More Shooting in Spanish Harlem

Update: added the photo above, you can't quite see it in the darkness and low resolution, but on the top of that car on the left were three bullet holes. You can see the police car and the streets roped off, this is from the fire escape of our apartment.

I heard some bangs the other night, and thought they were just a cars exhaust backing up or something. A little later my roommate came running in to say that there was a shooting on the street right in front of the building next to mine. I looked out the window from our sixth floor walk-up (that's right) and on the roof of a car now surrounded by police tape, you could clearly see three holes - big holes.

I couldn't believe you could see it from that high up, but there they were. There must have been other bullet holes because we heard what sounded like 5-7 shots in rapid fire.

The weird thing is that they were on the roof, so in our CSI educated world of understanding trajectory, was the shooter in a building shooting down? Or was it a tall shooter on the street who pointed his gun down through the roof?

I've lived in NYC for eleven years now, and I've never seen crime like this.

So I'm experiencing living without a lot of things we take for granted where I come from, and now that includes personal safety.

Somerset Christian College first to hear TNL

I had a great time last night with my new friends at Somerset Christian College. They had a panel discussion on art and faith issues and invited me along with Matt Milliner (millinerd) and Michael Cuozzo to be on it.

I was able for the first time to present publicly my new powerpoint for "The New Love" (TNL) - the book I am writing. The other presenters really gave me some insights and the we had a great dialog with the class.

My friend Keelan Downton is a professor of Narrative Biblical Theology there - he seems really poised to do some great work in this new position. We met this summer when I went to the National Council of Churches conference as a representative of Emergent Village. Besides his mind and basic cool nature, the thing I love about Keelan is that he did his PhD in Theology in Belfast Ireland and lived with Pete Rollins and the IKON community - serious emergent cred.

I'm going to start posting on TNL soon - I have to figure out how to do it well without giving away to much, while gaining from dialog it creates. I'm also considering starting a new blog.

Another post soon on the shooting outside my building the other night - with photo!

Howdy Mark, I love what you said....

I just have to get in on the fun...(anything to get myself to blog)...

I'm a member of the wink revolution...a fun way to poke fundie mouth Mark Driscoll while maintaining kindness, and to document historically the point at which he made himself...uhhh.... - well, when all people do is wink humorously at what you've stated with passion, it says a lot....

If you're wondering why I chose this lovely picture for my wink, it's because even though I look like a Viking warrior on the outside, really I'm just a little girl inside:)

A New Kind of Christian Forms

I have always felt that an important part of the emerging church conversation/movement is about a new kind of church which rises from a union of post-evangelicals and post-mainliners and post-other-traditions. The idea is that we all in humility discover our own weaknesses and discard them, and in a spirit of joyful discovery we uncover the strengths of the other and wholly embrace them - along with embracing one another, and in the end you have a new kind of Christian far closer to what God has been leading his people towards. (and the "post" can be just very personal and not formal, ie. you don't have to leave an organization, some might prefer calling themselves progressive or emergent)

So for a few years now, I have been on what I call my "mission to get inside the head of mainliners", to understand what makes them tick. I've talked to Tony Jones about this numerous times, including last week when he was in NYC, and together we've made some good progress in thinking it through. The fact that the emergent movement appears to be around half and half evangelical and mainline is an awesome comment on the real possibility we have to become a new kind of Christian.

So here's a post about a very specific thing I've been coming to understand - how we have understood the concept of holiness so differently - and this time it's a theologian and a Rabbi which inspires me.

I have always thought of holiness as relating to my personal behaviors...do I choose to not sin in my personal actions and choose to walk with God in prayer and bible eating?...I could entirely judge my own level of holiness by my own individual reality...I know my own heart and thoughts when I am honest with myself, and I know when I am seeking God first, or when I choose to relegate God to the background and seek my own desires first. This entire transaction takes place between me and God individually.

Anecdotally, within our evangelical subculture, we talk about, "being on fire" and "walking in the spirit" and having a lifestyle of consistent "devotions" or "quiet times". We talk about going through seasons and we comfort our own agony at not doing well by imagining we are in a season where God is not as close for his own purposes of teaching us.

