The Spectrum Blog

Sabbath Listening: The People's Messiah

by Johnny A. Ramirez

Performed at Avondale College in Australia.

Bloggin' the 28: Domestic Violence and Spirit-Body Unity

Continuing our summer Bloggin' the 28 project, elder, Vanderbilt seminarian and technologist Sherman Haywood Cox II applies the Seventh-day Adventist doctrine of The Nature of Man to contemporary life.

Juanita Bynum is shown on the news. We see a prominent, strong, black woman beaten by her husband in public no less. I have known about domestic violence, I knew it was a problem, but before doing this research, I did not know how big of a problem. Approximately 1/3 of American women report that a close partner has physically or sexually abused them during their lives.   “It is estimated that 503,485 women are stalked by an intimate partner each year in the US.” “Family violence costs between 5 billion and 10 billion dollars annually in medical expenses, police and court costs, shelters and foster care, sick leave, absenteeism, an non-productivity.” These numbers particularly become ominous when we take into account that domestic violence is often unreported.    This is certainly an epidemic.  Because of the relative silence in this society, it is a quiet epidemic.

Read and comment here.

Beyond Buildings: An Adventist Congregation Chooses Missions Over Mortar

by Johnny A. Ramirez

Crosswalk, a thriving congregation in Redlands, California, has decided to get out of the real estate business. 

More than 1,000 people worship at Crosswalk Church each Sabbath. Church leadership can pay the bills, but have concluded that renting a building the church generally uses only on Saturday is not a judicious use of funds.
 
On June 30, Crosswalk senior pastor, Michael Knecht, announced during his sermon that the church will save about $288,000 on leasing costs each year if it rents just one day per week. That chunk of the budget can be better redirected to, as Knecht phrased it, "fruit production."
 
For a church that prioritizes people, "the numbers don't make sense," Knecht said during his address.
 
Knecht explained that Crosswalk's goal is to trim its operating costs to just 14 percent of its total budget, or to about $100,000. The church would funnel the money saved to sustainable ministries in the church, community and overseas, such as the church's project to provide fresh well water, maternity care and polio relief for people in Gimbi, Ethiopia.
 
"The time for building concrete ... monuments to God is perhaps over," wrote one Crosswalk church member on a feedback forum on the church's Web site. "Storing our treasure in heaven through supporting others is the best investment strategy a church can make," the message stated.

Read the full article at the Adventist News Network.  They've posted a relocation FAQ here (pdf).

Crosswalk is quite fortunate in being able to afford its lease. Many dwindling Adventist congregations reside in buildings beyond their means and find themselves more and more becoming property managers just to meet expenses.  This newest change, to move beyond plywood and plaster, cements the reputation of this congregation as being on the cutting edge of church innovations. 

What excites me about Crosswalk is that Senior Pastor Michael Knecht, with his focus on missions overseas, perspicuity asks what it means for Crosswalk to be a church in the world.  Most congregations in Crosswalks position would look to build their own campus.  It really is quite a bold statement of vision and purpose.

Is your church spending too much of its money sustaining itself at the expense of missions and ministries?

Re-membering the Gulf Coast

By Alexander Carpenter

Bloggin' the 28: The New Earth

Continuing our summer Bloggin' the 28 project, pastor, community organizer and creative ministry guru Monte Sahlin applies the Seventh-day Adventist doctrine of The New Earth to contemporary life.

Much of conservative Protestant/Evangelical theology focuses almost entirely on the individual’s personal relationship with God and the hereafter. The most important thing in this approach to Christian faith is to be “saved,” meaning to be with God in some ethereal sense in the hereafter. The risk, to quote my dad, is a religion that “is so heavenly-minded as to be no earthly good.” It revolves around a profound disconnect between the known and knowable world and the world in which God lives. The spiritual sphere is separated from the real world we all experience.

This paradigm has been dominate in Christendom since the triumph of Constantinian values over the Jewish heritage of the Jesus movement. It is the source of much theological and ethical mischief, including dualism, the most monumental failure to “connect the dots.”

Adventist faith is different from this dominant theology in a very significant way. Adventist faith takes seriously Revelation 20-21, which suggests that the ultimate destiny of humanity is with God on this Earth, not with God in some insubstantial and wholly other place. The end of the story for Adventists is here on this Earth in a society in which God reigns fully and all suffering, disease, disaster, poverty and injustice is gone.

Read and comment here.

God's "Christian" Warriors

By Alexander Carpenter

As a service to the Spectrum Blog community. . .in case you missed it, feel free to watch Christiane Amanpour's CNN documentary, God's Christian Warriors below. The rest is on my YouTube site. 

ADRA on Facebook

By Alexander Carpenter

If you have a Facebook account, check out who is joining the Adventist Development and Relief Agency cause group. And, of course, consider joining too.

Props to Norwegian Adventist Britt Celine, who started it all.

Bloggin' the 28: Spiritual Gifts and Ministries

Continuing our summer Bloggin' the 28 project, blogger Marcel Schwantes applies the Seventh-day Adventist doctrine of Spiritual Gifts and Ministries to contemporary life.

Today's church is going through a crisis in leadership. Leaders of the old guard often resist change in fear of loss of status or position. Moreover, leadership practice is changing. Hierarchical models are disappearing in favor of egalitarian and holistic models. This crisis is opening up the door for new leaders to rediscover the nature and calling of the church as an authentic community, a missional people in a hostile land. Out with the leadership cults, in with the leadership cultures. This shifting is led by Holy spirit-fueled, compassionate and emotionally-intelligent leaders gifted for creating individual, group and systemic change.

Today, this gift is best exemplified in leaders who can demonstrate a heart attitude that shows they are lovers of God and lovers of people. As leaders prove their sincerity and commitment to honest community, seculars and postmoderns will take the risk of trusting them enough to be a part of that community of faith. This takes stepping out of comfortable molds, forsaking political posturing and inviting the breaking of bread with those who do not share the same (Adventist) customs, doctrines or look or talk the way we do. It is a gift enveloped in love, or it is no gift at all:

Read the whole post and comment here.

The kin-dom of God

By Alexander Carpenter

The future's already arrived; it's just not evenly distributed yet.
--William Gibson.

I think that this was Jesus' message as well: The kin-dom of God is here for some and is coming to more.
Not everyone experiences it yet, but more and more grasp that we, of this spot in space, create our future and it's up to each person to realize the kin-dom of God today.

The future: Theoretical physicist and 2057 host Michio Kaku speculates on the future of civilization.

is here? The final scenes of Stanly Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

On God's Warriors

By Alexander Carpenter

Like many Americans, my heart's an idealist and my head's a pragmatist on things religious and political. I often search for ways to split the difference between these two all too often separate states of being. However, last night Christiane Amanpour showed the danger that occurs when religious idealism and political pragmatism split the difference.

It's clear in the people that she interviews who participate in the Israeli occupation that when humans lie, preemptively attack, and occupy, they lose their head and their heart in the process.

She set it up with this contrast of two warriors on the same side in 1967. . .

But it goes beyond the personal, to explore the last four decade of Jewish history that these individuals influenced -- in part -- through their Godly warring. During the interviews with the settlers, one cannot miss the struggle in the faithful as they admit that they lied and killed in a pragmatic pact with their ideals.  As the Times noted, the most interesting aspect of this is the footage of the fund raising in America that support this cultural war. The mix of money and religio-political strategy should give folks of any faith -- liberal or conservative -- pause at the cost to morality and dignity that comes with the territory.

As evangelical blogger Peace and Piety writes: "Watching this, I found myself engulfed in disbelief, awe and amazement at what faith can accomplish. When faith is used to try and transform the masses, it destroys civilizations, neighborhoods, homes, cities, kills children and demolishes peace- to say the very least." Yale student Baptist Like Me notes that as a part of the God's Warriors documentary Madeline Albright gave an interview, titled here as On Religion in Politics: Ignore It "At Our Peril.'  She adds, "I'm not really a partisan person, and even though I would never have voted for her Baptist boss and I long for a compelling, ethical pro-life voice to emerge in her party, I didn't boycott or picket Madeleine Albright when she came to Yale a few years ago. I really admire the Secratary for many reasons, and I think this new interview, part of CNN's "God's Warriors" series, is a very good read." Methodist seminarian Facilitating Paradox found the topics covered to be evocative of other less prime time work on the Middle East, writing:

her documentary reminded me of the similar reporting of Bill Moyers and others on the subject. I've heard of AIPAC before, heard of its power, and knew that illegal settlements were the persistent problem in any Middle East peace process. I've read and heard enough Rabbi Michael Lerner to know that Israelis are just as much in the wrong as any Palestinian. I have a good deal of respect for President Jimmy Carter and his analysis of the situation. But how many other people are already aware of these things? This was the surprise to me: that I was watching this on CNN on primetime. How many people would have their eyes opened? How many people saw these things and heard these stories for the first time? Hopefully millions.

The Two State Peace Plan promotin' OneVoice blog got to

"thinking about how many people there are in the world NOT engaged in violence and enmeshed in “holy wars,” but are actually working to make things better.Extremists make a lot of noise and carry out their initiatives with a kind of unmatched zeal, dedication, and persistence.  They make so much noise, in fact, that they very easily drown out the voices of those calling for tolerance, moderation, nonviolence, and pragmatic steps toward a less conflict-driven and conflict-ridden world.

Thus, we come back to pragmatism.  But perhaps a different kind, not the sort where the ends justify the means, rather the ideal of a pragmatism deployed which finds hope in ethnic and metaphysical difference and always negotiates to keep heads cool and hearts beating on. Because as that old Federalist "blogger" James Madison wrote in famous paper number ten:

"Either the existence of the same passion or interest in a majority at the same time, must be prevented; or the majority, having such co-existent passion or interest, must be rendered, by their number and local situation, unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of oppression. If the impulse and the opportunity be suffered to coincide, we well know that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control. They are not found to be such on the injustice and violence of individuals, and lose their efficacy in proportion to the number combined together. . . ."

