This last Saturday, we loaded up vans, cars, SUVs, strollers, sticky kids and babies and went on a community field trip. We went in search of the wisdom found in the Hilltop neighborhood of Tacoma where Paul and Elizabeth Sparks have been living out the way of Jesus in community for over twelve years. And it was glorious. There is some wisdom that is only found as we put our bodies in a particular place, hear the sounds, see the sights, take in the scents, the tastes and the feel of the people there. Paul and Elizabeth’s warm welcome, the cozy living room with the shag carpet, the nourishing food from garden to table, the history of saints who have gone before them −  here in this place, a story of faithful presence over decades. The vibrant murals, the shelves of canned delights, the handsome chickens, the expansive gardens, the quiet spaces of reflection, the long dining room table indicative of the wide welcome and hospitality of this place. Sarah, a passionate business owner who is living on very little to pay her employees a living wage, providing a welcoming place for everyone in the community. Her heart , her café and her waffle dogs - amazing! Elizabeth and Nora, part of The Madrinas, all Catholic Workers who are present everyday to create community, hospitality and peace to those who are without it. The sacrificial love of lives laid down is palpable. The kind and weathered faces, the stories, the honesty and the humility. 

We couldn’t help but be moved just by being here, seeing a way of Jesus lived out that is equally challenging as it is compelling.  
 
These are not the Christians that you see in the news or in the media. Certainly not in the latest and greatest of Christianity superstars. They won’t make the headlines or trend on Instagram. And yet, what a beautiful thing to see a community living out the welcome and love of the gospel in such a simple and yet powerful way. I wish that more people could see Christians like this. Not the hateful, narrow-minded, judgmental, moral-policing types that have given so many reason to walk away from the church. But the sacrificial and extravagant love that embraces and includes everyone. All those at the margins of society. The immigrant, the undocumented, the prisoner, those living with disabilities or mental illness and those without homes or resources. This is whom Jesus came for. This is whom Jesus embraces. This is whom Jesus loves. This, right here, is what it means to follow Jesus. Forget what you’ve heard and what you think you know about so called “Christianity”. Jesus came to show us what God is like. And it turns out God is not angry or demanding as depicted by many. In fact, it is just the opposite. God is the most wonderfully inclusive, extravagantly gracious and relentlessly forgiving One far beyond the capacities of the human heart.
 
This is why we need to be grounded in the love of God. Cause our fickle human love only lasts for an hour or two if we are lucky, ‘til we’re mad and offended and inconvenienced. And yet Jesus said that the world would know Him because of our love for one another. Simply put, that we as followers of Jesus are to live a way of love together so that our neighbors can see what God is like. And as Paul talked about this Sunday, the gospel compels us to move outside of our own individual interests and singular families into the wide and expansive invitation of Jesus that includes everything and everyone. We are called into a new family that is not at all exclusive in regards to race, skin color, religion, gender, class or social status. In fact, this new community is radically inclusive. The good news is for all of us.
 
Now this sounds great. Most of us would nod our heads and even pontificate about how this is truly a wonderful vision for our communities. We are good people. Nice people. We’re for love and world peace and healthcare and ice cream for everyone.
 
BUT [And mind you, this is a big but]…
 
How many of us are willing to live out this way of love? To make choices to be faithfully present in a world that continually pulls us away from being present. To choose to invest and to be present to a particular place in a highly mobile culture that largely lives above place. To choose to live in community in a world that says that our individual rights and privilege are king. To choose jobs, homes and lifestyles that enable us to be present in the neighborhoods God has placed us. To choose to be in solidarity with others suffering in our place so that we too are affected. To live on less or go without so that others who have nothing would have something. To be inconvenienced for the sake of relationship. To experience discomfort so that others may be comforted. To face our fears to experience the gift of those very different from us. This is a hard gospel, I know. But what a compelling one. What lies beneath the many facades of the American dream, the corporate rat race, the injustices of those who have and those who have not, and the emptiness and the slavery of stuff, are loneliness, addiction and hopelessness.
 
What if we could live into another vision? A vision of living our lives together in our neighborhoods in such a way that would show those around us what God is like. No, it’s not flashy. Not glorious. Not prestigious. There will be no headlines here. No celebrities in the making. No reality TV stars. And yet I can’t imagine anything more achingly beautiful and compelling than to live into a way of love and community in our neighborhoods so that everyone - rich and poor, black, brown and white, Muslim or Christian, left or right has a place at the expansive and bountiful table of God.


Paul Sparks is co-founder of Parish Collective and co-author of The New Parish. He and his co-conspiring partner Elizabeth Sparks serve in a Catholic Worker Community in downtown, Tacoma, WA.

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by Jessica Ketola

I am so excited to introduce you to my friend Paul Sparks. Paul is co-founder of Parish Collective and co-author with Tim Soerens and Dwight Friesen of The New Parish. I first met Paul when I participated in the Leadership and The New Parish Certificate with The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, which was transformational in giving me a new imagination for the church.  And since then, he has been an integral part of my formation as a pastor, leader, and artist in my neighborhood, always encouraging me along the journey.