It's a huge subject and a core part of evangelical culture.

But here's what I'm discovering...there is an individuality about it which is unique to this time and place in history, and when seen in a certain light, increasingly troublesome. The main insight is the total individual focus to the exclusion of all others.

What I am learning about people of other traditions is that they have simply never experienced that perspective. For them holiness is not as much a personal thing as it is a set of realities that exist amongst a community of people.

When we read Jesus rebuking the Pharisees about their use of the law and the legalism they live in, we interpret that towards ourselves individually - I should try to understand legalism as a wrong way for me to live out my faith, and instead discover what Jesus was teaching and live out that fuller truth in my personal spiritual walk.

Recently I was challenged to imagine that maybe Jesus was rebuking them not for their "personal legalism" but for the way they were using the law to control the society economically to their own advantage. They, living in community with others, were using the religious codes they all ascribed to in order to assert power over others to their own economic advantage....Wow, that's a lot different than how they were reading the book of Leviticus in their quiet times! (this insight from Walter Brueggemann's book "Prophetic Imagination")

This transition from my own claustrophobic personal individual reality to the greater reality of the community I live in is one which entirely thrills me, because it holds promise for me that maybe I won't be so alone.

Here's another recent example of a similar insight from a blog written by a Rabbi who is involved in the New Sanctuary Movement along with me (though we've never met because of geography). It caught my attention because of the title, Calling us to Holiness...my "mission to get into the head" starts asking, "So what does this person imagine holiness to be"? Please Read:

Calling us to Holiness - By Rabbi Laurie Coskey

...In my tradition we call the central passage in the book of Leviticus the Holiness Code. Because if the scroll on which we have written in Hebrew the five books of Moses is unrolled and folded right in half, Leviticus 19 is right in the middle. The passage begins, You shall be holy because I the Lord your God am holy and then it tells us how to be holy including to love our neighbor as ourselves.

The holiness code instructs us explicitly and clearly about just treatment for immigrants. We learn: "When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens, you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt, I the Lord am your God.

Recently a group of clergy leaders were meeting with ICE officials to formally request that they put an end to the raids in San Diego County. (ICE is the old Border Patrol). In the course of the conversation, an ICE officer remarked that "only history could judge" whether a path toward legal residency for 12 million immigrants currently in the country would benefit our great nation. Rev. Scott Richardson the Dean of this Cathedral respectfully replied that "we would have to answer to a voice more demanding than that of history", that God would judge each of us and our nation based on how we treated the immigrants living among us. God expects us to be holy people. The Koran, The Old and New Testaments teach us to respect the spark of the divine in every person no matter on which side of the border that spark was lit. That is the holy path and that is how we will be judged by our Creator...

...Our mission is clear, to become holy people, vessels of God and recognize the spark of the divine. Today we call for humane, effective, comprehensive, immigration reform. AND we will continue that clarion call tomorrow and the next day, because our call to holiness doesn’t begin or end with a session of the congress.

May our stories remind us that justice is not yet fulfilled! May our stories move us to justice!

(To read more - please forgive the format, I'm on a Mac and I don't know how to hyperlink this - http://blog.newsanctuarymovement.org/2007/06/04/calling-us-to-holiness--by-rabbi-laurie-coskey.aspx)

So for her, holiness is an outward obedience within society, not an inward spiritual state of the heart. One could say the outward action reflects the inward state. I think James would like this very much. It is the huge difference in viewpoint that so grabs my attention and allows me to grow and be instructed if I can see more of the other and myself through it.

Her comments on God judging the nation are very insightful to an evangelical culture who's religious broadcasters built it by over and over and over (I swear this is all I heard during my youth in Southern California) warning of God's imminent judgement on our country if we didn't fall in line with a certain limited set of socio-political-religious views. But here is a socio-political-religious view that is totally different and that we have actually opposed in our bases of power (many religious republicans are very happy to deport the very immigrants that she is so passionate to protect). Our focus on the individual nature of our faith has allowed us to hand pick a few issues that we feel passionate about religiously, and to pursue them politically, while remaining unaware of other issues in society that haven't penetrated our eccleisial understanding.

