Details for meeting up to follow.  And I bet if we nag persistently enough, Sarah Coffman would make us another awesome CCfB sign.

Islam/Muslim/The Koran doesn’t equal 9/11 or terrorism. Throughout history, people have also used The Bible to wage war and commit atrocities. Their actions have nothing to do with Christianity or The Bible or God or Jesus and the same is true for those who are Muslim. This building down near Ground Zero is not a mosque, it is a community center that happens to also have a prayer room at the back.

One of the biggest complaints about the Trade Center Towers (other than them being ugly tall rectangles) was that they used the space in that part of the city poorly. There wasn’t public space. Those who don’t live here, don’t understand how important public space is to the people of New York–it’s something they feel very passionately about. When the groundwork was being laid for the rebuilding of Ground Zero, this is something that was corrected. If you’ve seen the drawings, you’ll see how the space is very different from the original. They want people to go down there–to inhabit that part of town–for it to be a neighborhood and not just business.

Being raised Christian in middle-class suburban Texas, these things were all very foreign to me before I moved to New York. I might have known a handful of Muslims in my life, and Pflugerville was just a little bit different than Brooklyn. The way this story is being blown out and played in the media is pretty ridiculous. I mean, if I had never lived up here, I might think the same as people outside the city. It seems very cut and dry.

The thing is, up here, we have a pretty high number of Muslims. They own houses and cars and have jobs and kids, just like you. We also have a lot of Jewish folks. And black people. And Puerto Ricans. And Dominicans. There are so many races and religions up here, that I couldn’t even begin to name them all. Up here, it’s not 85% white christians, like where I grew up. Everywhere you turn, there are places of worship, but they aren’t all Baptist or Lutheran.

And their prayer times are no joke. When it’s time for prayers, they will drop down and pray. I’ve even seen this happen in stores using pieces of cardboard as their prayer mats. It’s not unusual to see stores put a sign out that says they’re closed for prayer. This community center is for everybody, it just happens to provide a room in the back for Muslims to pray. That’s a big part of their faith. To say that they can’t have a community center near Ground Zero endangers the freedom of all religions. 99.95% of Muslims didn’t think 9/11 was awesome.

Muslims are New York City as much as Christians and Atheists and lovers of Buddha are New York City. It’s just something to think about.

“Dear Anne Rice,

I heard you on NPR on Monday. I had already read about your highly publicized declaration that you had “quit being a Christian.”

I understand rage at the church’s injustices, external and internal. As the saying goes, if Jesus were still in his grave, he’d be turning over in it, seeing what we have made of him and his message.

The problem is, you can’t do the Jesus thing alone…

What I am writing to tell you is that there’s no such creature as a lone follower of Jesus. You can’t be a Jesus-person away in a corner. Even hermits pray in communion with a larger tradition, a church beyond themselves in a world which is the place where God becomes incarnate…

This Christ you believe in, Anne Rice, where do you meet him? He doesn’t only live in your head and heart, or in the Eucharist you told us you will miss so deeply, or in the scriptures that are our legacy from the early churches. We meet Christ every day in others, especially in what Mother Teresa called “the distressing disguise of the poor.” Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker, knew and lived this also, but she went a step further than her co-religionist in analyzing the causes of poverty, the deadly rush to war that robs the poor even when we are only preparing for military battle and not waging it, the love of possessions and power above the respect for the dignity of humans all made in the image of God…

I wish you well, sister in Christ. You’re a friend of Jesus; so am I. We’re in the same boat. It’s called the Body of Christ. I hope that some part of it will continue to nourish you. Call it the church, call it communion, call it a meeting, call it solidarity, call it what you want. It won’t go away.”

from rudetruth:

So, Anne Rice quits, because people suck? What did she expect, anyway?

That was my first gut-check response to the statement she made this week on Facebook, subsequently picked up by Huffington Post: ‘I Quit Being a Christian.’ Why? Well, like I said, people suck–and apparently Christian people are the suckiest: “It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else. …I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of …Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.”

