The Pastors Brian on baptism

For the past year my family has been worshiping at Christ United Methodist Church here in Toledo. It's the church my wife and I were married in nearly 15 years ago, and it sits just a block away from our house. It's in our neighborhood and so that's where we've gone to church.

Christ UMC is shepherded by Pastor Brian Oliver. When I first showed up last year I approached him after worship and asked, "Need any help?" What pastor doesn't need help? So Pastor Brian and I have had a great time getting to know each other over the past year and we of course have had a lot of fun playing around with the fact that we're both named "Brian." It's been great to have another seminary-educated friend/colleague right here in town. To me, he's "Pastor-Brother Brian."

I've filled the pulpit a few times for him, but this past Sunday we did something new: We team-preached on the topic of baptism in our respective traditions, Methodist and Brethren (esp. the Anabaptist part). Here's the video...

"I owe you..."

(Photo by Nils Geylen via Flickr)

I've had debt on the brain lately. Our only car died last week and we had to rush out and get another, financed by a loan. We just signed papers yesterday for a home loan to finance some renovations on our old house. I look regularly at our outstanding student loans from grad school, which we've been paying on for just over a year, and will be for years and years to come.

Everywhere I look, financial debt constitutes a great bit of what we have to worry about in conducting the "business" of our household. We always attempt to be wise with our use of debt; we've never gotten in over our head, we've always been able to make payments on time, even paying a number of loans off early and aggressively. My wife and I both have jobs that pay, relative to the local economy, pretty well. Lenders in the past year have commented that our credit score is quite good; it is therefore quite easy for us to obtain loans.

That it is so easy is not simply a testament to the fact that we've played by the rules, though we indeed have. But as this provocative essay by Pamela Brown argues, the rules are surreptitiously geared to privilege well-off white folks like me. Lending and tax laws have changed over the past few decades, and combined with other socioeconomic and political shifts, consumer debt (credit card and mortgage, primarily) has disproportionately and negatively affected non-whites, particularly African Americans. Sub-prime mortgages, for instance, have not only affected poor blacks but also those solidly in the middle and upper-middle class. The impact of this racially-defined collective loss of wealth could take, by one estimate cited in the essay, take two generations to recover.

Similar to the New Jim Crow, then, a kind of "debtor's prison" has enclosed a large portion of the African American populace in the U.S., under a system that is purportedly "colorblind." That notion of colorblindness is, however, a smokescreen.

The gentle virtues of Grandpa Bud

Grandpa Bud (center), his son (left), and my family
at the WWII memorial in Washington, D.C., April 2012

On the last day of 2013, we buried my wife's grandfather, Bud Thiessen. He had been "Grandpa" to me since I married into the family nearly 15 years ago, and it was an honor to be asked by the family to officiate his funeral and graveside services.

Bud was a farmer and a truck driver. He was also a WWII veteran and proud of his service, which inspired a number of men in subsequent generations to serve in the military. He's pictured here at the right on an "Honor Flight," a program that transports WWII veterans from all over the country to the memorial on the National Mall in D.C. We were living in Virginia at the time and so were privileged to be there with him and his son, Sam, my wife's uncle. In light of all this, he could be rightly characterized as a "man's man."

So while courage and honor were two of his noble virtues, in my eulogistic reflections I wanted to also lift out what I took to be Grandpa Bud's "gentler" virtues that were crucial to his being a good man, as he indeed was. My intent for doing so was theologically rooted in the fact that virtues which might commonly be called "gentle" are precisely those that Jesus taught and exhibited himself, and the New Testament writers commend to those who would follow Christ. In naming and celebrating them in Grandpa Bud, I also encouraged those who knew him to embody these in their/our own lives. So they are...

Morality and culture change in Tama-Toledo

Heath Kellogg, Director
Tama Co. Economic Development

The saga of the closing of the Iowa Juvenile Home (IJH) here in Toledo, Iowa, continues. This week the Director of Economic Development in Tama County, Heath Kellogg, used his weekly column in the local paper to directly address our state's governor on his order to close the facility.

After opening with his characteristic folk tale, Kellogg has a few great things to say here. In his appeal to the governor, he's attempting to bypass the political and even economic dimensions of IJH's pending closure, and pushes into the realm of morality and culture, two things that I have an abiding intellectual and ministerial interest in.

The Iowa Juvenile Home: It takes a village...