To me this is huge. But one more step on the journey remains - how will others gain from the evangelical focus on the inward - surely a part of the story...For me to really get where I'm going, I need others to gain from me and change, just as I am gaining from them and changing, then we will together walk towards an understandable and liveable balance...

Welcome to Harlem

So I was going to look at an apartment in Harlem and when I got a block away, suddently cop cars were everywhere, sirens blaring - un undercover taxi police car had it's light blazing in the windshield and screeched around a corner going the wrong way down a one way street to get to the scene faster - and two guys on the corner go, "Man, that was fast, there was a shooting like just two minutes ago and half the precinct is here already!" Then ambulances, and I get on my cell phone to call the apartment I'm going to to see if they think I can still walk down the block, then an ambulance pulls right up to me, "Hey, did you call 911"?..."no"..."okay someone on this corner did"...then they told me someone had been shot...on the street I was going to.

So, I went and saw the apartment and took it. Welcome to the new neighborhood!

Here's the funny thing...this is so stereotypical of what people would expect of Harlem, yet most New Yorkers reading this post would be surprised, because this doesn't happen as much as it used to. New York is still the safest large city in America...but of all the city, this is still an area where there is crime because the people here are poor and don't have hope for a better life.

In a way a white guy moving here so he can learn more about racial reconciliation and practice social justice by simply living amongst the oppressed and listening is a bit of a paradox, because at the same time there is a lot of resentment about gentrification - all the white people moving into the neighborhood because the rent is cheap - and displacing families in the process. So it's not like I'm going to be greeted with joy by the neighbors...the tension between the races divided is hard to relax, it comes from both sides and is complicated by many confusions and mixed messages and inabilities to see and hear the other. I'm going to live here and work with a local church plant here (non-white leadership and almost totally non-white members) just trying to learn and listen. Maybe some listening will help to better hear and see the other.

Excerpts from an email about new liturgy

SA (not South Africa) was amazing. Buenos Aires is more of a European city and I liked it very much. It was just great to get away for a longer time from NYC and be in a totally different environment. Plus all the pastors I met and befriended was wonderful.

As for your question on new liturgy...that's really the nut to be cracked. I don't think we are going to figure it out very soon. Before we started our faith community I had it all mapped out and thought it was going to be awesome, but either things didn't work, or I didn't have the people to really do them as I imagined. Then other things did work but I didn't want to go in that direction. I am now very humble and non-opinionated about what an emerging church should be.

I think the best thing is to let it bubble up organically from the people you have and the journey you're all taking as a community. I think we need to have a sense that God is doing something new in our midst, experience a sense of liberation and joy in what he is doing and then create new liturgies or modify old ones out of that bubbling over of joy, or deep sense of lament. Of course what makes it emergent is that the pastor is creating an environment where creativity can happen. Many people involved and clear and easy paths for new ideas to be tried in the gathering.

Every congregation may have a different sense of what God is doing in their midst - but then here is the difficult part...actually experiencing something that God is doing new...I'm not sure I know what that is exactly. How is it that the Spirit is breaking out in our midst in a fresh way that we can celebrate?

Is there something new, or is it just the good news that we've always had? I think the very nature of EC is that the good old gospel we've understood doesn't seem to be that good of news to so many people. It has produced what we have and caused everyone to get depressed and leave the church. It hasn't answered the deep questions and yearnings of so many and hasn't made a discernable difference within communities. So obviously the limits of our understanding of the good news are no longer tenable in this day (thus EC attempts to understand it anew with new theology). ie, we can't keep slogging along with our limited understanding and must discover whole realms of the gospel that we never knew before.

I kind of feel like the underlying theology of EC has not developed enough to support an organic bubbling up of liturgy above it - we don't quite know what the good news in our day is. And I'm wondering if the first steps forward while we wait for the theology to form are to be reaching out to those who are different from us and building relationships across broken bridges - because maybe the Lord won't show us until we stop being disobedient little un-unified brats.

My understanding of theology has turned totally towards the relational. God is trying to create communities of love that change the society around them. How can we really understand the gospel of loving communities that heal, when we are an un-unified church? The world will reject our message because it's obvious that we don't practice at home what we preach to them.

