"I'm smiling with the sun in my face. Could I be Irish?"

I was reading journal #44 this morning and found this simple email message from Rich Starkey. "I'm smiling with the sun in my face. Could I be Irish?" Here was my response:

Hey Rich....If you can answer yes to the following questions I'd say "hell yes" you are Irish!

1. Do you get stoned to the soul by the power of words and music?

2. Do you often drink beers as large as your head?

3. Can you slide across the floor on your knees when dancing?

4. Do you get loud under the influence?

5. Are you under the influence now?

6. Do you practice heroic hospitality?

7. Have you been married to the same woman for more than 20 years?

8. Do you have a son to carry the Starkey name to the next generation?

9. Do you cry easily?

10. Do you have a warped sense of humor -laughing when others wouldn't?

11. Can you swear and not take the Lord's name in vain?

12. Can you hold a paradox until you burst with tension?

13. Can you pick a fight and then be over it the next day?

14. Do you spoil your children?

15. Do you spoil your wife?

16. Are you kind and generous?

17. Do you have a fair complexion?

18. Do you go upstream instead of downstream?

19. Do you like to read, I mean really read?

20. Do you attend church, at least occasionally?

21. Do you drink the blood of the Lamb?

22. Could you kill another with your bare hands if necessary to protect the life of many?

23. Are you deeply connected to your best friends?

24. Is the world your play ground?

25. Have you read C.S. Lewis - alot?

26. Do you like U2?

27. Can you tolerate rain, lots of rain?

28. Can you tolerate pain, lots of pain?

29. Do you get depressed in the dark cold half of the year?

30. Will you spend more money than you actually have?

31. Can you close a deal on a handshake?

32. Have you ever been Chairman of a Board?

I'm pretty sure you are Irish Rich, and I even found the Starkey name on mugs in Dublin to prove it!

Cheers,

O'

Cheers and Blessings on St. Patrick's Day

Esther De Waal reminds us that the Celtic world of faith understood life as a journey rather than merely a destination. Encouraging a deeper, fuller way of being, of living within the whole of themselves and Creation, St. Patrick nurtured a nation of agrarian tribes in the baptism of their collective and fertile imaginations.

With a generous spirit of orthodoxy, the ancient Irish Christians were able to embrace the natural rhythms of Creation, both the light and the dark seasons. These seasons became symbols of the Celtic refusal to avoid pain and suffering, while at the same time rejoicing and celebrating the fullness and goodness of humanity created in the image of God.

Centuries before the Great Schism of early faith communities into Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism and long before the Reformation, Celtic Christianity was instinctively communal, shunning any separation of praying and living and working. For them faith was inseparable from ordinary life with no notions of sacred/secular divisions. All life including Creation was..."taken up by a Christianity that was not afraid of what it found but felt that it was natural to appropriate it into the fullness of Christian living."

Celtic culture shared much with the traditional and aboriginal peoples around the world who rejected overt individualistic and competitive inward-seeking lifestyles common today. They recognized themselves instead as belonging to one another and embraced life as mutually interdependent beings within the whole web of Creation.

Our quantum world and the new science that describes it today, speaks the same language of mutual holistic entanglement, linking us all together in this unfolding work of Art that we Christians call the Kingdom of God.

"The Celtic world touches all of this but yet remains totally unique, earthly, and mysterious, knowing darkness and pain but equally rejoicing in light, full of poetry and song and celebration, showing us the depths of penitence and the heights of praise, touching us in the secret hidden parts of our own selves and yet connecting us with others. So although each of us is in the end solitary, St. Patrick reminds us that we travel in company with those who have made this journey before us, by the whole company of heaven, the saints and the angels, a "cloud of witness", who surround us and who hold us up as we go."

Cheers, and enjoy the Celtic challenge!

O'

Adapted from The Celtic Way of Prayer - The Recovery of the Religious Imagination by Esther De Waal

Revelation Through Conversation !

I am not making this up. Every time I sit down and read another chapter in Brian D. McLaren's book A New Kind of Christian - Ten Questions That Are Transforming The Faith, I come across something so simple and so obvious that it makes me mad.

By that I mean why didn't someone articulate these ideas prior to 2010? Really, why didn't I hear about these ideas early in my journey of faith, like back in 1976 or 1982 or even 1995.

I have waited patiently for over 36 years to finally come across these words...."revelation doesn't simply happen in statements. It happens in conversations and arguments that take place within and among communities of people who share the same essential questions across generations. Revelation accumulates in the relationships, interactions, and interplay between statements.

In this light, the biblical text doesn't give us cement blocks and mortar with which to construct a building of certainty from the ground up. It gives us a bunch of hammers and chisels in the form of stories and questions. With these tools we chip away at human constructions, and revelation is like the breeze or shaft of light that streams through the cracks. The Word, or Self-Revealing of God, in this light, isn't a bunch of lessons, morals, doctrines, or beliefs that God dictates or otherwise encodes. It is an event, a turning point, a breaking open, a discovery, a transforming and humbling and ennobling encounter that occurs to readers when they engage with the text in faith - the text with all its tensions and unresolved issues intact.

To say that the Word (the message, meaning, or revelation) of God is in the biblical text, then, does not mean that you can extract verses or statements from the text at will and call them "God's words." It means that if we enter the text and feel the flow of its arguments, get stuck in its points of tension, and struggle with its unfolding plot in all its twists and turns, God's revelation can happen to us. We can reach the point that Job and company did at the end of the book, where, after a lot of conflicted human talk and a conspicuously long divine silence, we finally hear God's voice." Or not....

