How well we are loved . . .

 Dear Friends,

Writing on the 20th of December, we are yet in the midst of late Advent, with the fourth Sunday of the season approaching in days.  And yet, yet, the feeling is more and more of the feast of the Nativity of Christ in just a few days.

The Incarnation, so central to the faith of Christians across the world and over the generations, says so much.  It affirms what our instincts tell us: that we are messed up, and that left to ourselves we will make it worse.  But that's not all it says, not by a long shot.  If that were so Christmas would be much less of a celebration and much more of a downer.

The truth of the Incarnation affirms how much we are worth in the eyes of God, how dear we are to the heart of God.  In a word, the Incarnation proclaims that we are worth: everything.  It reminds us - on December 25 and on every day of the year that we call Jesus' coming to mind - that we are the beloved of God.

May you and yours know this saving truth deep at heart this Christmas and always!  And may our efforts here at Mercer School always assist you in holding that affirmation in both mind and heart.

Wishing you every blessing of the season,
John McGinty+


January

22 - Safe Church Renewed Guidelines meeting for parish leaders.
25 - The Responsible Treasurer, a workshop appropriate to anyone involved in the preparatinon of a congregation's annual Parochial Report.

February

11 - Preaching the Lectionary for Lent and Easter, with Dr. Gordon Lathrop;
12 - Godspell and Bernstein's Mass: Faith and Unbelief in a Secular World; 6 sessions with Gregory Eaton at St Ann & the Holy Trinity, Brooklyn Heights;
20 - Training for new Lay Eucharistic Visitors;
22 - Safe Church Training (SHE-CAP) at Mercer.

March

8 - Mercer Institute of Spirituality Inaugural Event: Being Human -
Focusing and Spirituality: exploring a foundational practice for both pastoral conversation and spiritual growth , with Dr. John McDargh of Boston College;
15 - Leadership Day - "Leadership in the 21st Century Church," including presentations on Who Are We as Church?, Vestry Leadership, Clergy Leadership, Good Meetings, Planning for the Future, and more;
19 - Lenten Retreat Evening - the first of three: Come Aside - Silence and Prayer in Lent.

May

3 - 2nd Annual Faith Formation Convocation: a daylong exploration of formation resources from Sunday School through adult education;
31 - Bishop's Youth Bash.

June

14 - Safe Church Training (summer programs/camps);
21 - 50th Wedding Anniverary Celebration.

Further Spring 2014 events are listed on the Mercer Online Calendar.
For further information and registration, visit www.mercerschool.org.  Click from the homepage on Coming Events/Register.  On the calendar, find and click on the event date.  Locate the event title and click directly on it to open information on the event and how to register.  And you can always phone us at 516.248.4800, extension 140.

All these gatherings and more are at your service to help you serve well, to find your call and to live it well.

Mandela and Responsibility to the Future

The world has been singularly focused on the life and legacy of Nelson Mandela since his death last night in South Africa.  His is a powerful story of commitment to a cause, of openness to conversion of heart, of a profound ability to hear and connect with an adversary and to invite all to unity.

If you read again through those elements of his life and death, to which many others might eloquently be added, it is clear that these are each and all central aims of the life of the Christian community.  Mandela has been a teacher to us all of the possibility of reconciliation and of real progress to move through and past division.  He continues to teach those lessons in death.  I suspect that his voice will continue to move us for generations.  I hope that this will be the case.

We take these lessons and make them real everyday, right where we live and work.  If we do not, they will never become real and tangible among us.  If we do, we help in quite concrete ways to build a viable and even delightful future.  As a part of the Church, our goals here at Mercer School are the same.  Our programs are intended to deepen our commitment to Jesus Christ and his Gospel, to call us to always deepening conversion, to open our ears to really hear one another across differences of opinion and to allow shared insights to bloom among us.

This Advent we celebrate a new church year and look ahead to a new calendar year.  I want to highlight here a few of our upcoming events over the first weeks and months of the new year:

January

25 - The Responsible Treasurer, a workshop appropriate to anyone involved in the preparatinon of a congregation's annual Parochial Report.

February

11 - Preaching the Lectionary for Lent and Easter, with Dr. Gordon Lathrop;
12 - Godspell and Bernstein's Mass: Faith and Unbelief in a Secular World; 6 sessions with Gregory Eaton at St Ann & the Holy Trinity, Brooklyn Heights;
20 - Training for new Lay Eucharistic Visitors;
22 - Safe Church Training (SHE-CAP) at Mercer.

March

8 - Mercer Institute of Spirituality Inaugural Event: Being Human -
Focusing and Spirituality: exploring a foundational practice for both pastoral conversation and spiritual growth, with Dr. John McDargh of Boston College;
15 - Leadership Day - "Leadership in the 21st Century Church," including presentations on Who Are We as Church?, Vestry Leadership, Clergy Leadership, Good Meetings, Planning for the Future, and more;
19 - Lenten Retreat Evening - the first of three: Come Aside - Silence and Prayer in Lent.

