30 January 2008 by Mandy Sayers.

The LCI conference closed with an address from Dr. Peter Storey, past President of the South African Council of Churches and former Methodist Bishop in South Africa where he was part of the church’s struggle against apartheid. I thought his talk was the best and most awful thing I’d heard in a long time. I had to wait to blog on it until I had recovered.

Have you ever just been going through your life and suddenly the Gospel hits you in the face? It was like hearing a Pauline letter. I cried right there in front of the church staff and everything. Crying in public is something I try to avoid.

He talked about the struggle in South Africa, the Church on trial on trumped up charges by the government. He described church leaders from around the world descending on a dingy country courthouse to stand with the local church representatives, an example of what the Church can do when it takes its mission seriously and stands united.

But he also talked about white South Africa during apartheid in a way that drew some disturbing and accurate parallels with America today. Instead of seeing all humanity as one community, we are quick to divide along economic, racial and social lines. We are blind to those problems we do not want to see. We live in a big bubble of privilege that comes from being a part of a rich First World powerful country. If the church is to do its job, we need to begin to see the people we don’t want to see, to come to know them and realize that they are Christ for us.

He talked about many prosperous communities being like the man born blind, whom Jesus touched twice, once and the man could see shapes, twice and he could see clearly. Perhaps the American church needs to be “touched by Jesus a second time,” he said.

It made me ashamed for the ways in which I have become complacent–my own unwillingness to see and act in the name of the Gospel. When I called Eric afterwards, I said, “I feel wretched.” He said, “Honey, that’s great! What a gift!” (Yeesh). But what he meant was, the Gospel of Jesus is supposed to knock a person off her horse from time to time in order to bear some good fruit for God.

And in the end, I think God is working at Glen Mar to make sure we are about the ministry of Christ in the world, doing Church, not playing Church. Speaking truth to power, not talking to ourselves.

I think that’s why God has given us the new facility, to do and be the Church in new and kingdom of God sorts of ways. I pray that I might be faithful to those vows made at my baptism and that my own work in ministry would bear some fruit for God.

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23 January 2008 by Mandy Sayers.

Today’s keynote was Rev. Gary Mason, a Methodist pastor, who is doing some amazing work in Ireland at the North Belfast Mission. John and Brian heard a workshop he gave and I hope they will blog here about it. He said the Church, called to be salt, often keeps that salt in a fortress, a church building, when we are called to pour salt in the street, in the community. His organization has 5 staff that work in it, and 55 staff that work in the community, promoting reconciliation and building the Kingdom of God. His work in improving the lives of folks in poverty and his restorative justice work is amazing.  I’m humbled.

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22 January 2008 by Mandy Sayers.

Workshops at the LCI conference begin! My first one was on Emergent Worship. The name sort of makes me think of those horror movies where you wait for the scary alien baby to emerge from the cocoon, pod, unsuspecting human head. It’s worship that is experiential, with a view toward experiencing the living God, which is what people long for when they come to worship. It’s intriguing stuff. It reminds me of the iconoclastic movement.

People who tend to really love emergent worship can be any age. It incorporates ancient symbols, crosses, candles, and all the senses. In our postmodern age, this is a pathway to God many find meaningful. The best way to talk about it is to send you somewhere. Check out www.emergentvillage.com or google emergent worship.

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22 January 2008 by Mandy Sayers.

First off, today started with a great song called “Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down.” We’ve got to do that for Easter or the Great 50 Days!

The keynote speaker was Rev. Gil Rendle, who knows a lot about churches and how they work. What a smart guy. He talked about organizational management in churches, and Lord help me, I liked it. Administration is, shall we say, not one of my gifts, so it’s amazing to me that looking at the data can lead to something that helps. But it does.

Highlights include his statement that churches/organizations tend to know more about who they were and where they were than where they are going. True. And all churches have to deal with an increasingly “small margin of life” (the problem of less time left over in our crazy society). He said Large Churches have found ways to address this that work. He used the analogy of pew-renters (highly committed weekly attenders) v. time share people (can only come to church 2x a month in worship, but treasure that time). Large churches work with these realities in a way that still attempts to form disciples of Jesus.

Another cool thing was the distinction between management (Are we doing things right?) and leadership (Are we doing the right things?). Thinking about our church’s structure at Glen Mar, I wonder how all that shakes out. We need both Moses and Aaron, separated but working closely together, to make the mission work.

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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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19 January 2008 by Mandy Sayers.

Greetings! Welcome to The Vine, a blog about worship and related matters–part devotional, part newsletter, hopefully a forum where we can share information, ideas and encouragement. It is a professional-meets-personal blog of sorts, since my job at Glen Mar Church in Worship and Evangelism was a plausible excuse as any to start a blog.  However, to my way of thinking, this is a group project. The name for the blog is a reference to John 15.  Jesus is the true vine, we are the branches.  If we abide in Jesus and his love, we will bear much fruit.  It also works well with Glen Mar’s cool new logo, the sprouting plant.  I do so love a good metaphor! 

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