The Unmapped Way, by David L. Myers

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The Unmapped Way

An early Tuesday,
Late September morning
And the clouded light
Lines the closed slats
Of the window blinds.
Muted shapes
Of sofa and chairs
And last night’s
Wine glass on the
Coffee table silhouette
The room. Soon enough
There will be fillamented
Incandescence
And humming steel.
But for now
There is only this
Silent habitation
From whence cometh,
Finally,
A turning toward surrender,
A calming in holy defeat,
And gratitude for
Once again being on
The beautiful,
The unmapped way.

—David L. Myers has been a pastor of four Mennonite congregations and worked in a variety of denominational leadership settings. Currently he serves in the Obama administration, having been appointed by the president in May 2009 to direct the Center for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In 2011, he was also named as senior advisor to the FEMA administrator. During autumn 2015 he is Practitioner in Residence at Eastern Mennonite University.

Water Spouts and More, by Renee Gehman Miller

KCGuestPost-ReneeMillerOf all the bedtime Bible stories, Jonas had picked the story of the healing of the lepers, so on a recent, unstable kind of day, I found myself reading:

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten men were very sick. They were so sick, the doctors couldn’t make them better. They were so sick they couldn’t be with their mommies or daddies or boys and girls.”

I didn’t think he noticed a waver in my voice, but after I finished the story and we were lying in the bed, he said, “Tell me the truth, Mommy.”

I panicked a little. He was likely just trying out a new phrase he’d heard me say, but I was nervous about what was to come when I asked, “Tell you the truth about what?”

“Umm. . . .” He took a moment to fish in his mind for something he wanted to know the truth about before saying, “Um, about the water spout.”

Now I was trying not to chuckle. Of course I had no idea of what possibly could’ve brought his thoughts to “the water spout” in this moment (no, it wasn’t in his story of the 10 lepers, nor had it rained that day), but here we were.

“Well,” I said, “The truth about the water spout is that it helps catch the rain that runs down the roof so that it can all flow right down one road to the ground.”

“Oh,” he said, satisfied. “Okay.”

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Thus were the pleasantries of bedtime held intact for the night, even as my thoughts lingered on the men who were so sick the doctors couldn’t seem to fix them.

Nine days before, I had received a phone call to come in for an impromptu appointment with the doctor, which is never good.

It was an appointment during which the doctor left at one point because she wanted to give me time to punch the wall if I so desired. Not because I appeared to want to, but because she was concerned about my stoicism in the face of her words and thought maybe I might find some needed cathartic relief if she left for a moment.

It was an appointment during which Anthony and I exchanged words in what ought to be considered a foreign tongue for 31-year-old people who are not certifiably insane. (Or are we?)

And just like that I was scheduled for a return to chemo, something I never thought I’d do. Lung surgery been planned for the prior Thursday was canceled, apparently not because anything changed about my lung nodules but more because of the general up-in-the-air-ness of my case.

There will be two new (to me) chemo drugs, a loathsome ten weekdays on, five weekdays off per cycle, four cycles (until right before Christmas, I think), then scans, then determine if more chemo is the way to go or not.

I have a sort of post-traumatic-stress type association with chemo. It takes up a lot of time that is precious, it destroys what’s healthy while maybe getting rid of the bad.  While I am very skeptical of its ability to do much (any) good for me, I will proceed simply because this is the door we are in a position to access at the moment. I’m not quite sure, though, how I will return to the third floor, sign in, sit in that chair, and say “yes” when they hold up that bag of poison and ask me to verify that I am the person whose name is printed on the label.

Right now if you looked at me, you’d probably have no idea anything is wrong with me. Starting chemo again feels like unveiling truths that may start to become as plain as with the water spout. The truth you can see when Mommy has to rest so much, and her hair is falling out (again), and she goes to the doctor’s almost every day, and she can’t be out in public, and her leg that hurts seems to be having such a big effect on the rest of her, too.

And I wish he could face the transition to a big-boy bed or to school before learning about cancer. I want to create a masterful façade out of it all like the father in the Italian movie, Life is Beautiful, who convinces his son that the concentration camp is all one big game for which they must wear uniforms and strive to win the most points by following the rules.

If we are going to talk about the truth, let’s please just talk water spouts.

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We have disciplined ourselves to live one day at a time these past couple of years and will continue on in this way, one uncertain step at a time in an ever-changing plan. We continue to look into options for treatment, and flew halfway across the country recently to begin that process. We learned of a possibility to pursue that comes with a bigger price tag and no guarantees or refunds, but it sure sounded better than our alternatives. We still have a couple places we’d like to check out, but in the meantime, we go to chemo.

In a time when all the doors seem either closed or opened to the wrong way, we knock on Jesus’ door and say, “Tell me the truth,” and that is the happy ending to this otherwise Eeyore-esque journal entry.

For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.

If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.

In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.

The reality, for me, in light of these truths, is that even though we have had some really bad days recently, we are still finding that in our days there is joy, and hope, and faith, and a good deal of love.

—Renee Gehman Miller, writer and editor, was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma, a rare bone cancer, in 2013. Kingsview & Co readers who once subscribed to the blog’s prior incarnation, DreamSeeker Magazine, will remember Miller’s lively and creative contributions to DSM as former assistant editor and columnist. Her “Ink Aria” columns can still be searched for and read at DreamSeeker Magazine online. “Water Spouts” is adapted from one of the many eloquent CaringBridge posts through which she has shared her journey since 2013.

Mindfulness, Death, and the Bald Eagle

EagleKCPost-MAKThe grandmother’s response seemed almost the last straw to these grandparents. The van pulled into the gas island behind where I was pumping gas. The woman jumped out of the driver’s seat and ran her credit card through the pump. The little boy sat in his car seat. “Grandma,” he called out cheerfully. She whirled on him. “Would you be quiet! Let me pump this gas! Why can’t you ever wait for anything!”

We had spent much of the weekend mourning death, angry at a country and a world that seems unable and unwilling to band together to choose life.  Angry that the very systems that energize and organize our world seem to be destroying us. Angry that consumerist frenzies leave some addicted to making and taking millions of times more wealth than they can ever enjoy while millions to billions of others barely have any. Angry that across the globe mounts the evidence that we could destroy the very viability of Mother Earth and of our grandchildren, if not even ourselves, if we don’t change course. Angry that some believe the solution is to just free ourselves up to do more of what has gotten us to this point.

