daring to set people free

This week's theme is "Reforming the Church" with insights drawn from chapter 5 & 6 of Kelly Fryer's book Reclaiming the "C" Word. One of the songs that Ken has chosen for worship is an African American Spiritual, Mary, don't you weep. As I was working on slides for this weekend, I wanted to find out more about this song's history. What I found were 2 sermons preached about freedom relative to slavery. While our circumstances are much different, aren't we also struggling to find our voice in this strange land, to transform ourselves, our church, our country and our world?

The sermon, "Without A Song," is based on the 137th Psalm, where the Israelites, in Babylonian captivity, are asked to sing for their captors' amusement. In a lament that echoes down even into our own time—in Verdi’s opera, Nabucco, as in songs by the Medallions and Steel Pulse—the Israelites respond: "How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?" Franklin's response was direct, even blunt: The Israelites should have sung, he told his congregation, because "Some things you can’t say you can sing." In contrast with the Israelites, who had yet to reach their Promised Land, African Americans were in what many countrymen considered their Promised Land—but it remained "a strange land" for black citizens nonetheless. If that "strangeness" of segregation and prejudice were to be transformed, black Americans would need to find their individual and their collective voice. It was that voice that could transform themselves, and the nation, with its powerful reminder that, even for an unknown, individual slave surviving in a harsh, horrific system, "a change is goin' come". As C. L. reminded his congregation of an old hymn that described how God gave Moses the power to part the Red Sea and save the Israelites, a current of anticipation and hope snaked through his audience, particularly when Franklin sang out in his strong baritone of a slave named Mary: "Oh Mary, don't weep. Don't mourn; / Pharaoh's army got drownded; / Mary, don't weep, and then don't mourn." - source

By the mid-nineteenth century there were some four million black slaves in America. Some of the most immoral and unjust practices in the human community have been defended by appeal to the Scripture. In the South, when churches did pay attention to the institution of Slavery, it was more often than not to defend it by appealing to the Bible. Slaves who had become Christian knew better. They found in the Bible the promise of freedom. And in their songs they sang of their hope. - source

join mychurch.org/plc

Some of us are trying out a myspace-like site for church members @ mychurch.org/plc. Try it out and share your ideas on how we might use this online communication vehicle.

discipleship matters - part I

We've been hearing a lot about discipleship at Peace, but it's not just happening in here. This week during the Beth Moore study, she talked about a magazine article she was reading that had the dire predictions of the church in America dying, but she countered with what she has seen going on in the church communities she visits in her travels. She is seeing a discipleship movement where God is raising up disciples within congregations and connecting those disciples across denominations.

Technorati, a service that tracks blogs, reports that there are over 44,000 blog entries about discpleship within the past month. Here are some samples:

• Wineskins for Discipleship - they have some really good ideas about growing disciples


• Don't make outreach the primary goal? - do you agree?


• Discipleship 101


• Putt Putt Christians