Town hall meeting at South Tama High School gym; Dec. 19, 2013

Just over a week ago, it was announced by the Iowa Governor's office and the Dept. of Human Services that the Iowa Juvenile Home and Girls Training School (IJH) here in Toledo would be closing on January 16, 2014. The IJH has been a staple of the local community for nearly a century and has served over the years as a state care facility for some of Iowa's most troubled youth, coming from some of the most dysfunctional family circumstances imaginable.

The news of IJH's closing was a huge blow to the local Tama-Toledo community. In a very short period of time, concerned staff, citizens, and elected representatives sprang into action in ways that have been inspiring to me, a relative newcomer to the community. A Facebook group was created as a way to organize support to protest the facility's closing. It now has over 9,000 members. Flowing from that online effort and the amazing support it received, a town hall meeting was organized and carried out last night at the local public high school gymnasium. So my friend Travis, a local councilman, picked me up at about 6:45pm last night and we attended the nearly 2.5 hour event. I went with my camera and notepad to do a little citizen journalism...

We Are a Vulnerable Communion: Radical Democracy and Christianity

This post is part of an ongoing series on the book Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary, by Stanley Hauerwas & Rom Coles. This series is being authored by Jonathan McRay, Jonathan Swartz, & Brian Gumm. This post reflects on chapter 8, "The Politics of Gentleness: Random Thoughts for a Conversation with Jean Vanier" by Hauerwas.

If I had a canon of saints, Jean Vanier would be among them. In a confessional moment, Hauerwas might admit the same. Vanier’s writing on community, vulnerability, and brokenness has resonated deeply with me and influenced the way I think about the capability of life together. He writes simply and he writes gently. There is tenderness in the composition of his sentences. I don’t only mean the thoughts he communicates, which express grace for and within the weakness of our bodies and the fragility of life. There is also tenderness in the way his sentences are formed, the grace that is style and movement and sound.

Hauerwas is at his humblest in this chapter on Jean Vanier’s politics of gentleness, and Hauerwas is at his most honest: he worries that his polemical attempt to defend gentleness betrays Vanier and the work of L’Arche (196). For Hauerwas, gentleness is necessary for any just politics, and the world of L’Arche – communities where differently-abled people live and work together – is gentle (195). Gentleness is important for Hauerwas because it redefines power and rule through the concreteness of friendship. L’Arche fosters friendships between people with varying abilities so that diverse gifts can be recognized. Gentle friendships like those at L’Arche are cultivated by tending to the ordinary, actively caring for things nearby. These sets of practices are sustained by conviviality and cooperation, which do not erase weakness but instead welcome it.

Planting the Church of the Brethren in Toledo: A modest proposal

Photo by snowmentality (via Flickr)

This post is part of the NuDunkers conversation on church planting in the Church of the Brethren, on which we'll be hosting a live video chat this Friday, Dec. 6th, at 10am Eastern. Check out the event page on our G+ community page for more info on that.

I've been talking recently about how "seeking the peace of the farm town" has been my mantra for living and ministering in the rural communities of Tama & Toledo, Iowa, since moving here last year.

This phrase is an adaptation of the Lord's commandment in Jeremiah 29, addressed to the exiles in Babylon in the 6th century BCE. The command is to "seek the peace/welfare/shalom of the city to which I've sent you into exile." The exhortation is an echo of the creational mandate found all the way back in Genesis, to "be fruitful and multiply," and that in seeking the welfare of the pagan city (and empire) in which they found themselves, God's people would find their own welfare.

I fell in love with this text in seminary, wrote a paper on it, and posted it here a few years ago. It became a paradigm for me, helping shape my early thoughts about what my church ministry might look like after seminary. In particular, I've found the thematic metaphors of "building" and "planting" throughout both Jeremiah and Isaiah to be particularly, um, productive ones. So church planting and community peace-building have for years now been inseparable concepts in my theological reasoning, and practical mission/ministry planning. My aim has been toward forming worshipping communities with community peacebuilding teachings and practices wired in from the get-go.

Cultivation takes time and patience and risk - among other things - and planting is just one step in the cyclical process of life (and death). So when I discovered the Slow Church blog a year or two back, which takes its cues from agrarian-minded sustainability movements, I found another fruitful metaphor for church planting.

Most recently, I've written and submitted a church-planting proposal for my local community that takes cues from this "slow church" movement. As a bi-vocational minister (i.e. I have a day job that is not professional/paid "church ministry" in a congregation), I've committed to a small, open-ended, slow, patient, and discerning approach to church planting, with explicit nods toward community peacebuilding. It's been approved by the committee overseeing these things in my district and is on its way to the Northern Plains District Board for final approval at their meeting next month. I'll outline a few major points below, and embed the entire document at the end if anyone is interested in seeing how I approached this proposal...