Okay, granted: Christian people really are the suckiest, if only because they suck just as bad as everyone else and claim to be doing God’s will or loving Jesus the whole time they suck. And I hate just as much as anyone the fact that goofy Ted Haggards and odious Fred Phelpses and you-name-hims are the media face of Christianity. In fact, I hate it so much I refuse to accept it. Which is exactly NOT what giving up and publicly quitting being a Christian does. I get that she wants to indict these sucky Christians for their suckiness. But in the meantime, she grants that this is what Christianity really is, and must be, and all right-minded people must quit it because it will only ever be a religion of haters and that’s what Jesus would do.

Actually I think Jesus stuck around and got crucified for it, but hey, that’s a theological quibble for another day, right.

On my own Facebook page I groused, “why sell out and let the haters define Christianity? all she’s doing is legitimizing the perception that this is in fact what Xny has to be. Lame.”

Maybe that was a bit harsh. Susan Campbell’s reaction is better: “Come sit by me, Sis. Anne. One can be a Christian and cling to none of those antis, I believe.” (Amen and amen and amen!) Usually, I’m much more level-headed; I stick it out in my little corner of Christendom, but I have said (so often now it’s practically become a mantra) that we need some people to go and some people to stay, and everyone should do what they do loudly. Well, you can’t beat an Anne Rice Facebook statement picked up by HuffPo as a megaphone, so it seems like I am actually pissed off at someone conforming to my own advice. Which puts me in a bind. Mea culpa. So why is it that I still feel like what she is doing is misguided in some fundamental way? Why am I still pissed about it?

What makes Susan’s reaction better and different from mine is that, I got pissed off at the idea of quitting–because I have chosen to not quit, despite the fact that I too feel very much an outsider in my own Christian tradition. I’ve decided not to quit because I am an outsider. It’s the outsiders–the vampires and the cyborgs if you will–within the church that have the prophetic potential for changing the antis into pros. It’s not so much that I’m angry that Anne Rice wants to publicly indict Christians for the unforgiveable anti-stances that have been so publicly and politically taken up by a very vocal some. I agree. It’s that her chosen response to it indicts my chosen response to it as wrong: useless, hopeless, and worse, complicit rather than prophetic. As she sees it, her conscience cannot allow association with the horrors she sees perpetrated by those claiming Christianity. But me–I’m just not that interested in preserving the purity of my conscience. I’d rather spend my time trying to preserve other things.

Susan seems to agree with me that it’s hasty generalization to conclude that all of Christianity is defined by the haters, but instead of getting pissed off and calling Anne “lame,” she says “come sit by me.” That’s ever so much better.

[So, pssst, Sis. Anne, have you heard of The Episcopal Church? It officially welcomes you. Also, should you ever find yourself in Brooklyn, why not check out this awesome pro-gay, pro-feminist, pro-birth control (well, except for that one couple that doesn't seem to bother, and yeah, you know who I'm talkin bout, but hey, you make great babies), pro-Democrat, pro-secular-humanist, pro-science, pro-life church, CCfB...]

But in the meantime, use your megaphone while you exit–because we need this witness too. But I hope you decide to stick around. And, sorry for calling you “lame.”

When I’m done with it, let me know if you want to borrow it. This is a book that demands that Shakespearean wisdom about lending and borrowing be disregarded.

Or go get your own.

Nashville is underwater. And not in the happy dreamy surreal way that Sosuke’s hometown gets to be in Clare’s fave current movie Ponyo.

I’m scheduled to make a trip to Nashville for the Christian Scholars Conference at Lipscomb University at the end of this month, right after graduation. I’ll be thinking about how to make that coincidence work for us as a way of offering some tangible help.

