Young Anabaptist Radicals

A Poem for Hiroshima Day

TimN — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 22:25:47 +0000

The Necessity of Hiroshima: why we must believe

Act I

in The Year of Decisions, our savior Harry asked

"a committee of top men"
                                    Men all carved from the same superior
                                    Aspen, carefully lathed of their
"to study with great care"
                                    care. Eviscerated as children, smiling
                                    beneath strange fruit. They died for
"the implications the new"
                                    the new; our idolatrous messiah. Our
                                    silicon steel colossus will consume
"weapon might have for us"
                                    us, our civilization. As surely as
                                    Saturn Devouring His Son.

the scientific advisers of the committee reports:

"We can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war;
we see no acceptable alternative to
direct military use."

Act II

And so, 65 years ago today, an orange cloud blossomed above a city full of them for our salvation.

Act III

And in the end, today, we must believe
in the bomb
in its righteousness, its compassion, its justice.

Because the thread of the necessary Hiroshima
and Nagasaki
is woven through the cloth of Iraq, Afghanistan and Deepwater Horizon

to pull that sacred strand is to unravel the torturous tapestry of our exceptionalism;
to send 200,000 burned, irradiated bodies crashing through the streets of
our city upon a hill

Source for Truman quotes: Deaton, Paul, "Hiroshima Day 2010 in Iowa" accessed at http://www.blogforiowa.com/blog/_archives/2010/8/6/4596871.html

Immigration and the Church in Phoenix

JennaBoettger — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:54:09 +0000

I live in Phoenix, the front line in the war against the tired, poor, and huddled masses yearning to be free. I would imagine everything here looks pretty awful from the outside, seemingly without a silver lining, but I’ve been seeing something different, something beautiful happening here.

In the midst of our police raids, our masses of children orphaned by deportation, women giving birth in shackles, and our racist legislation, something wonderful is happing in the heart of the church. People from all sides of the religious spectrum are coming together in a way I haven’t ever seen before to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God” (Micah 6:8).

And it’s beautiful.

A friend of mine and I went to a meeting of clergy recently, gathering to discuss what we as a church can do. We met in the chapel of a United Church of Christ congregation downtown and had everyone from pastors and priests with their collars to rabbis with their yarmulkes, Muslim women in their hijabs and a few Anabaptists with babies in slings across their chests. Throw in a few Buddhist monks, devout Hindus, Unitarian Universalists, Baptists, and everyone in between and you’ve got a good idea of what the average immigration reform demonstration looks like here.

It’s a rainbow of beliefs putting our differences aside and uniting in the belief of a God without borders, without nationality, and who cares more about someone’s well being then their legal status. I have in my mind an image of God looking down on us and repeating the phrase “It is good.” as he did in the creation story in Genesis.

The hardest thing about SB1070 and similar hate based legislation is that politically, in a lot of ways, they makes sense. But I believe that we are called to do something radically different when we decide to follow Jesus. Jesus’ teaching didn’t make sense. Loving your enemy, praying for those who persecute you, turning the other cheek, these things don’t make sense at all… and that’s part of what makes it so fantastic.

Believing in Jesus is believing that doing what doesn’t make sense can be the best thing, and that sometimes doing what doesn’t make sense is what makes a better world possible. I believe in that world and I want so badly to be a part of it.

Goldman Sachs, the global food crisis and faith in corporations

TimN — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:22:41 +0000

Last week, Harper’s magazine published an article by looking at the link between the unabashed greed of big financial firms and the 2007–2008 world food crisis. The crisis resulted in the starvation of thousands, hunger for millions and riots in some of the countries hit hardest. For a window into the pain of an individual family in Ethiopioa, see this article in the Independent.

Kaufman’s article includes an in depth look at the history of commodity markets and futures trading and detailed explanation of how recent “innovations” led to a dramatic rise in food prices. The bottom line of Kaufman’s allegation is: big financial corporations manipulated the food market for their own profit and millions of people went without food as a result.

It’s worth noting that Kaufman is not critiquing the over all system of wheat futures. He is specifically pointing to “innovations” by the financial industry that created a “food bubble.”

Goldman Sachs has written a short, defensive letter calling Kaufman’s article “unfounded conspiracy theories.” Its amazing how quickly these organizations will resort to name calling. You can read Kaufman’s response here.

What is your reaction to reading a story like this? Is this surprising to you? Are you skeptical? Stories like this provide a mirror into our relationship with mega-corporations.

This story seems to have created a blip in mainstream media, but little more. If this story was about an individual who was responsible for starvation and social disruption, would we treat it differently? Would there be calls for an investigation or a criminal trial? Yet corporations are vastly more powerful then any individual, relentlessly greedy by design and immortal. Where do they fit in our moral framework? Why don’t we hold these persons* accountable for their actions in the same way we do individuals? Do we believe they can be redeemed more easily then humans? Do we believe they are a necessary evil? Do we believe they are the way, the truth and the life?

*A legal status created through decisions of the United States Supreme court.

CPT video of Israeli destruction of Palestinian tomatos going viral

TimN — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 17:34:01 +0000

With over 5,000 views and counting it looks like this video from the CPT Palestine team may be going viral. It seems like the absurdity of Israeli destruction of tomato plants is really connecting with people:

I’ve never really been connected with a video that has got this much attention before. In my capacity as CPT Outreach Coordinator, I’m trying to figure out how to best to build on this swell. My usual Google strategy failed since the keywords I thought of mostly turned up stuff on how to get a video to go viral. But once it is on that trajectory, what do you do about it? Anyone out there have experience with this or resources on how to manage a viral video infection? For example, at what level of viewership do media sources start to get interested in the story of the viral video itself?

You can read the whole story of the tomato destruction on the CPT website here: AL KHALIL/HEBRON: Israeli Border Police destroy vegetable fields in Al Beqa’a Valley

Reduce, Re-use, Recycle…unless you live in la ceiba

MatthewK — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 02:17:29 +0000

Author’s Note: Just to give some context; I’m a mission worker with Eastern Mennonite Missions in La Ceiba, Honduras. I in conjunction with the local Mennonite congregation, work in Los Laureles, a community built in and around the municipal garbage dump. If you’d like to read or see more about our work there you can visit my blog here.

