Tom Sine is asking this and other questions hoping to hear some good news.

By Tom Sine

Join the conspiracy…join the conversation.

Do you know of any churches that give a damn about our neighbors who are losing jobs, homes and resources to feed their families in this deepening recession??? We aren’t finding many congregations who have created new ways to reach to those in need near and far…but we are still looking. What are you seeing?

Would you join me in a conversation about why the church is doing so little to respond to our neighbors who are being devastated by this global economic meltdown and share any examples of those churches who are creating ways to reach out???

Read more and interact here.

Join us at the Mustard Seed House for an evening of conversation with Missio Dei’s communitarian Mark Van Steenwyk and follow Mustard Seed House people.

Mark Van Steenwyk is a member of Missio Dei (an Anabaptist intentional community anchored on the West Bank of Minneapolis that pursues Jesus’ way of simplicity, prayer, hospitality, and peace). Missio Dei is affiliated with the Mennonite Church USA and the Baptist General Conference.

The evening will be an informal time of sharing stories and experiences about new monasticism, intentional communities and radical discipleship.

For more info, contact Eliacín

When? Friday, February 27 at 7:00 PM

Where? Mustard Seed House , Seattle (click to see map)

This is a free event, but spaces are limited. Registration is required. Register here.

When we started planning this issue of the Seed Sampler, the near meltdown on Wall Street was still a few weeks away. We had no idea how pertinent this information would be become. In light of recent events, recession preparedness (and response) plans in churches and communities are going to be vital to the well-being of countless families and neighborhoods.

On September 7th, we gathered a group of church leaders to discuss methods of preparation and response for likely disaster. Tom Sine gives a fuller description of the event in the Seed Story, and the first Seed Share is a report of the ideas generated there. Read articles from Eileen Hanson and Rick Reynolds for new ideas and programs already in the works. Penny Carothers’ article documents the similarities between established disaster response plans and possible recession plans. And to keep a global perspective, Samantha Baker-Evans shares what the current crisis looks like in Cambodia.

You might notice that this issue of the Seed Sampler is coming a little later than it usually would. That is mostly because we wanted to include the most up-to-date information on the bailout plan and the likely future of our struggling economy, so that we can help you prepare. We hope that you will take these ideas to heart and reach out to the vulnerable in your neighborhoods.

Seed Story | Recession Is Looming: How Can We Prepare? by Tom Sine, MSA team

Liturgy | Prayer in the Face of Economic Downturn by Christine Sine, MSA team

Reflection | Abundance For Sharing by Christine Sine, MSA team

Seed Share | What Recession Looks Like In Cambodia by Samantha Baker-Evans, InnerCHANGE Cambodia

Seed Share | Report From the Brainstorming Session

Seed Share | Lessons Learned From Church Disaster Plans by Penny Carothers

Seed Share | How to Help the Most Vulnerable by Rick Reynolds, Operation Night Watch

Seed Share | Rediscovering the Domestic Lost Arts by Eileen Hanson, Trinity Lutheran Church, Lynnwood, WA

Resources | click here

Via Godspace

Sunday night we started a series of discernment sessions with the Mustard Seed House community to work out how we can put our MSA rule of life into practice.  Over the next few months we plan to use this process to flesh out the shape of not just our community life but our personal disciplines too.  The idea is not  to dictate how each person practices their faith but to provide a framework of accountability for the practices that each person wants to commit to.  I am a great fan of British theologian John Stott.  One of his great comments from a lecture of his is

“The answers we get depend on the questions we ask.  Our job is not to give people answers but to help them ask the right questions

Part of what we are discovering is that this discernment process enables us to ask the right questions that move us towards a more intimate walk with God and a life in which God’s presence is more deeply connected to everything that we do.

The first half hour of our meeting was spent checking in – reflecting on what we are looking forward to and what we have experienced in the last week.  This provided a wonderful foundation for our discussions.  We then asked other the question:

What personal prayer and Bible study practices would you like others to hold you accountable for?

As we shared we realized that we are all had very different ideas of how much time we should spend in prayer and Bible study.  Some of us were struggling with the very idea of daily prayer times because these had become rote routines that seemed to do little to strengthen our faith.  After a very open time of sharing we started to grapple with what is probably a much more important question for us.

What makes us feel closest to God?

As we discussed this question we realized that most of us draw closer to God through a variety of avenues that often have very little to do with Bible study and traditional forms of prayer.  However these practices often then draw us into prayer and Bible study as a way to go deeper into the revelation of God that we are already experiencing.  Some of us connected to God through nature, another person through walking on the beach or reading and yet another through encountering the divine presence of God in the mundane everyday things of life. Someone else encountered God through talking to friends and strangers.