In the meantime, here’s some immediate ways to act, from a distance:

1. text “REDCROSS” to 90999 to make a Red Cross donation
2. go to The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee and donate to their Flood Relief Fund OR go to Do the Write Thing for Nashville to participate in an online auction for books by local Nashville authors, proceeds donated to The Community Foundation for flood relief
3. send a check made out to Amos House (specify “flood relief”) to P.O. Box 54, Old Hickory, TN 37138.

• Sunday, May 9th: Open Sunday for visiting new churches
• Saturday, May 15th: Shiloh Work Day
• Sunday, May 16th: AIDS Walk
• Sunday, May 23rd: Open Sunday for visiting new churches
• Sunday, May 30th: Last Sunday at PS 261

So, one of our authors this week summed up his book’s entire thesis with these three statements:

The church is.

The church does what it is.

The church organizes what it does.

As CCfB struggles with the question of how to organize ourselves, it helps to remember that what we’re talking about is simply how to be who we are, and do what we are,  in a more effective way.

1. maturing as hearers of the Word of God. This means not just hearing, but being open to hearing things anew in different ways–and, importantly, being willing to assume responsibility for fresh interpretations and their implications.
2. maturing in prayer. This means not praying a lot or on a schedule or particularly eloquently, but cultivating relationship and a sense of God’s presence, as prayer is essentially personal communication.
3. maturing in freedom. This means experiencing and living out freedom in three ways–from legalistic living, from the compulsion to make everyone see things our way, and from passivity as we realize that we are intended and called to be agents of God’s love in this world. Or, more simply, freedom from all that undercuts love of God & neighbor, and freedom for expressing that love.
4. maturing in solidarity. This means recognizing kinship and fellowship across the artificial boundaries we allow to separate and define us. It involves repentance for these things, as well as celebration in our widening fellowship.
5. maturing in gratitude and joy. This is our response to God, as a God who creates and sustains life, a God who loves this created cosmos and the creatures in it, a God unwilling to let it all go down the drain as if it never had been and therefore a God willing to do whatever it takes to save it. Gratitude. Joy.
6. maturing in hope. This means learning how to hold on to #5, refusing to despair of it, despite the ways in which this world’s brokenness can obscure the loving presence and redeeming acts of God.

While the list is Migliore’s, the definitions are my own free interpretation of his text.

As a teacher, my task for the class was to ask, which of the above “marks” of sanctification, or growth in the Christian life, are evident and consciously cultivated in your church? Which are lacking, and what, as a pastor/member/aspiring ordinand can you do to address that lack?

Maybe that was my question to them because of all the introspection we’ve been doing at CCfB lately. I couldn’t help but ponder my own answers to these questions…and I’m interested in yours. Which of these “marks of growth in the Christian life” are most evident at CCfB? Where are we strong, and where are we weak? And what can we do, concretely, about that?

As many of you know, and the rest of you can discover by reading through our history, CCfB has undergone many transformations and relocations in our seven years. This body of Christ is young and still growing, and sometimes that means growing pains and sometimes that means scary leaps into unknown ventures, but that’s part of what it means to be vital and alive as the body of Christ. At seven years, we haven’t even hit puberty yet…we’re still losing our baby teeth.

(Okay, stopping myself before it gets too goofy… no one wants to think about puberty…)

Back to Lenten seriousness. During this time of Lent CCfB has been consciously and deliberately contemplating what is next for this community. What are we growing into? What do we need to keep maturing into the body of Christ we have always wanted to be?

Growing is just another way of talking about transformation–and growing is not always slow and steady and imperceptible…somehow those cute babies of a year ago are walking and talking, somehow my “baby” looks like she belongs in kindergarten already. Growth happens in spurts, after a period of storing up energy in preparation. That’s where we’ve been for awhile–storing up in preparation, getting ready for the next growth spurt and transformation.

So as we reach the end of this process of preparation, introspection, assessment, contemplation…consider another aspect of Lenten wilderness: visions. We need visions. We need your visions. What are our visions for this body of Christ’s future? How exactly do we want to grow? What do we want to grow into?

And then get ready. I don’t know what’s next, but it’ll be good.