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

A PhD student in Theology asked the teacher "Who is my neighbor?" The teacher responded with the following. While a man was returning home on a side street late at night, he was mugged, beaten, and left for dead. The following morning, a politician passed by on the same road. The politician was talking on his cell phone and didn’t notice the man lying on the side of the road. Similarly, an executive passed by on the same road and noticed the man lying on the side of the road, but decided it was too risky to stop and help. What if he sues me? the executive thought.

Shortly there after, an immigrant from Central America drove by and saw the man lying on the side of the road. The immigrant had compassion on him and pulled over. He realized that the man was badly hurt and that it might be dangerous to move him so he called 911 using his cell phone. The 911 attendant on the other end of the call ordered an ambulance to be rushed over. After ending the call, he stayed by the injured man’s side and comforted him until the ambulance arrived.

Of these men, which one do you think was the neighbor of the man who fell among robbers? The student answered the one who showed mercy on him.

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.

Gentry pointed me to a blog that Gordon Cosby (the founder of the Church of the Savior in DC) will be contributing to.  The blog is called inward/outward. Gordon’s first post, titled "Becoming the Authentic Church" can be found here.

Although I’ve never met Gordon or been to the church of the savior, I feel a kindred spirit connection and find inspiration from what I know about Gordon and his approach to church and following Jesus (see some previous comments here). In particular, his sense about the role of our culture pulling us in directions that God did not intend really resonates with me. Gordon touches on this a little in his first post:

What I imagine is a revitalized and committed people who take Jesus seriously, joining a movement that is already underway, a movement toward recovery from the culture’s addictive pull, a healing movement that lifts up all who touch our life together.

I was first exposed to these ideas by a missions pastor here in the Bay Area. I believe that the local pastor I connected with was drawing from the work that the Church of the Savior has been doing in DC to integrate new members in their community.  I’m looking forward to hearing more from Gordon on the web. Thanks Gentry.

Tags: Gordon Cosby, church, faith, church of the savior

I had to opportunity to join the peer learning community that ReImagine hosted in San Francisco. It is described as a group of leaders (thought leaders, those exploring spritual leadership, and people leading with their lives in various vocations who also have a heart for guiding other spiritually). It was a great opportunity to connect with different people who are struggling with what it means to follow Jesus in their context.

I got to meet a gentleman from the East Bay who is moving on from a career as an oil spill responder for the coast guard. He shared some of his experiences in trying to start a community center/coffee shop in his area. I also got to reconnect with Bob and hear some stories about his background and the job he is starting on Monday. Bob had some great thoughts to share about culture, the cluetrain, emerging trends in marketing, ministry and his efforts to pay for college for his daughter. I really enjoy connecting with him.

I also got to hear some of the stories, struggles, and progress of some of the other folks in the group. In our breakout group of 8 or so there were a few folks that were grappling with a call to be in ministry but finding it hard to live that out in the traditional church. A few mentioned that they were longing for ways to support their families while seeking their call that didn’t mean being on the pay role at a church. I found this encouraging since I’ve been finding myself on a journey to free up more time to seek my call while also keeping my technology vocation in some form. We all seem to have a deep longing for an integrated or more holistic life– a life where the different compartments of our world begin to bleed together.

I’m looking forward to learning from this group of people. I’m not sure what will come of it, but I was definitely sensing the energy to encourage, learn, and share with each other.

Tags: reimagine, emergent, spirituality, holistic

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

You can see the video over at CNN. DATA.org has the transcripts.

2100 times in the scriptures he says
It is about justice, not charity. Justice.
The poor, the sick, the naked the oppressed. God is with them.
The fabric is frayed. The creation groans. The chasm widens.
Equality. Do we treat 6500 African deaths a day equally?
He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for their maker.
Are we just? Are we righteous?
The time has come. Will we repent? Can we be good news to the poor?

Si has a post with some reflections on justice and mission. It got me thinking. In it he mentions Greg’s question regarding the story of the leper from Mark2 Who brought whom to Jesus? Was it the four who brought the one or the one who brought the four?”

He’s tired, confused, and lonely. He’s not much older than 30.
No where else to go. He has six months to live.
A life of intoxication, maybe drugs, numbing his senses to the pain and rejection of this world… of his lifestyle.
Late nights? Women’s clothes. Transvestite.
He’s dying. There’s no where else to go. He has six months to live.
He can’t sleep. The haunting of death. The comfort of mom.
Delirium and tremors. Alcohol withdraw. Valium.
They comfort him. They love him. They change him.
He runs away for a drink. They lead him back. He has six months to live.
He’s gentle. He has a kind heart. He has a beautiful smile.
He receives the sacrament. They anoint his head with oil. He falls into their arms.
They carry him. They mourn him. He receives him.

After my crude attempts to put this to words, I think it is both. Thanks for the encouragement and the reflection Si. Keep writing.