Mission Yearbook: Sojourners magazine’s editor in chief discusses ‘Light for the Way’

Betsy Shirley, the editor in chief of Sojourners, recently told the hosts of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” that resilience in difficult times such as the present can be strengthened by knowing what our forebears went through, and what helped them to stand.

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Betsy Shirley

Shirley joined the podcast, hosted each week by Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe, to also talk about the Sojourners compendium, “Light for the Way: Seeking Simplicity, Connection and Repair in a Broken World.” Listen to her 53-minute discussion with the hosts here.

When Shirley hears a reference to “resilience,” she said she thinks about “the Christians who have come before us who have been through, maybe not the exact same issues we’re facing today, but have lived through issues or timelines … where people seem to have forgotten how to share, whether that’s power or resources.”

“We’re not the first people to experience that,” she said. “God has been faithful through those people and those situations, and that gives me a little more confidence to say, ‘This is not the world as we would prefer it to be, and yet God is present, as God has ever been in the past.’”

For months now, “our readers and our staff and I have had this feeling of anxiety,” Shirley said. “Are we doing enough to protect the people being harmed by this onslaught of policies? Are we showing up in the right ways?”

One thing that’s important to remember is “the United States has never been a place where the national ideals of liberty and justice for all have ever been realized,” Shirley said. “We can look at people in our church and in our cities who have not experienced radical flourishing for themselves or their communities.”

Catoe asked Shirley to describe some of the impacts that Sojourners articles have had on readers and on others.

She noted that the word “magazine” comes from the root for “storehouse.” Shirley said in her mind, a magazine is like “a pantry full of all kinds of snacks. The variety is an important part of what it means to have a magazine.”

Sojourners includes reporting, opinion pieces, Bible studies and more. “We have spiritual reflections and the fun stuff that happens in our culture. It’s a real intentional mix,” she said. “We have a mix of authors who write for us, and I’m grateful for that.”

The mission at Sojourners is to articulate the biblical call to social justice, she noted. “We don’t want to be the journal of the right opinion on Christian justice. That’s impossible,” Shirley said. “We are a table around which a lot of people are gathered.” The editors try to “bring conversations we think are important to this ongoing conversation and to be in dialogue with others who are asking these questions and living these issues.”

As a reader, “that’s what I want from publications,” she said.

Last summer Shirley interviewed Jarvis Williams, a former pastor who’s now a pro-democracy organizer. “I was sharing with him some of these anxieties,” including worries around “are we doing enough?” she recalled. “He very kindly answered my questions, and then he said to me, ‘Let me put on my pastoral hat for a second.’” Then he said, “If you think the world is all evil and you are just bringing the goodness to help it, you have thought a thought that is not Christian. You are telling yourself a story that’s not even authentic to the Christian faith. Humanity didn’t just start having these problems this election cycle.”

“Whew!” Shirley told the hosts. “I thought that was really powerful and important.”

“I have moments of greed and prejudice and disliking things and not being true,” she said. “It’s not, ‘Let me and my posse come and help with these problems or solve the issues those people have caused.’ It’s more a sense of, ‘We are all facing these, and yes, certain people bring different things to the conversation, but we’re all in this together’” in an effort to bring about “mutual flourishing and liberation.”

New editions of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast" drop here every Thursday.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Teresa Bidart, Mission Specialist, Self-Development of People, Presbyterian Life & Witness
Ricky Blade, Customer Service Representative, Constituent Ministry, Presbyterian Life & Witness

Let us pray:

Dear Lord, we lift up your children who are burdened with the trauma of their childhood. We pray that your healing peace might wash over them, so that they might overcome their history and become light for others. Amen.

Mission Yearbook: Book encourages a walk of faith

The writing team of the Rev. Dr. Cynthia Campbell and the Rev. Christine Coy Fohr, which previously gave us “Meeting Jesus at the Table: A Lenten Study,” has a new book that’s been published by Westminster John Knox Press, and the two stopped by the virtual studios of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” to talk about it. Listen to their 49-minute conversation with hosts Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe here.

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Westminster John Knox Press published "Meeting Jesus on the Road."

