How far can you count?

How come we seem able only to count to 2?

Pope Frances is visiting Albania where—CBC News tells us—half the population is Muslim, the other half Christian. Two colours. Black and white. No grays.

Comments posted on North American websites hurl accusations back and forth; the labels—you lefties or you rednecks—suggest a world with only 2 political sides. (Some imply that in Canada, the Greens, the NDP and the Liberals are all "lefties," as opposed to the Harperites who are "that blessed ONE in a world of only 2," and vice versa, of course.)

I'm pretty sure ISIL, or ISIS, sees the world as 2: us and the infidel.

I remarked on this at the dinner table the other day, ill-advisedly declaring in defense of 2 that the entire population was either male or female, and was brought up short in support of all those many who are born with gender characteristics that are ambiguous, even scary to those who tenaciously cling to the fiction of a black and white world, a world of 2.

I grew up in the Mennonite Church in a predominantly Christian community. There we learned that "Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters (Luke 11:23, also found in the gospels of Matthew and Mark)." We also learned that, "Jesus answered (Thomas), 'I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me' (John 14:6, not recorded in the other gospels)." There's really no easy way to interpret these passages other than as a description of a world of 2—those with me and those against me.

I was diligently taught not to count past 2 in these matters.

Honourable Justice Murray Sinclair—speaking on the subject of Christian Church/Aboriginal reconciliation—said that  "Christians and their churches must demonstrate respect for Aboriginal spirituality . . . they must no longer insist that Christianity is the only way for all people."  (Esther Epp-Tiessen in INTOTEMAK, Summer 2014, Vol 43, No 2)

If Justice Sinclair is right, then the kingdom of heaven is not populated by a monochromatic white but by rainbows of colour, not 1 as against 2, but 3, 4, 5 . . . ∞ together, a myriad of persons known not by the greenness of their leaves but by the flavour and nutrition in their fruit. (See Matthew 7: 16 - 20)

I've never been to Albania, but I'm guessing there aren't only Muslims and Christians there, and among those two groups, that there are liberal thinkers and conservative thinkers and any numbers of gradations between, plus Buddhists, Unitarians, agnostics and atheists, etc. I’m also guessing that good fruit doesn’t only grow on tree 1 or tree 2.

(What a bit of irony—70+ and still learning to count!)

We do our politics, our religion, our social interactions, our very families great wrong if we can't bring ourselves to count past 2.

A Royal Pain in the Assets

My "snug property"

Abandoned assets - you can't take it with you

I’m puzzling this weekend over the meaning of property, ownership and the oft-repeated Biblical declaration that, “. . . the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.”

On the one extreme, we have George Bernard Shaw’s “property is organized theft,” and on the other, Maria Edgeworth’s “Some people talk of morality and some of religion, but give me a little snug property!” And then we have the Biblical Levite Joseph (aka Barnabas) who in the early stages of the Christian church is reported in Acts to have “. . . owned an estate which he sold; brought the money and laid it at the apostles’ feet,”

(To the latter, some cynics and property rights advocates would undoubtedly add, “. . . and went out and applied for social assistance and food stamps.”)

In Economics 101, I was taught that an asset is “anything tangible or intangible that is capable of being owned or controlled to produce value,” a very capitalist definition indeed but pretty much right on in today’s Western economies (and more and more so in China, et al). By this definition, a brain or a strong back are assets, as is an education, as are tools, your home (which could be sold for value in the form of cash which could buy tools or an education, etc.), your savings, your connections (which could land you a better position that generates more value) . . . you get the drift. And in our culture, you have legal title to dispose of, keep or exchange your assets . . . property rights, in other words.

One could argue that exchanging one’s brain or one’s strong back for something else looks pretty impossible, but think about the dock worker who ruins his back in exchange for a living wage and the scientist who labours in the interests of a corporation and property rights can be clearly extended to all kinds of assets over which we hold dominion.

Slavery is a theft of assets; Joseph aka Barnabas’ case was a donation of personal assets to a cause, the persecuted Christian church in his case.

I admit, like Maria Edgeworth I am in love with my “snug property,” my small stash of tools, my electronics, my house and its contents, my paltry savings. Steal any of it and you might feel the wrath of the courts descending upon your head. “It’s MINE, you usurper! Give it back, and speedily!”