And then also angry because of course we’re not perfect and we don’t have all the answers but now all of us together, whatever our perspectives, have  brought ourselves to such an impasse that even to speak of our dreams for a better way forward is to unleash more death, whether spiritual or literal. What is to be done when what I think will heal, you think will foment hell? What is to be done when as death stalks schools and nations and cultures and religions we seem only to know how to double down on the views that have brought us to this point?

I don’t know. I’ll just report this: After the grandmother yelled at her grandson to shut up, I got back into the car and in, yes, anger reported what I’d heard to my wife Joan. I said how can she do that to him? How can she take the treasure he is and be so unmindful of it? How can she be so ready to add yet more ugliness to the world by not seeing the beauty sitting right there in that van waiting to be cherished?

We had just come from church. We had been asked to be open to a different way. We had sought to open ourselves to each other through communion and through footwashing and handwashing as symbols of our readiness to be servants to each other as Jesus is servant to us.

We fumed. We drove toward home. Beside a field several cars were stopped, right in the middle of the road. I prepared a heartfelt homily on this latest evidence that we’re all idiots on the path to perdition. Then Joan said, “Pull over, pull over!”

I did. The cars were stopped because a majestic bald eagle was sitting just a few car lengths off the road, pulling flesh off a large rack of bloody ribs, likely a deer. We walked partway back. A driver of a pickup pulled up and said if we kept walking we’d probably scare it off but it seemed not to mind if people watched from their cars.

So we started to turn around. By this time there was an incipient traffic jam into the middle of which suddenly drove a township police car. But the officer, apparently as startled  as the rest of us, didn’t arrest anybody or even urge resolution of the jam. He simply slowed down and finally drove off. Soon we were parked near the bald eagle. He knew we were watching; he kept watching us. Then he’d pull again at the meat.

Even though it was ultimately the most earthly of activities, it was to us humans increasingly so cut off from our environment an unearthly sight. We watched some more. We did what humans do these days: We took photos. We watched.

Just as we started to drive away, the bald eagle took flight. It was breathtaking, the sight of that amazing denizen of God’s creation rising, rising, up from death into a gray sky.

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“Why didn’t you take a picture of the flight?” I asked Joan. “I didn’t think to,” she said, admitting failure. What twenty-first century technophile doesn’t know point phone camera first, think later? Then she caught herself: “Maybe it’s better that way. We were forced to see it directly. We were forced to be mindful. And isn’t that what you were saying that grandmother, and maybe all of us, no longer know how to be?”

—Michael A. King is dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary and vice-president, Eastern Mennonite University; blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC.

Being Saved, by Barbara Esch Shisler

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Being Saved

An old man
crouches in a November rain
calling a little dog.

From the dark cage in a puppy mill
to the universe of a fenced yard,
she runs wild, drenched and trembling,
desperate for what she doesn’t know.

His sciatica aches.
He chases, pleads, swears, plots.
He stays with her through
the cold afternoon,

until help comes and she is caught,
carried, wrapped, warmed,
held fast—
home.

Barbara Esch Shisler, author of the Kingsview & Co post “Imagining God’s Imagination,” is a retired Mennonite pastor and spiritual director, active in her Perkasie Mennonite congregation. Her life as wife, mother, and grandmother is filled with friends, gardening, dogs, movies, books and much more. Reading and writing poetry have been a lifelong joy and learning. She is author of the collection of poems Momentary Stay (Cascadia/DreamSeeker Books, 2015) from which “Being Saved” is drawn by permission.

Editor’s note: As Pope Francis electrifies many with his vision of mercy and compassion for all humans and creatures and earth itself, I see Barbara Shisler’s “Being Saved” as naming honestly the chasing, pleading, swearing it can take—even as she opens our hearts to the tenderness of being carried home by God and each other the Pope is inviting.

Imagining God’s Imagination, by Barbara Esch Shisler

KCGuestPost-BarbaraShislerI begin with my own small imagination. I have a blank piece of paper, a pen, and an idea for a poem. I write, cross out, rewrite, edit, and throw it in a folder. I get it out again, read, reread, rewrite, put it in the computer. Eventually I may have created a poem.

But of course, I have created nothing. I already had language, a vocabulary, images, experiences, memories, stories, dreams, and more, to work with. What I did was assemble a poem. God created a universe from nothing.

So who is this incomprehensible Creator God?

Here again, imagination is what we have to look through, a different window than hard facts. The Bible is rich with images of God, each describing some aspect of God. We all have our favorites. When I try to imagine Creator God imagining the cosmos into existence, this is what I come up with:

A force field of energy so enormous and powerful and beyond description, Huge . . . throbbing with pure love and joy and growing, swelling, ballooning, until the energy becomes so volatile it explodes with a whopping Big Bang, and flies into tiny bits of divinity that set off the process of creating a universe saturated with God’s life.

Now, it’s billions of years later and a fabulous universe exists, and a teeny pea of a planet with human animals are somehow miraculously worthy of God’s embodiment in the flesh. . . . Wow.

How can our little minds absorb this? It takes more than mind. It takes body, soul, spirit. Thank God we have five senses to try to take in the evidence of what God imagined into being:

Color astonishing enough to make us cry: name the sunset, rainbow, fall maples, fresh snow on spruce, cardinals, daffodils, monarchs. Name the sounds: music, wind, waves, frog and bird and locust. Name tastes of ripe tomato, sun-warmed peach, mint and basil. Name smells, name the touch of rain, grass, fresh-turned soil, the fur of a kitten, the cheek of a newborn baby. The universe is a marathon of feasts to glut our senses. We might well be saying “Wow” all the time.

When God’s creative energy let loose during the Big Bang it found its way into our human DNA and set off an innate longing to imagine and assemble new things, whether it’s art or machines, medicine or philosophies. The most beguiling and thrilling thing about this for me is that it all came about because of love.