Although the embed has been disabled, you can still watch the whole first night: God's Jewish Warriors here. And if you're watching too, let me know.

A Case for Indie Adventism

By Jared Wright, M.Div. student at La Sierra University.

Driving along I-5 between Mt. Shasta and the Oregon border on my way to visit the in-laws last week, I passed a large barn with a message to passers by: “State of Jefferson.”  I had heard talk of making two states out of California, and the writing on the roof piqued my interest.

In 1941, Gilbert Gable, the mayor of Port Orford, Oregon and some like-minded Northwesterners announced the formation of the State of Jefferson [http://www.jeffersonstate.com/] (part Northern California, part Southern Oregon), declaring that they would be seceding from California and Oregon every Thursday.  Yreka, California, would serve as the new state’s capitol.  Historians who have written about the Jefferson secession agree that the independence movement was part whimsy, part real.

Gable and citizens living near the California-Oregon border were fed up with state governments that dictated policy from afar, imposed taxes, and generally called the shots, while remaining grossly inattentive to the needs of the citizens.  Of particular concern was a lack of paved roads along the border region into the wilderness where timber and rich mineral deposits provided unlimited opportunity for economic development.  Repeated calls for aid from Sacramento met empty pledges of help that never arrived.

The secession movement found sympathy from residents of Curry, Josephine, Jackson, and Klamath counties in Oregon as well as Del Norte, Siskiyou, and Modoc counties in Northern California.  California residents of Lassen and Shasta counties added to the movement’s momentum, but Jefferson State met an untimely end.  Less than a week after the establishment of the State of Jefferson, Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor putting an abrupt halt to the Jefferson “uprising.”

The spirit of Jefferson State lived on, however, and in the 1970s, talks of secession again rose among those who opposed majority rule - most being those living in Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. 

Today, the stalwarts who sell T-shirts and bumper stickers sporting the Jefferson State logo (two X’s that stand for being double crossed) will tell you that Jefferson is primarily a State of Mind, albeit one with a lingering core of supporters.

I find myself sympathizing with the Jefferson people, because I have experienced being part of a system that calls the shots from a distance, yet fails to provide help where it is vital for growth and development.  I have seen vast resources – not timber and minerals, but rather female and minority leadership, inclusiveness, and intellectual honesty – overlooked and untapped because of persistent majority rule.

I have also witnessed the formation of a new State in Adventism: it’s already here, though it remains by-and-large a State of Mind.  The need for Indie Adventism, as I’ve dubbed it, is not the need to create something new (no new sects or denominations), it is the need to affirm and solidify what already exists.

This new State of Adventism thinks independently.  To a large degree it acts independently as well.  Indie Adventism has already begun drafting a constitution of sorts, which includes the imperative of ordaining women as well as men to the ministry.  Indie Adventism affirms the progressive nature of our understanding of truth, sees our fundamental beliefs as malleable, and believes that beliefs must stand up to intellectual scrutiny and criticism.  Indie Adventism acknowledges the centrality of community and sees inclusiveness as an integral part of community.  Furthermore, Indie Adventism tends to reject assent to a specific set of tenets as a test of membership.

The list of ways that Indie Adventism thinks and acts independently of the World Church could go on and on.  But to get to my central point, there are three reasons that I believe there is justification for an officially independent fellowship of Seventh-day Adventist Christians:

1.  As mentioned above, the “Majority Rules” attitude of the Power Structure in Adventism pandering to the broader constituency, as in the case of Jefferson State, hinders regional growth and development. 

2.  There is a need for the existing group of independents to be able to act with authority and integrity, which cannot happen when it acts in opposition to the group to which it has voiced its allegiance.  In other words, such defiant acts as moving forward with the ordination of women (as the most obvious example) against the expressed will of the World Church diminish the integrity of the group.

3.  There is currently an unhealthy battle of wills in which the (not fully) independent minority impose and project their will on the World Church majority and vice-versa.  This projecting of wills upon the other side is not only unhealthy - it is also counter-productive.

Elaine Nelson unwittingly provided a pithy, anecdotal synopsis of what Indie Adventism looks like in a conversation that ensued from a recent Spectrum Blog post:

“I attend [services] and have held office in the Adventist church which I attend. Everyone who has asked me to take a position has been fully informed that I am not a member. It was dismissed with "that makes no difference," if one is willing to work within the church that is all that counts… If one wishes to worship there, that is all that is required. My tithe goes directly to the local church to use as they choose... as long as the church operates smoothly, contributes to the [local] conference and always meets its budget, and grows in membership there is no reason for the administration to raise a voice against it.”

It’s time that we acknowledge and affirm what we have; it’s time for Indie Adventism (part whimsy, part real) to come out of the closet.

p.s. Jonathan Pichot recently made an excellent case for the formation of an Indie Adventist University.

Homesick for Harry: Thoughts on the “Chosen One”

By Daneen Akers

Friday night finds me a bit melancholy. As I’m sitting here in our apartment that opens onto a picturesque French courtyard, listening to the concierge and some friends chat over an evening aperitif, I am overcome with emotion, with an ache in the depths of my heart.

SPOILER ALERT in this paragraph: It’s a homesickness of sorts, but not the type you’d expect from an American living in Paris for the summer. I’m not missing home (although, I do). I’m not missing my friends or family (although, I do). I know I will see all of the above soon, next week, in fact. What I’m homesick for is a story, a story that I’ve followed for almost a decade, and that is now complete, the last page read. I’m homesick for Harry. For Hogwarts. For Dumbledore. And for Dobby—especially Dobby, the little house-elf who spent most of the series providing laugh track moments and ended up being the ultimate hero whose sacrifice foreshadows Harry’s and indeed gives Harry the strength to believe once more and to walk forward into his own destiny with courage.

There’s a core, fundamental part of my soul that is built for story, for myth, and for magic. Given the success of the Harry Potter series, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia and other quest epics, I think it’s a fair guess that we are all built for story (thank you Joseph Campbell). These stories speak to me in the way that good music does, bypassing the cynical, doubting voices in my mind and going straight to my heart, whispering that there is meaning, there is a bigger plan, there is a reason to believe. Even now, as an adult, I often find peace in difficult theological quandaries by remembering a moment or a conversation from one of these books—for some reason when I can’t find (or listen to) answers in the Bible, I can find (and listen to) answers from Aslan or Dumbledore. (FYI, J.K. Rowling says she can hardly pass by a book from The Chronicles of Narnia without stopping to read it cover to cover.)

When I first started reading the Harry Potter series, I was an 8th grade language arts teacher at an SDA school. One day I noticed several students sitting through all of their breaks—including their lunch breaks—reading the same book. I asked what could possibly be keeping them in the classroom over break, and, voilà, I met Harry and quickly became a fan.

The controversy over the books started quickly at our school. While I read the book with my students over lunch, the six grade teacher banned the book, citing arguments that are by now familiar: the books glorify witchcraft, tempt children to break the rules, and might tempt impressionable minds to dabble in the occult, or, at the very least, New Age philosophy. This was my introduction into the argument that has simmered among Christians about the merits (or dangers) of these books, flaring every time a new book or film is released.

At first, I felt that the books were simply good fun, an amusing and epic tale with good morals. This is what Charles Colson, a leading evangelical voice said at first too.  "The magic in these books is purely mechanical, as opposed to occultic," he said in 1999. "That is, Harry and his friends cast spells, read crystal balls, and turn themselves into animals—but they don't make contact with a supernatural world. ... The plots reinforce the theme that evil is real, and must be courageously opposed....[Harry and his friends] develop courage, loyalty, and a willingness to sacrifice for one another—even at the risk of their lives. Not bad lessons in a self-centered world" (Quoted on the Christianity Today website, July 2007). Colson and others have changed their tune though—he along with James Dobson now oppose the books (Christianity Today has continued to endorse them.)

On a personal note, family members of mine have discussed their worry about the books, feeling that we have been seduced by Satan as part of the last days resurgence of witchcraft. Just last week a friend forwarded an e-mail that I had to respond to—you know, the one about the throngs of children converting to Satanism as a result of these books? This e-mail is largely based on an article from The Onion, a satirical newspaper. I try to take these warnings with a smile, as I know they are offered in genuine love.

The biggest concern parents and others have is the “m” word: magic. As a teacher having to explain why I was allowing students at an Adventist school to read the books, I did have to think long and hard about the “m” word. I ended up citing the magic in Narnia as a predecessor and assuring parents that good and evil were very clear in the books. Now I refer people to John Granger’s Looking for God in Harry Potter where he differentiates between incantational magic—magic that works according to rules just like physics, gravity, and your car radio, and invocational magic—magic that calls upon the spirits of the dead, a practice condemned by all major world religions and not practiced by any character, good or evil, in the Potter books.

I’ve moved past feeling that the books are merely good, wholesome fun though and now believe them much deeper. Although I find several genres present throughout the series—Harry is as much an Everyman as a young King Arthur—they are also very clearly rich in Christian allegory and symbolism.

As I read Deathly Hallows with my husband, Stephen, I kept exclaiming at key moments, “I can’t believe how clear the Christian symbolism is in this book! How can people not see this?” The book spoke to me on a deeply Christian level.

In short, it’s a story about the difficulty of belief—how do we believe in God and that there is a bigger plan when we have so little to go on? When things seem such a mess?

