The CMC Annual Report landed in your email inbox last Friday, April 17 – and I know you’ve all read it multiple times.  I read through it this morning, noting the happy coincidence of it being Earth Day.  Although congregations are organizations, some folks suggest it’s more helpful to think of them as organisms – less a machine and more a living being.  Reading through the annual report is something of a brief tour through the ecosphere that is Columbus Mennonite Church.  We are a growing, learning, stretching, sharing, collaborating, strategizing, praying, serving creature, and much more than a collection of individuals. Today I was at a lunch gathering with other Columbus pastors at which the presenter spoke of the general failure of community throughout society and the great gift religious congregations offer in creating and sustaining community which overcomes our tendencies toward individualism. The thought that we are separate,

Three things for this week’s blog:  1) A brief reflection on spring/resurrection.  2) CMC in the news.  3) Quarterly Sabbath Weekend note. ———————————– When spring is, finally, in full motion, one might be tempted to panic.  Life is pushing out everywhere, some grand revelation is underway, and my blurred eyes can barely perceive it.  How many more chances will I get? “Raised up,” is how the Scriptures speak of resurrection.  The form is acted upon, effortless.  No one sees the moment when it happens, but there it is, in front of you.  The panic comes with the thought that everything has changed except me. I want to see brand new and am tempted to squint harder.  No.  I want to be caught up in something as effortless as being resurrected. ————————————- In the last few weeks Columbus Mennonite has been in the news: + The Saturday, April 11 edition of

Three things for this week’s blog:  1) A brief reflection on spring/resurrection.  2) CMC in the news.  3) Quarterly Sabbath Weekend note. ———————————– When spring is, finally, in full motion, one might be tempted to panic.  Life is pushing out everywhere, some grand revelation is underway, and my blurred eyes can barely perceive it.  How many more chances will I get? “Raised up,” is how the Scriptures speak of resurrection.  The form is acted upon, effortless.  No one sees the moment when it happens, but there it is, in front of you.  The panic comes with the thought that everything has changed except me. I want to see brand new and am tempted to squint harder.  No.  I want to be caught up in something as effortless as being resurrected. ————————————- In the last few weeks Columbus Mennonite has been in the news: + The Saturday, April 11 edition of

Be like the fox  who makes more tracks than necessary,   some in the wrong direction.  Practice resurrection. Last year about this time I had a conversation with a pastor friend from Virginia.  He noted that his congregation had decided to carry the theme of resurrection all the way through the Easter season until Pentecost, seven weeks after Easter Sunday.  His reasoning: if we are going to dedicate a whole season of Lent to repentance and wilderness wandering we also ought to dedicate a whole season to celebrating the ways we experience and practice resurrection.  Makes sense to me. So, this year, for the next six Sundays, our worship will proceed with the theme Practice Resurrection, the final phrase from Wendell Berry’s poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” an excerpt of which appears above.  We are resurrection people, and resurrection is not merely something to be believed, but something

This past Monday I had the opportunity to attend the Student Peace Conference at OSU.  It was a really nice event, and it was exciting to see so many young people interested in learning about peacemaking.  There was not much sustained conversation about any one topic, but I thought I would pass along some of the various intriguing ideas I took away from the event: During a workshop on conflict resolution, the presenter offered a framework for understanding how we make decisions during times of conflict.  This framework used a graph with one axis labeled “Concern for Goal” and the other labeled “Concern for Relationship.”  Using animal imagery (there’s that hermeneutical community again), the presenter had us think about different plot points on that graph.  For example, the “turtle” style of conflict management would be low on both goals and relationship, thus illustrated by a turtle withdrawing itself into its