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What can I believe?

CrossOver reflection for Week One • Beginning December 2, 2018
We Make the Road by Walking, Chapter 14

by Rev. Charles D. Brower

“His clothes were as white as snow.
… And flames were all around its wheels.
A river of fire was flowing. It was coming out in front of God.
Thousands and thousands of angels served him.”
– Daniel 7:9b-10a (NIRV)

A worldwide flood with only two of each type of animal surviving?

A burning bush not consumed by flame?

A sea parting so a people can escape slavery?

Early missionaries to Alaska met a people used to hearing tales of feats by the shamans making these Bible stories easy to believe. The locals had heard of shamans’ interstellar travels or of their experiences changing into spirit animals.

Ever wonder how the concept of a Promised Land might sound to an indigenous person hearing a missionary expound promises of a life eternal? Then to hear that same promise followed by an uncertainty of when that fulfillment might happen?

What might be our response today to stories we deem hard to believe? Do the stories in the Bible challenge our faith; do the stories seem impossible?

Rev. Charles Brower is an Inupiaq serving Nome’s Community United Methodist Church. Social justice, homelessness, and high poverty challenge this mission church.

Photo Credit: “parting the red sea” by amboo who? , CC BY-SA 2.0.

Wesleyan Traditions: Watch Night & Covenant Renewal

I often struggle to experience worship when I am leading worship. That was not the case on January 1, 2017. That Sunday morning I led my congregation through the liturgy of Wesley’s covenant renewal service. We included a time for personal reflection and journaling our covenant with God for the year ahead. I then kept my covenant within reach at my desk for the entire year. I reread it a few times. Looking back on it now, it’s plain to see how the covenant I entered into that day shaped the year ahead, shifted my ministry, and compelled me to follow my call in a new direction.  It was a powerful experience for me!

A new calendar year is a time of crossing over. It signals a fresh start, the opportunity to begin again—and that’s a gift many need any given year. What if we could invite our congregations, our small groups, our families, or just ourselves to really make the start of the new year a deeply meaningful time in our faith?

I remember well the challenge of offering something new or creative in worship immediately after an exhausting Advent and a pull-out-all-the-stops Christmas Eve. As a result, I want to offer you some resources in hopes that you and those with whom you worship and fellowship might revisit the tradition of a covenant renewal service.

The resources you’ll find here are intended to be helpful, which means that I hope you will adapt them to fit your context and your sense of where the Spirit is leading you. Here are a few ideas to get you thinking creatively:

  • Use these materials as a ready-to-go Sunday morning service on any of the first several Sundays after Christmas or at a time when a fresh, new start is needed in your setting.
  • In keeping more with the watchnight tradition, include this opportunity for covenant on New Year’s Eve. (Shout out to Burley UMC in Burley, Idaho! In years gone by, they sometimes had a game night on Dec. 31 as an option for those who didn’t have or want a raucous party. Shortly before midnight, there was an invitation to enter the sanctuary for a very informal covenant renewal service. Got a recovery ministry in your church? Invite them to join you!)
  • Have a potluck with all those holiday leftovers and invite those gathered around the table (in homes or church fellowship halls) to read the covenant renewal liturgy and talk about it together.
  • Familiarize yourself with the liturgy, then gather a group for informal conversation about the ideas within it. Talk about God’s faithfulness in the past year and your commitment to following God more closely or in new ways and different directions in the year ahead.
  • Include in the life of your family, your small group, your friends, or your church a “blessing of the calendars.” Gather all kinds of time-keepers—watches, day planners, cell phones—hold them or place them in the center of the group. Invite other voices and pray about how you long for God to be present and how you commit to be present to God in your moments and days, throughout the seasons and the year ahead.

