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Posts from the ‘Community’ Category

Oct 14

4 Comments

The Importance of Time Travel

How will the post-pandemic church pay the bills? Clicking on headlines like this, along with the usual parade of daily updates, warnings and statistics have become part of my grim COVID daily reading ritual. Forever scanning the horizon in search of some sign of clarity for what the future might hold when it comes to public worship or the gathered life of the church more broadly. This particular headline, unsurprisingly, wasn’t particularly encouraging. According to a Barna Group study, 65% of American churches have seen donations decline during the pandemic. Incredibly, one in five churches may be forced to close their doors in the next 18 months. I don’t know if the same numbers would map precisely on to Canadian realities, but the general trends aren’t hard to recognize. Read more

Jul 27

12 Comments

Monday Miscellany

Even in normal times, late July tends to be a time when things slow down. Church programs have mostly paused for the summer. Services are sparsely attended as many people flock to the cabin or the mountains or wherever else. For those stuck at work, it can be a hot, sluggish stretch of time where inspiration and motivation are in short supply. And this is, again, in normal times. During COVID time? Well, everything feels somehow worse. Words, and the motivation to produce them, seem to have abandoned me. That’s how it’s felt over the last few weeks at any rate. But a few things have been rattling around my head over the last little while. A quiet Monday morning seems as good a time as any to dislodge them. Read more

Jun 23

5 Comments

On Questions of Authority

Last Friday, our church took some baby steps toward reopening. Sort of. We’ve been recording worship services on Friday night so we can edit and get them out to people by Sunday morning. Last week, for the first time, we allowed a few people to be present during the recording. Attendees had to RSVP in advance, seats were spread out and each person’s place was designated. There were less than thirty people in the building, all told. There was no congregational singing, no handshakes, no hugging, no passing of offering plates, no communion, no touching of hymnals. There were masks and endless supplies of hand sanitizer. It was a rather sterile and unusual service, but then we’re getting pretty used to unusual by this point. I suspect that people were more appreciative of the opportunity to linger with friends in the parking lot after the service on a gorgeous summer evening than anything else. Read more

Apr 27

3 Comments

On Staying Safe

Stay safe. You hear these two little words a lot these days. They serve as the tag at the end of the phone call, the coda for the email, the last words before signing off yet another Zoom meeting, the wary exhortation as you watch your son head off to a shift at the grocery store. These two words have become part of the furniture of our leave-taking, virtual or otherwise, during the days of COVID. Read more

Mar 31

8 Comments

COVID Conversations Over Breakfast

A few field notes from a conversation with my wife over breakfast this morning…

“I think I might be able to get used to this social distancing thing,” my wife says. I think she might be kidding, but perhaps only slightly. One thing this virus has forced many of us to do is to fairly drastically alter the pace of our lives. We’re not running around to endless meetings and the gym and yoga class and chasing the kids’ sporting calendar and the social obligations that so easily clog up our calendars. We’re being forced to sit. At home. Often without anything pressing to do. Read more

Mar 28

23 Comments

I Don’t Think I Want to Get Better at This

Sometime earlier this week, I read the post of some pastor of a small church somewhere out there in Internet-land who said his modest goal for the week was to “record a sermon that didn’t resemble a grainy Taliban capture video.” That made me laugh. And it was a sentiment that obviously resonated for many of us who pastor small churches and for whom the idea of recording or livestreaming services would have seemed absurd even a few weeks ago, whether for philosophical or technological reasons. Or both. Read more

Mar 20

1 Comment

Memento Mori (Or, a Few Thoughts while Social Distancing Through the Rocky Mountains)

I spent two of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic practicing social distancing in my van. My daughter was attending college in British Columbia this year and late last week the directive came that dorms would be emptying, and students would have to return home. So, twenty-five hours in a forty hour period were spent bombing over the Rocky Mountains and back. Read more

Feb 28

17 Comments

Dispatches from the Breaking Point

Last Saturday morning, I, like many others, gasped as I read Ian Brown’s Globe and Mail article describing how L’Arche founder Jean Vanier had sexually abused six women over a period of several decades and known of abuses committed by his former mentor and spiritual director, Père Thomas Philippe. I had received a heads-up from local L’Arche leaders that “something about Vanier might be coming” (our church has close ties with the L’Arche community in our city), but most seemed to think that it might have to do with what and when Vanier knew about Père Thomas’s abuses. I certainly wasn’t expecting anything like what I read in the Globe last weekend. Read more

Feb 26

7 Comments

Fix the System, Fix the Problem?