Gregory Boyle, a Franciscan priest who works with gangs in Los Angeles writes in Tattoos on the Heart about God’s gladness and delight in human beings. Boyle’s ability to see God’s pleasure in tough, mean, dirty, drug-addicted gang members, to believe in their preciousness just as they are. This takes some imagination on my part. I get stuck in how God must see the ugliness, cruelty, suffering and sin in our world. How are we then creatures of beauty and goodness? Proverbs 8 says that God’s wisdom rejoices in the inhabited world, delights in the human race. Is God grieving or delighting?

Richard Rohr says that spiritual maturity means being able to hold two opposites as true at the same time. God suffers and God delights. I need to grow into a better balance of God’s joy and gladness even when I get stuck in God’s disappointment and sorrow with all that has gone wrong in creation. (Actually, I’m hoping to fall overboard someday into an ocean of God’s joy and gladness)

Brian Swimme is a specialist in mathematical cosmology, author of a book called The Universe is a Green Dragon. Here’s what he says about allurement and the universe:

Love begins as allurement. Think of the entire cosmos, 100 billion galaxies rushing through space. The dynamics of the universe is the attraction each galaxy has for every other galaxy. Each part of the universe is attracted to every other part. The result is the creation of community. Love is the word that points to this alluring activity in the cosmos.

Swimme acknowledges in his book his indebtedness to science, art, and religion but especially to the Mysterious Source of these realities.

Two poets of the 1700 and 1800s give me words to describe the holy mystery of creation.

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a Heaven in a wild flower—
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an Hour.
—William Blake

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here root and all in my hand.
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.”
—Lord Alfred Tennyson

 Mysterious, profound, extravagant words . . . but what it all comes down to is one simple word we all know: Love.

A song we used to sing says, “It’s about love, love, love. Everybody sing and shout ‘cause that’s what it’s all about. It’s about love.”

Barbara Esch Shisler is a retired Mennonite pastor and spiritual director, active in her Perkasie Mennonite congregation. Her life as wife, mother, and grandmother is filled with friends, gardening, dogs, movies, books and much more. Reading and writing poetry have been a lifelong joy and learning. She is author of the collection of poems Momentary Stay (Cascadia/DreamSeeker Books, 2015).

Through the Broken Glass

MAK-withFather-PostRevWhen this summer my denomination faced chaotic developments I was preparing to navigate as seminary dean, the idea came to change my Facebook profile photo. I wanted a reminder that though each generation faces the high calling of discerning how we live the Jesus Way in changing contexts, the wisdom of those who preceded us deserves honor.

A photo of me and my father drew me into a story with unexpected twists and turns and transformations:

A s touched on in “Present at the Big Bang,” I was taken to Cuba as a baby. I remember sitting in my crib listening to my parents talk in the kitchen about their missionary activities. I was so young I can’t confirm the memory’s reliability, yet what lingers is this thought: You are all alone in this crib, and you are going to need to take care of yourself.

At minimum what the memory points to is true: along with siblings and many other children of missionaries and church leaders, I wondered where I fit in my parents’ priorities versus God and their callings.

They did love their children. And I’m grateful that in later years, when my wife Joan and I sought their counsel at several traumatic junctures, they wrapped us in tender wisdom.

Still that image of boy in crib lingered as I turned to the photo. It’s probably 1957, the year I turned three. We’re in an office my father built. He’s conferring with a Cuban acquaintance.

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That was what I remembered of the photo. Then I moved it from my seminary office shelf to my desk to snap a picture with my phone. And the story deepened as details leaped out and surprises unfolded.

First, like never before it occurred to me the photo must have been taken soon after my father Aaron lost his father to depression in 1956. As I wondered if I could glimpse the grief, I saw memories of aloneness in a new light.

My parents had to navigate a new culture. Emerging from plain-dressing 1950s Mennonites, they had to discern in Cuban context faithful expressions of the gospel, such as through the tie my dad back then wore only in Cuba. In April 1957, I watched bodies of Castro’s rebels being dragged down our street. Rebels stopped my father’s jeep at gunpoint as he drove my mom and just-born brother Robbie home.

Throw into all this losing a parent to suicide—then considered such a mortal sin that cause of death was shrouded in secrecy and shame, bodies sometimes disallowed burial in the congregational cemetery. Suddenly my dad looked less a distant father and more a hero who had managed against all odds to care for me.

A memory surged of his inviting me to paint the wooden siding of that office as high up as I could reach. I remembered with fresh appreciation the sheer joy of brushing on the gray paint and learning, in that magical way, to be my father’s son.

I shared glimpses of this on Facebook while updating my profile picture. To my surprise, love rushed across the years from Cuba to Miami and up the Internet to culminate in a Facebook comment shared in Spanish by an older woman. She was who had sometimes played in our sandbox with me while her mother babysat my siblings.

Right there on Facebook she poured out her love for me, my parents, other missionaries. These aren’t simple matters, it seems, these questions of how parents should prioritize and love their children. Because the very activities that had sometimes shifted my parents’ focus from their children had generated this love now flowing as if from beyond the grave to offer back to that boy the embrace of parents who have been dead almost five years.

But there was more. Also commenting was Barbara Shisler, wise, eloquent pastor and poet. Barbara said, “Love your little hand so safely on his leg.” My response: “Thanks, Barbara. A gift of taking a photo of the photo for Facebook was that I don’t recall ever realizing that detail was there before. It tugs at my heart.”

Tug it has. For almost 60 years that photo has been floating around, yet not until June did I truly see where that hand was. Mystery remains. Why am I there while my father works? Is this a great privilege? Am I taking any opportunity I can to connect? Still as I gaze through Barbara’s eyes at that hand on my father’s leg, I feel safe.

Just this yet. The photo had migrated to my seminary office when Joan framed it as a gift. But one day my knocking it to the floor shattered the glass. When I took a phone picture of the photo I picked the shards off—then piled them back. I couldn’t quite let go of the broken glass as symbol of boyhood’s broken parts.

Then before a seminary convocation presentation at which I planned to mention the photo,  a seminary colleague and convocation planner came in to discuss convocation. I turned to show him the photo lying under broken glass. But it was straight up, glass gone. One of my EMU custodian colleagues must have cleaned and straightened it. Whoever it was helped me recognize it was time to see past the shards to the photo and life beyond. I’m grateful.

Michael A. King is dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary and vice-president, Eastern Mennonite University; blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. This post has roots in a June 2015 Facebook post and an August 2015 EMU faculty and staff conference storytelling session.