So here’s an example of injustice, greed, political corruption and a general screwing of the poor and powerless and it just fills me with raw anger. Stay with me here because some of this gets tedious but I think it’s necessary for understanding the problem we’re facing. Very often I get asked about how the people here in the garbage dump survive, what do they do for a living? Here’s the long version. Many men work as day laborers in construction, a few as night watchmen and quite a large number buy green bananas that come in from the plantations of Tocoa and then sell them throughout the La Ceiba area on the back of rusting-out pickup trucks. However, the largest form of income by far here in the community is connected in some way or other to the garbage collection process. No one scavenges directly off the dump anymore, those days ended almost 10 years ago when the city privatized the dump had it covered over, converted into a landfill and barred the residents from intruding onto the new dumping area.

The garbage though has continued to be a major and vital part of the economy here in the community, much to the chagrin of both the mayor’s office and the private waste treatment company (I’ll explain why in a bit). The company itself is not responsible for the collection of the garbage, they simply control what passes through their gates at the far end of the community and are then responsible for the treatment of the waste that is constantly being interred. The collection then, falls to the mayor and his cronies in the form of contracts; the mayor awards collection contracts to the people he owes political favors and those people in turn use a portion of that money to buy “garbage trucks” (converted, massive and pitifully old delivery trucks), hire truck drivers and a few assistants who actually collect the garbage. The drivers and assistants, usually 2-3 per truck, are also joined by scavengers who make a living by sorting through the garbage as it travels en route to the dump. They look for plastic bottles, metal scraps, car batteries and anything else that might be of worth (I’m talking everything from bed frames to clothing to half-used perfume bottles), sort it into separate bags and then upon arrival to the community and just before the truck passes through the gates into the no-entry zone of the new landfill, the scavengers disembark and sell their findings to a group of families who have made their living buying these items, sorting them, weighing them and then re-selling them to the local recycling company or interested parties, whichever the case may be. These people are perhaps the most resilient and hard-scrabble of the whole collection lot for they live and die by what the trucks bring in and what price the recyclers set; they work long hours, Monday through Saturday in the baking sun and torrential rain bent over and sifting through plastics for next to nothing in terms of compensation. In fact most of the workers at the collection and weighing site make no money at all, this is their “family farm”, it’s how the family survives, so what little money comes in is given directly to mother and father.

So, with all that process out of the way now begins the interesting part of the story. For the past 15 years the Liberal Party has held power in local Ceiban politics and while they have been no real friend to the people of Los Laureles, they have seen fit to award those collection contracts to men that have agreed to do all their hiring from within the garbage dump community itself. That means that for the last 15 years, 16 rickety old trucks have trundled through the community 2-3 times a day, driven by men from within the community, manned by their sons, nephews and close friends from within the community and also attended to by 3-4 more scavengers from within the community. These wokers have then in turn sold those scavenged materials to a group of families that have made their living off of being the middle-man in the recycling and re-using process. Is it a perfect system? No, I’m not idealizing it or denying that it couldn’t be more efficient. Moreover, I fully recognize that it can become a trap for the people here; it’s much easier to join the trucks or sort plastics than it is to continue on into high school and nothing is a bigger inhibitor to upward mobility here than a lack and undervaluing of quality education. Nevertheless, it has served these people well for nearly a decade in moving them from abject and absolute poverty to some form, however shaky it may be, of economic stability. This past November the Liberal Party was rejected here in La Ceiba in favor of the rival National Party and as is often the case, the new mayor came riding in on his platform of reform and brand new ideas to wow the electorate…he also had some favors to distribute. It seems that one influential Nationalista wanted the entire operation, from the collection to the actual recycling, for himself. The mayor and his administration obliged and because the old owners of the contracts were Liberal Party leaders, there wasn’t much thought given to it. This new single owner of the collection process then purchased 6 brand new, modern-style garbage trucks to replace the 16 old ones and hired drivers from amongst the general populace of La Ceiba, presumably friends or family; nepotism is life here in Honduras. The newly installed drivers, in their wisdom and because they didn’t know a thing about garbage collection or the routes themselves, decided to man their trucks with the old workers from within the dump community; but in that there were only 6 trucks to replace 16 there were in upwards of 35 workers left without employment. Add to that number the 16 drivers that got sacked and you can begin to see how we might have an economic situation on our hands. As if destroying the livelihood of 50 people wasn’t enough for our good friends in the Mayor’s office they then instituted a rule that no longer would the trucks be allowed to carry the 2-3 extra scavengers and that the garbage collectors themselves were also prohibited from scavenging and selling materials to the recycling collective in the community. As one of the workers told me:
“We were told that everything we collect is considered garbage, no matter how we may view it and that all garbage must go the actual dump; anyone caught scavenging or even taking gifts from wealthier families downtown will be fired.”

So if my math is correct, 16 drivers, 35 workers, 50 scavengers and the 5 families that buy and sell…or, nearly 120 people, in a community that only has 150 households, have been left without work so that one man could be paid back for his contributions to the democratic process.

I promised to explain why both the local government (regardless of party) and the waste treatment company have looked with mild disdain upon the community here at Los Laureles and I think in understanding that aspect we can understand the seeming callousness and outright disregard for the lives of the most marginalized here in Ceiban society. The local government here has always viewed the dump community with a mix of pity and disgust; this is a sentiment that I don’t believe is unique to local politics as I’ve run up against it even within the church community, and I think it speaks loudly to issues of class and wealth that run deep within Honduran society. Their response then to this community, instead of walking with it, caring for the people here and really meeting the needs that they face has been to modernize it, however slowly, out of existence. That was why the waste management company was brought in to convert to a landfill in the first place - they wanted to end the community’s ability to scavenge and survive solely on the garbage of others. Obviously the people here got around that one…and isn’t that just it, that those tricksy garbage people we’re able to get around the new rules and regulations and not only survive and make a living out of it but begin to prosper and grow? It really must sting, and I know it does because I’ve talked to them, that every day on their way into work the waste management workers have to drive past the buying and selling site and know that they’ve failed in keeping the community people from scavenging; and every time the local politicians bring in a foreign group to show off the new landfill they first have to drive through the embarrassment and failure that is Los Laureles. Even as recently as February the new mayor, the local congressmen and some ministers from the national government held an event here in the community to announce that they were planning on turning Los Laureles into a “model community” with paved roads, running water and new homes for every family. Apparently they had been the recipients of some international grant monies and the requirements to receive those monies were met by only 6 communities in all of Honduras, Laureles being one of them. Of course it’s hard to create a “model community” when the residents buy and sell garbage, stack it in front of their homes, allow their women and children to work on the trucks and generally do whatever the hell the please.

