Still waiting for the dawn...

Promenade ends today.
It was never really intended to be a permanent site for conversation and walk - with myself, with God, with friends, with others on the web.

I started Promenade the week of Live 8/G8 in order to be a small cyber part of that massive movement for social change but also in a more self-serving/care way to transtition out of Washington and back into Chicago.

Last night U2 won Album of the Year for "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" - an odd accolade in a way because the album was released in late October 2004. The album (of course) is phenomenal - and it served as a sort of soundtrack for our life that year in Washington and back on the ground here, back "home." Listening to it this morning takes me to certain places - good, bad, hopeful, and ambiguous.

This week is, in a way, massive for us. Begun last semester of Seminary, deep in "the Call" process, receiving potentially great news on tenure track position (for Sarah) at Lane Tech HS. It's also the 100th anniversary of Bonhoeffer's birth, and weeks of memoriam for both Coretta Scott King and Betty Friedan. We move forward in hope knowing that others have walked before us. We also anticipate word on what could become "Neighbor's Good."


A friend and I will be releasing a new blog soon to the World Wide Web - something more intentional on faith+politics. We have to navigate a third way to be Christian + American. It will be carried not by the major prophets but with the minor ones scattered in towns, cities, and neighborhoods...

love+peace, Adam

Mission Covenant vs. Evangelical Covenant Church

We had a terrific discussion in our Pietism seminar today on what was lost when the Covenant took out the word "Mission" back in 1957. The Mission Friend identify of the those early Swedish pietists was jettisoned for a more evangelical ethos. Now that might've not been intentional but I do think that "Evangelical" has become a sort of loaded word and with the word "mission" in the name we could maybe point to our heritage more directly as missional people wherever we were found. Home mission and global mission.

Thoughts? Remember that Time magazine listed Catholic Republican senator Rick Santorum as one of the nation's leading evangelical figures... evangelical means something more political now than ever before.

"Evangelical is better used as an adjective than as a noun." - Weborg

Lost Cause Paul

My pastor has a new blog - check it out.
He was a classmate at seminary, a companion on summer camp staff, a comrade at Bread for the World lobby day 2004 and a mission friend on the journey.

http://lostcausepaul.blogspot.com/

Currently on the rotation

1) Madonna's Confessions on a Dancefloor
2) various Lyle Lovett
3) recent Vertigo Tour boots - but especially ripped audio from the new Chicago DVD
4) the new Afro Celt Sound System record Anatomic
5) Nuclear by Ryan Adams
6) The Killers
7) Blondie's Greatest Hits
8) Sufjan Stevens' Welcome to the Illinoise
9) the new Stones (we skip to the better tracks)
10) Brandenburg concertos

Seattle I

I'm sitting on Bainbridge Island in my rental car waiting for the 4:35 ferry back to Seattle - free wifi!

This is my first trip to Seattle - I'm here a month ahead of our Covenant World Relief sponsored ONE Campaign event - and I've quickly fallen in love with a place - if that's possible. The city is beautifully set between mountains and water, cool vibe in town and lots of great ideas flowing about. And did I mention the espresso?

Outside Katie Meyer's (high school friend) apartment is Cafe Vivace. Yesterday morning the barrista was pouring my milk and gave me this direct look as if I needed to respect the fine art he was about to create in my cup - and it was amazing. 15 seconds later he had carved a heart into my latte. This morning he carved a leaf. I've seen this in photos but this guy made it look easy.

Preaching at the 95 year old Skogsbergh revival tabernacle of Seattle's First Covenant Church this Sunday. It's church in the round and it is glorious inside.

Great time spent with Mark Nilson at Bauhaus cafe Wednesday afternoon.

more later

Pasadena III

Spent this past sunday in worship at Pasadena Covenant Church. Donna Sider is a member of the church and serves on the Peace + Justice committee of the church - she's also been involved with planning for the upcoming Bread for the World / ONE event in Pasadena on October 15th (visit www.bread.org/Pasadena for more info). She helped to invite me to the church to give a brief mission moment on the event. It's wonderful and exciting to arrive at a church to give a mission moment on justice and advocacy issues to find that the sermon for the day is titled "Justice and Leadership." Pastor Charlie Barker delivered a timely sermon on the issue - asking how we (the church) would be relevant in a polarized world where there is so much need. He did not mince words on the governments response to Katrina - even going so far as to ask if the Democrats would have done any better - he inferred that they would not. In his sermon was a recovery of an old but useful category - "the commonwealth." He went on to suggest that our government had lost a sense of concern and maintenance of a "commonwealth." This was a helpful way to look at the past few months (and years).

David Gist and I talked with a number of folks afterwards who were pleased to see the church involved with Bread and ONE. Got to reconnect with Kristin and Kyle Michaelson, had a rousing debate about debt relief, talked with a man who works at Warner Bros who was interested in promoting the event back at his office.

It was a terrific time - great fellowship, great worship, great conversations on civic engagment and advocacy for poor and hungry people...

Rushed from there to LAX to catch my flight - a whirlwind trip but more than significant for me personally. Still wrapping my head around it all - I went out there looking to turn out people for an advocacy event and found a part of myself that I felt like I lost a long time ago.

Justice casino?

George Clooney is unconventionally raising funds for Make Poverty History.

From this week's Newsweek:

Is a fun-loving liberal a contradiction in terms? Clooney is testing the theorem. This past year he found himself picking out restaurants for a casino that he and partner Randy Gerber will open in Las Vegas. "At the same time, I'm at the G8 summit in a room with Paul Wolfowitz and Bono trying to get $50 billion in relief for Africa," he says. "I'm in this weird place: I have this beautiful house in Italy and I have these social agendas. I don't want to give up that lifestyle because I enjoy it, but I also feel that I have a responsibility. So the way I try to rationalize that, and it may just be Irish-Catholic guilt, is, for instance, with this casino 25 percent of anything it makes will go to the Make Poverty History campaign. It's the only way I can reconcile being successful."

___

This is so ridiculous I want to love it - casino bucks for justice. But at the same time it seems a little like cheap grace. I've been reading a book on medical doctor to Haiti, Paul Farmer, who says that WL's "White liberals" expect to fix the world without any cost to themselves...

How can the Christian parties in ONE help Clooney's Catholic-guilt be absolved? This is something to think about. What about formation here in the ONE Campaign? Discipleship?