FTE Dissertation Fellow ('11)
Vanderbilt University
June 07, 2011
"Are you traveling to colonize or are you traveling to be a co-learner?"
This was the query posed by Dr. Margaret Aymer to FTE fellows at the closing panel discussion at the 2011 Leaders in the Academy Conference. After all, in the pursuit for excellence in scholarship in our fields of theological education, we are on a quest. This quest encompasses, as Dr. Emilie M. Townes proclaimed in celebration of the great legacy of Dr. Sharon Watson Fluker, great oeuvres along the way.
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Intern for Volunteers Exploring Vocation
May 24, 2011
What does freedom look like? I am a wind lover. As a child I loved
running barefooted in the wind and climbing a certain tree with my best
friend where we could feel the wind more intensely. We would compete to
see who could climb the highest and then we would stay awhile longer,
waiting for the wind to sway the branches back and forth. I don't have
quite as much freedom to do these things anymore but I continue to value
the wind and as I have come to see her as a metaphor for the Holy
Spirit, I learn to feel her presence in other areas of life.
Feeling her movement in the first event I attended with Volunteers
Exploring Vocation surprised and excited me. The few days I spent with
VEV participants in Atlanta were the best days of my year in service. I
was suddenly surrounded with other young adults asking many of the same
questions as I was.
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2011 Tranisition into Ministry Participant
Pastor of the First Baptist Church of Ballston Spa, NY
May 20, 2011
REM’s musical lyric: “It’s the end of the world as we know it and I
feel fine” describes the way I feel today. Today, millions of people
seriously doubt that the world will end tomorrow, as predicted by Harold
Camping. Camping’s Family Radio’s website “proves” through some dizzying mathematics that Jesus will come to usher in the eschaton (the end of time).
Here are three reasons I gave why the world will (most likely) not end on May 21, 2011:
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May 11, 2011
The problem of distraction in the spiritual life has always been a
challenge. The gospel account of Jesus in the home of Martha and Mary
has often been a reminder to Christians of the call to let go of the
worry and distraction we see exemplified in Martha and to choose the
“better part” of attention on God that we find in her younger sister
Mary. In the early desert tradition of Christian spirituality, the
ancient monastics spoke of the need for Sabbath, solitude, silence,
stillness and unceasing prayer in an effort to create enough space
amidst inner distraction and dissipation to hear God’s call to
relationship. Lest we think this was an impossibly remote ideal for
young persons, the later medieval ideal of the school and university was
based on the experience of “schola” (Latin for “leisure”) in order for
deeper order reflection and contemplation to take place.
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May 09, 2011
One day, I stepped off the plane in Minneapolis airport to catch another
flight and found myself sitting in a departure lounge waiting for the
next boarding call. A gentleman near me suddenly started talking to
someone I couldn’t see. He was holding a conversation with no one. I
looked but he wasn’t even holding one of those new, nifty palm-sized
mobile phones. Who was he talking to then? I looked around embarrassed
and thought that the poor man must be delirious after a red-eye flight
from San Francisco and just needed to lie down somewhere and collect
himself. The conversation continued. I began to stare and finally
noticed a strange blue light flashing on what appeared to be a hearing
aid in his ear but the device had a long cord I’d never seen before. I
had just been introduced to Bluetooth technology.
At that moment, I began to feel a strange shock and dread coming over
me. There was something weird going on...
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May 02, 2011
I have been praying for Osama bin Laden for ten years. I was not
surprised by news of his death. As I asked myself why, I suspect it is
because, in my eyes, bin Laden died long ago. He died to goodness; he
died to mercy; he died to shalom. He died to the things that God cares
most about. He was alive until this week—but he died to life a long
time ago.
I have wondered over the years what God tried to do to get him back. I
wonder about the confounding ability of human beings to resist the love
of God. I wonder about these things for Osama bin Laden and I wonder
about same things with respect to my own life. Today, as I have many
days before, I pray for my enemy—I pray him into the hands of the God of
justice and of mercy.
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Former Chaplain for Episcopal Canterbury Fellowship
Northern Arizona University
April 19, 2011
The folks at FTE have asked me if I’ll write a follow-up to my 20 Steps to a Renewed Church
(posted on April 8th). At first, I didn’t think I had anything more to
say than I’d already said. Plus, the mere mention of Church Issues
makes me want to fill my backpack with trail mix and furs and head into
the Alaskan wilderness indefinitely. But then… what I got to ponder was
how easy it is to spout off a Manifesto For How To Live, and how hard it
is to actually live. So, here’s my follow-up to the original post.
There are good reasons, culturally, why church does not work for many
people, especially many young people. By and large church is a place
where human beings come to interact together in person and
inter-generationally, discuss an ancient text, and participate in a
bunch of archaic rituals. In short, it is a counter-cultural situation
in the extreme. A very common response to the counter-cultural
character of church is to try to make the church “relevant,” which is
often a synonym for non-counter-cultural, hip, trendy, and full of Power
Point.
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