Moving church 'off-site': 5-21-10
May 21, 2010
The evening traffic along 55th Street in Kansas City made its usual muffler noises -- from cars, pickups and the occasional motorcycle.
But almost in response, the 80 or so of us (partly pictured here) gathered on our church patio answered back with prayers, music and voices telling profoundly human stories.
We held what was called "Faces of Immigration: A Prayer Vigil" one evening this week as a way to help anyone who came put a human face on the immigration issue -- one that is deeply complicated in one sense and yet simple in that, in the end, it's essentially about people and their dreams.
So some immigrants from Latin America, Haiti and Portugal spoke, some members of the Grandview Park Presbyterian Church in Kansas City, Kansas, including Pastor Rick Behrens, played some music, and our associate pastor, Don Fisher, led us in corporate and individual prayer.
If the evening was about a faith community's response to the immigration issue, it also was, to me, a tiny step toward a church going "off-site," as the current phrase for this has it.
Well, we weren't exactly off-site. We were, rather, outside our own building and still on church property. But churches increasingly are coming to understand that they must open their doors not only to welcome others in but to encourage their own members to move out into the community to be the church there.
In the May 31 issue of The Presbyterian Outlook, on the page next to my own column (not yet available online), there's a good piece about this by Tom Erich, an Episcopal priest. Its headline says, "Going off-site is critical."
One of his important points: "It seems counter-intuitive to be decentralizing the congregation's life even as they stretch to keep the central location's doors open. But expanding reach will be critical for the congregation, no matter what its size." After all, Erich writes, "interactions with God and other Christians are just as lively 'out there' -- on a retreat, at a renewal weekend, in an at-home Bible study, in doing mission work -- as they are 'in here.'"
My church does several things "off-site," but we're still pretty landlocked. My hope is that all faith communities, including ours, can find respectful and helpful ways to interact with the communities around them. That will be more healthy for everyone.
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SOME ABUSE SCANDAL LEGAL REALITIES
As court cases relating to the Catholic priest abuse scandal move through litigation, the sometimes-complicated legal issues begin to become clearer. This AP analysis relating to some developments this week helps all of us understand what's at stake and why the legal relationship between American bishops and the Vatican is important.
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P.S.: If you've been waiting for a pastor to take on Glenn Beck's ridiculous rants against "social justice," here's one. Enjoy.
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THE BOOK CORNER
Father Fiction: Chapters for a Fatherless Generation, by Donald Miller. The last Miller book I read, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, I simply picked up meaning to scan it to see if I liked it. I read every word. Miller has the capacity to draw you in and keep you reading. This new book is no different. The author is the founder of the Mentoring Project, which equips churches to mentor young people. In Father Fiction he describes growing up without his father in his life -- and the emotional hole that left in him. What he discovered was that he kept turning to different men to fill that void -- some much less successfully than others. But what he finally discovered is that the ulimate father figure, God, had never abandoned him, and he needed to acknowledge that faithfulness and live in light of that. Miller writes with raw honesty, not sugar-coating things. In the end, this is a call to men to be better fathers so that their sons and daughters can be better human beings.
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