Emerging Women

Sorry for the delayed book discussion this month, I’ve been kinda out of touch online since my son was born a month ago. But it’s the summer, so laid back is all good right?

Anyway our book club selection for this month is Tony Jones’ The New Christians. If you don’t know Tony is the national coordinator of Emergent Village and so is in a great position to tell the story of this new movement called the emerging church. And telling that story is just what he does in this book. From its beginnings as a young leaders attempt to do generational ministry, The New Christians describes the formation of emergent, its main influences, and the ways it has manifest over the years.

So as we start this discussion I want to ask a few basic questions –

- how aware are you of the emergent movement and its history?

- what manifestations of the movement have you encountered?

Much has been said regarding differences of opinions as to what the “real” version of emergent is. Some say that Tony’s perspective is just one of many. Given that emergent isn’t a denomination, but an organization and conversation, such differences are perhaps to be expected. In light of that, did the story of emergent told in The New Christians resonate with you or did it seem outside your particular experience? Do you think emergent will ever be a cohesive group or is the diversity present in the movement something to be valued and upheld?

Next week we will explore some of the characteristics of the new Christians that are described in the book, but I hope that we can explore the larger issue of the movement as a whole this week.

by Nancy Ortberg

One of the best parts about Nancy’s book for me has been her simple style of clearing out clutter — spiritually speaking. For example, she tells the story of a woman named Babs, who gave a kidney to a friend of a friend who happened to desperately need one. A friend of a friend. Not her mother, child or sister. Not her best friend or even her favorite childhood babysitter. A friend of a friend needed a kidney and Babs said, Yes. Nancy writes, “Love is such a difficult word to define. Except when a kidney is involved.” ( 127)

Another place where Looking for God calls us to act, instead of talk about beliefs and consider potential actions is in her story about when Shane Claiborne visited her church and asked everyone to give up their shoes so he could distribute them to homeless people that evening. Her co-worker clarified the invitation: “Shane is not telling you to go home and then next week bring back a pair of shoes to donate; he is saying right now.” (79)

These two illustrations got me thinking: What if we were as impulsive about simple, bold acts of kindness as we are about impulse purchases of snacks and caffeinated drinks? Or what would happen if we impulsively gave away something of value to us every time we impulsively act NOT in accord with our values — like when we snap at someone we love or let our vision of abundant life get sucked up in the vacuum of surviving day-to-day to-dos?

I appreciated Nancy’s chapter on CouldaWouldaShoulda, in which she tells a heartbreaking story about a woman with little money, two kids facing terminal illness and a husband who just left and what Nancy almost did to organize assistance and blessing for this family. A spirit-fire brainstorm of inspiration didn’t become incarnation, because the list with all the ideas kept getting shuffled and covered with other papers and priorities until it got thrown out and the vision lost. I could so identify! I have so many wishes to be a conduit of grace and so often inspiration turns into procrastination that trails off into…nothing but lost good intentions that breed a feeling of guilt and paralysis. I wonder, is our habit of forgetting to act while our intention is fresh off the press a piece of what feeds our cynicism, our gnawing suspicion that we can’t make an important difference in other’s lives or the world?

1. What keeps you from acting on your best intentions?

2. What kind act will you undertake right now?

3. What sacrifice will you make this week for someone who isn’t personally important in your life?

4. What habit would most help you create a life open to inspiration and grounded in follow-through actions? (A will-do list for the day that ONLY includes important, rather than urgent goals? A question for the day? A walk past the homeless shelter?…)

Week One

I have truly been enjoying this book about life in God opening up afresh. Nancy has a wonderful voice and it’s easy to connect with her and uncover insights with her in a way that’s inspiring, convicting and simple without being boxy or formulaic. And this from a woman who is from an evangelical orientation. It is rare that I feel connected with God without too many abrupt interruptions when I read books by evangelical writers, so this is high compliments for Nancy and the one who breathes in and through her work. I appreciated both Nancy’s references to life full with days parenting young children as well as her chapter devoted to work as a valuable avenue for loving God and living an abundant, dynamic life. On page 27 she argues biblically for why we ought to have sermons on men cooking, based on John 21 where Jesus cooks breakfast for the disciples. I like that view of godly manhood.

On page 14 Nancy says, “The power of gratitude is breathtaking and centering. It is along the lines of nuclear power.”

1. What inspires in you breathtaking gratitude?

Nancy talks about watching her grandmother make homemade jell-O and writes of the molds, “Molds are rigid, predetermined boundaries that create shape but leave no room for movement.” (29)

2. If molds didn’t exist, what shape would you be?

3. Without molds, what ways would you move freely as a lover of God?

Nancy discusses the issue of wanting to trade callings with someone else and how this is something that gets under Jesus’ skin when the disciples get into a dynamic of, “Well what a about him?” Nancy describes an experience of feeling jealous of a fellow speaker and how she handled that. (30-32)

On page 62, Nancy discusses the gift of ordinariness. She says of enjoying the ordinary,

it gives us a sense of purpose even in the mundane, a kind of freedom that releases us from the need to be important — a need that can weigh us down and sink us into our own pitiful selves. Ordinary gives a peace and joy and centeredness that turns us toward God and builds him deep inside of us.

