Nothing but what I've been saying...

but still it's nice to see someone else say it.

Here's an article from the Houston area about "Slow Church" - taking the time for liturgy, prayer, and sharing food and time together.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/life/religion/7643739.html

I mean - we have Slow Food (I belong to the Russian River chapter) and Cittaslow - Sonoma is one - though I think it should either be Slow City or Citta Lenta - what's with the Itaglish?

So why not Slow Church?

Frankly, I think smaller and more rural congregations do better with a pace of life which does allow time to savor and opportunities for conviviality. I also see that Trinity in Sonoma where I am volunteering these days does pretty well. But I feel a longer essay coming on to explore applying the values of Slow Food to church life, and perhaps promote the explicit claiming of the best of this countercultural movement.

Ponderable quotation

I picked up David Mas Masumoto's latest book, Wisdom of the Last Farmer and want to share this quotation.

He's speaking of his father's "annual haircut" of the raisin grape vines.

"Good pruning is really the art of taking away, like a sculptor chiseling at a rock, working to uncover life inside. Dad paced around the grapevine, paused and clipped, leaning in and cutting; eyes darting back and forth, searching for the strong canes, locating spurs for next year's growth. He worked with the past and saw the future----adding to a living timeline."

Working with the past and seeing the future - this seems to me the essence of ministerial leadership, too - of prophetic leadership, if you will. We need to get that gestalt, that helps us work deftly to get rid of the non-essential, to get rid of what weakens, what draws our energy in an unhelpful, and eventually undermining direction. The strong canes of our life together are already there. The promising spurs are, too. We just need to uncover and free them.

Sometimes the landscape maintenance people here where I live say they are pruning - but they really aren't. They are hacking and cutting without any eye to the plant's history or the plant's promise - and often their work makes the next "pruning" more difficult, even less helpful.

We need to encourage the art of pruning - both in the life of plants and the life of organizations. But what pruning do we need to do to accomplish better pruning?

New resource for churches

I just hate when I can't find the right person to talk to so that I have an Episcopal hook on an ecumenical story. It happened again this week when I found nobody home so that I could write up the efforts of Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon at their October 3 conference, Food Sovereignty for All.

But I can at least post a link to their handbook here:

http://emoregon.org/pdfs/IFFP/Food_Sovereignty_for_All_handbook.pdf

Download a copy and have a look. It's great stuff - practical advice for congregations wanting to do a food system related project, with real life examples. If you've got extra land or a big underused kitchen at your church, of if you just want to strengthen connections with and support for local agriculture, there is help with getting started in these pages. Even if a congregation has never done a community ministry project before, there should be no excuses after reading this handbook. There are also several pages of resources if a congregation wants to begin with study of the food and faith connections.

Diet Discipleship?

Eric sent me the link to this article on Beliefnet

http://blog.beliefnet.com/news/2008/09/growing-numbers-say-diet-must.php

which is a good summary of some of the things going on at churches of various denominations around the country - community gardens, vegetarian options at potlucks, CSA deliveries, concern for the epidemic diabetes among poor parishioners.

Buy I balk at the phrase "diet discipleship". Dear God, please free us from purity codes. It's bad enough that we have all the food taboos in popular culture. Ethical reflection, thoughtful choices - but thou shalt not preach negative apodictic diets!

Potlucks

An article from last week's LA Times food section on potlucks

http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-potluck3oct03,1,3971443.story?coll=la-headlines-food

got me thinking about how we might do better at eating together.

There is a certain bias against potlucks, probably because of the jello salad - tuna casserole connection. I've been to plenty of them (occupational hazard) and usually tried to eat a little of everything, praising all the cooks. Now I don't eat meat and have a range of other things I'd rather not, which makes navigating such potlucks difficult. And they are a challenge for those on restricted diets, too (whether for medical or vanity reasons).

I've also been to planned potlucks, at least in my Reno days, where a main dish was chosen and folks negotiated things to go with it and committed to prepare them, or a menu was developed and assigned.

Not so much anymore, though.

Church potlucks seem to have more and more stuff from Costco, or a centerpiece of Kentucky Fried Colonel surrounded by homemade and deli salads - or they just aren't done at all.

And I don't know anyone anymore (maybe I know the wrong people) who is part of a circle of friends who regularly cook and eat together.

It occurs to me, though, that the potluck may be a solution to the frustrating problem of who to invite to dinner and what to serve.

I know some people go into high anxiety wondering what to serve me when they invite me - even though I always say "Just don't put bacon in all the vegetable dishes and I'll be fine." I've figured out some ways to do vegetarian or piscatarian menus when type II diabetics are on the guest list, but I am stymied by the absolutely no sugar ever crowd of whom I know too many.

The worst thing is the people who say, "Invite me over and I'll bring the food." Well, I hate - that's HATE - to clean and I love to cook, so it's no fun for me to prepare the setting and have someone else bring the food.

