Amen and Amen and Amen

"The political novelty that God brings into the world is a community of those who serve instead of ruling, who suffer instead of inflicting suffering, whose fellowship crosses social lines instead of reinforcing them. The new Christian community in which the walls are broken down not by human idealism or democratic legalism but by the work of Christ is not only a vehicle of the gospel or only a fruit of the gospel; it is the good news. It is not merely the agent of mission or the constituency of a mission agency. This is the mission."

John Howard Yoder, The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical (1994)

Fall Books

When life gets hectic, I've developed a coping mechanism: I make lists of books. Reading is a meditative and disciplined habit in my life--I almost consider it my primary form of monasticism--and so the listing of books feels much like preparing to pray, or calming my heart for worship.

So here are four books I plan to read (or have read) this fall that I feel confident in recommending for your consideration.

1. Summoned from the Margin: Homecoming of an African by Lamin Sanneh. Sanneh is perhaps the greatest missiologist now writing in English, and I have for quite some time been curious about his life story as it relates to his teaching and theology. This is his autobiography, and it offers incredible insights into world Christianity, the nature of religious conversion, and more.

2. I'm kind of on a missiology jag this fall, so my second recommended volume is Walk Humbly with the Lord: Church and Mission Engaging Plurality, edited by Viggo Mortensen and Andreas Østerlund Nielsen. This is a collection of essays from the 100th anniversary conference (in Aarhus, Denmark) commemorating the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh. Responding to issues of globalization and increasing religious pluralism, the authors address an interesting question. Is Christian faith called to permeate plurality or establish an alternative to plurality? And what kinds of churches will either of those options take?

3. Luke (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible): Beginning this Advent, we enter Year C in the lectionary cycle, the year of Luke. I try to read a new commentary each year on the gospel for that year, and the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible series is the commentary I have over time been trying to collect as a set. Scott Hahn says of it, "Always attentive to the text and sensitive to the historical background, especially the Old Testament, David Lyle Jeffrey opens the reader's eyes to the literary artistry, spiritual drama, and theological depth of Luke's portrait of Jesus's life, teaching, death, and resurrection. Drawing deeply from the wellspring of the church's living tradition, Jeffrey's commentary allows us to hear anew the voice of the Evangelist as it's been born by the Holy Spirit down through the ages into our own life and time. Beautifully written, this volume will prove equally valuable for study or contemplation, preaching or prayer. Truly one of the exemplary works in this popular series."

4. When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God by T.M. Luhrmann. I think this is definitely the best book I've read in 2012. Her anthropological approach is first rate, and offers an incredibly empathetic view of Christian communities striving to hear God's voice in their life and worship. I'd like to try and bring the author to Fayetteville in 2013.

What are you reading? What do you recommend?

What does it mean to 'help' others?

Heidegger's response is that with regard to the other only a noninvasive mode of helping others is to decide to 'let the other be' in its alterity from itself, which is to say, in its authentic inauthenticity or most proper impropriety: 'The resoluteness toward itself first brings Da-sein to the possibility of letting the others who are with it 'be' in their ownmost potentiality-of-being, and also discloses that potentiality in concern which leaps ahead and frees. Resolute Da-sein can become the 'conscience' of others.' This means that there is no positive, affirmative, 'political,' or 'ethical' mode of relation to others that doesn't co-open [co-aprirli] to them, a co-opening of oneself to the common responsibility for one's own proper care (ours and theirs, inextricably linked). Neither are we dealing here with 'making' a gift but of 're-placing' (freigeben) in the other the possibility of being-with in donation, or the self-sacrifice (dedizione) of being. The community is and needs to remain constitutively impolitical in the sense that we can correspond to our being in common only to the degree in which we keep it away from every demand for historical-empirical actualization, that is, if we do not take on for ourselves the roles of subjects: the community cannot have 'subjects' because it is the community itself that constitutes--that deconstructs--subjectivity in the form of its alteration.

[Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, page 97)

ELCA Presiding Bishop to Visit Northwest Arkansas

Bishop Mark Hanson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the seventh largest religious body in the U.S. and the largest Lutheran denomination, will visit Arkansas November 4th, all Saints Sunday, preaching at the 8, 10, and 11:15 a.m. services at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, 2925 Old Missouri Road, Fayetteville, AR, 72703. All are welcome to attend.

This is Mark Hanson's first visit to Arkansas. He comes at the invitation of the high school youth group at Good Shepherd, who in an informal lunch meeting with him eighteen months ago during their synod assembly and Lutheran Youth Organization meeting in Tulsa, Oklahoma, asked him if he would like to visit Northwest Arkansas. Bishop Hanson responded, "Send me a letter, and I will try to come."

There are currently five ELCA congregations in Northwest Arkansas. In addition to Good Shepherd, Peace Lutheran Church (Rogers), Christ the King (Bentonville), The Neighborhood Church (Bentonville), and United Lutheran (Bella Vista). These churches work cooperatively on many projects, including most recently a joint trip to the ELCA National Youth Gathering in New Orleans, LA, with 35,000 high school youth in attendance, and a fall project with Habitat for Humanity.

Bishop Hanson also visits Northwest Arkansas this month in recognition of the new mission starts currently under way through the synod and Good Shepherd. The Neighborhood Church in Bentonville is a new mission start of the ELCA within this past year. Good Shepherd Lutheran Church is currently in the process of calling a second pastor, titled a Pastor of New Communities, with the goal of establishing new faith communities in Fayetteville and Northwest Arkansas that reach new groups of people with the gospel of Christ.

Bishop Hanson, at a recent ELCA Conference of Bishops Gathering, said that ELCA congregations are committed to being in a process of "renewal that begins with worship," and to planting new congregations "in all kinds of new ways and new contexts," adding that the ELCA has 343 ministries now under development, with 30 percent of them among new immigrants, those who live in poverty, those who are homeless and others in rural areas and suburbs.

The ELCA is celebrating its 25th anniversary as a denomination in 2013, under the theme, "Always being made new." Bishop Hanson, said, ""We have the opportunity and responsibility to ask, what does it mean to be deeply rooted in Christ and always being made new as we live in communities of increasing religious pluralism?"

The ELCA is made up of over 10,000 individual congregations across the United States. Divided into 65 geographic synods, each headed by a synodical bishop, Bishop Mark Hanson is the Bishop of the ELCA Churchwide, whose offices are in Chicago, Illinois. Good Shepherd Lutheran is a member church of the Arkansas-Oklahoma synod.

Mark S. Hanson has served as presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America since 2001. He was elected to a second six-year term in 2007. From 2003 until 2010, he was president of The Lutheran World Federation. He has traveled widely throughout the world, sharing a confident hope in God's promises and a vision of the joyful freedom in Christian community and mission.

Learn more about the ELCA and Bishop Mark S. Hanson at www.elca.org. For more about Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, visit http://goodshepherdnwa.org