Youth Offering: Week 3 Buffy Group

Buffy Week 3 (for teens and their adults):

Worship for July 19, 2020: "Wheat and Weeds"

Youth Offering: Buffy Group Week 2

Season 1, Episode 2:

Resources Thru July 19

Spirit Stories Subscription Boxes

I’ve aimed to create “lessons,” which is to say: a story and activity you can do with your children at home or in a classroom. Each lesson is designed around a Bible story, includes a modern picture book story which can help explain and elevate the moral themes of the Bible story, and a craft that also explores the theme.

These are designed to be useful: many correlate to particular times of year– not just religious holidays, but cultural moments like “Black History Month” and LGBTQ+ Pride.

They are designed to be inclusive: Most lessons do not require children to be able to read, though their experience is often elevated when they are literate. The books are also chosen with care to include a diversity of characters and protagonists, authors and illustrators.

The crafts are also designed to be accessible for children who aren’t yet masterful artists (and for teachers and parents that may not be, either!).

The lessons are progressive. I aim to use inclusive language that does not shame or degrade your child’s identity. I do not use gendered language for God (I don’t call God “He.”). While some of the materials and books do use such language, I encourage you to replace “he” with other pronouns to expand your child’s understanding of divinity and the inherent worth of gender.

The lessons are also progressive in their theology. Bible stories are weird. I do not intend to “fix” texts that are uncomfortable, nor do I aim to tell anyone “how” to think about God. I try to approach these stories with a scholarly background, a firsthand experience of many holy land sites, a respect for the text and its authors and subjects, and an open way of understanding these stories.

STORY
The picture books that correlate with each lesson are not necessarily “biblical.” We don’t live in a world of burning bushes and temples and our biblical figures didn’t live in a world with cars or the internet. The picture books lift up biblical themes in ways that I hope can help young people think about Bible stories differently– in ways that lift them out of the dust and sand they seem to live in within our imaginations.

I want there to be room for differences in the ways we understand God and experience God’s presence, not to dictate anyone’s understanding. I hope that the lessons, stories, and crafts can help you and your child/ren explore God’s presence and role in your lives.

SNACK AND/OR CRAFT
Each lesson has a craft designed to help your children enjoy learning about the material, engage different skill sets and media to engage various learning processes, and create something to remind them of their own divine spark. Many lessons involve cooking something that corresponds with the Bible lesson. If there is no cooking/kitchen component in the lesson, there is a suggested affordable snack (usually water and matzah). If the lesson doesn’t include kitchen craft, it will include artistic crafts. These vary slightly in their complexity and cost, but are designed to be affordable, easy, and fun. We know not everyone can afford a $25-per-child curated craft each week. Most of my supplies are from the dollar store or a closet.



SERVICES
FULL YEAR DELIVERY
Our most economical and environmentally-friendly option. All materials for a calendar year of weekly lessons included in a single delivery. Craft and recipe materials not included.

CHOOSE A SINGLE LESSON
Choose one of our featured lessons.

MONTHLY DELIVERY
Our most popular plan. Monthly deliveries with a lesson for each Sunday (or whatever day you use). Lessons are shipped the month prior to their intended use to allow time to purchase supplies and materials.

CHOOSE A SINGLE MONTH
Order one month (4 lessons) from our selections available.

USES

FAMILY EVENING @ HOME
If you are looking for a progressive home supplement to your church experience or wish to explore Christian scripture from a progressive lens with your children at home, our subscription boxes may be a great solution for your family.


CHURCH SCHOOL
Does your Sunday School classroom span a variety of ages? Is it hard to find projects and lessons that work well for diverse ages and families? Our lesson plans are designed to be accessible to grades K-5, but enjoyable for the adults, too. We take care to use materials that represent a variety of people in a variety of roles while being faithful to sacred stories.

Sunday Worship Playlist: July 12, 2020-- Still Here

Sunday School Lesson for July 12, 2020

Following is a lesson for this coming Sunday. Please look it over so you can make any preparations or purchases necessary.

