A collar helps

9/4

Finally get to church after a morning at a Department of Buildings hearing. Experience told me to get here before the doors open and get my file into the process. And to wear a collar. Always helps. I won an adjournment  until the end of October, the longest allowed. 

Then a meeting with Pastor Heidi where we reviewed where we are with food justice and decided with all the energy tied up with the upcoming Climate march, we need to wait until after the Jewish holidays, call our colleagues together, review what we had previously planned to do and then see what we still had  energy to do. And both of us would remain committed to the SWEAT campaign and that I would reach out to Jo Ann the organizer for an update. 

Russ is by and we go for lunch and another conversation  about congregational revitalization. He tells me how he got connected to the Wild Goose Festival through Peter Heltsel of New York Theological Seminary’s Micah Institute. (http://www.nyts.edu/the-micah-institute/). He found his sound and stage skills quickly in demand.

I share my conversation with Kristen. Russ has a reading list for me that includes Phyllis Tickle’s  Emergence Christianity: What It Is, Where It Is Going, and Why It Matters  and Diana Butler Bass’ Christianity after Religion and Christianity for the Rest of Us. Somehow the conversation  winds around to Kurahara’s film version of Mishima’s Thirst for Love.

Russ is reviving his podcast show Love in a Dangerous Time, a title familiar to Bruce Cockburn fans.  or Burnheads, Russ says. (Would love to build a church that Cockburn would just have to come buy next time he is in town...) He invites me to be his first guest. We’ll tape tomorrow.

Our window is small

1/14

So what would be the story behind one surgical glove? Makes you wonder...

Today’s breakfast with my attorney. Slowly he moves from skeptic to ally as he begins to understand the vision. That we’re not talking about a real estate deal, but a process. And he begins to see why people  would be excited about the vision. But he’s right about the strategy to move ahead, beyond a dream.  That we have an opportunity to move our presbytery beyond its internecine battles to a place of moving forward. That we are in a context of a dying mainstream tradition with new life happening around the edges and that we have to be able to make clear that this is not just one more attempt for little West-Park to keep hanging on, but about something that’s bigger than West-Park, something that could be a model. That would need research, input from around the country. I know the people who could do that, who are doing it. Our window is small. Voices other than ours have to see the hope and lift it up before a preoccupied body. We need to be able to describe it with clarity. David against Goliath is not enough. We’ve said from the start that this is not about our small congregation but maintaining a place, an opportunity for reformed presence and witness in the center of the Upper West Side. There is no crowd  of traditional Presbyterians out there looking for a church. We need to somehow be able to engage those who are “spiritual but not religious.” Those who have been hurt, burned by the church or pushed out. (Like the West-Park of the ’80’s was, only in a new day.) An opportunity to move the church away from its self-absorbed irrelevance to living authentic presence. “Lunatic fringe with a strategic plan,” as Rick says. Not an easy task. With allies, we maybe can do it, he says. But without, sisyphusian at least, improbable at best. Only with allies do we have a  chance.

Waiting for a response from our city council member? Will she respond? if not, what then? I stop by her neighborhood office on my way home to see if i can set up a meeting.