I’m in the Bronx, New York City at Part of The Solution.

I’ll try to update periodically. Hope all is well with all of you.

two steps forward, one step back

Furor Over Cartoons Pits Muslim Against Muslim

This is an intense article, partiuclarly because of the blacklash inside the Islamic world. I find it such an interesting fight, and then I think how it’s such a microcosm of any society, really. While we might not kill in our anger, we certainly find it easy to talk down to those we disagree with, even if they are members of the same family, country, or even religion. How many right-wing evangelicals will damn anything and everything that doesn’t fit their theological box? How many post-modern Christians reject their modern mother churches on the basis of their rejection of post-moderism? How many times do Protestants still toss barbs at Catholics and vice versa?

And how many times does Jesus look at all of it and say “you’ve got it wrong in the first place”?

While I doubt I’ll ever shake my conservative evangelical roots – nor do I ever want to – I do want to see what our world would be like if we as the Church proper began focusing on working together rather and dividing ourselves. We, as the Christian faith, have quickly become the parenthesis to a secular world, and have allowed ourselves to be at least complacent, at most comfortable with the idea.  Not to mention we’d rather find points to fight on rather than work with the sea of folks who know Jesus as a nice guy, and not as the transformer and redemptive power of this world.

And this is why I’m excited about Jubilee tomorrow.  Almost 2,000 college students gathered to find out who this Jesus guy is, and how they can incorporate his message of the Kingdom of God into everything they do.

In other words, to open the parentheses.

definition of my day

This picture reflects almost every singe day at Gannon. The tea cup, my radio that I use while I’m on duty, my computer, and the ever-growing stack of folders, color-coded to reflect each of the three major departments I’m responsible to (Orange – Campus Ministry; Yellow – Student Living; Blue – CCO).

One of the toughest things I’ve had to do so far in my life is create a job where none exsited. My job, as it’s done, has never been done prior to my arrival. The best anyone has to reference from is the two positions I brought together – an Assistant Resident Director, and a Resident Campus Minister. However, neither one of these really fit what I do. ARDs don’t have campus ministry responsiblities, and are almost always taking a full load of classes here at Gannon. RCMs don’t deal with discipline, rooomate conflicts, and basically anything Student Living related.  This is also the first time that anyone has had a full time Co-Op relationship with Gannon in the CCO. Often times, this is what invigorates me about the process – that I’m redefining something, and I get to help define and create a vision, and obviously one has to expect bumps in the road.

However, on days like this when I’ve worked the better part of thirty days straight, compiling 50+ hours a week, when I’m spending the next weekend on amazing (albeit tiring) trips to Jubilee and the Bronx, and when my body is finally starting to disagree with afformentioned schedule, I begin to feel the more irksome parts of my job – that I have no professional clout whatsoever, that I feel marginalized because I don’t fit into any pre-defined box, that ultimately what I’m doing will have been a holding pattern for three years, I’ll get my master’s paid for, and I’m out.

On days like this, I don’t expect pity, but maybe just a nod of agreement, and maybe a pat on the back. I struggle most with the feeling few folks understand what I’m trying to do, or my concerns make much sense. However, I must keep remembering “Rome wasn’t built in a day”.

Tonight I have to take a long shower, make a turkey burger, do some paperwork for a program last Thursday, have my 1:1 with Colleen, and head to Atticus, the men’s group I help oversee. I’m hoping to create a page on this blog that maps everything I’ve done (and will do) at Gannon, for myself and for whomever takes my job after I’m done here.

picture 2 – redemption

This is a picture of my Nasturtium plant, which I was certain had died. As I was getting ready to throw it away, however, I noticed a couple of green shoots still around. I started watering it again, and a couple weeks later it’s this. Though it may not look too impressive now, before long (if it did what it did when I brought it up in August), it will have found its way into my blinds and up to the top of the window.

Quote from “Emerging Churches”

I’m reading a book on the Emerging Church movement, and came across these words, and thought they were just ridiculously well written:

ReIMAGINE! (San Francisco) illustrates the pursuit of transcendence and immanence in the following way. Imagine that a person parachuted and is now floating down to a city. As this person comes closer to the earth, he or she sees defferent things at different levels. At 15,000 feet, this person might see the city as a beautiful green. At 5,000 feet, he or she might see it as green pixels, like a Seurat painting. As this person get even closer, her or she might notice that the green dots are people. Everywhere thsee kingdom people go, they leave a little green smudge. Keach kingdom person is an “incubator” of green and advocates greenness in the city.

Green is not a primary color – blue and yellow are. Yellow is the vertical axis, the spiritual axis, the pursuit of God. The higher it goes, the more faint it becomes. This is the sole pursuit of the Creator, of transcendence. Blue is the pursuit of creation, social justice, the good life, going good to others. It becomes darker and darker as one moves away from the center. Yellow people view God only as transcendent. Often, they are evangelicals and conservatives. With their focus on transcendence, they care about God but not about what God loves. Blue people love what God loves – they love the earth, humanity, the environment, and the sensuality of being human. They are liberals. With their focus on immanence, they don’t love God and they deny Jesus, but they long for the kingdom.

