vitalwholeness

Notes from El Salvador II

Posted: October 25, 2011 in Uncategorized
Tags: El Salvador, ministry to gangs, ministry with the disabled

After working more on the little block casita we’re helping build for Gabby and her family, we headed to the church for a conversation with leaders about our different ministries to those with disabilities. The two congregations are tackling the same mission for the same reasons – to reach out to all people with God’s love – but in remarkably different contexts. Ours is to families who have a child with a disability, most usually involving the autistic spectrum. Our amigos in El Espina are reaching out to the profoundly disabled in both body and cognitive functioning. Together, juntos, we have committed to keep one another’s ministries in prayer. We are united in knowing this is God’s will for us.

After a worship service, in which I preached from Philippians, some of the same themes I have been sharing at Broadway all fall, but in a different form for a very different context, we had a fellowship dinner in the open air. Out back the women were cooking papoosasas over the open fire. I could have eaten a dozen.

At the close of the dinner, David McGee introduced me to Estrella (star!), a remarkable and courageous woman who, with her husband, has established a relationship with gang members in one of the most feared and gang-controlled areas. Her story of the gradual forming of a Christian relationship with those gang members – often unemployed and in dire poverty – was humbling. They now trust and protect Estrella, accompanying her throughout the district. A number of the gang members have become Christian, and though they cannot leave the gang or else be killed, they can change their focus and direction, building some kind of different future for their families. With projects designed with the church they have developed nine Tilapia ponds in the area as well as home gardens. The church of Pastor Santos is the only church in the area that welcomes gang members. But most importantly, with the help of Estrella, the church is reaching out beyond its own walls.

I asked Estrella, “How did you win their trust?” And she answered, “I told them that God loves them, and I do, too.”

Notes from El Salvador

Posted: October 24, 2011 in Uncategorized
Tags: Broadway Christian Church Columbia Missouri, Disabilities, El Salvador, ENLACE

I was very pleased, in our first day in El Salvador, to leave the capital city, drive to the village of El Espino, and work on completing a house for a very special person. The church we are partnering with has a mighty goal of reaching out to the shut away persons with disabilities in their community. We moved a lot of dirt today – in preparation for cementing the floors. Gabby (and her mother and brother) will be so delighted to move out of their shanty. And it’s all because of the mission vision of this little church that has caught a vision for congregations helping to transform their communities.

We also spent time in the afternoon visiting the humble casas of these forgotten ones, the disabled, who have been kept in some custodial care at home with no other recourse. There are no agencies or governmental support. The disabilities are profound. Twenty year old adults with radical Cerebral Palsy and who weigh 50 pounds are cared for by exhausted parents, siblings, cousins. And the church is there saying, “You are not forgotten. God loves you. And we’re going to care for you.”

What prayer is said before such a bed, in such a home? A heart-felt one, desperate to receive God’s presence, healing, blessing and comfort. It’s a beginning that the door has been opened and it’s all because of this little church, the church that, when it calls the major for help, he now responds like never before. He’s seen what can happen.

Equip churches. Help them partner with communities in their transformation. Rejoice at what God does.

Tomorrow: Moving more dirt, mixing and pouring the cement, meeting with leaders to talk about the church’s ministry with “la gente con capacidades especiales.” (the people with special capacities) Then we worship. It will be long, because their worship always is. Just throw away your watches and forget about beating the Baptists to the restaurant. God’s shown up. You just can’t stay too long.

Extreme Home Makeover, Joplin, Missouri

Posted: October 20, 2011 in Uncategorized
Tags: Extreme Home Makeover - Joplin MO

Nancy Miller threw her hammer in the ring and then was selected to participate in the seven day, seven house Extreme Home Makeover in Joplin, Missouri. She worked Wednesday night, the late shift, 8:00 p.m. – 2:00 a.m. As a veteran of many church-related mission trips in many places of great need, Nancy brings a broad perspective few might boast. So her reflections on this experience, a qualitatively different one, is both informed and informing:

This build was different: a one-night stand, of sorts. The common thread was thinner, more commercially appealing, and–for the volunteers–more distant from the family who would live in this house; no conversations with the new owners as we hammered on hurricane straps or wrapped the walls with Tyvek.

But the stories were different too–the volunteers were also the survivors.

“My sister and I drove the streets all night looking for people…so many streets we couldn’t get through…”
“I had to check the animals at the vet hospital where I work; it was so close to St John’s ….”
“I looked out the back door and from clear across town I could see St John’s–we could never see it before because so many buildings had been in the way…”.
“When my husband saw the school, he dropped to his knees…”

Stories of loss, of death, of near misses. Their reasons for working on these houses were not for fifteen minutes of fame; the cameras weren’t rolling at 1 a.m. The stars were not on the roof nailing down the decking. For these volunteers the work was part of their own healing and of making a new story of hope. “When you have done it for the least of these, you have done it for me.” And for yourself, I imagine Jesus adding.

Those from other places had stories too: from far corners of Missouri, from Wisconsin, from Connecticut.

“I was away but my family was here visiting when the tornado hit…I rushed to get here and ended up staying.”
“My boss is heading the crew on this house. He said, ‘why don’t you come along?’ “
“I remember what it was like in 1993 and people came to help us battle flood waters.”