I’m not really sure what else to say, I tried getting the Peace & Justice Project of the Mennonite Church of Honduras involved and there seemed to be some real interest. We had a sit-down meeting with all concerned members from the community and it was agreed that the Director would use her connections to gain a meeting with the Mayor. That was 2 weeks ago. I’m leaving in a week for a month-long furlough in the U.S. and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about the character of the people in this community it’s that they will not advocate for themselves. They just take whatever life throws at them and attempt to use it to survive. I guess just pray.

Toothbrush Revolution

Ben_jammin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:38:13 +0000

Yesterday I was at the dentist‘s and they gave me a toothbrush. Now I hear in the States that‘s not an usual thing, but in Germany it‘s actually really strange and so after the dentist thought she had put her fingers in my mouth long enough and I was allowed to go, I was carrying a toothbrush in the pocket of my jeans and somehow the toothbrush kept coming up in my mind and with it the chorus of a song.
A song my father always sang with us when I was a little boy. It‘s about Martin Luther King Jr. and what he said to kids who also wanted to participate in the demonstrations. He told them they could participate, if they had a toothbrush with them. Because if you get arrested you have to empty your pockets and all is taken away from you. Only your toothbrush you can keep. So keep your toothbrush as a sign of your willingness to go to jail for freedom. The song was written in Eastern Germany and was a famous song amongst Christian youth in the protest movement against the state-socialist regime.

In my head, I heard my eight year old self singing the chorus over and over again, the rough translation would be:”Do you have your toothbrush with you? You will need still need it. Still today people are put in jail who are against oppression.”

I was really amazed by this, on the one hand because I rarely remember anything from my childhood, but on the other hand because of the radical message this song was giving.

It‘s paraphrasing Jesus, “Take your cross upon you and follow me” into words children can understand and that I still remember ten years after I last sang the song…

To me, taking up my cross or carrying my toothbrush around is a daily struggle because although it feels good to be really critical of the state and school and be the radical guy in school who challenges basically every opinion, my radical activity is usually done there (sometimes I also translate stuff for the German CPT branch…). How can I live a life where it makes sense to carry my toothbrush with me all the time, because I challenge the world so much, that it can’t stand me, it wants to put me in prison?

I sometimes lead Sunday school classes in my congregation at home, and I’d love to sing that song with the kids, but I feel like I have to carry my toothbrush with me for some time, till I can do that.

The last line is:”I have my tooth brush with me and I will still need it. Still today people are put in jail who are against oppression.” - this I will try to do…

Reflections from Bolivia

AlanS — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:28:51 +0000

I just got back from Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Our church took a group of 10 high schoolers on a week and a half long service trip. Our primary work was on the Samuelito Daycare building, a project of the Mennonite Churches in Bolivia. Our church here in Harper, Ks has had a relationship with the Bolivian Mennonites for going on 20 years. For a fairly typical rural Mennonite church, it’s a partnership that is pretty special and really quite amazing.

One thing to know about our group is that the majority of the kids that we took aren’t particularly involved in church. Also, most of them haven’t really been out of the state or even our county, let alone to another country. That to say that this trip was the first profound experience of the working of God on a global scale for most of our kids. As with most service trips, yes we did do some amount of good work on the building project. However, we certainly received more than we gave and were changed in some profound ways.

As part of our reporting back to the congregation, I offered the sermon below. Hopefully it’s a helpful reflection. It’s specific to this trip and to Bolivia, but I think it really should to many cross-cultural situations.

Oh, yeah and it’s cross posted here.

____________________________________________

I went to the Grand Canyon with my family when I was in High School. As my family toured various parts of the canyon and different times of the day it felt as though I was seeing new things about every 10 minutes. And of course, I felt compelled to take picture of every new thing that I saw. When we got back home and had our pictures developed I remember looking at all of the pictures and thinking, “yep, that’s a hole in the ground. Yep, another hole in the ground.” What had been so vivid when I was experiencing it lost it’s uniqueness when I tried to put it on film.

We just got back from a 2 week trip to Santa Cruz, Bolivia and on some level, I have a similar feeling about this trip. This trip was an intense and life-changing experience for everyone who was on it. But it is a really hard thing to figure out how to explain that to the people who stayed at home. To me, every picture of construction that I have is unique, but for most people looking at them, it’s hard to tell them apart and it’s just one more picture of kid’s moving dirt.

At one point on the trip I asked the kids what was the one thing they wanted people to really understand about this trip when they got back home. There’s all kinds of things that we can’t fully explain but what is the one thing that they would want family or friends to really understand. As I thought about this for myself, my one thing that I want people to really understand is what it really means for all Christians to be one in Christ. I want you to really understand what it means to seriously say that we are brothers and sisters, that we are family with the people in Bolivia (or anywhere else for that matter).

To tell you what I mean by this I first need to tell you what I don’t mean. When we in North America look at the relationship between us here and the Bolivian Mennonites there are a number of reactions that I often hear that really seem to miss the mark. The first reaction is often one of pity.

When we are confronted with the differences in material and financial wealth, and the poverty that exists, often our first reaction is to feel sorry for them. One night when we were talking with one of our hosts named Tito, he made a very profound comment. He said, “It is true that we have poverty here in Bolivia, but we are not poor”. I think he meant a number of things by that comment. One of the biggest things that he meant by that statement is that there is more than one way to measure wealth. We in the U.S. often think of wealth in terms of having money and physical possessions. However, it is also just as important to measure your wealth in terms of your faith, the strength of your family structure, your community and many other things that can’t be measured in Dollars and Cents.

The other reaction that many Christians have when they see the differences between Bolivians and ourselves is to think, “look at how God has blessed us.” Some of us have the tendency to think that the physical wealth and the financial wealth that we have in comparison to those in Bolivia is a sign that God has blessed us and has given us much more than them. Even if we want to say that because of this blessing we should be responsible and generous, this understanding of blessing is a false one because it is not a full measure of the ways in which God blesses people. I would guess that all of the youth would be willing to say that after getting to know the people in Bolivia and seeing how God has blessed them, that in reality, we are the ones who are dirt poor. We are the ones who are lacking in faith, in strength, in family. We just have more stuff.

