intersections

Two days at a Benedictine Abbey

I spent two days this week at the Benedictine monastery, St. Andrews Abbey, in Valyermo, California. I was so hungry for solitude and silence. So, I went out into the desert to be alone, to be silent and to listen. For nearly 1,500 years, monks have lived by the Rule of St. Benedict. For over 50 years monks have been adhering to this way of life on the edge of the Mojave Desert.

Five times a day the monastery bell (right) called us to prayer. Vigils at 6 AM. Lauds at 7:30. Mass at noon. Vespers at 6 PM and Compline at 8:30 PM. Between these times of prayer are three freshly cooked meals eaten in community. This Abbey practices a Great Silence from 8:30 PM until 8:30 AM. No one speaks, except in prayer and as absolutely necessary, for those 12 hours.

When I wasn't praying with the monks and eating, I was reading, thinking, writing in my journal, walking around the beautiful high desert surroundings and taking pictures.

You can see  a number of the pictures I took here.

If you've never spent any time at a monastery, I highly recommend it. In particular, I recommend St. Andrews Abbey. The Benedictines are by far the most welcoming I have encountered. St. Benedict, in his rule, explicit instructs that "All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ" (RB 53:1).

So much is running through my head right now. How I will again commit myself to set times of prayer, how my family needs a 'rule' to live by. In what sense my congregation can be a people ordered by a rule of life and in particular how what we traditionally think of as "elders" could be so helped by taking vows not unlike St. Benedict's Rule.

In closing, if you're interesting in Benedictine spirituality, I highly recommend the rule itself, of course. But I also highly recommend Joan Chittister, OSB, Wisdom Distilled from the Daily. This is the book I spent most of my time reading while in my retreat.

Talking about Human Trafficking

I've been invited by a couple of the faculty at the School of Religion at Loma Linda University to participate in a conversation being taped today for Loma Linda Broadcasting Network on the topic of Human Trafficking. Dr. Julius Nam is the co-host of this regular program called "Intersections" (what a nice name for the program) and Dr. Siroj Sorajjakool is an expert on this topic especially as it relates to his native Thailand.

Our congregation has been getting our feet wet by cultivating awareness about Human Trafficking in our community of Hollywood and around Los Angeles, as well as planning a study tour to Thailand in the near future. But I'm certainly no expert. I really have no idea what to expect today, but we'll just see what happens I guess. I'll let you all know when it will be aired and/or available online so you can see for yourselves.

The Cross and the Flag

As a pastor, the 4th of July is my least favorite American holiday. It isn't that I'm anti-American. I love being American. But it's so easy to uncritically blend faith and nationalism. The the photo above, taken by my friend, Scott Arany while on vacation in Virginia, says it all. This kind of display of the cross and the flag isn't that unusual in America. But every time I see this kind of, what I would call, syncretism - it gives me the chills.

I don't think it's too much to call it idolatry. At best this kind of image is just confusing and misleading. Thankfully, for the past three years I have been able to totally avoid the mention of the 4th of July in worship. In our church, the story of God takes presidence over the story of America.

Thanks, Scott, for sending this to me and for taking such a beautiful - even haunting - photograph.

My two favorite things about the 4th of July weekend...

...are British and French. I'm sure that will get me in trouble with some people. But it's true. The best things about the 4th of July weekend are the Wimbledon Finals and the start of the Tour de France.

Wimbledon features two classic finals match ups. The women's finals have the two Williams sisters facing off (with the obligatory drama that always surrounds that). On the men's side Rafael Nadal will face Roger Federer in what has become an annual event. I watched little of the Williamses semi-final matches yeterday and most of the Nadal/Rainer Schuettler semi-final this morning. Nadal v Schuettler was almost too painful to watch. Can it really be this easy? I am very eager to watch both finals matches.

The Tour de France starts tomorrow and I have never seen such little coverage of this event in a decade. That's how long it's been since Lance Armstrong began his 7-in-a-row win streak at the Tour. Due to a ridiculous amount of doping scandals, this year's Tour seems a little ho-hum. Most of the big names I've followed for 10 years are either retired our out for doping violations. I'm still smarting from the Floyd Landis debacle in 2006. Just this week Floyd lost his last appeal and is officially stripped of his 2006 victory. But I'll be watching anyway. Someone will emerge as the new king of the greatest sporting event in the world!

Have a safe and happy holiday, everyone!

Help bring an end to torture

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The issue of government-sponsored torture of suspected terrorists and so-called enemy combatants is one of the great stains on American democracy in the past 5 years. The irony of attempting to spread democracy around the world while undermining it at home has not been lost on journalists and the American people in general.