If we had more potlucks and each person brought plenty of something we like that is on our sugar free/gluten free/soy free/low sodium/low carb/low fat/meatless/vegan diet, then we each would be sure to have at least one good thing, and the omnivores would be in heaven.

It's worth thinking about...

greening the church

September 23 bulletin insert focuses on 'a fair harvest,' the U.S. Farm Bill

September 17, 2007 [Episcopal News Service] Fairness for farmers and food for the hungry at home and abroad, and how you can help are the main ingredients in the September 23 Episcopal Life bulletin insert

http://www.episcopalchurch.org/79901_90098_ENG_HTM.htm

http://www.episcopalchurch.org/78650_8852_ENG_HTM.htm

Churchshed

I've been thinking a lot about local - the whole peak oil, locavore thing - and how that relates to faith and spirituality.

Part of this is stimulated by periodic news bulletins about religious leaders who cannot resist flying around the country (and world) to speak about global warming. What do they think they are doing? I mean, we know what celebrities are doing when they use a private jet to get to an eco-benefit - but religious leaders ought to know better.

But mostly it's a positive impulse to consider local spirituality.

It takes work in a culture that is so mobile, lots of work to put down roots and pay attention to the weather and the landscape and the living things around us, as well as the history of human habitation and the folks who represent generations of life in the places where we live.

And it takes a conscious effort to bring the awareness of our surroundings in dialogue with the traditions of our faith.

Historically, Christianity took root in Britain - it went local, or became indigenous. And so we end up with mock English gothic church buildings around the world, and vestments suited to cool damp climes. Nevermind a fascination with things English.

Contrast that with efforts, not just in the tropics, not just in the southern hemisphere, but in urban north temperate dioceses, to find a sense of place. I recall when someone told me the Diocese of Massachusetts had become conscious of its congregations in relationship to its watersheds. The nine generations of Anglo-Americans who preceded me gave me a grounding in that place, so I will always understand what it means to have a sense of place, and of that place in particular. But what a boon it must be for the many who move to greater Boston, to be able to locate themselves, not just economically and politically, but geographically, ecologically.

Identifying one's watershed is one way to take root; another is gardening, with the attention it requires to weather, terrain, soil, wildlife, invasives. The concept of terroir applied to wine might also be applied to prayer - how are our prayers shaped by the totality of factors in the places where we are growing?

I am wondering what others do to live their faith in place, to become indigenous Christians.

More on the Sustainable Enterprise Conference

I've been mulling over some of what I learned last weekend, and am somewhat surprised by the connections. I think it started when in the workshop on Web 2.0 our leader said there were many common values between geeks and greens, and it was time environmental activists got over their anti-technology attitude. I don't think I've ever been there, but I certainly saw what he meant. And when you add in the challenges of re-localization, which we heard about on the second day, you really have something: a renewing of the local economy and community combined with greater global communication and trans-local networking and collaboration through the wiki-world.

(Is wiki-world an amusement park?)

It also seems to me that local ministry development fits into this picture - the revitalization of the local congregation in its context, with its resources, combined with greater connectivity with the wider church no longer mediated by a professional clergy class.

What does this have to do with food?

Well, perhaps food is the place where can begin to live into relocalization and enhanced communication, and also one place where we can sign that reality.

Suppose our congregations put more of emphasis on the seasonal and the local in our feeding and food distribution programs, with gleaners, and community gardens, and the like? And suppose we could then build a network of churches doing this, to share vision and information, and maybe even to work together to get some grants - to redistribute money to local projects - not just in one locale, but in national or even international networks.

And suppose a locavore meal were not something we did once a year at church - but that every Sunday the coffee hour, the flowers, the potluck, reflected the beauty of the local season in that place?

Then there's the whole notion of sharing. Julian Darley of the Post Carbon Institute suggested we need to bring back sharing. Why are our congregations not sharing networks? We don't need to go to the extreme of challenging the concept of private property (though some of us might like to) to see that there are many things some own that could be shared by everyone. There might even be some things - tools or equipment or ??? - I need to do more imagining here - that we could hold in common and then "rent" from the church to members.

There was not just a rush of self-righteous frugality, but real joy, when I lived in Los Angeles and the Horstmans brought a big bag of lemons to share from their very old back yard tree. Ditto in congregations around here when excess fall persimmons find their way to church. How could we see this sharing of bounty as sign and invitation to get creative and do more?

Another message for our churches I took away from the relocalization address was that limits are good. Too often, I think, our churches have bought into the American way of Growth Is Good. Thirty-five years ago on those early Earth Days, I thought about limits, and what a theology of limits might look like. It is time to revisit this, and draw out of our bag of tricks those Christian virtues which respect the limits of nature, and the limits which justice requires.

Okay - one last heavy thought. Darley said that relocalization is inevitable. That feels like both a statement of doom and a challenge to get started now, and do it right, in ways that are creative and adventursome, not cramped and painful.