemed to me in past years, that Paul was a breed apart. He had a vision that I did not see, a power I did not know, an authority I was not given. When you stand next to somebody who is 20 feet tall, somehow you’re not even inspired to stand up straight.
But that changed for me a few years ago, when my dad and I were able to visit the lands of the Near East, and in part at least we traced the steps of the apostle Paul. It was George Truitt who once said, he “saw the tracks of a wounded rabbit red across the snow, and those were the tracks of the apostle Paul across the Roman Empire”. Terrifying, antagonistic, demon infested was the world of which Paul lived. And if you and I feel that we face obstacles, he faced them even more. And yet the apostle, that little Jew with just a band of nobodies, not only effected his day for God, he changed the course of history. So that today we name our sons after Paul, and our dogs after Nero.

And the Greatest of these is...

Who loves not women, wine and song remains a fool his whole life long.

Martin Luther