Origins…

Strumpel Watching REO speedwagon at church... he laughed.

Hey all,

Sorry it took a little while to get this up (the holiday and all that jazz). Here is what some people had to say about the gathering a few weeks ago.

shaunalott I’m thankful for certain people in my community that have supported me the past 3 1/2 months out of their “plenty”. #originsgathering

gshelsta “Conflict is like relational excavation” #originsgathering

nickKOFAHL I thought worship was good. I wish I could have had a monitor. Never really heard it tonight. #originsgathering

#originsgathering- “There are no Chuck Nori (that is the plural form of Chuck Norris).” – Ramin My favorite quote from tonight’s gathering.

gshelsta I just found out that “Nori” is the plural of noris #originsgathering

shaunalott A genuine relationship is one where two people pull out of each other who they really are and not who they aren’t. #originsgathering

Hope this finds you well. I am working on a blog for either this week or next week about the Resound Worship conference that some of us a few weeks ago. Also, if you have anything that you would like to write for the blog, let me know so we can see what we can do.

Peace,

Garret

Hey all… I was out with swine flu last week and was MIA. So, for that and the fact I didn’t post this jewel of a reflection that Natalie Razavi wrote after our “All Saints Day” lingering, I apologize.  Without delay Natalie:

If I had to choose a word to describe my last month it would be: FUNK. You know those times where you’re doing all of the things you hate and you’re failing to do all of the things you love or know are good for you? Well, Sunday night was a divine break in the funkiness. I couldn’t escape the presence of God because He was there and I couldn’t escape my bad attitude because I was surrounded by all of you, the people who challenge me to walk in fullness of life.

I was drawn out of my self-absorption as we worshiped (which felt great!) and then at the very end I looked over at the static on the screen and found myself completely identifying with it.  “That’s my brain, Lord,” I thought. Sometimes the circumstances of life, the attitudes I live in, and the things I think about create a noise that I can’t seem to escape. When life gets that way I often find myself leaning into the noise instead of leaning into my Father. The static seems so overwhelming that I almost resist the quiet that I’ll find with Him. As I stared the Holy Spirit quickened these thoughts, “The noise of life is something that has effected every follower of Jesus for all time’s sake. A life of faith is finding me in the midst of all of it, listening for my voice in the noise.”

I was so thankful to be reminded again that the aim of life is not necessarily eliminating all of the noise, but being one of the faithful, who discerns the presence and voice of the Father right in the middle of it.

May your voice be louder

May your voice be clearer

Than all the others, than all the others.

May your face be dearer

May your words be sweeter

Than all the others, than all the others.

In my life, please keep my eyes fixed on you.

Please root my heart so deep in you.

Keep me abiding, keep me abiding, keep me abiding that I may bear fruit.

May your presence be truer

May your presence nearer

Than all the others, than all the others.

May your light shine brighter

May your love move deeper

Than all the others, than all the others.

In my life please keep my eyes fixed on you, please root my heart so deep in you

Keep me abiding, keep me abiding, keep me abiding, that I may bear fruit.

- Jeremy Riddle

Truth= Shoe

Hey all here is the tweet line that went down last sunday. It was a little quite on the tweet-o-sphere which means either Ramin and I were totally awesome and had you completely entranced with our oratory skills (less likely) or you were more interested in the world series (more likely). There were some great thoughts here regardless, so comment away:

camillecompston A good night at church, full of eating my shoe. #originsgathering http://yfrog.com/9gl8qj

waneka #originscommunity relational and predicated by revelation

keelycormier Imagine a church where the first concern is people’s relational experience with The Truth, not rational acceptance of it #originsgathering

shaunalott Engage your world honestly. #originsgathering

This weekend Ramin, Ryan and I are going to do a joint presentation on the Origins value of “Truth and Meaning.” As I was preparing for this I was looking through some old notes and found this poem I wrote when I was working at a church in south orange county. I thought that this was interesting for two reasons. First, I feel like the poem reminded me of the pertinence of the running towards pain second mile initiative. I wrote this sitting on a beautiful beach directly after a missions trip to the slums of Ensanda, Mexico. The juxtaposition of two experience caused some turmoil. Second, as I am reflecting on truth and meaning this struct me as a way that I was attempting to expose the untruth I often see in consumer culture.

