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).
My pastor, Bob Henry, read this wonderful blog post this morning at Silverton Friends Church. The post is called “The Hill” and it was written by Mike Huber, pastor of West Hills Friends, a Quaker meeting in Portland. The blog post reminds me of something Wendell Berry wrote in a poem called “How To Be a Poet (to remind myself)”:
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
The apostle Paul says followers of Jesus are ambassadors of reconciliation. That reconciliation work extends to – and is perhaps even rooted in – our particular places. Thus, part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus is to re-sacralize the desecrated places, as well as to resist the spread of “non-places” (to borrow a term from the Slow City movement) that are the byproducts of fast life. [Read more...]
One of the keys to understanding Slow Church is captured in the seventeenth-century French phrase le goût de terroir, which can be translated “the taste of the place.”
Carlo Petrini, co-founder of the Slow Food movement, writes often about terroir as “the combination of natural factors (soil, water, slope, height above sea level, vegetation, microclimate) and human ones (tradition and practice and cultivation) that gives a unique character to each small agricultural locality and the food grown, raised, made, and cooked there.” Thus, a Pinot noir from Oregon’s Willamette Valley takes on the taste and texture of the grape, the soil, the barrel, and the late frost. Milk, it turns out, is also highly sensitive to terroir, according to a fascinating and slightly terrifying article on raw milk in the latest issue of The New Yorker.
In the same way that food and wine take on the taste of the place, Slow Church is rooted in the natural, human, and spiritual cultures of particular places. Slow Church is a distinctively local expression of the global body of Christ. “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14, The Message). [Read more...]
The arts and craft college where I work sits on an 11-acre wooded campus in Portland’s west hills. It’s a beautiful campus, built on the site of an old filbert orchard, and it bewitches almost everyone who visits. A few years ago, the college put in two new beautiful, architecturally-significant buildings. Both buildings have been submitted for Silver LEED Certification. Unfortunately, a significant percentage of the old filbert orchard was destroyed during construction. (This was not part of the master plan.) Many faculty, staff, students, and alumni were understandably devastated at the loss of so many beautiful old trees. There is still a palpable collective grief. I am a member of an Orchard Committee that has been formed to recommend what to do with the clover field that now covers that area.
Today, some students, faculty, and staff got together to do landscaping near the college library, which included planting two new Japanese maple trees transported from the nursery that surrounds our house in Silverton. It was a joint Earth Day/Arbor Day celebration. I was asked to say a few words at a tree dedication this afternoon. I thought I would post my brief remarks here, since they touch on the Slow Church theme of good work, as well as on the conversation taking place on this blog about the standards of health and flourishing. I have edited my remarks very slightly for clarity.
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