I was so touched by this email from my friend Kara (a Presbyterian minister in Minnesota) tonight:"Oh, I meant to tell you - our poignant and wonderfully honest blue Christmas ritual was the other night. We put our prayers on these balls and lit candles for people. I posted other pictures of it on the church's FB account, but I wanted you to know you and your church were held in prayer that evening. For courage to stay with the grief."Yay for Christmas and hope!
Stephy, I was just on Facebook looking at nothing in particular when my thoughts turned to you and, this is the freaky bit, I felt your pain! I don't know how or why but just for a minute or 2 I felt it and it was like being crushed inside. It didn't stay with me because I suspect it's not mine to keep but at least I can now share just a tiny bit of it. When I pray I can now pray about that pain. I don't think I'm nuts (depressive - yes, nuts - no) and I do know that sometimes I hear things from God that I know can't be from me. This, however, was a first, totally out of the blue and, oddly, something to treasure. God bless you and, as always, prayers from across the pond.
Hugh
My friend Nikki wrote this letter to the leadership of our church to explain to them why she's leaving the congregation. She said she considers it to be public domain and gave me permission to post it here. She expresses so well the struggle against literalism that goes with faith and how that struggle is worth fighting, and reading this gave me a lot of comfort while I'm grieving this so hard.
***
To the Session of Grace Seattle,
Over the course of the last four weeks, I have decided that the time has come for me to leave Grace Seattle. While I’ve never pledged my membership at Grace, I have called it my home for over 10 years and feel compelled to share the reasons behind my decision.
In my experience, worship is not a place of escape, but rather a place of reality. A place where the seen and the unseen mingle. A place where the rough edges aren't smoothed out; they’re explored. A place where we don’t have to hide. Difficult ideas aren't simplified so that we feel better, but are allowed to stand openly in their complexity. To worship is to engage both imaginative thinking and concrete thinking. It is both formulaic and intuitive. We must practice worship and also wait for it to happen. Worship is demanding.For most of my life, I've had to shut down my "intuitive knowing" in order to sit in church, because my intuition can smell untruth about 30 miles away and while technically every intellectual idea and construct presented may be true there is also a falseness, a shallowness that makes itself known and unsettles me.
By intuition I mean that my physical perception interacts with a "felt" inner sense of something: its truth, its presence, its beauty. Thoughts arrive on my peripheral awareness, and I feel the edge of an idea, but can't find the whole thing – like trying to recall details of a dream. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about, since we all rely on intuitive thought in one way or another. For me, intuition is essential. It’s how I relate to the world, how I process ideas, how my creativity emerges.
For years, the only way I could make it through church service was by turning off my intuition and sticking with the facts, which is pretty depressing for someone like me. In fact, it’s debilitating and maybe even spiritually deforming. But since that was the only way I could worship, I sort of thought that must be what God wanted me to do.
When I came to Grace over 10 years ago, I slid into a pew and was stunned by the fact that the music awakened part of me with its truth. A song written in 7/4 time might not be the easiest to sing, but its structure acknowledges that we live in a broken world. A tune in a minor key might feel dark and scary, but that's how my interior life feels much of the time. The lyrics we sing are sometimes simple and sometimes difficult to understand, but their poetry is honest and has often withstood centuries. So there I sat. ALL of me fit into that pew, and I felt the corset on my heart begin to come unlaced. For the first time in my life, I took a full breath during church. Years passed, and over time I decided it would be ok to let some people at church actually know me. My relationship with God deepened, and Grace became my home.
After my last letter to the Session, I have hesitated to speak again, because I believe that the Session has the best of intentions. I hesitate because leading a church is difficult, and I have watched members of the Session rearrange their lives to help individuals understand and process the decision that has been made. I’ve witnessed the Session taking ownership of the ramifications of their leadership. These things are the marks of good leaders, but my heart aches and that sick feeling I get when I "know" something that I don't "know" won’t leave me.
I have spent a great deal of time reading and re-reading the Worship Vision and new Worship Arts Director job description. I do not use hyperbole when I say that they made me nauseous and I wept over them for days. The very format of these documents is of rigidity and their language demands conformity – but not a conformity to God, a conformity to human made power structures. And suddenly my intuitive knowing became very concrete and with those documents I felt my heart’s corset begin to tighten again.
I am heartbroken that Phil is gone. But that's not what is eating at me. I don't want to see the worship music dumbed down so that people can sing it while mentally mowing the lawn. But that's not what it is either. It's the part of me that spent the first 30 years of my life trying to squeeze my head and my heart into a pew and not die in the process that has reared her head. It is the part of me that reads the new "Worship Arts" job description and sees a church using the word “Art” and then describing a technician who will create only a world that the Session can see, thereby minimizing the gifts God has given the artist. I suspect that we are now a church moving in a direction where efficiency is key and effectively reaching goals is the primary objective. And I cannot ignore my intuitive knowledge just to fit into the new Grace paradigm.
