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A useful vision statement is sort of like a star to steer by. In the absence of a clearly illuminated path or an easy-to-read road map, a brightly lit star can keep us heading in the right direction. In ministry, when so many options are available to us and so many needs crying for attention, we need some sort of direction to help us stay focused on the work God called us to do. When we live in harmony with our stated vision, we not only see good results—we wind up moving forward together.

I don’t think it’s an accident that I am frequently called to ministry between the branches of Friends. As someone who grew up in an evangelical culture but now worships with liberal Friends, I feel…

The emerging church and mothering sites are what drew me initially into the blogosphere:  daily I would check for new Quakes or young adults crying out for more authentic living and worship (and new funny ‘here’s the many colors of poo of my child today’ stories:  when you’re sleep-deprived, they’re a hoot).   As blogging’s become more normalized, posts feels very mechanical, formulaic.  The topics are rehashed, and unless serious digging takes place, the grand sense is evangelical white males talking about oppression:  something’s a bit off in that scenario.

Great piece:

How come the rest of the church is taken up with missional or emerging church as if it were something new? We are only doing what the apostles did two thousand years ago, and what the regular old Christian in the street did – helped the neighbour, fed the poor, nursed the sick, visited the imprisoned, clothed the naked…

I’ve been reading John P. Bowen’s book Evangelism for “Normal” People, (Augsburg Fortress 2002). What is “normal” evangelism? Not approaching strangers with “Are you saved?” or handing out leaflets on street corners! It’s living peacefully, helping our neighbours, reaching out to those in need, and generally following Christian principles. It’s taking some risks when people question us about faith. It’s being bold in witness, but in witnessing with love.

In Haiti we have about a dozen Evangelical Friends Churches under the direction of Evangelical Friends Church-Eastern Region with 2000-2500 attenders. They are located 30 miles northwest of…

Friends are now at a crisis… We can conform to political culture… liberal Friends siding more and more with the democrats, Orthodox/evangelical more and more with the republican Religious right. We…

Oh, to be a young believer in Philadelphia right now, where the spirit of Christian activism is mingling vigorously with an apparently unkillable strain of old-school countercultural Jesus-freakery. Here, if you’re listening, you’ll hear hosannas on the streets, and a flavor of tambourines. A band called Psalters mounts an ululating, multi-drum offensive against the capitalist hegemony. They dress the part, too—if you saw this lot coming on a dark night, you’d run. The dreadlocked Shane Claiborne is here, author of The Irresistible Revolution (2006) and a leader of a movement known as the New Monasticism. Claiborne co-founded the Simple Way community in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood in 1998, and the area has since grown to include a branch of the young storefront evangelical church Circle of Hope.

But corruption occurs when we begin to forget the “why” of our folkways and let them become filters that totally contradict the extraordinary wave of God’s power that originally formed us as a community, and ought to be continuing to form us—from the full range of human variety! Our distinctive teachings are only “peculiar” because we’ve not gone far enough in making them available to all.

But that begs the question of why bother identifying as anything at all. I mean, if it’s just between me and Jesus, what’s the point? The point is evangelism. (Did I just write that?) The point is letting people know that Jesus is the reason that I do my best to live with integrity, obedience and intentionality.

What worship among Quakers has brought to me has been a maturing of my faith. I often say that Quaker meeting for worship is church for adults. We don’t have the programming and the pomp and circumstance, the readings, the sermons,  etc provided for us. We have to make our own magic happen.

As we live with the results of the 19th-century divisions among us, the stuff we put out often reflects where we are in the complex geography of today’s Friends. We evangelical Friends write more…

Eastern Region is the original. Here, ever since the Revival experience of the mid-1800s, Friends have greatly emphasized the tradition of Evangelical Protestantism, often at the expense of Friends…

There will be one item of business that has already drawn a lot of interest and generated a lot of discussion. The Yearly Meeting Board on Christian Ministries and Evangelism is recommending that Phil Gulley’s recording as a minister with WYM be rescinded because of substantial disunity with WYM Faith and Practice. Unfortunately, over the years this process seems to have generated more heat than light.

Evangelical Friend AJ Schwanz writes about a new book from Mike King called Presence-centered Youth Ministry: Guiding Students into Spiritual Formation:

In my history of being part of faith communities I realized that those who are “group”-oriented seem more clubish, more “come in, be one of us”, more fractured, more self-interested. Those that were “ministry”-0riented thought of the bigger picture, had more awareness of the each other, practiced more over-arching hospitality. And in my faith gathering we have many ministries, but not a lot of groups … but the places where there are groups, we seem to have more lack of communication and conflict with each other.

Martin Commentary: On her post I asked AJ to tease out this distinction between “groups” that separate youth and “ministry” that keeps them in the church body.

I wonder if there’s some lesson for liberal Friends in this and not just for youth ministry. It seems like we have a tendency to compartimentalize our activities. Every purpose needs its own committee and we spend a lot of time starting and laying down committees. Why is “peace and concerns” separated from “earthcare” separated from “outreach” separated from “racial justice”? They’re all loving our neighbors.

My impression is that earlier generations of Friends did most things through two “committees”: ministers and elders. By divorcing our good deeds from ministry, we often secularlize them. How might we pull these functions together? Have any liberal Friends read out there Mike King’s work? Here’s the Amazon description:

How many programs does it take to change a youth group?

That question has bothered youth workers for decades, and the cracks in its logic are beginning to show. In place of the contrived, artificial mechanisms employed so widely in modern youth outreach and discipleship, Mike King proposes a ministry centered in the presence of God.

Young people encounter Christ not in the flash and pop of arena ministry, but in the sacred shadow of his presence. They learn what it is to love and follow Christ by observing others loving and following Christ—letting Christ shape their worldviews, their habits, their virtues. Presence-Centered Youth Ministry gives shape to such ministry through the classic disciplines and potent symbols and practices that have sustained the church over the centuries.

The sound and fury that has characterized youth ministry for so long has left too many youth workers tired and too many young people disillusioned. Come explore the deeper terrain; your students are sure to follow.

The NYTimes asked some religious pundits about Governor Mark Sanford’s repeated allusions to God and self-comparisons to King David. Some samples:

Chuck Colson:

When God created humans, His first act was to join the first man and woman as one flesh. Marriage is therefore a pre-political institution, the first of three institutions specifically ordained by God. It is therefore a sacred covenant between man, woman and God. Having read the governor’s latest statements about several prior dalliances (enough confessing already, please) I think he needs to go home, and get his own house in order before he can do much for the state of South Carolina.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach:

The paradox of American evangelicals is that they are Christian on the one hand and political conservatives on the other with utterly opposing views of redemption. Christians believe that no one is blameless and all must therefore ride the coattails of a perfect being into heaven. But conservatives espouse the gospel of personal accountability. The state cannot save them. Man must earn his bread by the sweat of his brow and not by welfare alone.

Steven Waldman (Beliefnet):

The problem with this is that Jesus never suggested that being cleansed of spiritual sin meant you were exempted from temporal punishment. A murderer who accepts Christ might still get to heaven, but he doesn’t get sprung from Leavenworth.

Colleen Carroll Campbell (whose book Julie & I reviewed a few years ago)

A politician who publicly champions traditional values while failing to faithfully live his own marriage vows may be a moral weakling, and he certainly loses a good deal of credibility on those issues when he fails to live his professed values in his private life. But his personal failings do not automatically discredit the causes for which he was fighting or serve as irrefutable proof that he never believed in those causes in the first place.