The Search for God in The Act of Service

For Baby Boomers like me, faith development using involved study and conversation. We'd talk and talk and talk and then think about concept of considering the idea of exploring the notion of service. Not so with today's younger adults, notably those who find "old-school" religious forms wanting. Today's young adults often work out their theology through their service, that is the discover what the believe through what they do.

 Here's an example... Leadership Education at Duke University has many thought-provoking articles, including this one by Nick Street, titled "Tell David Brooks the 'Nones' are Alright": by Nick Street @ShindoStreet

David Brooks’ Feb. 3 column in The New York Times, “Building better secularists,” begins with a sleight of hand. “Over the past few years,” he writes, “there has been a sharp rise in the number of people who are atheist, agnostic or without religious affiliation. A fifth of all adults and a third of the youngest adults fit into this category.” For starters, lumping atheists and secularists into the same category as agnostics and religious “nones” — those who don’t consider themselves atheist but still check “none of the above” on religious identification surveys — makes sense only if you think that everyone who says “no thanks” to organized religion is doing so for the same reasons. And that’s just not the case. Atheists shun religion because they don’t believe in the supernatural, regardless of whether that term is used to refer to gods, ghosts, karma or witchcraft. They point to human reason rather than divine revelation as the source for moral codes of conduct. On the other hand, most of the “nones” — whose ranks are growing much faster than atheists, according to Pew Research Center surveys and who account for the lion’s share of the religiously unaffiliated — are leaving organized religion for very different reasons. They tend to describe themselves as put off by what they see as institutional religion’s rote ritual, polarizing politics and disengagement from the needs of those who are economically marginalized in their communities.

 So when Brooks argues that “secularism has to do for nonbelievers what religion does for believers — arouse the higher emotions, exalt the passions in pursuit of moral action,” he’s actually talking about the tiny fraction of nonbelievers in the religiously unaffiliated group whose numbers have sharply risen. More to the point, he’s also overlooking the fact that the “nones” are leaving organized religion precisely because, in their view, many religious institutions are no longer doing a good job of arousing those emotions or exalting that passion for moral action. In my reporting on service-oriented multifaith groups in Southern California, I’ve had a chance to see these trends playing out firsthand. “The Episcopal Church is dying,” Christian Kassoff, the founder and a co-leader of an experimental spiritual community called Thom’s, told me. “And I was screaming, ‘We need to change the church!’” Named after Thomas, the doubting disciple of Jesus, Thom’s radically reimagines what it means to be a church. For one, it has dismantled the traditional Sunday worship service. “We weren’t a choir,” said Kassoff. “We weren’t the Nicene Creed. We weren’t stale music or hymns with bad theology. We weren’t talk and not action. What we wanted was service first, worship second.” For the past three years, Kassoff and the other Thom’s members have poured that energy into the group’s monthly Laundry Love event, during which they gather at a laundromat in Huntington Beach to do laundry for the homeless and the working poor. As Kassoff put it, “For Thom’s, Laundry Love is church.”

And they are not alone. In the decade since its inception in Southern California, Laundry Love has become a nationwide movement and includes 100 participating laundromats. Many who leave theological confines do so because they feel they must seek those experiences elsewhere. This growing passion for service is apparent among many of the “nones” I’ve met recently. Some of them, like 30-year-old Abraham Booey, participate in multiple service groups in order to get an altruistic fix. “Once I got the ball rolling,” he said, “it’s kind of addicting.” Booey, who describes himself as “spiritual but not religious,” is a service junkie. He volunteers with Share-a-Meal and Monday Night Mission, organizations that help feed the homeless on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. Last year he organized Down but Not Out, a service-oriented Meetup group. “Obviously you’re doing it because you care,” he said of the motivation behind his volunteerism. “But you’re also doing it for selfish reasons. You kind of feel good about it, and when you step away from it, it’s hard to feel that way with something else.” This is exactly the kind of morally inflected emotional experience that Brooks apparently believes religiously unaffiliated young people will not easily find outside the doctrinal boundaries of organized religion. But as with Booey, many of them are leaving those theological confines because they feel they must seek those experiences elsewhere. According to a Pew survey published in September, more than 70 percent of American adults say that religion is losing its influence — and most of those surveyed believe that’s an ominous development. But the news of organized religion’s declining influence trades on the discredited idea that people who leave religious institutions become secular citizens who are no longer interested in any form of religious practice or experience — or in the expressions of compassion and altruism that most believers place at the heart of their faith.

