Ordaining Donna {A Celebration of a Friend and a Leader}

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Four years ago, when I was only ankle-deep in the digital ocean of blogs and forums, I crossed paths with a woman named Donna who insisted we meet and have coffee. We did meet,in broad daylight at a crowded coffee shop in Portland's Lloyd Center district. That first "blind date" went well, and so, we began to meet up regularly for coffee and conversation.

About that time I had been invited to be a guest at a faith conference in Seattle hosted by an outfit called Off the Map. Their roster of speakers included an intriguing couple named Ken and Deborah Loyd who were pastors of a church called The Bridge. I casually mentioned this on my blog which Donna read.

The Loyds - and The Bridge - intrigued Donna like it did me and soon she was quietly visiting the small, but rowdy church. Within a couple of months, my family had also jumped into the swirling waters of Bridge community life.

Donna and I had many more coffee dates after that. Being nearly the only women over forty in the very young Bridge church (average age is just 27)we talked often of how to find our way in a church where we found ourselves at the Older End of the spectrum.

Deborah appreciated the efforts we were making. The three of us had several coffee dates at Albina Press, one of North Portland's best coffee spots.

Ken was recruiting for cooks to help prepare and serve meals on after Sunday service. He was going downtown a lot to befriend homeless kids and travelers and often invited them to come to The Bridge. He knew that a hot meal after church would make for a more hospitable

Church Rater: Reviewing Churches to Find One that Fits

My friend Jim Henderson of Off the Map fame is very talented at critical thinking, especially when it comes to evaluating churches and their practices.  With his flair for PR and knack for mass communication, Henderson is leading the charge for a structured approach to rating churches for those pastors curious enough to know what the outsider (and insider!) really thinks about them. Introducing Church Rater: Find a Church that Fits:

Every Sunday close to 350,000 churches open their doors to the public. How do you know what you’re walking into? What will the pastor be talking about? What kind of people attend?
Church Rater lets you read what others say about the church and rate your own experience. ChurchRater lets you talk back after sitting through a sermon. Church Rater lets you...  find a church that fits.

The seed for Church Rater's birth goes back to an interesting experiment Henderson did in 2006.
He  took an atheist on a tour of ten churches around  America (including mine!) in an effort to see the evangelical world through the eyes of an outsider. That adventure resulted in a book called Jim and Casper go to Church: Frank Conversations about Faith, Churches and Well-Meaning Christians.

LIVE Broken Worship from The Bridge in Portland, Oregon

 (**note:  I intended to post this LIVE during church yesterday, but the wi-fi signal was so weak it kept dropping out. So just imagine it's still Sunday and that you are there with me!)

This morning I am blogging LIVE from my faith community, The Bridge, in the beautiful city of roses, Portland,Oregon.

Every tribe has it's own set of customs and sounds, it's dialect and vocabulary of movement, ritual and interaction. The tribe of The Bridge has a sound that is unique to who we are. It is loud, boisterous and at times, much of the time, chaotic. It is broken worship, the collective laments of a people who scarred and bleeding come busting through the gates into the hall of heaven to shout our praise from weary lungs.

(hu)Man's Search for Meaning

Drifting up and down the long shelves of neatly lined up books, I waited for that magical moment. The connection. The moment when my eyes seize upon a title and a little click pops gently in my brain and I know, I just somehow know, this is the book calling me to take home. Like a woman at the animal shelter looking for a puppy to adopt, this is what it is like for me in a bookstore.

There it was. Black-spined, slender, an unassuming book to look at with a great big, bold title that hooked me the moment I read it: Man's Search for Meaning.

A New Kind of Christianity

I am part of a network of bloggers who review books on themes of progressive Christianity. (If you are interested in becoming this kind of reviewer go to Viral Bloggers for more info)

This past month author Brian McLaren's new book, A New Kind of Christianity, was offered up for the first 50 bloggers. The copies were whisked up so fast that  Mike Morrel, who heads the Viral Blogger network, and Spencer Burke, who is The Ooze producer of it all, came up with a brilliant plan:  let's host a  one- hour phone conference with up to 90 of our bloggers who missed out on getting a review copy

.And that is why I found myself in a parking lot in front of my fave teriyaki joint at 5:30pm today to participate in this conference phone interview.