Hope as Church Unravels? Part 6: Present at the Big Bang

MHKC2015postMy granddaughter has been holding me spellbound as she alerts me that even the faintest gusts of love or laughter, of dismissal or devaluation, have amazing power to form or deform. She teaches me that even as so much unravels, any of us open to it are participating in the miracle of becoming ourselves as persons made in the image of God.

Here then, drawing on this week’s Eastern Mennonite Seminary convocation presentation, is the sixth and final post in the six-part series introduced in “Hope as Church Unravels? Part 1, The Unraveling” on a.) ways the church, denominations, concepts and patterns of ministry, theological training are unraveling and b.) how we might work at weaving and reweaving. Here I want to ask how, in deep and primal ways, our lives in community with each other form us, weave and reweave us, individually and jointly, as the selves God invites us to be.

Present at the Big Bang

On November 6, 2013, I dreamed of an impish little girl. I’d been gathering trash in a leaf bag. I knew it wasn’t sanitary, but I thought it wouldn’t kill her when we both seemed drawn to putting her in the bag, closing it around her shoulders, and playfully carrying her around. Although she couldn’t talk yet, in the dream I sensed her interests and thought Well, her parents won’t be too excited but probably won’t catch us. We had a high old time. As I pondered the clues—aging me, baby too little to talk, parents to be outwitted, so much giggling to be done—this, I concluded, was my granddaughter.

I reported the dream to my daughter, who was celebrating that an ultrasound had allowed her to see the heartbeat even of her blueberry-sized embryo, whom she too thought was a girl. My daughter welcomed any more dreams and commented that “This one was magical, even if you were putting my daughter in an unsanitary situation.”

Seven months later the blueberry was born. I had carried her mischievous magic in my heart with both a smile and a sense of kinship with gospel writer Luke’s report (2:19) that after Jesus’ birth, mother Mary pondered these things in her heart. As my granddaughter seemed, eerily and wonderfully, precisely the girl I had already met, I was reminded also of Jeremiah. The Lord says of him (1:5), “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, / and before you were born I consecrated you. . . .”

My grandparental gaze had already been trained by my first grandchild, about whom I had also had a primal dream: Grandson and Grandpa crossing a sand dune above a mystic ocean. I had learned that one grandparenting gift is to cherish grandchildren from above the action.

I dearly loved my own baby daughters. I’ll never forget when the mischievous mother of my mischievous granddaughter played the song “Baby Beluga” 50 times while supposed to be asleep before cheerfully reporting, “I done with nap now, Daddy.” But amid many treasured memories, when I try to remember details I often see a crazed blur of daughters and parents trying to figure out how to get enough sleep or milk or fun but not the too-much fun of keys in outlets or cars dodged in a street crossed at the wrong time.

For a grandparent, the blur slows, like reliving a marvelous baseball play in slow motion. As I’ve experienced this with a granddaughter I felt bonded with from blueberry on, watching her grow has seemed like gazing, spellbound, as God hovers over what is formless and void before with a Big Bang calling forth light and sky and ocean and all living beings.

What I’m awed to glimpse, and it’s awe before the holy, is a person in the very act of being formed, formed through relationships with others, self, and ultimately God. As we laugh and tease each other and read books and put paper bags over our heads and laugh some more, minute by minute I learn her rhythms and loves and dislikes and longings and she mine.

So when I enter the room I know to expect large eyes waiting to see who it is. Then the “It’s Grandpa!” smile appears. Grandpa goes bonkers. A shy head leans into her mom’s shoulder. Patience required. At what she deems just the right moment her arms stretch out to melt my heart.

Theories about what’s happening here are valuable. The stories told, often in their conflicting ways, by Freud, Jung, Mead, Mandell, Piaget, Erickson, Bowen, Bowlby, and more have influenced my grandparent’s gaze. What generates my deepest awe, however, is that sense of observing a human emerge in real time.

Seeing just how powerful even tiny grandparent/grandchild interactions can be also underscores that things will go wrong. Sometimes it’s just an accident, the fingertip graze of a baby’s eye that turns giggles into outraged sobs. Other times the delicate dance of human formation is profoundly violated.

Watching the intricacies shaping my granddaughter second by second, I think of what I know of my own infancy. The story of my missionary parents taking me at three months on a ship from Miami to Havana and my being the only one not throwing up on heaving decks. The photo of my mother hanging laundry on the roof of the first Cuban house we lived in, where she said I cried almost constantly. Sitting in my crib while in the kitchen, on the other side of the thin wooden wall, my parents wrestled with their missionary work—and thinking, though I can’t be sure such an early memory is reliable, You are all alone in this crib; you’ll need to take care of yourself.

Or go back a generation. In her final weeks, my mom, even with a mind strokes and Parkinsons had frayed, still ached to make sense of her relationship with her own mom. She showed me written fragments she had labored over in which she wrestled with loving a mother who, emotionally distant, had largely had another woman raise her.

In his last days, my dad sought to heal wounds going back to those Cuba days. When I was two, his depressed father checked himself out of treatment and ended his life. A photo in my seminary office shows me and my dad in his Cuba office soon after his dad’s death. Am I imagining that his face looks haunted? What’s going on in him? In me?

One day I accidentally brushed the photo to the floor. The frame’s glass shattered. The shards spoke to me of how easily during becoming ourselves we fall and break.

They hint at the Genesis 3 account of Adam and Eve evicted from their primeval garden, their return barred by an angel’s flaming sword. We aren’t shaped only within a flow of innocent love, laughter, play. We’re also born into shattered glass going back to the dawn of time.

Even a dream of mischievous girl holds dangers. How in seeking what I dreamed do I deform as well as form? When am I twisting her into my rather than God’s image? How did my imperfect love for my own daughters help shape both their best and broken selves even as how my parents loved me, in turn shaped by how their parents loved them, both tore and treasured the person I was to become?

We all face such questions, whether grandparents, grandchildren, parents, the children each of us once were, or participants in this seminary community or any formational setting. Here we learn to minister and be ministered to. We invite each other into sacred spaces. This includes not least the core of who we are, how we became who we are, who we’re yet to become. This can mean going down, down, down into the layers of our selves and stories, our laughters and joys, our traumas and tears.