See what I mean? Wow! As usual I have my wife Ann to thank. She is always lugging home tons of books, and from the library of all places. As I write this blog post in bed I can easily count over 47 books with titles like The Next Reformation - Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernity, by Carl Raschke, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Leaders Who Last by Margaret J. Marcuson, The Company of Strangers by Parker J. Palmer, Sexual Bargaining by John Scanzoni, Soul Survivor by Philip Yancey, The Night Offices by Phyllis Tickle, two different version of the Bible, The Healing Power of Emotion by Fosha, Siegel and Solomon, Intuitive Leadership by Tim Keel, Picturing the Face of Jesus by Beth Booram, The Education of the Heart by Thomas Moore, The Healing Imagination by Ann and Barry Ulanov, and a giant book called The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett.

And these are just the books I can grab with my right hand on her side of the bed. (Did I mention Ann was an English major in college?) So thanks again to the wife of my youth for exposing me to some of the greatest minds to ever flesh out an idea on paper with words.

Yet even better than merely reading a lot of books, Ann is out daily in the marketplace engaged with real people, with hammers and chisels constantly discovering revelation through relationships.

Thanks Ann for dragging home thousands of library books over the past 29 years of our marriage and introducing me to writers like McLaren. And thanks even more for living out your faith in an extended community of global relationships while chiseling away at the certainty that keeps so many of us from the transforming power of revelation found in intentional conversation.

Keep swinging that hammer!

Love you like a rock,

O'

Why I Am Not a Socialist

If I were a poet writing an Utopia, if I were a magician waving a wand, if I were a God making a Planet, I would deliberately make it a world of give and take, rather than a world of sharing. I do not wish Jones and Brown to share the same cigar box; I do not want it as an ideal; I do not what it as a very remote ideal. I do not want it at all. I want Jones by one mystical and godlike act to give a cigar to Brown, and Brown by another mystical and godlike act to give a cigar to Jones. Thus it seems to me instead of one act of fellowship (of which the memory would slowly fade), we should have a continual play and energy of new acts of fellowship keeping up the circulation of society. Now I have read some tons of Socialist eloquence in my time, but it is literally true that I have never seen any serious allusion to or clear consciousness of this creative altruism of personal giving.

G.K. Chesterton 1908

The Next Reformation

"What today we call the hermeneutics of Scripture - the invocation of a precise theoretical method to decode the biblical text - was never really on the table during the Reformation. The Reformation - both the so-called Radical and Magisterial Reformations - adhere to the conviction that the Holy Spirit could guide each believer (or the church community as a whole, on Calvin's view) to a patent understanding of the meaning of Scripture.

From a theological vantage point, that really signified that there can be no "hermeneutical," or even "theological," skewing of Scripture in the late-modern sense. The power of God to reveal himself through his Word was taken as a given, not as a conundrum.

The Word had authority because it could speak directly to the heart of the justified sinner. The Word of God was intimate and divine communication, not an impersonal ontological benchmark reinforced by a secondary calculus that correlated between text and the order of existence. The latter "methodology" was elaborated by post-Enlightenment philosophers who happened to be enamored with experimental science. For the most part, it was an "inductive" version of Scholasticism, which the Reformers had repudiated. It was a stance totally foreign to those who staked their lives and careers on the authority of Scripture.

In their own way the Reformers maintained what we now term a "dialogical" reading of biblical authority. God does not simply speak through the Bible; God speaks to us. Just as Christ, as Luther put it, is always "pro me (for me)," so also is God's word." Amen.

Carl Rashcke The Next Reformation Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernity

"Women on the loose" - Kjerringsleppet

The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd

During the 1994 Winter Olympics at Lillehammer, thirty five Norwegian women skied down the slope, opening the giant slalom competition. In Norway this group of bold women is known as the Kjerringsleppet, which roughly translates as "Women on the loose."

The group formed back in 1989 when only men were invited to participate in the opening ceremony of Norway's Alpine Center. The women felt insulted and excluded, so these thirty-five banded together, waited in the woods until the appropriate moment, then shocked everyone by swooping out of the trees on snow skis, clanging cow bells and crashing the ceremony. The country loved it, and the women became a fond symbol, so much so they were invited to the Olympics.

The Kjerringsleppet are a marvelous image for female empowerment and a "woman on the loose" is a woman who leaves the woods where she has been growing strong all these years. She swoops out of the trees, ringing her bell. She is saying, I am here now and I am not going away!

The motto the women on the loose adopted is translated as:

"To improvise, surprise, and come uninvited."

To improvise means to take whatever abilities and resources are available and to use them in whatever situations arises, often an unforseen one. These Norwegian women were presented with a situation in which they were excluded, so they improvised a way to challenge and circumvent it. As Sartre said, "Genius is the way one invents in desperate situations."

An empowered woman becomes a genius in desperate situations; she is an improvisational artist. Rather than bypassing or shrinking from situations where her consciousness is needed, she speaks and acts, relying on something insider herself. To improve you must trust your-self and value your own knowing.

The rest of the Kjerringsleppet motto is "to surprise and come uninvited," which means stepping out of the expected and becoming a daring and dissident presence. Powerful women are always surprising themselves, always getting a small gasp out of the world.

When women speak truly, they speak subversively," writes Ursula K. Le Guin. They refuse to be uninvited. They learn surprising ways to invite themselves.

Amen!

O'

"Old men ought to be explorers." T.S. Eliot

Understanding the Word of God

"It seems to me that the church and every person within the church is faced with a choice: to witness to an ancient Near Eastern cultural bias of male gender superiority, or to witness to Jesus Christ and his redemptive life and ministry. The best methods of biblical interpretation, from the Reformation on down through today, urge us to reject narrow historical and cultural bias and instead to follow Jesus' example. The purpose of the Bible is not to weld us forever to an ancient culture. The purpose of the Bible is to tell us the story of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection.

Those who choose to witness to ancient cultural bias will always be able to find certain passages, take them out of context, and turn them into church laws that benefit them and discriminate against those whom they dislike. Those who choose to follow Jesus will see Jesus as the center of the biblical story and interpret each passage in light of his ministry. Using this Christ-centered approach enriches our understanding of the gospel and brings us into a closer relationship with God and our fellow human beings."