6. What is your most cherished ordinary time?

7. What will you do today to celebrate WHAT IS in your life?

In continuing our discussion of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I want to turn to the obstacles that often stand in the way of our choosing to eat sustainably. While it can be easy to read about how other people switched to organic or local food habits, making that transition in our own lives can prove to be a challenge. I have not fully made that transition, but I have learned to do what I can. What I discovered along the way were that there are a number of common obstacles (or excuses depending how one looks at it) that I had to overcome. These included –

1. Information – I had to discover what was good to eat and where I could find it.
2. Cost – I had to adjust how and what I ate in order to pay the full price of the food I was eating.
3. Time – I had to be willing to sacrifice convenience in order to grow, make, and eat sustainably.

In reading Kingsolver’s account, the time issue seemed to be the most all consuming factor. Not everyone can grow all of their own food. But they did discover that by putting their own effort into the process they saved significant amounts of money over the course of the year. For them it was all about developing a different perspective and making it work.

What obstacles stand in your way? Are they too big to overcome? What has helped you overcome them?

“Take a minute to study this creation – an imaginary plant that bears over the course of one growing season a cornucopia of all the different vegetable products we can harvest. We’ll call it a vegetannual …”

As Barbara Kingsolver and her family embark on a year of living off the land, they realize that they will be eating whatever the land is offering at that particular time of year. If the asparagus are in season, you eat a lot of asparagus. And for the times of year when the land isn’t offering up much food, you prepare ahead by freezing, drying, and canning the harvest grown for just that reason. In December one didn’t go to the grocery story and buy a tomato that was picked unripe in South America, shipped thousands of miles in refrigerated storage, and made to look red with ethylene gas that doesn’t taste like much of anything. No they ate the fruits of their own garden that had ripened naturally and they had taken the time to preserve for the winter. They ate a much better tasting tomato and didn’t waste the transportation gas and refrigeration energy to get it either.

But eating food in season from local sources is not the norm for most Americans. Kingsolver writes, “It had felt arbitrary when we sat around the table with our shopping list, making our rules. It felt almost silly to us in fact, as it may now seem to you. Why impose restrictions on ourselves? Who cares?” Kingsolver advocates the pleasures and ethics of seasonal eating, but she acknowledges that many people would view this as deprivation “because we’ve grown accustomed to the botanically outrageous condition of having everything always.”

Do you believe that American society can—or will— overcome the need for instant gratification in order to be able to eat seasonally? How does Kingsolver present this aspect in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle? Did you get the sense that she and her family ever felt deprived in their eating options? How can eating seasonally be seen as a spiritual discipline?

Today we start our discussion of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Telling the story of her family’s experiment at being locavores for a year, this book turns one’s thoughts to the food we eat. Kingsolver and her family chose to move to an area where they could connect with the community and the land. Their goal was to grow or raise most of their own food and get the rest as locally as possible. In essence, they took the plunge to put into practice their commitment to sustainability, family, and community. Personally, this was one of the most engaging books I read this past year. I enjoyed her storytelling ability to chronicle their day to day adventures and struggles and still manage to be engaging as they detailed the ecological, economic, and justice reasons for why they chose to do this.

In her own words –

“This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew . . . and of how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air.”

For more information about the book and eating local, check out the book’s website at www.animalvegetablemiracle.com.

To kick off our discussion, I have a few questions –

- Have you ever considered where your food comes from or done the research to find out?

- Is eating healthy, ethically, and humanely a priority for you as a Christian?

- What do you know about sustainability and eating locally?

I look forward to our discussion this month as we use this narrative to explore these issues.

1. What does it mean to live biblically?

A.J. Jacobs shares the insight he gets on biblical interpretation from Steven Greenberg, the first out-of-the-closet gay orthodox Jewish Rabbi:

“The whole Bible is the working out of the relationship between God and man,” says Greenberg. “God is not a dictator barking out orders and demanding silent obedience. Were it so, there would be no relationship at all. No real relationship goes just one way. There are lways two active parties. We must have reverence and awe for God and honor for the chain of tradition. But that doesn’t mean we can’t use new information to help us read the holy texts in new ways…Never blame a text from the Bible for your behavior. It’s irresponsible. Anybody who says X,Y and Z is in the bible — it’s as if one says, ‘I have no role in evaluating this.’”

2. What ways have you experienced a happy cooperation between mind and Spirit in the Word coming to life for you?

3. Have you ever used “the bible says…” as a cop out when you didn’t actually believe what you were saying?

4. What, in your opinion is the healthiest way we can approach biblical texts with which our spirits deep down cannot agree, at least in terms of a traditional interpretation of the passage?