Sunday School Lesson for July 12, 2020  Download

Youth Offering: Buffy Group

For adolescents and high school kids, I recommend watching Buffy and using these videos to talk about it:



Season 1, Episode 1:

Interconnection

This sense of God as inherent in all things, yet greater, is articulated in a diversity of ways within with Christian tradition and beyond it. While biblical texts can offer windows into this all-pervasive God, more recent theologians have articulated relation in more explicit ways. Alfred North Whitehead developed a cosmological system in which he insisted that all of life was intrinsically connected. This relatedness “...means that the value an actual occasion achieves is not merely for itself, but contributes to the value for others in the future, and for God.”(1) Each atom in our bodies is connected to every other atom in the universe in a way that requires us to consider what that means. If God is, indeed, inherent in every element of the universe, my kindness, love, and compassion must extend to all of God in a way that asks me to heighten my awareness of my actions and in a way that highlights the absolute importance of my life in my unique manifestation as a conscious, moral being. For economically privileged members of the Global North, like myself, this means curbing consumption, most specifically of products which serve to enslave and degrade our planet and the lives in the Global South.

As a first-person Whiteheadian, I see each of us as what Whitehead might call “actual occasions.” To illustrate, if we can imagine the two halfs of a Venn Diagram as actual occasions, God is the relational newness, growth, and transformation that happens when each of us “prehends” the other-- the space shared by two circles-- we absorb parts of each other and are forever different and more individually diverse and creative than we were before our encounter. This encounter with the tangible fecundity of life is the space in which the grandeur of God becomes real-- where the veil becomes thin. These moments of encounter in which we delve immersively into the world with the conscious intent of seeking God, elicit the emotional responses that convey a sense of transcendence. The gift of Process Theology allows me to glimpse a God that loves the most menial and intimate spaces of life, yet is also articulated by propensity for creative potential and transformation. The God with the unspeakable YHVH name beyond our comprehension is also the God that forms life out of mud in one of the foundational stories of our faith.

True Relationship-oriented faith must seek deep community engagement, but must also be aware of the ripple effects of our most mundane and seemingly meaningless actions on our distant brothers and sisters. It must engage our histories with our current world, helping us to understand how our theologies and church structures have engaged in the damage and good that make up our current world.

1) Dr. Donna Bowman and Dr. Jay McDaniel, eds., Handbook of Process Theology (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2006), 151.

Undoing Duality

I believe that our binaristic western categories sit squarely in many of our blind spots. Much of our world seems to be divided into (supposedly) disparate categories: male and female, spirit and flesh, revelation and creation, saved and unsaved, white and black, citizen and immigrant, human and nonhuman, among others. More often than not, one category is decidedly preferable, despite the reality that many biblical and spiritual sources will suggest differently. These places also often sit in our blind spots. While trees, people who look different than us, and dogs may be part of our everyday lives, we may seldom consider what it is like to exist as something else. As Whitehead suggests, “In some measure or other, progress is always a transcendence of what is obvious.”(1) Progress requires creative imagination and recognition of our interconnectedness.

In Trans-Gendered: Theology, Ministry, and Communities of Faith, Justin Tanis highlights how Jesus' ministry and the Jewish tradition ask people to seek new and complex ways of viewing the world and scripture, to "tease out all... possible meanings so... [we have] the richest available knowledge of how God spoke, and speaks..."(2) Tanis suggests that, similarly, transgendered ways of being similarly call on all of us to look more deeply and consider the complexities of this world from outside the boxes of binaristic thinking. Not only does this ask us to open ourselves to new ways of being and thinking about gender, but it asks us to consider the ways that we limit our own thinking based on our societally-ingrained presuppositions about gender and what it means in our lives and world. Unraveling this binary allows us to see how we are not only arbitrarily defined by our sex organs, but by our species.

