lifeasmission

1/2 Way Through CCDA

October 24, 2008

We’re about 1/2 way through CCDA on Friday morning.  I feel like I have gleaned some great nuggetts of thoughts and ideas through the main sessions and workshops.

Wayne Gordon spoke in the morning yesterday.  Quipped that

charisma w/o character is catastrophic and

success w/o spiritual depth is superficial.

He also held up those in the conference who were willing to “go to places that others aren’t willing to go to.”  Of course this made me think about my own (quite cooshy) situation – one plenty of others would flock to.  And I was compelled to add to his thought in my notes… “some go to places that others are unwilling to go.  Others go to places that are easy for others to go, but refuse to be there in the same manner.”  I hope this is true of me.

Yesterday I attended a networking event that centered around a discussion of the centrality of the church in God’s mission.  As this topic is near and dear to my heart, I was disappointed that we didn’t have a lot of time, given the nuber of folks that showed up, to really dig into it, but it was valuable to hear perspectives nonetheless.  If the 20 or so people in the room were any sort of adequate representation of CCDA, it would seem that CCDA would do well to but a spotlight on this conversation.

The first worshop I attended was on the relationship of justice and shalom (shalom being the main theme of the conference).  The presentation centered mainly around the movement of the people of God (in terms of issues of justice) from Acknowledgment, to Awareness, to Addressing, to Betterment, to Empowerment, to System Changing.  There was good disscussion from the people who atteded the workshop about how they or their church communities were at these various stages.  Again, not enough time, but I would love to have gotten more into the way in which the Kingdom of God goes about “System Changing,” not by fixing what is broken, but by being something different altogether.

The 2nd workshop I attended was entitled “Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers,” and was led by Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.  It was a packed house as one might expect.  Shane did a great job of sharing illustrative stories and Jonathan spoke about the centrality of prayer in seeking to change the world – not in a disembodied sense, but in the sense that when we diligently commune with God in prayer, we become the sorts of people capable of living and acting out God’s dream.  2 quotes from this workshop, the first from Shane and the 2nd from Jonathan…

Jesus wants to give us a new economy of sharing and distribution… where the world calls us poor, but we experience having more than enough.

It is dehumanizing to always be on the receiving end of things.

Though he only spoke for a short time, Pete Scazzero was brilliant in the evening session.  One of his central points was, “It is not possible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature.”  He also talked about the ways in which most people live off of the spirituality of others – which begs us to consider an entirely different dimension of consumer christianity besides mere marketing and advertising.

For a conference filled with people acute social awareness, there has been a lot of great talk about the need to remember our first love and being mindful of being so socially engaged that we burn ourselves out.  Superb topics to be sure, but my hope is that people would be able to escape the dichotomy of “either I focus on loving God (a personal matter) or I focus on loving others (a public matter)” and embrace a more holistic spirituality – one in which we learn to love both God and others well by living in rhythms of contemplation and action.

More later – peace.

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1. CCDA Insight
2. CCDA Update

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