Bethany Lowery’s India blog

Bethany Lowery, who interned for DisciplesWorld last year and is a student at Disciples Divinity House at the University of Chicago, is spending 10 weeks in India studying the Church of North India. She’s having quite the adventure - in her very frank blog posts she shares wonderful discoveries about India along with difficulties with travel and with adjusting to a new culture

This particular post gives some of the background on her reasons for going to India.

Bethany is also the daughter of General Minister and President Sharon Watkins and Lexington Theological Seminary’s interim  dean, Rick Lowery.

New Disciples blog

Rev. Linda Hunsaker is the pastor at Ursa Christian Church in Ursa, Ill. Linda has taken her passion for worship design to the web, with her new blog, Creative Disciples Worship.

It’s a great place to share ideas and musings on all styles of worship - traditional, contemporary, emergent, and so on. So go on…check it out.

And keep Linda and her flock in your prayers. They are very close to the mighty Mississippi and the flood waters were rising Sunday as she was preparing for worship. She posts some interesting thoughts about that in her latest blog entry.

 

Former GMP reflects on “two holidays and a resolution”

Probably the most divisive and difficult resolutions to come before the 2007 General Assembly was the one dealing with the Iraq war. In the scant minutes alloted for debate time, Disciples spoke passionately from the red and green microphones, before and against. Resolution 0728 narrowly passed, and many people walked away disappointed, frustrated, and angry.

Former General Minister William Chris Hobgood revisits the resolution, as well as larger questions of war, peace, and the role of the church, in a post on the CENTERpiece blog, which is maintained by several Disciples advocacy groups.

It’s possible that Disciples’ decision-making bodies could do away with Sense-of-the-Assembly resolutions in the near future (of course, this would ultimately come before the General Assembly for a vote). And it doesn’t include ALL resolutions - we would still have items for reflection and research and other types of business items. But the Sense-of-the-Assembly resolutions are the ones that allow the church to “speak prophetically,” some say. Others think 12 minutes of debate followed by a yes/no vote creates a ‘win/lose’ situation and that we don’t do justice to the issue or to our relationship with each other by approaching difficult issues this way.

Look for the debate to heat up in the coming months as Disciples leaders move this toward a possible 2009 General Assembly resolution.

Graduation season

The streams of Charmin blowing in the trees outside the local high school confirmed it: it’s graduation season.

Disciples colleges, universities, and seminaries are sending forth the Class of 2008 this month. Commencement speakers at these schools include Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, former presidential candidate George McGovern, and the esteemed Rev. Fred Craddock, who will speak at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa this weekend.

Jeff Gill, whose wife teaches at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, attended the school’s commencement exercises last weekend where Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, addressed graduates. In “Notes to a Commencement Speaker,” Jeff shares what he wishes the speaker had told them.

‘Round here [the Woods family hacienda], it’s all about the high school graduations this year. We have two of them, plus my ordination, during a four-day span.  [more on that later...]

Conversation on race, anyone?

You may have heard that the United Church of Christ has invited its pastors, members, other Christians, and the nation to participate in a ’sacred conversation on race.’ This was announced about a month ago, in the middle of the whole Jeremiah Wright/Barack Obama thing. Part of the deal is that ministers will be kicking off the conversation this Sunday by preaching on the subject of race.

We’ll be posting an article on DisciplesWorld’s website tomorrow about the UCC and their hopes for this conversation.

Meanwhile, I came across an interesting blog post from Dennis Sanders, an African-American Disciples pastor in Minneapolis. Frankly, Dennis says well what I (and maybe others) are thinking: let’s have a ‘real’ conversation on race.

Maybe Dennis and I are just feeling more than a little post-liberal crankiness these days (hey, he didnt’call his blog “Oscar the Pastor” for no reason), but it seems like all our conversations about race are short, because they seem to be aimed at identifying systems (and people) that are racist. Not that that is bad…but does it really lead to change? What if we had a different kind of conversation, as Dennis suggests? One where people could just speak their minds.

