Resonate Community

Intentional Community

admin — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 21:43:18 +0000

After a season in which resonate was the young adult ministry of Woodland Hills, we are moving a different direction. After a few months of really searching the gospel for the way he was calling us to live we have been drawn to a neighborhood. A few years ago the McCoy family planted themselves in the Hamline Midway Neighborhood of St Paul MN. They were followed by the Hamline House, a group of 7 young adults living in a new monastic community. Soon after that the Cavaliers moved across the street, and the Gilberts were just around the corner. Next a second house will start and more folks, like the Axelson’s are moving into the neighborhood. We feel called to be an intentional community, with families and monastic houses, gardens and living rooms. We are mostly mennonite, and have connections with Woodland Hills Church. We always have an open bed, a warm meal, and a place in our lives for any friend or stranger passing through. We hope to continue the work of Jesus, peacefully, simply, and together.

If you are interested in visiting, or considering joining our community leave a comment or email sethmccoy@mac.com.

peace to you

Season of Change - IMPORTANT

natalie — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:50:44 +0000

We’ve been going through an interesting season at Resonate these past few months. There have been several things on our minds:

At Woodland Hills, we’ve been going through a budget crisis and have had to make changes to our ministry accordingly. One of the things we looked at was efficiency. How are we doing at managing our human and physical resources? Are we good stewards of those? Are there areas we can cut? One conclusion we came around to in the EG department is that Resonate serves almost the exact same age group as Immerse. Our creative solution to this redundancy was to dissolve Resonate and direct 18-20somethings to Immerse and lengthen the Echo (7-10 grades) age group to include 11th and 12th graders.

Resonate HouseGroup will continue until May and when we break for the summer we won’t start up again in the Fall. Resonate staff and volunteers will be assisting folks with the transition from Resonate to Immerse over the summer.

Please call Natalie at (651)-287-2073 or e-mail npotts@whchurch.org with questions or concerns.