Campbell served in ministry, taught at seminaries and was the ninth president of McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. Coy Fohr is head pastor at Harvey Browne Presbyterian Church in Louisville. Their new book is “Meeting Jesus on the Road: A Lenten Study.” Videos to aid group studies of the book are here.

Campbell said the title for the new book came from a collection of essays from Kosuke Koyama called “Three Mile an Hour God.” “His point was if you walk and try to have a conversation at the same time, 3 miles per hour is probably as much as you can do,” Campbell said. “God slowed God’s self down to 3 miles per hour. The incarnation happens in the bodies we actually inhabit, with all the limitations and all the possibilities.”

“If we believe in this 3 miles per hour God who chose to be incarnate and take on flesh, we should let our spiritual and physical lives do the same,” she said, “that they can come alongside one another and build one another up.”

Walking prompts are included in the book, Campbell noted.

“I love the idea of holding a person or an issue in your mind or your heart as you take a walk,” she said. 

As people walk their neighborhood or one nearby, they’re asked, “What did you see? What does that tell you about who lives there?” Campbell said. “Jesus lived in a real location. You can go to Israel-Palestine and there are guides who will say, ‘this is exactly where the Sermon on the Mount happened.’ We don’t know that, but what we do know is that he was in the whole region, and you can look around. Context matters, and being aware of that is a very important spiritual discipline.”

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The Rev. Christine Coy Fohr

Coy Fohr wrote a chapter on walking a labyrinth. “People for centuries have tried to slow down and be mindful and prayerful,” she said. “There’s a spiritual practice in walking unattached to wherever we’re going.”

The very act of slowing down “can be so important to being present in a way that we see Jesus being present to people,” she said.

In Mark’s gospel, Jesus tries multiple times to explain to the disciples what discipleship entails, Campbell said. “It’s about decentering yourself. It’s about changing allegiance from the reign of Caesar to the reign of God, to living in this new, dynamic, different way,” she said. “I think Jesus had to understand there was no way these folks would really get it until they are on the other side of the resurrection, which is where the gospels are written.”

“These are hard questions,” she said. “Who am I loyal to? What’s the center of my values, and what am I willing to put on the line for that? How much of me am I willing to invest in living in a different way?”

Coy Fohr also wrote the final chapter, on Easter itself. In that chapter, the authors note that after his resurrection, Jesus instructed the people to “go back to Galilee and there you’ll find me,” she said. “We explored what that means, to go back to the thing that first captured your heart, that first got you on this journey, and it just keeps going.”

“You’re not thinking, I’ve reached the endpoint and I’m good to go,” she said. “It’s an ongoing process, and it’s not an easy process.”

“It’s also about going back to that place where you were first captivated by Jesus and by this joy of living your life differently, and the possibility that holds.”

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Cheryl Barnes,  Lead, Global Ecumenical Liaison-US, Global Ecumenical Partnerships, Presbyterian Life & Witness
David Barnhart, Film Producer, Advocacy & Community Engagement, Presbyterian Life & Witness   

Let us pray:

God of love, you came down to this lowly place because you loved us so much. Help us to follow you and go out to the ends of the world to proclaim the gospel to the unreached, that your kingdom may come on this earth! We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Mission Yearbook: Authors discuss being Presbyterian in a dysvangelical nation

The Rev. Alex Thornburg and the Rev. Ted V. Foote Jr., the authors of “Being Presbyterian in a Dysvangelical America: A Guide to Reclaiming the Good News of God’s Grace,” newly published by Westminster John Knox Press, appeared recently on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast.” Listen to their conversation with hosts Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe here.

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Thornburg is pastor of Heartland Presbyterian Church in Clive, Iowa. Foote, himself a longtime pastor, teaches pastoral ministry and leadership at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Previous collaborations include “Being Disciples of Jesus in a Dot.Com World” and “Being Presbyterian in the Bible Belt.”

“You can believe that immigrants and refugees are dangerous. You can believe empathy is toxic and women are second-class citizens. You have the right to believe that,” Thornburg told the podcast hosts. “Just don’t call it Christian, because it’s not.”

Thornburg said “dysvangelical” is a term coined by Foote to describe “a voice that’s articulated and has a lot of political power,” used by people who are “defining what they understand ‘Christian’ to be. We wrote this book in many ways to push against that and what Presbyterians understand what it means to be faithful” and “not defined by this very loud public voice that’s got a lot of power these days.”