Out of this discussion we have shaped our question for next week

Out of knowing how we experience God, what practices should we encourage in each other in order to help us experience God more deeply?

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I constantly get ask what is Mustard Seed Associates (MSA) and what do we do. I also find myself trying to answer who we are and what do we do as intentional community, re: The Mustard Seed House. The answer to those  question can be as short as “we are a group of people living together trying to embody the Kingdom of God and a community that collaborate and sojourn with others planting mustard seeds of hope.” But it also can be as long as a 2 hour conversation over a couple cups of coffee. I prefer the long conversation.

MSA more than an organization, is an organic community of people. It grows organically and silently as it walks with others and serve as companions of many seeking to live intentionally by the alternative vibes of God’s Kingdom. It can be hard for people whom are used to the “do’s” and “programs” of organizations and non-profits to pin-point what we do. More than doing, we are -being- better yet, -becoming.  MSA, of what the Mustard Seed House is an expression of, is a community in becoming. One of our desires is to live alternatively, not just do or talk, but live and to become living beings in the new reality of God’s Realm. “But don’t you have programs?” Well, yes we do. But those programs grow from whom we are becoming. They are not the core, but the fruits.

As a community, we have house in which we welcome people into. We have our meetings around the same table where break bread and eat. We gather in living rooms for prayer and conversations. Our times of “planning” happen with our dogs in our midst and to the wonderful sound of children playing in the yard or in front porch. This is the kind of organic community that can drive some people crazy. As one with anarchist ideals, I thrive on it. It takes awhile for some people to come along, but there is no hurry. It is something we hope friends will grow into as they live into the rhythms of community. 

Because of our desire to move deeply in live together and in the Spirit we have decided to take time once or twice a month for mutual discernment. The following is a brief summary of what we have harvested out of those discernment meetings.

More On the MSA Discernment Process

Our MSA team has held a number of group discernment meetings since the last Board meeting with the intent of moving MSA towards a strategic plan for the next 3 – 5 years. These sessions have built on the foundations that we shared at the last Board meeting about why we have chosen to use this group discernment process because of our convictions that all we do needs to reflect our call to community.

 

Each session focused on a question that we feel is an essential part of the process that we are journeying together on. We have revisited our goals and pillars on several occasions to make sure that our direction is consistent with what we see MSA to be about. The questions that have been particularly important for us to grapple with are:

1. What is MSA and how does that effect the way that we think as community?

   • This session reinforced our call to model community in all we are and do. It helped us to revisit the big picture of what MSA is about and how our new way of thinking can reinforce the values, goals and pillars of the organization.

   • This session helped us to recognize that one of the major roles of MSA is as a crossroads organization:- a convener of opportunities for a broad spectrum of people to come together and learn from each other.

   • We revisited this discussion at one of our later meetings, looking at how we can make our language & story consistent and uniform so that all of us communicate what MSA is about with the same words. Also this seemed consistent with the fact that we are highlighting a process rather than an end goal.

     • We felt that we needed organic language and decided we would like to use gardening imagery, obviously very consistent with the mustard seed concept –

       • greenhouse – composting – taking the old & making it new; Fertilizing – nourishing & growing; Mustard seeds – planting; Cross pollinating; Harvesting – encouraging fruitfulness; Watering; Weeding

   • We emphasized in this discussion that we are highlighting a process which also fits well with the Celtic imagery

     • Come to the greenhouse, incubate for a while, be fertilized (educated); germinated, & planted, grow produce fruit and multiply your efforts.

2. What Gifts Does each member of the team bring to MSA and to the Broader Community?

   • In this session we asked each team member to share what they identified as the gifting of each other member in the MSA team. It was not only a very affirming and team strengthening time it was also a wonderful exercise to help us discern our strengths and weaknesses as an organization

3. How Do We Relate to each other in a community based team?

   • This session was not just about interpersonal relationships. It helped us to confront the fact that most of us are used to working in a group but not necessarily as part of a team. We also recognized that in the past we have not tended to think about how our individual projects fit into the organization as a whole. If we respect each other as equals then we need to take each person’s projects as seriously as we do our own. We also need to make sure that decisions on new projects are made as a team that discusses together how this particular project will enable us to accomplish the MSA goals and how we as a team can ensure that this project is accomplished. I

   • It also initiated a good discussion about rhythms of life and how this impacts who we are and how we fit into MSA. We talked about the impact of family on our organization and started to grapple with this as a whole new way of thinking about what it means to be MSA

4. What Are Our Roles in MSA?

   • In this session we started by talking about how each of us perceived our own job descriptions but this led to a much broader discussion of our dreams and hopes for the development of what each of us does in MSA. We also started to talk about how each of our roles in MSA integrate together.

