This is probably the rhythm that I have grappled with the most. All of the rhythms are important, but I feel a sense of urgency attached to simplicity. Our world is anything but simple and I think it is longing for people and communities that are seeking and living simply. It can also be a complex and confusing discipline that can easily trip us up. For me it has also created a constant struggle against competition, comparison, and judgment.  

The first direction from which I really began to struggle with this idea of simplicity was from money and possessions– primarily with my relationship with money. Being an engineer and making an engineer’s salary in the Bay Area I sensed acutely a tension between what God has created me to be and do and what I think I’m worth verses what I think I need. There seems to be a constant pressure to make more in this area– both out of a perceived need (sense of scarcity) and a tech culture that can often equate self worth with what you make. These pressures can drive us towards seeking more compensation while driving me away from a deeper sense of what God is calling us to. I had been feeling for some time that God may be calling me to something other than software development but I didn’t feel free to pursue it because I felt like I needed the engineering salary.

I felt like I needed to intentionally seek a simpler life and that I also needed to understand exactly how much I need to sustain myself in this area. If I can choose a way of life that requires a lot less capital to sustain, I am a lot more free in my vocational choices. I don’t have to keep a busy, stressful, high-tech job if I don’t feel like that is what I’m called to. I think this is a practical route to a freedom God calls us to.

To help me get there, I started tracking every penny I spend (I got the idea from Your Money or Your Life). Developing this discipline helped me to better understand what I spend my money on and whether or not it is congruent with the way of life I am seeking. It gave me insight into what I need and what I don’t and gave me more control over it by allowing me to tangibly reflect on my spending habits.

The first "dojo" segment that we did with ReImagine was focused on money and possessions. We called it "have two give one" based on John the Baptist’s encouragement to give one tunic away if you have two. During this process we literally went through all of our stuff (books, bikes, clothes, everything) and tried to sell what we didn’t need to give the proceeds to the poor. It was a great exercise that we went through as a community (it took a few months).

We wrapped it up with a garage sale in the mission where we raised several hundred to give to worldvision. It made me a lot more aware of what I have and what the stuff is actually worth. Things that we originally purchased for $50 or $60 were going for just a few dollars on the street.

There is one other aspect of simplicity that I have been challenged by. If I am seeking a way of love for my creator and his creation I need to be available, with time, space, and energy (physical and emotional). This might mean making hard choices with work and play. For me, I was struck by how much stress at work can affect the rest of my life. If I want to lead a way of life of love, I need to be more intentional about the projects and responsibility I take on if it will affect my presence and capacity to seek this way of life. Maybe next time I need to pass on that project that my boss thinks will give me a lot of exposure.

Some books that I have found helpful in this area are Freedom of Simplicity and Voluntary Simplicity. Both were helpful in guiding me in a helpful direction. The latter book provides some interesting predictions of what the future might look like if we don’t take a more reflective approach to live. I also found Mustard Seed Versus McWorld and Affluenza : The All-Consuming Epidemic tremendously helpful.

Tags: simplicity, sustainability, money, stuff, affluenza

I thought since the vows are fresh it would be good to go through each one and share a few thoughts. I started yesterday with a post about prayer and today I’ll talk a little about community.

One of the community rhythms that we have started practicing is reading a chapter of scripture with others out loud every day. We are currently reading through Romans. We started with Romans 1 on May 1 if you want to follow along. I have found that I get more out of scripture reading when I hear it out loud and can also read along. I also appreciate the opportunity to think about and discuss scripture with others on a daily basis.

Our community Bible seems to be the Complete Jewish Bible. See the image and link below. The author of this translation attempts to connect Christians with the Jewish roots of scripture and the faith. I’m really beginning to appreciate it. Instead of reading about the cross, we hear the execution stake. Instead of referring to Jesus we hear the Messiah Yeshua. Alice and I picked up a copy last week.



The word "community" rarely means the same thing between two people or between two groups of people. For me the term community refers to the group of people that I find myself trying to follow the Messiah Yeshua with. For Alice and I, this includes our cohort and ReImagine friends from around the Bay Area and our peninsula/south bay friends and family from MPPC and a few other local churches.

My observation is that community in the Bay Area tends to be formed around geographic location. Although this can pull people together at first, it is my hunch that community was intended to be formed around a calling or mission that serves to love the creator and creation. In thinking about my experiences with community, my greatest sense of it has always been found intentionally "in mission" either locally or abroad. What I mean is that my deepest sense of community has always been experienced while serving others with friends. When you sense a call to be the hands and feet of Yeshua in the world, grab some friends who are resonating with the same call and see what happens when you try to do something about it together.

For our community, the sense of call is taking shape around helping others discover life in the way of Yeshua the Messiah. It has been difficult at times because many of us live so far apart but I sense (and trust) that a deepening sense of mission will develop as we progress.