Several weeks ago my congregation's board voted to endorse the National Religious Campaign Against Torture and to participate in their Banners Across America Campaign in which churches across the country are posting banners like ours on the exterior of their buildings.

I remarked this week to my congregation, as we held up the banner in worship for everyone to see, that it seems ridiculous that we would even need to make a statement as self-evident as "Torture is a Moral Issue," but apparently we do.

If you click here you will see that the Adventist Peace Fellowship is a member organization of the NRCAT and Monte Sahlin is our representative there.

I hope you will consider visiting their site and taking some action on this issue today. You could start here by endorsing a "declaration of principles for an executive order banning torture."

 

The Envision Declaration

The Envision Declaration is now online and open for signors. It was my privilege to participate in the Envision '08 Conference. I also participated in a very exciting online conversation using a technology called Synanim, so I feel as though I actually had a hand in this statement.

I have signed it. Now I invite you to read the Declaration and sign it yourself, even if you did not participate in the conference.

In the news: Envision '08 Charts Future of Faith in Politics

Glowing review of Chris Chinn's "On the Row"

Three months ago I wrote (here and here) about my friend, Chris Chinn, and an amazing solo exhibition of his portraits. He is one of the most talented people I know and, along with his wife, Mae, who is an architect, is a key part of the art community that is the Hollywood Adventist Church.

Well, just last week he told me that his show, "On the Row," was reviewed in the current issue of Artweek.

Chris posted the review on his website and you can read it here. Here's a short excerpt. It's really a very profound review. I think I'm going to ask him if I can put one of his pieces on layaway...for like, 10 years!

Portraits of individuals, when they do their main job, contain their stories, residual evidence of their lives.  In fulfilling the very highest historical function of portraiture, they also contain clues to the sitter’s economic status (usually elevated).  What Chinn has undertaken with this project thus has profound sociopolitical foundations as well as psychological subtext.  In paying attention to those to whom it is rarely paid, it is analogous to Gustave Courbet’s transgressive Stone Breakers (1849), considered brashly bohemian and inappropriate for lavishing that kind of technical finesse and dispassionate formal accomplishment on peasants doing manual labor.  And so it resonated as a political statement and sparked a realist movement.

ReligiousLiberty.tv

There is a new blog by an Adventist attorney friend of my, Michael Peabody. It is a massive undertaking and it holds great promise for a very, very important conversation! Please go check it out at www.religiousliberty.tv.

The cover story is currently an article I wrote entitled, Announcing and Enacting Peace in an Age of Empire. A previous version of this article was published in a special edition of the Adventist Review called "Beatitudes Project 2." However, the article at www.religiousliberty.tv is the original, unedited version.

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I haven't blogged in over a week, so I have a lot of things to catch up on. Stay tune for updates later today or tomorrow!

Annihilation or Transformation?

Tomorrow I'm preaching part 3 in my series on work and the topic is "Nothing is Secular." Part of my argument, following many theologians I greatly respect (N.T. Wright, Jurgen Moltmann, and Miroslav Volf, who I'll see next week) is that it is important to consider eschatology when thinking about the theology of work. Actually, I often wonder if all theology boils down to eschatology, but that's another subject.

So, in my research I'm reading this great book by Miroslav Volf, Work in the Spirit, and I ran across this quote, which I'm going to type here at length because I think we Adventist pastor-theologians need to grapple with this. Will I get killed tomorrow for talking about this?

Belief in the eschatological annihilation and responsible social involvement are logically compatible. But they are theologically inconsistent. The expectation of the eschatological destruction of the world is not consonant with the belief in the goodness of creation: what God will annihilate must either be so bad that it is not possible to be redeemed or so insignificant that it is not worth being redeemed. It is hard to believe in the intrinsic value and goodness of something that God will completely annihilate.

And without a theologically grounded belief in the intrinsic value and goodness of creation, positive cultural involvement hangs theologically in air. Hence Christians who await the destruction of the world (and conveniently refuse to live a schizophrenic life) shy away as a rule - out of theological, not logical, consistency - from social and cultural involvement. Under the presupposition that the world is not intrinsically good, the only theologically plausible justification for cultural involvement would be that such involvement diminishes the suffering of the body and contributes to the good of the soul (either by making evangelism possible or by fostering sanctification). Comfort, skill, or beauty - whether it is the beauty of the human body or of some other object - could have no more intrinsic value than does the body itself; they could be merely a means to some spiritual end (Volf, 90-91, emphasis in original).