Jack Rogers - Moderator of the 213th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, 2001

OPEN HAND "Ubuntu" 1997 - 2010

"Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language. It speaks of the very essence of being human. You share what you have. It is to say, "My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours." We belong in a bundle of life. We say, "A person is a person through other persons." It is not, "I think therefore I am." It says rather...."I AM HUMAN BECAUSE I BELONG." Desmond Tutu

I am often amazed when I reflect on our Open Hand global community and the unique fabric we have woven together over the past twelve years. From the beginning we decided to relocate as intentional neighbors embedded in urban Indianapolis near Tabernacle Presbyterian Church. The prophetic words we received and lived into said that from here the nations would come and bless us and from here we would go to the nations and be a blessing. In creating our organ-ic community we apprenticed ourselves to processing an influence and quality of being together, capable of generating systemic multi-cultural life forces.

With an open source architecture and global mobility designed into our community DNA, we generated over the years a robust network of multi-tasking Kingdom opportunities. These include but are not limited to:

1. Emerging Faith Community / table fellowship - Surrounding all of our activities, is a subtle natural rhythm drawing us together in Christian worship, as we join our Lord in the banquet table feast. Our community is continually refreshed and challenged by the telling and retelling of our Kingdom journey's, creating myths and cultural symbols that help us understand who we are. We celebrate the sacraments of our shared lives together with weddings, baptisms, commissionings and a sprinkling of lively special occasions. Our windows into the Kingdom of God are wide open, encouraging a prophetic imagination and passion for inviting people from all over the world to join us on our journey.

2. Mana Deschisa Romania (Open Hand) - We helped launch Marshall McKenna in 1997 by commissioning, sponsoring, and encouraging his life among the street kids of Bucharest. This connection continues to thrive today with a dynamic relationship of mutuality including the input of countless individuals, churches, and organizations in the USA and Europe. Our expanding global network is creating a labor of love for those homeless and disadvantage young adults of Romania. Over the past several years Open Hand has commissioned and sent out other explorer's to establish and connect missional networks worldwide. (Kenya, Norway, Holland, Australia)

3. Church-State Faith-based Initiatives - In 1998 Open Hand helped establish the first applications of faith-based initiatives in urban Indianapolis, combining the activities of church and state (DCS) in providing Faith-based / Home-based mental health services to juveniles, children in need and families in crisis. Over 500 families have spent between 3-6 months of weekly interaction with our Christian counselors in their homes exploring the dynamics of spirituality and family emotional process.

4. Coaching, Counseling, Consulting - For over ten years our community has provided dynamic faith-based interventions for individuals, couples, families, and organizations in crisis and conflict. With a systemic orientation combining the insights of Christianity with Natural Systems and Marriage & Family Therapy, countless people (including many in positions of leadership) have apprenticed themselves to new ways of conceptualizing their lives and the surrounding relationship systems of extended family, workplace vocation and congregational life. Lives have been powerfully impacted, marriages rejuvenated, leaders empowered and relationships restored in the process or our global coaching, counseling and consulting.

5. Global Learning Community as YWAM Associates - Pioneered by Rod and implemented by our community, thousands of Youth With A Mission students from around the world (Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and North and South America) have tasted freedom as they personally explore vital new understandings of healthy, dynamic faith and empowering relationships. We teach in YWAM classes (University of the Nations) worldwide and will be traveling to Singapore, Hawaii and Brazil in 2010.

6. Arts - All of the arts are celebrated and encouraged in Open Hand and embedded in the culture of our community for the nourishment of our hearts, minds, bodies and souls. The Starkey's have pioneered excursions out west, sharing art and faith with young Native American's in an effective effort to multiply this nourishment. Artists Julie Ball and Derek Powell have sponsored art shows, installations and the annual gatherings of select artists in the Limner Society.

7. Urban Practicum -Internships / Outreach - In connection with our faith-based counseling and YWAM relationship worldwide, our community has been selected by several organizations as a training and equipping site providing practical hands on internships for local and international graduate students completing university work. Many YWAM students from around the world have subsequently lived in our Open Hand community while completing a three month urban practicum with us.

8. Publishing: Teaching / Coaching Materials - From the idea of the open handed metaphor, Rod and others of us are constantly developing life and faith coaching materials and book manuscripts. As a community we apprentice ourselves to a wide variety of biblical, scientific, and scholarly authors in helping shape and inform our understandings of what it means to live and work intentionally in the global community for the Kingdom of God.

9. Hospitality - We continue to create an open space within our community where guests can enter for a short period of a few days, extending to several weeks or months as necessary. They are encouraged to explore their freedom as human beings created in God's image and are in a safe space for processing life - for falling apart if necessary and coming together, for experimenting with new ways of being and being with, one another.

10. Peer-based Networking - As a global learning community, Open Hand values dialogue and diversity in an attempt to explore and process the manifold mysteries of life and faith. A high value is placed on education and sharing the fruits of social networking.

11. Excursion and Resource Teams - Open Hand organizes, sponsors and launches local and international outreach teams to the nations, seeking to lure the larger world into the Kingdom of God. We have had teams recently in Italy and Romania and plan to reach out to Kenya, China and Romania in 2010.