It also means gazing out—out across the large social, environmental, climatological, and global forces shaping our most intimate beings. To see, for example, how sensitive a grandchild is to a minute shift in gaze or voice is to grasp that the merest external breeze can twist our formation.. Even the slightest gusts of violence actual or threatened, of abuse, of racism, of marginalization by poverty, sickness, low-status occupations, having our identity viewed as abomination, can distort your and my ability to embrace that great gift—being formed in the very image of God.

In seminary, university, church, or other communities informed by faith understandings, we’re invited to wrestle with how to understand, confront, and transform the forces that twist us. We’re called to root ourselves in that amazing inaugural dream of Jesus. Grasping matters at levels more profound than we ever will, he launched his ministry with a vision of what it would take to re-form his followers, to gather their shards of glass back into panes through which the holy could shine into their very cores. As Jesus put it in Luke 4:18-19,

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Here we are—in shards. Here we also are—able to exchange with each other something like a grandparent’s gaze through which to see and treasure in midstream that Big Bang of creation—our becoming the persons we’re meant to be.

This is why some of the most amazing moments in seminary life are the stories seniors tell in graduates’ brunch of arriving lost and departing found. This is why one of the most awe-inspiring things any of us can do is to participate in the miracle of becoming ourselves.

Though not speaking here officially on behalf of EMS, Michael A. King is dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary; blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. This post has roots in a September 1, 2015, EMS convocation presentation.

Hope as Church Unravels? Part 5, Recognizing Jesus When Phone Booths Vanish

KCMainBlogPostThumb200x200x72While I was pondering that riveting story of disciples of Jesus telling a stranger whom they don’t recognize as Jesus how troubled they are by his death, I ran across a blog post on whether seminaries are training students to repair phone booths.

The unrecognized Jesus and the danger that we may not recognize ways church practices are unraveling because they are like phone booths in an era of cell phones came together for me as sources for further reflection: Might fresh ability to recognize Jesus also connect with renewed vision for moving beyond phone booths?

Here then, drawing on a seminary convocation presentation, is part 5 of the six-part series introduced in “Hope as Church Unravels? Part 1, The Unraveling” on a.) ways the church, denominations, concepts and patterns of ministry, theological training are unraveling and b.) how we might work at weaving and reweaving.

Recognizing Jesus When Phone Booths Vanish

Followers of one who inspired love and loyalty trudge to Emmaus, “faces downcast.” They’re bewildered, even “foolish,” as a stranger who joins them puts it (Luke 24:13-32 NIV).

Two ingredients of their story catch my attention.

One is their difficulty recognizing Jesus. He is the stranger, the person they’re discussing. Jesus was their hope. But he’s dead. Oh, some who investigated rumors of angels saying he was alive found an empty tomb. But they didn’t see Jesus. So on the followers walk, discussing with Jesus the absence of Jesus.

While reflecting on their situation, I saw a PBS video posted by Tony Jones under the title “Seminaries: Training People to Repair Phone Booths.” Because I’m old, I remember booths. If you managed to find coins for the call, you’d scrunch behind glass doors until so many were vandalized you had to shout outside over traffic.

Are seminaries repairing phone booths? Partly yes, as some denominational and congregational structures crumble like booths did once cell phones arrived. Cell-phone-like changes are buffeting most denominations. Sexuality is just one area of change but often a straw that breaks a structure’s back.

In times like these, what does it mean to do more than teach phone booth repairs? Here I see a link with the Emmaus disciples: We too often fail to recognize Jesus when phone booths crumble. As we confront denominational, congregational, higher education, or theological arrangements too constricting for God’s wild and wonderful work among us, we’ll sometimes not recognize this risen Jesus, believed dead, even as he joins us.

I’d apply this to our standpoints regarding those issues of the day which become divisive precisely because we reach different conclusions regarding the path forward. We convince ourselves Jesus is in our understandings. I suspect that’s true; almost by definition if a matter requires discernment this is because how to proceed has become a larger matter than any of us alone can fully grasp. Hence our particular understanding may well represent aspects of Jesus others need and vice-versa. If so, this calls for polities, theologies, biblical interpretations humble enough and gentle enough to allow us to be partly right and wrong. That means being ready to welcome even—maybe especially—those we consider wrong.

Now through proposing peacemaking hospitality even for antagonistic stances, I’m offering my own fallible testimony to seeing Jesus. Maybe a better alternative would be to advocate for the one and only right theology of this or that. But might some either/or approaches be phone booths? Might we more easily recognize Jesus by confessing that when most sure we see Jesus we might be wrong? And when we have no idea Jesus walks with us this may be exactly what he’s doing?

I hope for us at Eastern Mennonite University and Eastern Mennonite Seminary and beyond to minimize imposing favorite views of Jesus and maximize opening ourselves to the Jesus we have yet fully to meet. I don’t know the precise policies or curricula this calls us toward. But we can together ask which are phone booths and which will help us live with cell phones until their day passes too.

Truly it can be hard to recognize Jesus. Who knows what fresh arrangements we’d dream toward if we believed that.

But there is that second Emmaus ingredient catching attention. Jesus is there. Those Emmaus travelers may think they’re living a horror movie or at best a foreign film so strange they’ll never grasp its meaning. Yet what’s actually unfolding is wonderful, though it seems to take forever. Emmaus is hours away; this is not just seconds of chit-chat. They walk and walk, until finally they’ve trudged into “the day . . . almost over,” as they tell the stranger they wish to join them for supper when he seems set to go on.

He accepts. And “he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened. . . .” Now they get it: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”

Their story’s first ingredient undoes us. It reminds us we know so much less than we think. But its second ingredient rebuilds. Theirs is not a tale to breed cynicism, to encourage doubt in the divine. We face our difficulties recognizing Jesus to see that Jesus is in fact among us. We accept our need for something from Beyond (which in the Emmaus story even prevents recognition of Jesus until the right moment) to open our eyes.

So we need higher education, congregational, denominational, cultural arrangements that nurture hearts burning. In an article on “Deep Trends Affecting Christian Institutions,” Gregory Jones, (EMS 2015 commencement speaker), and Nathan Jones highlight seven trends shaping how we work at this: the digital revolution; a multinodal world (in which we navigate countless cultural, ethnic, religious diversities out there and in here); reconfiguring denominations and emerging forms of congregating; questioning institutions; economic stress on Christian institutions; shifting vocations of laypeople; and the lure of cities.