The last main reaction that many people in the states have is one of guilt. We can look at the gulf between us in terms of money and resources and we can become very guilty for how much we have accumulated. This is probably the feeling that I have struggled with the most. Early on in the trip one of the people at the daycare complimented me on my camera. I instantly felt a sense of embarrassment and shame. The reason is that I recently learned that I paid more for my camera than most manual laborers in Bolivia would make in a year. This sense of guilt can almost be crippling at times.

All three of these reactions are understandable, but I would say that they are ultimately wrong. They’re the wrong reaction because with all three of them they maintain the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’. With all of these reactions we continue to see ourselves as somehow different, or separate from the people in Bolivia. If we are going to seriously say that the body of Jesus Christ goes across borders, nationalities, continents, races and whatever boundaries we might set up, then this separation between us and them has to go. We must see ourselves as one family.

The best analogy that I can think of right now is that of a marriage relationship. There are some relationships where one person is working outside the home and is the one who is responsible for earning the income for the family. The other person will often work just as hard as the breadwinner and contribute just as much to the relationship and to the family even if that work isn’t measured in terms of dollars and cents. It does not mean that either one is less valuable. It also means that the one who earns the money freely shares those earnings with their spouse, not out of pity, not out of guilt but out of mutual, self-giving love.

This is what our relationship needs to be with the church in Bolivia. Yes, we have should have a great desire to give to the Bolivian church. But it should not be out of a sense of pity or guilt. And it had better not be out of a desire to make ourselves feel good about how much stuff God has given us. We need to give of our resources because we are the family of God and that’s what families do.

I can tell you that the Bolivian church has given this group and has given our church much more than we have given them. It is my prayer that God will continue to keep this family together and that we will all continue to build up the kingdom of God.

Sparking Renewal and Becoming Undone: What I’ve been up to recently

TimN — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 16:26:59 +0000

For the last few months I haven’t been as active on Young Anabaptist Radicals as usual. Aside from my normal work doing web design and work for Christian Peacemaker Teams, I took a class on Anabaptist History and Theology. I’ve also been part of organizing a gathering in conjunction with the US Social Forum in Detroit. It’s called Becoming Undone: a gathering of Christians drawn to Anabaptism and the continuing work of Undoing Opressions. Follow the link for more details. There’s still room if you register now!

I’ve also been very involved in a movement called Spark Renewal.

For many years, I’ve been fascinated (and disturbed) by the way that institutions tend to drift away from their original mission and towards self-preservation. I started writing about it in back in 2004, but the decision by Goshen College to start playing the anthem got me thinking about it a lot more. Around the same time friends started sharing their concerns and frustrations with the “Joining Together” campaign to build a new Mennonite Church office building on the campus of Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries. I started noticing some of the connections between the different issues. In all these situations it seemed like institutional reasoning was central with other was of thinking and being revolving around bureaucracy.

Spark Renewal was initially made up of people in Elkhart, so I joined in as I could by email and conversations on Skype. I was impressed how quickly the group organized itself using email and a wiki (an on-line collaboration tool for documents). It involved young and middle-aged folks, women and men and white people and people of color. There was also something different about their meetings. It wasn’t just a group of people sitting down to organize. When I listened to the recordings of meetings and heard the notes I heard prayer, worship, reflection. When I finally got to attend my first in person meeting, I discovered hula-hooping and singing were on the agenda as well. This was not a group that just gave lip service to being spirit led.

As I was drawn further into the energy and hope of Spark Renewal, I joined them for a meeting with with leaders of the “Joining Together” campaign (the meeting I alluded to http://www.themennonite.org/bloggers/timjn/posts/Are_we_building_for_the_future_of_the_church_or_the_bureaucracy_Part_1“>in this post). Again, I was struck with the vision of institutional vehicle focused more on its own maintenance then its mission. I was also aware of how difficult it is to challenge that vehicle. Dissent can so easily be dismissed or marginalized by those in the center of institutions. Which is why I have been so amazed by the resiliency and energy of Spark Renewal. Again and again they have been told to give up in the face of the inevitable.

Yet the movement has steadily grown and blossomed, with dozens of people coming out of the wood work to share about their own experiences of frustration and hurt caused by the “Joining Together” process. Listening and watching to the stories flow, both publicly and privately, has deepened my commitment to this movement. Joining together for the future of the Mennonite church means listening to the voices on the margins, and not just those in the center. For me, that’s what it means to be the body of Christ.

As the Mennonite Church Executive Board meets this coming weekend, I pray that they will listen to this river of stories and decide to pause this process and take time to reflect, heal and change.

The Word made Flesh - An examiination of the Mennonite COF, Part 2

Robert Martin — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 01:55:47 +0000

To be honest, in reading this article, there’s not a whole lot that needs to be added. I think the framers of the confession did a remarkable job of wrapping up a lot in a very short piece.

However, what I would like to comment on is something that seems to have received lesser emphasis in our current culture. This article talks a lot about Jesus’ acts and what he did and achieved as a human among us. It deliberately talks about him as someone other than God the Father. He’s a prophet, a high priest, a king, a servant, a Savior, the Son of God, the incarnate Word, the Lord and final judge. But there is something that gets passing mention that I think is important to re-emphasize.

See, in today’s pluralistic society, people like Jesus are a dime a dozen. There are so many religious figures that people can point to as a “good person” or a “prophet like no others” or an “inspiring figure”. People can be disciples of almost anyone, any great teacher. What sets Jesus apart from all the others?

I think the COF points this out when it says

As fully divine, he is the one in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. During his earthly life, Jesus had an intimate relationship with his heavenly Abba and taught his disciples to pray “Abba, Father.” He is the image of the invisible God, and “all things have been created through him and for him, for he is before all things.

But I think that something brought out in the commentary needs to be brought fore-front in our theology discussions in the church. The commentary points out a passage from Colossians 1 as specifically discussing Jesus divinity. We recognize one God. We recognize one creator. With one God and one Creator and Paul being a VERY Jewish man also steeped in Monotheism, these statements in Colossians bring us pause.