Anyway, here is the poem let me know what you think (and if Amy Fant reads this please don’t critique it to critically… I am an amateur Just to give you some deciphering tools… there are some references to my continued struggle with pornography and lust in the first and second stanza,  a quick reference to Dante’s inferno , and an odd reference to surfing (it is odd because I wasn’t a surfer in my time in CA) both in the second stanza. Here you go:

American Dream vs. Reality

Deceiving looks and broken eyes

Stray to Beige cells

On beige granules

That stick to a brown blanket

Bought from a brown faced man

In a dirty country whose citizens

Rule the upward city.

Downward however I look.

Parallel and strait across

My visual hands concentrate

Choices being made already,

As to waves are blown out in the afternoons.

My will is tossed by the wind.

Similar to the souls in the first circle

Surfing their every desire and whim.

Into shallow kiddy pools I jump,

From a thin pole of high dive

Anorexic in nature

To look good for the diver.

Almost broken.

Tied together with triangles and string.

Still this broken toy I want to play.

And As the shards cut and dig, pierce and whip.

With a cat tail and nail

With a hammer and a spear.

Gasping breaths yelling at me to see

The breathtaking beauty of a “fat” girl

Bent over a toilet

In an army canvas for a cover

Beautiful like the brown babe yelling

“Back ride! Back ride!”

But so quickly I seem to forget the things that are Forever.

Forcing full feeble feelings of fulfillment.

Fleeting facets of facts.

Pleasing to a personal placebo

Doing nothing but deceiving the mind

To believe that life is

An American dream

Born in a dreamless sleep

With no colored coat to discern.

Life is more than

Beauties on beaches,

Houses on sand,

Corner stores,

3 marriages,

Paid vacation,

Guitars,

Rock n roll,

Hot dogs,

And Wal-Mart.

Look with eyes to see,

Find and search for life in

Off seasons,

Broken Hearts,

Deceiving days,

And Red Letters.

Ramin brought the keynote noise and funk on sunday… and here is what people were tweeting:

kristencompston How come @camillecompston is the only baby that is loud during church? #originsgathering

JuliaDub @Waneka is the best slides guy. #originsgathering

gshelsta #originsgathering I am impressed at two things: @JuliaDub passion about being people who do what we say. Chris Nelson know his his history

kristencompston “The trinity was brainstorming”-Ramin#originsgathering

gshelsta Did the trinity need a white board and dry erase markers in their brainstorming session. #originsgathering

ashelsta PowerPoint makes me feel like I’m at school and am supposed to be taking notes #originsgathering

kristencompston He is taking us to a good and spacious places, the boundaries are pleasant there. #originsgathering

gshelsta We must live like we have already won… Because we have… death has been destroyed. #originsgathering

gshelsta “The holy spirit is kind of like the bastard son of trinity.” -Ramin Razavi #originsgathering

good stuff guys…

-Garret

As I’ve been thinking about what it means to run toward pain, my mind and heart have been drawn toward the persecuted.  Although, I may have experienced persecution on a very small scale, I have no context for being severely treated for my faith.  So many of our brothers and sisters, are literally laying down their lives in order to follow Jesus through imprisonment, torture, estrangement from their family, and even death.  They truly understand that what is most valuable is often the most costly.  How many times do we forget that our faith is meant to really cost us something?  My mind is full and my heart is heavy.  I’ll leave you with some scripture that I am meditating on and a link to help you connect with the stories of those who are willingly giving up everything for the sake of knowing Christ.  May they inspire and challenge us.