I’d add such global challenges as ongoing oppression and injustice; rising inequality; structures from which emerge police of one race shooting people of another race; the yearning to cleanse the world of views we hate even to the point of genocide; and countless canaries in the mine signaling environmental upheavals. For example, Google “Lake Mead Nevada water level” to see photos of the bathtub ring warning cities and farming valleys that drought and Colorado River overuse could wither lifestyles.

Our learning, congregational, and denominational communities need to be in the thick of exploring how we experience hearts burning amid such trends and challenges. This is particularly the case since I see these times, chaotic as they are, as resembling the period of the Reformation or the first century when the gospel exploded across the worlds of its day in fresh forms.

We glimpse examples in a news report by Laura Amstutz on the 2014 EMS graduates and their commencement. Laura tells of final-year student capstones:

The topics ranged from “Jesus Deconstructor: Lord of Parable, God of Madness, King of Graffiti” by Brittany Conley, who is now leading a small church plant . . . to “The Medical Model and Its Creation of Unnecessary Suffering: Pastoral Responses for Chaplaincy and Beyond” by Melanie Lewis, a chaplain. . . .

I myself noted that precisely as one capstone highlighted deconstruction gifts, others reclaimed worship practices that form us as Christians when cultural trends unglue us.

Laura observes that

In these projects students have already begun the work that Elizabeth Soto Albrecht, the seminary commencement speaker, encouraged. . . .

“You are asking how to be church differently,” Soto Albrecht said. . . . Sometimes the church becomes a holy bubble that no one can touch. Sometimes we need to burst that bubble.” . . .

“We are not individuals doing our own thing. . . . The church is in the middle of major changes. Lift up your prophetic voices, but always stay within the church, because once you are outside you can’t change it. Be the change you wish to see.”

 We have worked in EMU and EMS settings to provide holy space for those with sharply divergent views to study, teach, learn together.  This can seem problematic when we find ourselves at times united in affirming Jesus yet, as one seasoned church leader puts it,  thinking that at the very center of Jesus’ way and words is welcome—or alternatively that at the very center is purity. We don’t know how to reconcile opposing convictions of which stories Jesus meets us in.

Yet maybe it’s exactly in looking for Jesus within what challenges our understandings that we find him. Because those first disciples didn’t know how to reconcile what they thought had happened to Jesus with what did, they couldn’t identify him. Yet finally they recognized a Jesus bigger than their preconceptions. Maybe we can too, in relation to any of our confusions as phone booths vanish.

On we walk with Jesus, telling him how profoundly his absence bewilders us. Until, at last, our hearts within us burn.

Though not speaking here officially on behalf of EMS, Michael A. King is dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary; blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. This post has roots in an August 2014 EMS convocation presentation.

Hope as Church Unravels? Part 4: Grandparents Dreaming, Grandchildren Seeing

KCMainBlogPostThumb200x200x72During his first year, a dream about my grandson suggested to me that key to reweaving those aspects of church that are unraveling is working together across generations and experiences of church. We need both the fresh perspectives of those increasingly giving up on the church and the seasoned wisdoms of those who can articulate anew treasures of the faith going back millennia.

Here then, drawing on a seminary convocation presentation, is part 4 of the six-part series introduced in “Hope as Church Unravels? Part 1, The Unraveling” on a.) ways the church, denominations, concepts and patterns of ministry, theological training are unraveling and b.) how we might work at weaving and reweaving.

Grandparents Dreaming, Grandchildren Seeing

I had a dream just before leaving for coastal Maine, where our daughters, sons-in-law, and first grandchild Kadyn, soon to turn one, were to join our first-ever three-generation gathering. In the dream, Kadyn cradled in my right arm, I was walking across a towering ocean dune. The sky was bluer, sand sandier, and sea grander than the waking world provides. I recognized that dreamscape; I’d walked it before; I knew that there the Spirit and transformation hovered near.

As Kadyn and I walked, the dune turned into a mountain. Its snowy slope was almost one Kadyn and I could laughingly slide down. But I was responsible to care for him; I realized it was too steep to risk.

The dream haunted and blessed me. I remembered it as Kadyn and I walked actual beaches, dodged waves, explored breakwaters. I thought of it as Kadyn aimed an index finger at lights, fans, wind, people he wanted to learn more about—and as after learning their names he pointed at them when asked, “Kadyn, where’s the light? Fan? Wind? Grandma?” I thought of it as with fingers pulling in he asked to nap with fan on or signaled feeling the wind outdoors.

Watching Kadyn reminded me how wonderfully the young reach out to life. Yet I’m the graying elder charged to know that when he reaches down from boulders on the Camp Ellis jetty I can’t let him tumble into the cracks where the rats run or beyond the rocks into the Saco River where it joins the Atlantic swells.

Somewhere in such images may lurk insights for seminary and faith-based education communities—or any faith communities—as today so many people bypass the church.

Kadyn might too. He’s being raised within passion for grace and truth yet with church viewed as sometimes helpful, sometimes harmful. To watch Kadyn is to see him grasping the miracle of something like the psalmist’s vision of the earth as the Lord’s and all the fullness thereof in ways my aging self struggles to glimpse anymore. But I can also imagine him experiencing, like I sometimes have, the church as taming all the wilder fullnesses.

So Kadyn may become one of the “Nones.” These are the growing millions who say, as Pew Research reports, “none of the above” if asked which church, denomination, tradition they identify with. Nones are often spiritually energized yet view organized religion as maintaining lifeless structures, majoring in doctrinal minors, elevating leaders who love power and polish more than authentic walking with the torn as wounded healers, caring more about who gets kept out than who finds new life.

Partly because so many experience religion as not offering food to nourish the soul, seminaries are struggling. As introduced in “Hope as Church Unravels? Part 1, not so long ago, loyal members, congregations, and denominations built each other up. Resources flowed to denominational schools and institutions. Students would get their degrees then be paid within and feed this virtuous cycle.

But amid None-ish trends, the cycle increasingly breaks down. Students aren’t sure if they believe enough in the church to train themselves to serve it. Or if they do leap, they’re not sure the church will pay enough to live on plus pay down school loans.

