The previous post expressed quite a bit of condemnation. And I feel justified in that, except that I also know that this is not the kind of energy that leads to anything good if positive action does not result. Let the reactions and the things that offend our sensibilities and our spirits move us toward a call. This was the message of the Dean campaign as well. A Call to Action. Many who see danger and corruption in this path the Administration has taken are also mobilizing. It is a time where the Church can proclaim a different message. (see Recovering a hijacked faith, by Jim Wallis of Sojourners at Boston.com). There are numerous Church leaders and Church bodies who are sounding concern nad beckoning their people to Jesus’ example.
I keep returning to how the Church of the Saviour has gotten it right, and have, for over 50 years, carried out amazing missions in the heart of Washington, DC, and have been helping other Churches all over our country discover some of the things they have discovered about what it means to be Church. Their Potters House mission, a coffeehouse in Adams Morgan, is a good fit for imagining a model that could expand online, and connect Church people for the purpose of finding fellowship around a sense of shared call to the mission to which Christ is calling them. The Church of the Saviour already knows that part of the Church needs to be in the halls of power, speaking the truth. That message needs to reach more people, and so be able to build a community of “Meetups”.
The Servant Leadership School they run just down the street from the Potter’s House, whose “student body” often adjounrs to the Potters’ House to continue the conversations begun in class, is co-directed by Ray McGovern, who left the CIA not too long ago, and gave Sojourners an interview this past year (Nov-Dec 2003 issue)
Sojourners introduces Ray, and their intervieww with him on the way the administration handles and mis-handled and re-shaped information about Iraq) with these words:
We first interviewed David for our August 1984 issue. He’d found while working for the CIA that some of the Reagan administration’s primary justification for the contra war against Nicaragua was, in fact, false. This discovery, and how the information he found was stifled within the agency, eventually led him both to a spiritual re-awakening and to a public challenge to the Reagan policy in The New York Times.
Ray was a CIA analyst for 27 years, but his Catholic faith and other life twists have led him to very different work. He is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an outreach and training ministry located just a few blocks west of our office. He has been outspoken for the past year about the false and faulty intelligence that’s been used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
I mention Ray to show that there are consciences like his in the Church of the Saviour whose allegiance is to Christ first, before nation, and that those values trump national interests. This is also nothing new for the Church of the Saviour. They have , from their beginnings, been known for sending forth “lobbyists” who seek not moneyed interests, but to be a voice to make known to some in the coriddors of power that someting needs attention. On one of my visits (with a youth group I brought there), one of their Mission Groups was formed to join with some people in Nicaragua (in Nicaragua) to find out first hand what was happening there, and what they found did not sqaure with the assesments and priorities of the Reagan administration.
Church of the Saviour is a bit of a Seminary themselves. They have a built-in mission on department, a “School of Christian Living” (which has been absorbed , as I can tell, into the Servant Leadership School*)
* There may well be a separate stucture existing which corresponds to their original School of Christian Living” which they constructed as a part of the original sets of “Membership expectations or Covenant” that all who wish to become a member must complete. Servant Leadership School conducts numerous worshops and ongoing classes on a wide variety of theological and spiritual formation and education issues, many around the issues of Money, Social Issues, Contemplation, Journaling, Issues of Community and Accountability, and many others.
I have often begun asking myself how some of this might be offered in an online setting, as a “place” of meeting, a source for connecting people and encouraging “meetups”, and thus raise anew all the issues about how an Online Church might look; or whether such a term is legitimate. I prefer to talk about Online Extensions or Web Extensions to Church—- and let the actual percentages of face-to-face to online balance themseleves out in an appropriate proportion. Some things may require or desire more “meetups”; some others may do a larger proportion of their group work in the world of blogs and such. The whiole notion has still yet to be done , to my knowledge, in much of an extensive way.