VISIT OUR NEW PEACEMEAL WEBSITE
Peacemeal is no longer using this as a blog site. Please visit our new blog/website. Thanks!
an emerging, missional Christian community in the Scranton, PA area:
rooted in the Episcopal Church, welcoming all.
Peacemeal is no longer using this as a blog site. Please visit our new blog/website. Thanks!
I just read an interesting post by Kimberly Roth over at Jesus Manifesto about creating a soundtrack for ordinary time. Among other things, she writes:
Today, we start counting Ordinary Time.She follows this with her list of soundtrack suggestions.
Ordinary Time…
The time of growth…
The time of day to day clinging to the vine and working out our faith with fear and trembling…
The time of going beyond the hopefulness, the waiting, the celebrating, the preparing…
The time of fleshing out what it means to be the Church and bring the Kingdom here on earth as it is in Heaven.
Ordinary time is when the Body of Christ stops staring up into the sky and starts living as the type of community that becomes the hands and feet of God toward a watching, waiting world.
Ordinary time deserves a soundtrack of its own
An invitation:
Labels: abundance, barbara brown taylor, community, compassion, discernment, ego-evacuation, lent, resistance
Peacemeal had our first baptism this week! Josh and Jill's bright and beautiful boy was baptized on Friday night. What a joy for us all. Continued love, joy and the blessings of Christ, baby Jude.
I was able to find some time yesterday morning to update the main peacemeal site.
peacemeal has a public space! we've made arrangements with covenant presbyterian church to rent their manse (the large home next to the church where the pastors previously lived). this makes our weekly gathering much more accessible to university of scranton students and, hopefully, to our friends that come to FreeSpace. we're closer to the heart of scranton, where we feel a strong call and desire to serve. the address is 816 Olive Street, Scranton, PA, 18510. click there for google maps; it's near the corner of madison ave. and olive st., and there is plenty of parking in the church lot. you should definitely come join us! we're currently meeting:
fridays
5:30-6:30 p.m. - community dinner
6:30-7 p.m. - clean-up and set-up for worship
7-8 p.m. - eucharist
8-8:30 p.m. - tidy up
the manse allows us to keep the intimate, relational feel of meeting in people's homes (this one being a rather large, rather beautiful one at that!) while alleviating some of the pressure for one family to prep their house each and every week. it has a large kitchen and a large dining room, which are important to us, too (i mean, come on, we are peaceMEAL, right? would you expect less?).
finally, there are 2 rooms we hope will be cleaned and renovated in the near future to accommodate the growing number of young children in our midst. people are stepping up to provide care and faith-growing activities for the kids during the first parts of our worship time, and we look forward to seeing that part of our community life blossom.
Labels: disappointment, hope, isaiah, wild grapes
As we are working on our mission statement(s), I've been on the looking for thoughts, ideas, and images that could inspire our own self-descriptions. I just came across this wonderful poem by Stephen Dobyns called "Thelonious Monk" (click here for the whole poem). Here's an excerpt from it that makes me imagine what it could be like to embody church as improvisation:
Thelonious Monk
A record store on Wabash was where
I bought my first album. I was a freshman
in college and played the record in my room
over and over. I was caught by how he took
the musical phrase and seemed to find a new
way out, the next note was never the note
you thought would turn up and yet seemed
correct. . . .
What Monk banged out was the conviction
of innumerable directions. Years later
I felt he's been blueprint, map and education:
no streets, we bushwhacked through the underbrush;
not timid, why open your mouth if not to shout?
not scared, the only road lay straight in front;
not polite, the notes themselves were sneak attacks;
not quiet—look, can't you see the sky will soon
collapse and we must keep dancing till it cracks?