Resources offered here include the following:

  • Sample Order of Worship—Watchnight Service – PDF
    A basic pattern of worship for traditional Sunday morning worship services that includes the Covenant Renewal liturgy and reflection time in lieu of a sermon
  • Wesleyan Tradition of Covenant Renewal—Sample Introduction – PDF
    The sample order of worship includes an introduction to this tradition. The text provided here can be used as that introductory material or adapted to suit your community.
  • Covenant Renewal Service Liturgy & Journal Pages   PDF Version – Publisher Version
    This document includes the complete liturgy, covenant prayer, and lined pages for journaling about one’s own covenant.It is designed to be printed on letter sized paper, two-sided pages (flip on short edge), and folded in half. Each booklet uses 3 sheets of paper.
  • Covenant Renewal journal for KIDS – PDF Version | Publisher Version)
    This document invites children to think about the past year and the year ahead. It is most useful for children who can read, but it can be used alongside an adult for non-readers and has plenty of spaces for drawing or coloring. It is designed to be printed on letter sized paper, two-sided pages (flip on short edge), and folded in half. Each booklet uses 3 sheets of paper.

Click here for some additional Watchnight liturgical resources courtesy of Ministry Matters

Do you have great ideas of your own about how to bring greater meaning to people of faith at the start of the new calendar year?  Share them here!

Rev. Karen Hernandez is Sage District Superintendent. Most recently she served Kuna United Methodist Church (Kuna, Idaho), where the congregation graciously tried all kinds of new things in worship and beyond. 

Tight Fists or Open Hands?

CrossOver reflection for Week Zero • Beginning November 25, 2018

by Bishop Elaine JW Stanovsky

The Church is of God and will be preserved to the end of time.
Reception of Members, The Methodist Hymnal, 1935

Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing…
Isaiah 43: 18-19

Well, which is it? Is God enduring, unchanging, immovable, like a mountain? Or is God an innovator, creating new, unimaginable things, twisting and turning and even changing course like a river?

Does God call us to hold fast, dig in, preserve what we have inherited from the past? Or does God call us to engage the changes that surprise us, peer into an uncertain future, and then move beyond what we thought we knew, stretching, evolving, adapting?

Is God bound by these conflicting opinions? Or, might both be true in their own way?

What if God holds some eternal, immutable values that are true in every time and place, AND what if God expects us to recognize that these values may look very differently as they come to life in the changing circumstances we encounter in the real lives of people? What if, throughout our lives, God continues to call us to explore what is not familiar – what is strange or foreign, and to bring the eternal values of God’s love and justice, to situations that are new and challenging?

Clint and I met Robert when I was a seminary student. He was a hard-living, damaged soul in middle age. He drifted in and out of the reality I knew. Heard voices I couldn’t hear. Muttered under his breath to people I couldn’t see. Old West Church had become a safe place for him. On a sunny afternoon, you might find Robert sitting in the parlor emptying the tobacco into a pie pan from butts foraged in gutters and rolling it into fresh cigarette papers. Or, he might be setting the loose tobacco on fire right in the pan. Cigarettes were life to him. He lived from smoke to smoke. Bummed them off people on the street. When it came time to say good-bye after three years, I wanted Robert to understand that I really knew him and cared for him. So, on my last day at Old West, I walked to the corner store and did something I had never done before or since. I bought a carton of Kool menthol cigarettes – Robert’s favorites. Love came wrapped as a carton of cigarettes that one day in the spring of 1981.

Love is constant, like a mountain. Our neighbors change from time to time, necessitating that we keep fluid, like a river.

Our challenge is to know what is constant, and what is changing; to hold tight to God’s eternal values, and also to open our hands to put them to work in every situation we encounter in the world, and in the lives of the people around us. If we greet every change with a fist grasping the past, we’ll never even notice, let alone embrace, the new things God is doing.

Brian McLaren says, “You are ‘in the making.’ You have the capacity to learn, mature, think, change, and grow. You also have the freedom to stagnate, regress, constrict, and lose your way. Which road will you take?”

As we are Crossing Over to Life, I’ll meet you on the road, where “the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning…” (Lamentations 3:22-23)

ETERNALLY FRESH!

