Here’s a video clip of Alan Roxburgh talking about “The Call to the Parish” at The Inhabit Conference last month…
John and I both have been challenged by Roxburgh’s work, and especially his recent book, Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood (Baker, 2011 — Read my review of this book on The Englewood Review of Books website).
I rarely listen to music on the radio, but the other day I was flipping through the stations as I was driving and heard the opening riffs of the Barenaked Ladies’ song “The Old Apartment.” This song was a favorite of mine around about the time I graduated from college, so I turned it way up and reveled in the nostalgia. But in the midst of my revelry, the words caught my ear, and I realized that there was something profound here that I had never heard before: the song brings to the surface the deep grief we bear as a result of our hypermobility.
Yesterday, we took our homeschool co-op to the Indiana Repertory Theatre to see William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker, the renowned story of Helen Keller’s childhood. This field trip was a special event since Rachel, one of our homeschoolers, had a small role in the play. It was an amazing performance, and especially 12-year old Ciarra Krohne who played the role of Helen (pictured).
But this is not a review of the play; there was one line that stuck in my head and that seemed particularly relevant to the recent posts here about the faithfulness of the local church in a peak oil world. Early on in the play, as the tension is building and as Anne Sullivan struggles to make the tiniest bits of progress in her work with Helen, the Keller family is about ready to dismiss Anne and in the course of this tense conversation, she says: “I have nowhere else to go, and nothing else to do.”
Yesterday, John raised the question: what are the standards by which we make decisions and judge the health of a church community in a peak oil world?
This question has been a pressing one for us at Englewood Christian Church, one that has regularly been the focus of our Sunday night conversation (the story of which I told in the recent ebook The Virtue of Dialogue). As I suggested in the comments to John’s post, our experience has been that the standard should be the health and flourishing of our places, our church communities should bear witness to the neighbors in our particular place that God is bringing shalom.
One of the areas in which we have worked to bear witness to the coming of God’s shalom is working with our neighbors to launch a food co-op in our neighborhood, which was not long ago, a food desert. Pogue’s Run Grocer is the product of the efforts of neighbors throughout the Near Eastside working together, but it has been an effort in which we as a church have been deeply invested from the outset. A local group has just made available a beautiful video that introduces the co-op and elegantly frames its mission. I’m delighted to give you a little peek into our neighborhood here:
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