The ”gospel of grace is where we all have ultimate value,” Foote said. But some instead “want to turn away from the table with everyone else and go to their own small table and change the recipe.”

There’s no better good news than God’s grace, Thornburg said. “Ted argues that some have taken the good news and turned it into something that’s bad, and that’s mean-spirited,” Thornburg said. “They have turned the good news into something dysfunctional, distorted and dystopian.”

“They have taken the good news of the gospel and used it to harm folks,” Thornburg said. It’s like Superman and the Bizarro World from the 1950s, Thornburg said, a world where everything was topsy-turvy from the world of that era.

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“We freely admit that even in our own tradition, the Presbyterian Reformed tradition, we have had had times in our history that have embraced dysvangelical beliefs,” Thornburg said. “We still see some of that in the church today.”

According to Foote, one tack the book takes is to “look at historical development to see how the gospel can come alive in different times and places.”

“We’ve tried to locate people who were not the great men and women in history — everyday folks with something to say and it just wasn’t heard,” Foote said. “We don’t always get it right, but we want to trust that God’s Spirit in Christ, with love, moves us forward together to be the people God intends.”

“What the world needs — and we believe Presbyterians can offer this if we stay true to our tradition — is good news,” Thornburg said. “At the core of our Reformed Christian theology is grace — grace that embraces us in the midst of our brokenness, wherever we are.”

One thing Thornburg loves about the PC(USA) “is that it’s changed its mind,” he said. “It’s painful to have a revelation. Repentance means turning around and changing your mind. That’s what we celebrate, that we are always open to changing our mind.”

Among the examples Thornburg pointed out are historic ways some in the church treated African Americans, LGBTQ folks and “not recognizing women as full members of the church.” Fortunately, “God was a work to lead us” to where the church is now.

“I don’t want to rest on our laurels,” Foote said. “If we go through our [Presbyterian] family history, we have disagreed and people don’t come to the family reunions anymore.”

Our communities and our nation “needs a Presbyterian Church that stands up and says [dysvangelicalism] is wrong. This is not who God calls us to be,” Thornburg said. “While we’re imperfect and we sometimes show up late to the party, we have something to give the world — something to pronounce and proclaim that we think might make a difference in this moment.”

New editions of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” are released every Thursday. Listen to previous episodes here.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Servicean Life & Witness (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Christine Long,  Church Consultant – Tacoma, WA, Engagement & Church Relations, The Board of Pensions
Lisa Love, Deputy General Counsel, Legal, The Presbyterian Foundation                           

Let us pray:

Holy One, may we hear your calling us to participate in your inbreaking kingdom. May we recognize just how you have prepared us. And may we, with gratitude, give as you ask. In Christ’s name. Amen.

Mission Yearbook: Editor shares how new book can help families grow together in God’s love

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Jessica Miller Kelley, a senior acquisitions editor at Westminster John Knox Press and the editor of the new book “Growing in God’s Love: A Family Devotional,” recently told the hosts of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” that when families read the Bible together, they must balance honesty with appropriateness.

“There are so many stories in Scripture that are violent or scary or may imply things about God that we don’t want our kids to believe,” she told Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe during a 57-minute conversation that can be heard here. “The answer to the problem is not to avoid the texts altogether, but to be honest about who wrote the Bible and why, so that we’re teaching kids the Bible was written by people who loved and followed God and were trying to make sense of the world, like we do.”

Kelley added, “Kids have such creative insights about faith and about life. The more conversations we can spark about important issues, the better it is for everybody.” Whether a question elicits “a Sunday school answer or not, just wrestling with Scripture, with faith and with each other,” can help families to grow closer.

“The beautiful thing about Scripture is it took a community to write it, and it took a community to figure out what books were going to be in there,” Catoe said. “I think we miss that communal way of reading Scripture.”

Highlighting stories that are sometimes overlooked “can be a fun way, especially with kids but adults too, to show how interesting Scripture is,” Kelley said. “It can tell us what people were like then and how we can wrestle with God today, too.”