Elaine JW Stanovsky serves as the resident bishop of the Greater Northwest Area including the Alaska, Oregon-Idaho and Pacific Northwest Conferences of The United Methodist Church.

Shift Happens: The Value of Unlearning and Relearning

You know this, but I’ll say it anyway. Culture is always emerging.

You get what that means, right? That the world and ways around you are always shifting — always innovating. The introduction of new things and new methods continues to happen every moment of every day, whether or not we are willing to embrace it. The larger question lies in how we choose to respond. Do we welcome the uncomfortableness of the new or do we double down with a comfortable existence in the world?

Regardless, shift happens.

Am I allowing this shift to happen in me? Always for the good? Always letting go of the old me in order to make room for the new, less comfortable me? I have to be honest with you for a moment: Every morning, I wake and have to check myself because it feels like the ground beneath my feet continues to shift. I feel compelled to regularly address the question: Who am I?

Rev. Dr. William D. Gibson

Around our country, overt hate and xenophobia have stepped out from behind a thin veil in a sprint to become the new norm. It’s bolstered by unapologetic fearmongering and outright lies. And, it’s insane. I refuse to allow it to gain a foothold among the space Christ calls me to steward in the world — a place of peace, hope, and justice. I simply refuse. Being a United Methodist demands that I “do no harm,” “do good,” and “stay in love with God.”

How do I allow myself to be undone and recreated by the grace of God? There’s enormous value in the process of unlearning my cultural identity as an American Christian and relearning what it means to be a follower of a rogue revolutionary, un-American, Middle Eastern-born person of color, represented in Jesus the Christ. Secondly, how does my personal undoing become a part of a corporate rebirth — shifting from individual to community?

I am always drawn to Matthew’s telling of the Sermon on the Mount, which you can read in chapters five through the beginning of seven in the Gospel of Matthew. There, you have this 30-something newcomer, sitting on a hillside near the Sea of Galilee, with disciples, followers, and the curious gathered around. Among people who have been shaped for generations under the Law of Moses, Jesus calls into question everything that had defined their perspective of the world. He basically said in varying ways, “You have heard the law that says _______________. But now I say _______________.” Jesus was rewriting the Torah on the fly! Surely people were reflecting (maybe even out loud), “Who does this guy think he is?” Can you imagine the internal struggle going on within those listening to Jesus? He called into question their cultural formation and challenged them to see the world — including the “other” — through a new lens. The lens of Christ.

This unlearning and relearning process can be painful, but it is a necessary part of spiritual growth and re-formation. It inescapably remains at the core of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. And if the statement “culture is always emerging” is true (and it is), then how are you I emerging as part of the Body of Christ within the neighborhood, community, region, nation, and world? How are our individual actions creating space for a fresh, communal voice to rise up above the bombastic noise we (and others) are hearing?

As we move toward a CrossOver Year in the Greater Northwest Area, beginning this Advent season, these questions could never be more important than they are now.

Shift happens. While making room for others, how will you respond in the midst of it and cross over to life? A new season is dawning. Let’s make the road by walking into the new.

Rev. Dr. William D. Gibson serves as Director of Innovation for a New Church for the Greater Northwest Episcopal Area including the Alaska, Oregon-Idaho and Pacific Northwest Annual Conferences.

Making the Road By Walking

Originally published on Reflections of a Running Reverend
The Rapanut grandkids having a light moment together before we drove to the airport.

My mother passed away earlier this month. And while she had not fully recovered from the stroke she suffered almost two years ago, her death was sudden and completely unexpected. The last time I talked to her, she was full of life and happy to report that she was making good progress in learning to walk again. That was three weeks before she died. Phone and internet lines had gone down after the devastation of Typhoon Mangkhut, preventing us from making wi-fi calls. Perhaps I should have tried harder to find other means to connect. It’s too late now.

No matter how hard we prepare ourselves and our loved ones for it, death still comes with an impact that shakes us to the very core. We who are left behind are left to pick up the pieces from the life that has ended while dealing with the void created in our own lives and the deep sense of loss.