I have all sorts of ideas about the church - you know ecclesiological/praxis things about the design of the space, the flow of the gathering, etc., etc., but I don't know how those are communicated to the congregation as something to be joyful about. Maybe they are being imposed artificially upon the group?

So what is a church planter to do in the meantime? Reach out to those that are different than you and experience the healing of God's church in the big way - and then rejoice about it. Then simultaneously in the smaller local way find the deep yearning needs of your people and together ask God to heal you and then rejoice about it. (and make sure you have some creative people on hand who can encapsulate that rejoicing in liturgical forms for ongoing use).

Eras Are Within God's Sovereignty

Here's a thought. Imagine how significant, how pervasive a historical era and it's mindset are - in the modern era, whatever the mindset was, it penetrated every aspect of life - it was the air we breathed and affected everything.

Now, with what we generally believe about the sovereignty of God over the earth and all hummankind - that he has a plan for history and is unfolding it in his way and his timing; can we imagine that modernity happened outside of God's will? Of course not. So the question is, what was the wisdom and purpose of God in bringing all the forces to bear that shaped the era we call modernity?

And then of course, why is it that God has moved on from that era and started a new era? What are God's purposes in this yet to be named era? How should the church respond to what God is doing, and how can we be his wise and purposeful agent in the midst of it?

ie: pomo isn't just some new thing to be tolerated or fought against or toyingly fascinated by - it is the work of God for his as yet undiscovered purposes on this earth. I would like to join with a whole bunch of other people from every walk of life to discover together those purposes from a loving God who will answer those who seek.

LGBTQ

How are communities in our day forming? We have much to think of and learn from what is happening around us if we truly want to imagine a way forward.

Look at the LGBTQ community...lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (or questioning). They are united in one sense and different in others.

You can imagine the voices..."we're lesbian not just gay...we're not happy, we're queer...queer sounds too queer...I like everyone and don't want to be limited to one camp:)...c'mon let's all just be gay".............

So a diverse yet unified community has found a way to live together while maintaining distinctions. The name LGBTQ may be a harbinger of things to come. Maybe we'll be Methodist-baptist-postmoderns, MBP's.....

Speaking to Congress in Washington DC

I'm back in NYC, so my work with the New Sanctuary Movement continues. Yesterday we packed a bus full of families, organizers and clergy and drove to Washington DC.

We had a press conference on the steps of the Supreme Court and visited the offices of congresspeople and senators to let them hear in person the stories of these families facing the deportation of a husband and father (they're almost always men). I don't know how much we influenced and changed minds, but all the folks we talked to were very moved to see a family and realize our government was going to destroy that family by sending it's father away.

I missed most of the press conference because I had to run off to an appointment with Senator Charles Schumers office. We talked to an aide, but last month we had an appointment in person with Senator Hillary Clinton (which I missed because I was in Argentina).

After the heart rendering failure of the comprehensive immigration bill, we are hoping to get some smaller ones passed - HR1176 - the Citizen Childs Protection Act is a bill introduced by Congressman Serrano that allows judges to have a discretion they do not currently have to consider that the individual facing deportation has a family with children who are US citizens. Why should US citizen children not have the right to not have their parent deported? The best line I have heard that sums up my passion for this cause is - "family unity is a human right".

Of course, our God made the family and it is at the center of his heart - God has a son. Jesus has a Father. Jesus is our brother. The church is a family. Honor your parents. Love your wife. We must protect these vulnerable families before we hear Christ say to us on that day - "You didn't protect me from deportation and you allowed my family to break apart"...and we'll say, "but Lord, when didn't we protect you from deportation and allow your family to break apart?".....

Everyone at the Table - Events in Argentina

So before I left for Argentina, I contacted some emergent friends to see if anyone had any contacts down there so I could meet a few pastors and try to get a pulse of what was happening down there with the church. Maybe find a good place to worship while there.

So I end up with this contact who is excited about emergent and knows everyone in the church in Argentina and is so excited I'm there and just goes crazy calling everyone and arranging get togethers with me. It was absolutely amazing. It ended up becoming a working vacation - but what lovely work.