¹⁵He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. ¹⁶For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. ¹⁷He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. ¹⁸And he is the head of the body, the church; he
is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. ¹⁹For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, ²⁰and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

Note the parts that I’ve accented. While there can be debates about other passages about Jesus being a person, perhaps not God but some other being lesser than God, these words of Paul seem to indicate that Jesus was the Creator. Also, to have “all his fullness” dwell in a man seems to be beyond just some portion of a spirit laying on Jesus but an indwelling of the complete divinity of God.

This is something that I admit that I’m not an expert on: the divinity of Christ. But Paul was an expert on the Judaic YHWH and, with his Pharisaic training, I cannot imagine him switching over to a polytheistic worship. Also, his Damascus road experience showed that he recognized Jesus for who he was. “Who are you, Lord?”. A Jew would not call any being Lord except for YHWH.

I leave the major theological arguments to others who are more well trained than I am. However, I do think that this is something that we need to emphasize in our churches. Jesus was a great man, but he was more than just a man. Without the divinity of Christ, there is a lot of our theology that just falls through. If just any man could live so purely just by talking with God more, why did do we need to rely on Jesus? Why can’t we just do it ourselves? If Jesus was some sort of angel or something, why would God who gives the command “You shall have no other gods before me” allow worship of Jesus on equal with him? For that matter, if Jesus was just an angel, what would be the point of the crucifiction or even the incarnation? The theology of the NT relies on God’s indentification with man through the incarnation as proof that God loves us. “¹⁵For we do not have a
high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have
one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without
sin.”

In our post-modern/post-Christendom culture where people are seeking everywhere for someone to believe in, a God who cares, and a way that gives hope, Jesus as just a man falls flat. But Jesus as God, who came down among us to identify with us, that rings solid. God condescended. God came down among us to our level because God realized that, in our humanity, due to our falleness, we could not understand how to relate to him. We needed Jesus to put a face to God, to bring God into reality, to make God relatable. No longer do we have a figure like a man on a throne, burning like fire. No longer do we have a mysterious wheel within a wheel. No longer do we have to be content with seeing just the backside of God. Now we can relate directly to God. When Moses spoke to God, it was as a friend speaks to a friend. Because God came down and put on flesh, now we, too, have that awesome privilege. Like Adam, we now have the opportunity to walk with God in the cool of the day. God is no longer a mystery to us because Jesus is the revelation, not just of who God is, but of how man can relate to God. John said it best. The Word became flesh and walked among us. That Word is no longer a mystery. We can give it a name.

Jesus.

Some ponderings

Robert Martin — Wed, 19 May 2010 19:54:51 +0000

Okay… I know I owe a post on Article 2 of the Confession of Faith… life has been strange lately.

In any case, something my wife mentioned today made me wonder some stuff. Here are some questions that I think the Christian church in the USA needs to seriously ask themselves. Likewise, these are fair questions for any Christian in any society today. Please note, these are not political questions, these are ecclesiology and missiology questions. They apply no matter what the politics, governmental structure, economic philosophy, or what not that you are currently living under.

If your government were to fail utterly today and a tyranny that is unfriendly to the mission of the church arise in its place, what would you, as a Christian, do differently?
If there is something you would do differently, why aren’t you doing it now?
What is preventing you from making those changes in your life?

I personally need to think very hard and very carefully about these. The answers may be a lot harder to deal with that appear on the surface.

If you are challenged by these questions, please comment here or on the corresponding FaceBook link. Let’s start this discussion now, before it becomes necessary.

Mennonite denominationalism and the Concern pamphlets

IsaacV — Tue, 18 May 2010 01:35:47 +0000

I’ve been a Mennonite for nearly 8 years. I’ve felt welcomed in local congregations and regional assemblies and national conventions. I have enjoyed everything about our denomination–even the quirkiness. But I also can’t help but notice that there are lots of faithful people who have been Mennonite for a lot longer than I have been who are asking tough questions about denominational structures (both physical structures like a new office building, and institutional structures like the merger of various board agencies).

After reading Wipf & Stock’s wonderful collection of republished Concern pamphlets, I can’t help but notice similarities between Mennonite discourse in the 1950s and today. Here’s a passage from the introduction of the 1954 Concern pamphlet:

Are American Mennonites, in spite of their great institutional and even spiritual progress, perhaps after all moving rather toward ‘respectable’ denominationalism rather than toward a dynamic and prophetic ‘grass roots’ movement? And if so, what responsibility devolves upon us in our generation? (Concern, vol. 1, p. 3)

What do you think? Is this the same sort of question that needs to be asked?

I also beginning to wonder if this is a perennial Mennonite concern. Paul Peachey and his friends asked it back then, and plenty of others are asking it again today.

While the Concern group of the 1950s offered important criticisms of their denomination, I am also struck by one of quotes at the beginning of their first pamphlet–an epigraph that offers a kind of framework for their essays:

…send me to Judah, to the city of my fathers’ sepulchres, that I may rebuild it. (Neh 2:5)

“I AM” - An examination of the Mennonite COF, Part 1

Robert Martin — Tue, 04 May 2010 12:50:32 +0000

Note: This is a repost from http://ballymennoniteblogger.blogspot.com/

One of the ideas behind confessions of faith and creeds and the like is to attempt to answer questions being asked by people of the current culture and society as relates to matters of faith and the practice thereof. So, in these posts I make about the articles of the Mennonite Confession of Faith I’m going to attempt to address them in how well they answer the questions of our current society and culture. And, honestly, I do so with great humility. I am by no means an expert in sociology or culture, nor am I a pillar when it comes to theological discussion. But I am someone who struggles at times with belief and faith and what it means. Perhaps we need more people like that talking about theology than people who study in the ivory towers.

So, with great trepidation, here I go.

The first article of the Confession of faith is simply titled “God”. I think this is an important factor. Any religion you pick has some sort of concept of a supreme deity or deities. Even those that are devout atheists (those who adamantly deny the possibility of any existence of such a being) have something to say about supreme beings, albeit in the negative. And yes, I consider atheism to be a religion in the purest sense of the word. So, it is important for a confession of faith to start with a defining statement about that ultimate question: Is there a God?