Philippians 3:7-11

Matthew 5:10, 2

2 Timothy 3:10-17

Hebrews 13:3

-Shauna Rushing

Hey guys…

Here is some of the stuff that surfaced on twitter last night during the lingering. If there was something that hit you please comment below. Also, there is a post below that still has no comments. Agreements and disagreements are welcome

OriginsBoulder #originsgathering… If something hits you while you are worshiping tonight tweet it:)

JuliaDub Running towards pain. Running toward Spain. Running toe ward Spain. But seriously that a heavy concept. Running towards pain.

gshelsta Sometimes I mistake doing stuff for Church as worshiping g-d… #originsgathering

kristencompston Singing prophetically over others (like peeps really suffering) is way better than thinking of self in worship. #originsgathering

That is all for now… Dave wilton is going to be posting some thoughts this Wednesday so keep your eyes open for that…

See you soon.

This Is the Lord's Cupcake...

As we establish this blog, one of the main things we hope occurs is a in this space( although a limited digital one) people can work out what they encounter on their journey. One way we are going to do this is by having people simply reflect on the things they are confronted with in their daily lives. Whether they are reflecting on something that happened in their house church, or something from the gathering on sunday,  perhaps they had an insight at the lingering, or durning their small gathering during the week, we want to create a space to ask question about what God is doing in the day to day. So, here goes the first one:

A few weeks ago when Ryan spoke on the imago dei and asked us to think of the first things we noticed when we encounter cultures different on than our own. Many of our answers were not surprising. We said language, race, food, etc. The point of the exercise, I believe, was to have us realize that most times our first impression of different cultures is the tangible and mundane, rather than the ideology and spiritual. He then drew our attention to our tendency if not habit of our christianity being the exact opposite of that. The first exercise of our christian faith is our concern for the IDEAS about christianity or what we think about God. Ryan was showing us that our notions about christianity are largely overly spiritualized (i.e.gnostic). We think the most important marker of the christian faith are our IDEAS about God rather than how LIVE. Because I have been trained theologically I want to put some theological language around this, we value our orthodoxy (thoughts about God) more than our orthopraxy (how we live toward God). As Ryan continued my mind rabbit trailed (Ryan did encourage this) and I started thinking about our original answers to our first impression cultural distinctives: language, race and food. It occurred to me how those cultural traits illuminate our own christian culture and if we reflected/acted on our findings we could manifest the kingdom presently and take on the personhood of christ. In order to explain what I mean a little more clearly let me explain two things I think about church, and how I see those things playing themselves out in our lives so that we can manifests the kingdom and take on the likeness of Christ.

If you know me it is no surprise to you that I have strong opinions about church. One of those strong opinions is that the church IS a counter culture. We are a peculiar people, strangers or sojourners in strange lands (1 Peter 2:9). And by counter culture I am not talking about crappy music, book stores and conferences. All of that is evidence that we are more concerned with free market enterprise and profit rather than discipleship. When I say the church is a counter culture, I mean that there are things christians do that are counter to the dominate cultural tendencies. For example, we pray for our enemies wellbeing and desire their blessing rather than their demise (for more examples see here). Now, this does not mean everything the culture is for the church is against. For example, because the culture likes drinking beer and watching football christians can’t like either of those things and especially them together. All this is to say that the church has it own set of cultural peculiarities that can make us different from the broader culture  and we should not be surprised if that happens more times than not.

Another of those opinions is expressed in the following axiom: how we live toward God(our orthopraxy) has equal importance to what we think about God (our orthodoxy). I think this axiom play out in two ways. First, it is a diagnostic. We can tell what we believe by how we act. To use what Ryan was saying as an example, a majority of evangelical churches value ideas about God and that is why they devote 40 minutes to some man (well normally it is a man) telling us what he thinks the Scripture means.  Second it is descriptive of how we should idealistically live. If we believe a certain thing we are compelled to act consistently with what we believe. For example, at origins we believe that church is something we ARE not something we go to, and this is why we have house churches at the end of every month. House church is a discipline for us to remember that we ARE the church.

So, if the church has its own set of cultural distinctives or values, and we can identify those by how we act then how we answer questions of race, language, and food are important indicators of our THEOLOGY. I think it would be great for us to reflect on each one of those answers but for the sake of time (this is already much longer than I thought it would be) I want to focus on the answer that was occupying my mind a few sundays ago: Food.

