Exciting Times - To Be A Young Pastor

Well, I have been at my first call now for about a week and a half. Things are going very well and I am quite excited to finally be up and running. My ordination is coming up on October 20th @ 7pm in Manassas, VA - so if anyone is around you are welcome to join us for worship that evening.

What is really exciting to me is a recent conference meeting that I had. About half of the folks there - all pastors - were young adults. Lively, energetic, and encouraging. I didn't expect this, because on internship the pastors in my cluster were NOT of the young adult persuasion, but here in the Metro DC synod, at least in my conference of the ones who showed up, there are quite a few young adults!

I have also been led to other networking and connecting spots. For women who are under 40, there is an online community called Fidelia's Sisters and they are having a meet up here in DC soon. This makes me very excited.

As well, as an art & music opportunity for young adults in the DC area is the upcoming Washington National Opera's Generation O event - Don Giovonni featuring Placido Domingdo conducting. This is an event exclusively for folks 18-35 and tickets cost only $15. So check it out if you are in town!

So you're a Lutheran in North America...

I am writing this from a hotel room in Lund, Sweden (having convinced the members of the congregation where I work that their new pastor is going to take off to a different country every few months. If only that were true!)

I'm here as a young communicator for a Lutheran World Federation conference and 60th anniversary celebration. After an all-night flight (nothing makes me long to be horizontal more than trying to sleep on a plane) I arrived in Copenhagen and took a train to the town of Lund. Here I'm reconnecting with a group of young adults from all the LWF regions -- fellow young Lutherans from places like Brazil, Ethiopia, Argentina, Australia, India, Madagascar, France, Norway... and that's just a handful.

One of the things I may get the chance to do here is to communicate some of the important issues facing young adult Lutherans in North America, and specifically in the U.S. But why speak alone when I could include your input?

So I officially invite you to share your thoughts -- and here's a meme (a short personal quiz) to get you going!


Name: Meghan

Age: 27... for two more months.

The way I describe my faith identity: Lutheran. Or Lutheran-Christian. Or "Christian who happens to be a Lutheran." Depends on the audience.

I think God is like... wise and loving laughter.

I think the core of Christianity is... Belonging to God because Jesus gathered us, and living out our part of Christ's body in the world.

Paid to go to church? Yes, I'm working as a pastor.

If not, how would you describe your participation in your faith community? As I said -- leading.

Number of people in the LWF "youth" range (18-30) in your worship community: a handful.

Favorite thing about being a Lutheran: paradoxes! And the ability to laugh at ourselves.

Biggest issue(s) facing me, and other Lutherans my age where I live: As I see it, there's the large geographical distance... plus the way young Lutheran adults are spread out among congregations... plus the fact that there are not a lot of resources for people 18-30, especially once you leave college... plus the fact that many of us who ARE this age and ARE involved in church are working as lay or ordained leaders.

Greatest gift our generation can offer the church right now: a perspective familiar with the smallness and "grey"ness and interconnectedness of the world, and the interest in being the church in ways that reflect diversity.

Future of Lutherans in North America? I'm not sure. I get worried about the deficit of people in our generation in church because I think we are missing their gifts. And we need them.

A role model of faith: someone like Anne Lamott or Barbara Brown Taylor, for being confident enough of God's grace to admit doubt and vulnerability on purpose, because it helps to make the gospel real for them and others.

Favorite non-religious movie or book that taught you something about God or faith: Big Fish, for wondering: what makes a story true?

What's most important to you about a community of faith you'd want to join? Not perfection... but the openness to be surprised by the Holy Spirit, the willingness to be uncomfortable for God's sake, the sense that living faith in the world is the point, and "church" is practice.

How about a favorite quote to end? Life is too important to be taken seriously -- Oscar Wilde

Geneva

In January I got to spend a week in the offices of the Lutheran World Federation in Geneva, Switzerland, and composed the following note that I wanted to share with you all:

Greetings from the Lutheran World Federation offices in Geneva, Swizerland! It feels a little unreal to be here. Check it out: This building shares space with the World Council of Churches, Action by Churches Together, and even some UN folks. The main United Nations building is down the way. The Red Cross/Red Crescent are headquartered here. So is the WTO, for that matter. And despite being one of the smaller and less-famous international organizations here, did you know that the LWF represents 66 million Lutherans worldwide?