   • This discussion reinforced some of our strengths and weaknesses and helped us to identify places in which we need to more intentionally look for collaborators and partners to be our companions on the journey and further strengthen what we do.

5. How do we integrate all that we are and do in order to more effectively accomplish the goals of MSA

   • In our last session on Wednesday we talked about how to draw everything that we are involved in together as a single stream (or a Celtic woven cord). We recognize that we already have a lot of resources available or almost completed that could become excellent steps along a journey but that we need to be more intentional about how all of these fit together. .

   • For example – most people connect to MSA through the internet, through an event one of us is invited to speak at, or through reading a book. We discussed the possibility of developing an integrated process that draws people into MSA and encourages them to move along a journey towards a deeper relationship with God.

   • A possible process would be: Entry point  moving deeper by reading seed sampler and/or other MSA resources  moving deeper by attending a workshop or conversation at the Mustard Seed House  moving deeper by spending three months at the Camano Celtic Community.

   • One of the questions we asked that we will flesh out more in the next few months is: What is growing in MSA at the moment that we need to be fertilizing, watering and encouraging to grow?

 

 

Just in case you missed Tom Sines challenging and topical address to the Moot Community tonight, check out the Moot podcast here, recorded in two sections.

Toms wisdom is a challenge as we contemplate Moots desire to set up an intentional community and activities around social justice, in our eventual home we hope.

To listen to the podcast – click here
For details on the new book, click the book cover

This podcast is quite different to talks Tom is doing with other Emerging Church groups in the UK. He is speaking more indepth in Manchester with Sanctus 1, so if interested – click here

Women in the Third World – Seed Sampler 08

The status of women varies enormously from one part of the world to another, but there are few places in which it is equal to that of men. Crushing poverty overlaid with long standing patterns of discrimination can create living conditions for women almost too harsh to imagine for those of us living in Western industrialized nations. Seven out of ten of the world’s hungry are women and girls. Worldwide women grow about half of the world’s food, but own only 1% of the world’s property and receive only 10% of the world’s income.

These inequalities have dire consequences for all of society, today and in the future. Women profoundly impact the well-being of their families, communities and local environment. They often have greater influence than men on population growth rates, infant and child mortality, health and nutrition, children’s education, and natural resource management. The articles in this issue of the Seed Sampler focus on the areas where women need the most help, which correspond to specific geographical areas (although the issues are not exclusive to these areas): sex trafficking in Asia, community development in Latin America, reproductive health in Africa and gender-based violence in the Middle East.

Unfortunately most development projects are targeted towards men and those that are directed at women are often small, scattered and peripheral to the main aims of development. Jesus, however, demonstrated respect for women, granting them privileged places in his life and illustrating their equal worth with men. These women have God-given dignity and worth, equal to that of men, granted at creation and deriving from the image of God which is neither male nor female. They are worthy of our concern and our ongoing commitment to see them become all that God intends them to be.

Shalom,
Christine Sine

Articles

• The World’s Women need our help

• Liturgy for the World’s Women

• Two Easily Ignored Stories

• Review of Book Not For Sale

• Submitting to the Healing Love

• Luisa moves from despair to hope

• Women’s Activities in Agros Communities

• Film Review: A Walk to Beautiful

• Mercy Ships’ Obstetric Fistula Program: Providing Corrective Surgeries to Women Suffering From Birth Injuries in West Africa

• Refugees and Gender-Based Violence in the Middle East

• Violence Against Women and Girls in the Iraq Crisis, Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, video (September 26, 2007)

Organizations

Agros International
MEDA
World Concern, Women of Purpose
Mercy Ships International
Grameen Bank
Not For Sale Campaign
Stop the Traffik
Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children

Books

Thin Space Learning from the Celtic Saints:  a day long learning/sharing experience hosted by Mustard Seed Associates and the Mustard Seed House.

• When? June 7
• Where? Mustard Seed House, Seattle WA

Register online

The rediscovery of Celtic Christianity has been a delightful revelation for many followers of Christ in recent years. Many Christians are intrigued by this rich tradition and by the men and women who led it. They were described as God intoxicated people who lived with an intense sense of the presence of God. All of life and all of creation were embraced by the triune God whom they believed walked with them throughout life’s journey. 