Paul Sparks will be with us (The Practicing Church) this Sunday, September 24th for an important time for our community to envision and to dream about what it means for us to the church in our neighborhoods. And you will not want to miss this. It's going to be good!

See Paul believes that something invisible and yet revolutionary is happening in the church, if we have eyes to see it. In his article, Finding Church On The Ground, Paul refers to these radical shifts in the church.
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Take the United States, where I live, for example. Below the clamor of the political circus, something profound is happening on-the-ground. Researcher George Barna, who has been regarded as the most quoted person in Christianity, designates a movement within the church of twenty million by 2020 and growing exponentially.

Though perhaps premature, he calls this group "revolutionary" in the sense that their way of life uproots "established systems" and includes "a radical and pervasive change in society and the social structure."

The Paradox Of The Parish Church
Here is the paradox of what Barna calls the quiet revolution:

"The media are oblivious to it. Scholars are clueless about it...Christian churches are only vaguely aware that something seems different, but they have little idea what it's all about."

Over the course of the last decade, my work with Parish Collective has taken me to over 800 towns, neighborhoods, and villages across the United Kingdom, Canada, United States, and Australia. Joining worship gatherings, sharing meals, and walking the main streets and public spaces I too have discovered this strange phenomenon.

In literally every neighborhood, the number of parish churches, missional communities, and small groups of friends weaving a fabric of love and care on-the-ground is growing exponentially. Yet, their work goes largely unnoticed. Even these groups themselves often have a perennial sense that they are on their own.

This article, Finding The Church On The Ground is too good to miss. Read it here.

Today I am full of hope and anticipation for this next season and what God is doing in our midst. Last week, we reflected on The Story of Us and God’s faithfulness to us. But I am more encouraged than ever that surely God is creating something exquisite out of our motley, rag-tag selves, something beautiful out of our broken lives.  You see our “we” will always be exponentially more powerful than our “me”.
 
For I believe that the church is us. You and me. And this big, grand, glorious church that Paul pontificates about in Ephesians - almost to the point of making our head spin - is made up of just plain ol’ broken, flawed folks like us. Mostly well-meaning and good-hearted with our fair share of quirks, neurosis, addictions and blind spots with a propensity for fits, rages and chocolate. This is why Paul also said, But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. [2 Corinthians 4:7] This is the mystery of the gospel. God's whole, big, fancy plan for the world to be simply us? The church? Just our ordinary clay pot lives. I mean, have you looked around on a Sunday morning recently?
 
But “WE”? Seriously? This flies in the face of our American culture. Where the “I” in individualism is king. If you want to make it in this world, you have to make your own way and chart your own course. We live in a society grounded in the sense of individual rights and personal freedom.

But I do believe in freedom. I do. Deep in our souls, we know as human beings that we were not created for slavery; we were not created to lead drab, narrow or constricted lives, but to live in the wide-open spaces. Ours is a gospel of freedom. We are familiar with these words. The truth will set you free. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. But how are we defining freedom? According to the kingdom of affluence? The kingdom of fame? The kingdom of power?  Or the kingdom of love?
 
“Our present idea of freedom is only the freedom to do as we please: to sell ourselves for a high salary, a home in the suburbs, and idle weekends. But that is a freedom dependent upon affluence, which is in turn dependent upon the rapid consumption of exhaustible supplies. The other kind of freedom is the freedom to take care of ourselves and of each other. The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.” ― Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound
 
As The Practicing Church, we are longing to live into another kind of freedom. A freedom that brings God’s shalom to earth. You see, though culture and Christianity are united in this universal, human desire for freedom, in practice they are worlds apart. While freedom means “throwing off all constraint and all authority” to the modern man,  the freedom to do whatever we want, when we want, where we want, Christianity invites us to submit our lives to God and to each other, to lose our life in order to find it, and to receive the gift of abundance that comes from loving and being loved.
 
In addition, so often we view our circumstances as being the thing between us and our freedom. But the mystics and saints know better.
 
We judge ourselves to be the victims of difficult circumstances, when the real problem (and its solution) is within us. Our heart is imprisoned by our selfishness or fears, and it is we who need to change, to learn how to love, letting ourselves be transformed by the Holy Spirit; that is the only way of escaping from our sense of confinement. People who haven’t learned how to love will always feel like victims; they will feel restricted wherever they are. But people who love never feel restricted.  ― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom
 
Perhaps this is why Jesus called us to love. God and neighbor and yes, even ourselves. This is why we are wrestling with the hard teachings of Jesus to submit the whole of our lives to another vision of the good life. To make the decisions about where we live and work, how we invest our time and money, and who we break bread with based on a collective dream. A dream of "being the church" in an embodied way in our neighborhoods. Where the rubber hits the road, and there is nowhere to hide, and our integrity is at stake, as our neighborhoods become the testing ground for our faith. Are we a people of generosity, compassion, forgiveness and grace or are we not? I believe there is a beautiful, messy, hard, glorious, meaningful way to do life that lives into a new vision of community. But it is costly. For it requires that we pick up our cross daily and lay down our lives for each other. So if it is freedom that we are longing for, let us not choose the “me” for surely there is something far greater. Let us choose the “we”. For love is the way to freedom.

