“Being listened to is so close to being loved that most people cannot tell the difference.” – David Augsburger, Mennonite teacher and author Throughout the next year Central District Conference is conducting Sacred Listening conversations across the conference.  The goal, as I understand it, is for conference leadership to get a sense of where the Spirit has been and is moving among us and how the conference can best serve congregations in light of the effects of Covid.  And to share some of these stories across congregations for us to better know one another.  This past Sunday was our turn.  Three folks representing Central District Conference worshiped with us and led a Sacred Listening conversation over lunch in the fellowship hall where 17 of us represented CMC.  It felt kind of like a one-sided dinner date in which one partner asks all the questions and the other partner talks about

This past weekend I was in Minnesota at the invitation of St. Paul Mennonite Fellowship.  They have an annual retreat at a secluded retreat center an hour north of the twin cities.  The time includes input from a guest and planning for the coming year.  I presented about transitions. The congregation is small – eight covenant members.  One member likened the fellowship to a base community, solidary groups that developed within Brazilian Roman Catholicism.  They have had children amongst them in the past but now range in age from 50s to 80s.  The fellowship was one of the first publicly LGBTQ-affirming congregations within the Mennonite Church.  And they suffered the consequences.  Begun as a mission church, their former conference cut off funding that had supported a half time pastor.  None of the current members grew up in the Mennonite Church.  Three are seminary grads.  They are all committed to Jesus’

“Ritual is a very ancient social technology and it fulfills the exact same roles today as it did for our ancestors thousands of years ago.” These were Dimitris Xygalatas’s closing words in an interview that aired on NPR’s All Things Considered last evening (8 minutes audio).  Host Ari Shapiro had asked him what he might say to his younger self who grew up in Greece questioning the value of the religious and secular rituals in which he participated.  Xygalatas is now an anthropologist and cognitive scientist with a new book – Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living.”  His final words to his younger self regarding ritual: “I would say embrace it.”  Early in the interview he names the ritual paradox – the fact that many people cling tightly to the importance of ritual without being able to explain why.  He observes “all our social institutions are permeated

When I was getting ready for my sabbatical I had a list of books directly related to my topic (creativity and spirituality) that I was looking forward to diving into during those months away, but in the end it was a book that wasn’t on my original list that has stuck with me the longest. It was one that caught my eye while my husband and I were browsing a bookstore during our visit to NYC and which I instantly started to devour on our subway rides around the city.  I know I’m really late to the Brené Brown bandwagon, but there was just something about her book, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience, that jumped out at me. Maybe it was that it includes lots of beautiful photos and diagrams and even a few cartoons, or maybe it was that Brown attempts

After seeing various verses cited in articles I’ve read, I recently purchased the First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament.  It was released in 2021, the work of a twelve-member translation council from diverse tribal heritages and geographical areas, led by Terry M. Wildman (Ojibwe, Yaqui), a minister in the United Methodist Church.  Wildman had been doing his own ad hoc translations for years and would share the rewordings in his travels to Native-led churches across the country.  He reflected: ““They just loved listening to it because it didn’t have the church language. It didn’t have the colonial language. It had more of a Native feel to it—as much as possible that you can put in English.”  More on the story behind the translation HERE, the source of the quote. The FNV is what’s called a “dynamic equivalence” translation, focused more on thought-for-thought than word-for-word (The Message