Laurel Schneider suggests that we need to move into "promiscuous incarnation," understanding God as unbound to a particular kind of body.(3) If God is not limited by these binaries, why should humanity, created in God’s image? The Church has suggested that God became flesh in one particular time, place, and body. Many churches still hold that those particularities are meaningful. Schneider offers a counterpoint: that this need to specify God's particularity reflects human tendencies and, furthermore, serves to reinforce claims of exclusivity and power. The Jesus of the Gospels is extravagant and promiscuous in whom he chooses to love, implying that God is likewise as promiscuous. The particularity of Jesus' body, then, at least as far as moral implications that can be derived from it, must be liberated. We must understand God as incarnate in all kinds of bodies in order to approach the kind of love that God truly conveys. This must, perhaps queerly, reach other animal and non-animal expressions of God.

If I see God as woven throughout and within creation, God loves as intensely and closely as is possible. Perhaps a panentheistic God can queerly return us to embodied intimacy with God that happens at a physical level, that thrives on physical contact with diversity. If we take this to heart, we can open to ours to how God is present in everything and to reading our scripture with fresh minds.

1) Alfred N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 9.

2) Justin Tanis, Trans-Gendered: Theology, Ministry, and Communities of Faith (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Pr, 2003), 177.

3) Laurel Schneider, “Promiscuous Incarnation” in The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires, and Sexuality in Christianity, ed. Margaret D. Kamitsuka (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010).

Sunday Worship

Context: You Are Here

As a United States citizen with white skin, I almost inevitably fall into the “haves” of global society. The average American consumes at such a rate that it would take four Earths to sustain us if everyone on the planet lived as we did.*  We can take this to mean that Americans’ global footprint is at least (on average) four times larger than it should be. In a post-election world, as I listen to “alt-right” personalities praise the legacy of the Western, Christian, Anglo-Saxon world, it seems clear to me that this praise is tied to a level of consumption.**  Our generations face a unique challenge in the history of the world because of this history of conquering and colonizing, as Richard Spencer might put it in an oddly positive way.***   Our planet is warming due, in large part, to the rampant consumerism of the Global North. This consumerism has plundered the earth; it threatens its peoples-- most especially impoverished communities of color who have continually fallen victim to racist and colonialist systems of oppression and whose own lifestyles do not have near the degree of impact as members of “Western Society;” it threatens the wellbeing of our planet and the species which inhabit it, including humans.

Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, predicts that the conditions for societal collapse will collide within the next few decades, resulting in what he expects will be a “future of significantly lower living standards, chronically higher risks, and the undermining of what we now consider some of our key values.”**** He goes on to suggest that the future is ours to determine; whether we resolve this crisis “in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice…”+ 

As a white American Protestant living in this time, I and other members of institutions of privilege and power must confront our role in developing the morality of a nation whose legacy includes slavery, colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, economic inequality, and systemic oppression and discrimination. We must also celebrate the prophetic legacy of our faith. In continuing the work of prophetic witness and justice, we must embark on the task of addressing the intersections of these issues of justice with our treatment of the Earth. We must begin the work of transformative eco justice.

Christianity has a long history of being co-opted by power structures. As early as Constantine, the violence of the cross, directed at Jesus, seemed to sanction further aggression, oddly enough, on his behalf. After a dream that led Constantine to believe that God approved of his military ambitions, he combined the symbol of the cross with his imperial advances and used the cross to conquer land and people. This dangerous coupling of Christianity with conquest would continue for hundreds of years via churches and governments. Most of our modern minds know that the violence of the Roman Empire and the countless other eruptions of violence supported and instigated by Christian religious institutions were tragic abuses of power that resulted in lives lost and ruined. Today Christianity’s entanglements with our systems is less overt.

Max Weber famously connected The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in his book titled such. As he draws from Puritans and early Americans, he elucidates ways in which our religious worldviews shape our interaction with the world. Indeed, for many, the lines between Christianity and capitalism are blurry. While Weber is somewhat reluctant to definitively ascribe capitalism’s success in America to Protestant ideals-- after all, society is complex and multilayered-- his study asks us those of us living in today’s world to flip that table and ask, “How might Christianity resist these systems we have built in order to reach a more just future that protects our planet and slows its warming?”