Note that the article in the confession answers that question in the positive. The Mennonite Church part of the body of Christ definitely believes that there IS a God. We must establish that first. There is a God and He has made Himself known. Now, note that I am using the male pronoun. Considering some words from one of my sisters in the church (Hi, KrisAnne!), I use this pronoun, not out of saying that men are superior or that God Himself has a gender. However, the traditional form of addressing one aspect of God is as “Father” or “Son”, both being male indicators. Rather than muddy the waters with some sort of strange way of addressing God, making up pronouns or words (like “godself”), I’ll bow to tradition simply because the English language is insufficient to truly describe God in those sort of terms. However, as I said, God has no specific gender and even is described in very feminine ways in various scriptural passages. Humans, male and female, were made in the image of God in that both human genders display the characteristics of God. So, we can not say God is male or female, but is God.

This article of the confession makes some great effort to describe who God is, what He does, and so on. He is the creator. He loves His creation. He reaches out to people. He has called specific peoples to be His witness to the purpose for creation. He calls people to love as He has loved. He is glorious, compassionate, sovereign, powerful, merciful, full of love. He knows all and abounds in wisdom. He is both full of perfect grace that gives to no end. But he is also righteous in His wrath and the ensuing campaign against sin and rebellion against His purposes. God is just but He is patient. He is a redeemer. He gives great freedom and gives selflessly of His love. There is so much about God that characterizes God that a few paragraphs seems hardly to begin to do justice.

And that is something that I think needs extra emphasis in today’s US culture and society. This confession makes a point of saying “We humbly recognize that God far surpasses human comprehension and understanding.” This is very important to remember. Many of those characteristics that the article uses to describe God, in our limited humanity, we perceive as being paradoxical. How can someone be both merciful and wrathful? How can justice be done but mercy also be done? How can there be a sense of grace but a demand for righteousness? This all seems to contradict itself.

The commentary seems to try to make sense of this but I think it still falls short. Using a phrase like “righteous love” helps, but it does not satisfy the questions that these contradictions raise. Again, the commentary says that there is a tension in knowing the unknowable. God has revealed Himself but our human understanding sometimes cannot make sense of it.

In our post-Christian world, we cannot depend upon people understanding God in the same way that we do who have been brought up in the church. In our post-modern age, we cannot rely on human reason to describe it either as, in the reaction to modern age of reason, the post-modernist is skeptical of the ability for human reason to answer all questions. What is truth? We can answer that God is the source of all truth. And that is a characteristic of God. What that implies, though, is that God, being beyond our understanding, “owns” a level of truth that we cannot grasp as humans. We can only see parts of that truth and comprehend it in our finitude. We will even make mistakes in this comprehension in our falleness. And that is where the revelation of God’s grace comes to play. Through his grace, mercy and compassion, he allows us to make those mistakes in the journey of coming to grips with the truth that He alone can contain. And, through His grace, he has reached out to us in a way that we can get a glimpse of that light. Calvinists use the term “condescend”. This is not a bad term. It is the same fashion in which parents and teachers take a complex idea (like the refraction of light waves) and explain it to a child who cannot comprehend of quantum particle theory. Things are explained in a context and in a fashion suitable to the person receiving the information. It is not false. There is nothing wrong in saying “The rain drops break up the light into all the colors”. That is true. And it is understandable for a younger mind. It is not a lie.

So, God has revealed himself in such a way that we can understand him. Jesus is the ultimate means of that revelation where God, Himself, came down to our level, experienced what we experienced, and taught us about Him in terms even we can understand. Does this answer all the questions? It doesn’t even start. But we can trust God (that is what faith is, anyways) to not lead us wrong. After all, he went through all that effort to reach us, he must care deeply for us.

But I get ahead of myself. Tomorrow, I look at Jesus Christ. God bless!

Here we go…

Robert Martin — Tue, 04 May 2010 12:49:00 +0000

Note: This is a repost from my personal blog at http://ballymennoniteblogger.blogspot.com/. Since there are a number of post-modern/post-Christendom Anabaptist radicals hanging out here, I thought y’all would enjoy participating in the conversation.

Remember this post?

http://ballymennoniteblogger.blogspot.com/2008/09/post-anabaptism.html

And this one?

http://ballymennoniteblogger.blogspot.com/2009/01/daunting-challeng.html

It’s been a little over a year since I set that challenge before myself. Well, guess what. I’m starting this now.

See, I’m working on my MLI for the Mennonite Church Leadership Database and one of the questions in that database is my reactions and responses to the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective. Since I’m going to be spending the time looking at that in detail for that purpose, I thought I would blog about my reactions as well.

If I can swing it, tomorrow I’ll be hitting Article 1 on God. If y’all wanna follow along with me, you can read the articles as I go. I’ll be sticking to the order in the document.

Before that, though, you might want to review the Introduction. There’s a lot of information there about the importance of Confessions but also points out that the commentary published along with the Articles are important in understanding the articles as they were written. Instead of looking at the commentary as “opinion” commentary (as some commentaries on Scripture are), these commentaries should be viewed the same way the book of Romans would be if Paul had written it as a blog article and interacted with commentary. The commentary on these articles were written by the people who constructed the articles so they are a window into the mindset and thought processes of those men and women. They should not be discounted but instead used as a tool to gain understanding for those parts of the articles that may be less clear because we are not part of the context in which they were written.

So, come with me. This is a journey for me. I invite you to join in.

Here we go… and may God go with us.

Bureaucracy, professionalism and dissent in Mennonite Church USA institutions

TimN — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:19:46 +0000

This is the second article in a series on the Mennonite Church USA and its institutions.

In the first article of this series, I critiqued “professionalism” in Mennonite institutions without defining it clearly. In the comments responding to the article, a number of people rightly pointed out that professionalism plays a very important role in allowing us to work in consistent, safe and effective ways. As Alan Stucky said in his comment:

Make no mistake that our seriousness and professionalism had a hand in helping to get MVS be the first recognized Christian alternative service organization in 25 years. Professionalism is not inherently evil, or antithetical to the Gospel. Yes, it should be kept in check by the Gospel, but they are not opposites.

Roses shared in their comment about their experience of seeing God move through values of professionalism. Paco, on the other hand, over at Young Anabaptist Radicals speculated on how well Jesus would have done at project proposals and budgets.

I’d like to take the opportunity to define my concern with professionalism more specifically: I am concerned by the way it views internal dissent. During my meeting with Mennonite Mission Network staff that I referred to in the first article, two staff involved with the capital campaign defined professionalism as prohibiting them from publicly dissenting from their institutions public position. As they saw it, their only public option for public dissent was to resign from their organization.