May

3 - 2nd Annual Faith Formation Convocation: a daylong exploration of formation resources from Sunday School through adult education;
31 - Bishop's Youth Bash.

June

14 - Safe Church Training (summer programs/camps);
21 - 50th Wedding Anniverary Celebration.

Further Spring 2014 events are listed on the Mercer Online Calendar.
For further information and registration, visit www.mercerschool.org.  Click from the homepage on Coming Events/Register.  On the calendar, find and click on the event date.  Locate the event title and click directly on it to open information on the event and how to register.  And you can always phone us at 516.248.4800, extension 140.

All these gatherings and more are at your service to help you serve well, to find your call and to live it well.  As Nelson Mandela taught us:

Advent blessings,
John+

(Photo courtesy of Huffington Post: http://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/15-of-nelson-mandelas-most-inspiring-quotes)

Lighting Up Advent

Over the past few days, since Thanksgiving came and went and Advent has begun, I've been at times on the road after dark (as most of the day is after dark at this point in the year!).  One of the things that I have noticed over this brief period is quite obvious: if not before Thanksgiving, certainly immediately afterwards, many homes are brightly lit with decorations looking forward to the celebration of Christmas.

Or perhaps to put it more realistically in our present culture, the actual celebration of Christmas for many is taking place now in the work of decorating the interior and exterior of homes, in shopping, in listening to Christmas music on the radio or online.  For many. Christmas is now.  It will end the morning of December 25th.

On the one hand, this means that the Christian church needs to be all the more intentional about keeping Advent.  Advent is its own proper season, with its own long and storied history, and its own gifts of expectation, patience, and a rich sharing in liturgy of the beauty of the scriptures.  We lose Advent and its gifts, as many have, at our own peril, with regard to living life at a human pace and with spiritual depth.

On the other hand, the dyspepsia between the church season and society's take on the season becomes all-too-visible as one drives through neighborhoods these present evenings.  What do I mean?  One sees brightly lit houses in their dozens and eventually hundreds, decorated beautifully, proclaiming at the very least that there is something special about this season.  Then one comes across a Christian house of worship, of virtually any denomination or non-, including our own, and the building in which the Christians meet is either darkened or looks exactly as it does throughout the year.  There is nothing visible to say or to confirm: this is a special time.

I am not suggesting that our churches decorate now for the Christmas season.  To do so would be to betray the reality of Advent, and if the church does that, this gorgeous season so little kept will be a goner.  What I am suggesting is that either:

•  - we need to find a way, using greens and Advent colors and light, to allow our church buildings to say out loud now, "This is Advent, and it counts for something, and we are joyfully and intentionally and lovingly preparing for the coming of the Savior!" or
•  - we need to decorate our church exteriors amazingly well with Christmas decorations once the Christmas season actually begins and for its entire length, while early-bought Christmas trees languish on the sidewalks waiting for the sanitation truck as early as noontime on December 25.

Of the two possibilities, which are not mutually exclusive, I want to advocate especially for the first.  If we are keeping Advent, let us look like it outwardly to the world around us, the world we serve in Christ's name.  It seems to me that if the rest of the neighborhood is lit up with joy - whether informed or not - and the neighborhood churches are dark, we are in effect confirming the worst images of Christianity in the general population: out-of-touch, crabby, distanced from people's lives.

We have so much to share in the gifts of Advent that can deepen the coming celebration of the Nativity for all.  What can we do to look like this is really true?

***
A renewed invitation to join us on Mercer School's Facebook page, Conversations at Mercer, for a shared reading and discussion of Christopher Webber's Advent with Evelyn Underhill.  We'll be there every day throughout the Advent and Christmas seasons,

Pax,
John+

Welcome to the Beginning.

There is a wisdom to beginning anew, with some regularity.  At work it is good to step back now and then and consider whether we are progressing as desired, or whether we are even still on the path we first elected.  In personal and family life, where routine can become the enemy of love's expression, how important it is often to pause and look into the eyes of a loved one as if we were seeing them for the first time.  What a miracle it is that this person exists at all, and is in my life, and that we are joined by the bond of love.

The liturgical year of the Church's life bears this same wisdom to us.  Last Sunday we celebrated the final Sunday of the Church's year, bowing before Christ the King.  This very next Sunday we find ourselevs at the beginning, at the first Sunday of the Church's year, at the threshold of Advent.  Grace invites us to see the presence and the promise of God today with a fresh eye, to hear the Gospel as if we never had before, to wake up to the wonder of God existing at all, of God caring for us at all, of God caring beyond all borders and electing to come among us.  Today we begin, anew, to consider all of this, and so much profoundly more.  What a gift.