Reading the Bible together “can be scary,” she said. “What if your kid says something you find theologically abhorrent?” But learning about, say, Thomas and his doubts can teach children that “doubt isn’t the absence of trust or faith in God or Scripture or any of that, but an expression of care, that you care enough to wrestle with it.”

The ”fun thing” about a resource for people of all ages is “you’re theoretically teaching kids, but the adult is learning right alongside the kids, and it becomes accessible for everyone,” she said. Children and grownups both learn from the act of storytelling: “how would you tell the story of our family’s origin, our family’s history in faith?” Kelley said. “It wouldn’t sound like Abraham and Sarah, but it would have a similar purpose of showing us who we are and learning from our past.”

When we imagine Scripture coming from those kinds of questions, “it seems a little less magical,” she said. “It’s not a golden book falling from the sky, but it becomes more relatable and understandable as part of human history — how we’re all trying to make sense of the world and connect with God and to see how our life experiences connect to God.”

Every devotion has response options, including discuss, discover and do. Children can act out a story, then talk about the experience, Kelley said. “We tend to see ourselves as the hero in the story, the same as those who wrote the Bible,” she said. “Today especially we need to think about not being the hero and what that means about what we can take from these stories. Hopefully the invitation to play with Scripture can invite some of those insights.”

The book is part of what Kelley called “a trusted brand that Westminster John Knox Press has, the ‘Growing in God’s Love’ line.”

“It’s theology you don’t have to un-teach later. It’s inclusive, and being a story Bible, it’s illustrated, and the illustrations show Jesus more authentically with folk in the brown skin tones that they would have had, and not give erroneous ideas about the Bible.”

“I believe it’s really important to pass on our values to our kids, and those can be rooted in Scripture,” Kelley said. “It’s a shared library we’re all drawing from.”

“Growing in God’s Love: A Family Devotional” is published in collaboration with Around the Table, an initiative of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). 

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Stacy Davis, Senior Academic Editor, Publishing & Editorial, Presbyterian Publishing Corporation
John DePaul, Director, Enterprise Reporting & Analytics, Information Technology, Board of Pensions                               

Let us pray:

Loving God, may we be and see others as bridges of hope and transformation. Amen.

Mission Yearbook: Author and pastor proposes better ways of Bible reading

In 17 years of church ministry, the Rev.  Zach Lambert has seen Scripture “read and applied in harmful ways.” With the recent release of his book “Better Ways to Read the Bible: Transforming a Weapon of Harm Into a Tool of Healing,” Lambert discusses how the faith community he leads, Restore Church in Austin, Texas, is working to help bring about one of Jesus’ most important ministry roles: “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

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Lambert was a recent guest on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast,” hosted each week by Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe. Listen to their 49-minute conversation here.

Lambert said he’s seen the Bible weaponized “in horrific ways, to subjugate women, justify racism and bash LGBTQ people, cover up abuse and even try to silence anyone who speaks up about those injustices. I became convinced early on [in ministry] that this is the opposite of what Jesus wants.”

At Restore Church, finding better ways to read the Bible began in community, “and I think that’s the most important thing,” he said. “When you’re reading the Bible in a diverse and healthy community, you have a lot less chance of hurting people.” Before and during the Civil War, a substantial amount of defenses for chattel slavery were penned by members of the clergy, Lambert noted. “I can only imagine if it had been a group of both white and Black pastors in a room talking about biblical interpretation, the Black pastors would have said, ‘No, it doesn’t mean that. That’s not how you interpret that passage. I know because of my experience as a Black person in America and because of my loved ones who have been tortured into chattel slavery.’”

Lambert and members of Restore Church came up with four healthy lenses for biblical interpretation, which appear in the book:

• Jesus, the Christo-centric lens. “Jesus wants all parts of our life, including our biblical interpretation,” which leads to “abundant life for us and neighbors,” he said.
• Context, the historical-critical analysis of Scripture, including context, culture and genre.
• Flourishing. Lambert includes a chapter on liberation theology.
• Fruitfulness, which Lambert identifies as “the lens we use at our church most frequently to say, ‘Jesus said his followers would be known by their fruit.’ Our biblical interpretation should be leading to more of those in us and in the world.”

“My hope is that the book is pastoral,” he said. “Anytime we do deconstruction or reconstruction, it comes from a trauma-informed pastoral lens, understanding just how deep religious trauma is for a lot of people.”