If seminaries could easily withstand such headwinds, the Auburn Center for the Study of Theological Education wouldn’t be reporting that cumulative enrollment at 205 North American seminaries peaked in 2004 and has been declining since. I myself don’t know precisely how those of us passionate about theological education or a flourishing church should address the challenges.

But Kadyn inspires me to offer two guesses.

The first is this: We should plunge into the yearnings and questions giving birth to the Nones.

We should take seriously that Nones include our children or even us. I can’t tell you how often as I roam the church its leaders confess that their own children, longing for more wonder than the church offers, are seeking it elsewhere. We need to listen to such leaders; to our children, siblings, friends; to our own hearts; to the EMS and EMU students asking the hard questions. We need seminaries and faith communities to be a place where it’s safe to say, with Ezekiel, that some of these bones are dead, and to dream of what it would look like for bodies and breath once more to throb with Kadyn-like wonder.

But then a second guess: Courageous exploration of how the church has died should be paired with hope that not all structures, not all traditions, not all sacred scriptures and holy rhythms and rules are ready for the bone heap.

I resonate with the yearnings of the Nones; I feel them. I also was privileged as a young pastor to help a congregation aim toward actually implementing a vision of church as a place to which we could bring our true selves, our dreams of wilder glories, our yearnings to love enemies and those cast out, our doubts and questions, our cravings for assurance that we didn’t have to be perfect to find God waiting at lane’s end to welcome us home. This in turn meant we dared plunge even into that riskiest of adventures, following Jesus.

In hindsight, we were groping toward emerging/emergent before Brian McLaren and others popularized the terms. And the Spirit deeply blessed us. Yet we also learned by trial and at times frighteningly great error that some faith-journey slopes are too dangerous. We needed not only fresh wonders of the Spirit but also the ancient wisdoms that had led the church to form its members in the first place within the boundaries and structures, the rhythms and rituals that had come to seem worn out.

Agree or disagree, Rachel Held Evans believes what millennial-generation Nones want is—

not a change in style but a change in substance.

We want an end to the culture wars. We want a truce between science and faith. We want to be known for what we stand for, not what we are against.

We want to ask questions that don’t have predetermined answers.

We want churches that emphasize an allegiance to the kingdom of God over an allegiance to a single political party or a single nation.

We want our LGBT friends to feel truly welcome in our faith communities.

We want to be challenged to live lives of holiness, not only when it comes to sex, but also when it comes to living simply, caring for the poor and oppressed, pursuing reconciliation, engaging in creation care and becoming peacemakers.

You can’t hand us a latte and then go about business as usual and expect us to stick around. We’re not leaving the church because we don’t find the cool factor there; we’re leaving the church because we don’t find Jesus there.

Evans is saying that yes, parts of the church are dead bones. But the answer isn’t to replace all the old stuff with flash and glitz. It’s to connect the old treasures with times like these. Thriving denominations, churches, seminaries, Christian universities, and faith-based communities won’t throw out the ancient wisdoms. They’ll become labs within which so boldly to blend time-tested, Jesus-shaped truths and teachings and practices with today’s longings and realities that the horizons of then and now fuse to yield miraculous life.

By framing my comments in the dream of a grandfather and a grandchild, I don’t mean simplistically to image students as grandchildren and faculty or staff as grandparents. Grandparents can be students, grandchildren can be teachers, and in each of us there are grandchild-like and grandparent-like selves.

But across our life stages and trainings and circumstances, we can bless each other. We can cherish the visions of those in awe as they see some things for the first time. We can treasure the dreams and wisdoms of those who having been around the block have mentoring to offer.

We can help each other discern when the slope is too steep or when after too many times around the block we’re preserving dead bones. We can together invite the Spirit to breathe new life into bodies with which to the walk across the holy landscapes, the high dunes and the sand and the snow and the sea, energies of youth and gray hairs of the elders joined.

Though not speaking here officially on behalf of EMS, Michael A. King is dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary; blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. This post has roots in an August 2013 EMS convocation presentation.

Hope as Church Unravels? Part 3: From Position Statements to Communities of Discernment

KCMainBlogPostThumb200x200x72I don’t know how to reweave an unraveling church if we don’t do it together. Precisely the inability to do it together is a key source of unraveling. Can we do it together?

In “Hope as Church Unravels? Part 1, The Unraveling,” I introduced a six-part series on ways the church, denominations, concepts and patterns of ministry, theological training are unraveling. Here in Part 3 I home in on whether we can, in fact, do the reweaving together. I actually don’t know—if anything  our ability to work together seems to be declining. So in this post I proceed with no assurance that we can do this even as I ponder how, particularly through functioning in communities of discernment, we might take steps in that direction if so inclined.

From Position Statements to Communities of Discernment

Battle. Win-lose. If we differ, my position should defeat yours.

What if instead we moved from position statements to communities of discernment? Let me test steps and possible outcomes of such a move:

A first step is to take seriously that we all know only in part, as if through a mirror dimly, as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians. Then, face to face with God, we will know fully. But now we get some things right—and some wrong. If our main approach to Christian faithfulness is to determine what’s right, then champion it as the position all should hold, we bypass the getting-things-wrong part.

If we accept that we know only in part, we may consider a second step: recognizing that the fullest knowing we can experience now flows from seeking truth together. This is what Jesus invites in Matthew 18, as he promises that where two or three are gathered in his name, he is with us.

Jesus also empowers us to take a third step. That’s to trust that when we gather in his name we form communities of discernment through which in what we bind or loose on earth we are seeking to implement what is bound or loosed in heaven, in God’s realm. We dare not do this frivolously. Just verses earlier Jesus has warned that better to drown than cause one who believes in him to stumble. Still amid ways we can misuse this amazing power, we are to help each other discern what to bind or loose.

Yet how far from knowing how to do this we are, as increasingly we even accuse each other of wrongly binding or loosing. We take stumbling seriously—except that the cause of stumbling is not I but always you.

Is there a step beyond this impasse? Acts 2 offers a possibility. Long before, humans in their pride had tried as one people speaking one language to build a tower to the heavens—but God had scattered them into many peoples babbling countless dialects. Now God’s Spirit falls as tongues of fire on Jesus’ first disciples, and they speak “in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” This astonishes their audience from many nations, because when these Galileans speak, “we hear, each of us, in our own native language.”