As she’s done in every book, Rowling emphasized key points that seem to me, not just Christian, but down right Adventist: there is a “Great Controversy” happening that most people (muggle and wizard alike) want to deny; there is true evil that must be resisted; material wealth is insignificant, relationships are what matter; the right path is often difficult, dark, and full of opportunities for failure; death is certain, but there are things worth dying for and fates worse than death; we have a choice in our destiny, and, the most consistent theme of the series, self-sacrificing love is the most powerful force in the universe—Voldemort’s weakness was always that he underestimated the power of love because he could not feel it.

Rowling finally admitted a Christian bias in the series in a recent Dateline interview.  She was asked by a child in the studio audience what the significance of her calling Harry Potter the “chosen one” might be. 

J.K. Rowling: Well, there– there clearly is a religious– undertone. And– it’s always been difficult to talk about that because until we reached Book Seven, views of what happens after death and so on, it would give away a lot of what was coming. So … yes, my belief and my struggling with religious belief and so on I think is quite apparent in this book.

Meredith Vieira: And what is the struggle?

J.K. Rowling: Well my struggle really is to keep believing.
(Dateline/Today, 26 July 2007)

I’d like to hear your stories about Harry Potter. Do we have a strong Harry Potter contingent among the Spectrum Blog readers? What have been your experiences with the books? Do you find them not just Christian but even Adventist-friendly with the whole idea of a hidden world with good and evil forces fighting for our souls? Does it help you to know that Rowling did intentionally create religious symbolism in the series—we’re not just reading what we want in (or do you think we’re stretching it?) How about Harry’s sacrifice at the end of Book 7? What was your take on this? Did you find yourself understand the Garden of Gethsemane in a whole new way? Will you read these books with your children?

Is anyone else homesick for Harry?

Call for gender justice response

By Alexander Carpenter

Adventist Gender Justice blogger, Trisha Famisaran has been working with a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is doing a study on how members of our church community create empowering space for women. (Tangential to this, I recommend Ben MacArthur's letter regarding Seeking a Sanctuary in the current issue of the journal.)   

Trisha writes:

Courtney Crenshaw posted a survey on Adventist Gender Justice several months ago and received great feedback. Courtney has several more questions for our community to answer. The questions and her contact information are available on Adventist Gender Justice.

 

Courtney is interested in getting responses from active bloggers, but she is also interested in the broader perception of gender equality and spaces of empowerment in the wider church. It would be especially helpful if you might consider linking over to Courtney's post from your own sites so that she gets as much response as possible. So please spread the word!

 

I think it's exciting that a non-Adventist from the University of California, Santa Cruz, has chosen to focus on women's empowerment in our church community. Courtney's work will be useful to us and I will try to get a hold of her research when it's complete.

Click here to answer her five questions.

The ethics of conversion

By Alexander Carpenter

You may have been aware that Christians churches throughout the world have been gathering recently to knock out a ethics of conversion. The Associated Press writes: Evangelical groups have joined efforts spearheaded by Roman Catholic, Orthodox and mainstream Protestant churches to create a common code for religious conversions that would preserve the right of Christians to spread their religion while avoiding conflict among different faiths.

The World Council of Churches, which joined the Vatican last year in launching talks on a code, said Wednesday that the process was formally joined by the World Evangelical Alliance at a meeting earlier this month in France.

The code aims to ease tensions with Muslims, Hindus and other religious groups that fear losing adherents and resort to punishments as extreme as imprisonment and even death for converts from their faith and foreign missionaries.

And ReligioScope reports:

"'Evangelical' and 'ecumenical' Christians have never been as close in this regard as they are today. Thus, something that would not have been possible 30 years ago has become achievable," said Thomas Schirrmacher, a German theologian who chairs the WEA's International Institute for Religious Freedom. "It would be the first time ever that such a broad Christian backing is given to an agreement of this kind."

 Adventism's own North American Religious Liberty Association (I'm a proud member) has a position on this, and executive director James Standish shares his opinion below.

Art: Spiritual Journey Through Art - Part 6

By Sharon Fujimoto-Johnson

Identity: Owning My Spiritual Territory   

“Where thou art, that is home.” —Emily Dickinson 

Last week, we completed part 5 of our spiritual journey through art. We have now taken survey of the landscape of our spiritual journeys, mapped where we’ve come from and where we’re going, taken inventory of what’s in our spiritual luggage, contemplated who our traveling companions are, and claimed our spiritual territory. In case you missed them, here are links to the the intro, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4. and part 5. This week, in our last installment of this series, we envision the flags that fly over our individual spiritual lands.   

Our culture is flooded with symbols. We see them in product branding, corporate logos, bumper stickers, advertising, flags, and religious icons. Consider the following examples:   

The Olympic flag: five interlocked colored rings to represent the five areas of the world joined together in the Olympic games.      

The American flag: George Washington is said to have declared, “We take the stars from Heaven, the red from our mother country, separating it by white stripes, thus showing that we have separated from her, and the white stripes shall go down to posterity representing Liberty.” For some, the red and white stripes represent, respectively, the blood of freedom and purity.   

The flag of the United Nations: a map of the world surrounded by olive branches symbolizing peace.   

Coats of arms: In European traditions, the symbolism in tinctures (colors), divisions of field, ordinaries, and charges (crosses, lions, bears, fish, dragons, etc.) are used to create coats of arms to represent family clans, or sometimes individuals.    The one above is the coat of arms of South Australia.

Family crests: The circular Japanese “kamon” or family crests often include symbols of flowers, trees, birds, or lucky symbols. The one above is the family crest of the Miura clan, my ancestral Samurai family linked to Emperor Kanmu, the 50th imperial ruler of Japan. Miura means “three bays,” and the crest seems to indicate three bodies of water. 

The Christian flag, which includes the most universal symbol for Christianity, the cross, red for the blood of Christ, white for purity and forgiveness (“My sins have been washed white as snow.” Isaiah 1:18), and blue to represent heaven, truth, or baptism.

The Seventh-day Adventist logo: “The choice of the Church's logo reflects the core values that Seventh-day Adventists are committed to. The foundation is the Bible, the Word of God, shown open since its message must necessarily be read and put into practice. Central to that Biblical message is the Cross, and is also central in the logo. Above the Cross and the open Bible is the burning flame of the Holy Spirit, the messenger of Truth.” 

The bread and wine of the communion service symbolizing the broken body of Christ and his blood 

The tearing of the temple veil at Christ’s crucifixion

The prophetic symbols of Daniel and Revelation

A spiritual flag represents your faith, your spiritual values. If you were to fly a flag over your symbolic spiritual territory (the territory you claimed in last week’s activity), what would it look like? Joshua challenged the Israelites: “Choose this day whom you will serve,” and then declared, “As for me and my household, we will follow the Lord.” (Joshua 24:15) This was Joshua’s “verbal flag,” his public statement of his faith. 

1. Consider the symbols, colors and shapes of flags and family crests and their significance in your spiritual journey. For example:  What colors represent your spiritual territory? What do those colors symbolize? Courage? Faith? Grace? Compassion? What shapes and symbols on your flag represent your spiritual values? When others see your flag, what do you want them to understand?   

2. Make a flag that represents your spiritual territory.   

 

This is my “flag. I drew it (left-handed again) in the circular shape of a Japanese family crest, which is also the shape of the earth with its surface of water. The colors—greens, pinks, and golds—represent creativity, growth, and light for me. Emblems include a stalk of bamboo, a symbol of strength, endurance, and growth; and a white flower that represents the centrality, purity, and multifaceted simplicity-complexity of grace, which also evokes the idea of faith in a creative, compassionate God. This exercise, for me, was the most challenging of all six we’ve attempted. I found it difficult to distill into simple symbols an expression of my spirituality, but having attempted to do so, I’m all the more convinced that it’s important to be able to own one’s spirituality. “Choose this day whom you will serve,” Joshua challenged. Making the choice is the first step; understanding and being able to express what that choice means is the next—and complex and significant leg of the journey.

 

***

This is the final installment of our spiritual journey through art, but hopefully not the end of your artistic exploration. The gate has been left open. I hope that you’ll return often to consider how art can impact your spirituality, and I hope that you’ll carry what you’ve learned through art into the rest of your life. 

To close this series, I want to share with you the artwork sent to me by artist, teacher, and mentor Nancy Johnson, whose comments you may have seen from time to time on this blog. (She also happens to be my dear mother-in-law with whom I share a love of creative endeavors.) Nancy created two drawings in response to the first exercise in this spiritual journey through art, which was to create a representation of the current landscape of one’s spiritual journey.   

The first depicts a traveler on a rather dark and desolate path just past an overshadowing, sinister-looking tree. Light streams from a source up ahead. Nancy says that creating this drawing allowed her to reflect in a manner that ultimately inspired her to go on to make the second drawing:

I was completely blown away when I saw the second drawing. The rings of the circle in Nancy's artwork are filled with words and intricate drawings that represent significant dates and places, a self-portrait, a picture of Nancy’s family, depictions of artists that have impacted Nancy’s spiritual journey, and finally—what moved me most of all—dozens and dozens of names of loved ones. You’ll have to click on the image to get the full impact of Nancy’s artwork. To me, it’s a portrait of a rich life. I think it’s fitting that the circle depicting Nancy’s journey fans outward, grows larger and more intricate. The X depicts where Nancy sees herself now. Beyond the X is the future, and I can only imagine the harvest that will fill each succeeding ring of the circle.   

Nancy created these drawings in conjunction with the first exercise, but she was already projecting ahead to where I was headed in subsequent exercises. In the second drawing, she effectively maps the span of her spiritual journey up until now and casts forward into the future. She identifies a diverse community of travel companions and names the individuals in her extensive spiritual family tree. Her  drawing includes symbols that evoke a sense of her spiritual territory and spiritual luggage. Though Nancy may not have intended it thus, I think this artwork reflects the fullness and scope of her spiritual journey and the many lives she blesses along the way. I’m moved and inspired.   