So many details. So many matters to think of: planning of the wake, the funeral; what to write in the obituary; what to write on the epitaph for the tombstone; volumes of paperwork that goes with reporting the death so that pension benefits may transfer to the surviving spouse; more paperwork for bank accounts to be transferred; the care of my aunt, Mama’s younger sister, who is mentally handicapped and has been under Mama’s care since our grandmother passed away. I could go on with this list…

And then there’s the grief. The deep sense of loss. Even if the aforementioned logistical details were all taken care of, the painful fact still remains – our Mama is dead. And she has left a gaping hole in our hearts. She will no longer be there to answer when I make a video call. She will no longer call me with a joyful report about how many more steps she has taken today. She will no longer be there to watch with pride and joy as her grandchildren play the saxophone, piano and guitar or cheer for them as they run, swim, play volleyball or taekwondo. She will no longer be there to give encouraging words for my ministry…

I have been on the phone with my Papa Joe more frequently these past few weeks after Mama’s passing. I’ve been on the phone with my brother Noel almost everyday since we got back from the Philippines for Mama’s funeral. This is something we’ve not done as much as we would like to since my family and I moved to Alaska almost 10 years ago. Even in death, Mama has her way of keeping her family close and connected as she did when she was alive. We are supporting each other in our grief. We are crying together, and laughing together as we remember our beloved Mama Rhona. We are journeying together and figuring things and details out as we go. We are “making the road by walking” and we are trusting that God is walking with us.

To honor the mathematician that Mama was, we came up with an epitaph that describes her life in mathematical terms: “a finite life lived in infinite grace.” As we make the road by walking, we pray that this road be one that would honor her memory, keep alive her legacy and ultimately glorify God.

What about you, dear friend? What shifts or changes, great or small, are you, your family, your group or your community going through right now, throwing your life into a complete tailspin and causing you to lose hope and sense of grounding? Is a way forward yet unknown? Is the road ahead yet unseen? How can I journey with you so that together, we might make the road by walking? And more importantly, how can we together trust that God is journeying with us, even as we walk through the valley of life’s deep and dark shadows?

Let’s talk. Let’s journey with God. And together, let’s make the road by walking.

Your fellow disciple,

Carlo

+++

In Memory
To the one who first taught me how to walk, physically and spiritually, and I know walks with me still.

Teofina “Rhona” Axibal Rapanut
August 8, 1947 – October 4, 2018
A finite life lived in infinite grace

Rev. Carlo Rapanut serves as Conference Superintendent for the Alaska Conference of The United Methodist Church.

An Ordinary Revival has started…

Across the northwest, rooms filled with ordinary people are putting their trust again in an extraordinary God!

This video provides a snapshot of the ‘Love Thy Neighbor’ Ordinary Revivals as they crossed the Greater Northwest last summer, seeking to inspire new connections between faithful people and the communities they live in. These revivals remind us that God is indeed at work outside the church and that there is strength in diverse communities that keep their hearts open to cries for justice.

Keep your eyes open for information on revivals coming to Boise (ID), Anchorage (AK) and Tri-Cities (WA) in the spring of 2019.

Learn more: ordinaryrevival.org

Crossing over into something new

The late Phyllis Tickle had a broad historical theory that assumed that every 500 years the Church went through an epoch-changing transformation, a crossing-over from one way of life into another.

Christianity began as a minority movement of dissidents who claimed that Jesus, not Caesar, was Lord and demonstrated their allegiance to Jesus through lifestyles of compassion, generosity, nonviolence and deep bonds of solidarity with each other. But after 500 years this movement had grown so rapidly that it had transformed into the very Empire that had arrested, tortured and killed their Lord. Christianity went from an outside minority, to a culture shaping dominant majority. And with that, its virtues of compassion became political calculation, generosity became institutional tithing, and solidarity shifted from the least of these into a common good defined by an authoritarian Church. Christianity had crossed over from clarity into complexity.