The Liturgy of Abundance, The Myth of Scarcity

admin — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:02:00 +0000

The majority of the world’s resources pour into the United States. And as we Americans grow more and more wealthy, money is becoming a kind of narcotic for us. We hardly notice our own prosperity or the poverty of so many others. The great contradiction is that we have more and more money and less and less generosity — less and less public money for the needy, less charity for the neighbor.Robert Wuthnow, sociologist of religion at Princeton University, has studied stewardship in the church and discovered that preachers do a good job of promoting stewardship. They study it, think about it, explain it well. But folks don’t get it. Though many of us are well intentioned, we have invested our lives in consumerism. We have a love affair with “more” – and we will never have enough. Consumerism is not simply a marketing strategy. It has become a demonic spiritual force among us, and the theological question facing us is whether the gospel has the power to help us withstand it.The Bible starts out with a liturgy of abundance. Genesis I is a song of praise for God’s generosity. It tells how well the world is ordered. It keeps saying, “It is good, it is good, it is good, it is very good.” It declares that God blesses — that is, endows with vitality — the plants and the animals and the fish and the birds and humankind. And it pictures the creator as saying, “Be fruitful and multiply.” In an orgy of fruitfulness, everything in its kind is to multiply the overflowing goodness that pours from God’s creator spirit. And as you know, the creation ends in Sabbath. God is so overrun with fruitfulness that God says, “I’ve got to take a break from all this. I’ve got to get out of the office.”And Israel celebrates God’s abundance. Psalm 104, the longest creation poem, is a commentary on Genesis I. The psalmist surveys creation and names it all: the heavens and the earth, the waters and springs and streams and trees and birds and goats and wine and oil and bread and people and lions. This goes on for 23 verses and ends in the 24th with the psalmist’s expression of awe and praise for God and God’s creation. Verses 27 and 28 are something like a table prayer. They proclaim, “You give them all food in due season, you feed everybody.” The psalm ends by picturing God as a great respirator. It says, “If you give your breath the world will live; if you ever stop breathing, the world will die.” But the psalm makes clear that we don’t need to worry. God is utterly, utterly reliable. The fruitfulness of the world is guaranteed.Psalm 150, the last psalm in the book, is an exuberant expression of amazement at God’s goodness. It just says, “Praise Yahweh, praise Yahweh with lute, praise Yahweh with trumpet, praise, praise, praise.” Together, these three scriptures proclaim that God’s force of life is loose in the world. Genesis 1 affirms generosity and denies scarcity. Psalm 104 celebrates the buoyancy of creation and rejects anxiety. Psalm 150 enacts abandoning oneself to God and letting go of the need to have anything under control.Later in Genesis God blesses Abraham, Sarah and their family. God tells them to be a blessing, to bless the people of all nations. Blessing is the force of well-being active in the world, and faith is the awareness that creation is the gift that keeps on giving. That awareness dominates Genesis until its 47th chapter. In that chapter Pharaoh dreams that there will be a famine in the land. famine in the land. So Pharaoh gets organized to administer, control and monopolize the food supply. Pharaoh introduces the principle of scarcity into the world economy. For the first time in the Bible, someone says, “There’s not enough. Let’s get everything.”Martin Nieimoller, the German pastor who heroically opposed Adolf Hitler, was a young man when, as part of a delegation of leaders of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, he met with Hitler in 1933. Niemoller stood at the back of the room and looked and listened. He didn’t say anything. When he went home, his wife asked him what he had learned that day. Niemöller replied, “I discovered that Herr Hitler is a terribly frightened man.”Because Pharaoh, like Hitler after him, is afraid that there aren’t enough good things to go around, he must try to have them all. Because he is fearful, he is ruthless. Pharaoh hires Joseph to manage the monopoly. When the crops fail and the peasants run out of food, they come to Joseph. And on behalf of Pharaoh, Joseph says, “What’s your collateral?” They give up their land for food, and then, the next year, they give up their cattle. By the third year of the famine they have no collateral but themselves. And that’s how the children of Israel become slaves — through an economic transaction.By the end of Genesis 47 Pharaoh has all the land except that belonging to the priests, which he never touches because he needs somebody to bless him. The notion of scarcity has been introduced into biblical faith. The Book of Exodus records the contest between the liturgy of generosity and the myth of scarcity — a contest that still tears us apart todayThe promises of the creation story continue to operate in the lives of the children of Israel. Even in captivity, the people multiply. By the end of Exodus 1 Pharaoh decides that they have become so numerous that he doesn’t want any more Hebrew babies to be born. He tells the two midwives, Shiphrah and Puah (though we don’t know Pharaoh’s name, we know theirs), to kill all the newborn boys. But they don’t, and the Hebrew babies just keep popping out.By the end of Exodus, Pharaoh has been as mean, brutal and ugly as he knows how to be — and as the myth of scarcity tends to be. Finally’ he becomes so exasperated by his inability to control the people of Israel that he calls Moses and Aaron to come to him. Pharaoh tells them, “Take your people and leave. Take your flocks and herds and just get out of here!” And then the great king of Egypt, who presides over a monopoly of the region’s resources, asks Moses and Aaron to bless him. The powers of scarcity admit to this little community of abundance, “It is clear that you are the wave of the future. So before you leave, lay your powerful hands upon us and give us energy.” The text shows that the power of the future is not in the hands of those who believe in scarcity and monopolize the world’s resources; it is in the hands of