This, it seems to me, is the elephant in the room for Adventist theology and praxis. Volf makes this statement in a section where he is talking about "Work and New Creation" and drawing a contrast between "Work and the Annihilatio Mundi" and "Work and the Transformatio Mundi". Did you notice how evangelism popped up in this conversation? In other words, if you believe in the Annihilatio Mundi, then social and cultural involvement becomes, at best, a kind of bait for some "spiritual" ends.

Is God's purpose to annihilate the world or transform it? It's a questions I briefly wrote about almost exactly a year ago. I'm really coming to think that if we get the end of the story mixed up, we won't know how to live in the story now. How I enter the narrative of God's redemption today depends on where I think this story is going.

I periodically get questions from people who read this blog. They ask me basically, "Okay, so if this is true, what does it mean for our Adventist eschatology?" I wish I had a great answer for that question. I'm not going to try to answer it here, but it needs to be worked on.

Anyone care to get us started? Is Adventism really married to a particular sequence of events that must transpire exactly like we say in exactly the order that we say?

Zoe's Headshots - by R & J Photography

It's one of those things you may not think of unless you live in Los Angeles. Yes, my 7 year old daughter just got head shots. And what's even cooler is that my brother, Robert Bell, was the photographer. My brother has been a high-tech guru for years, working for companies like IBM/Lotus doing stuff I can't even explain. But lately he's been getting in touch with his artistic side. Personally, since I've known him for, oh...almost 34 years, I think he always was an artist inside. He was always creating something. Photography seems like the perfect intersection of technology and art.

So, he now has a photography studio that he mostly runs from his home, called R & J Photography. Please go and check it out. He does portraits, weddings, and he's done work for schools and Cub Scout troops. Basically anything you need! And he's very portable.

As you can see from the photo's in this post, we found some nice areas around where he lives in Canyon Country. You can read his description of this shoot at his blog, Captured Thoughts.

It was a pretty cold day so we had to try to get some shots in between warming up. Strange for late-May in Los Angeles. We did some other indoor photos later at the house. You can see the whole gallery here.

I'm not sure but I think Zoe enjoyed being doted over like this. She's going to be such a primadona no one is going to be able to live with her! You should see her with Rob's daughter, my niece, who is just a little older than Zoe. Talk about girlie-girls!

Interreligious Council of Southern California

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Yesterday I met with the Inter-religious Council of Southern California (IRC) (sorry no website yet - it's coming soon). The picture above is a good representation of our council. We are Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Baha'i, Sikh, Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, Quaker and Protestant denominations of all kinds.

The occasion of the photo is the signing of our Bylaws. The IRC has been in existence for a long time but we're just now getting our official status sorted out. I've only been a part of the IRC for the past six months. I officially represent the Southern California Conference, along with Betty Cooney, the Conference Communications Director. In fact, at the meeting yesterday I was elected to be the Treasurer for the group for the next 12 months. I'm honored to serve.

Next Thursday, June 12, at the Hollywood Adventist Church, we will be having our Annual IRC Service Project. This year we have been collecting items which will be assembled on June 12 into hygiene kits and other important items to be distributed through three agencies to survivors of Domestic Violence.

CLICK HERE to download a flyer with all the details about the event.

The three agencies we are supporting are:

• Jenesse Center
• The Center for the Pacific Asian Family
• Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles

If you're in the area, please come out to the Hollywood Adventist Church from 5-9 pm. If you want to make a donation, please contact me or download the flyer and see what items we need to have donated.

Take the re-church survey

I am attempting to gather some information about how we can shape the re-church network for new stage of its ministry. I have had phone or email conversations with many of you over the past months or years. I am increasingly asked by Adventist pastors of all ages for advice or just conversation about the questions they're having. Maybe you are one of those.

All of this has got me thinking again about the importance of a network like re-church. I've begun to think of re-church as a kind of "Order/Fraternity of Missional Leaders" ("Order" is less sexist, I think). This is not about subscribing to a particular theology or practice, but about a way of being in the world and being in ministry in God's kingdom. It is about openness to the questions that God's Spirit is stirring within us.

So, to that end, I've created an online survey. It should take you less than 10-15 minutes to complete. In fact, it's very short. I would very much appreciate your input.

>>TAKE THE SURVEY<<

I'm also reviving the re-church website, so check it out and subscribe the RSS feed.

Finally, if you know people who have attended a re-church event in the past or have been involved in any way, please ask them to take the survey. It's completely open.