The invigorating prayers and traditions of this movement continue to inspire people today. Come and learn from the Celtic saints and see how this wonderful Christian tradition can enrich and empower your prayer life and your spiritual observances. This day long seminar will explore the lives of Patrick, Columba, Brigit and Brendan and the rich understanding of prayer that each of these Christian leaders brought to their faith.

Discover new ways to connect your prayer walk to your everyday life as you explore the many examples of prayer that under girded the lives of these dynamic ancient followers of Jesus. Discover a deeper understanding of prayer as you learn to write Celtic prayers based on your own life situation. 

Schedule for the Day:

• 9:00 Welcome & morning prayer
• 9:30 Learning from Patrick – the all encompassing presence of Christ
• 10:30 Break
• 11:00 Learning from Columba – rhythms for life
• Lunch
• 1:00 Learning from Brigid & Brendan – journey into hospitality
• 2:30 – 4:00 Writing prayers for the journey
• 4:00 Sharing.
• 4:30 Closing and afternoon prayer

Register online

The conversation started from the question of why we as followers of Jesus should care about the social aspect of the web. While many of us experience the social applications of the web, churches and ministries still jogging the the “information” super highway by making their web presence a mere online copy of their church bulletin or ministry brochure. Before the conversation turned into one about new cool applications to attract more readership to our “missional” blogs or  how to use the web for evangelization and to proselytize, Thomas Knoll who was the “web/social guru” of the night, was wise enough to stir the conversation to the importance of relationships, online and offline.  He was very emphatic on the importance on the latter. From then on we moved from the virtual to the real.

Part of the conversation was dedicated to the topic of gatekeepers and their place  in the church and in the web.  Institutions that in the past were the repository of information and knowledge are not anymore. We live in an age where have access to the same information as seminaries and elite institution of higher learning. Take for example MIT Open Course Ware  which offer materials for nearly all its courses freely available on the Internet. So the raw information is out there for us to get. What is needed is a way to process that information in community and with relational mentors. This is where gatekeepers come to play, gatekeepers can bring life by pruning and nurturing by being open and collaborative, or can squash it by command and control.

There were several online tools mentioned that can foster or enhance relationships that we already have with people – i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Seesmic, Ning among others.  Tools like this serve to facilitate more conversation among smaller groups of friends for an more authentic relationships, instead of the myspace syndrome of thousands of friends who do not know anything about each other. Thes tools if used with a well plan purpose and mission can foster wonderful experience of collaboration and participation among likeminded missional groups and organizations.

The “organized” conversation ended around 9:30 p.m., but many stayed around for coffee and more informal-networking-get to know each other chatting. Some of us hit the road for some good belgian beer and more conversation at the Die Bier Stube.

Bloggers that were present:

Thomas Knoll

Dave Laird

Karen Ward

Steve Lewis

Justin Beader

Alex, Karen Ward, Thomas Knoll and Kimberly Knoll.

A good conversation about the need for more “blessing and release” and less “command and control” from the gatekeepers

Me (Eliacín) Dave Laird and Justin Beader.

jonnybaker: jesus’ empire of the mustard seed – tom sine is back in classic fashion

Tom (Sine) maps the current new things happening with a mapping of four movements whose edges are blurred and overlap – emerging, mosaic, new monastic, and missional and he is enthusiastic about them all (i agreed with shaine clayborne’s hesitation in the foreword that the book runs the risk of making some of us young tykes look too good, better than the reality – but what a refreshing change!) weaving stories he has gleaned into the mix. he does carefully issue a few challenges on the way – for example he loves the creativity in emerging church but wonders why it tends to get focused on worship and church rather than taken outside the walls. he also wonders if those of us who like the postmodern world haven’t got our imaginations too shaped by the consumer dream of cool – these are great challenges and need to be responded to.

he follows the opening section mapping the new conspirators with conversations about culture and what the future challenges might be. woven into this is a view of god’s future that is wonderfully inspiring. in much the same way as i enthused about tom wright’s book a while back, this book also lays out a vision of a future for the earth that is healed when god’s kingdom comes. one of the things i have always found challenging and inspiring about tom and christine is their imagination. in the face of the consumer culture and the busyness and drain on resources so many of us face they suggest communal responses in relation to housing, resources, and neighbourhood. it takes courage to take these on board, but this is precisely the kind of imagining christian communities should engage in. in fact the last section of the book, taking our imaginations seriously, was definitely my favourite – story after story and idea after idea are laid out so that you can’t help feeling that as tom puts it all of life is a design opportunity to be co-creators with god. at the end of it, because the whole approach is inspired by jesus’ story of the mustard seed where something grows from a tiny seed, you think that even i could do something really really small and see what happens…

Read full review…