those who trust God’s abundance.When the children of Israel of Israel are in the wilderness, beyond the reach of Egypt, they still look back and think, “Should we really go? All the world’s glory is in Egypt and with Pharaoh.” But when they finally turn around and look into the wilderness, where there are no monopolies, they see the glory of Yahweh.In answer to the people’s fears and complaints, something extraordinary happens. God’s love comes trickling down in the form of bread. They say,“Manhue?” – Hebrew for “What is it?” — and the word “manna” is born. They had never before received bread as a free gift that they couldn’t control, predict, plan for or own. The meaning of this strange narrative is that the gifts of life are indeed given by a generous God. It’s a wonder, it’s a miracle, it’s an embarrassment, it’s irrational, but God’s abundance transcends the market economy.Three things happened to this bread in Exodus 16. First, everybody had enough. But because Israel had learned to believe in scarcity in Egypt, people started to hoard the bread. When they tried to bank it, to invest it, it turned sour and rotted, because you cannot store up God’s generosity. Finally, Moses said, “You know what we ought to do? We ought to do what God did in Genesis I. We ought to have a Sabbath.” Sabbath means that there’s enough bread, that we don’t have to hustle every day of our lives. There’s no record that Pharaoh ever took a day off. People who think their lives consist of struggling to get more and more can never slow down because they won’t ever have enough.When the people of Israel cross the Jordan River into the promised land the manna stops coming. Now they can and will have to grow their food. Very soon Israel suffers a terrible defeat in battle and Joshua conducts an investigation to find out who or what undermined the war effort. He finally traces their defeat to a man called A’chan, who stole some of the spoils of battle and withheld them from the community. Possessing land, property and wealth makes people covetous, the Bible warns.We who are now the richest nation are today’s main coveters. We never feel that we have enough; we have to have more and more, and this insatiable desire destroys us. Whether we are liberal or conservative Christians, we must confess that the central problem of our lives is that we are torn apart by the conflict between our attraction to the good news of God’s abundance and the power of our belief in scarcity — a belief that makes us greedy, mean and unneighborly. We spend our lives trying to sort out that ambiguity.The conflict between the narratives of abundance and of scarcity is the defining problem confronting us at the turn of the millennium. The gospel story of abundance asserts that we originated in the magnificent, inexplicable love of a God who loved the world into generous being. The baptismal service declares that each of us has been miraculously loved into existence by God. And the story of abundance says that our lives will end in God, and that this well-being cannot be taken from us. In the words of St. Paul, neither life nor death nor angels nor principalities nor things — nothing can separate us from God.What we know about our beginnings and our endings, then, creates a different kind of present tense for us. We can live according to an ethic whereby we are not driven, controlled, anxious, frantic or greedy, precisely because we are sufficiently at home and at peace to care about others as we have been cared for.But if you are like me, while you read the Bible you keep looking over at the screen to see how the market is doing. If you are like me, you read the Bible on a good day, but you watch Nike ads every day. And the Nike story says that our beginnings are in our achievements, and that we must create ourselves. My wife and I have some young friends who have a four-year-old son. Recently the mother told us that she was about to make a crucial decision. She had to get her son into the right kindergarten because if she didn’t, then he wouldn’t get into the right prep school. And that would mean not being able to get into Davidson College. And if he didn’t go to school there he wouldn’t be connected to the bankers in Charlotte and be able to get the kind of job where he would make a lot of money. Our friends’ story is a kind of a parable of our notion that we must position ourselves because we must achieve, and build our own lives.According to the Nike story, whoever has the most shoes when he dies wins. The Nike story says there are no gifts to be given because there’s no giver. We end up only with whatever we manage to get for ourselves. This story ends in despair. It gives us a present tense of anxiety, fear, greed and brutality. It produces child and wife abuse, indifference to the poor, the buildup of armaments, divisions between people, and environmental racism. It tells us not to care about anyone but ourselves — and it is the prevailing creed of American societyWouldn’t it be wonderful if liberal and conservative church people, who love to quarrel with each other, came to a common realization that the real issue confronting us is whether the news of God’s abundance can be trusted in the face of the story of scarcity? What we know in the secret recesses of our hearts is that the story of scarcity is a tale of death. And the people of God counter this tale by witnessing to the manna. There is a more excellent bread than crass materialism. It is the bread of life and you don’t have to bake it. As we walk into the new millennium, we must decide where our trust is placed.The great question now facing the church is whether our faith allows us to live in a new way. If we choose the story of death, we will lose the land — to excessive chemical fertilizer, or by pumping out the water table for irrigation, perhaps. Or maybe we’ll only lose it at night, as going out after dark becomes more and more dangerous.Joshua 24 puts the choice before us. Joshua begins by reciting the story of God’s generosity, and he concludes by saying, “I don’t know about you, but I and my house will choose the Lord.” This is not a church-growth text. Joshua warns the people that this choice will bring them a bunch of trouble. If they want to be in on the story of abundance, they must put away their foreign gods — I would identify them as the gods of scarcity.Jesus said it more succinctly. You cannot serve God and mammon. You cannot serve God and do what you please with your money