As a white person, I know that I participate in racism. I know that I can’t always see it and I want to help eliminate it. But white guilt is a dead-end street and I gave up living there a long time ago. [Note: there's a great book called The Heart of Racial Justice by Brenda Salter McNeil and Rick Richardson which, as a step toward reconciliation, calls for renouncing our false identities, including the "hip white person" identity.]

Now this may seem to contradict some things I’ve said/written in the past, but in my mind it doesn’t. I wish more white people understood more about black liberation theology, but the fact is, most have never heard of it. And most have never participated in anti-racism training. And probably never will. But a real conversation on race, the one we keep on not having in public but having all over the place in private or semi-private, in email and on blogs but NEVER in the church, is the one where whites are allowed to say something like “Jeremiah Wright makes me mad,” without someone looking at them like they’re an unenlightened jack***.  And black people need to be able to say what they need to say too. The conversation might be heated, but it need not devolve into death threats. People do need to be able to be real.

And that’s what I LIKE about Jeremiah Wright, and why I don’t find him offensive. It’s not just that I’ve read James Cone. It’s that at least Wright, for all his brashness, is speaking honestly what he believes (even if many people don’t agree).

My son, who is 18, tells me these conversations we ‘old folks’ (i.e. mostly well-meaning liberal Boomers and X-ers) are having about race are irrelevant to his generation. He agrees that racism exists (as do I, don’t get me wrong) and that it is still a problem. The difference is that his peers talk about race in a different (and possibly more authentic) way. Maybe he’s right.

Where in the world in DisciplesWorld?

Rev. Ike Nicholson and his wife Shauna, of First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Ashland, Ky., visited Jordan in March, hosting a group of 25 Disciples from Kentucky, and they took DisciplesWorld along - literally.

If your Disciples of Christ congregation or group is going on a mission trip or tour this summer, take us with you! Send us a photo of your group with our magazine, and we’ll post it on our blog.

We also want to hear about your experiences. We publish trip stories and reflections on our website under the “Disciples Around the World” and “Hurricane Recovery Stories” categories. This is a great way to tell others how Disciples are learning and serving in Jesus’ name. We also hear, from those who’ve been on mission trips and tours to places such as the Holy Land, that the experiences deepened their faith and that they received more than they gave. So send us your trip stories and photos!

Photo: Rev. Ike Nicholson (left) with Jordanian tour guide Ali, and Hakim, in the holy city of Petra.

Desperately seeking faith

I’ve only met him once, but I wouldn’t have figured Rev. Bob Cornwall for a “Desperate Housewives” viewer. Yet in his latest column in the Lompoc (Calif.) Record, he writes about an episode of the popular show that explored faith and church-going in a surprising way. Bob writes:

If you follow the show, you know that the character of Lynette Scavo has faced a series of challenges that include cancer, seeing a friend being killed by a tornado, along with significant marriage issues.

Having gotten to that point in life without any significant religious training or background, she begins to wrestle with spiritual questions. As she does so, she spies the prissy Bree Van de Kamp and her new husband heading off to church.

Filled with questions, she decides to go to church and looks to Bree for guidance.

Read more about the episode, and what Bob had to say about it, here. For more of Bob - visit his blog “Ponderings on a Faith Journey” on the Christian Century’s blog network. It’s worth the trip.

Wright and King

Bob Cornwall, on his “Ponderings on a Faith Journey” blog http://pastorbobcornwall.blogspot.com/, makes some interesting observations about the whole Jeremiah Wright controversy. While checking those out though, I started reading through some really interesting stuff he posted regarding the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, on April 4.

Bob includes a link to King’s “Mountaintop” speech and excerpts a piece by Michael Eric Dyson in the LA Times as reminders that King’s calls for justice became stronger and less palatable to many in the years since his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. By 1968, he was losing popularity for his willingness to take on the Vietnam War, among other reasons, and he may have been losing hope that the nation could really make racial progress.

Since his death, as Dyson points out in his recent Time Magazine piece called ”The Burdens of Martyrdom,” (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1726040,00.html) remembrances of King tend to portray him more like he was in the early 1960s, in the “I Have a Dream” days.  Bob compiles examples of some of King’s rhetoric toward the end of his life, which sounds not all that far off from Jeremiah Wright’s.  All of this is not to disparage King, but to point out how much our collective memory has forgotten. 

