Resonate

For those of you in the Greater Toronto Area and are looking for a place to discuss theology in a casual setting, you will want to check out Toronto’s Theology Pub.

Theology Pub is a monthly gathering of Christians in Toronto. We gather for fellowship and to discuss theology with a desire to grow in our love for God and obedience to him; to sharpen and encourage each other; and to pray for the city of Toronto.

It’s hosted by our friend Darryl Dash and looks like a great night out for all of you theologians out there.

Andrew Jones was laid off by Church Mission Society today.

Anyway. Its a hard thing to receive a redundancy letter, despite how nice your employer has been about it. Its like getting dumped by a girlfriend. Its a blow to your ego. It whispers insulting challenges to your accomplishments, It highlights the ‘dunce’ part of ‘redundancy’ when you say the word too many times in the same sentence.

You can support his ministry and the Jones family over on his blog.

The other day I sat down and re-read my friend Rudy Carassco’s book, Protect & Invest.  It is a book about urban and multi-ethnic outreach and he gave me a copy while I was in Pasadena a couple years ago.  I am getting ready to give away about 1000 volumes from my library and this was one that I put in a pile to be kept.  The other night I was looking for something to read and I grabbed it and it was worth the couple hours that it took to read and digest it.

Rudy is writing from his own experiences in Los Angeles, Stanford, and now at Harambee and from his own Hispanic ethnic background.  While the racial make up of Saskatoon is a lot different than Pasadena and Los Angeles, Rudy’s observations transcend geography and make sense wherever there is racial diversity.

He talks a lot about the tension that existed in his own life in reconciling coming from a Mexican family, being born in the United States, and being a Christian which all have at least some sort of competing world views.  In some ways he reminded me of the first chapter of Hans Kung’s autobiography in which he starts with a history of Switzerland because to understand Kung, you had to understand Switzerland.  While Rudy does a good job of touching on it, our culture, background, and location has a tremendous influence on our faith and it needs to be thought through and wrestled with.

At the same time he reminded me that this is no small struggle and I see that daily with clients who wrestle with how to honor traditional native culture, life learned on the reserve, and now life in urban Saskatchewan which all have different values.  For Christians on top of that there is another dynamic and tension between culture, history, location, and the Kingdom.

It’s a good book and one that if you are involved in the melting pot experiment that is the United States or Canada’s idea of multi-culturalism, it is one that you will want to read.  You can purchase it from from Lulu.com.

I have been experimenting with Yahoo! Pipes and have created mashup of the bloggers who make up Resonate.  You can subscribe to the RSS feed at feeds.feedburner.com/resonateblogs.

From his weblog

A few critics again and again make the allegation that I am – along with many of my friends – “pandering to postmodernity,” in a misguided desire to be relevant to contemporary culture. Relevance, in their minds, is a terrible temptation that seduces us away from the “ancient paths.”

I have thought and prayed about this pretty carefully, and I actually think my goal has never been to accommodate to postmodern culture – or in any way to trim the gospel to fit into postmodern tastes. Instead, my goal has been to be honest about the ways in which the Christian religion in its many forms has already over-accommodated itself to modern Western culture, and before that to medieval Western culture, and before that to ancient Greco-Roman culture. These are accommodations about which I wish some of my critics would become more concerned.

Having learned from the past, I would hope we could strive to live faithfully in the world of today – an increasingly postmodern, postcolonial, post-Industrial, post-Christendom, and otherwise post-al world. Our goal should be to live fully “in” the world – incarnationally in it, missionally sent into it … but not to be “of” it, as Jesus said.

Jason and Brooke Evans are taking a summer road trip

Along the way, we will be documenting the lives of a variety of intentional/missional Christian communities and the food they eat. Our desire is to be able to eventually compile a book with recipes and stories from the lives of these communities. We hope that this book will become a practical tool for those starting communities with stories that inspire and recipes for preparing simple, healthy, inexpensive meals for large groups.

We are also going to be doing some speaking and cooking classes along the way. These opportunities will help us off set the cost of gas and hopefully allow us the chance to connect with folks we normally would not have been able to.

Justice Kitchen
During some of our stops we will also be partnering with churches and faith communities to do what we are calling, Justice Kitchen. The basic idea of Justice Kitchen is this: You invite 10 to 20 of your best friends over for dinner. No one knows what is going to be served for dinner, not even us. When we get into town, we will shop for locally grown and sold food in order to prepare a healthy and just meal for you and your friends. During the cooking demonstration, Brooke and I will address issues such as your health, the health of your community and health for the world. We will talk about the current, global food crisis and how you eat can help change things. And we will also discuss how food and spirituality intersect. Each attendee will walk away with a full stomach, new insights, recipes and hand-outs.

Check their site out for more information and to donate.

Congrats to Andrew and Debbie Jones on the opening of The Sorting Room.

The Sorting Room is the Community Interest Company side of our social enterprise. This opening marks the launch of a dozen micro-businesses, some of them from the small islands around Orkney. We are artists and artisans who want our creativity to inspire and we want our business to help transform society around us. The Sorting Room offers Orkney’s first free WiFi zone, a small performance space, a reading area with a small arts library, printing equipment, free coffee and tea, and classes in things ranging from pottery to blogging. And you can also buy products directly from the artists who make them.

Mark Scandrette, Doug Pagitt, and Tony Jones are hitting the road and doing a church basement road show.  The information and tour dates can be found on the tour website.

Mark Scandrette, Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt and a RV in a city near you?  It could happen.  Check out Mark Scandrette’s blog for more information.

A friend of many of us in Resonate is looking for submissions for a cookbook of recipes for and from missional communities.  Check out this post for more information.