or your sex or your land. And then he says, “Don’t be anxious, because everything you need will be given to you.” But you must decide. Christians have a long history of trying to squeeze Jesus out of public life and reduce him to a private little Savior. But to do this is to ignore what the Bible really says. Jesus talks a great deal about the kingdom of God — and what he means by that is a public life reorganized toward neighborliness.As a little child Jesus must often have heard his mother, Mary, singing. And as we know, the sang a revolutionary song, the Magnificat–the anthem of Luke’s Gospel. She sang about neighborliness: about how God brings down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly; about how God fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty. Mary did not make up this dangerous song. She took it from another mother, Hannah, who sang it much earlier to little Samuel, who became one of ancient Israel’s greatest revolutionaries. Hannah, Mary, and their little boys imagined a great social transformation. Jesus enacted his mother’s song well. Everywhere he went he broke the vicious cycles of poverty, bondage, fear and death; he healed, transformed, empowered and brought new life. Jesus’ example gives us the mandate to transform our public life.Telling parables was one of Jesus’ revolutionary activities, for parables are subversive re-imagining of reality. The ideology devoted to encouraging consumption wants to shrivel our imaginations so that we cannot conceive of living in any way that would be less profitable for the dominant corporate structures. But Jesus tells us that we can change the world. The Christian community performs a vital service by keeping the parables alive. These stories haunt us and push us in directions we never thought we would go.Performing what the Bible calls “wonders and signs” was another way in which Jesus enacted his mother’s song. These signs–or miracles–may seem odd to us, but in fact they are the typical gifts we receive when the world gets organized and placed under the sovereignty of God. Everywhere Jesus goes the world is rearrange: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor are freed from debt. The forgiveness of debts is the hardest thing to do–harder even than raising the dead to life. Jesus left ordinary people dazzled, amazed, and grateful; he left powerful people angry and upset, because very time he performed a wonder, they lost a little of their clout. The wonders of the new age of the coming of God’s kingdom may scandalize and upset us. They dazzle us, but they also make us nervous. The people of God need pastoral help in processing this ambivalent sense of both deeply yearning for God’s new creation and deeply fearing it.The feeding of the multitudes, recorded in Mark’s Gospel, is an example of the new world coming into being through God. When the disciples, charged with feeding the hungry crowd, found a child with five loaves and two fishes, Jesus took, blessed ,broke and gave the bread. These are the four decisive verbs of our sacramental existence. Jesus conducted a Eucharist, a gratitude. He demonstrated that the world is filled with abundance and freighted with generosity. If bread is broken and shared, there is enough for all. Jesus is engaged in the sacramental, subversive reordering of public reality.The profane is the opposite of the sacramental. “Profane” means flat, empty, one-dimensional, exhausted. The market ideology wants us to believe that the world is profane–life consists of buying and selling, weighing, measuring and trading, and then finally sinking down into death and nothingness. But Jesus presents and entirely different kind of economy, one infused with the mystery of abundance and a cruciform kind of generosity. Five thousand are fed and 12 baskets of food are left over–one for every tribe of Israel. Jesus transforms the economy by blessing it and breaking it beyond self-interest. From broken Friday bread comes Sunday abundance. In this and in the following account of a miraculous feeding in Mark, people do not grasp, hoard, resent, or act selfishly; they watch as the juices of heaven multiply the bread of earth. Jesus reaffirms Genesis 1.When people forget that Jesus is the bread of the world, they start eating junk food–the food of the Pharisees and of Herod, the bread of moralism and of power. To often the church forgets the true bread and is tempted by junk food. Our faith is not just about spiritual matters; it is about the transformation of the world. The closer we stay to Jesus, the more we will bring a new economy of abundance to the world. The disciples often don’t get what Jesus is about because they keep trying to fit him into old patterns–and to do so it to make him innocuous, irrelevant and boring. But Paul gets it.In 2 Corinthians 8, Paul directs a stewardship campaign for the early church and presents Jesus as the new economist. Though Jesus was rich, Paul says, “yet for your sakes he became poor, that by his poverty you might become rich.” We say it take money to make money. Paul says it takes poverty to produce abundance. Jesus gave himself to enrich others, and we should do the same. Our abundance and the poverty of others need to be brought into a new balance. Paul ends his stewardship letter by quoting Exodus 16: “And the one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.” The citation is from the story of the manna that transformed the wilderness into abundancy.It is, of course, easier to talk about these things than to live them. Many people both inside and outside of the church haven’t a clue that Jesus is talking about the economy. We haven’t taught them that he is. But we must begin to do so now, no matter how economically compromised we may feel. Our world absolutely requires this news. It has nothing to do with being Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, socialists or capitalists. It is much more elemental: the creation is infused with the Creator’s generosity, and we can find practices, procedures and institutions that allow that generosity to work. Like the rich young man in Mark 10, we all have many possessions. Sharing our abundance may, as Jesus says, be impossible for mortals, but nothing is impossible for God. None of us knows what risks God’s spirit may empower us to take. Our faith, ministry and hope at the turn of the millennium are that the Creator will empower us to trust his generosity, so that bread may abound. Walter Bruggemann