Not through human effort but through the Spirit’s power unleashed in the emerging church, Babel comes undone. Here we glimpse a fourth step, which is to trust that still today the Holy Spirit can empower us to speak and hear across the isolating languages our opposing viewpoints become. We won’t become communities of discernment unless when polarized we invite the Spirit to interpret for us. When faced with your seemingly misguided views I need the Spirit to help me hear your language.

If the Spirit interprets us to each other, then maybe we can begin to understand how to take a fifth step, which is to celebrate that in Christ dividing walls of hostility have been torn down. In Ephesians 2, the Apostle Paul celebrates that Christ is our peace. Drawing perhaps on a hymn that had celebrated Christ as unifier of the fragmented universe itself, Paul celebrates miracle: that primal division, a Berlin Wall between Jews once thought to be God’s people and Gentiles once understood not to be has tumbled.

Might that miracle, the reconciling peace of Christ who invites us to love the viewpoint enemies we turn each other into, destroy our walls today? I’m actually not sure. We battle even over whether walls should be demolished, if so how and in whose favor. In the years since I first began to develop the material in this post, theological warfare rather than peacemaking seems to be intensifying. But let me fallibly ponder what might happen if, when we gather around Scripture in the presence of the Spirit, we wrestled with divisive issues as communities discerning what to bind and loose today.

One key thing I suspect we’d wrestle with is the relationship between specific Bible texts and biblical themes or trajectories.

Take slavery, no longer, I hope, divisive, so maybe permitting calm learnings. How could Christians for most of Christian history support slavery? Because specific texts seemed to. But texts gain meaning within larger paradigms or worldviews that have come to be experienced as the common sense of the day.

For centuries worldviews that treated slavery as just the acceptable way things were coexisted peacefully with texts that seemed likewise to assume slavery as normal. Then abolitionists drawing on broader scriptural themes of justice and equality shattered the slavery-is-acceptable paradigm. That’s why we don’t view biblical admonitions for slaves to obey their masters as validating slavery today. Specific texts do matter—and so do the trajectories that sometimes help us interpret given texts anew.

Cut to that battle-surrounded word homosexuality and such successors as LGBTQ. Among reasons we’re at each other’s throats in this area of discernment is a clash over whether to prioritize specific texts many understand to condemn same-sex relationships or such classic scriptural themes as God’s love for the stranger, alien, slave, outcast of a given era or context. Some believe that unless the specific texts bind us, we evade God’s call to costly righteousness. Or they may point more broadly to the primal order of creation as being union of man and woman.

Others wonder whether Jesus wants to surprise us today by turning those we marginalize into heroes, as he did the Good Samaritan or the woman who wept on his feet, frequently turning upside-down expectations of who belonged among God’s people. This reversal was then extended as some of the early Christians, such as Peter in Acts 10-11, came to see Gentiles as belonging among God’s people. Previously Gentiles had been deemed unclean but now, as Peter is told in a vision, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

Whatever our overarching paradigm ends up being, it will guide our giving greater or lesser weight to given scriptures even as careful study of and wrestling with specific texts continues to be essential.

Maybe we should try a cooler topic, though it was once white hot and still is for some: the role of women in the church. When I was growing up, I understood specific texts to make matters clear: women are to be silent in the church. Hence women can’t be pastors.

But by the 1995 Confession of Faith in Mennonite Perspective, the Mennonite church was teaching that all leadership offices are open to women. After generations of agonizing discernment, many had shifted to a paradigm in which, for example, Jesus’ empowerment of women took priority. Now texts that seemed to forbid women pastors were understood as tied to specific New Testament circumstances. Yet others of us believe that in loosening the ties that bound us to literal application of specific texts we’ve taken a broad path leading not to righteousness but to destruction.

Then let’s ponder peace and war and the implications in such a setting as Eastern Mennonite Seminary, both Mennonite and ecumenical. Roughly half of our students are Mennonite and perhaps mostly believe Christian participation in war goes against Jesus’ teachings and his Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7) call to love enemies, to do good to those who persecute us. But half are from other denominations and may believe the Bible makes space for some just wars to be fought precisely to free the captives and liberate the oppressed, as Jesus preached in his Luke 4 “inaugural address.”

Across our traditions, we take specific texts with implications for war and peace seriously. But which ones we treat as literal guides to daily decisions or as dreams of what may yet be in the already-but-not-yet of the kingdom of God depends on the broader paradigm within which we approach them.

Does this cover the issues for discernment? Not remotely. We need to discern whether the Bible offers explicit or at least thematic guidance on abortion. The death penalty. Gun control. Care for the earth. Global warming. Whether God is biased toward the poor or if not how we honor biblical warnings that the mighty will be brought low. Whether government is part of the problem or the solution in caring for “the least of these.” Whether to be Christian is to prophetically challenge capitalism, constructively embrace it, or both.

Is the point that any view is as good as another? No. It’s that when we see only in part we need to wrestle things out together. If I’m too quick to focus on specific texts when the debates rage, you need to remind me of classic themes of Scripture that could complexify my engagement with such texts. If I’m too quick to ride on viewpoints above the fray, I need you to call me down into the muck and sometimes God-ordained suffering the specifics call for. To wrestle it out together is to become the communities of discernment Jesus invites us to embody.

At EMS we already teach discernment, which threads its way through our curriculum. Yet at EMS and in many congregational and denominational contexts we can more proactively name the importance and nature of discernment and the need to train each other in the discernment process.

This is ever more crucial in a church and culture addicted to offering position papers even when what will truly bless us is the reconciling peace of Christ. That blessing can come as walls of hostility are replaced by bringing our warring views to Scripture in the presence of the Spirit who empowers us to understand each other’s foreign languages. Then truly we might be within range of learning how redemptively to bind or to loose without causing each other to stumble.

Though not speaking here officially on behalf of EMS, Michael A. King is dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary; blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. This post has roots in an August 2012 EMS convocation presentation and provided some of the seeds for the seven-part series of summer 2015 posts overviewed in “Blogging Toward Kansas City, Part 1: Introduction.”

Extending DreamSeeker Magazine through posts from Michael A. King and guests