21 January 2008 by Mandy Sayers.

Tonight we all arrived in Orlando, which gave me the additional thrill of having some of our staff meet my wonderful parents who had driven me from Stuart. Mom treated the whole thing like she was leaving me at college, saying she’d help me get “settled in” in the room before they left. Dad was low-key, despite threats to assure everyone who would listen that “he had all the attributes of a dog, save that of loyalty.”

The Welcome Address was by Dr. Trudy Kibbe Reed, President of Bethune-Cookman University. I was struck by her notion that we are all “authenticated” by someone. Who is “authenticating” our people? Gangs, materialism, media? Clearly the church should be authenticating in the name of Jesus…isn’t that part of what our baptism is about? Learning who we are in Christ and then, as a servant of the Servant, learning how we are supposed to live?

I’m excited about what tomorrow may bring.

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21 January 2008 by Mandy Sayers.

As I write this, I’m visiting my folks down in Stuart, Florida. The breeze is making palm trees wave and I’m trying to send some of this warmth northward. This afternoon, I’ll be going to Orlando to participate in a Large Church Initiative Conference called “Making a World of Difference” with other members of the Glen Mar staff. It seems appropriate that the conference starts on Martin Luther King Day.

Dr. King was a Christian, and a pastor, and a prophet, just the sort of person to be a keynote speaker at some eclectic gathering of Christians from around the country at a conference such as this. Dr. King’s life was a witness and a clarion call to the power of love, nonviolent resistance, and the power of a dream.

His “I Have a Dream” speech gets quoted a lot, and it should….but if all he had was a dream, we would not be remembering him today. He had a dream that spurred his lungs, feet and soul into action on behalf of poor people everywhere, of all races. He had a vision of justice for the oppressed that could not be consigned to sleep, some ethereal vision that disappears under the heat of “real life.” He energized a people that the world said had no reason to dream in the first place. And they took up their beds of hopelessness and despair, and they walked. They walked because they wouldn’t ride in the back of a bus anymore. They walked across bridges and in heat and rain. People came from all over to walk with them. They took a stand that was going to get them in some trouble, no matter who they were or where they came from. They did it anyway, and they did it without violence, overcoming hate with love.

I am not old enough to remember Martin Luther King, but his voice still calls to me, as a Christian in particular. It calls me to account for all the ways I crave “the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority.” (Strength to Love, 1963). It calls to me as a baptized soldier for Christ, charged with being part of God’s mighty project of love, liberation and peace in the world.

This LCI conference is in the city of the Mouse, the Disneyplex of anesthetizing happiness, where hundreds of dollars can buy you and the kids a coke and a bad hamburger, and a few rounds on a roller coaster where a tape plays “It’s a Small World After All.” Songs talk a lot about Disney being a place where every dream you dare to dream can come true. But this week, at a Methodist Church up the road from Universal Studios, a motley crew of unlikely dreamers will come together in the name of Jesus, the Word made flesh, who called folks to do more than listen to him, to do more than dream about him. He called them to take up their cross and follow him, into places where they might get into trouble, spreading healing and freedom and choices and hope.

Martin Luther King Day is a fine day for Christians to gather–may we heed the call to align our dreams with God’s liberating will, and then, let’s get to walking. After all this is a day about action in furtherance of God’s dreams.

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