Membership Requirement - a. faith of a mustard seed, b. the ability to say "yes" more than no to life's challenges, c. a valid passport to the global marketplace

OPEN HAND opportunities - 1. participation in our Table Fellowship, 2. utilization of our open source system for the development of new Kingdom opportunities, 3. networking partnerships - creating new Open Hand missional communities worldwide, 4. imaging new adventures and leading outreaches for our community involvement, 5. partnering with us in launching new social businesses to help sustainability while focused on the urban marginalized youth and families

OPEN HAND Innovation & Mission as an Emerging Faith Community

Over the past twelve years our OPEN HAND International Christian Community has been part of a sometimes deliberate and sometimes random recalibration of what it means to be the church today. Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch in their book The Shaping of Things to Come - Innovation and Mission For the 21st Century Church insightfully express many of our surprising communal experiences with God, including ongoing redemption, transformation and atonement. It is always encouraging to see folks like them highlighting what is happening worldwide and to recognize that we are right in the center of it all. We didn't plan it this way, but graciously give thanks to God for leading our OPEN HAND community onto the roundabout of the global emerging church. I have highlighted some of their book and hope your are as encouraged and challenged as we are by their wisdom and insights! Amen.

Postmodern expressions of what people are looking for in the church today:

1. Belonging - sense of welcome, acceptance and place where they are known

2. Adventure - challenge of being stretched, deep longing to live into full potential

3. Empowerment - expressive opportunities to co-create life, individually and communally

4. Sensuality - experiential community, tasting, touching, sharing, expressing life

5. Celebration - joy of salvation, embracing life in its fullest, meeting deepest desires

6. Liminality - transcending self, in touch with mystery of life, profound spirituality

Christendom - the standardized historical model (stuck in the past and almost irrelevant in popular culture today) is an expression of faith stemming from the post-Constantine period with a heavy Greek influence. It is an out of touch mode of engagement that is primarily attractional (come to us) rather than missional/sending (going out among). It has a strong focus on dedicated and sacred buildings / places of worship and an institutionally recognized, professional clergy class functioning primarily as a hierarchy of pastor/priest. Also there is an institutionalization of grace in the form of sacraments administered by licensed priesthood within the confines of the attractional church format.

Missional church:

a. On the other hand is incarnational rather than attractional in its ecclesiology - not creating isolated and sanctified spaces into which unbelievers must come to encounter the gospel, rather the missional church is mobile and able to disassemble itself, seeping into society in order to be Christ to those who don't yet know him.

b. The Missional church is also messianic rather than dualistic and adopts the world-view of Christ rather than that of the Greco-Roman empire which sees the world as divided between the sacred (religious) and the profane (nonreligious). Rather it sees the world as Christ sees the world and God's place in it is holistic and integrated.

c. It adopts an apostolic rather than hierarchical mode of leadership, recognizing the fivefold model of leadership detailed by Paul - apostolic, prophetic, evangelistic, pastoral and teaching

Values of the missional church include: a desire to be adventurous, playful, surprising, chaordic, relevant, improvisational, with sensual-experiential-participatory worship, deeply concerned for matters of justice-seeking, mercy-bringing, unity in diversity, placing a high premium on community, flexible, less structure, broadly biblical, Christ centric...

Shared traits of missional communities include: 1. proximity spaces - places where Christians and not-yet Christians can interact meaningfully with each other 2. shared projects - valuing the development of joint endeavors between the Christian community and its host community...intrinsically valuable activities for the entire society 3. sustainable commercial enterprises that bring more intrinsic value to the broader community and those less fortunate that it serves 4. indigenous faith communities - emerge within the local culture (anti-clone of the existing traditional model of church) infiltrating and transformational....

Incarnational mode - creates a faith community that is a dynamic set of relationships, friendships, and acquaintances...enhancing and flavoring the host community's living social fabric rather than disaffirming it....thus creating a medium of vital connections through which the gospel can naturally travel.

Centered set (not bounded set) - the membership is not defined by some artificial (and often socially prescribed) set of criteria, but by proximity to Jesus...think of a watering well in the center of the land where everyone comes for refreshment, rather than a land fenced in to keep folks in and out....a lifestyle of love, generosity, healing, hospitality, forgiveness, mercy, peace, joy, and belonging.

Missional-incarnational community - lives, eats and works closely with its surrounding society, developing strong links between Christians and not-yet Christians. Recall the movie Chocolat - celebrating life, good food, laughter, romance, storytelling, fantasy and imagination.. offering non-judgmental and compassionate relationships, offering practical help as well as a context for honesty and truth telling....entirely open to innovation, experimentation and creativity.

Gathering spaces - modeled on household space, neighborhood pub, lounge rooms, place of friendship, hospitality, safety, feasting celebrations...for the entire community.

Missional objectives - real connection for the not-yet Christian to participate in the host community.... presence, partnership, inquiry, demonstration, access, encounter.

Critical Contextualization - missional community takes the Bible seriously, recognizes the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of all believers, sees the church as a hermeneutical community, within a global network, thus ensuring a broader international perspective...

Whispered - many people are whispered into the Kingdom slowly and graciously over time... and the communal church fulfills the yearnings for corporate faith and worship that is experiential, participatory, image-driven and communal with an infectious lifestyle, provoking a sense of wonder and awe, showing extraordinary love, exploring how God is touching our lives and focusing on Jesus.

Hebraic Spirit vs Hellenistic consciousness - Hellenistic thinking is speculative in nature, whereas the Hebraic spirit is much more concrete.... Christendom (historical perspective up to modern church) have been overly influenced by Greek notions... and fascinated with abstract and speculative ideas about God and faith - even the creeds (Apostle's Creed included) are primarily focused on the doctrines of God and Christ, saying little more about anything else, avoiding talking about right living, while stressing right thinking.

Orthodoxy - assumes that if we change a person's thinking, we will change the way they live, but there is lots of evidence to the contrary.

Orthopraxy - is a system that believes right living provides the context for us to embrace right thinking... as Pauline Epistles constant references to righteous Christian living as the framework for Christian theologizing.

Fully Biblical - missional community can embrace both orthodoxy and orthopraxy, with God-in-the-mess perspective found in the incarnation... Hebrew mind incorporated "religious" existence into all of life. As such there is no distinction whatsoever between the secular and sacred in the Hebrew world-view.....