Thank you, Nancy, for sharing your artwork, and thank you, readers for joining me on this six-week spiritual journey through art. May your journeys continue. May they be graced with light, artfulness, fellow travelers, and growth.   

Tell the church what to do with $41 million

By Alexander Carpenter

Recently the Seventh-day Adventist Church received a $41 million tithe donation.

Spectrum editor Bonnie Dwyer writes:

At Annual Council this fall the delegates will consider how to use this gift. I suggest that windfall funds such as this should not be used for normal operating expenses. They should be used to secure the financial future of the church. To my mind the future of the church lies in its young people. Therefore I would like to suggest that the funds should be used for the college and university endowment funds.

But we'd like to hear from the Spectrum community.

Drop a comment below and let us know: What do you think the church should do with $41 million?

Spectrum will compile the suggestions and send a report to Jan Paulsen before Annual Council in October.

Bloggin' the 28: God the Son, truly human

Continuing our summer Bloggin' the 28 project, writer Trudy Morgan-Cole applies the Seventh-day Adventist doctrine of God the Son to contemporary life.

I am fairly sure that my Sabbath School and church school teachers did not intend to transmit the heresy of Docetism; they were simply so anxious to underline the divinity of Christ in a world that mocked it, that they unintentionally backpedaled and downplayed His humanity.

It wasn’t till I began reading the works of more liberal Christian writers on the historical Jesus – authors like John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg – that I began to seriously examine my perception of the humanity of Jesus. While I couldn’t believe, as they did, that Jesus was merely human, I realized when I explored my inner picture of Jesus that the Jesus I’d been worshipping and following all these years wasn’t even truly human. He was God dressed up as a human, like Superman wearing those ridiculous Clark Kent glasses that apparently made it impossible for anyone to recognize his true identity.

But it wasn’t only the works of liberal Christians that forced me to confront the humanity of Jesus. It was Scripture itself — passages like the story of Jesus’ temptation by Satan in the wilderness (Matthew 4; Luke 4). When Satan tempted Jesus, he threw down the challenge: “If you are the Son of God….” If Jesus was incapable of self-doubt, if He knew He was divine the same way I know I am a woman, then how was this a temptation? He wouldn’t have been tempted, even for a moment, to prove Himself if there had been no possibility of doubt.

Catch the idea and comment here.

UPDATED:Sorry folks, I forgot to turn off the commenting. Before people self-lacerate on the comparison between God and mammon, visit Trudy's site and join the conversation there.
 

Why handouts are outdated

By Alexander Carpenter

From small scale projects to HIV/AIDS programmes NGOs (Non-Governmental Organisations) charities and aid agencies are everywhere in the developing world. They are all the rage in the West too, and are seen as the good people who want to save Africa. But, however well meaning NGOs may be, their programmes often get up the noses of everyone, from African fishermen to shanty town inhabitants. Their idea of improving people’s lives by promoting the basics only are a far cry from the aspirations of those they seek to help. Serious development and growth is definitely not in the NGO dictionary. Shot in Ghana, Godbless, Waffa, Deroy and local fishermen and women are articulate and angry. They loathe the peanuts offered and sanctimonious lessons in good behaviour. They want industry, jobs and material advancement and for NGOs and aid agencies to stop treating them like children. As Godbless tells us: “Africans have big brains, big aspirations….and want to live in liberty.”

Bloggin' the 28: The Heavenly Sanctuary

Just when you thought that with homosexuality and a non-gendered God, the Adventist blogosphere couldn't get more conventional and boring. . .now it's time for bloggin' The Heavenly Sanctuary. Here's a very practical take on the topic, by two pastors -- Marty Thurber and David Hamstra over at Just Pastors -- who imagine a conversation with God and include a second part which has probing point:

"When Paul Rusesabagina, the innkeeper in Rwanda offered sanctuary in his hotel, he was building God a sanctuary. When the pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana and his son offered the illusion of sanctuary, really offering only death and slaughter, they were yielding to the darkness which wishes to exist in all of us. The light of God’s sanctuary is seven branched, unwilling to be walled in, hid under a basket as it were. This light intends to go to every country and every home and every hotel and every heart."

Amen!
Read and comment here.

Truth and errata

By Alexander Carpenter

I've been caught up in moving my life-in-books deeper into the bowels (a new apt) of Berkeley; thus somewhat delayed, I hope that you'll excuse my Johnny-come-lately status while I tackle some ideas from the comment section. 

There are many reasons that fair-minded folks disagree. Sometimes it's over different life experiences -- from books read to influential mentors.  Most of the time, I believe, we disagree because our interpretative frameworks prioritize different aspects of our shared experience of authoritative evidence.  But sometimes people are just flat wrong.

As a service to my good readers, I did some actual research and found a commenter to be fundamentally incorrect. On July 2, following Jim Coffin's post, "If Women Had Written the Bible," a certain John wrote:

Nobody seems to have had a problem with a "male" God until the post-modern "revolution". However, what is worse is that many of these replies assume that the Bible is a creation of man as opposed to an inspiration of God. Lastly--with the prevalence of women in religion, this "male" thing seems to have worked out quite well after all. Adventism is the only Christian sect/denomination with more men than women.

As is common with this mindset, there are not sources, just apparently a synapse flash left on the screen for all to absorb. But John is wrong. I emailed three people, waited weeks, and finally got an answer. Yes, truth sometimes takes more than abstract deductions.

From [email, August 7, 2007] Heather-Dawn Small, Women's Ministries Director of the Seventh-day Adventist Church:

Based on the information we have from the divisions we have concluded that women are 70% of the world church. In a few countries it is less, very few however. In most our divisions, Africa, Inter America, South America, India, Philippines, areas where the church is the largest women are at least 70% of the membership and in many of those places the number is higher. So we have averaged based on this information that women make up 70% of the church.

John, wherever you are, feel free to bring your own evidence, or apologize for making information up. Maybe these numbers are too "postmodern" for some -- I love how this term is increasingly bandied around as a slur by people who clearly don't know their Deleuze from their Guattari. In fact, I derive no small bit of pleasure from providing a fact to someone who attempted what some might recognize as an redescription of reality peddled to provide greater epistemic certainty.

But this development leads me to dive farther into revolutionary pomo musings: how exactly does it advantage a community or organization to legislate that 70% of its participating, even paying members, should get less than 1% of the say in what happens?
_____________

Recently I wrote a Bloggin' the 28 post on the "God the Father" doctrine. Although most of the comments were supportive and engaged the strange idea that our doctrine not only genders the divine, but also gives God a specific role, not of husband, or mother, or Grand Father, but as father. I'd like to briefly address one critique and in so-doing, get at a larger problem that this critique is indicative of. To wit: good Bill Cork and good Wondering point out that Christians, but apparently not Jews before Jesus appeared, must use paternal language when referring to God, since Jesus did teach us to pray, Our Abba. And so that claim is that since Jesus used the VERY WORD we translate as Father that this describes God's relationship to us all: As our father.

Fundamentally, this is another example of when literalists don't go literal enough. Let us read Matt. 23:9.

"Call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven."

So, do you, Bill and Wondering, also advocate against children recognizing their earthly dads? (Because I for one, stand up against this attempt to displace fathers from their named place in the American family.) In fact, perhaps Jesus is getting at something deeper here than gendered language. 

The Jews had a practice of not even speaking the name of God and now Jesus comes along and uses a familiar, familial (familia! -- you get my point) term to describe the divine. Tell believers that they could give God a name and address God as they would their person who fathered them was pretty radically open stuff. In fact, that claim of familiarity with the divine (this man claims God as his father) contributed to his eventual death -- I am the Son of God. Sometimes terms are just too hard for people to change. Now let's think about the larger literal meaning of what Jesus was doing with the grammar of God. Was he only saying that God is actually a father, or was Jesus teaching a bigger idea, that we can approach God as we would our own fathers. Consider Matthew 7: 9-12

Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

Here in the context of explaining the main point of the Law, the golden rule, Jesus uses the model of the loving father to help people who mostly knew God as the requirer of sacrifices and cursor of the Jewish nation to see God in a broader light. In that context, that was a pretty big deal. And so is thinking about God as a Mother, a Sister, a Brother.

To see those terms as acceptable continues the same Christ-like goal of broadening our idea of a relationship with God. It may seem too different, but think how people reacted to Jesus calling God his Father. Isn't it time that we recognize through our language that a relationship with God is more than masculine. One should no longer have to choose between Heavenly Father or Mother, God is both and so much more.

But this gets to the deeper issue which lies behind a lot of rhetoric for not re-applying theological understandings. Obedience! Wondering articulates it:

"Again, to me, all the debate is not necessary. . . .  All the wiggling and weaseling in the world...never mind. Obedience is really hard."

Or more recently here:

Very few adults realize this--too few. Feelings follow actions and not the other way around. All throughout the Bible, transformation (and great blessing) followed total obedience: Abraham, The Exodus, The Crucifixion. Our willingness to obey is the sign of loyalty that allows God to imbue us with His transforming power.

I love that: TOTAL OBEDIENCE. To some, it all boils down to an obedience problem. If everyone would just control themselves, then. . .really amazing double blessings would pour out. We need more discipline, more theological spankings, less fuzzy, accepting love. Because what does love really get you, just lots of gay people hanging around not disciplining anyone.

Ah yes, the tough-headed approach. Not like all the wondering Spectrum losers, asking questions, reinterpreting, trying to apply the principles of God's Word thousands of years later, negotiating time and space, trying to reduce conceptual contradictions between God first and second books. I see this in their confusion over sexuality. Just erect the barriers. Keep out a maternal conception of the divine. I ask you, if it could be shown that the verses that are used to excluded homosexuals from Christian communion don't apply, would you feel less secure in your faith?