At Mercer School we begin by inaugurating this afternoon our online reading, in common, of Christopher Webber's edited collection, Advent with Evelyn Underhill.  Join us on Mercer's Facebook page, Conversations at Mercer, to discuss day-by-day through the season what Evelyn Underhill shares with us and how it applies to us now during Advent 2013.

In this season, as always, responsibilities continue.  Among our responsibilities to one another in Church and society is that of confronting racism, of coming to understand and know one another across differences, respecting and celebrating our diversity all the while.  For many, this is a challenge.  We seek to help one another by beginning again the offering of Racism Awareness workshops here in the Diocese of Long Island.  The first is scheduled for Saturday, December 14th at Mercer in Garden City.  Information on the day, and online registation instruction, is available from the Mercer homepage (www.mercerschool.org) by clicking on Coming Events/Register on the lefthand column.   From the calendar that appears, click on the date of December 14th,  There you will you see RAP listed (Racism Awareness Program).  Click directly on the program title and you'll see a description you can scroll through and a link to register,  Incidentally you can explore and register for all Mercer's offerings in the same way.

Blessings to all as we begin again together.  Thanks be to God for the opportunity!

Pax,
John+

ThanksWords. ThanksActions. Thanksgiving.

Dear Friends,

As this Thanksgiving week opens, it is likely that the attention of people around here and around the country is divided between whatever you do to earn your living and last-minute thoughts and plans for Thursday's gathering  - hopefully with family and friends - to celebrate our national day of Thanksgiving.  And that is okay.  We likely learned as children that anticipation is at least as important as an event in itself.  And if we didn't learn it as children, we may have been instructed on the same point at some point by the Rolling Stones!

In our madcap-paced society, it really behooves us to make the attempt - whether sometime this week or throughout the coming blessed (and so overlooked) season of Advent - to radically slow down physically, emotionally, spiritually and to consider what are those blessings for which we are truly thankful.  Gratitude is a revelation to our deep hearts of what our world - both the greater one and our own personal part of it - actually looks like.  Gratitude is one of the healthiest reality checks we have been given.  Don't let it slip by.

I have been considering what are some of the people, things, events, memories and hopes for which I am most grateful - particularly writing from this office at the Mercer School of Theology.  I have been trying to push the envelope on gratitude this year.  That is, to both round up the usual suspects and push myself to delve deeper into good reason for thanks.  So here is a very partial list.  I would invite you to add your own.

Thank you, good God, for . . .

family - a first and lasting blessing, from generation to generation;
for fellow workers in the work of this school, and in the diocese of Long Island in all its congregations;
for friendships, both those which have endured for decades and those being planted today;
for the Word of the Gospel, which constantly reveals the gentle power to give and to renew life, to revise perspective and expectation;
for this beloved nation, crazed in these days in its maddening and confusing current culture, yet filled with great good hearts, people of love and hope;
for the right to free speech, although the exercise of it often reveals first the crazy-making current culture referenced just above (!);
for the invitation to delve together ever more deeply into contemplation of you, dear God, in prayer and thought;
for the reality of the godly worship that takes place daily, and certainly weekly, throughout this world;
for those who gather bodily at that worship, for those who are joined to those gatherings at heart, and for those who would be there but for obstructions remaining painfully from the past;
for hope in a future unseen, untested, but filled surely with the living Spirit of Jesus Christ;
for possibility;
for mercy;
for light;
for grace;
for the oft-revealed ultimate deep openness of the human heart.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!  Thank you for your past and present interest in the work of Mercer School.  Do check out our coming events on our homepage (www.mercerschool.org) and register to come visit.  And if there's planning for the future you'd like to have us undertake, be in touch! We'll do it together.  That's the best way to do anything at all.

With gratitude,
John+

PS - sometimes what we need and that for which we're grateful is quite simple - like "a stone to roll."  Take a listen.

A question on the train

 

The other day I was returning to Garden City after a visit to Brooklyn on the Hempstead line of the Long Island Railroad.  After the iPhone ran out of juice, I was blessedly compelled to pay attention (as I want to do anyway!) to my actual, rather than virtual, surroundings.  At the end of the car was an advertisement from a business magazine that included this question, "Is your business capturing the new consumer imagination?"

 

Now I have the disease that hears all questions and assesses all statements in terms of the state of the church, especially at the fundamental level of the parish congregation.  So I read this question and began to muse.

 

First of all there is the weighty (or not) matter of effective translation.  The church is not a business, though there are things we should (and hopefully do) learn from the business way of being.  To give but one example, a responsive healthy business is responsive precisely to the people whom it is trying to either reach or to retain as customers.  As a church, how effectively responsive are we on the 'inside' to the folks around us who know little about the church, or who mistrust the church, or who have had a bad experience of church in the past?  How open are we to seeing, hearing, engaging these people (who are sometimes known as the majority of people!)?  So, although we are not running a business, there are things we can learn there.

