Sunday I led the third of four Lenten series events at the church. We’ve been looking at Prayer: prayer in the bible, obstacles to prayer, and exploring together various ways to pray. Jeff and I have been trying to balance corporate and individual prayer as well as the various types of prayer (some people use ACTS as a way of remembering that: Adoration (or praise of God); Confession (recognizing the ways we ‘miss the mark’ and asking for ways to make it right); Thanksgiving (celebration!); and Supplication (or asking God for something…). We’ve also been working to balance prayers for ourselves and prayers for others.
For this session, I started with the question: What is Prayer? Conversation. Connection. My best definition: an authentic expression of the soul directed towards God. And I offered as a way to orient us a gathering song (think modern club music) from the Book of Uncommon Prayer. The point was to stress that authentic expression of the soul varies from person to person, and what works as prayer for some of us might not work for others.
We had three stations: the five-finger prayer, where we had people use crayons to outline their hands and then write over each finger the prayers suggested for that digit; prayer books and the daily office, to explore using a set liturgy or the words of others in our prayer life, and how to make that our own; and a form of the lectio divina as a way of seeing readings scripture as prayer, and even some discussion of doing that in groups. For the latter two, I suggested that the use of the daily lectionary might be helpful to some (see the PCUSA page on the daily lectionary and related devotional materials, or just the daily lectionary texts themselves.)
It was a good session. Maybe you can join us for our last one this coming Sunday…
Jim Bonewald is small-church Presbyterian pastor in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, whom I “met” online through his blog, The Church Geek. Blogging pastors tend to be pretty cool, and Jim is no exception: I’m even taking advantage of his online appeal to join in a March Madness bracket pool called “Decently and in Order.” Did I mention that Jim is a Presbyterian…
I’ve often puzzled over the “he descended into hell” phrase of the Apostle’s Creed. Here are, perhaps, some helpful words from Emil Brunner:
God goes to the end. He reaches the goal. To be sure, this end is exactly the opposite of what we fix as our goal. We wish to climb up to heaven: God, however, descends - down to where? To death on a cross. This is why Jesus Christ has to descend into hell. He had to go the way to its very end. Our rightful end is hell, that is, banishment from God - godforsakeness. Only there has God completely come to us, there where he has taken upon himself everything, even the curse end of our way.
Jesus Christ has gone into hell in order to get us out of there. For with everything he does, that is his goal, that he may get us out, reconcile us with God, and fill us with God’s Spirit. He had to despair of God for us (”My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) so that we do not have to despair of God. He has taken this upon himself so that we may become free of it. Emil Brunner
This Lenten season, the Adult Ed class that I’m leading is tackling the “Seven Last Words from the Cross.” Its been a challenging class, but that’s because what God does on our behalf from the Cross is challenging to us.
So, this picture might give you some idea of how the youth group sees me. This is from our 2007 Dinner Theatre, where we raised over $1500.00 for our summer work trip to New Orleans. Those who came to the dinner ate good food (lovingly prepared by our parents and delightfully served by our youth) and saw our presentation of The Ever After. This picture shows their roast of me during one of the “commercials” built into the play: their point is that I pray too long. I think David has my hair and my glasses down, though; don’t'cha think?
Anyway, a belated THANK YOU to all of you who support our youth. If you’d like more pictures, choose any one of the flickr photos on the right, or try this link…
Incidently, I also have photos up at flickr chronicling some of the construction upgrade. You can see those here.
A bit more difficult than I anticipated moving to a new template. But I’ve started to, and hope to have the blog up and running again soon….
I’d love to hear your comments about the new look and feel, too. You’ll notice that I’ve tried to integrate the old sanctuary picture and the capital improvement logo. Thoughts? Send them my way!
Friends, February brings with it an update to wordpress, the software running this blog. I need to upgrade a lot of things, including the theme. So….long story short, the look and feel of roeminations will change soon. Once that’s done, I’ll be able to blog again on a semi-regular basis. Stay tuned….
I’ve been thinking about all the great things at Southminster that have come out of 2006, partially because our Annual Meeting is coming up. The list is too great to go through, but highlights have to include some wonderful mission work (such as our Heifer International focus, with the youth visiting the Heifer Ranch this summer, and our Habitat project), some great fellowship opportunities, lots of new members. I’ve experienced the wonderful community spirit and grace that Brook and I felt from day one anew upon the birth of our girls in August. And of course we embarked on successful a Capital Campaign to fund an exciting remodeling project for our worship spaces.
We’re a cool community. We do lots of wonderful things. We share great experiences. We have a vibrant faith.
Here’s the logo that came out of the capital campaign and which was used on much of our promotional literature related to that drive. I like it. A lot. It draws upon the beautiful cross in our sanctuary (which you can see above in the Roemination’s header logo). Its wavy lines and non-linear curves suggest movement, motion, activity: not bad for a place that listens for what the holy spirit is doing in its midst.
So I wonder whether we as a church might want to start using it as part of our regular correspondence and publications. That cross is a distinctive part of our building, of our common worship space, and in that small sense, of who we are as a community of faith. Might be nice…
I’ve had an unexpected Blog Hiatus, but I’m back. I think it was the combination of advent preparations, kids, and the nuts and bolts of ministry. I hope you kept with me in the meantime.