Leadership styles: 1. the entrepreneur (apostle) - ground breakers and strategist who initiates an organization 2. the communicator / recruiter (evangelist) - takes the organization's message to those outside and articulates it to them 3. the questioner (prophet) - disturbs the status quo and challenges an organization to move in new directions 4. the humanizer (pastor) - provides the organizational glue by caring for the individuals inside the community 5. the systematizer (teacher) - organizes the various parts into a working unit and articulates that structure to the other members....

Missional community development - a. is organic with the systems held together by the unique distribution laid out in the community DNA, b. it is reproducible both in the local and regional setting, a ministry matrix that is inherent in the community itself, always able to find and reach people, c. it is self-sustaining and self invigorating / regenerative, and grows itself up, with built-in mechanism for maturity.

Pioneering - Pioneers set out to explore and discover new lands, and once it has been opened up, settlers come along and build and establish themselves... without pioneers there would be no place to settle and without the settlers the pioneers would never see their work bear long lasting fruit.

Creativity - is the entire process by which ideas are generated, developed, and transformed into value, it encompasses what people commonly mean by innovation and entrepreneurship, it is the art of giving birth to new ideas and the discipline of shaping and developing those ideas to the stage of realized value...John kao

Imagination - one of the working definitions of poverty is not just lack of resources, but the lack of a dream, a vision, and a hope, people without a dream.... and it is one of our core tasks to help people and the community dream again.

Structure of meaning - good leadership stirs and awakens and harnesses the dreams and visions of the members of a given community, providing a deeper coherence by means of a unifying grand vision that helps tie together all the multiple dreams of the members.

Courage - imagination takes courage as it involves risks and the supreme gamble in which we stake our lives upon a conviction... it is far closer to raw courage than to mere belief, a missional community is as imaginative as it is bold, and willing to try new things and risk it all if necessary to embrace the Kingdom coming.

Paradigm shift - from pre-Copernican to the Copernican, from the Newtonian to the Einstenian, from relativity to quantum, from Christendom model to missional model, a community always embraces the search for truth and a true paradigmatic shift involves the following: 1. we begin with a well-established paradigm, though dominant, it encourages a sense of expectation and searching, and so the quest for answers goes on... 2. an increasing sense of anomaly develops, an awareness that something is wrong...something awry, 3. a slow growing recognition of problems that need a new solution....the beginning of a new process, 4. a new paradigm (answer) begins to emerge, most often with opposition by those who still hold strongly to the established ways...

Fringes - the renewal of church generally comes from fringes, on the edge, with a radical openness to and engagement with real life...

Emerging missional church - rediscovers itself as a missionary movement, where it organizes itself as a centered set, as it builds organic structures, gears for metabolic growth, and develops a missional leadership training style

A movement - is something new, and it is just too chaotic and uncontrollable for most institutions to handle and revival and renewal includes: a thirst for renewal, a new work of the Holy Spirit, a concern for being globally counter-cultural, nontraditional leadership, ministry to the less fortunate, energy and dynamism, ideology of articulated values and goals, real or perceived opposition, personal commitment

Centered set - like land with a wellspring at its center, missional community has a strong identity, but porous boundaries, allow all to get refreshment as necessary, holistic, action focused, cross-cultural, grassroots, diverse, networked, passionate, creative, strategic, leadership development, service, nurtured identity, fostering cooperation, shaping youth, pioneering movement, helping birth, contributing to development, actively stimulating, coordinating energetic activity.

Call to the wild - the task of missional communities requires us to call one another to do wild things - to remind each other what we are made for. It has seldom been observed that tame geese can become wild again...

Transformational Community Living - Global YWAM Affiliates

Transformational Community Immersion: Innovation and Mission in the Kingdom of God

OPEN HAND International Christian Community (global YWAM Affiliates)

Duration: 3-6-9 months

Location: urban Indianapolis, Indiana USA / in partnership with Mana Deschisa Romania

Join with us as we boldly face the future with baptized imaginations :

1.) Belonging - offering solace, welcome, acceptance in our unfolding community life

2.) Thriving - a challenging adventure, stretching us all to live into our life potentials

3.) Empowerment - expressive opportunities to co-create life, individually and communally

4.) Sensuality - experiential community, tasting, touching, sharing, expressing life together

5.) Celebration - liberation, joy, meeting deepest desires, embracing of life in all its fullness

6.) Liminality - transcending self, in touch with mystery of life, profound spirituality

Facilitated by: Open Hand community members - Weekly Group Process, Individual and Family Therapy, Leadership Development, Missional Emerging faith community, Global Sustainable Social Businesses - Participation, Dialogue and Community Outreach

Cost: Everything you currently are to become who you truly want to be !

OPEN HAND is an emerging urban faith community founded in 1997 by several families committed to creating an incarnational and international Christian presence in the heart of Indianapolis. As worldwide YWAM associates with a faith-based orientation combining the insights of Christianity, natural systems and Marriage & Family Therapy, many young adults have apprenticed themselves to new ways of conceptualizing their lives and the surrounding relationship systems of extended family, workplace vocation and congregational life. Lives have been powerfully impacted, marriages rejuvenated, families empowered and relationships restored in the process of transformational immersion within our community.

Are you over 18 with a passion for the spirit of adventure, the challenge of discovery and the courage to change and grow beyond the limits of your current life? Then we welcome you to come journey with us for a season as we stretch our collective imaginations and live into our vocational callings as an emerging faith community, powered by global sustainable social businesses focused on our marginalized and less fortunate neighbors here and abroad.

YWAMer's needing outreach credit are welcome to apply. We look forward to your participation as we wrestle together with what it means to live intentionally with one another in our faith community.

Grace, O'

Community as a public 'halfway house'

Saint Patrick by Derek Powell

A challenge from Parker Palmer - highlighted by O'Steven

Goal - is for the community of faith to become a 'halfway house', helping people move from fear of the world around them, into a role as co-creators of a world which is both God's and our own.