Improved race relations are a great thing, but we have a long way to go and we don’t have to “whitewash” history to achieve them.

Speaking of race relations, the United Church of Christ is calling for a new national dialogue on race. (http://www.disciplesworld.com/newsArticle.html?wsnID=13237 )

Wherefore art thou, Disciples of Christ? Per my last post, now WOULD be an appropriate time for the leaders of the UCC’s partner denomination to step up. Perhaps they will.

Editor’s note: an apology for including the links in this post. WordPress switched its blog interface and it’s not allowing me to link the usual way.

Weighing in on the Jeremiah Wright controversy

…is actually what I’m not going to do (at least not until the end of this post). But I do want to draw attention to what other Disciples are saying and writing about it.

Dr. Ed Wheeler at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis wrote an essay which circulated via email among some Disciples and others. It was also sent to CTS’ faculty. Wheeler sent this piece or something similar to Brite Divinity School’s trustees also, expressing his support for their decision to move ahead with plans to recognize Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright for his ministry. Although Texas Christian University asked Brite to move its State of the Black Church Summit events off-campus because of security concerns, and Wright later canceled for safety reasons, Brite honored him last Saturday evening.

Wheeler makes a great point about technology and how a few repeated sound-bites from Wright’s sermons were chosen to represent (or misrepresent) his ministry and preaching; what might this mean for the church, and for preaching in general?

Another Disciple who expressed an opinion in a public forum was Rev. Robin Hoover of First Christian Church in Tucson, Ariz. Hoover, a TCU and Brite alum, weighed in with a piece in TCU’s Daily Skiff and a similar one that ran in the Arizona Republic.  Hoover “falls on his sword” for Wright and reminds readers about the prophetic tradition in Scripture, which included prophets who criticized Israel when God’s justice was at stake. Also, the Daily Skiff deserves much recognition for publishing a number of opinion pieces, news articles and letters to the editor as events unfolded last week.

Disciples blogger and Gen-X pastor Dennis Sanders posted his “Notes from a Black pastor” early in the controversy, giving a negative assessment of Wright’s message, and then came back with another posting, “The Way We Were…and Are,” noting that while there may have been a time and place for rhetoric like Wright’s, that time has passed. The nation still has work to do, but has also made progress and we need to take that into account.

What I’ve been wondering is, should the denomination be weighing in on this in some official way? Wright’s not a Disciple, although he’s ordained and has standing in the United Church of Christ, with whom we Disciples have a relationship. And what continued to feed the controversy last week was partly the plans of a Disciples seminary to honor him.

My conclusion is that any ‘official’ statement from the General Minister and President or even the head of the National Convocation would be a little ‘off’, for Disciples. We’re not a denomination where anybody speaks for anybody else.

However, a lot of folks ARE speaking, and talking, and writing about this. But from what I can gather, we are speaking mostly to and with those who already know and agree with us. Publishing Ed Wheeler’s opinion piece on our website (with his permission) is, in part, an attempt to get some thoughtful dialogue going in broader circles, before all this fades away.

I’m not in favor of letting the Disciples totally off the hook though. For a denomination with the intentional anti-racism commitments we have made to just let this slip by unremarked would be a shame. What would be great is if this, coupled with Barack Obama’s speech on race, could be the starting point for some new conversation on race and racism in the church. They say this ‘new conversation’ is happening on college campuses and in other places already, because of the Wright incident and the Obama speech. Why not in the church? Or is it?

Tanya Tyler’s Punchbuggy blog

New blog alert! Tanya Tyler, a talented contributing writer for DisciplesWorld who lives in Lexington, works for the Herald-Leader, is a graduate of Lexington Theological Seminary, and is a part-time pastor… has added another ‘hat’ to her collection. She’s now a blogger.

Tanya’s Punchbuggy blog is part of the BluegrassMoms.com site. Her most recent post, “It’s Perfectly Biblical” begins this way:

Is your young adult child driving you crazy?

Go ahead and stone him.

As the mom of a young adult son, she had me at “driving you crazy.”