There’s so much that’s interesting out there in the blogworld that it is impossible to keep up with it all. I use a program called a news aggregator to keep track of websites that I want to read regularly. Personally, I use bloglines, but there are many out there (google has one, for instance, called google reader. These allow the user to go to one webpage to read many different blogs. Pretty cool.
Anyway, I want to suggest that you spend some time reading Scot McKnight’s blog, Jesus Creed. Scot is a professor of New Testament at North Park University, and his blog was just named “emerging church blog of the year” by Andrew Jones, who is a grandfather in the emerging church movement. Its a pretty neat blog.
(…Thanks to Susie! The link to Jesus Creed is now repaired.)
This is the time of year, along with Lent/Easter, that various aspects of Christianity get a lot of media coverage. You’ll see cover stories of the major news periodicals–US News ( “The Real Jesus ” ), Time, Newsweek ( “How Jewish Family Values Shaped Christianity” –devoted to Mary, or the Nativity, or something related to our Christian holiday celebrating the incarnation of God. And you see pieces on FoxNews, MSNBC, and CNN, for instance, that want to examine religion in the public sphere or essentials of Christianity. Sometimes you see general critiques of Christianity from big names associated with it, such as this one by Jay Bakker (yes, the son of that Bakker) and Marc Brown entited “What the Hell Happened to Christianity.” That you’re seeing it so overtly shows how its part of a media flood that happens twice a year. You’ll see it again around Easter. Its a fascinating aspect of American culture, and some of it is good, some of it isn’t.
That’s preamble to this piece that I heard about through connections at my seminary alma mater, the University of Chicago Divinity School. One of my erstwhile professors, Dr. Dwight Hopkins (who taught my Constructive Theology course), was on Anderson Cooper with Jim Wallis (of Sojourners fame) and Richard Land (a prominent Southern Baptist) talking about all sorts of things related to contemporary Christianity. Cooper is examining the rather broad question “What is a Christian?”. This is the excerpt pertaining to the interview with these three:
If you ask me, this is much better discourse than the “is Christmas under attack” trope. It doesn’t go very deep into any particular issue, and its more of a hodge-podge of things, but still its interesting. Anyway, I thought you might appreciate this conversation. It’s worth the 9-10 minutes. And I’m quite glad to have had the opportunity to study under Hopkins, and I am a fan in general of Wallis’ project. Enjoy.
Its hard to blog while on a vacation, particularly the kind of vacation I’m in the midst of: mainly doctor’s checkups for the kiddos, working with contractors on neglected areas of the house, trying to clean up the home office, that sort of thing. But I did get off to see Casino Royale today. If you, like me, love James Bond movies, you’ll enjoy this one too.
But blogging has not been possible, but there’s more to say, and I’ll blog more soon…
A time to slow down, a time to lie fallow, a time in which growth ceases and nature rests. It is a time in which many animals go into hibernation not emerging again until the warmer days of spring come to bring new life to the world.
Winter is the season of rest.
Can you imagine life without the electric light or central heat? What would winter have been like 150 years ago? I don’t want to romanticize the harshness of life in the mid-nineteenth century but certainly it was a slower time. What if we had to turn off all our electric lights when it got dark at 4:30? What would that do for us? How would that slow you down? Candlelight only from 4:30 until bed time. That would include not headlights on your car, you’d have to be home by dark.
Winter is a critical time of year for the land, it’s important for it to lay fallow, for it to rest for a season. If the land is overworked, if the land is not permitted to be fallow for a season then it will become unproductive and unusable.
The apple tree blooms with flowers in spring and fruit begins to appear over the summer, in the fall the fruit is picked and the tree goes dormant, the leaves fall off as the process of photosynthesis stops for a season, winter. For several months the tree lies dormant and then the work begins again.
When is your season for being dormant? Do you need to take a break, to stop, to do nothing for a time? We all need this, it is part of God’s order of things, a sabbath days rest each week.
Winter, ceasing, stopping, slowing down, hibernating, it’s the way God created the world… how will you slow down this winter?
March 19, 2007 
Sunday I led the third of four Lenten series events at the church. We’ve been looking at Prayer: prayer in the bible, obstacles to prayer, and exploring together various ways to pray. Jeff and I have been trying to balance corporate and individual prayer as well as the various types of prayer (some people use ACTS as a way of remembering that: Adoration (or praise of God); Confession (recognizing the ways we ‘miss the mark’ and asking for ways to make it right); Thanksgiving (celebration!); and Supplication (or asking God for something…). We’ve also been working to balance prayers for ourselves and prayers for others.
Posted in Christian Education, Faith 
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So, this picture might give you some idea of how the youth group sees me. This is from our 2007 Dinner Theatre, where we raised over $1500.00 for our summer work trip to New Orleans. Those who came to the dinner ate good food (lovingly prepared by our parents and delightfully served by our youth) and saw our presentation of The Ever After. This picture shows their roast of me during one of the “commercials” built into the play: their point is that I pray too long. I think David has my hair and my glasses down, though; don’t'cha think?
I’ve been thinking about all the great things at Southminster that have come out of 2006, partially because our Annual Meeting is coming up. The list is too great to go through, but highlights have to include some wonderful mission work (such as our 
This is the time of year, along with Lent/Easter, that various aspects of Christianity get a lot of media coverage. You’ll see cover stories of the major news periodicals–
From Neil Craigan at his blog 
Chad Andrew Herring :: creature of dust :: child of God :: husband of 9 years :: 
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