Tags: monasticism, community
  

I have been enjoying Scot McKnight’s blog Jesus Creed. It is a little hard to keep up with though. Sometimes I wonder if he has sidelined his teaching and research just to blog. I enjoy the depth and breadth of his writings on the emergent phenomena, the books he’s reading, and the discussions on theology in general. I also appreciate that he spells his name with one "t" like my brother.  

He recently did a series on the Echoes of N.T Wright. You can read them (here, here, and here). He covered Tom’s new book Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense. In the third section, he mentions some of Tom’s thoughts on prayer and the notion that in prayer heaven and earth are overlapping. It is this latter idea that really resonates with me.

The last segment or rhythm of the "dojo" that we went through in our community was focused on prayer. One of the suggestions was to "pray the hours" (e.g. at some time during 6-9am, 12noon, and 6-9pm) or set your watch to chime on the hour and make it a point to say a prayer on the chime. For my practice, I decided to choose the latter. When possible I’ve also tried to incorporate my body into the prayer somehow by getting down on one knee. It gets a little tricky during the work day if you are in a meeting or talking with someone. I’ve found though that even in those circumstances a short prayer under my breath works.

This week, I’m going to try to say this pray that I derived from some of the Tom’s thoughts that Scot was commenting on in part 3. It incorporates Tom’s version of the Jesus Prayer and the Shema. Here it is:

Son of the Living God have mercy on me a sinner.
I will love the Lord my God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength and
I will love my neighbor as myself
for there are no commandments greater than these.

I decided to make the Shema a bit more personal by using "I". For me, making it personal invokes a greater sense of commitment for me than using the command form. And hearing "Son of the Living God" helps me to connect with the idea that God is living, present, and active in the world.

Tags: jesuscreed, Scot McKnight, prayer, NT Wright

This weekend, we had our sixth Sabbath retreat in the redwood forest around Mt. Hermon. Our community started the process back in December with the hopes of coming (stumbling?) to a place where we would be able to commit to a common set of practices that will help shape us in the way of Jesus. This weekend many of us made that commitment for the next year.

Took a vow to pursue a way of life that is led by the Spirit and characterized by love. We committed to doing this by pursing these rhythms in our daily lives (my paraphrase):

We desire to love the creator and His creation by following the way of Jesus and helping others to discover life in the way.

Community: Knowing and loving God and others cannot be done alone.
Service: We collaborate with our creator in loving creation.
Creativity: We seek to leverage our imaginations in exploring the story of God’s kingdom and subverting the royal consciousness.  
Simplicity: We seek to live in the love and generosity of our creator within an empire of greed and scarcity. 
Obedience: Together we submit to the Son of the Living God.
Prayer: We pursue the guidance of the Spirit by centering ourselves in the presence of our creator.

Alice and I made this commitment together. We were both a little anxious about how it will play out over the coming year as we build a life together but we both felt like we have learned a lot from the "dojo" process so far and trust that the shaping and forming will continue.

Tags: monasticism, vows, community, simplicity, service, prayer

Here is a more complete listing of the six rhythms:

COMMUNITY: We cannot know or love God apart from knowing and loving one another. Through his life and words Jesus teaches how to love one another and seek reconciliation with all people. We are committed to taking the journey of faith in solidarity with one another and our brother’s and sisters around the world.

SERVICE: We are made to collaborate with our maker in caring for creation. We recognize the sacredness of work and use the capacities of our minds and bodies to serve others according to our talents, skills and the needs of the place where we find ourselves.

CREATIVITY: We seek to be awakened in our imaginations and actions, inspired by the epic story of God’s kingdom and creation, and connected to our cultural context. We want to live artfully, taking risks, experimenting and using the language and mediums of our culture to explore the story of God’s
kingdom together.

SIMPLICITY: We acknowledge the abundant provision of our maker, and seek to live in trust, radical contentment and generosity in an empire of greed and scarcity.

OBEDIENCE: We recognize Jesus as our teacher and authority, and wrestle with how to surrender to the way of love in every detail of our lives. We submit ourselves to one another in love and strive to keep our vows to God and our commitments to one another.

PRAYER: We seek the fruitfulness and guidance of the Spirit that comes from being centered and surrendered to the will and presence of our creator. We practice rhythms of prayer, silence and solitude that help us remain open to the voice and power of the Spirit.

Since Mark posted this on his blog, I thought I would throw it out here to. Here are some thoughts on what the organization we are working with is trying to build.

ReImagine and a Regional Center for Spiritual Formation
The goal of ReImagine is to create a regional center for spiritual formation. This regional center will be composed of a progression of stages or forums for engagement that will be designed to further the spiritual formation of the participants. The center will be composed of the following stages: proclamation, conversation, new vision/new habits, and a community based on the new vision.