To begin - we must first abandon our idealized image of the family as the foundation for our faith communities in which intimacy is the primary and often exclusive goal - dominated by the expectation of closeness and warmth. Faith communities formed in that image of life together are not likely to prepare its members for full public involvement.

Envisioning - our faith community as an idealized family causes many problems

• devaluing conflict because we want to maintain a facade of peace - we hide disagreements instead of getting them into the open where we might learn from them, working through our problems
• apparent unity is fragile and unfulfilling, and behind it one often finds anger, frustration and other taboo emotions
• church community as an idealized family also hinders heterogeneity (public diversity) - squeezing out people with whom we cannot achieve intimacy (since intimacy often depends on social and economic similarities between people)
• such a community does everything in its power to eliminate the strange and cultivate the familiar - so it can neither welcome the stranger nor allow the stranger in each of us to emerge
• such a faith community creates barriers to public life, becoming self-contained, joined only by those who conform to its ideology

Church community then becomes a place of retreat rather than engagement, innovation, and change, paralyzed by a fantasy image of the ideal family, unable to imagine new structures which might help humanize the surrounding public in need.

Redefine - we need to redefine our faith communities, and envision creating spaces which are not mere extensions of private security and familial intimacy, but which bridge our public and private lives - leading us from the familiarities of private life into the strangeness of the public realm.

All faith communities - (and families and marriages) have deep conflict, and the task there as in all human relations is not to perfect or abandon relationships, but to let the conflicts and contradictions pull us open to larger truth. As Christians we understand all our relations - even the closest ones - to be broken and imperfect, but forgiven and redeemed. We are called to live in the recognition of both realities.

God's Kingdom - is unfolding as faith communities resembling family formations - but only in as much as we are able to regard all our neighbors (and societal strangers) as our brothers and sisters; when we can embrace all of the contradictions and conflicts of public life with familial compassion, knowing that under God, in our astonishing variety, we are made as one.

Domesticated faith community - until we abandon the notion of community as an idealized vision of the family and let that word embrace far more than it normally does, we only further domesticate our faith communities by conceiving them in unrealistic and ideal familial terms.

Community as a "school of the Spirit" - is perhaps a better way to envision our faith community, places where God is continually drawing us out of ourselves into the larger public life. Our idealized images of community will always fail us, as they project upon the community such needs for personal nurture and support as can only be met by our relationship to God.

Unmasking - Community life is a continual process of unmasking, of having to let go of illusions about ourselves and others. It is a place where the nudging of the Spirit, holy teachings, show us where the power of life really lies.

The external stranger - reminds us of the inner stranger who we do not want to acknowledge or confront. It is a painful experience, but only as this darkness is "educated" out of us will we be prepared for life together. Such pain is not a denial of community; it is a fulfillment of the role that community can play in our lives, the role of drawing us out into a renewal of public life.

What is missing - are the relations of strangers who will never achieve intimacy, but who meet with a sense of commonality which makes creative conflict possible - meetings of the sort which characterize the healthy public life. Can our Open Hand community learn to model that mode of relationship?

The faith in which our community is grounded emerges from a story of conflict. Never in the biblical record is that conflict finally resolved, we have not been delivered into a utopia of perfect harmony. But in our unfolding story, conflict is the context in which the faith is taught. In the midst of conflict God the teacher moves, offering the gift of reconciliation even when it is refused over and over again.

Amen.

Toward a more responsible redemptive social action

Highlighted by O'Steven from John Hay, Jr., D. Min.

RESCUE:

View of the problem - individual moral default

View of the person - moral bankrupt, "project", dependent

Position of the helper - benevolent evangelist, authority over

Nature of intervention - press for spiritual-based behavior adjustment in the dependent

Catalyst for change - conversion

Intended Result - Discipleship

Practices - preaching, teaching, mentoring, accountability

Where is God? Above

What is Salvation? non-material, transcendent

Community impact - individual lives positively impact the community indirectly

SERVICE PROVIDER:

View of problem - individual & systemic default

View of person - client, dependent/codependent

Position of helper - professional caregiver

Nature of intervention - call for social-based behavior adjustment in client

Catalyst for change - connect to good resources, will power

Intended result - productive member of society

Practices - assessing needs, procuring entitlements, follow progress

Where is God? Aside

What is Salvation? social stability, relieved of social oppression

Community impact - self-sufficiency, independence impacts the community indirectly

HOSPITALITY:

View of problem - personal & relational estrangement

View of person - guest, gift-bearer, neighbor

Position of helper - host, toward mutuality

Nature of intervention - opens possibility for change within guest and host

Catalyst for change - sustained, respectful interpersonal interaction

Intended result - neighboring

Practices - making room, hosting, neighboring

Where is God? among

What is Salvations? realizing hope in relationship, emerging community

Community impact - interdependence between neighbors impacts the community directly

A Few Observations:

1. Hospitality offers a powerful "next step" for many faith-based initiatives struggling to breakthrough to more authentic relationships

2. Hospitality reframes redemptive social action away from specialization and professionalization while maintaining a highly disciplined approach

3. Hospitality is thoroughly Biblical in its grounding and Kingdom focused

4. Hospitality places confidence in the work of God the Holy Spirit to foster authentic relationships between guests and hosts

5. Hospitality creates a dynamic system of true freedom, clear boundaries, and mutuality among participants

6. A paradigm of hospitality is not easy to initiate and it is maintained precariously by constant reinforcement of its principles, practices and open conflict (not competition)

Misso Dei - "Mission of God"

Basilica Di S. Vitale - Byzantine Mosaic Ravenna, Italy circa 548

"As the Father has sent me, so I send you." John 20:21

Missional reorientation - the biblical message of mission is radical, and much more transforming that we have traditionally allowed it to be.....the church of Jesus Christ is not the purpose or goal of the gospel, but rather its instrument and witness.