Sometimes it seems that some care less about hermeneutical consistency than keeping a pure church, the old Donatist heresy. To set up a club-like test, saying: "if you are willing to stick with the group, even at the expense of your knowledge or reasoning ability than, and only than, can we really trust you and let you stick around. Don't try to expand on the idea that Love is the most pure definition of God, the distillation of the commandments, the reason Jesus died. Love for all. No, obey they say. This cinema, bicycle, necklace, card game, women's sub-ordination, discriminating against blacks, I mean gays is a test of fellowship." Oh wait, that's exactly what it's called. . .

Do we need standards? Absolutely! That's part of what this whole Bloggin' the 28 project is about -- actually turning these now mostly mental tests into contemporary moral action. Thus Jesus' truth about God roughly 1977 years ago, remains the same today, that God transcends our earthly attempts to box Her into our religio-cultural understanding. What might that be? Well, look at the power structure in our denomination -- the body of Christ divided most starkly by gender. What kind of witness is that?
________________

And now good Bob had referred to the infamous O'Hanlon/Pollack Times Op-Ed on how the Iraq surge is doing. If you care about this at all, I encourage you to go read Glenn Greenwald's investigative interview with O'Hanlon in which he reveals who set his agenda and what he left out of the 1400 word essay.

Now history deletes itself?

By Alexander Carpenter

Boston University presidential historian Robert Dallek talks about his new book, which include the fact that Nixon was drunk and sedated during the Yom Kippur war. And that's because that administration actually recorded their secrets.

And if that's not enough for you, watch University of Texas poli prof Robert Pallitto talk about the Bush administration (& Cheney super fourth branch) approach to secrecy and "democracy."

Art: Spiritual Journey Through Art - Part 5

By Sharon Fujimoto-Johnson

Discovery: Staking My Claim 

"To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul." —Simone Weil 

Last week, we completed part 4 of our spiritual journey through art. We have now taken survey of the landscape of our spiritual journeys, mapped where we've come from and where we're going, taken inventory of what's in our spiritual luggage, and contemplated who our traveling companions are. In case you missed them, here are links to the intro, the intro, part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4. This week, we stake claim to our spiritual territory.   

God to Abraham: "Get out of your country, from your family, and from your father's house, to a land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." (Genesis 12:1-3) 

In this week's exercise, spiritual territory is metaphor for spiritual gifts or spiritual stewardship or spiritual wisdom. What do you recognize as your sphere of spiritual influence, and thus, your sphere of responsibility? Where do your gifts of wisdom lie? What is the spiritual territory that has been entrusted to you?   

Consider several aspects of spiritual territory: 

Category: 

"There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are differences of ministries, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of activities, but it is the same God who works all in all. But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to each for the profit of all. For to one is given the word of wisdom through the Spirit, to another the word of knowledge through the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healings by the same Spirit, to another the workings of miracles, to another prophecy, to another discerning of spirits, to another different kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. But one and the same Spirit works all these things, distributing to each one individually as He will. For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ." (1 Corinthians 12:1-12) 

Scale:   

"I never look at the masses as my responsibility; I look at the individual. I can only love one person at a time—just one, one, one. So you begin. I began—I picked up one person. Maybe if I didn't pick up that one person, I wouldn't have picked up forty-two thousand…. The same goes for you, the same thing in your family, the same thing in your church, your community. Just begin—one, one, one." —Mother Theresa   

"Today, more than ever before, life must be characterized by a sense of universal responsibility, not only nation to nation and human to human, but also human to other forms of life." —Dalai Lama 

Duration: 

"You are responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose." —Antoine de Saint-Exupery, from The Little Prince" 

"I try to live what I consider a 'poetic existence.' That means I take responsibility for the air I breathe and the space I take up. I try to be immediate, to be totally present for all my work." —Maya Angelou

"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors." —Jonas Salk 

Spiritual territory may be literal physical territory—your home and the lives you nurture within its walls, or your local community, or your church. Or it may be symbolic: perhaps your spiritual territory is the teaching of young children or social activism or theological scholarship. Whatever the case, responsibility begins with recognition—recognition that "The earth is the Lord's in all its fullness, the world and those who dwell therein" (Psalm 21 1-2), and recognition of our role of stewardship.   

1. Consider the symbols of land and geology and their significance to the spiritual journey. What is the spiritual territory you claim? What territory has been placed in your responsibility? What does this spiritual land look like? Is it fertile? Arid? Mountainous? Next to a river? On an island? What does these geographical metaphors represent to you?   

2. Make a drawing that represents the spiritual land to which you are laying claim. 

Here's my drawing (left-handed once again), which is split it into four smaller pieces (click for full image):

On a small scale, a flat arid stretch represents what I consider to be the spiritual territory placed in my responsibility. People who are crossing parched land in their spiritual journeys often come into my life. The climbing of treacherous snow-capped mountains, I leave to the erudite. The drowning waters, I leave to those who know how to save. The lush meadows are strangely foreign to me. The crossing of parched land, however, I understand. And I know that it calls for the simple gift of water, which I think of as a metaphor of compassion and nurturing. I'm still learning to give this gift, but it is one I've received, and it seems only natural that I should pass it on.

On a cross section, I feel I am always drilling down toward the spiritual-universal level of my spiritual territory, on a level deeper and darker than what is visible on the surface. I feel my heart pulling me toward that cross section of earth, as though that's closest to the source of water that will nourish arid ground.   

Switching perspective a bit, a geographical map of my spiritual territory includes the island of Adventism connected to the mainland of the world, or humanity. I've always felt my responsibility was to the world at large more than to the island of Adventism. I wish Adventism didn't feel like an island and that I didn't have to straddle the bridge that connects the two.   

Finally, my spiritual territory wouldn't be complete without this quote from J.R.R. Tolkien: "We come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal light that is with God." It was with physical light that God opened the curtains on our literal earth and with metaphorical light that, as a writer, I explore my literary world. 

What I gained through this exercise was an awareness of where I stand, and consequently, a sense of possibilities growing out of the spiritual territory that has been entrusted to me. "My foot stands in an even place," David said, and I feel much the same (Psalm 26: 12). 

Have you made any discoveries through this exploration of spiritual territory? Leave a comment and let me know. As always, if you're brave enough to share your creations with the world, scan them in and email them to me (signed or anonymously) at sharon@sharonfujimoto-johnson.com along with a brief description of your artwork. I'll see about putting them up on the blog.

Sabbath blog potluck of new and interesting things

by Johnny A. Ramirez and Alexander Carpenter

New Flavors

Statistician Nathan Yau of the Thai Seventh-day Adventist church in Hollywood is currently interning at the New York Times and actually made the above Hillary Clinton graphic.  Read his fascinating blog FlowingData here.

La Sierra alum Ana Gamboa lives in Los Angeles but works in Riverside and writes about both in her Toward an Interactive Urban Environment blog found here.

Newboldian Anca Tanasa writes about sunny days in her blog Les Adventures de Martinique found here.

AUC graduate Jennifer Peach-Guzman talks about breastfeeding and more at her Boy Mommy blog found here.

Old Favorites

It's a hot day over at The Wheeler Spin. 

Having trouble finding a job?  The Adventist News Network tells of South Korean opportunities. 

Doug Morgan takes on the Crusaders over at Peace Messenger. 

Speaking of gainful employment, Jonathan Pichot has a worthy summer suggestion for those better off.

Always interesting yet mostly in Finnish, Ansku post 8 facts about herself over at Pastorin blogi.

Trevan Osborn sends us to the thrift store in this Divergence post.

Julius and Kendra share some of their favorite Ellen G. White quotes over at Progressive Adventism.

Mission spotlight -- SPD

By Alexander Carpenter

Often leading the church, the South Pacific Division now has it's own YouTube channel and just started broadcasting what looks like a weekly Adventist News video cast. Check it out! Nathan Brown gets in the picture talking about one of the most important moral issues of both the 19th century and our time.

Bloggin' the 28: Marriage, family, homosexuality, children

Continuing our summer Bloggin' the 28 project, we have two -- from a man and a woman -- applications of the Seventh-day Adventist doctrine of Marriage and the Family to contemporary life.

“Marriage was divinely established in Eden and affirmed by Jesus to be a lifelong union between a man and a woman in loving companionship. For the Christian a marriage commitment is to God as well as to the spouse, and should be entered into only between partners who share a common faith. Mutual love, honor, respect, and responsibility are the fabric of this relationship, which is to reflect the love, sanctity, closeness, and permanence of the relationship between Christ and His church. Regarding divorce, Jesus taught that the person who divorces a spouse, except for fornication, and marries another, commits adultery. Although some family relationships may fall short of the ideal, marriage partners who fully commit themselves to each other in Christ may achieve loving unity through the guidance of the Spirit and the nurture of the church. God blesses the family and intends that its members shall assist each other toward complete maturity. Parents are to bring up their children to love and obey the Lord. By their example and their words they are to teach them that Christ is a loving disciplinarian, ever tender and caring, who wants them to become members of His body, the family of God. Increasing family closeness is one of the earmarks of the final gospel message.”

Between Heaven and Earth: A Reflection on Marriage and Family
Siroj Sorajjakool

I personally believe that there is an ontological drive toward Transcendence in all of us and this drive expresses itself in various dimensions of life.  This fundamental belief about marriage and family grows out of this inner reach for Transcendence and Divinity within human relationships.  While it may be practical to capture this within the belief system, Transcendence always transcends any attempt to capture it, especially in doctrinal form. 

There is an inner longing in us for that ideal family where love, respect, honor, and responsibility form the core values.  Where our inner needs are fulfilled.  Where there is harmony.  Where family members constantly support and nurture one another.  Where everyone is fully committed to standby in misery and happiness.  Where there exists complete acceptance and love.  Where family members take the time to really listen.  These are the yearnings of the soul for the Divine within the boundary of human relationships.  These yearnings and longings are a part of us from creation.  They are the essence to which we were created for.  They are the stuff of the soul that needs to be recognized and honored. 