I beg you to consider one thing as you move forward. Is a nine-page outline, lead by a “goal statement” the best way to describe how Grace will approach worship? The way we frame ideas shapes the way we respond to those ideas, the format will play a large role in determining how the document “works on us.” How would a contemplative approach the same task? What would it look like if Annie Dillard wrote it? Luci Shaw? Thomas Merton? Perhaps the issue of “format” seems a small issue to you, for me, it’s huge. I cannot have a “goal statement” govern the way I worship God. I do not want business language, linear measurement, footnotes, or technical textbook language coloring the way I approach the Creator of the Universe. Nor do I want those elements to impact the person who is helping to lead me into worship.
Some of you have encouraged me to stay at Grace, and while I am grateful for your expressions of hospitality, the truth is that in order to implement the Vision at hand, you need me to leave. You need people like me to be part of the collateral damage that comes when a church body makes changes to integral parts of its DNA. Perhaps God has called Grace to a bigger, broader future, but I suspect that He has prepared me for small things. For the places of God where people who have a hard time sitting in a pew might find a place to worship and be transformed.
As I leave Grace Seattle I ask you to please pray for me; pray that God will use me and that he will not let me go. In turn I will pray the same for Grace – and I will always be grateful for the home that it provided me all of these years.
Blessings on us all,
Nikki Visel
Creep (Radiohead) - Scala & Kolacny Brothers from Alex Heller on Vimeo.
I like this New York Magazine article on the best rap lyrics.Hey guys,
I just want you to know that my heart is heavy for you and I can only imagine what you're feeling, and I'm sorry you have to go through this. This bullshit has been happening since Acts, so know it's nothing new and is in the grand tradition of the ancient church. The ancient church was a mess and it still is a mess but God pursued it and cherished it then and he's doing it now.
So I just wanted to say to you I guess, that there's nothing new under the sun. God has given me things to say and it's scary, and I have an idea you have the same feelings, that it's scary to do what God is calling you to do. But God will protect us through it all and he hasn't given us a spirit of confusion but of a sound mind and I've been praying that for Grace Seattle as we're muddling through this.
You are dealing with so much and the powers and principalities are unfortunately all too real but I like what George MacDonald did when he saw a demon sitting on his bed, he said "Oh, it's only you" and went back to sleep.
I've been feeling for almost exactly a year now that I'm on the cusp of a big change, that something big and huge is coming up like a swelling wave and I don't know what it is but that it's going to be good. And I think that this church stuff is part of that big change. I just want you to be encouraged and to have rest in the midst of this somehow. I will pray this for you. CS Lewis said in Letters to an American Lady, "Underneath are the everlasting arms, even when it doesn't feel like it."
Love you, dear brothers!!
stephy
Hey guys,
it's me again. The situation at Grace that's unfolding from the new worship vision has been weighing so heavily on me but I haven't been able to put words to my feelings beyond what I sent to you guys a week or so ago, and then last night I was reading something by Eugene Peterson and came across these three paragraphs that describe my concerns for Grace Seattle so well, I thought I'd send them along to you.
"Americans talk and write endlessly about what the church needs to become, what the church must do to be effective. The perceived failures of the church are analyzed and reforming strategies prescribed. The church is understood almost exclusively in terms of function — what we can see. If we can't see it, it doesn't exist. Everything is viewed through the lens of pragmatism. Church is an instrument that we have been given to bring about whatever Christ commanded us to do. Church is a staging ground for getting people motivated to continue Christ's work.
This way of thinking — church as a human activity to be measured by human expectations — is pursued unthinkingly. The huge reality of God already at work in all the operations of the Trinity is benched on the sideline while we call a timeout, huddle together with our heads bowed, and figure out a strategy by which we can compensate for God's regrettable retreat into invisibility. This is dead wrong, and it is responsible for no end of shallowness and experimentation in trying to achieve success and relevance and effectiveness that people can see. Statistics provide the basic vocabulary for keeping score. Programs provide the game plan. This way of going about things has done and continues to do immeasurable damage to the American church.
This way of understanding church is very, very American and very, very wrong. We can no more understand church functionally than we can understand Jesus functionally. We have to submit ourselves to the revelation and receive church as the gift of Christ as he embodies himself in this world. Paul tells us that Christ is the head of a body, and the body is his church. Head and body are one thing." — Practice Resurrection, Eugene Peterson, p. 118
One more thing I thought I'd pass on. Our friend Pete is a Presbyterian pastor in Oregon and he told me this recently:
"I told Eugene in August that his books annoy pastors. He was surprised (which surprised me). But his books annoy pastors who want to create their own little empires — even while being completely self-deceived into thinking that they are really wanting to build the kingdom of God. But as Jesus showed us in his parables, the kingdom of God is already all around us for those who have eyes to see a mustard seed and a wedding and a field and a guy playing cello. But pastors and pharisees are too busy looking at stats and charts and wishing for a better demographic."