It’s not surprising that “talk of morality and religion” normally take second place to property rights, particularly in stress times: property is the measure of a person’s worth, the hedge against poverty and the safe haven in a dark, uncaring world (sorry; sometimes a bit of exaggeration goes a long way!)

So keep your hands off my stuff!

In response to the adage, “You can’t take it with you,” Jack Benny is reported to have said, “Well, then I ain’t going.” He went anyway (December 26, 1974) and by all reports, without his wealth.

I’m moderating a discussion in adult Sunday School this morning on “Giving to the Church.” Wish me luck, or pray for the class if that’s your way of supporting good causes. We’ll be defying the tenets implicit in Economics 101, let alone the entire capitalist club of nations!

Or not.

On Playbooks and Ipads - not!

Jasper National Park

Grasslands National Park

If the community of traditional North American churches were a corporation; it might well be called RIM—stock values falling, clients defecting to sexier alternatives, management in despair about what to do to halt the bleeding. Obviously it’s not a community and it’s not a corporation, but anxieties about the future are rampant in nearly every Western, traditional denomination: attendance drop off, budget cutbacks, even layoffs of personnel are becoming more and more common.

           
            Sailing against this tide is a host of non, or semi-denominational churches that have caught a breeze in their sails that established denominations have obviously been missing. Like RIM, older denominatiol's Playbooks have been overtaken by these new churches’ Ipads. A part of the world is hoping for a recovery; a larger part is already writing an epitaph.

            Recently, I downloaded an update to my Blackberry Playbook that makes it—in my opinion—superior to my wife’s Ipad in a number of ways that I won’t go into here. The reality is that RIM—in desperation—reinvented itself in the hope that it would again be competitive. “Too little, too late,” the pundits are saying. They’re probably right.

            So if the traditional churches would remake themselves in the style of the more successful, new wave of churches, would that, too, be too little, too late? It shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out what the differences are: send spies to case the new churches' procedures and programs and duplicate what they’re doing? Apple Ipad came out with a user-friendly email program; Blackberry Playbook didn’t. Playbook developed an excellent email program, but will it make a difference to sales? And what should traditional denominations modify in order to raise their stock value, expand their client lists once more? Bands and contemporary music? A return to a simpler, more personal gospel? More aggressive community outreach?

            It’s a conundrum. The basic gospel message is the same in its core; the creeds differ only in minor details. So is it all in the delivery?

            I’m sure there are those who would answer this question quite emphatically. They might point to “old and tired” versus “young and energetic,” or “spirit led” versus “tradition led,” or “outward-looking” versus “inward-focused,” and there might be a grain of truth in all these comparisons. On the other side, I can hear people say that the success of the new churches is based on the willingness to provide a simple, black and white theology that provides great reward while demanding very little. That they, too, will be subjected to tiredness, client loss and dissolution with time. There might be a grain of truth in that as well.

            And then, of course, there is the possibility that Christian churches, like trees in the forest, are inevitably subject to the decay that time and changing climates are bound to bring.

            I’m presently on a train to Winnipeg to a denominational conference that will again visualize its future against the above backdrop. The Assiniboine Valley is slipping away to my right as we speed southeastward. Even in its winter monochromes, it’s very beautiful. It’s a majestic, miraculous creation, this verdant, living planet and us to enjoy it. It makes me wonder if we’re too much missing the forest for the trees, if we’re fiddling with the trivial while the majestic slips by us unappreciated.

            It’s been know to happen.

            Can the Creator be worshipped and creation held in reverence without churches, mosques or temples? Or must an old, old revelation descend on us again, this time in hip-hop dress with a Blackberry and headphones?

            No matter how hard you shake them, clocks refuse to run backwards.

Churches, tables and craft sales

Decoupage table

Tile tabletop








Decoupage tabletop

Some time ago, I posted a photo of a tile tabletop my wife and I had made. Since then, I've determined to participate in a craft sale members of my church are staging on November 21st as a fundraiser for church construction. I rescued two rickety tables from the local thrift store. I removed the embedded photograph from the smaller one, fixed the legs and tiled an impressionist flower-design top for it.