At ReIMAGINE! the focus is green.  Jesus is the ultimate green, for Creator and creation meet in Christ.  People are fallen and are either blue or yellow.  ReIMAGINE!’s task is to help yellow people add blue to their pallette (becoming tied to creation) and to help blue people add yellow (becoming tied to the Creator)…

I found this to be a great summary of my view of minstry at Gannon, because I can name individual after individual that can fall into one of those two categories.  I was very much a yellow person until I went to New Staff Training, met Alania Cronkright, and began to see that social justice is just as important to the whole Kingdom as my time in prayer and looking to everything beyond this world.

The emergent church movement, CCO, post-modern theology all boil down to this in my mind first: the rejection of any dualism that has been sought since the advent of modernistic ideals over a century ago.  I hope to write more on this, but I still have much learning (and duty rounds) to do.

the picture

As part of this blog, I wanted to start adding some random pictures. Tonight is outside my window, looking towards Peach Street.

a new blog

yes, i realize i’ve only had awra_boringname in livejournal for just a little time, but i’ve been really impressed by wordpress, and i think i’d rather work with something i enjoy.

for those of you already linked to my other blog, i don’t want to cause you all sorts of work in rearranging your link to my lj page, and it could very well be that many of you won’t read this one. but if you do, great.

in any case, welcome to my new blog.

18959

so here’s a list of a few things i’m thinking about… just thought i’d let you know:

1. war is really bad, but we can still love the soldier and care for him
2. http://www.slowfoodusa.org
3. fair trade is amazing, and we oughta think about it more often
4. “what is going on with me? why am i thinking about this stuff all of the sudden?”
5. the emergent church (reading a book called “emerging churches”)
6. sabbath is made for man, not man for sabbath, but we really need it regardless
7. i heart the cco

please pray for bob robinson, as he had an aortic aneurysm this week, and is in a drug induced coma. his blog is on my list.

peace and love to all
a

something i wrote for another blog:

Hey there all. So, my name’s Adam Anderson. I’m a campus minister in Erie, PA, and friends with some of the folks posting, and I was asked if I wanted to post something on here. And, seriously, who doesn’t like to see their words up on a screen for the world to see? Here I am.

Relationships in a Christian context can be one of the most frustrating, if not downright inexplicable things around. We’re called as Christians to love with every fiber of our being God and those around us. And yet, when we try to love someone a little more than the rest, we simply get ourselves caught up in hurt, frustration, and inevitably, we start to mistrust ourselves and ability to love in the first place.

And believe me, I’m no different. I had my serious ups and downs when it came to dating. I was blessed with some sweet and wonderful girls to spend time, and really had some rough spots. And from all this experience, I think I finally figured out a solution.

I really don’t give two rips about relationships.

Let me repeat myself: I don’t care.

At this point I should probably quit posting to a website devoted to determining these things right? Well, please keep reading, and hopefully it’ll make sense (girls, please don’t have a heart attack).

For many years, I thought of myself as a fairly devoted Christian, and realized a lot of that devotion to God involved being willing to give it fears to him. So, that’s what I did. My college life? Gave it to God. My major? Gave it to God. And as I gave these things up, I felt less frustration in them. When I stopped trying to fix them myself, the peace that came out of it was surreal – even if it wasn’t what I originally intented (this spoken from the english turned business management turned marketing major turned RD/Campus minister).

But I realized that the one places I wasn’t giving God the leadership was my relationships. And for awhile, through major screw-ups in physical and emotional boundaries, it was showing up in a major way. I was unhappy, and had no peace or joy. So I prayed to God, and told Him that I’d just allow Him to lead, and that I’ll respect his rules.

So I sat around.
Waited.
Hoped.

…and nothing. For awhile I thought it was penance for the crimes of physical intimacy (which, unfortunately, our churches make many of us feel the more bases you run, the less of a chance you have to getting married, or worse, getting into Heaven. As if anyone deserved it before we made mistakes), or maybe, as we all hear (inevitably from our friends with good relationships) that “it’s just not the right time… oh, it’s all okay, plenty of fish in the sea!”

All that did was make me mad, and think there was something more to all of this garbage.

Then I remembered my purpose as a Christian again: to love God with all my body, soul, mind, and strength, and to love my neighbor as myself. A few words with a weight that transcends all of the categories I was trying to put God’s will into. Sure, I was gaining peace, but it wasn’t full, because ultimately it still concerned me. Loving God and people leaves little space for loving myself – and that is a concept we as Americans don’t tend to like to hear.

Time’s progressed, and I’m trying to put love into action. And as I do, the things I was worried about don’t matter anymore: my Master’s degree? Love God and people, and don’t worry. Doing good ministry at Gannon? Love God and people, and don’t worry.

Which brings me back to not caring about relationships. At this point (and, I suppose at any point in my life) I want to choose to love God and people, and not worry about what relationship I’m in. And, inevitably, I think that’s where the beauty comes in – when I’ve decided to just start loving, I stop caring about relationships and how they affect me, but how it affects the guys and girls around me. The relationships developed from giving up my desires and just loving are deeper, and more God-like.

So, in the end, I guess I still care about relationships – I probably care more. But, I care about God’s love the most.

I’d love to hear any insights or comments, and will do what I can to reply.

peace and love to all,
a.