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Tentative Gathering Date and website blues
(from the Coordinator, Brent Laytham)
We are looking at Gathering July 7-9 (Mon.-Wed.) in
Chicago again this summer. A first query of various
folk in leadership has indicated that those dates can
work. However, if the rest of you cannot do these dates
we need to know it right away. So, at risk of swamping
my inbox, please email me
if you were planning to come to Gathering 2008
but couldn't make those dates.
Some of you noticed a few weeks ago indications that
our website had been infiltrated. As far as we know,
no one suffered any problems from this other than the
annoyance of the warning messages. Nonetheless, if
you do encounter such indications, we ask that you
take the time to email me or our webmaster about the
problem.
Two Holy Women
In the Catholic church, November 16th is the
feast of Sts. Margaret of Scotland and
Gertrude. So with this issue of the
newsletter, we'd like to hold up two other
holy women who joined the EP board in July:
Debra Dean Murphy and Nancy
Bullock. EP
endorsers will know them from their faithful
and ubiquitous work with the EP. Debra Dean Murphy, Director of
Christian Education at Fuquay-Varina
UMC in North Carolina is not only one of
the most frequent writers on the EP weblog,
bLOGOS and a workshop leader at our last two
Gatherings. She has also led her congregation
through the first round of our Congregational
Formation Initiative.
Nancy Bullock has been with the EP from the
beginning, and has for many years been the
face and voice of EP hospitality. Whether
greeting registrants at the summer gathering
or writing welcome letters to new endorsers,
Nancy's efforts have been invaluable to the
day-to-day running of the EP. With her
husband Jeff, Nancy led their parish - All
Saint's by the Sea Episcopal Church in
Santa Barbara, CA - through the CFI as well.
When not doing EP work, Nancy serves as the
director of Mount
Calvary Retreat House and Monastery in
Santa Barbara.
(Joel Shuman also joined the EP board in
July, but since he doesn't fit the theme of
'two holy women,' we will profile him next month)
Meet the EP
Pamela Hanson, relatively new to the EP,
introduces herself in these words:
I am single and have been a Christian since
1981. I was raised in the Evangelical
Covenant Church but have been a member of a
PCUSA church for 17 years. Feeling
unsatisfied, I left my job as a family doctor
in 2000, at age 46, to seek a situation where
I could be doing God's work in community with
God's people. He led me to Tegucigalpa,
Honduras, where I now work with Pastor Rafael
Maradiaga, also a physician. Pastor Rafael
and his wife and family have adopted me, and
I them. God has unexpectedly knit us together
across national, cultural and racial
boundaries.
Pastor Rafael received the vision to come
alongside poor pastors in the squatter
communities ringing the city, after a stroke
in 2001 left him unable to work as a doctor,
He began discipling twelve pastors in 2004,
and I joined him in 2005. My vision is to see
the pastors of Honduras lead the Church in
taking back the position and role that God
intends for her, in their communities and the
world.
Our primary praxis is presence and
relationship. We do not have a detailed plan,
but simply (hah!) try to live out the
Kingdom. A key feature is that we fight
creeping busy-ness so that we are available
for 'divine appointments'. Our projects have
grown out of the conversations we have had
with our pastors. We haltingly begin a
project with many mistakes and work out the
theory - and the bugs - later. Not the
approach I would have chosen, being a
perfectionist. But as they say in Ecuador,
'nothing works, but everything works
out.'
The center of our ministry, Jehovah
Jireh Project, is shalom--healing and
wholeness for humanity and all of
God's good creation. Our primary emphases
include pastor training and a literacy
program. Presently the practical expressions
include a micro-enterprise loan fund, a
septic field initiative and a scholarship
program.
I heard about the Ekklesia Project from my
best friend, who learned about it from the
youth pastor at her church. I attended two
annual Gatherings before I left for the
foreign mission field. I resist with every
fiber of my being the culture's vision of
faith as merely private and personal, and the
civil religion which seeks to co-opt the
Church for the purposes of the State. I aim
to make everything I am and do proclaim the
power and sovereignty of the God I see
revealed in Jesus Christ to the fallen powers
and principalities of this world. I long to
see the Church be more and more the light to
the world that God intends - I grieve over
her failings while rejoicing in the knowledge
that God is surely carrying out his purposes
through her, 'lame' as she often is. It is an
encouragement to me to be part of the
Ekklesia Project, to know that others are
intentionally living out the Kingdom and to
learn from them.
Culture and Calculation
Longtime EP endorser D. Stephen Long
offers
two new books to readers interested in
theology and culture and theological
economics. With Wipf and Stock's Cascade
label, Long offers Theology
and Culture: A Guide to the Discussion, a
short introduction to the various (and often
confused or confusing) uses of the word
culture in contemporary
conversations.
And, if you go to the
Baylor University Press website, you can read
passages from Calculated
Futures: Theology, Ethics, and Economics,
co-authored with Nancy Fox and Tripp York.
Here Long, et al., seek to chart a path
between neo-conservatism and the Christian
left to craft a theology of economics.
EP Financial Report
Our financial picture through the first 10
months of 2007 is fairly typical. The
Summer Gathering pays for itself with a
little left over to give scholarships and
cover some of our administrative costs. The
balance of our administrative costs (such as
our significantly underpaid but greatly
appreciated coordinator, banking/accounting
costs, internet/website services and small
amounts of equipment and supplies) are
roughly equal to the amount of contributions
received. Our total assets at the end of 2006
were at about $28,000; our assets as of
October 31, 2007 were nearly $31,000. In
other words, we are holding our own. However,
the important thing to remember is that our
non-Summer Gathering expenses for the first
10 months of 2007 is almost $11,000 and our
income for the same category is $10,333. which
means very little margin for unforeseen
expenses or no resources for new initiatives.
So, there is no financial crisis but we are
certainly operating on the institutional
equivalent of "daily" bread. As always, full
financial reports are available on request at
mjbowling@indy.rr.com.
Michael Bowling
From the Editor
A fine little journal I first encountered at
an EP Gathering is Christian
Reflection, published by Baylor
University's Center for Christian
Ethics.
Each issue is devoted to a specific theme:
the current issue centers on "Hospitality"
and features an article by EP's own Beth
Newman, a solid piece on Dorothy Day authored
by Coleman Fannin, a doctoral candidate at
the University of Dayton (I can guess who he
has studied with), along with other good
articles. Best of all, the subscription is
free! Multiple copies can be ordered for
group study at a modest charge, with study
guides and lesson plans available on their
web site. To subscribe visit their web
site.
John McFadden, editor
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