Suburban Church Parking Lots vs. Peak Oil

by Andrew Stephens-Rennie

You know, it used to be that being on the outside of town was not such a desirable place to be. That’s where we used to cast lepers. That’s the place where society cast those who were considered to be of little worth, those who were considered ‘impure’. And in old Jerusalem, that place was a burning rubbish dump, a place called Gehenna, not terribly far outside the south wall.

Loosely translated, Gehenna means “suburb.”

Well not quite, but…In Judaism, Gehenna was a real place. It was metaphorically linked to the underworld, and not without reason. A place of loneliness, despair and destruction. A place of punishment where the bodies of the dead were burned. Not a spiritualized place. A real, live, burning garbage heap. And it’s from this real-life place that our more modern understandings of hell are derived.

Church + Walkability + Neighbourhood Life (Part 1)

by Andrew Stephens-Rennie

In a previous post, I began to track the growing discussion around the impacts of current economic fragility on the future of the church. I quoted comments from Chris Marshall, Jason Evans and Alan Roxburgh, while also mentioning an exceptional post from Jordon Cooper.

Something that just popped up on my radar this morning, however, was a reflection from Malcolm Irwin over on the Just Comment blog:

The loopier, newer, and more scandalous thinking only starts to emerge when we honestly look at the potential impact of commuting less on our commuter-centric churches and the commuter-centric dispensaries of our social services.

What if people cannot get to church? What if people cannot make it to our centralized sites of professionalized help? What if we got to a point where we only went where we could walk? What could that mean for how we practice church?

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.

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

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.”

Shine A Light

by Andrew Stephens-Rennie

As Ericka and I prepare to move to Ottawa next week, my mind is drawn towards the projects that lay before me this fall. Working alongside and for the church is going to be, I think, a great challenge.

I love the church so much, get frustrated with her so easily, and want to strive to see her in better health and in better spirits. Not only for her own sake, but for the sake of the world around me, the world around us.

The church is supposed to be a place where others can see evidence of God’s enduring promises. The church is supposed to be a place to which people are drawn because of the wisdom she has, a wisdom she has received from God.

Sustainable Ministry

by Andrew Stephens-Rennie

What does sustainable ministry even look like? After a year of parish ministry, I’m still struggling to figure that out.

Every time I turn around, I see ministry staff scrambling like the coworkers I left behind with my corporate job. Every time I turn around, I hear someone huffing and puffing about things that need to be done yesterday, stepping all over those alongside whom they are supposed to be ministering.

Where has holy communion gone? Where is sabbath? Where the time for reflection, meditation, and responsive, considered action? Why the capitulation to business models of governance that require us to be more productive, that require us to do more? Why the focus on doing, and the ignorance of the importance of being?

Where is the wisdom of spiritual direction? Where the wisdom of nuns and monks who realise the importance of setting time - in fact, setting aside one’s life - for the joy of being in the presence of God?

Prophetic Preaching & The Church

by Andrew Stephens-Rennie

Over the past couple of weeks, my thoughts have turned to Jeremiah 32. I’ve been auditing a class over at Knox College entitled “Prophetic Preaching,” taught by visiting homiletics professor, David Schnasa Jacobsen.

It’s been an incredible course filled with a number of challenging books that help to balance prophetic preaching with the need to maintain a pastoral presence while reflecting on and preaching from some pretty difficult texts.

Texts that call us to account, that tell it like it is: we have not loved God with our whole hearts, we have not loved our neighbours as ourselves, and we surely need to repent.

Jesus for President

by Andrew Stephens-Rennie

Welcome to all those visiting from Zack Exley’s blog or article over at the Huffington Post. We hope you’ve had a chance to scout out the Litany of Resistance, to poke around at some of the other resources, and to scan through some of the recent blog posts from Brian Walsh and other contributors to this site.

Those of you not arriving by way of Zack’s Revolution in Jesusland blog should probably go check out his first in a series of articles on Shane Claiborne and the upcoming Jesus for President tour. Zack notes:

In Jesus for President, Shane and Chris unambiguously take aim at capitalism and empire; and they are much more explicit that Jesus calls upon his followers to actively resist systems and structures of oppression in ways that will ultimately put you in danger.