If this were just the personal opinions of two capital campaign staff members, that would be one thing. However, I have heard first and second hand stories from people who were pressured by MMN staff because of their public dissent from the building plan. I have heard how internally, there has been extensive listening by MMN leadership to staff concerns, but dissenters have had little sense that their objections might lead to real change.

Seeing internal (and external) dissent as something to be overcome rather then an opportunity for change and growth is part of the way we can expect institutions to operate . Here’s How Kathy Furgeson puts it in The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy:

Part of the perniciousness of bureaucracy is that, when passed through the filters of personality, it seeks to “tie up our loose ends” and reduce us to a reflection of the organization…

Since bureaucracy rests on the assumptions of scientific rationality–namely, that there is “a single best solution” (or at least a managerially defined resolution) to organizational problems–and since it cloaks itself in the myth of administrative neutrality, the very effort to deal with conflict must be disguised even as it goes on. Bureaucracy is anti-political because it cannot recognize the legitimacy of conflict, seeing it as a temporary aberration to be dealt with through elaborated administrative technique.

How does an institution respond to a “temporary aberration”? In talking about the building, I heard staff members come back again and again to talking points centered around the financial savings this building promises for the church. It is critical in building and maintaining institutional momentum, that staff members stick to a given set of talking points. For a list of these talking points, see “Joining Together, Investing in Hope” Frequently Asked Questions).

I should say at this point that, in my work as part of Christian Peacemaker Teams support team, I have experienced internal dissent to decisions I was part of making. It’s not fun, it’s messy and it’s often quite emotionally draining. I have no illusions that we’ve got anything “right”. However, I can say that the times when I have felt that dissent enriched us in the long term were times when we talked with each other as members of a community first and professionals second.

I need to be absolutely clear at this point: I have very little hope that any significant change in the building on the AMBS campus. Rather, my hope is that we can examine the processes around this capital campaign and take the opportunity to re-evaluate the role of bureaucracy in Mennonite Church USA. How can we imagine together ways of being that see dissent as an opportunity rather then an obstacle?

In talking with people about this process, I haven’t just heard negative stories. I have heard hopeful stories of affirmation and support for dissenting staff members. This is an important reminder for me that Mennonite Church USA is not monolithic and every staff member of every Mennonite instiution is a child of God. As Walter Wink says, the powers are good, the powers are fallen and the powers are being redeemed.

Young Church of the Brethren Radicals

TimN — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 01:13:16 +0000

Things are picking up over at Feetwashing and Four Square, our sister blog started by Nick Miller Kauffman (nicolas here on YAR). I’d particularly commend to you the recent post Anabaptist Fierce by Katie Shaw Thompson. Here’s an excerpt on the relationship between some theories of nonviolence and white privilege:

Bob cited a weak (or rather antithetical) version of non-violent theory he often hears from seminarians as symptomatic of the problem. Concerning Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount commandment to “love your enemies” these seminarians want to claim that we have no enemies, which as Bob cited is not really nonviolent theory at all.

Only someone at the top of the food chain, with all kinds of privilege, could claim that we have no enemies. People of color (and other oppressed peoples), who in this country are faced with messages every day that often demarcate them as the enemy to “American” culture, know the point of that old labor song “which side are you on?”

And a kind of “peace church people” who want to pretend those demarcations are not there and that no matter what someone believes they are not working in opposition to us, will always seem frighteningly and dangerously out of touch with reality.

Read the whole post on FWFS

Bureaucracy and Buildings in the Mennonite Church

TimN — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 20:41:56 +0000

crossposted from As of Yet Untittled

A few weeks ago I sat down with a group of Mennonite Mission Network staff who have been managing the $10 million capital campaign for the new Mennonite Church USA building on the campus of Associated Mennonite Biblical seminaries in Elkhart, Ind. The staff members were meeting with a number of people inside and outside of the institution who have had significant concerns and questions about the direction this project is taking the church.

In listening to the the responses from Mission Network staff to theological and missiological questions raised by the dissenters, I was struck by how much they focused on institutional values such as finances, efficiency and professionalism. The conversation made real for me the way the institutions of the Mennonite church are centered on values of professionalism and institutional interests in their decision making process. I heard them asking: What would a professional do? before asking, "What would Jesus do?"

For those talking with us, it was clear that they saw their institution at the center of the future of the church. You can see this clearly in the the language of the bulletin insert for the campaign. It invites donors to "Help strengthen the future of Mennonite Church USA" and "build the future" and talks about "investing in hope." Is this building really the future of the church? Is this institution?

The metaphor that came to mind for me in thinking about church institutions was is that of a vehicle. In building the vehicle, the church hoped to better live out Jesus’ call. They looked to others building similar vehicles in both the secular and religious world. They valued stability, continuity and efficiency. They saw the necessity of the vehicle in moving things forward. Over time, the perspective of those who work within the vehicle is shaped by the necessiities of vehicle maintenance and fuel.

Here’s how Kathy E. Ferguson puts it in The Feminist Case Against Bureacracy.

The norms and rules dominant in bureaucracy, as in any social system, are generally those that support the requirements of bureaucratic self-maintenance. Motivations and behavior that are consistent with the needs of self-maintenance are encouraged and rewarded; those inconsistent with it are penalized. Thus the real goals of the organization become those that keep the machinery of the institution running.

At the same time, the instinct to institution build is understandable. Institutions promise to preserve a vision for a future generation: to make a part of ourselves immortal. Those who work for them can derive a sense of meaning and belonging, not to mention a job. My parents both work at Mennonite instititions and I spent a wonderful two and half years volunteering with the Mission Network in London. At their best, instiutions can provide community for their workers and constituents.

But how do we know when we’re off balance? How do we know when the values of institutional maintenance have become too central in our thinking about church? I look forward to looking more at these questions in part two of this article.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Jesus Matters, edited by James Krabill and David W. Shenk:

Does church mean an institutionalized, bureaucratic organization, irrelevant, slow to respond and limiting our potential? Obviously, this was not at all what Jesus had in mind. The church is meant to be an alternative community, subverting the values of our dominant society with kingdom of God priorities. It is to be radical, countercultural, and prophetic. It is to be a mobile and portable reservoir of kingdom-living that can be present and contextualized everywhere. Because the agenda of the ekklesia is the agenda of God’s kingdom, its interests are not narrow but broadly inclusive of all things that impact the welfare of society as well as creation. - Jack Suderman with Andrew Suderman and Irene, Bryan, Derek, Julie, Rebecca and Karen Suderman in the "Jesus and the Church" chapter

Photo by by Marco Bellucci. Licensed under Creative Commons by attribution 2.0

The messy meaning of Easter

TimN — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 17:29:54 +0000

crossposted from As of Yet Untitled

Over the years, I’ve been a semi-regular reader of Revolution in Jesusland, a blog by Zack Exley. Zack was a secular progressive activist who discovered the church a few years ago and was blown away by what he describes as "the fourth great awakening", that is, the church discovering and acting on God’s heart for justice. The blog was an attempt to tell the story of this movemen to secular progressives.

