We’re moving!  The new neighborhood is about 10 miles south and one mile west from where we are today in Evanston.  This is a more centralized location to work with the different faith communities we’re resourcing and connecting in Chicago.  The neighborhood is a west side neighborhood called West Town, a diverse district filled with businesses, mixed income households (homeless, immigrants, young professionals and established families), social centers (parks, coffee spots, food distribution plots) and loads of potential.  These are our new neighbors!

There are new friends that we’ve grown to love here on the north side, and we’ll be close enough to them to continue growing in friendship, in community, and in mission here in the city.  We’ll hopefully see more of our friends as we start to see groups meeting together on the larger scale.  For the last year, we’d been commuting down to Hyde Park on a weekly basis (50 to 90 min!), and now we’re located in a much more central location that will reduce travel time and create more space for relationship building.  We’re looking forward to new communities, new relationships, new heart connections, developed training, kingdom dreaming, and of course, coffee!

We’ve been so thankful for our little apartment here, and being right next to the train and easy access to the north side of the city has been a blessing to begin to see our mission field up close. (Katrina really enjoys the trees here!)  We’ve met new people, helped form new communities of faith, come alongside other missionaries and disciples of Christ, and even helped resource and connect individuals and groups with this tool.  We’re taking this to a new level, from a strategically centralized location.

We’ve been up close to Chicago and sharing the Gospel for a year, but strategically moving into the geographic middle of it changes everything…

The second word missional refers to the Latin root missio or “sent.”  We are moving into bold new territory.  We are actively entering the conversation of the city – we are involving ourselves with the big issues facing millions of others.  This includes problems of crime, political corruption, violence, disintegrating public schools and spiritual darkness.

• Oh yeah, and there is an empty lot nearby where someone has already started a produce garden.  I’m all over that like white on cauliflower!

As we prepare for our move – we beg your prayers.  We see our work as missionaries in a city – helping to re-imagine the Body of Christ’s potential to be catalysts for change in the city, and the spark for a spontaneous expansion equal to that of the early church or the modern Chinese underground church.  We believe God is moving his people strategically toward revealing himself in amazing ways.

“…Streetwise people are smarter in this regard than law-abiding citizens.  They are on constant alert, looking for angles, surviving by their wits.  I want you to be smart in the same way — but for what is right — using every adversity to stimulate you to creative survival, to concentrate your attention on the bare essentials, so you’ll live, really live, and not complacently just get by on good behavior.”  — Jesus, Luke 16

This Parable of the Crooked Manager has been one that has haunted my Biblical readings all my life, yet has strangely remained absent from the sermons, classes and seminaries I’ve attended.  Yet it comes directly after The Prodigal Son in a series of stories Jesus is sharing dealing with money and relationships and seeking the most important things.  Its a story of a manager who has been embezzling funds from his company.  Soon the owner finds out and fires him.  As the manager is cleaning out his desk, he does some last minute changes to the books, offering clients to settle their debts for less than what they owe.  Jesus praises this guy for his incredible shrewdness.  What’s going on here?  Is Jesus teaching us to be unlawful with our money?

I see Jesus’ summation of the Crooked Manager (quoted above) as a connecting point to the Prodigal Son and to the rest of his teachings.  Think of it through the lens of religion.  How many do you know who “play it safe” with spirituality, who never step outside of the “laws” long enough to ask if it is actually bringing them life and a closer relationship with God?  I have known Catholics, Pagans and even atheists who do this – who never think to ponder if God might actually be calling them into a personal relationship of freedom and outside the confines of “good behavior” or “law-religion” or “me-centeredness.”  They, unlike the manager, would have left their job quietly and discovered what the manager feared – a lifetime of begging.  Or maybe they would have not embezzled in the first place…but then there wouldn’t be much of a story!

Much like the Prodigal Son, we have the choice to simply follow the rules (the older brother) or to find ways each of us are off in a distant country and return to our Father, desperately seeking forgiveness.  We can choose the life of spiritual stability of the 99 sheep and never experience of being sought after as the 1 lost sheep was.

We can live with a love for “an old time religion” or “advanced philosophies and theories” or “laws that keep me in good graces with the Lord” and truly miss being in love with our Father.

But God sees behind appearances.  He knows our hearts.  He wants to guide us into love.  But my question is, do we have to “get fired for embezzling” or “run of to a far away country and spend our money on riotous living” in order to feel the forgiving love of God?  The answer I think is, “Yes…and we have.”

Yes, we have lived the life of the crooked manager and the prodigal son.  But most of us don’t believe it – and therefore most of us refuse to return to Father seeking desperate forgiveness.  Most of us don’t forgive the debts of others because we don’t believe we have debts that need forgiving in our own life.

If we truly knew where our deeds take us – where our lifestyle of me-centeredness leads – all of us would be leading a life “using every adversity to stimulate us to creative survival” not just compacently getting by on good behavior.

Spirituality by Carl McColeman is not your typical book on the topic.  For starters, the subtitle is A Postmodern and Interfaith Approach to Cultivating a Relationship with God. I got this book in the mail to coincide with some relationships that are developing in my life; pagan priests, self proclaimed “recovering agnositcs,” and Kabbalists.  For my entire life, I’ve spoken of my spiritual life through a “Christianese” vocabulary (correct words that don’t always make sense to outsiders) and I wanted to explore fresh ways of saying the same things about my walk with God.  This book did just that.

Though a bit bookish, Spirituality helped explore the linguistic roots of faith through etymology and cultural history.  I learned that “community” is derived from the Latin words “shared tasks” and that humus (the root of humility) means “of the earth” – meaning humility is less about self-loathing and more about being people “of the earth” — people willing to get their hands dirty to get a job done for instance.  I even was reminded of a Greek seminar where I learned metanoia (Greek for “conversion”) is more often found in an ongoing present (perfect tense) than in a finite past or present.  We are continually being converted – which is what spiritual formation is all about. Knowing the history of our language helps bring fresh insight into our sometimes subconscious beliefs.

His foundation of language as the starting point for discussing spirituality is a tricky, yet helpful place to begin an interfaith dialogue – I suppose there is no shared holy text from which to base arguments or draw out ideas – so language itself will have to do.

McColeman says that spirituality (of any faith) begins with a fundamental choice “to trust in life’s wonder rather than to fear life’s risk.  It includes the choice to live life with a greater emphasis on vulnerability and playfulness than on control and inflexibility.” (211)  McColeman hismelf is an ordained Episcopal priest who explores the practices of the ancient Celts, who themselves developed a spirituality of wonder, adventure, and delight.  He clearly defines himself as a Christian, and it was refreshing to read his admonishion not to mix all religions together – they are not trying to do the same thing and will lead to different results.  But spirituality as the title suggests, is about cultivating your faith and giving words to it is McColeman’s best gift to us.

Neither revolution nor reformation can ultimately change a society, rather you must tell a new powerful tale, one so persuasive that it sweeps away the old myths and becomes the preferred story, one so inclusive that it gathers all the bits of our past and our present into a coherent whole, one that even shines some light into the future so that we can take the next step… If you want to change a society, then you have to tell an alternative story.

– Ivan Illich, Austrian Philosopher

Last week I was interviewed by Chelsea Schneider, a freelance writer for the Chicago Tribune.  Yesterday her article on house churches and the like was published, which focused on several of the organic church networks in the city.  Check out the article here. A lot of co-workers and friends of mine were in the article, and toward the end they pulled a few quotes from yours truly.

Since the article’s publishing, there’s been an interesting influx in people wanting to know more about the Underground Network.  I’m hoping that new friendships and relationships that reflect the Kingdom will develop through the article!