There’s No Place Like Home

The following is an excerpt from an essay written by Brian Walsh and Steven Bouma-Prediger, originally published in the 2008 edition of Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought. The essay is an adaptation of a chapter from their forthcoming book, Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement. The book will be released by Eerdmans at the end of May.

If you ever met them, you wouldn’t think that Kenneth and Kenny share much more than their names. But even their names are different. No one would ever call Kenneth “Kenny” and “Kenneth” doesn’t even appear on Kenny’s birth certificate. No, Kenny was Kenny from the beginning.

The Church As We Know It

by Andrew Stephens-Rennie

Now this is interesting. Or at least I think it is. In the past couple of weeks, there have been a flurry of blogs discussing the church’s response to a fragile economy. These bloggers are (thankfully) digging into these rather deep issues that will unquestionably impact the shape, societal role, and mission of the church in years to come.

My friend Dave, an inestimable theorist of inevitable urban apocalypse, and I have been talking about these things on an ongoing basis for months now, which is one of the reasons why it caught my attention to see these conversations bubbling to the surface elsewhere. Back on April 23, Chris Marshall posted:

Recession seems inevitable, will it go way beyond that? A nation already ruled by fear and over-spending with no margins by individuals and the government, what will be the consequences? How will this impact churches and mortgages and credit lines that can’t be fed?

No Impact Empire

by Andrew Stephens-Rennie

Following up on Brian’s post on Gratitude and Empire, I want to point to a couple of interesting thoughts from Colin Beavan (aka No Impact Man) on Gratitude and Consumption. While Beavan claims no religious affiliation, the posts throughout his No Impact experiment have often gravitated towards the spiritual.

It’s good to see the coincidence of the material and the spiritual in his thought - it seems a much more coherent way to argue for treading lightly on the planet than a more reductionist, anthropocentric view. Here are some thoughts from his recent post, Living in Gratitude instead of Desire:

This could be totally wrong, but I’m guessing that the decline of religious life in our culture has brought with it a decline in gratitude. Not that I am laying some sort of a religious trip on everyone—I am the first to cop to not maintaining an attitude of thankfulness.

But I do feel as though we (and I include me) have come to worship desire. Here in the United States, I sometimes despair that our state religion is consumption and our main prayer is for more.

Gratitude and Empire

by Brian Walsh

I love thank you notes. And I know that I don’t write enough of them. But I love getting them and on those occasions when I write one, or when I send an email to someone to say thanks for something, I love that too. Now I know, some of those Hallmark thank you cards are pure sap, pure sentimentality. But even those cards mean something to me. Sometimes it really is “the thought that counts.”

In the last few months I’ve got more than my fair share of thank you cards and notes. Sometimes it is a card in our box at church from someone who simply wants to say thanks to Sylvia and I for picking up on a lot of the preaching while our church is without a pastor.

Sometimes it is an email out of the blue from someone who has appreciated something that I have written (sometimes on this website!). But most often these thank-you notes come from folks in the incredible community of people that I get to hang out with as a campus pastor at the University of Toronto.

I Think We’re the Orphans

by Erika Kivik

I was recently telling a roommate over breakfast that I often experience guilt over ‘never doing anything as well as I could.’

In fact, it seems that a sort of ‘performance anxiety’ follows gen Y-ers around, whether we like it or not. (Actually, I think most of us feel more comfortable with some anxiety. If you don’t agree, imagine a truly anxiety-free state of being for moment: …pretty stressful, isn’t it?)

…Later, washing the dishes, I began to muse: perhaps gen Y-ers are more likely to feel anxious today because it is no longer culturally acceptable to submit to authority?

A Letter From New York

by Sue Erickson

Five months ago, I moved from Toronto to live in New York. I work for a church called Origins Church New York, a two-year-old community in Manhattan. It’s the only church I’ve ever worked for, and I love it; it is home.

I was educated as an engineer, but an intense longing for something made me leave engineering. I left, and went…nowhere. I knew I was not an engineer; I knew there was something else I could or wanted to or needed to be; and that was the end of my knowledge.

The blind, grasping feeling for something I knew was there but couldn’t see or take hold of or touch was so frustrating! So, at the advice of a friend, I started to see a spiritual director in the hope that we could search together for my vocation.

Something About Context

by Andrew Stephens-Rennie

Moving from the economic to the political centre of Canada has me asking some questions about how to get on remixing things in a slightly different context. Ottawa isn’t really worlds apart from Toronto (tho any federal bureaucrat working outside of the Ottawa bubble might disagree), and yet there is a different flavour to this town.

It’s a more car-oriented city. It’s harder to recycle. There’s no such thing as a green-bin to easily dispose of our organic waste. And living in an apartment, there’s nowhere to compost. At the same time, there are more green spaces, a lot of great trails for walking and biking, and the air is so much more clean.

Where on earth will we shop without our regular local-organic farmer’s market? There’s got to be something like that here, right? There are other questions, too, about how to contextualise the gospel in our particular west-end neighbourhood, what parts of this culture we accept, and what parts we push back on. And these are questions I suppose we should always be asking

Hurt, Love and Empire

by Brian Walsh

During the buildup to the war in Iraq I wrote an op-ed piece for a campus ministry newsletter that the editor refused to publish. Essentially I argued that empires are always deceitful and the American empire was no exception.

When the President of the United States uses phrases like “Operation Infinite Justice,” “Shock and Awe,” and “Enduring Freedom,” Christians should recognize the arrogant deceit involved.

Or when he confidently proclaims that “the liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to the world” the imperial overtones should be clear to all of us, and Christians should recoil at such blasphemy.

Romans Disarmed :: Tickets Now Available

Tickets for our upcoming Romans Disarmed Salon Discussion featuring Marva Dawn and Sylvia Keesmaat are now available for $12 through Crux Books in Toronto. Drop by or give them a call to reserve yours today:

Crux Books
5 Hoskin Avenue
Toronto Ontario
416.599.2749

Exhaustion and the Built Environment

by Andrew Stephens-Rennie

A few days ago on the Slow Home blog, John Brown posted the following quotation from Dolores Hayden:

It is much more common to complain about time or money than to fume about urban design. In part this is because we think our miseries as being caused by personal problems rather than social problems Americans often say, ‘There aren’t enough hours in the day’, rather than, ‘I’m frantic because the distance between my home and my workplace is too great’.

Hayden, who is a Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies at Yale University first wrote these words in her 1984 book, “Redesigning The American Dream, The Future of Housing, Work and Family Life.”