It's kind of heady stuff...and yet, Geneva is a fairly normal (even fairly small) European city, and the LWF office is a fairly normal (and VERY 1960s) building. With regular people doing regular work, notwithstanding the fact that I keep hearing a mixture of English, German and French drifting in from the hallway. And coming from the same people.

I'm here for eight or nine days, helping the Office for Communication Services with part of their Communications Audit. Ever heard of one? It's like the financial kind, only it measures how effective communications are: do the various newsletters, magazines, emails, website, etc. successfully communicate who the LWF is? Is the message getting out? Is it clear? Is there a common look to LWF publications that provide widespread recognition? (Answer is NO to the last one.) If this is fascinating to you, welcome to my world. If you think it's boring as dirt, I guess that just goes to show the truth of all the world's various kinds of work being holy callings. (For example, for soil engineers or archaeologists I suppose dirt is fascinating.)

But I think it's amazing how powerful communication (verbal and especially visual) is these days, and how much churches often struggle with it. My current congregation is trying to let go of the "Will you tell Bob when you see him at bowling on Tuesday that the meeting is at noon on Sunday, and could he tell June?" style of communication, because we're just too big for that now.

As I'm doing research, I was hit again by how well these sisters and brothers in Christ are communicating these days. Kind of makes ME want to join the UCC.

I've missed our group and hope we can get together sometime soon!
Until then, wish me luck. Post a comment and I'll buy you some swiss chocolate!

Summer Lovin...had me a blast

In honor of the "beach reading" section of the bookstore, which mainly includes books that tend toward the fluffier side of "fiction and literature," here's a post that's just for fun.

Buddhism has Richard Gere, Catholicism has Mel Gibson (but is trying to return him, I hear) and the Scientologists, unbelievably, have not only Tom Cruise and family but John Travolta and Kelly Preston and Leah Remini and all KINDS of people. Eek.

True, we Lutherans have some celebrity members too -- like Julia Roberts. (Okay, she's not Lutheran, but Lyle Lovett is, and they got married in an LCMS congregation...Julia's famous bare feet and all.)

Wouldn't it be cool if Lutheranism became the hot new celebrity trend? People wearing Luther seals instead of red Kabbalah bracelets? Convening secretly for Wednesday morning Bible Study with watery coffee and pastry from the Jewel?

Tell me: if you could choose one famous person whose devoted Lutheranism would be revealed in a People magazine cover, who would it be? Why?

I'm voting for Ewan MacGregor. I'd just love to hear him in a Scottish accent talking about how much he believes that all people are saints and sinnerrrrrrrs. (Not enough Scottish Lutherans in the world, really.)

Your turn!

Do You Have an Opinion about the Situation in Iraq?

Lutheran Young Adults Network (LYAN)
Hola, LYANistas! I'd like to let you folks know about an opportunity to collect antiwar petition signatures on behalf of DAWN (DuPage Against War Now). We're going to be at the "Cool Cars" event in downtown Elmhurst tonight. (Sorry, I'm sure y'all could have used some advanced warning.) Anyhow, I'll be there. If you want to find out more about DAWN yourself, go to d-a-w-n.org. From the DAWN website, you can download petitions for DuPage and Cook counties if you'd like to get signatures on your own. Thanks.

Voices from outside Chicago

Howdy from the Northland.

Seems that life is starting to catch up with me and I need to head out to take care of a family emergency. I may be heading to Winters, Texas sooner than I had thought. (KG knows the reference.)

Sorry to put such a down first post.

JK

A Theology of Stuff

So my husband and I recently moved to a new apartment.

This is not an unusual occurrence for people in our age bracket in North America, I realize. In fact, despite the newness of being in an apartment my new husband and I have chosen together, moving itself is a familiar ritual. I have moved a lot (maybe six times in the past five years), and the process of packing and unpacking my belongings always feels a little like an archaeological dig into my life up to that point. (Is it particularly American or North American or upper middle class, I wonder, to perceive my "stuff" as somehow representative of my identity?)