Intentional Community

admin — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 01:58:26 +0000

Well I think it’s high time someone mentioned INTENTIONAL COMMUNITY on our blog! We’ve been exploring Intentional Community like CRAZY over here at Resonate. What do you think HouseGroups are for???Yesterday Danny and I drove around some neighborhoods in St Paul looking at houses for rent. We found a few promising places and today we looked at one in particular. I am becoming more excited than ever: stuff is happening… people are talking… and WE ARE ACTUALLY GOING TO LIVE IN INTENTIONAL COMMUNITY WITH EACH OTHER!

I can hardly wait! I have so many daydreams of reading books together, cooking meals, walking around our neighborhood, building relationships, playing at the park, watching tv together (if Danny makes me!), and also struggling through all the relationship stuff that I know will come up.
Before I say more about that, I must first inform you that I tend towards the idealistic side of reality. I know my automatic reaction to relational conflict–walking away. And there’s no way to resolve conflict when I act like that. This is something I’m certain I’ll be confronted with–especially when living in community–and I’m TERRIFIED!

We’ve started talking about commitment–commitment to our house, to the people living with us, and to Resonate. This excites me more than anything… and it makes me nervous. What if I fail? What if it gets hard and I walk away? Pray for me, people! There is much to look forward to, and much to consider so that I can be sure I’ve counted the cost. On another note, if you are reading this, and you’ve also been exploring intentional community, PLEASE hit me up! (763)-670-2919

peace,natalie

The Sabbath Distinction

admin — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 21:39:20 +0000

I have some friends who take special care to observe the Sabbath every Friday night and all day Saturday. Last night I was over there spending time with their family and it struck me how distinct this Sabbath-keeping tradition is! Again I was reminded how God created his people to be visibly alternative, to show the rest of the world a different way to live.

In our HouseGroup on Wednesday, we read a story called The Kingdom. There’s a point in the story of Jesus where he brings up several of the laws given to Moses and calls his followers to an even deeper living out of those laws. For example, Jesus brings up the law that says it’s wrong to murder. Jesus tells his followers that more than murder, it is wrong to even hate someone in your heart. Jesus takes these laws and brings them to a heart level. He no longer calls for a certain behavioral orientation, but challenges us to experience genuine love toward other humans. I think the Sabbath is a little like this.

Maybe Jesus doesn’t call for our Sabbath experience to be restricted to a certain day. Perhaps he calls for a Sabbath day and more! Maybe Jesus means for a Sabbath attitude of rest to become part of who we are. This means that we no longer hold up success and achievement as the greatest triumphs of our society, but instead we value humility, being close to God, freedom and love for all people. Maybe a Sabbath attitude means that we allow time for the presence of God to enter our lives. That we let God lead us as we try to follow the way of the cross.