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Comparing faith to a house made of bricks, Lambert likened hearing something that conflicts with what we’ve experienced to taking a brick out of our house of faith and determining whether, “OK, am I going to ignore my experience, put this brick back into the house and pretend like nothing happened? Do I need to replace this with something that more aligns with my experience because it’s more truthful now, or am I throwing this completely away because I can’t engage with it right now?”

That’s why tools including books and podcasts can be helpful in interpreting the Bible, he said. “We get to move away from soundbite culture that doesn’t allow for much nuance or conversation,” Lambert said, “and move into spaces where we’re actually digging deep into some of these things.”

Restore Church thinks of itself as post-evangelical, he said. “We attempt to take what evangelicals are good at” including personal spirituality and accessibility.

There are post-evangelicals in many PC(USA) and other mainline congregations, Lambert said. “How do we make sure we’re ready to care for those people, support those people, and unleash those people into ministry roles? A lot of them are sharp leaders and hard workers. They know how to get things off the ground. How can we mobilize folks who have those cool characteristics for positive purposes?”

“My proposal,” he said, “is we all lean into things we’re uniquely good at and build bridges not based on ecclesiology or polity or church structure, but on shared values.”

Listen to previous episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” here.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Erin Skinner, Ministry Relations Officer, Development Office, The Presbyterian Foundation
Ashley Smalley-Ray, VP Director of Compliance, Trust Services, The Presbyterian Foundation     

Let us pray:

God of all, it is our greatest joy to give you thanks and praise. Open our hearts to the movement of your Spirit thorugh all the landscapes of our lives. Guide us to be your hands and feet as we faithfully serve in a world of need. Amen.

Mission Yearbook: Finding healing in community through shared stories

PC(USA) pastor and former Boston television news anchor the Rev. Liz Walker presented what she’s learned from a community of trauma victims during a recent episode of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast.” Listen to Walker’s 51-minute conversation with podcast hosts Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe here.

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In her recent book “No One Left Alone: A Story of How Community Helps Us Heal,” Walker, the former pastor of Roxbury Presbyterian Church in Boston, discusses the “Can We Talk? Community Conversations on Trauma and Healing” gatherings that go on at Roxbury Presbyterian Church and 20 other locations. People come to briefly share their stories around trauma, then sit down and listen to other stories.

When Walker began her pastorate at Roxbury, “the neighborhood was in the midst of a gang war. Our church wanted to do something more than the usual [advocacy for] improved policies or the allocation of funds,” she said. Church leaders decided to focus on “people in pain: people who had lost loved ones to gun violence, and people who sometimes commit violence.”

Some of the research they conducted uncovered “this notion of collective trauma: an entire community could be victimized by any violent act,” Walker said.

“The way we decided to deal with it was to invite people to the basement of the church — lots of good things happen in church basements — to talk about their pain, their experiences, their trauma, their violence, but to talk about it from an emotional standpoint, not to talk about it to fix it,” she said. “We’ve learned over the past 10 years that story sharing helps people feel not so alone, to process the pain they are in, and ultimately can heal a community — not heal in the sense of fixing things or resolving these issues, but healing in the sense of bringing people together and finding ways to work with each other.”

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Rev. Liz Walker

She described the community transformation that occurred as “soft transformation, that person-to-person transformation. It’s something I believe the church absolutely is primed to do.”

The story sharing program began with a death in the church. A young member died as a result of gun violence in the neighborhood. He was out with his half-brother near his home when they were caught in a shooting.

When the man was killed, “his family was devastated, as were his neighbors,” Walker said. “The church comes alongside the family and does the best it can to support this family. There’s a funeral, and we come over and sit with the family. But then we leave, and the world moves on — but the family is stuck in that moment of trauma. There are victim support groups, but there is always an expiration date on the support of families of homicide. The pain doesn’t go away.”

As she’s listened to people’s stories, “what I have learned is grief is a rollercoaster. Trauma can happen over and over again,” Walker said. This young man’s mother, a deacon and a leader in the church, “had already dealt with the funerals of lots of other people, but had never experienced anything like this.”