The American capitalist economy exists in ways which prize individuality over community in ways that I see at odds with Christianity. The for-profit model of capitalism, which measures success via profit and economic growth, cares little for what it deems external. By considering only the desires of the for-profit business and the individual consumer, communities and the environment are subjected to whatever repercussions result from the transaction. In order to maximize profit, companies increasingly outsource labor and supplies in an effort to avoid regulation set in place to protect human, animal, and plant communities (such as labor standards, environmental protections, and taxation designed to support government systems that take care of our communities). This has repercussions for people around the world, especially as our economies become increasingly global. Companies pollute and use irresponsible quantities of resources because it is most economical to do so.

One of the fundamental shifts that must be made is toward a less individualistic faith that does not prioritize personal consumerist desires over the direct and indirect repercussions on the many. American individualism presents a barrier to an ecological worldview. As long as our primary ways of understanding ourselves are as individuals, not members of various communities, we will lack a perspective capable of understanding the gravity of our lives. The core of Christianity can no longer be imagined solely as a personal relationship between oneself and the Divine/God/Jesus. While there are many good things that can come of this individualistic relationship, such a theological directionality lacks scope and leaves ambiguous our relationships with other bodies, perhaps especially nonhuman bodies.

There is a temptation among white, Protestant Americans (although certainly others as well) to buy into the myth of individualism that leads people think of success as a personal achievement and our jobs and lives as siloed. I worry that this perspective disrespects and disregards the many lives that have helped us along the way, but furthermore fails to see the myriad of possible actions and outcomes before us that exist in those interrelationships we sometimes fail to think about. Part of uncovering these connections is undoing the binaristic paradigms that constitute much of western thought.

* “How Many Earths Do We Need?”  BBC News.  Last modified June 16, 2015, accessed December 10, 2016.  http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33133712
**As well as a fundamentally dishonest and/or ignorant understanding of history, although that is not the topic of this paper.
***Richard Spencer interview with Al Jazeera.  Last modified December 9, 2016, accessed December 15, 2016. https://youtu.be/ni_6sISHnqQ
****Rasmussen quoting Diamond in: Larry L. Rasmussen, Earth-Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 326.
+ Ibid. 327

Resources Thru July 5

Ecotheology: Improvisation on a Theme

"Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development."— Alfred North Whitehead

I once heard it said in an undergraduate classroom that “the Bible is true and some of it happened.” I loved the quote immediately; it articulated a truth that many of us identifying as progressive Christians understand: that the Bible is moving, powerful, and meaningful and speaks truth to our souls, but it is not (entirely) a document whose purpose is to historically and particularly document events as they literally happened. The continuing challenge of religious communities is not to retell the stories of our faith with precision accuracy so as to recount them factually, but to improvise on a familiar melody in order to bring a message alive in a new way. The most talented of musicians know their instrument well enough to play and tinker in a way that does not become cacophonous, dissonant noise, but can communicate a melody uniquely for its moment.

This particular moment in history requires something new from us. As our planet warms, Christianity must learn to improvise. Our spiritual ancestors could not have imagined modern industrialization or internet technology. If God is real, however, God surely can. The work ahead of us is the work of tension and reconciliation, repetitions in the history of our world-- contractions in the ongoing creation of our world. Just as Jesus reimagined his tradition and critiqued the ways it had “sold out” and been used to further those in power, we must do the same. While the complicities and corruptions of our current situation are similar and dissimilar, we follow the tradition of a queer-thinking religious revolutionary who challenges us to continue flipping over tables of injustice and the ideas that sit atop it. If our work as theologians is, in many ways, counter-systemic work of resisting cultural normativity in search of the interstices where divinity lives, then we should also seek lenses of resistance by asking where resistance is in our time and place (and others) to ask how their lenses might inform our search and how that search might help us to embolden active resistance in the world. In coming posts I will discuss our current dilemma and the context from which I speak from and for. I hope to uncover ways that Christianity has contributed to this dilemma as well as develop theology conducive to transforming our relationship with the earth by exploring the Bible and the theologians who have improvised on it. It is my hope that an ecotheology of relatedness can transform hearts and minds toward ecological change.