​by Jessica Ketola
 
 
 

Floods. Fires. Smoke so thick it hurts to breathe. Ashes falling from the sky. A premonition of what we fear. Whether it is a nuclear bomb falling from North Korea, or the sky falling in on our young immigrant neighbors, “the Dreamers,” the relentless onslaught of hateful rhetoric from religious and political leaders, the KKK and white supremacist groups, or the brutally oppressive weight of a police officer crushing into Michael Bennett’s chest, it feels like the sky is falling. Like we are living in the midst of an apocalyptic movie, with orange suns, swirls of smoke, eerie light and ominous music. But before we begin to channel Chicken Little, inciting mass panic with our cries, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling,” let us remember that fear is never the answer.

History tells us that “fear mongering” — whether justified or not — can elicit a societal response called Chicken Little syndrome, described as "inferring catastrophic conclusions possibly resulting in paralysis". It has also been defined as "a sense of despair or passivity which blocks the audience from actions”. So before we hole up in our dens numbing ourselves with endless hours of Netflix, emergency supplies and our favorite vices, let us consider the ashes that are falling on our heads.

Yes, we are living in turbulent times. But there have been far more turbulent times. And throughout history, the leaders who have emerged to influence culture for good were those who responded not out of fear, but out of hope, faith and love. And so in the midst of the turbulence, we must not be overwhelmed and paralyzed by hate and fear.

My good friend and pastor Rose is always reminding me of Dorothy Day’s words. “People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.”
 
So yes. Though we are living in a time of great political and societal upheaval with the threat of an atomic bomb greater than it has been since the midcentury, there is simply too much work to do. Now is not the time to bury our heads in the sand. Now is the time for courage. For love. For action. For peace. Now is the time to show up for one another, to get rid of that ugly hate and bitterness in our own hearts that erodes the very thing we are here for — love, meaning and connection.
 
I loved Anne Lamott’s recent post, “Sunday, eventually, I sat there with the first hope I've felt since Charlottesville, since the speech in Arizona, since Arpaio--that there is a path, a little light to see by, and most importantly, companionship. Us! You and me, motley old us, singing and writing and picking up litter, marching for peace, taking care of each other’s kids and elderly, ladling out food for the poor, making each other laugh; together…

"Don't let them get you to hate them." Well, I did let them, let them get me whipped up into a vicious kind of superiority, visions of revenge and perp-walks, where I'm channeling Sissy Spacek at the end of Carrie. And it was good. Yes, there is beauty and meaning in resistance to evil; and yes, there is a reasonable terror that we are closer to launching nuclear weapons than any time since 1962. There is the deepest grief and shell shock in memory. But for me, there is also plain old hate.

Hate is, on the one hand, comforting; and on the other, malignant.

And right there in church, I realized I didn't want it anymore. What I wanted was the love, the organized resistance, the guacamole. I wanted to continue to help fund the resistance, and to help people keep their spirits up, to serve the poor, pick up litter, listen to the very lonely.

And I wanted to get over the hate, to get on the same old path of the Berrigans, of Gandhi and Dr. King and Molly Ivins, peace and truth telling and never giving up."
 
So as the ashes continue to fall from the sky, reminding us that the world is ablaze with hate, let us remember who we are. Beloved children of God. All of us. Old and young, red and yellow, black and white, legal and illegal, conservative and liberal, Christian and Muslim, American and North Korean, straight, gay and transgender, rich and poor. We all weep and laugh, desire and hurt, hunger and thirst. And we all are created for love.

You see, the greatest resistance is repentance. We must turn away from our own comfort and fears, our apathy and our lack of compassion. We must expose our own judgments, privilege, biases and superiority. And we must let perfect love cast out fear. Fear of the "other" and fear of what we do not understand.

​Love compels us to live boldly and wholeheartedly, to listen with empathy and vulnerability, offering our gifts generously and wholeheartedly to the world. This is why it is so important for faith communities to be living out this way of love together in an embodied way in the places we live, work, and play. For just like Jesus, we are called to be people of peace, love, reconciliation, grace, and forgiveness. For such a time as this.

So let the sky fall. For surely love brings heaven down to earth.


​by Jessica Ketola
 

As a Vineyard church, we are partnering with Convoy of Hope to provide relief and supplies to those who have been hard hit by Hurricane Harvey. To learn more and to give, go to Convoy of Hope's website. Please pray for comfort, safety and provision for all who have lost so much and all those working to bring aide. Lord, have mercy.