I spent Monday morning in a packed hotel conference room full of community leaders who had been summoned to hear a presentation on a plan initiated by our city called the “Community Wellbeing and Safety Strategy.” Like many cities, ours is facing significant challenges. Poverty, homelessness, crime, lack of affordable housing, and, of course, the scourges of addiction, mental health issues, and racism that bleed into all of the others. The opioid crisis is hitting our city hard. It is hitting the indigenous population particularly hard. And this spins out into all kinds of social realities that heighten suspicions and diminish good will in our community. The picture of the reality on the ground we were presented with was bleak. “We can’t fix these problems on our own,” the city representatives said. “We need your help.” Read more

Sep 5

5 Comments

On Simplifying

Early September is one of a handful of “new years” that many of us use to orient or mark time. The beginning of another academic year is experienced as a new beginning for many, particularly those with kids. January 1 is another, obviously. For Christians, the First Sunday of Advent would be yet another, as we mark the beginning of another year lived according to the story of Jesus. These are logical points on our calendars and in our lives for us to recalibrate, reorient, recommit, or remind ourselves of important truths. Read more

Aug 6

It’s This, But It’s Also That

Last weekend, I read a remarkable piece of journalism. It was about an issue that I knew little about and it described a reality with which I have no personal experience. It was about a city I have never visited in a country not my own whose social conditions are difficult for me to personally imagine. It discussed a material reality has very little bearing on my everyday life in a small city on the Canadian prairies. And yet, the article modeled a way of approaching a difficult issue that I think we can (must) all learn from if we are going to inhabit our cultural moment in honest and hopeful ways. Read more

Jul 31

1 Comment

How Long?

I periodically listen to the popular podcast This American Life, hosted by Ira Glass. It’s hit and miss, for me, like most podcasts, but very often it will at least leave me with a lingering thought, an itch or two worth scratching. In this week’s episode, “The Weight of Words,” it was the prologue that provided the aforementioned itch. Read more

Jul 23

2 Comments

Desire Infection

Most of us are at least dimly aware that our thinking and behaviour is influenced in important ways by our social circumstances. We tend, in general terms, to think and act like those we surround ourselves with, those we rub shoulders with daily, those we hang out with on the weekend, those we worship with, those we sit in coffee shops or book clubs with, etc. Over time, our thinking tends to come to resemble the thinking of our social groups. Not in every way, of course. It’s not like every social group is comprised of mindless automatons all regurgitating identical content (although social media might offer a depressing counterexample here…). But most of us would acknowledge that our beliefs about the world are profoundly social both in their origins and in their ongoing maintenance. Read more

Jun 11

2 Comments

Jesus and the Invalids

Jesus makes his way from the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem around 33 AD to our city in 2019. Jesus can do this because Jesus is alive and because Jesus shows up behind locked doors and along roads to Emmaus and over breakfast with confused disciples. Also, because, well, Jesus is God. He walks around our city streets to see what he will see. Read more

Mar 29

6 Comments

The Dis-Ease of our Time

I was talking to an older friend the other day. His life has been hard in many ways—long years of manual labour, the loss of young children to a devastating accident, the death of several partners, a long descent into the pit of addiction and an emergence out the other side, a walking away from and a coming home to faith. Now he’s living out his remaining years on a slim pension in a small apartment. He has a litany of health problems. His medications conflict with each other producing unpleasant side effects. He can’t eat what he likes, struggles to sleep, moves slowly. Whenever I see him, we usually run through some portion of the above scenario. The last few times I’ve spoken with him, though, he’s had a different complaint—one that supersedes all of the others, one that may even, in some way, play a role in his deteriorating physical health. He states it baldly, unapologetically, without a hint of pretense or shame: I’m just so lonely. Read more

Mar 21

6 Comments

No Religious Books!

I was walking around downtown this morning in a pleasant little neighbourhood near some stately old churches. It was gloriously warm—a desperately welcome respite after our sub-arctic February. People were out and about. Spring was in the air and it was delightful. Read more

Jan 16

7 Comments

On Nostalgia

Funerals often produce interesting conversations. Especially when the funeral follows the tragic and unexpected death of the matriarch of a massive family with deep history in and connection to the local community. This was the case with the funeral for my grandmother last week. There were so many interesting conversation topics—everything from the ethics of assisted dying to eccentricities of family history to Trump to atheism to, of course, the life that my grandmother lived. But one theme that popped up over and over again, indeed seemed to weave its way through most of the others in some form or another, was a deep sense of nostalgia. Read more

Nov 20

7 Comments

The Disconnect

I spent last weekend participating in a church renewal workshop. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I tend to be a little ambivalent when it comes to these kinds of events. Whatever “church renewal” is or might look like, it seems like the sort of thing that resists easy formulas or clever strategies. Also, I hate group exercises. But desperate times call for desperate measures. These are hard times for the church in Canada. The litany is familiar enough by now: shrinking, aging congregations, dwindling budgets, the evacuation of younger generations, the perception of irrelevance (or worse) out there in the broader culture, etc. The wearisome data piles up. Something, clearly, must be done, even if many of us have little idea what that “something” might be (or whether, indeed, it is all the church’s frantic “somethings” that are part of the problem). Read more

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