In particular, my new lifelong friend Flavio and I spent a ton of time together along with his wife and the beautiful young people of his church - Salta de Alegria (jump for joy). I havn't felt so loved and warmly received in many years. They took me to my first tango and I really fell for it (and them).

Towards the end of my trip after meeting this wide range of people and observing this tremendous hunger for something new in the church, something happened. A momentum from them all hearing about each other meeting with me and combined with some tips from my own experience of coordinating the network of emergent cohorts here in the US, and there was birthed a new progressive network for Argentina. Wow, what a privelge to be right there and see it happen.

Even though I tried to talk them out of using the word emergent, they really like the word and so decided to call themselves "emergente". They will begin to meet together like a cohort and will network with other groups like Red del Camino, another South American group associated with emergent village, but which no one there I talked to had ever heard of.

More evidence that something is happening worldwide in God's church. A new reformation is slowly springing up and God is connecting it in order to make it complete. Amahoro in Africa this May was another bellwether event that says to me - everyone is coming to the table, and when we're all there, we can hear where God wants us to go.

Argentina

I am back in NYC after a month and a half of travels - a full month in Buenos Aires! They pronounce it something like "bwo-nus eye-eee-des"

What a place. It's like the europe of South America. Heavy on the Italian and looks like Paris at times.

A group of friends talked about going there a number of years ago and it didn't work out but left me always wanting to go there, so when I realized my schedule and housing situation were aligning perfectly to allow me some free time I pulled the trip together quite quickly.

The vacation part of the trip worked perfectly, I found myself in a place far away from New York City and with a world of new sights and sounds and tastes to experience - and there was no rush, I had plenty of time.

Of course, taste was a big highlight. They are known for two things - their many cows and all the beef they provide and their lovely red wine - Malbec. That doesn't get much closer to the center of my culinary inner motivations so I was at home. The only thing missing - sauces. They're not French.

Their two most ubiquitous foods are pizza and empanadas. They are everywhere. Honestly, I don't know how they can not get sick of seeing them everywhere. But they are good. The pizza is different from ours and I like it better. Empanadas are getting a foothold here, but we have much to learn from them, for example making the bread thinner so it's not so doughy. Here is where we could quickly take them over. They only have like five types of empanadas. If someone here were to learn how to make empanadas right, and then to go crazy with all kinds of flavors, we could one up them. Our dollar is doing so bad against other countries, we must find some new place to dominate!

New Sanctuary Movement Launches

After two months of hard work, we finally launched the New Sanctuary Movement yesterday at a huge press conference at St. Paul's near Columbus Circle. It was pretty amazing. Rising up and taking a stand in society, for churches to proclaim that they are stepping right into the middle of the immigration debate and the actual environment of raids and deportations the government has created - and to insert ourselves physically between the government and the people we love and are determined to protect. We proclaim the churches of this nation as a place of sanctuary for those pursued by a system run amok.

If you know of anyone in fear of deportation, please connect me with them. If you would like for your church to consider joining us and becoming a Sanctuary Church, please write me (jkursonis@yahoo.com).

Personally the experience yesterday was unique in my life. As I said before we did a few small press conferences recently, so that gave me some good preparation - but this thing was crazy.

Cameras and reporters everywhere - and they didn't stay still, they were moving all around getting all different angles. I was one of six speakers - the others far more experienced at this and pretty big religious leaders in New York City. So I did my best to be the emergent voice and to call evangelical churches into the fray.

I think some of my friends didn't kind of believe me when I talked about this being a major national press conference - here's a partial list of who covered it:

Associated Press

New York Times

ABC News

CBS News

Reuters

CNN

Catholic News Service

Religion and Ethics Newsweekly/ Jim Lehrer Newshour

Fox News Channel Live

Telemundo

Sing Tao Daily

Fox News Channel--Weekend Live

Tucker Carlson Live

BBC World News Service

Religion News Service

Chicago Tribune

CNN Radio Network

MSNBC

Fox News

USA Today

So just turn on the TV or open a newspaper and you can read all about it.