*****
So for whatever all that's worth, this is where I am and these are the questions I'm holding. Very much in a holding pattern and trying to let myself feel all my grief and fear of what will happen. You know, the usual.
Big in Japan Teaser from John Jeffcoat on Vimeo.
My answers to that thing going round on Facebook.
Name fifteen authors (poets included) who've influenced you and who will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.
1. Roald Dahl
2. CS Lewis
3. Beverly Cleary
4. Ann M. Martin
5. Flannery O'Connor
6. Dave Eggers
7. David Dark
8. M. Scott Peck
9. John Kennedy O'Toole
10. David Sedaris
11. Lorrie Moore
12. Marva Dawn
13. Aimee Bender
14. Walker Percy
15. Eugene Peterson
Token poet: e. e. cummings
"I took Eugene Peterson's class on Ministry and Spirituality about four times. Once as a student, the other times as a teaching assistant. But it took me that many times to get what he was doing. He was trying to teach us budding pastors not to mess up the churches we serve. The novels he had us read all had they lame pastor figures in them. And we kept trying to turn them into heroes, kept on trying to find the redeeming qualities they had (and they all had them). But that wasn't his point. His point was: Look at all of these new opportunities to sin. Pastors have a wider range of sins to work with than anyone else, because we've got all of these spiritual sins that others don't have (well, I guess parents have them, too). So, he had us read Graham Green's The Power and the Glory, Walter Wangerin's The Book of the Dun Cow, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Aldous Huxley's Grey Eminence, and so on. When the penny finally dropped for me, I thought, "Oh, crap! What am I getting into?"
Thanks to all of you who gave towards the needs of another. We reached our goal this morning and we were able to work out taking care of the security deposit for our most recent ARM client. So I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
It was a hard "move" to do today. A single mom with four girls from 3 different fathers. Not one of the fathers is present. There's a tremendous amount of brokenness in this family and just such a lack of support for them.
So a lot of fighting between the sisters took place all day and the mom just hung her head from being worn down. We had to break up the fighting several times and try to speak words of life into this household. Sometimes it is so overwhelming that I want to just cave in but I can't help but look at the little 7 year old blond haired girl and think who will fend for this little one? Who will give her some worth?
I wish I could have a happy ending kind of thing to write to you all, but the fact is that there is just so much pain out there. But whether things go well or not we are still there and still willing to continue to respond to our neighbors in need.
I know nothing but Christ and Him crucified. Sacrifice.
Peace be with you all,
scott budzar
The car belonged to a tall, thin fag who was on his way home to Kansas and woreMy friend Bill in Oakland got special glasses with a camera in them so he can go to Wal-Mart and take furtive pictures to send to peopleofwalmart.com. Here's my favorite he's gotten:
dark glasses and drove with extra care. The car was what Dean called a "fag Plymouth."
Charlotte Bronte wrote this in her preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre. Her words are a little different, but her spirit is the same. Funny how the wheel never stops turning.
______________
Having thus acknowledged what I owe those who have aided and approved me, I turn to another class: a small one, so far as I know, but not, therefore, to be overlooked. I mean the timorous or carping few who doubt the tendency of such books as Jane Eyre: in whose eyes whatever is unusual is wrong; whose ears detect in each protest against bigotry – that parent of crime – an insult to piety, that regent of God on earth. I would suggest to such doubters certain obvious distinctions; I would remind them of certain simple truths.
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns. These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded; appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is – I repeat it – a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them.
The world may not like to see these ideas dissevered, for it has been accustomed to blend them; finding it convenient to make external show pass for sterling worth – to let whitewashed walls vouch for clean shrines. It may hate him who dares to scrutinize and expose, to raise the gilding and show base metal under it, to penetrate the sepulcher and reveal charnal relics; but hate as it will, it is indebted to him.
_________________
Stay strong in the struggle. Fight the good fight.
i wish they would realize that God doesn't care. he is well pleased. ..and there is nothing that we can or can't do to change the way he loves us. unconditionally.
we don't lead straight and narrow lives to please him. if we are with him and love him, this comes naturally. love is not forced. someone should really tell this to the mars hill congregation.
The kids, David and my brother at the ocean
The kids and me were the only pasty white Seattle people on the beach
redwoods
cousins under a redwood tree
legs for sale
my sisters-in-law
David transporting cookies
My kids loving on Uncle John while PopDad (granddad) looks on
Lolly & Mick at KEXP"My own opinion is that this thing we have each done has connected us to the transcendent; the sublime. This (music/experience/love) is -- for atheists, agnostics, and believers alike -- something that has transported ourselves outside of (for me at least) EVERYTHING. Remember all the times your heart just took off when a song started up? Your brain expanded? Everything alive? I think it's spiritual. To lose it is a gut-wrenching."We fell in love with everything about their band, their music and style and writing and generosity of spirit and it's all affirmed in the way they've treated us, their rabid fans; they've been so so gracious. My abridged photo history with Supergrass is here and here are some of my favorite videos of theirs. I know they'll be back someday so I can't be too sad.