The question on the train asks us if we are in tune with "the new consumer."  There are indeed not a few folks in the church who may rightly be called consumers in the way they relate to their parish.  (See Rebuilt: Awakening the Faithful, Reaching the Lost, Making Church Matter, Introduction and Chapter 1, by Michael White and Tom Corcoran, published 2013).  In church terms, that's not a good thing either to be or to be called.  Rather we are called to make and to be disciples.  A consumer consumes, chews up and spits out.  A disciple commits, learns, remains, and serves.

But, to go on with translation, is there a 'new consumer' in the church?  That is to say: is there a new 21st century person who needs to be approached differently in order to be invited well to consider the life of a disciple?  Are there ways we have connected with people in the past as church that are less likely to be successful now, or even advisable?  I think there are.  Is there openness among us who are already church members to be open to new ways to get to know, to approach, to accept new possible disciples?  There had better be such an openness, for the sake of the present, the future, the church, the person to whom we are speaking, and the mission.  All these benefit when we connect where people are, in the way they are accustomed to doing so.

And the final word of the question, the best word there of all: "imagination."  The new consumer, the 21st century man and woman on the street, on the web, and not in the pew, the potential disciple, can only be reached by a people of imagination, a people ready to imagine previously unseen ways of speaking the Good News, of being the church, and of inviting to discipleship.

How alive is my imagination?  Is it likely to have a walk-on role on "The Walking Dead"?  How lively is your imagination?  Perhaps the first thing we need do in answer to the question on the train is to loosen the reins and allow imagination some blessed freedom.

_______________________________________________

 

Mercer’s new Vision Wall of art’s first exhibit, “Living Ubuntu,” featuring photos by the Reverend Wilfredo Benitez is ending this month. We will be sharing news soon about the new exhibit. The photos of “Living Ubuntu” are available for purchase at $125.00, all of which benefits Mercer School programming. Just come by the Mercer offices if you are interested. We are grateful to Father Benitez for helping us transform a blank wall to something much richer and beautiful.

Note the new section of the Mercer website (www.mercerschool.org called “Safe Church.” Here, fully revised and new guidelines will be made available to you after Diocesan Convention has concluded on November 16th.  These will be must reading for all parish leaders and for everyone committed to a Church in which all, including the most vulnerable among us, are safe and valued.

All of the above, and everything on this site, on our Facebook page and on our Twitter feed is meant to say this: we are a service organization here at Mercer. We serve you so that you can better serve where you are? What is your call to service? And how can we help?

 

Blessings,

John McGinty+

Dean

November 2013 @ Mercer

Dear Friends, 

Abraham Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation

Around these parts the month of November is notable in at least two ways: the Diocese of Long Island’s annual Convention takes place (this year on the 15th and 16th), and we all pause for a day of Thanksgiving. At Convention, Mercer School will have a display table. If you are present as a delegate or visitor, please stop by and say hello. Among other things, you’ll be able to get information there about second semester offerings and plans for Mercer’s future. You’ll be able to learn about upcoming revisions to our Safe Church Training and the renewal of anti-racism training in our Racism Awareness Program. We will also be sharing a new brochure about the vocational diaconate, asking whether that might in fact be your call.

Prior to Convention, our Preaching the Lectionary series continues on Wednesday, November 13th. We are delighted to welcome Professor C. Clifton Black of Princeton Theological Seminary who will lead us in considering the preaching task for the seasons of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany this year. We continue this series in happy collaboration with our brothers and sisters of the Metropolitan New York Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Again, registration online is available through the Upcoming Events Mercer calendar. There is still space. If you are a preacher, do yourself a favor for the upcoming seasons and register to join us on November 13th. 

Mercer’s new Vision Wall of art’s first exhibit, “Living Ubuntu,” featuring photos by the Reverend Wilfredo Benitez is ending this month. We will be sharing news soon about the new exhibit. The photos of “Living Ubuntu” are available for purchase at $125.00, all of which benefits Mercer School programming. Just come by the Mercer offices if you are interested. We are grateful to Father Benitez for helping us transform a blank wall to something much richer and beautiful.

Note the new section of the Mercer website called “Safe Church.” Here, fully revised and new guidelines will be made available to you after Convention has concluded. These will be must reading for all parish leaders and for everyone committed to a Church in which all, including the most vulnerable among us, are safe and valued.

All of the above, and everything on this site, on our Facebook page and on our Twitter feed is meant to say this: we are a service organization here at Mercer. We serve you so that you can better serve where you are? What is your call to service? And how can we help?

Finally, all the best to our alumni, students, instructors, families and all the people of the diocese for a happy celebration of all we have been given, on Thanksgiving Day! 

Sincerely in Christ,

John McGinty+