 In fact, over the past decade, as half of all adults have switched from one religious affiliation to another and 1 in 5 has left organized religion altogether, service-oriented groups have begun to flourish. “Helping other people in a way that’s effective is very affirming, a positive emotional experience,” said Matthew Lee, a professor of sociology at the University of Akron and co-author of “The Heart of Religion: Spiritual Empowerment, Benevolence and the Experience of God’s Love.” “This is pretty close to the purpose of life itself. If an organization is effective at getting people into that flow, it’s going to grow.” Multifaith and religiously unaffiliated service groups are arguably thriving because the ritual and social priorities of many religious institutions are driving away people such as Kassoff and Booey. This trend is apparent with Monday Night Mission, which over the past two years has grown from a handful of volunteers gathering on Mondays in downtown L.A. to a regular crew of roughly 300 spread across five nights a week. Meanwhile, membership in mainline Protestant and even evangelical congregations continues to decline. Brooks believes that the “nones” who are abandoning those pews are part of a “mass secularization” movement that is morally rudderless. He is wrong on both counts.

 Nick Street is the senior writer with the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California. His writing on religion, science, sexuality, media and culture has appeared in Religion Dispatches, Global Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, the Jewish Journal and Patheos.

So, I haven't posted on this blog in forever, but hopefully that will change, starting now. 99 days till sabbatical... What will it be like to be away from my work routine for three months? In 2006 I went six months without work and it was awful--the most depressing time of my life. Granted, this will be a very different kind of experience, but still. I would like this experience to teach me something about the spiritual connections post-modern people are making. What place does spirituality have in their lives? Does the idea of God speak into their world? Could something (someone) as old-school as Jesus have a place in a post-modern spiritual journey? How will congregations like Shepherd of the Hills speak into the lives of today's young adults and "post-religious" people? Let the conversation begin!

I think this post is quite profound, and hope you read it. http://sojo.net/blogs/2014/02/14/marked-ashes-and-bearing-cross

My son, Erik, wrote this piece in memory of my mom, Mickey Peterson. I think he captured his Gramma Mickey perfectly. http://beholdthesky.blogspot.com/2014/01/mickey.html

Before Vision

I've spent a lot of time over the last twenty-five years reading, writing and speaking about change. I have led a great deal of intentional, planned change, and I have found myself carried along by a river of change that looks nothing like “planned.” Healthy change begins before a vision; healthy change begins with a desire for a vision. When an individual or an organization begins to wonder what a new reality might look like, the possibility of healthy change is born. Oftentimes, healthy change begins with what someone has called “a holy discontent with the way things are.” That sense of holy discontent pushes a person or an organization to wonder what might be. When people begin that wondering, they open themselves to the possibility that God has something in mind for them beyond what they already know. The very idea that there’s something beyond what we know is challenging for many people. In the time of the great explorers, the motto of Spain was “non plus ultra,” no more beyond. But once the exploration took hold, the King had the motto changed—“plus ultra,” more beyond. That change of understanding set the stage for an entirely new way of seeing the future. For an individual or an organization, believing that there is more beyond is the first step in turning the holy discontent into something positive. From there, it’s possible to begin the process of discerning what the new vision will be. The discernment of vision takes many forms, and will depend on the personality of the individual or the organization. Some are methodical and linear, while others are serendipitous, unstructured and curious. While the development of vision is not tied to a style, it is connected to the desire to imagine the plus ultra and to be willing to commit time and energy to its discovery. Beyond that, inspiration may come slowly, like a light spring rain, or in a rush, like a summer thunderstorm. For Christians, for churches and other ministries, discernment also means trusting that in the middle of the process God will be active and will lead the searchers through the difficult middle time to something powerful and good. For the faithful, it is God who reveals and calls one to the plus ultra. Individuals come to their plus ultra often through personal difficulty and struggle, and sometimes the holy discontent causes one to reimagine the form or content of one’s life. It is an unpleasant lesson that few of our important discoveries happen while life is problem-free. But when the holy discontent can give way to the plus ultra, a person can begin to have hope for meaningful, healthy change. Some persons get are unable to see for themselves what others around them can see, and are then unable to grasp that there could be a plus ultra in their own lives. For the ones who care for these people, it is important to know that until a person is willing to wonder for him or her self what might be, it isn’t possible to effect change on their behalf. The caregiver can’t be more invested in changing that person than the person is personally, for to do so will only invite heartache, frustration and disappointment. For organizations, one common roadblock is the disconnect between those who have a holy discontent and those who are perfectly content with non plus ultra. Often, those who are in leadership positions are there because they are motivated for change, and this can lead to frustration when the rank and file don’t share their passion for what might be. A key for removing the disconnect can be to share the plus ultra more often and with more variety, so that others might begin to wonder what might be. Sometimes it could mean taking more time to listen to understand what keeps people from imagining the possibility of a new future. Occasionally, leaders must simply understand that they are simply at such a different stage in the visioning process that they will need to slow down and wait a bit while others catch up. For most of us who embrace change, this is very difficult. Once an organization recognizes its holy discontent with the way things are, begins to wonder what might be and imagines that there is plus ultra, more beyond, then the work of discerning a new vision can begin.

