There’s an old Yiddish proverb that asks, “If I try to be like him, who will be like me?”  In this question is an affirmation of the important uniqueness of everyone and everything.  To be created is to be cast by the Great Director to play a part in His great play.  Never be another’s understudy, then – learn your own lines and hit your own marks.

The church was founded and created by God to be the agent of salvation in the world.  What the ark was to Noah and his family, the church would be and now is to Christ and His family.  And just as God gave to Noah very specific details on how the big boat was to be built; the church’s design and make-up was also neatly blueprinted for its builders and custodians.  In recent years, it seems the church in the West has grown insecure in its design and despairing of the peculiar part it’s been asked to play.  Past generations built grand spaces, big enough to accommodate the entire town and on most Sundays it seemed like the entire town crowded in.  But today, the pews are largely empty and the rafters no longer ring with the hearty chorus of hundreds.  The population has flocked to other venues to be about other things.  There is a great temptation for the church to be somebody else; something more hip, more attractive, more relevant.  Our reading for this week is a fascinating Op-Ed by Rachel Evans published in the Washington Post back in 2015.  Entitled: Want millennials back in the pews?  Stop trying to make church “cool”; Evans offers her insights as one who grew up in the church, left the church, and has found it again.  There’s plenty to consider here and much to discuss.  Looking forward to hearing your thoughts this Sunday morning at the Roundtable!

Click Here for this week’s article

There’s great power in a pathway.  When out for a wandering walk, we’re more apt to follow a path than make our own.  Though field and forest, mountain and meadow be open before us; we usually default to what is mown, paved, salted, or blazed.  Those who first made these ways, whether deer,  trader, courier, or civic planner, exercised tremendous power in directing future footsteps.

What’s true for traffic on land is also true for traffic in thought and feeling.  Our hearts and minds tend to wander on the broad and banked pathways paved by those looking to speed all traffic past what might lead to heaven and onward to what most certainly will dead-end at the gates of hell.  Following Jesus requires that every disciple take the next exit off the highway for the slower, narrower, and more ponderous path.  As the wonderful summer months are now upon us, it would be good to consider how we might make the best use of opportunities to slow down and recreate a bit.  To that end, two readings for this week’s discussion.  First is an excerpt from Pirsig’s classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  The second is A Forest Hymn; a poem by famed American poet William Cullen Bryant.  Of the two, the poem is the more difficult read, but give it a shot.  There’s a lot of encouragement in these two readings for our project of knowing and living a more authentic faith.  I’m looking forward to the discussion!

Click here for Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”

Click here for Bryant’s “A Forest Hymn”