Spiritual Youth for Reproductive Freedom

September 29th we'll host Caroline Locke, an intern with Spiritual Youth for Reproductive Freedom. 

Caroline writes, 

"SYRF is a part of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. SYRF is the youth activist branch of RCRC. We mostly do activism via education. Our main goal is to promote reproductive justice (such as abortion, access to birth control, and comprehensive sexual education). We do all this through a spiritual and religious context. We promote the idea that religion and advocating for reproductive autonomy aren't mutually exclusive ideas. Engaging local churches in our community is very important to me, so I'm very excited about this possible opportunity. Thanks!"

Thank you,Caroline. We look forward to hearing you.

Please be warmly welcome. Game on at 9:45

Youth Villages with Aisha Ellerson

This coming Sunday, Septermber 22, we're pleased to host Aisha Ellerson who works with Youth Villages in Johnson City. Aisha is going to tell us more about Youth Villages where she is a recruiter and trainer for potential treatment foster parents. Aisha writes, "I absolutely love what I do. I would like to come out and speak with your group on how they can help make a difference in these children’s lives. Many of the children have experienced so much trauma and the one thing they need is a good, loving home. I would like to present this idea to the group and give them a little more information on what that would look like."

Aisha is a Memphis native who "loves to stay involved in the community and working with children". She has volunteered at a few after school programs in the area. She's also a mentor at my church and works with the children’s ministry. She says that her desire is to one day start a non-profit that focuses on the betterment of our community and creating positive and future oriented experiences for youth of this generation.  Here's the link: www.youthvillages.org

Please join us. We'll be happy to see you.

Painting the Stars, An Evolving Faith

This Sunday we'll continue the Painting the Stars series with Chapter 4, An Evolving Faith.
From the included literature:

"“Christ is the evolver, the centrating energy of the evolutionary
movement. But Christ cannot be the energy of evolution unless the
incarnation is allowed to be continued in us.”—Ilia Delio

“Stress is the only thing that creates evolution.” —Elisabet Sahtouris

Scholar Phyllis Tickle claims that every five hundred years or so the church
holds a massive rummage sale. These are the times when it becomes
necessary to go through all the theological and ecclesiastical baggage that we
have been carrying with us over the years, and do the hard work of sorting out
what we need to let go of, what we intend to keep, and what we need to make
room for. The last big rummage sale was the Protestant Reformation. With the
advent of the printing press, and a rise in literacy, it became possible to take the
Bible out of the hands and dominion of the priesthood and entrust it the laity.
These rummage sales are evidence that the church has always been in the
process of evolving in response to shifting life conditions.
In an evolutionary paradigm, shifting life conditions represent provocations to
adapt. When these life conditions represent a deep enough challenge, sufficient
creative tension is produced that give birth to a whole new set of values, beliefs,
intelligences, and technologies. A new worldview emerges in response to crisis
requiring the church to evolve. Modernity, for example, challenged priestly
authority with the mantra of “no more myth and no more superstition.” German
scholars, one hundred and fifty years ago, began to distinguish between the
Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. The church was compelled to find out
what Jesus, the first century Mediterranean Jew, actually said, and what the
early church said about him. It is now commonplace for us to differentiate
between the religion of Jesus and the religion about Jesus. Radical
postmodernism began to challenge the legitimacy of any grand narrative, realizing that “truth” is contextual, and arises in and through perspectives.
Postmodernist philosophers noticed that the interpretive keepers of the grand
narrative tended to gain a disproportionate amount of power in society.
Eventually, the “myth of the framework,” (all we can really know is the frame
we’re looking through), replaced the “myth of the given,” (the traditional idea that
Truth is revealed from on high). In response, the church has needed to update it
truth claims and the basis of its faith.
It’s time for another rummage sale.""

Please join us. We'll be delighted to see you.

Painting the Stars -- Getting Genesis Wrong

This Sunday, September 8th, we'll explore the 3rd chapter in Painting the Stars: Getting Genesis Wrong. 
The reference is to Genesis 1:28 -- 
"And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."

Sometimes we've abuse an interpretation of "subdue it."

The tone for our session is set in two verses:

An absence of a sense of the sacred, awe, is the basic flaw in many of
our efforts at ecologically or environmentally adjusting our human
presence to the natural world. It has been said ‘We will not save what we
do not love’. It is also true that we live neither love nor save what we do
not experience as sacred.” —Thomas Berry

and,

Earth’s crammed with heaven
And every common bush, afire with God
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes —Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Please be warmly invited to join us.