Moving means sorting my things, and by extension, my past, into categories: "TO KEEP." "TO KEEP, BUT ONLY IN STORAGE." "TO GIVE AWAY TO GOODWILL." "TO THROW OUT." This time, my husband and I were determined to be ruthless, to simplify our lives by chucking everything unnecessary. We would not become people who, by the time they bought a house, filled a garage meant for cars with boxes we never opened but still insisted we needed. We were Christians, after all. No storing up treasures on earth for us.

This has not been an easy task. It's not the furniture or the kitchenware that gets me--it's the personal stuff, all the photos and cards and mementos that I have accumulated. Some people (I am thinking in particular of an old college roommate) create amazing, Martha-Stewart-like scrapbooks with those things; I pile them haphazardly into boxes and drag them from residence to residence. But it is hard to part with any of it. Who knows when I might want this My Little Pony plate? What if we need these extra fifty copies of our wedding program? I know I'll never have a use for all these Christmas cards, but how could we think of ripping them up and throwing them away? Isn't that somehow dishonoring the givers?

Then there's my fears of creating waste. I imagine standing before God one day (who, in this vision, looks like the genie from "Aladdin" or possibly Alanis Morissette) and having God look at me quizzically over endless landfills of toxic waste created by MY STUFF. Alanis...er, God, that is...smiles at me gently while I try in vain to explain that my commitment to material simplicity led me to contribute to the destruction of the earth's fragile equilibrium.

Why keeping all my stuff in boxes in my basement is a better alternative, I'm not sure. But throwing it out FEELS worse. It's exposing the public to my accumulation and my wastefulness. (Yet, whom would I benefit and not insult if I benevolently donated dirty t-shirts, socks without partners, or broken utensils? Isn't that a little patronizing?)

I guess I'd make a bad cynic. Or Buddhist. Or any faith that challenges me not to be attached to my stuff. (Oh, wait. That's my faith, too.) But I start to see the power of stuff when I'm moving... the ways it can be genuinely meaningful, but also the ways that I let it trap me and rule me.

So the move has been a process of treasuring some things, but letting a lot of things go... in the hopes that the true meaning of the "things" remains. Maybe it's one way for people in a stuff-absorbed culture to think of baptism and grace: baptism, the washing of excess stuff from the body. The stripping away of reliance on stuff. Grace: the freedom to uncurl ourselves from around our stuff.

And yet... I am saint and sinner. I am clearing our space in part to make way for new stuff. Sigh.

Lutheran Shoes

Hi everyone. I hope this finds all Lutheran (and other young adults well and happy and not suffering from heat exhaustion). A funny story--today---it rained in Chicago. I wore some "sensible" shoes to walk to the train-they are flat slides. At one point, I got surrounded by water and had to go in---to the puddle---it was deep. The rest of the way--my sensible slides kept sliding off and I would lose my shoe on the street as I was in perpetual motion. I would be walking--and off slides the shoe and almost falls down is KG! It was like some sort of real version of SATC. Only-Sarah Jessica Parker never lost her shoe on the sidewalk, or on the subway platform (yes, my bare foot came into contact on the platform).

I'm calling it Lutheran shoes. Glam life would tell us that you can walk forever in shoes that will never fall off-just like SJP. But-most of the time-real life intervenes in the midst of pretty, but sensible walking shoes and sometimes, there you are. Foot to sidewalk, toe to subway platform, non-pedicured foot exposed to the world. The real world is full of funny and silly and humbling stuff. Nothing can escape the complexity of God's created world--full of puddles, and heat waves, and days of going to work, not even my shoes. Thankfully-nothing can escape the simple grace that unfolds in the complex world and calls us forth to revel in the puddles, and keep on walking. I'll tell you what, though, I'm definitely keeping a spare pare of flip flops in my bag at all times.

KG

Chicago-area get-together

Well, since I'm old hat at this blogging thing, I thought I'd use my first post here for actual, ahem, business.

Howzabout a real-life get-together for the Chicago-area folks at my place, say 7 o'clock?

Here are some possible dates:

Monday, August 7
Monday, August 14
Tuesday, August 15
Wednesday, August 23
Thursday, August 24
Friday, August 25

Use the comments field to list any of the dates that work for you!

A Pre-Pre-Prologue?

Oh, this is fun!
I've never done anything like this, yet I've always wanted to.
I feel almost giddy with anticipation.
Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot.
Well, it all seems so simple now!
On with the show...