agri.church

You know who you are…

anyways, just thought it’d be helpful to pass the link to the branch podcast along. Click here or on the image to the right and you’ll be fillin your bandwidth with all kinds of audio goodness.

while your waiting for all that goodness to download come back here and share an april fools joke you’ve played… Sandy was sharing some really great ones that she plays on the music department at meal night tonight. absolutely brilliant. I wanna be inspired people!

I want to call your attention to one of the blogs in my blogroll to the left. Marlin and Sally Vis are in Palestinian Jerusalem and are doing some incredible blogging at marlinsallyvis.typepad.com. When I was growing up with my Mom in Portage, Marlin was the pastor of our church. Sally worked at the seminary up until this past December so both Chris and I know them well. Now they are serving as missionaries working with the Christian community in Palestine.

If you have some time I highly recommend reading their blog at least back to the beginning of February…

Hello to all my new SCUPE friends that come round to visit! I’ve got one more audio file to share:

click here to download plenary given by Claudia de la Cruz.

ALSO, These files are in Mpeg 4 format, so you may need iTunes or Quicktime to listen to them. If you have any questions just post a comment by clicking the link just below these words and I’ll try to help solve it.

This morning Dr. Marsh from the University of Virginia and Author of one of our texts for the class, The Beloved Community, talked about the vision articulated by MLK in the civil rights era. He helped flesh out the story and where we are today. It was helpful. We have to know our story and this is one that gets glossed over in most history classes. It get’s reduced to a petty sound bite.

Anywho… if you’d like to take a listen, click here to download [warning - this is a little over 20MB]

And then there was Sekou… After lunch, Rev. Sekou gave a message about recovering the pophetic voice in the face of oppresive empire.

I’m going to post this audio but be warned, this is like lighting a stick of dynamite. This is like chucking a live grenade in the middle of a crowded room (which is why I like it). download at your own risk!

Our class this afternoon was to get on a bus and go deliver a list of signatures to the Hotel Lobbyist people. We then marched six blocks to walk the picket line with unfairly treated hotel workers (on strike for 2.5) in front of the Congress Hotel on North Michigan Ave. You see, Illinois passed a law last year requiring Hotel workers to be given two 15 minute breaks and a half hour unpaid break on a 7+ hour day. Oh, and they need to be provided safe drinking water and a place to sit on break. The Hotel lobbyist think this is unreasonable so they have filed a lawsuit and have received an injunction against the law.

Talk about a teaching moment…

It was so enlightening to be marching in that picket line and watching the security/police officers get really nervous and start blocking the door way. And to see the renewed hope on the faces of the strikers at being noticed by the management for the first time in a long time. I’m still processing this experience… stay tuned…

This afternoon we heard from Jim Wallis.  Jim is the author of God’s Politics and close friend of Bill Wylie-Kellerman (who taught the other SCUPE class that I have taken).  You can listen to Jim’s talk by clicking here.

Is it possible that we, as the rich of the world,  can only enter the kingdom of God alongside the least of the world?  Leslie Newbigin poses this question in his book Open Secrets and it has haunted me ever since.  Most days, life simply pushes this question aside but this week the haunting has resumed…

Hey friends,

I was thinking that I’d upload a recording or two of the class lectures from the week, so that you can get a taste of what I’m experiencing.

this upload is our first lecture by Rev. Sekou.  Enjoy!

Hey folks,

I’m in Chicago for a class on urban ministry this week! It’s been a bit since I’ve been really excited about a class, so this is quite a treat despite the extra work. I didn’t get a chance to get the questions on the textperince page, so I’m going to post them here…

Feel free to post comments about the chapter below (I’d really love to hear from some of you about this chapter!).

Everyone is again invited over to our house to share a meal together. It’s going to be a soup night with a couple different kinds of soup, bread and salad. You don’t need to bring anything but yourselves and kids are more than welcome (in fact Haeli is counting on it). 6:00pm is the official start time but frankly you can come anytime after that as well (we’ll keep the soup hot!).

If you go here, you’ll find a map to our home. You can park in the Southside Vineyard parking lot and take the sidewalk to our back door.