“She didn’t say she felt like God had deserted her, but she didn’t want to have anything to do with God,” Walker said. “That’s what we know about trauma: You disconnect from your neighbors, from yourself, and from your higher power, from God. That’s a bad place to be lost in, and it’s an isolating place to be lost in.”

“We have made the road as we’ve walked it, in many ways,” Walker told the hosts. “We’ve realized our nation is now full of traumatized people for all kinds of reasons. By sharing your story, you start breaking out of that stuck place.”

Doong pointed out that sharing one’s story “is not going to change the fact that a loved one is gone or that someone has experienced something very tragic.” But story sharing “does allow someone to feel heard and to feel connected, and sometimes that’s worth its weight in gold, even when it’s not something you can measure.”

New episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous editions here.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Shawn Ford, Internal Auditor, Internal Audit, Administrative Services Group
Lynne Foreman, Major Gifts Officer, Stewardship and Major Gift Officers, Administrative Services Group

Let us pray:

Almighty God, giver of all good gifts, bless our efforts to provide to the people of this world. Through these efforts, may more of your children know the abundant life that Christ came to bring us. Amen.

Mission Yearbook: Rethinking how to care for church leaders

How can clergy and other church leaders be more resilient and avoid burnout?

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That was the question posed to a recent guest on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast,” hosted each week by Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe. Dr. Kate Rae Davis, the founder and executive director of the Center for Transforming Engagement at the Seattle School for Theology and Psychology, said she starts with the understanding that “people are already resilient.”

“Pastors are resilient, or they wouldn’t be [in church pulpits] every Sunday. Our lay leaders are resilient, or they wouldn’t be showing up to do the work they care about, even above and beyond their normal work,” Davis said. “We already have resilience. How can we tap into it?”

Listen to the 44-minute conversation here. Resilience resources can be found here.

Research by the Center for Transforming Engagement helped distill contributors to resilience among church leaders into three areas: people, practices and purpose.

People form a leader’s community of support. Practices, Davis said, refers to “everything you do to keep yourself well and healthy in every meaning of the word.” Purpose “is about meaning-making and calling. It’s about the bigger picture of why I do what I do. What’s the lesson I learn from setbacks and hardships that makes me more equipped” to face them? she asked.

For many of the pastors she works with, “purpose is the one we live in. … It’s inherently connected to the work of pastoring,” Davis said. “Meaning-making is what we’re training to do for the church and for others” with services that include pastoral care. “It’s all the same work. We tend to get into ministry because of some sense of call, some sense of ‘there’s something bigger than just my life that I want to dedicate my life to.’”

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Dr. Kate Rae Davis

Practices are habits “most of us know we’re supposed to be doing. It’s a matter of getting ourselves to actually do it,” she said. “We know we should be spending more time in prayer and meditation and less time stressing over our in-box. It’s how we stack those habits, and more importantly, how we put together a community of accountability.”

The piece that’s often overlooked in ministry is people, Davis said.

“The people we care about ministry leaders having is the person who can say, ‘hey, you just went through something really stressful in your church. How are you handling that?’ Or, ‘you just had this big event. How are you taking care of yourself?’ That’s a different level of friendship than what we often have access to, which is much more often where we’re the ones offering care, if you’re in a traditional ordained ministry role.”

“Even for our lay leaders, it’s a level of intimacy to invite that kind of feedback from others,” she said. “That’s the piece we see people most hungry for.”

Catoe asked: How do we navigate church cultures that have formed around suffering servant models for their leaders?

“The boundarylessness we have in ministry, we have to unlearn that,” Davis said. “We have to learn other stories of what it means that Jesus died for me, died for us, and what his ministry looks like in my life.”

The dilemma we are facing in this “possibly reforming era of being the church right now is congregations won’t yet know how to treat a pastor who isn’t bleeding out for the ministry, and pastors won’t quite know how to be boundaried with their ministry,” Davis said. “How do we relearn leadership skills more aligned to what God wants for us?”

Davis said the Center for Transforming Engagement added a fourth “p” word, “place,” to the list of three.

“We can do a lot to condition ourselves to heat. I love a good sauna for 20 minutes, but I don’t want to live in that kind of heat,” she said. “It’s the same with some of these leadership positions. We can do them for short periods, but if the heat gets too much, we can’t live there.”