500 years later Christianity rid itself of its nonviolent lifestyle and became the sword of an aggressive, conquering Empire that seized and ruled all of Europe. In the name of Christ, Christians imposed religious doctrinal beliefs on all citizens, made alliances with the uber-wealthy, and instituted itself, with military force, as God’s kingdom on earth as in Heaven. Obedience to the Church rather than the following of Jesus’ ethics and teachings became the norm. Christianity left its simplicity of solidarity and entered the complexity of enforcing conformity and obedience upon all.

Around the year 1500 Christianity again morphed with the “protesting Re-formation” that essentially proclaimed that every person was their own Pope. In other words, the conscience of the individual became the throne of authority and guidance. The notion that Europe was God’s kingdom on earth was not disputed. Rather, God’s kingdom became a far more complex negotiation between God’s kingdoms and the citizens of those kingdoms who increasingly needed no king.

Each of these revolutions were a “crossing over” from one way of life into another. Indeed, each was a transformation in how God was understood, and how Christians were to relate to culture. Each crossing over was from a tradition that had worn itself out requiring increased novelty and imaginative innovation so that the power of the new might be given birth. In other words, just as each of us must evolve through toddlerhood into teenagers into adulthood into maturity and elderhood, so too Christianity as the good news of God’s love and liberation must evolve up the ladder of complexity and responsibility.

Today we are in the midst of another epoch changing cycle of complexity. On the one hand Christianities have so mutated that our central message of Jesus has become incoherent. Which Jesus are we talking about? The Jesus of Franklin Graham, of Joel Osteen, of Martin Luther King, Jr.? Each Jesus has a different version of God with a vastly different governance of ethical guidance. Which God are we talking about? The God who stands outside of history, intervening every now and then. Or, a God who is inside of history as the unfolding power of evolution itself?

On the other hand, a new cultural god has emerged that increasingly displaces the role of religion itself. This power is the rapidly changing scientific-technological milieu that uses technology to redesign what it means to be a human being. Indeed, we can now see the inevitability of the creation of a silicon-carbon based form of life. What is the image of God in such hybrid forms of humanity? What is the need of God when humans can control evolution’s future? And what is the Gospel good news in an age of technological control, political centralization and authoritarianism?

We are always crossing over from what is to what is coming. The question that faces us as a Church is Bonhoeffer’s question: are we still of any use?

O God our help in ages past, our Hope for years to come,
Return us to the wisdom of Jesus and restore within us the fullness of Human Being.
Make us to be the Body and Blood of Christ, so that this world might have new life.
Bread for the hungry and a cup of everlasting joy.

Rev. Rich Lang serves as SeaTac Missional District Superintendent in the Pacific Northwest Conference of The United Methodist Church.

CrossOver and El Buen Coyote

“Christ came and preached peace to you outsiders and peace to us insiders. He treated us as equals, and so made us equals. Through him we both share the same Spirit and have equal access to the Father.  That’s plain enough, isn’t it? You’re no longer wandering exiles. This kingdom of faith is now your home country. You’re no longer strangers or outsiders. You belong here…” – Ephesians 2:17-19 (The Message)

I have yet to hear any mention of “crossover” that does not immediately cause me to think of immigrants. Caring for and about immigrants is not only part of our Judeo-Christian faith tradition, but it is a somewhat new and very particular part of my call.

Recently, I stumbled across another crossover story online. (What follows will be far more meaningful if you read that original post.) It grabbed my attention because the author/guest blogger, Bob Ekblad, happens to have connections to our region. The story he begins with takes place on Fir Island, near the Skagit River in Washington.  It’s a story of agricultural workers that could easily have come from many places, including places very near my own home.

Ekblad describes a conversation with an undocumented worker who has been condemned by many people who tell them they speak from a place of Christian faith.  Ekblad responds, “…I believe that in the Kingdom of God there are no borders and that God views us all as beloved children. If salvation were about obeying the law, then all of us are damned. I tell him that I’ve been seeing Jesus more and more as our Buen Coyote. Jesus crosses us over into the Kingdom against the law, by grace.”