Jesus’ Birthday Par-tay!

admin — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 01:52:40 +0000

For the past couple of months, I’ve been traveling to downtown Minneapolis once a week to talk with and bring warm clothes and food to some homeless people who gather in a parking ramp near the freeway. There are other people following Jesus who do the same. We all come from different churches and organizations and the mission is to meet some needs of people who are living on the streets.

Last weekend, a Christmas party was organized for this particular group of people—for anyone who ever stops by the parking ramp! Man it was crazy! I took the role of a server at this party—bringing food and drink to everyone who was seated at a ginormous, really long, banquet-y feeling table.

After the meal was done, everyone headed to the basement to take part in a White Elephant game and then all the people living on the streets opened Christmas presents that had been given to them by sponsors. That was really fun to watch…but it wasn’t even the best part!

Karaoke came next! Someone had one of those machines that you hook up to a television. It was so much fun! I haven’t been at a raucous party like that in ages! It was such a merry occasion! I loved to see downtrodden-looking people begin to celebrate and even laugh at themselves. At that point, I began to think about Jesus’ instructions to have a party and invite people who can’t invite us back…that’s exactly what we did.

At the end of everything, we prayed together. It was one of the greatest conversations I’ve ever heard! There was warm thanksgiving expressed to God and to each other. And as one person spoke to God, others would jump in to add things and make jokes… it was a real conversation; like a group of friends all talking over each other and making everyone laugh!

I felt so accepted. There was no point in trying to impress people with my wit or get attention by acting silly or even go out of my way to be friendly so I could feel like I had done my job. It was like we had all fallen out of society. There was no need to advance myself. The fact that I was taking part in God’s Kingdom was enough. I think I am beginning to see that this is how I find life—by participating in God’s Kingdom; by working to advance it, by allowing it to transform me and become real inside of me.

Interesting— I found all of that at a party with some homeless people and the Christians who are serving them.

Inhale…Exhale

admin — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 22:15:51 +0000

Last weekend was Breathe, the fall retreat. We headed over to Beaver Creek Reserve in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. The camp was super woodsy; animals lined the walls of our meeting room and everything was made out of logs. We opened the first evening with a time of prayer and worship and then stayed up really late playing card games and hanging out. The second day brought a nature walk, recreational time, and some silence.

Early Saturday afternoon, we spent 2 hours silently listening to God’s voice. We engaged a booklet designed to guide us through some experiences in silence. It was a really cool time for me—of releasing some anxieties into prayer and learning more about Jesus through scripture.

There was this verse—the one where Jesus tells people that they need to give up their lives to find life—that made sense to me for the first time. Jesus says “…whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it.” When I read the words “My sake,” I was immediately reminded of that time Jesus tells his disciples that whatever they do for “the least of these,” they do for him.

I saw for the first time that Jesus wants us to give our lives away to people who are sick and hurting and broken. People who are poor, people who don’t have any friends. People who are forgotten about in a world that loves glamour and values status. I think that’s what he meant. If we aren’t doing this, we aren’t finding eternal life.

High Sodium… No Injustice

admin — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 00:51:31 +0000

I’m at Seth and Jen’s. We just finished eating dinner; tonight we enjoyed vegetarian lasagna. Jen discovered a product called Smart Ground that has the texture and consistency of ground beef…but it’s made from soy beans. And I guess there’s other flavors, like for tacos and stuff.

The brand is called LIGHTLIFE. Here’s a taste of their mission statement: “We are also committed to promoting a good life for all. That’s why we contribute 5% of our profits to organizations that are working to protect children, human rights, the environment, economic justice–and peace. We believe that together, we can make a difference.”

That’s good stuff, folks. Check it out.
Natalie

Resonate Site Up and Running

admin — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 14:52:47 +0000

Well here it is. We have finally launched this site as a place for us to stay connected. We will try to make this a place for you to be part of a conversation around being partner people with God in his work of restoring our borken world. Some will be funny, some challenging, some informational. As always on a blog you can post a response and we hope you will. Soon we will be adding links to books, people, video, and audio stuff that we are being influneced by. I just want to say a big thanks to Mike Selner for hosting this site and for all the work he put into getting it up and running. See you next post.
Seth