When I visited the blog again today after a long absence, I was introduced to his new baby daughter Esther and this powerful passage:

… one side effect of Esther’s arrival was that I had to take over some of Elizabeth’s responsibilities to friends in need. She was eight months pregnant but calls kept coming in from refugee families needing help with medical, legal, financial and paperwork emergencies. So I finally crossed the line that I had been resisting for 20 years: I started getting wrapped up in the messy details of other people’s hard lives — as opposed to "organizing" them, or advocating for "policy" to help them.

Finally getting my hands dirty in various hopeless situations stunned me into silence. What it actually did was give me TOO MUCH to say, and left me tongue tied.

For the past 20 years, I witnessed and condemned systemic injustice. I thrived on the drama of “organizing” against it. But I carefully avoided ever getting my hands dirty in the messy business of merely surviving in the face of it.

For me, the temptation to focus on the systemic injustice and to miss the personal is very real. I would prefer to simply focus on macro change: the big stuff. It’s not hard to work up a head of righteous anger reading the latest quote from the director of ICE on disappearing immigrants. But what about visiting the immigrant family down the street? To focus on either the systemic while losing site of the personal (or vice versa) is a road to unsustainability and burn out.

This is where the church comes in. As a body, Jesus calls us to live together in the tension between the personal and the political. It’s there in his very first sermon:

"The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

      because he has anointed me

      to preach good news to the poor.

   He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

      and recovery of sight for the blind,

   to release the oppressed,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor(Luke 4:18)

We see at the same time the challenge to the economic and political systems (opression and economic Jubilee) and the personal connection of his healing ministry. And so we too in the church are called to engaging the powers and engaging the poor at a personal level. At Living Water I find that my relationships with people from other economic and social background are what keep me grounded and sustained for the long haul.

I’m convinced that this is the work of the church, to come together with one another in our shared, messy brokenness. And together, with the power and strenght of Jesus, to resist the systems of death that seek to dominate us.

And I guess that’s what Easter is about for me. It’s not about the lilies, though they are pretty. It’s about the delicious, impetuous audacity of the resurrection. The way Jesus walking out of the grave frees us from the fear of death that isolates us from one another and binds us to the domination system.

As David Weis says:

Christ is Risen!

WE are risen indeed!"

Bodies Matter: a footwashing protest

IsaacV — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 15:23:54 +0000

For Holy Thursday a bunch of gathered at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Cary, North Carolina, and held a footwashing worship service—we told them we wanted to wash the feet of the people detained inside. If you haven’t heard about these ICE detention centers, that means the federal government is good at what it does: Obama is turning out to be just as good as Bush in keeping secrets from U.S. citizens. ICE sets up field offices in unmarked buildings, tucked away in business parks throughout suburbia. Once citizens find out about a particular site, ICE closes up shop and moves to another unmarked building, tucked away in one of the other many business parks in a different suburb. The detention center in Cary we visited is next door to the offices of Oxford University Press, the publisher of many of the books on my shelves. (For more information on ICE detention centers, read this article from The Nation: America’s Secret ICE Castles).

Here’s some local media coverage of our worship service and protest: “Protesters hold demonstration,” and “Taking the Cross to the streets.”

And here’s an excerpt from the short sermon I preached at the detention center as a Cary police officer kept telling me to stop preaching and leave the premises:

This chair here will remain empty as a sign of all the bodies that the department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement have hidden from us, the bodies that law enforcement agents have torn from our communities and our families in the middle of the night, the bodies that they have ripped away from our churches. By refusing to let us wash the feet of the people hidden in their detention centers, the federal government has dismembered the body of Christ, they have torn apart the church, they have pierced and severed the body of Jesus.

For the rest of the sermon, follow this link to my church website: “Bodies Matter, part 1”

Never doubt that a small group of marginal wierdos chan change the world.

TimN — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 14:02:43 +0000

In fact, according to Clive Thompson, marginal weirdos brought us computer, democracy and the novel. Basically, Thompson argues that when the audience gets too big for a conversation, it stops taking risks. Which is why I’ve come to see these long posting breaks on YAR as pruning moments. A 10% drop in visits to YAR in March means 10% more risk taking! Another part of Thompson’s argument is the way small groups can have wider ripple effects.

For example, I have to admit that I’ve been a Twitter skeptic. I just can’t bring myself to try to squeeze a meaningful into 140 characters. Its probably quite closely tied with my lack of enthusiasm for texting. Maybe its a generational thing. But I discovered that technology doesn’t wait for us to get used to it. Turns out people have been tweeting about YAR for at least a year.

In Other News

“Having been a senior executive at some of America’s largest corporations I am convinced that model is ultimately doomed. An entity that lasts forever and grows forever is just not possible and is silly anyway. It is a waste of resources. Society deserves a better model for the organization and deployment of resources to provide products and services.” - Glen Edens, former senior vice president and director at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, chief scientist Hewlett Packard in The Impact of the Internet on Institutions in the Future (via BoingBoing)

For more of my thoughts on the declining relevance of institutions, see Bureaucracy, Resurrection, and Mennonite Church USA

“Wow. What a ride!” - in memory of Gene Stoltzfus

TimN — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:31:13 +0000

“None of us is promised tomorrow, which makes me wonder if maybe we all shouldn’t be living as if we’re on our final journey home… Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow. What a ride!’ - Barbara Baumgardner in My Fantastic Final Journey

I came across this quote this morning while I was reading an article by Joan Hershberger in the latest issue of the Mennonite. It made my laugh out load and think of Gene. It was such a life he lived. And he died on the first warm day of the year, enthusiastically pedaling his bike to town, back home, and beyond.

Godspeed, brother. Godspeed.