It may only appear to be 7 families helped with these houses, such a small drop in such a huge bucket, cynics might say. But it is really a help for the entire network of human community. The volunteers are the real receivers. And when they heal, we all heal. In this important way the stories are more universal than they are unique, played out in every Eagle, New Orleans, Galveston, Greensburg, Cedar Rapids, Nashville and Joplin, and giving us all the chance to drink from that cup and remember who we are and Whose we are.

What’s the longest you’d want to live without internet access?

Posted: October 20, 2011 in Uncategorized
Tags: electronic life, The net and culture, to plug or unplug that is the question

It’s a strange question because “time is constitutive of the reality in which it participates.” That’s how the fancy existential philosophers put it. In other words: our experience of time’s speed is determined by what’s going on. Time seems to move fast if it’s filled with great, exciting things. Time seems to move slowly if we’re bored, agonizing, anchored in burden or drudgery. If things are really significant, time may seem to stop. The most pleasurable moments may pass most quickly.

What’s the longest I’d want to live without being plugged in?

I’d want to live without long enough to not depend on it, long enough that it didn’t act as a replacement for face-to-face relationships, long enough for it to not be the security blanket in my pocket, long enough so that I’m reminded of the deeper ways I’m connected to the universe.

I’d want to live without it no longer than if I felt disconnected from the way the world communicates, no longer than I lost touch with communities who do communicate that way, no longer than I couldn’t receive texts from my brother across the state, emails from friends who live 12 hours away by car, blogs from people I care about living 12 hours away by plane, news piped in from cell phone cameras live in some global hot spot.

How long without? Time is a funny business – it depends on what is going on. It could be long and it could be short, but in the end, I don’t want secondary things to masquerade as primary things and I don’t want to be disconnected from what I care about. That’s how long.

Finding our Hearts: It’s about the Relationship

Posted: October 20, 2011 in Uncategorized
Tags: Building Relationships, El Salvador, Mission Trips

Lynelle Phillips recently shared a story about a rural village in Honduras, one which received visits from her own Masters of Public Health interns and Engineers Without Borders.

The Engineers were ready to fix things because that’s what they do and they can. In fact, they had some pretty good and ingenious solutions to their public water problems. But the villagers were passive, not responding to their recommendations. In a different kind of approach the Nurses Without Borders ( my name!) focused instead on building relationships, finding out what their real lives and needs were about. This helped create a relationship of trust, one in which all were listening and exploring, seeking the solution together. In time, villagers, nurses and engineers may find a way together.

As Lynelle reflected on our new relationship with brothers and sisters in El Salvador, she concluded:

Well-intentioned Americans have been traveling to impoverished communities with superior resources, knowledge and skills in attempts to “fix” them for decades. The reward of a mission trip may not lie in how many bricks are stacked and walls are built and wells are dug, but in the relationships that develop and the stories you collect and bring home. It is these relationships that foster understanding, and blend us together in one overarching spectrum of humanity.

El Salvador Juntos (Together) team Visits El Salvador

Posted: October 18, 2011 in Uncategorized
Tags: El Salvador

A Juntos, “together” team from Broadway Christian Church will be leaving to share faith and life with our Salvadoran brothers and sisters beginning October 22 and continuing to October 29.

We will be working in the area of El Espina with the church of San Piedro and its minister, Pastor Santos. Our partner organization is ENLACE, a Christ-centered ministry that equips local churches to transform their communities. Our time will be spent doing some practical work as we help create a block security wall around a school. But of equal or greater importance will be worshiping with new friends, sharing conversations about the work they are already doing and our own lives, and exploring the ways our two churches are attempting to reach out to those with disabilities – Los Especiales.

It has been unseasonably rainy in El Salvador, but not so much in the area in which we will be working.

We have created a new Facebook page for this mission pilgrimage that you can follow here:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Juntos-Broadway-Christian-Church-walking-together-with-El-Salvador/272552916117667?sk=wall

Follow the work of ENLACE through their blog here:

http://www.enlaceonline.org/blog/

Stephen Carter Up Close

Posted: October 17, 2011 in Uncategorized
Tags: Schiffman Lecture in Religious Studies, Stephen Carter, The Violence of Peace

I was privileged to hear Stephen Carter speak tonight at Columbia College. Carter was the speaker for the annual Schiffman Lecture in Religious Studies. The Yale professor has been engendering public conversation around ethics, religion and politics for the past thirty years, bouncing into the national arena with his best seller, The Culture of Disbelief. It would not be his last. I bought my copy of the latest tonight, The Violence of Peace (Beast Books, 2011).

The erudite presentation included a couple of simple propositions, both which swim upstream in common public discourse now.

The first was that religious discourse has always been a part of American politics, from the pre-revolutionary period, to abolition, to the civil rights movement. Those who deny this are simply ahistorical. The fact that Governor Romney’s Mormonism has become a political issue is not a shocking development on the American stage. Our sitting president, during his campaign for office 2008, was highly scrutinized for his church affiliation and in particular his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. That, too, was not a new phenomenon in American politics. All past public figures have been evaluated, in one way or another, according to religious issues. Ours is not a religiously vacant or neutral republic. Debate on policy, law and legislation has always included moral dimensions informed by religious claims.