At the very same time there needs to be the recognition that as human beings, we are always standing in-between, between the heaven and the earth, Divinity and humanity.  We are children of both realities.  And “family” is very much a part of these two realities.  We stand in-between.  The earth represents the possibility for conflicts, tensions, human weaknesses, the basic primal aspects of our humanity.  The earth symbolizes the messiness of life, of the reality that love is a difficult path to follow, that respect requires a great sense of maturity, that honor does not come easy, that responsibility comes with growth.  On earth one realizes that the desire to love is compromised by the reality of our humanity, of the possibility of our weaknesses, insecurity, and jealousy. 

To stand in-between is to come to an awareness of the deep yearning for the Divine within the boundary of marriage and family and the reality of our humanity. It is to create the distinction between the yearnings and the reality of there fulfillments.  To stand in-between is to allow our souls to savor the romance of Divine agape while extending our love tarnished by our very own humanity in the best possible way.  I personally think that if we do not place our marriage and family between heaven and earth, we may be living in a home without a soul, or having a soul that has no home.

I do have many suggestions about raising children in relation to the concept of standing in-between.  But when you have your own children and you have lived through their teenage years, what is there left to say about raising children except that may the grace of God be upon all of us parents.  As my wife once remarked to me, “When you have children, you are never the same.  They change you.”  While raising my teenage son, I was forced to grow emotionally.  I can’t say that I’m fully emotionally  mature, but I have certainly grown.  If you are not growing while helping your child to grow, you have to wonder what growth is all about.  A part of parenting is about a corrective that a child places on us in the way we come to experience Transcendence.
______________________

Marriage is a School; Churches are Families
Carrol Grady

In addition to procreation (“Be fruitful and multiply”), companionship (“It is not good for man to be alone; I will make a helper suitable for him.”) and a reflection of the Trinity’s relationship (“Let us make man in our image.”), in our fallen world I believe marriage serves as a school where we can learn to understand God’s love for us and model His love to each other and to our children.

Marriage, at its best, draws us out of our self-centeredness; becoming one-flesh, we learn that our partner’s needs and desires are as important as our own. If we stick with our marriage through difficult times, God uses them to teach us many lessons and mold our characters. Becoming parents, we learn to forego sleep, surrender personal plans, and expend financial resources for the sake of a helpless, squalling mite of humanity we helped create.

The love we experience for our children gives us a small glimpse of God’s love for us. We discover that discipline is necessary for their long-term good, even though they don’t appreciate it, and this helps us discern God’s loving hand when our cherished plans go awry. Our deep love is strong enough to encompass our children even when they are flawed, make mistakes, or misbehave, just as God loved us while we were still sinners. (Romans 5:8).

Children don’t realize their parents are just people. For a few years, in their little world, their parents are God for them. One of our most important tasks as parents is modeling God’s constant, unconditional love. If we fail at this, it may take our children a lifetime to believe God really loves them.

From my experience, some of the most profound, most difficult lessons we learn as parents come as our children near or reach maturity, when their decisions may be life-changing. For me, such a lesson began 20 years ago when we learned our youngest son is gay.

Not once did the possibility of shunning or withholding my love from him enter my mind. The first thing I had to do was confront my ignorance and prejudice. After the first shock, I realized that my pre-conceived ideas about homosexuality needed some revising. I’ve spent the years since learning as much as I can and reaching out to hundreds of other families going through this experience.

God has taught me many lessons. I learned the meaning of unconditional love on a deeper level. As I came to understand homosexuality better and to realize what my son had gone through, I learned tolerance for those who are different from me. I learned not to be judgmental, because I can’t know others’ circumstances. In sharing my experience, I learned that transparency and vulnerability allow others to drop their masks of perfection. I learned the relief of humility. Through it all, we have kept a close, loving relationship with our son.

I believe church families, just like individual families, have an important responsibility to model God’s overwhelming, persistent, mighty, unconditional love to everyone who seeks their fellowship. Our job is to love everyone and pray for them. We can leave the rest to God and the Holy Spirit.

Just one final, thoughtful question: Do our gay and lesbian sons and daughters also need the growth and learning provided by the school of marriage or a committed relationship?

A lil' Old Testament fury

By Alexander Carpenter

Here's a great scene from a great show. . .with a queer moral implication. Yeah, yeah, I know that this is not as tightly argued as a Bruggemann tome, but you get the point.

The only proper place for pacifism

Many in the Spectrum community really seek to understand how best to reconcile their ideals of conscientious objection with the contemporary realities of humanitarian and/or corporatist military intervention. Recently Arlyn raised some questions and Bob Rigsby has taken up the challenge. Although these usually happen in the comment threads, Bob has spent the weekend honing his thinking on the topic connecting the larger issue of redemptive violence to pacifism. Let them know what you think.

By Bob Rigsby, a Seventh-day Adventist anesthesiologist who grew up in Ethiopia as the son of a missionary doctor, and now lives in Altamonte Springs, Florida.

Arlyn: This is a huge topic with lots of corollary ideas, and still being formed in my mind. Here goes…

Some things seem undeniable. We live in a violent world; problems are solved with violence. This happens on a personal level, and a national/international level. It is easy to reflexively call violence evil. We instantly recognize that something is amiss when we see violence. Be it verbal, institutional, emotional, physical. At the same time, we realize instinctively and through history, that there is a type of evil which does not learn; it does not change; it does not repent. And perhaps it can not repent -- though I resist this idea.

This evil is not evil “lite” -- examples might be the evil against which MLK spoke -- and Christ too. The evil which can be “shamed” into change. The non-violent “acts” of turning the other cheek, walking the extra mile, giving the cloak also, and silently shaming a “Christian” nation into recognition that blacks are also created in the image of God, all are designed to allow the victims of violence (oppression) to retain their dignity, not passively submit, and call to change to better values. These acts are a call to higher moral ground. They offer time and context, and are the hope for transformation of the enemy's heart.

But some evils will not be “called” to anything but more violence. For ultimate evil knows no self restraint. It only knows self-justification. We know this intuitively. A good man (who is a pacifist; unwilling to use violence for any reason) goes into a locked room with an evil man who (the reasons he acts this way a fascinating aside) who has no moral qualms about using force to achieve his purposes, and it is certain -- 100% percent of the time -- that only the evil man will emerge. Baring external interventions, this is easily predictable. Predictable too -- and we often find this jarring -- is that the evil man will have come up with some very good and convincing “reasons” for his actions! He emerges actually believing he is “justified” in his violence!

This is no idle mental exercise. It’s already happened in history. God (whom I will try to sustain as the perfect pacifist) enters the locked room of this evil earth and, given His priorities, didn’t stand a chance. He killed -- and true to form, His killers imagined they had thereby accomplished a certain “good”.

Jump to another train of thought; the various theories of the Atonement. Most Christians have embraced the violence of the cross in ways that implicitly accept -- maybe even rejoice in -- violence. Good violence. God’s violence. This, in my opinion, mirrors our human (and profoundly fallen) conviction that in fact there are certain kinds of violence which are “good” -- so good in fact that this violence actually “saves” us! And if you believe in the saving violence of God, in Christ, you will take great and holy meaning from it and it will be celebrated. (Just watch Gibson’s “Passion…” to see what I mean) It will be celebrated and mimicked.

In short, we humans have largely bought -- deeply and completely -- into what Wink (and others) calls the Myth of Redemptive Violence. The “right” violence, against the “right” people, in the “right” circumstances, is not only justified, but it will save us! It is more ingrained in us that we comprehend, I believe.

Well, what about it? Does God ultimately solve His problems with violence? This is a long story in and of itself for me, but I’ve concluded that He does not. It is totally foreign to His nature. All manner of other ideas -- each betraying the bias (again, my take) of fallen humans -- find little niches for “useful” violence. Ideas like punishment, discipline, judgment, and yes, justice. You do X (bad thing) and justice insists you be disciplined and punished. At this point it gets horribly confused and conflated as we bring in ideas of “law” and since God is equated with His “law” somehow He becomes wrapped up in all this violence as solution.

And so we partake of the system of command and punishment for misbehavior. We console ourselves it is punishment with a “purpose”. We will enforce goodness (with all it’s attendant usefulness to our community at large) with violence. But the reliance on the motives of fear, deterrence, force, pain, to accomplish common “good” is troubling. Sure there are temporary and visible advantages; we’re safer. In time however, I’ve become convinced that God’s ultimate solution involves neither fear, nor force, nor coercion, nor punishment, and consequently no violence. For what God really wants can in no way be gained by those things. In fact, those things produce the exact opposite of what He desires. (The savage and absurd irony of “beating the ‘hell’ out of somebody” comes to mind. In reality, hell is beat in.) He will not, now or ever, be satisfied with a love born of force and fear. (This truth didn’t become real for me until I had read so called “Feminist” and “Liberation” theologies… Theologies uniquely qualified to discern the absurdity of associating Love with violence.) For the love upon which His entire Government and Universe are founded is freely given; it is drawn out -- we are wooed to it; it cannot and will not be forced. We must choose God’s system as free, individual, moral beings.

This stands as the ideal then; the city of God, there on the mount ahead and above us to which we march. Yet we are not “there”, we are here, in our earthly kingdoms and systems. Flawed, fallen, and fearful. It is my firm conviction that one cannot even begin to contemplate the rightful place for pacifism until he has come to the knowledge that violence itself has no place in God’s ultimate plan. It’s that simple. But from where we stand in our earthly “prison” we imagine it is very complex. And the complexity multiplies as we discover new reasons and ways to smuggle in “necessary” violence in the service of “good”. And when we try to shroud and bless this violence in the name of “Love” it only gets worse. Yet, if we cannot imagine that shining ideal of God’s true kingdom of nonviolence, it’s unlikely we will ever find a proper understanding of pacifism. (As an aside, Elaine and Arlyn, my eventual embrace of God’s Universal salvation, seemed a logical consequence of a God who eschews all violence.)