The second project needed to do with church, I thought. and I hit upon the idea of using a decoupage process I’d read about to transfer photos to a hard surface. I sketched the original Eigenheim Mennonite Church—constructed of logs in 1896—and used photographs of the subsequent generations of the EMC structures. The decoupage process didn’t go smoothly and the pictures ended up with some stretching and bulging. I took the amateur’s way out; using decoupage glue, I put wrinkles in the rest of the table top as well, did a great deal of repainting and varnishing and called it done. I didn’t feel too bad about it because the flaws may remind us that all three churches pictured on the tabletop were built by amateur carpenters and were replete with instances where one would want to say—in retrospect—“Boy! We could have done that better!”

In any case, labouring over the decoupage project gave me plenty of thinking time about the meaning of church buildings, particularly since we claim that the church is the people and not the stones and timbers that house their communal activities. We’re building a new one, and in our group there is considerable doubt that the expense is justified in a needy world. And yet, buildings are more than buildings, as evidenced by the nostalgia that is evoked by the thought that a building we have come to think of as HOME will have to be moved away or demolished.

The verse on the table is, of course, the ubiquitous cornerstone verse of Mennonite Church Canada. “No one can lay any other foundation than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ (I Corinthians 3:11).” Paul wrote this to the Corinthian church as a reminder not to stray from the fundamentals (foundation) he had laid down and on which they were “building” a still-fledgling church. The use of the metaphor of constructing a building as a model for constructing a faith community is apt. In Eigenheim, each successive community worked at the building of a foundation, walls and a roof to house their communal activity and to form a centre for their faith. The temple is not the church, but we are human, made of clay, delicate vessels, and the lack of a temple might well mean the dissolution of a community that was meant to be.

sunday morning musings

How did we end up where we are? ^©

I had occasion to talk church history with a member of the Salem Bible Fellowship Church in Waldheim, Saskatchewan recently, primarily on the question of their history as a congregation. She couldn’t help me very much, since she hadn’t paid much attention to the congregation’s historical roots, but she gave me one of those rural community history books that were being produced in the 1980’s all across Saskatchewan, and there a few pages summarized their story.

They began as the Krimmer Mennonite Brethren church (Krimmer: German for “Crimean”), an offshoot of the Mennonite Brethren movement in the area of the Molochna Colony just north of the Black Sea in Ukraine. In the 1870s, a group of about half a dozen families emigrated to the US where they settled in Kansas for a time before some of them decided to move on to the area between the Saskatchewan Rivers at present day Waldheim. Here they worshipped in homes until a “revival” saw their numbers increase and the need for a permanent worship home emerge. The building that grew from that burned down in the late thirties and a new building was erected west of Waldheim, but subsequently moved into town and added to. (This may not be precisely accurate, but I’m not so much interested in the building.)

Time came when the Krimmer churches in Canada merged with the Mennonite Brethren, except that the Salem Group chose not to participate in this merger, joining instead another branch of the MB church called—I think—the Evangelical Mennonite Brethren Church. In the 1980’s, as I recall, the Salem group joined the Fellowship of Evangelical Bible Churches and parted company with the “Mennonite” name for good.

Salem “Mennonites” are considerably more conservative in their theology than the Zoar Mennonites (Mennonite Church Saskatchewan) and the Mennonite Brethren Church a stone’s throw away. The website for the Fellowship of Evangelical Bible churches has a pdf download available on their tenets regarding controversial issues: Not surprisingly the stand on abortion is “conception marks the beginning of a human life;” on homosexuality: “it’s a sin but homosexuals can find redemption;” on gender roles: “God gave the tasks of eldership and pastoring to men, but women have important other roles in the church,” etc.

Waldheim could well form a useful case study for the branching that occurred in the Anabaptist world in the last half of the 19^th Century. The last names of people in at least the three branches of Anabaptism represented in Waldheim are often the same, and so I wonder how it came to be that I am attending this branch and not that. If my ancestors had lived a few houses over in the Ukrainian colonies, would I be a conservative of the Kleingemeinde or Krimmer branch? Are my more-liberal, less-literal Bible interpretations a matter of choice, or are thy consequences of historical accidents?

I’ll think about this in church this morning as Allan delivers his sermon and the Gideons bring greetings to the congregation, and as we sing hymns, some from Hymnal: a worship book and some from Sing the Journey. And I’ll remember what Robert Frost said so eloquently:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim . . .

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back . . .

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Acronymania

ARRAPEL (A Reflection Regarding Acronymial Proliferation in the English Language)

Acronym: n. word formed from the first initials of several words (e.g. NASA)

I recently read Stephen Lewis’s Race Against Time, (See http://ca.360.yahoo.com/geoe41 ) and was highly impressed by the fervour with which he advocates for the Africans suffering from the ravages of the HIV/AIDS epidemic sweeping across that continent. But that’s not what I want to talk about today.