The proclamation stage will incorporate the announcement of the Kingdom of God. "The time has come," he said. "The Kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!" (Mark 1:15). This proclamation, taking different forms, will be an invitation for the hearers to explore the Kingdom of God, explore ways in which the world has captured their imagination that God did not intend, and seek a new, holistic vision of their life as apprentices and followers of Jesus.

The next stage or forum will be a place for people seeking conversations and encouragement in their efforts to follow Jesus in a complex and diverse culture such as the San Francisco Bay area. This forum will serve as one of many regional connection points for emergent.

At the next level, the center will provide a vehicle for participants to develop a new vision, new habits, and new actions as people seeking to be formed in the way of Jesus. This stage currently referred to as the Jesus Dojo, will offer a year-long process of spiritual formation composed of six modules or exercises eight weeks long. Each module will be devoted to a stream of the teaching of Jesus. The modules will focus on the following six streams from Jesus’ ministry: generosity and abundance, healing, imagination/story telling, prayer, integrity, and community. Once a “novice” completes the year long process of spiritual formation they will be encouraged to live out their call or vocation which could included participation in the next level—the covenant community.

The final stage will be a monastic or covenant community based on a new vision and new habits and whose members will take vows pledging their commitment to living lives as apprentices of Jesus. This community of men, women, and children will devote their lives to living and teaching the six streams of Jesus ministry mentioned above. They will serve as the facilitators, guides, and stewards for the center for spiritual formation.

Tags: spirituality, monasticism, culture

This weekend, we kicked off a brainstorming session on creating a common life as apprentices in the way of Jesus. It was a fun beginning to what will probably be a lengthy process of both individual and corporate spiritual formation.

The discussions centered mostly around coming up with common, multi-layered rhythms that will be practiced by the community. The rhythms of the community will be inspired by the life and teachings of Jesus and fall more or less into six buckets or streams: centeredness, generosity, community, restoration, integrity, and creativity.

The rhythms of these streams will be practiced daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, etc. We will start off by focusing on a stream for 1-2 months like we did with the have2give1 project. As we focus on the stream for a few months and allow the project to challenge and shape us we hope to come up with daily, weekly, or monthly practices that can be incorporated into our daily lives. These practices will ultimately shape the vows of the community– the values and practices we commit to in seeking to be apprentices of the master.

We also took this opportunity to dive into a creative chemistry project– soap making. Ever since I saw fight club, I’ve had a passive interest in making soap. I also think it could be a interesting and creative way to make some money on the side. Imagine coming up with a funky concoction and convincing some swanky department store to sell it for $20.

Anyway, Lisa was telling me a few weeks prior to this trip that she has done it and that a friend gave her some supplies for making soap before leaving the area. She offered to guide us through the process using some of the materials she had left over. You just need some water, lye (sodium hydroxide), fats/oils, a fragrance and or texture, and about an hour. The recipe that Lisa was drawing from called for a cup of coffee grinds that had been sitting in vodka for 24 hrs as the fragrance/texture. Textured it will be. The coffee grinds are still intact in the semi-finished product.

One catch is that you need to wait for about 6 weeks before you use it. I’m assuming that the six weeks allows the lye to break down some so you don’t burn your skin.

I’m thinking about making this a series to collect and share my thoughts on each of the streams. If you have any thoughts on monasticism, intentional community, or soap making let me know. I’d like to hear about it.

About a day or so ago, I was browsing Andrew Jones’ site and found this post on monastic vows. I was intrigued by the list of vows that he listed from the Vineyard article. I tried following the links to the source, but they have since moved. If you are interested, you can find the source article here.

The issue of Cutting Edge referenced also has a great article on the Church of The Saviour in DC. What a great article. It has some amazing quotes from the founder Gordon Cosby. Their ideas on cultural captivity are fascinating. They have done a lot of work on helping followers of Jesus find freedom from the ways in which the culture has captured their imagination that God did not intend. They have developed a framework of intense training in spiritual formation that is part of the membership process at the church. The cool part is that it is not just about spiritual formation but preparing the individual for their call or “mission” and the “corporate” mission of the community. This is distinct from the more individualistic notions of spiritual formation that are more common.

Mark and Nate of reimagine are starting a six month process to establish a network of people committed to a common life inspired by the example and teachings of Jesus. The idea is to get a group of folks together to be intentional about being and making disciples in a first world urban context like such as the SF bay area. I’m pretty excited about such an idea. I have my reservations about what value I will add to the venture. I feel like a bit of a novice to be participating in forming something like this. I long for a deeper foundation in scripture and church history to guide me and help inform the process. But maybe this is one way to get there. Undoubtedly a rhythm of study will be one stream of this common life. Perhaps that will afford me the opportunity, and the encouragement, to pursue a deeper understanding of scripture, theology, and apprenticeship to the master.