News & Views

Join us for an exciting evening.  Stimulate your senses with aromatic coffee blends and help us choose the perfect blend and roast for West Hill.  Our Fair Trade coffee selections are roasted by Alternative Grounds. Then stimulate your mind with an incredible new play by Munroe Scott, performed by Rick Miller and based almost entirely on interviews with the Great Infidel himself, a.k.a. The Orator, Robert Ingersoll.  February 23, beginning at 7:30.

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Beginning on Monday evening March 1, 2010 at 7:30 p.m. (to 9:30 p.m. with a short break) in the Lounge is a six (6) week Lenten/Easter series on: Faith.

Lent is traditionally a time of reflection, of giving something up - in anticipation of Easter.

This series is a Conversation with you. What have you given up regarding your faith journey ... BUT more importantly, what are you choosing to keep!!! What does your faith journey look like these days - what inspires you and connects you to/ with 'mystery, the divine, the spirit, gaia, wisdom, your inner-knowing, the transcendent, god, creation, love, and so on ...'?

The weekly conversations are hosted by Janice Meighan, chair of wellness & care. There are no books to read, simply because, YOU are the 'book of faith' being shared during this conversational program!

Some topics for the Conversations include:

Faith/Spiritual/Religious Journey - are they the same thing, different and does it really matter?; Death & Dying - the afterlife?; Creativity As An Expression of Faith - music, art, poetry, drama, pottery ... do you "connect" through creativity? ... AND Much More....!!

Come out to one, several or all weeks ... it's your choice. Please do sign-up (initially) if you are interested in attending any week in this series. Sign-up sheet is on the Wellness & Care board directly across from the church office. Or speak to Janice if you have questions.

Mark your calendars and see you Monday March 1, 2010!

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With thanks to Scott Campbell for the link.

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This morning I opened a bulk email I receive regularly and enjoyed a poem by Pedro Salinas, particularly these lines:

Your task
is to carry your life high,
and play with it, hurl it
like a voice to the clouds
so it may retrieve the light
already gone from us.

 

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(This article is also published in the October edition of the Salt Shaker) 

Winner of the 1964 Caldecott Award for children’s books, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak had a film adaptation released earlier this year that will introduce a whole new generation of children to the fairy tale Sendak weaves.  In the book, little Max, angry at having been sent to his room without a dinner, imagines his way into a strange and distant land ruled by wild things. Staring into their yellow eyes, he becomes king of them all, dances and rules them until, finally, he becomes bored. Max, tiring of the wild things, finds the control he needs to manage the complex emotional landscape of a child, a place where all the decisions are made by people bigger than himself.  When he returns to his room, he finds his still-warm dinner, a sign of his mother’s love, awaiting him.

From time to time, we all feel like Max.  What we want and what we can do are two different things; forces beyond our control impose their choices upon us; situations we understand but can do nothing about, threaten to engulf us.  Frustration builds and anger erupts. If we aren’t careful, our “wild things” end up running the show. We react with our emotions instead of responding with as objective an appreciation of the situation as is possible.

On September 20^th, I advised the congregation of the financial situation in which West Hill currently finds itself. Thrown off the long range plan we’d set in 2007 by the departure of many long-term, established donors, our focus, necessarily, turned toward survival. The situation appeared beyond our control and, indeed, threatened to engulf us.  Frustration built. Feelings of betrayal have been strong. Anger, periodically, peeped out from the depths. During the service that day and in a subsequent email, I invited the congregation to come together to talk about what we might do about the situation the following Saturday. 

In the interim period, the wild things had a pretty good time. We conjured up all sorts of measures to cut expenses or create income that, while seemingly drastic, were all potentially acceptable outcomes.   The images were graphic and stark.  The darkness swirled.  The week was long.

But Saturday came.  That afternoon fifty-six people gathered to offer their energy and put their shoulders to the task of getting some objectivity and creating a plan. We worked under the leadership of Scott Campbell, author of 5D Leadership (check it out in our library!), and mentor to the board through its leadership assessment process, to describe the mess we found ourselves in; clarify what we knew and what we only guessed at or didn’t know at all; identify the key elements that would stabilize and sustain us; and “fish-bone” our way to an incredible list of potential options that we can now explore and engage as we (wild things at bay) choose what it is we want to do.