Ecclesiocentric approach of functional Christendom - has made missions only one more of the many programs of the church and this church centered approach is alive and well in North American congregations - collecting funds and sending them off to genuine mission enterprises elsewhere - rather than viewing the entire congregational budget as an exercise in mission.

Reorientation of theology - has been necessary to help us see that the church is God's instrument for God's mission and the definition of "church" itself continues to present challenges as new faith communities form to prophetically challenge the dominant cultural dynamics and accept their vocation to proclaim the hope, the message and the demonstration of the inbreaking reign (Kingdom) of God in Jesus Christ.

Fundamental affirmations of this missional hermeneutic include:

• a missional ecclesiology that is biblical where scripture functions authoritatively
• a missional ecclesiology that is historical - is part of our catholicity (global universality) as we are guided by the church in all its cultural expressions, including those that precede us and those that are contemporary with us
• A missional eccelsiology is contextual - there is only one way to be church and that is incarnationally, within a specific setting as the gospel is translated into surrounding culture
• A missional ecclesiololgy is eschatological - the church and its doctrine is not static, but developmental and dynamic, moving toward God's promised consummation of all things
• A missional ecclesiology can be practiced - and translated into action as the function of all theology is to equip the church for its calling to - "make disciples of all nations..."

Body of Christ - no accident that the church is called the "body of Christ" as it continues as an incarnate expression of the life of God...and no less than for Jesus, this necessitates that the church always takes particular form, shaped according to the context in which it lives....leaving the church never finished, settled or permanent incarnation...its vocation is to live faithfully, to the gospel in a fully contextual manner

Missional faith community - finds expression in a number of different organizational arrangements.....formations of particular communities began in Jerusalem, Samaria, Antioch, Asia Minor, Greece and Rome....in homes, assemblies in rented halls, riversides or synagogues... with the ecclesial practices beginning immediately, and the structures for continuing Christian witness emerging, borrowing from the cultural context for regular meetings for worship, instruction, and mutual encouragement highlighted by diverse patterns of celebration.

Diverse structural forms - existed as these faith communities each embodied an expression of the one people of God formed by the Holy Spirit to be witness to Jesus Christ...and the structure of connectedness was likewise diverse but present in their common vocational calling.

The challenge is to enable the missional community to function faithfully in its specific cultural context with the structures incarnating the message in its setting.... "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." John 13:35

Reign of God - the church is the sign, foretaste, instrument, and agent of God's inbreaking Kingdom and the goal is to organize the church in ways that will enable it to "represent God's reign as its community, its servant, and its messenger." The church finds itself living out the tension between what God has already done and what God has promised to do...with a continual need for confession, renewal, and change.....a continual conversion of the church.

Apostolic instruction - church's task in every culture is to find the visible structural form that is worthy of its calling to be the witness to Christ in that particular place...a faithful response to the gospel, appropriation of the Spirit's empowering gifts for continuing ministry, and the dynamic translation of the gospel into the structure and functions of the community.

Basic form of particular community - is a gathering company of followers of Jesus called by God's Spirit and joined together as God's people in a particular place where this happens concretely in the joining together to worship, to grapple with the Scripture, to be instructed in the faith, to love each other, and to practice the rule of Christ corporately and individually.

Challenge - is to become a missional community, with continual reform and transformation and the resources of the Holy Spirit to guide ongoing structural innovation and to practice radical hospitality that welcomes into the centered community people who are at all stages of response to the gospel...not establishing levels of spiritual status or a spiritual elite.

Overarching sense - of church life is that of a pilgrim people, a movement toward God's promised fulfillment....and the community itself is continually being converted as it follows Christ. Membership can't be defined in terms of achievement, or completion, or having arrived...there is ongoing growth, and a covenanting process.

Calling at Pentecost - what Peter calls a "race, priesthood, nation, and people" (1 Peter 2:9-10), a worldwide multicultural fellowship of witness....a universal community of communities with the particular community in essence, an expression of the church catholic....a common bond, a relationship that is part and parcel of their vocation and their faithfulness.

Reformation - supplemented the "classic marks of the church" from Nicea in the 4th century, with its definition of the "true church" in terms of basic functions: where the Word is preached, the sacraments administered, and Christian discipline practiced...read as adverbs rather than adjectives...the church's missional ministry is unifying, sanctifying, reconciling and proclaiming, with a focus on the dynamic work of God's Spirit in and through the church, rather than dwelling on abstract concepts defining the church.

Sent church - can't let the need to maintain itself organizationally eclipse the mission for which it is called and equipped - faithfulness to the original apostolic authority which means reconciling, sanctifying, and unifying ways it demonstrates the love of God through the rule of Christ.... further the catholicity, holiness, and unity of the church are rooted in and formed by its apostolicity.....these marks express the sent-ness of the church; they describe what this sent community does and how it does it.

Missional community - is catholic when its way of serving Christ is appropriate to the gospel, while modestly recognizing that it is not the only way to be a Christian community...its way of being contributes to the reconciling of the entire church by focusing on the center of the gospel: the person and work of Christ, the hope of the gospel, the promised inbreaking of God's rule already begun in the apostolic mission. God's Spirit (the Sanctifier) works through the community's witness to heal the broken creation, to extend the salvation that Jesus accomplished on the cross.

Holiness demonstrated - in the ways that it practices forgiveness, fostering healing and reconciliation, makes peace, loves righteousness, and walks in Jesus' footsteps...translated into concrete service to the poor, the marginalized, and those subject to injustice....the community makes holy as it lives out the gospel in all its organizational processes, internally and externally.