I was—and I still am—especially struck by this idea of Jesus as el buen coyote, the one who breaks some laws in order to fulfill the Gospel.

I put a significant amount of effort into seeing various sides of issues and different perspectives on matters that come to my attention, but there are plenty of circumstances where there is a clear line.  With so much talk about crossover, I am paying extra attention to how I respond to those lines.

Immigration requires crossing an international boundary line, and there are many ways to do that. When it comes to matters of safety and wellbeing, for instance, I refuse to cross lines that will put children at risk. But when there are terrifying risks on both sides of the line, then what?

I don’t know how a parent ever makes the choice between staying in la patria (the homeland) where their children are in grave danger and crossing an international border into the land of opportunity that is riddled with countless other risks. Church polity and biblical obedience present another line.

It is not always so simple as right and wrong, at least not as I see it. Sometimes there is a choice between being right and doing right. Other times, it is still far more complicated…and often heartbreaking.

Recently I have found comfort, hope, and new perspectives by referring to worship resources from other cultures.  I have several favorites from Fiesta Christiana: Recursos para la Adoración (Resources for Worship), including “The Immigrants Creed” by Jose Luis Casal.  (Spanish and English text available here. Video with Spanish and English available here.)

Since coming across this idea of Jesus as el buen coyote, my prayer has been this: May the only lines I ever cross be those that Jesus, El Buen Coyote, leads me across.

Rev. Karen Hernandez is Sage District Superintendent in the Oregon-Idaho Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. Don’t be fooled by the name—she’s una gabacha (a white girl) who seeks to confront privilege and racism, beginning with her own.

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Just as he is

Starting this Advent, the Greater Northwest Area will begin a CrossOver year study together. Groups and individuals will work their way through short readings of Brian McLaren’s book We Make the Road by Walking over the 12 months that follow. This study will be complemented by short reflections and creative pieces offered regularly throughout the year, like this one republished with permission from Steve Garnass-Holmes.

As we consider the journey ahead in this CrossOver year, how will we bring Jesus with us? That is a question Garnass-Holmes’ piece begs of us. What else does it evoke in you?

Learn more about the study and subscribe to future posts.

Just as he is

They took him with them in the boat, just as he was.
 — Mark 4.36

Not the holy, jewel-encrusted Jesus,
not the Son of God believe-it-or-else Jesus,
but the teacher from Galilee, plain, just as he is.

No emblems, no gesture, no crown.
No doctrine, no special powers.
Just his presence, his open heart, his willing flesh.

Let him go with you. Take him as he is.
He will change your journey (You will be frightened.)
Just get in the boat.

   —  June 21, 2018

Responding to Hurricane Florence and Typhoon Mangkhut

Typhoon and flooding

People who love God and neighbor in the Greater Northwest,

If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and the healing.

I Corinthians 12: 26, The Message.

Tragic death. Terror. Devastating loss. Heroic rescue. Miraculous generosity. Recovery.

When we watch the news coverage of Hurricane Florence on the Atlantic coast of the United States and Typhoon Mangkhut ravaging the Philippines and Northern Mariana Islands, we feel the hurt, and we see what it takes for healing to begin. In every natural disaster lives unravel in ways that take months or years to put back together.

We have neighbors in North Carolina and in the Philippines, who need our love to put their lives back together. And we have United Methodist partners who can carry our love to heal what was broken in these storms.

On Sunday, September 23 or 30, please give what you can to put your love to work by giving to the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR). You can give through your local church by marking a donation to the U.S. Disaster Response fund (#901670) or the International Disaster Response Fund (#982450). 100% of your gift will be used for response work relief with no administrative overhead.

Or you can give online at www.umcor.org/donate. You can include your church name when you give so it will be recognized.

And as you give, pray for the people whose lives are disrupted and for those who are responding.  Also say thanks for the United Methodist connections that give us confidence that our gifts are used wisely, for the purpose given, to benefit all God’s people.

Bishop Elaine JW Stanovsky

Greater Northwest Area