In some of the work I have been doing recently, I have had occasion to reflect on how much of who I am, or for that matter who any one of us is, comes from our family of origin. First, there are the physical attributes. I have my dad’s coloring, my mom’s nose and ears (thanks a lot, mom!), my dad’s eyes, and so on. I am taller than both of my parents, so who knows… But there’s so much more than physicality. Our attitudes, our mores, our perspective on the world, our likes and dislikes are all fueled by our family experiences. Sometimes we emulate what we grew up—“Our family always votes Republican,” sometimes we move away from it—“I’m the only card-carrying Democrat in our family,” and sometime we reject the whole concept—“I never vote.” How any one of us develops is strongly influenced by those family belief systems in one of those three ways, from our attitudes about money, to food, or to conflict. While some of these things can be negative, many of these attributes are very positive parts of one’s life. A sense of responsibility, generosity, love of art, books, music, sports, and faith are often nurtured in our family settings. All of us have attributes from our families for which we are grateful and which we hope to pass on to future generations. The first Sunday in November is All Saints’ Sunday, a day when we look back to remember the saints among us who have passed away in the last year. But it is also a day for a much larger remembrance; we remember all the saints, our Christian “family of origin,” and celebrate how much of who we are has come to us from them. We use words in worship today that have been used by our Christian family for 2000 years. We have been taught to pray, to sing and taught to study the scriptures by our forebears, as well as how to be generous to those in need. Our faithful family of origin taught us to be gracious and merciful, to stand up for the marginalized, and to see Jesus in the face of our neighbor. All of these “traits” have been passed down from generation to generation just like those physical characteristics from our biological families, handed from faithful fathers and mothers to faithful daughters and sons, until they came to us. In their brokenness and frailty the people of God have continued to be the hands of God in the world to this day. So it is for you and me, in all of our imperfection, to carry on what we have been given, to share the love of Christ with the next generations, and take our place in the family tree of faith.

I have been thinking about my dad recently. He died October 7, 1999, so it will be 14 years this coming week. Dad, I want to say thanks for a few things. I hope I said these things sometime when you were still here, but I’m sure I never said it all at one time. You had a couple of passions that rose above all others: hockey and jazz. And as I go through this season in my life I am a little surprised at how both of these things you taught me to love have come back into the center of my life. Thanks for giving me a love for jazz, for teaching me how to listen for those unusual harmonies and appreciate their complexity, for loving syncopation, and for teaching me to clap on two and four (which is against many Lutherans’ DNA). Thank you for making Mulligan, Desmond, and Brubeck household words. I am drawn to listen to them regularly these days. What interests me these days is that the sounds of their kinds of jazz feel like home for me in a season where notions of home a bit fleeting and untethered. I am drawn to Mulligan’s rich, full bari tones and his groove, to his melodies and his artistry. While it’s true that his music has always been part of my life, it is a grounding thing for me these days. You gave that to me and I am thankful. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in conversations about your other passion, too. I have been able to meet so many interesting people and have great conversations because of hockey. Memories of nights spent watching the North Stars or the Fighting Saints make me smile every time they come to mind and to watch that little kid skate out to center ice at the X and plant the flag for the State of Hockey chokes me up whenever I see it. Go Wild! And I will always bleed Maroon and Gold. Anyway, these are loves that you gave to me because they were things you loved, and I love them still. Thanks, Dad, for all the gifts you gave me. I still miss you. Kyle Peterson 1931-1999