Servus servorum Christi - missional thrust of the covenant means that we understand ourselves as servants of our companions in the centered congregation....Jesus washing the feet of his disciples is the model of ministry for the covenant community....redefine oneself within the community as a "servant of the servants of Christ"

Missional ecclesiology - must clearly identify and resist all attempts to equip the church merely for its maintenance and security....it must reject every proposal to restore the trappings and privileges of Christendom

Gospel of the inbreaking reign of God - must be upheld as the sole criterion of the particular and connecting structures of the church....that gospel requires of the church that it be open to surprise, to testing, to suffering, as well as to the blessing of joy and peace....

Highlighted from Missional Church - A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America edited by Darrell L. Guder

OPEN HAND - Emerging Community Themes

OPEN HAND International Christian Community 1997 -2009

Emerging Themes that have been woven into the DNA of our global community structures:

1.) Intentional Faith Community: Emerging Church

2.) Social Business Network: For-Profit/Not-for-Profit Sustainable Businesses

3.) Missional Faith Community: Global Apostolic Missions

Postmodernism

Question: "What happens when you meet postmodern Italians in a dark alley?"

Answer: "They offer you a deal you can't understand."

Check out Carl Raschke and his book The Next Reformation on postmodernity.

Josh sends greetings to Romania

Unell and Josh at the Mana Deschisa campus.

Excerpts from Josh's recollections of his time in Romania with Marshall and Mana Deschisa:

"I was at my parents the other day and somewhat cursing the black walnuts that unpredictably fell on my car when parked in the driveway. The tree only looks like a green, healthy tree a month or so of the year. The rest of the time it looks on the verge of dying as its leaves are half-brown and appear to be hanging on for dear life. The nuts come falling in autumn and they are encased in a hard casing that stain your hands if you touch them. The beauty of them, however, is that walnuts are considered a 'super-food', one of God's best creations for feeding us Mid-
West folks. Super high in protein and omega 3 fatty acids, along with being good source of vitamins B,E and magnesium.

It really makes me glad and excited when people I know are going to visit Marshall and experience Open Hand Romania. It oft feels like another lifetime that I was there five (or more ?) times. It also makes me think of guys like Unell (who I often forget the names of), who is in the picture I've attached. He is a guy who has a pretty awesome conversion-process. I'm not sure if he is with Open Hand anymore but if so, please tell him Peter Reynolds and I said "Buna!" As for the walnut tree, it was in thinking about Unell that made me reflect upon that difficult, but beautiful tree. Marshall has spent the past 12 years recognizing the 'walnut trees' in Romania. I love that about him and think I share a bit of it with him. My dislike of roses is connected to this, for they are so easily recognized as 'beautiful', yet really have much less to offer than those awkward walnut trees. Marshall has recognized the streets of Romania as the tree that litters its walnut seeds about and knows that the messiness of handling them is so, so worth the effort. Unell is one of God's best creations, I believe.....

Have a phenomenal trip and I look forward to hearing about it when you return,

Josh

OPEN HAND - Intentional Faith Community

Open Hand USA is an emerging catholic, missional and monastic faith community: 1997 -2009

Affiliates: Australia -Holland - Kenya - Norway -Romania -USA

Catholic implies a post-Reformation ecumenical embrace of the church in its numerous world wide expressions.

Missional can be summarized by a global focus on the good of the cosmos (world) with a desire to work for God's Kingdom in transforming love for all creation.

Monastic informs us of the ancient rhythms of intentional community and spiritual disciplines woven into the fabric of our relationships.

Emerging means just what it says - an ongoing process of discovery and formulation as we are continually informed and often surprised by what God is doing here and now in our journey of faith as an intentional community in Indianapolis.

C.S. Lewis reminds us that .....we are forbidden to neglect the assembling of ourselves together. The Church is the Bride of Christ and we are members of one another. As Christians we are not called to individualism, but to membership in the mystical body. The very word membership is of Christian origin, but has been taken over by the world and emptied of all meaning. Today it refers to "members of a class or group" and this definition that stands for "particulars included in a homogeneous structure", is almost the opposite of what St. Paul meant by "members". Club membership consists merely of "units", not anything in the Pauline sense.

We can see how true membership in a body differs from inclusion in a collective by looking at a family. The grandfather, the parents, the grown-up son, the child, the dog and cat are true members in the organic sense precisely because they are not members or units of a homogeneous class. They are not interchangeable and each person is almost a species in themselves. If you subtract any one member from the family you have not simply reduced the family in number, you have inflicted an injury on its structure. Its unity is a unity of unlikes, almost of incommensurables.

Inherent in this kind of unity is a richness, a diversity and extreme differentiation of persons in harmonious union which we know intuitively to be our true refuge both from solitude and from the collective. This is real organic unity. The society into which the Christian is called is not a collective but a Body. It is in fact that Body which the family is an image on the natural level. Membership in this body is not a massing together of persons, because at the threshold we discover that the head of this Body is so unlike the members that we are summoned from the outset to combine as creatures with our Creator, as mortals with immortal, as redeemed with sinless Redeemer.

The sacrifice of selfish privacy which is daily demanded of us in the Body is daily repaid a hundredfold in the true growth of personality which the life of the Body encourages. Those who are members of one another become as diverse as the hand and ear. Obedience is the road to freedom, humility the road to pleasure, unity the road to personality. Our structural position in the Church which the humblest Christian occupies is eternal and even cosmic, and the Church will outlive the universe - everything that is joined to the immortal head will share his immortality. The collective is mortal, the individual shall live for ever. Amen

Leadership,Imagination & The Spirit of Adventure

"Consider," he said, "that you, as young architects are to be the pattern givers of civilization... you must be the way showers. As no stream can rise higher than its source, so you can rise no more or better to architecture than you are. So why not go to work on yourselves, to make yourselves in quality what your would have your buildings be?" Frank Lloyd Wright

Rabbi Jesus

"Define the hell out of yourself, or someone else will...." Rabbi Ed Friedman