Lewis worked for quite a few years with the United Nations, and the UN with its many departments and sub-departments is a breeding ground for acronyms, those ubiquitous stand-ins for names-of-more-than-one word. He was with UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund) and then later with UNAIDS (United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS). AIDS, of course, is itself an acronym for acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Here are some other acronyms that float around the UN and other international circles:

WHO – World Health Organization. This one has potential for an Abbott and Costello parody, i.e. Abbott: “I work for the World Health Organization.” Costello: “You work for who?” Abbott: “That’s right.”

PEPFAR – President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS relief. This one has the fortunate outcome of exuding energy; both “pep” and “far” are complimentary to the acronym’s original, although the “far” part could be cynically said to suggest that the president would rather fight AIDS abroad than at home.

SAP – Structural Adjustment Program. This is one of those acronyms that has a homonym which is not complimentary to its original.

NATO – North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Pronounced Naytoe, pretty much everyone knows the acronym while few North Americans know what it actually does. But then, NATO is never sure either what it ought to be and do.

CIDA – Canadian International Development Agency. Lewis says Canada’s record in foreign aid is abysmal. The acronym is nice, though, suggesting “see” as if to say that we are watching the world, or “seed” as if we were growing something. Our aid program is withering on the vine, however, and most Canadians don’t “see” that. Duh.

UNIFEM – United Nations Development Fund for Women. Now where did they get that? The acronym is supposed to be made up of the initials of the organization. Letting “fem” stand in for women, we still have to wonder where the “I” comes from? I suppose UNDFW is simply unpronounceable.

Sometimes the name of an organization includes only consonant initials, as in Prairie Spirit School Division. The rule of thumb in such acronyms is that you supply the vowels where they would logically fit. I live in the PSSD and am not particularly enthused about the acronym resulting from “voweling” that organizational abbreviation. An entity like Dominion Rehabilitation Program would become DRP, but the acronym could be pronounced “DRIP” or “DORP,” neither of which has a classical ring to it.

Sometimes the acronym can speak ironically about its original. United Nations Food Emergency Directorate simply won’t ever exist. UNFED would simply be too appropriate! While I was an MCC (Mennonite Central Committee – See below) administrator in Europe, I was present at the formation of a group that would spearhead joint church building efforts in Portugal. When they decided to call themselves the Portugal Interest Group, I suggested that they rethink that. A colleague who liked irony spoke in favour of keeping it; he thought it would be neat to say—whenever a question arose on the work in that particular sphere—“Just ask the PIG!”

But in that vein, the acronyms that would be created by the Canadian Organization of Women, or Saskatchewan Organization of Women, quite a bit less than helpful, knowing the ribald humour that men in this country seem to prefer.

Of course, many acronyms don’t read like words at all. Saskatchewan Government Telephones has always been “S-G-T.” Even adding a vowel to that combination of consonants doesn’t seem to work: “SGIT?” “SGET?” Likewise, Canadian National Railway and Canadian Pacific Railway will do doubt remain “C-N-R” and “C-P-R.”

Probably the most frequently used acronym in my daily life is MCC (Mennonite Central Committee). In fact, the acronym has become its name, as is the case with, say, CBC or DVD. That is, of course, fortunate. Mennonite Central Committee sounds like a branch of the Communist Party, and I don’t understand how the spin doctors and PR people haven’t cottoned on to that a long time ago and campaigned for a better name. But then, we Mennonites aren’t very creative in that department: Mennonite Disaster Service sounds like we service disaster, when we really purport to mitigate its effects. MDS should really be MDMS, Mennonite Disaster Mitigation Service. Also, we now have MCC—Mennonite Central Committee—and MCC—Mennonite Church Canada. With the two organizations being part of one family of Christian churches, the misconstruing of intent is a daily phenomenon, at least in my world. So, MCC (the relief organization), you are now CCM: Committee of Centrist Mennonites. (Or is a CCM still a bicycle?)

I am in search of the perfect acronym. The “word” derived from the initials of the organization would be so appropriate that were I to come across it in Lewis, I wouldn’t have to flip to the glossary to get the drift of the sentence at all.

Please send in your contributions.

g.epp@sasktel.net