No small amount of soul-searching results as we find ourselves both captive to our dependence on systems of violence for our sense of security, while at the same time puzzle at Christ’s insistence that His kingdom was already here; it has broken in to this darkened room filled with evil. The tension we find between these kingdoms is seen and felt at all levels of experience. We see ideals, and goals, yet seem powerless somehow to live Kingdom values in earthly kingdoms.

And so we imagine -- and list -- all manner of reasonable places for violence (in all it’s forms). We discipline the immature, (think children) using force, to achieve desired behaviors. We see the desirable effects of sensible laws (think the command not to kill; or not to speed) and so tolerate the “enforcement” of those things. We see that here in this realm, certain “good” can in fact be accomplished through selective violence. It is easy to see the “good” in protecting the lives of my family -- by killing with violence the intruder into my home. It is undeniably “good” that the horror of the Atom bombs in Japan hastened the end of the war (ending war; surely a “good”) and resulted in the saving of many more lives than those lost to the bombs themselves. A “bad” thing necessitated by the “good” which results.

But this is not the calculus of the kingdom of God; it is our own. That very moment we allow the motive of fear and force to serve our goal of love, we have become severed from the true Kingdom. Enlisting violence, in any of its forms, in the service of love, betrays the true Kingdom. The WAY of the cross could not be clearer; yet we resist (for what seem to us, in our humanness and fears, good reasons) it’s final destination. Death. In the great confrontation between kingdoms, death is the result of the one who participates in God’s Kingdom values. There is no way to sugar coat this reality. Christ showed us that.

Attempts to avoid and temper this stark truth of Christ’s cross results in strains, species, and variations of pacifism. But for every variation we imagine, we enable a departure from the only sort of pacifism deserving of God’s name. Pacifism thus laden with conditions, contingencies, and qualifiers, is a pinnacle of fallen man’s hubris and arrogance. (Due respect for John Howard Yoder’s “Nevertheless: Varieties of Religious Pacifism” noted earlier by Alex on this blog.) For a pacifism thus adulterated with human pragmatism, wise as it may seem to us at the time, is worse than a neutering of the Kingdom; it is thus destroyed. Such dilutions to the Kingdom of God can not, and will not prevail, ultimately.

That is the goal; that is the Beacon which both calls us and guides us. The ways we fall short of this high calling are many; too many to count. Yet there hangs the Christ -- urging us to live inthat very Kingdom. Freely, and without compromise -- pragmatic as such pragmatism may seem. The calling could not be higher; this distance we feel from it can be discouraging. But there it stands.

Two realities (for starters) can form the basis for our actions toward this goal. First, they must be freely chosen, and second they must be chosen by individuals -- not groups. This seems, to me, axiomatic. That all choices made in the Kingdom must be free and made by individual minds is surely foundational. Again, the cross. Christ chose it with full awareness of what He was doing. Not commanded, not forced,  but chosen freely. Further, not even Christ Himself can make the choice for us; we chose it ourselves. Thus Christ faced the cross alone. His choice was His own -- He will not make that choice for the group. Years later, His followers made similar choices in the full knowledge of the meaning of what they were choosing. Freely. Individually.

As an example of the implications for my personal life, I can consider my attitudes and understanding of violence, enacted by me, in “defense” of my home; my family; my “castle”. I have, for some years now, believed that, given all the unpleasant choices, my best, most “moral” choice is to be willing -- and possess the means and ability -- to kill that intruder who threatens my family. I have seen that not to do so would be, in effect, to participate in their deadly harm. Were I to adopt a policy of pacifism, it would force my moral choice upon my family -- who have not made that choice for themselves.  But the day comes when my children are grown, mature adults; they make the personal choice for pacifism then.

For myself, my own paradigm is slowly shifting. Hard as it is for me, I’m beginning to see that this moral calculus is my own; it is of this world. Had I faith enough (in God’s promised resurrection, for example) and absence of fear ( can I really, willingly and freely, let the intruder kill me? -- Trusting my life will be restored; just as Christ’s was?) it seems that I have the support system to make that hard choice.

Some comparisons exist with nations who wage war. Suggesting nations adopt a policy of pacifism (the total -- indeed only meaningful -- version) seems inappropriate. Each individual of that nation, it seems to me, must chose that option for himself -- given the high stakes inherent with pacifism, (i.e., it may well kill you). However, if one imagines a nation with a high percentage of citizens who have made that very choice, and have openly elected leaders who explicitly ran on that platform, that is a very different (and in my view) unlikely scenario. (And of course could never happen with an Adventist running; believing in separation as we do.)

That said, there really is a body of people who can, and according to Christ’s witness (my take), should have real basis to make that very choice; it is the Christian church. Imagine if such principled pacifism achieved large adherence. (By principled, I mean undiluted with “exceptions”.) Might they not be scorned, ridiculed, and even blamed for all the evil and wars about them? I have often wondered if the eschatology of the Adventism I grew up with actually applies to all those who chose, under Kingdom of God principles, to observe the true Sabbath peace God offers. And their resulting pacifism marks them as the enemy. With great passion and righteous indignation, they are scapegoated as the real cause of conflicts (after all, they are utterly unwilling to solve the problems of obvious evil with what “everybody knows” to be the proper solution) and attempts are made against them with the very force these pacifists abhor. It is only then, when the commitment of God’s true church to His ways of pacifism is total, completely freely chosen, and obvious, that God intervenes and offers divine protection. This only serves to infuriate those who have come to trust in earthly means of violence in the service of God. And the ultimate irrationality of violence as solution to anything in God’s Kingdom becomes plain to all.

Well, all manner of implications and questions can arise from this line of thinking.

To the narrower question (Arlyn’s) of the usefulness of the metaphor of the violence of surgery being likened to certain violence being acceptable in the cause of a greater good… It can be a useful metaphor, but it is limited. The very need for surgery is a glaring reminder of our fallen state. This is not how God created us. And surgery must be chosen freely -- by individuals. (So must pacifism -- one of my main contentions  here.) However, the realization that all our surgery, well intentioned as it is, is ultimately futile (for all our patients die eventually) serves to emphasize that earthly kingdom solutions which rely on violence, obvious as the “good” may be, are only temporary. Only God’s Kingdom offers the permanent solution.

Thanks Arlyn for your thought provoking questions!

Memento mori and Ingmar Bergman

By Alexander Carpenter

The Seventh Seal (1957) four minute opening sequence.
"And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour" (Revelation 8:1)

Art: Spiritual Journey Through Art - Part 4

By Sharon Fujimoto-Johnson

Traveling: Living on the Road

“I am a part of all that I have met.” —Lord Alfred Tennyson

Last week, we completed part 3 of our spiritual journey through art. We have now taken survey of the landscape of our spiritual journeys, mapped where we’ve come from and where we’re going, and explored what’s in our spiritual luggage. In case you missed them, here are links to the intro, part 1, part 2, and part 3. This week, we consider who our companions are on this journey.

Travel in the Biblical stories was rarely a solitary experience. Noah traveled with his family and a ship full of animals. Abraham’s lengthy travels with his wife, Sarah, were rich with failures and victories alike. Friends Barnabas and Silas accompanied Paul on his missionary journeys. Joseph and Mary make a wearing journey together toward Bethlehem and a part in the story of salvation. Moses spent forty years wandering the wilderness with a crowd of oft-complaining Israelites.

We are not alone on our spiritual journeys either. “The Lord will guide you continually,” Isaiah wrote (Isaiah 58:11). Not only are we accompanied by divinity on our spiritual journeys, but we are also accompanied by one another. Our paths weave together and across one another like braided streams. We encounter one another on our spiritual journeys, sometimes as fellow travelers, sometimes as guides and followers, sometimes for encouragement: “For if they fall, one will lift up his companion, But woe to him who is alone when he falls, for he has no one to help him up.” (Ecclesiastes 4:10)

As you mapped your spiritual journey a couple weeks ago, perhaps you began thinking of people who impacted you along the way—perhaps an older person who took the time to befriend you as a child, parents who modeled a joyful Christian life, a college professor, a friend who is overflowing with grace, or even a fictional character who challenged you to grow spiritually. These are some of your companions on your spiritual journey. Perhaps not all of the significant individuals in your spiritual journey were positive examples, but in some way they affected the direction of your path. These are also your companions.

In college, I encountered two professors who, for me, modeled a life rich in spirituality and art. I saw in them both a genuine faith and a deep love of art, and because of these professors, I realized that I didn’t have to choose between religion and art. I began to believe that I didn’t have to give up either Adventism for the artist’s life or vice versa. My professors had answered Asher Lev’s struggle to reconcile religion and art by embracing both fully, and by doing so, they became spiritual ancestors of mine.

But I am not just on the receiving end of spiritual legacy. I am passing on spiritual legacy as well. My dear nieces and nephews come to mind, of course. They’re growing quickly and are beginning to navigate their own spiritual journeys too, and I’m aware that I’m accompanying them on their journeys and that I’m passing on to them something of my own faith. They are my spiritual descendents, and I hope the spiritual legacy I leave them is an understanding of God’s faithfulness and unchanging love.

Who are your travel companions?

1. Consider the symbols of genealogy, families, and community and their significance to the spiritual journey.

I think the visual of a family is particularly significant here. Jesus said, “I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5). In a sense, our family trees all start with Christ.