In the twitter conversation that evening @tylerwaneka asked what christian food would look like, which at first sounds like a very strange and humorous question. Tyler actually followed up by answering “Christian cupcakes,” and for the record if Jesus made cupcakes I am pretty sure it would taste like the red velvet cupcake from Tee and Cakes.  But, in all seriousness I think that we know the answer to what christian food looks like: Communion.

This sacrament is beautiful for many reasons but I want to highlight just two in order to make one final point. First, I think communion is wonderful because Jesus told his people to remember him by an activity. Many of the leaders of that and most other time periods would build elaborate memorials to ensure that their memory would be solidified. Jesus, however, asked us to remember him by the means of something that WE do. We remeber Jesus by action. This leads me to the second aspect of communion I wanted to highlight. When we take communion we take food into our body, and in our sophomore biology class we learn that food is digested, broken down and converted into nourishment for our bodies so it can grow, live and act. We do the same when we gather as the body of Christ’s people and partake in communion because communion is more than what we eat but it is what we become. While participating in the sacrament, we become the body of Christ. The same body of the one who tells us is broken in order to become nourishment to the world, so it may live, grow and flourish. What we do when we take communion is effectively become the bread/nourishment to the world by taking on the mission of the one we are remembering: in the same way that the bread and wine nourish us we nourish the world.

That being said, if communion is a guiding christian cultural distinctive that constitutes “Christian food” how do our actual eating habits reflect that value? And if we discover that we don’t eat in a way that shows our value of communion, what does our eating habits tell us about our theology?

I hope this isn’t to self indulgent but I wanted to put out there as a way means to show ways that I have dealt with this issue. It it was precisely because of this thought process that I became a pescetarian (the only animal protein I eat is fish) over a year ago. The thought behind it was that I had read some books which detailed that the conditions of slaughter houses were not only detrimental to animals (I don’t think that when God said tame the earth in Genesis that he meant allow his creation to stand wast deep in the own feces and inject them with steroids that enlarge their liver to the point of continual pain) but detrimental to the workers who worked in them (undocumented workers who have no rights and no health insurance when they become sick from the bacteria that is growing in the plants they work in). I decided that my eating habits should reflect the things I believed and I felt certain that vegetables and the people who grew them were much less likely to be miss treated than those who produced my meat. As I conversed with friends, prayed and thought I came to the conclusion that this was inconsistent with my life as a follower of Jesus. How could I perpetuate a system that so fragrantly took advantage people and  blatantly abused the creatures that God told us to caretake?

So, much to my own disappointment (I LOVED EATING MEAT) I began abstaining from all land produced animal protein. My decision, I have learned, is far from complete. I learned of the TERRIBLE working conditions of migrant famers and the continual mistreatment they receive from big agriculture. We read a book called In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, a wonderful book that has very helpful practical way to eat. After reading the book and at the prompting of my wife, we took one of the suggestions of the book and began eating as locally as possible. Our first step was buy a share of C.S.A. (community supported agriculture). Through this program we were relationally tied to a local farm. If their crop failed,we didn’t get as much to eat. If their crop went was abundant, we had more food the usual. Every wednesday when we picked up our share for the week, we could meet with the people who grew our food. They gave us a newsletter informing us of how their farmhands were doing and how hard they were working. They even invited us to come and visit them at the farm. Needless to say it was refreshing. By eating local I knew I had a relationship with the people who grew our food. I could drive out to 75th and valmont and see their farm. I knew their farmhands were not being mistreated and I knew that simply by taking the time about how I ate I was able to eat in a way that connected me to my value of Communion. Simply, by taking the time to work through some the connecting of my thoughts about God and how I act, pushed me to take a very simple step to change my eating habits.

All of this were small steps for sure and they are by not any means a “solution” to the worlds problems, but it has lead me to many new pathways of connecting my thoughts and my actions. I don’t say these things to tell you how to eat , however I do provide you this as a means see how I (so take it with a grain of salt) have begun thinking about how our lives can reflect our values. I desire us to be a consistent and truthful community of people.

So, here is to that. Here is to our journey heres to becoming a people that have language and racial ties that are nutrients to the world.

-garret