New editions of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous episodes here.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Tina Finley, Accountant, General Ledger Office, Administrative Services Group
Rob Fohr, VP, Strategic Alignment & Mid-Council Relations, Strategic Alignment, The Presbyterian Foundation         

Let us pray:

Gracious God, by your Spirit you inspire our efforts to feed the hungry, preach the good news and share your love. Your people, all your children, are hungry for food, for friends, for peace and for the good news. As you have fed us, bless our efforts to feed each other, for we serve in your name. Amen.

Mission Yearbook: Mystical reading opens new paths to encounter God, author says

Of all the ways we can read the Bible, the mystics offer us one that can help us encounter and experience God in ways other traditions can’t.

Carl McColman, a speaker, teacher and retreat leader who recently published “Read the Bible like a Mystic: Contemplative Wisdom and the Word,” was a recent guest of Simon Doong, host of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast.” Their 56-minute conversation can be heard here.

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Carl McColman appeared last week on "A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast."

In his book, McColman suggests four interpretive ways of reading Scripture: the literalist approach, an agnostic or atheist approach, the historical-critical approach used by many Presbyterians, and the mystical approach based on “the writings and teachings of Christian writers and thought leaders we have called mystics,” McColman said. “What they offer us is this fourth hermeneutical approach which in many ways weaves the best of the other three.”

“Contemplatives would say they ask the hard questions so they can wrestle with their faith and be invited deeper,” he said. “It’s anchored in seeking that relationship with the Holy, the Mystery, without any negativity toward the gift of scholarship and the historical-critical method.”

Theologians dating back to Origen stressed that reading the Bible is “about bringing love and grace, freedom, mercy and kindness into the world,” McColman said, citing as an example the distinction conservative and progressive Christians see in the taxonomy of sin.

“In conservative world, sin is a personal dynamic,” McColman said. “The salvation Jesus offers is deliverance from those personal failings. On the liberal side, it’s more academically informed, more cognizant of the role that psychology, sociology and cultural forces play in our personal behavior. It de-emphasizes the need for personal conversion and is more of a pushback against systemic sin,” including racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia, and economic injustice.

“Conservatives focus on the individual’s program for self-improvement or self-healing and give the system a pass,” he said. “Liberals tend to do it the other way around. Really, the biblical text fires on both those cylinders.”

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While McColman said he’s a member of the progressive camp both theologically and philosophically and is “very sympathetic to how we struggle for justice and dismantle the systems of oppression and privilege,” there is “still the question, if there is a God, what does it mean for me and my heart to encounter the living God, and how does that make a difference in my life?”

“It’s less about what our thermostat will be set on in eternity,” he said, “and it’s more about how do I enter into a transformed life here and now? That’s where the mystics challenge all of us, whether you identify as conservative or progressive. Maybe we all need a more robust definition of what spirituality is.”

Part of that has to do with “this paradox of interior transformation and also social revolution, this idea that the Spirit of God calls us into a revolutionary society, the Beloved Community, a society based on love and kindness and kinship and relationship,” he said.

“For people of goodwill, the text lands in different ways,” McColman told Doong, and that’s why it’s best to interpret the Bible in community and not individually.

“There’s this bedrock principle that church happens in community,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there isn’t space for that individual experience. It’s a kind of tension. We need the individual encounter with the Mystery, but we also need the community to hone and form and shape our best practices as people of faith.”

“Who gets to decide? We have to decide together,” McColman said. “There has to be communal discernment.”

McColman believes the missing “secret sauce” in many progressive churches with, for example, a membership that’s aging is “that personal challenge. How are you giving your life to the spirit of love, the spirit of Christ, the spirit of holiness? How is this making a difference, and how can it help transform and heal society?”

New editions of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous installments here.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Mark DeSantis, Vice President, IT Infrastructure & Security, Information Technology, Board of Pensions
Ann DeVilbiss,  Production Associate, Publishing & Editorial, Presbyterian Publishing Corporation 

Let us pray:

Christ, we thank you for being the Word made flesh. As you ministered to those around you through touch, sight and sound, teach us to make use of our whole selves — body, mind and spirit—to do your work. Give us the courage to act and the grace to welcome all with a loving spirit. Amen.