What is your spiritual genealogy—literally and figuratively? Who are your spiritual ancestors and descendants? What role models (biblical, familial, secular, fictional) do you include in your spiritual genealogy? What I’d like us to consider here is the impact we have on one another’s spiritual journeys as fellow travelers.

What spiritual inheritance has been passed down to you? And to whom are you passing on this spiritual inheritance? Spiritual descendants may not necessarily be younger than you. They may be friends who seek your companionship on the spiritual journey; sometimes spiritual legacy is passed on and received simultaneously. They may be parents who are growing into the experience of grace.

What is your main role in this family tree? Are you a mother? A younger sister? An uncle? An older brother? I don’t mean literal familial roles, but the spiritual role you fill within your spiritual family tree. Are you the elder sister who nurtures the spiritual growth of those around you? Are you the younger sister looking for spiritual guidance? Are you the uncle who always makes time for his nephew? Are you the spiritual father in your family tree? Does your spiritual identity reveal anything significant about your journey?

2. Draw a spiritual family tree that includes your fellow traveling companions. It can be a traditional-looking family tree, or a creative interpretation.

Here’s my spiritual family tree (click for full-size image). It’s much more extensive than my genealogical family tree, and it’s a series of overlapping circles. The circles represent grandparent, parent, sibling, aunts/uncles and descendants roles in my spiritual journey. As I sat down to do this exercise, I realized that in my mind there’s a lot of overlap between the roles—hence the overlapping circles. Each of these roles represents something specific for me.

Grandparents in my spiritual journey represent “heritage”—the faith beliefs and examples instilled in me during childhood. Parental roles represent modeling—the modeling of a life of faith. I chose writers like Flannery O’Connor, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Chaim Potok to represent the many novelists and poets who have impacted my spiritual journey, and they join my real life parents and others from whom I’ve inherited spiritual values. Aunts and uncles represent “nurturing” to me, and the initials and names in this circle indicate some of those who have not so much passed down spiritual values to me as encouraged me in my quest. The quality characterizing my spiritual siblings is “growth.” The names and initials in this circle represent those with whom I am learning and growing. Finally, I’ve designated the word “grace” for the circle that represents my spiritual descendents, because an understanding of God’s grace is what I hope to pass on. In this circle are the aforementioned nieces and nephews, but also my community and the world. I don’t know exactly my role in my community and the world, although I have some inkling. I do know that each of us makes an impact. Each of us passes on something to the world in which we live. For me, I want that something to be grace. In a sense, everything I’ve learned and experienced in my spiritual journey funnels into that statement.

“Everything is interwoven, and the web is holy. None of its parts are unconnected. They are composed harmoniously, and together they compose the world.” —Marcus Aurelius

What does your spiritual family tree reveal? What are the responsibilities that come with inheriting faith and with passing on faith? I discovered through this exercise that I believe that spiritual legacy is an interconnected, complex, and colorful inheritance. In our community of faith, our influence is real and it matters. How we live our faith matters—not for what it means for us, but for what it means to those with whom we share our spiritual legacy. We can neither overlook those who have traveled with us on our spiritual journeys nor ignore the responsibility of spiritual legacy. The experience of God’s grace flows down from the hands of Christ into our lives, and it is meant to continue flowing out of our lives into the lives of others.

Are you participating in this spiritual journey through art? Leave a comment and let me know. As always, if you’re brave enough to share your creations with the world, scan them in and email them to me (signed or anonymously) at sharon@sharonfujimoto-johnson.com along with a brief description of your artwork. I’ll see about putting them up on the blog.

Next week’s activity is “Discovery: Staking My Claim.”

Bloggin' the 28: Expanding the Scope of Stewardship

Continuing our summer Bloggin' the 28 project, La Sierra University M.Div. student Jared Wright applies the Seventh-day Adventist doctrine of Stewardship to contemporary life.

He writes:

During my first year as a Theology major in college, my professor, Lloyd Willis, the Australian dean of the religion department, shared with us his conception of what he called God’s “economy of miracles.” I’ve forgotten exactly how Dr. Willis put it, but in essence, he stated that God will not act supernaturally to accomplish what people can (and perhaps should) do naturally.

A few years later, toward the end of my college days, a friend of mine, Kevin, an older man and atheist, expressed to me a common atheistic sentiment toward God. He said that if there were a God, he would have a lot to answer for. How, for example, could a God characterized by love simply sit by and watch as millions of people on earth starve to death in famine-stricken parts of Africa or India? If a human parent behaved in that way, he said, at the very least, they would be accused of gross negligence!

Both of those thoughts impressed me, and over time, they have woven themselves together to form a backdrop for my concept of stewardship: In brief, God does not seem to intervene miraculously to accomplish what human beings can and should be accomplishing on their own, and secondly, (contrary to what my friend suggested), human tragedies like genocide, famine, global warming, and war are not indicative of the absence of God, but rather, they are indicative of human failure to live up to the God-given charge to be stewards of what God has made.

Read the rest and share your ideas here.

       

Our man in Spain

By Ruben Sánchez in Barcelona

It was Thursday, the 26th of July, around 9pm when a few twenty-something-year-old church members gathered at a friend's house in Barcelona for some spiritual time. Before grabbing our Bibles, I opened my notebook and took out my pen as I explained that I had been asked to blog about Adventism in Spain. There I was, ready to write down their thoughts.

"We are kind of afraid of showing who we are as Adventists", said Marta Muñoz, a 26-year-old award-winning film maker.

"I think there is a lot of escaqueo (skive off work)" interrupted a 25-year-old Ph.D student, Sara Llorca. "Everyone, starting with the pastors down to the laymen, shows a lack of involvement, we tend to think that someone else will do it".

Ms. Llorca's opinion is shared by many in Spain. However, official data may show the opposite. According to figures appearing recently in the Spanish Adventist Review, in the last five years church has grown by 906 members each year, (now there are 13.200 total in Spain). The numbers report that tithe collection has recently doubled, from € 4.855.839 in 2001 to € 8.239.338 in 2006.

Considering these upbeat numbers, is Ms. Llorca's impression wrong?

In an email I got some days later, Isaac Llopis, a 26-year-old, who is close to finish his Ph.D in physics, pointed out that, "our church administrators try to make us happy by giving us general statistics which show the church's growth in the past five years, but this change is due to immigration. We would cry if we had the statistics for the native Spanish members".

Our conversation at friend's house went on. "Truly, the cultural diversity that immigration has brought is the greatest challenge our church faces", explained Pablo López, a 28-year-old IT assistant. Immigration is a church issue because it is a country's issue. Spain has experienced little immigration for the last 500 years, and now suddenly we have to learn how to deal with it.

Offering a suggestion, Mr. López added the church's bureaucracy should be reduced.

Something that seems harder to do is what Ms. Muñoz, expressed: "women can not be ordained as pastors, and that makes me angry." Judith de la Fuente, a 19-year-old nursing assistant did not go that far, but still sees the need for change. "Let us update our liturgy", she exclaimed with a big smile. Adding that in Spain, we still worship with hymns composed centuries ago.

Ms. de la Fuente also said she likes Spanish church activities, something that arose controversy among the group because the big majority of youth activities organized by the Spanish Union are just sporty. Only one is mainly spiritual. Youth evangelism rallies have been non-existent until three years ago when ASI started to support a long evangelism campaign per year. Ms. de la Fuente was in the last one and she loved it.

Another thing made possible by the laity's initiative and hard work is AEGUAE, an Adventist university students and graduates association which has been around for 30 years. Rarely supported with funds from the Spanish Union, AEGUAE has been the only way in Spain to get the most advanced Adventist thought and intellectual reflection.

Finishing the conversation, we all agreed in one thing the film maker Muñoz said: "We need a more transparent church". After this experience, it may be good for us to create a blog, post short clips of people explaining how they imagine the church and let people comment on them. What do YOU think?

The sad insanity of Iraq

By Alexander Carpenter

This video comes from a whole series called Hometown Baghdad, created by young people in Iraq. I found this episode, One of Thousands, to be particularly revealing in the Kafkaeque sad insanity it portrays about the real world of living in an occupied Iraq. Is this objective truth? No. Is this a larger reality? I think so. But you should decide for yourself.

I think the story's most salient point centers on the resentment that the occupying troops often inadvertently spread in the discharge of their duties. By being there we undermine the very peace that we are supposed to represent. And more and more of the normal middle classes are trapped between Iraq and a harder place.

Below, I have also posted some video from one of the most straight-shooting reporters in Iraq, CNN's Michael Ware. He gets past the endless debate over whether the surge is working in some areas or not to the wider concerns of what the last six months have cost. In fact, we are now undermining the very government we created and arming para-government militias (this time Sunni --thanks Bob) -- a policy that should bring a smile to those familiar with Afghanistan, Colombia, Nicaragua, oh yeah, and Saddam Hussein during the 80s.

As Sy Hersh writes in the New Yorker: 

The Bush Administration’s reliance on clandestine operations that have not been reported to Congress and its dealings with intermediaries with questionable agendas have recalled, for some in Washington, an earlier chapter in history. Two decades ago, the Reagan Administration attempted to fund the Nicaraguan contras illegally, with the help of secret arms sales to Iran. Saudi money was involved in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal, and a few of the players back then—notably Prince Bandar and Elliott Abrams—are involved in today’s dealings.

Iran-Contra was the subject of an informal “lessons learned” discussion two years ago among veterans of the scandal. Abrams led the discussion. One conclusion was that even though the program was eventually exposed, it had been possible to execute it without telling Congress. As to what the experience taught them, in terms of future covert operations, the participants found: “One, you can’t trust our friends. Two, the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can’t trust the uniformed military, and four, it’s got to be run out of the Vice-President’s office”—a reference to Cheney’s role, the former senior intelligence official said.