In the process, we realized that two significant things could be identified as essential to stabilizing our financial picture and moving forward with confidence. 

1.      we need to raise a certain amount of money immediately to stem the use of our reserves and

2.      we need to increase our monthly income in order to sustain us into the future.

We came to a couple of numbers to use without hard facts in front of us. Review of our finances shows that we were close, but not bang on.  The figures as they stand now are:

 

1.      we need to raise $34,000 by April 1.

2.      we need to increase our monthly income by $4,300 by April 1.

 

Two groups of people are needed to get this work underway, one looking at immediate fundraising ideas and the other looking at sustainable income sources. A few names were collected at the end of the meeting.  Darrick Heyd has agreed to coordinate the fundraising group. Joe Konecny will coordinate the other group. Both groups will be energetically engaged in the process of moving us toward stability so if you’re inclined or forgot to put your name down on Saturday, let someone know!

Getting these two groups going and brainstorming some ideas for them to work with were huge tasks we had to accomplish on Saturday and we did. I like to think, though, that the greatest accomplishments made that day came in the form of single steps. As each person took his or her first step toward the church that day, a little bit of “we can do it” that hadn’t existed before popped into the realm of possibility; working through our challenges became a little bit more likely.  Without those first steps, it would have been an empty room. In an empty room, “we can do it” never gets said, thought, even dreamt. The wild things continue to stamp their feet. But Saturday afternoon, one step at a time, we stared the wild things down, got them under control, found our way to possibility, to maybe, to something can be done.  And, as we all know, once you’ve managed to get that far, the sky’s the limit!

 

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In April I posted a piece on clergy compensation, pointing to the $600K package that New York's Riverside Church had offered its newest minister. Little did I know then that complaints about compensation were symptoms of a greater ill that has prompted some to suggest that it goes even to the core of the progressive Christian project.

Two months after the compensation fiasco, Rev. Brad Braxton resigned. While the compensation issue was cited as the reason for his departure, as this NY Daily News article hints, other concerns may have been influential. For one thing, Rev. Braxton was the second black pastor in a row at Riverside, and some speculate that there was growing concern that the church was becoming "too black." For another thing, Braxton tended to preach from the Bible and introduced a more evangelical style into the worship space. This would be problematic for a church which describes itself as progressive and which does not ascribe to the Bible any special authority.

This has raised debates about how far a progressive congregation can go. How does the white Protestantism which underpins the progressive movement deal with race (and difference more generally)? What does it mean to be tolerant and inclusive? See “God Needs You To Get Out of the Bubble”: Riverside Controversy Exposes Theological, Racial Fault Lines of the Christian Progressive Movement, by Peter Laarman and Jonathan L. Walton. This is a conversation which appeared yesterday in Religion Dispatches.

But even more interesting is the response posted by Rita Nakashima-Brock - "We Might Need the End of Progressive Christianity". Some of what she writes is tainted by vitriol and she admits that it's a "rant", but I make the assumption that because she writes from one within the progressive perspective, she is pained by the conflict that has gripped Riverside. She is purposefully raising larger questions which need to be raised. I invite you to read her article in full but here is a sampling:

I don’t think progressive Christianity can offer a compelling vision because we are at the end of the fumes of the Protestant reformation that created us. We carry in our bones its reductionism, focus on individual salvation, and visions of the elect and eschatology.

We need a new paradigm.

Progressives, especially, value tolerance, which creates dispassionate, lay-them-side-by-side-respectfully-as-equals approaches to ecumenism and interfaith dialogue. They have a smattering of shallow ideas about other religions that are largely intellectual. They dabble appreciatively.

So here are a few questions to ponder:

First, does Rita Nakashima-Brock's "Progressive Christianity" describe what we do at WHUC? Do American proponents like John Cobb jr. & the TCPC describe something different than what we're accustomed to? Does the Canadian experience free us up to do a different kind of work?

Can we learn from the Riverside experience? We have recently enjoyed conversations about intercultural church with Michael Blair, intersexuality with Calvin Neufeld, and have declared ourselves an affirming congregation. Are we just making nice? Or do we have to go further and enter into places that make us really uncomfortable?

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A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Albert Einstein

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