If there was a controversial position in Carter’s speech it might have been found in point two, namely, that the traditions that grew around the metaphor of the wall of separation between church and state (pre-existing Jefferson) were chiefly designed to protect religion from the encroachment of government and not the other way around. I would argue that the concern moves two ways, that the non-establishment clause of the First Amendment also protects government from the encroachment of religion. Carter, though, would also define establishment as a government climbing over the wall of separation issue; meddling with the church should be avoided universally, even by favoring one religious entity over another.

Though Carter in no way agrees with many religious positions exercised out of this freedom he believes, nevertheless, that such freedom must be safeguarded in a true democracy.

I’ll let you know about The Violence of Peace. I’m betting it’s as good as all his others.

The Top Ten Reasons I Won’t Use Lists

Posted: October 14, 2011 in Uncategorized
Tags: Top Ten Reasons not to List the Top Ten Reasons

Every single time my web browser opens there is another list. The Top Ten Reasons You’re Going to Lose Your Job. The Top Ten Reasons People Get Fat. The Top Ten Reasons My Dog is Better Than Your Dog.

The only reason that we are provided a list for every day of the year must be because we want them. Why else would these savvy web pushers push lists?

Well, I believe lists are an enormous cultural and personal cop out. And in an act of pure defiance I would like to share why I will never publish a list:

1. Lists trivialize the complexity of the real dynamics that go on behind every issue

2. We’re lazy and want someone else to do the work for us

3. Too many preachers want to reduce the mystery of God and our practice of faith to something more concrete than it actually is

4. We believe that if we only have it on a list we’re somehow in control of it

5. My lists go with my shirts into the washing machine

6. I’ve been on someone’s list before

7. WWJD? To my knowledge Jesus never made lists

8. Lists communicate a false sense of importance

9. Usually people run out of things to list by #8 and have to make stuff up for #9 and #10

10. I misplaced my list of future must-write blogs and have to instead write about lists

The Savaging of the Best

Posted: October 12, 2011 in Uncategorized

I have a dear clergy friend who has just been savaged by the church she has served faithfully and successfully for years. She is not a pedophile. She did not plunder the church’s financial cookie jar.

It was a fairly small, discontent, self-centered, entitled, well-organized and unholy coalition that inflicted the damage, that poisoned the water. The violence is conspicuous, and of course, always rationalized. The darkness is always projected upon the victim, who is sacrificed on the altar of the perpetrator’s arrogance.

So, in these cases, does the church have some kind of death wish, sacrificing the leadership it has called out? Or is it simpler and worse than that? Is it just the dark underbelly of human nature, a reminder that what we most need to be saved from is ourselves?

How sad. I’m glad there are bright, inspiring, hopeful stories to balance this one. I’m consciously bringing several to mind.

Kyrie eleison.

Unless a Grain of Wheat Falls

Posted: October 8, 2011 in Uncategorized
Tags: El Salvador, Romero, Slaughter of the Jesuit Priests

So it seems that El Salvador’s Supreme Court has refused to order the detention of the military officers indicted for the 1989 slayings of the six Jesuit priests in San Salvador (AP Oct 7 2011). It is the latest indignity. On the night of November 18, 1989, an elite force of the Salvadoran military laid siege to the residence of the University of Central America. When they were done six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her young daughter were dead.

At the time of the slaying we in the United States were well on the way to becoming aware of the long history of atrocity generated by the civil war, a product of the cold war. El Salvador and its population were pawns in the geopolitical game. And the Salvadoran military and its paramilitaries – rampaging and slaughtering thousands – were equipped and trained by the United States. The School of the Americas was conspicuous in this regard. Romero, the Jesuits, the American sisters – all slaughtered. Thousands of peasants, slaughtered. There was no more covering it up; we were complicit in the atrocity. Pandora was out of her box. The military was eliminating all resistance – not only revolutionaries standing against their oppression – but the religious who stood beside the violated. The oligarchy, the powerful ruling families of El Salvador, those who had taken all the land from the peasants to establish their coffee plantations, were protected by military forces who eliminated any threat to their accustomed way of life.

A year after the slaughter of the Jesuits, a minister in the United Church of Canada, Robert Smith, traveled to El Salvador for a special commemoration of the slaughter of the Jesuits. I remember Smith telling his story in a clergy gathering just after his return:

A year later I was part of the ecumenical group who gathered in the Romero chapel to remember the death of the martyrs. The evening was long, the air close, and those of us who had traveled long miles to be present were beginning to flag when Jon Sobrino, the seventh Jesuit who, but for the fact he was out of the country that fateful night, would have also been assassinated, came to the microphone. He held in his hands a tray on which rested eight clay flower pots filled with earth. His hands shook as he solemnly planted a single frijole, the bean which is the staple food of the Salvadoran peasant, in each of the pots. He placed the tray before the tomb of the martyrs and turned and said softly the only words he could have said, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies it remains alone, but if it dies it bears much fruit.”