If you don't know by now, Brian is a defining voice in these times of great shifting that is happening in and around the modern church.  He has written numerous books that have resonated deeply with an increasingly  disenchanted Christ followership. This newest title, A New Kind of Christianity, is a shout-out of sorts to one of  his first books that garnered so much attention and catapulted Brian to a wide platform. It was titled, A New Kind of Christian. 

The conference call went well. There are a host of online services nowadays to help groups organize a phone conference. Once I was on the call it was clear that though I could hear the banter of Mike and Brian and Spencer, they could not hear the dozens of us who were listening on our phones. After Mike and Spencer introduced Brian and talked a bit about his book they cued us to push Star 6 to queue up if we had a question for Brian. "You'll have 30 seconds to ask your question so we can get to as many people as possible," said Mike, a guy I've emailed numerous times. It was fun to hear a voice to the digital persona. I've met Brian and Spencer before, both through the network of Off the Map.

Brian kicked off the Q and A by stating that the current shift we find ourselves in (church and faith) is being led by people who are asking questions, people who have felt stifled in their faith as if they are locked up in a box. "It's a conversation," he said.

Missing {Lost sheep and souls and the Hell Thing}

If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them wanders away, what will he do? Won’t he leave the ninety-nine others on the hills and go out to search for the one that is lost? 13 And if he finds it, I tell you the truth, he will rejoice over it more than over the ninety-nine that didn’t wander away! 14 In the same way, it is not my heavenly Father’s will that even one of these little ones should perish.

My friend Kathy Escobar who co-pastors The Refuge in the Denver,CO area, posted on her blog the bones of a message she recently preached when she was in Africa.  It resonated with the listeners there, and it is resonating with me. Here's a teaser of what she wrote:

i don’t know exactly what direction Jesus was going with this parable and i’m not one to waste a lot of time picking it apart.  but maybe Jesus was talking about the whole community of believers, the church, as the 100 sheep.  and as i thought about this more, the part that really got stirred up in me is how powerful the model of the “church of the 99″ really is. and what does the church look like from the standpoint of the 99?
we feed it. we tend to it. we worship it. we feel good about it.
from the standpoint of the 1?  maybe it looks like something that has no place for them, that can’t handle their doubts, fears, real life, shame, pain, struggles, questions.

I've been saying it for a while : Small is the new big.

Church of the ONE

My friend Kathy Escobar of Colorado, who co-pastors a small church called The Refuge, recently returned from a mission trip to Africa. She has posted an entry on her blog about some of her initial thoughts and experiences as she recovers from jet lag and processes the experience as a whole. A prolific blogger, Kathy especially hit a point home when she wrote this:

The Dying Art of PageTurning

Last week I kept a friend waiting at a coffee joint as I made my way across the city to meet her. Worried that she'd be annoyed at my lack of punctuality, I instead found her cozied up in an oversized chair sipping on a latte and reading.

Right then with that word picture you are likely imagining my friend curled up with a paperback book. Or maybe even a hardcover.  Nope. She had her Kindle on her lap and had just downloaded a sample of a book she was considering buying.

In the next two hours of our time together we talked about several books. I jotted down titles of promising books into my very cool journal with all the owls and tree art, while she tapped on her Kindle and instantly downloaded sample chapters to give herself an appetizer.

Welcome to the new world of reading and it doesn't involve a single rustling, turning page. This is the revolution of not only a lifetime, but an entire era. The internet was last year, so to speak. The digital book is today and tomorrow and the tomorrow after that.

Is it Fair to Criticize the Mega Church Model?

I don't know when it happened. There is not  specific event I can pinpoint as to when I suddenly found the notion of the so-called megachurch model absurd. But like the weather, which shifts without warning, so went my perspective, from enthusiastic member to supporter and now critic of the modern mutation of the form of church known as The Mega Church.

Why I Don't Have a Big Library

When I was a little girl and I dreamed of my future it included a big house with a big library. The kind of home library I saw on television shows. Floor to ceiling bookshelves sentried along a wall; dark, rich wood holding a collection of thousands with oversized comfy chairs and elegant reading lights that created the perfect reading lounge. Yes, a large home library to hide away from the world. This was my little girl dream.