Author Archive for admin

Urban Teaching Urban Living

Published
by
admin
on May 27, 2008
in Action, Community and Dialogue
. 5 Comments

Teaching in the inner city is an idea that never occurred to me until recently. I was raised in suburban Delaware a few miles outside the city of Wilmington. Last year I became involved with the Circle of Hope community. For those of you who do not know me, I am an Earth Science Education student at the University of Delaware and lead a cell in Newark DE.

As I grew in faith and spirit over the last year, I wanted to dedicate more of my time towards achieving the Kingdom here on Earth. A follower of Jesus isn’t a person who attends church every Sunday. Jesus wasn’t merely a sacrifice, but is a living example of how to live our lives. There are many ways that one can get involved in the community with Circle of Hope. For me there was a barrier, blocking me from getting involved in some of the various projects, teams, and community building opportunities. This barrier is a fifty-mile blockade that extends from Newark to Philadelphia.

In August, a wonderful community of people living on Ellsworth St. about 2 blocks down from BW is letting me move into their home. This is very exciting for me as I will be living near my Circle family. Now where am I going to work?

Everyone around me has tried to convince me not to teach in the inner city. My student teaching supervisors told me that it is not a good idea for my first year. I even convinced myself that I would never teach in an inner-city setting because I believed I would get ripped apart, as I am a fairly timid person. I was planning on living in South Philly and commuting maybe 30-40 minutes or so to Delaware. I could spend a couple of weeknights in Wilmington so that I could rely less on gasoline. Here lies the same problem. I would still be living a double life: one in Delaware, and another in Pennsylvania. This dichotomy would eventually wear me down.

When speaking with other teachers from the Circle community who teach in Philly and Camden, I could not help but envy their passion, desire, and sense of obligation to help inner city students. I am wrapping up my student teaching at an up and coming suburban district in Middletown DE. I love every single one of my students, but over the last 12 weeks I have felt as if this may not be for me.

My mom has told me that I have always rooted for the underdog. I have a passion for helping the students who are behind or struggling. I want to motivate students, not just teach them about the Earth. This is why I have come to the conclusion that I want to teach in Philly or Camden. I think it will be extremely difficult, but this is where God is leading me, and I pray that he will give me the strength to survive in this setting, which I am somewhat unfamiliar with.

Christianese, Economics, and Context

Published
by
admin
on September 26, 2007
in Community, Dialogue, Family and Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

By: Alison N.

Last week I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker (for those who don’t know, I am a social worker and a therapist for a child welfare agency). My co-worker, Amy, was telling me about how she has been sending out resumes in France and is thinking about moving there. Amy grew up in a missionary family and spent her high school years in France, where her family still lives. I asked about her reasons for wanting to move back, and Amy commented that she hasn’t really been happy here for a while, and that she can’t figure out how to be a Christian in America. I thought this was very interesting (maybe partly because I’ve never tried to be a Christian anywhere else, so this concept never occurred to me), and asked her to say more.

She went on to talk about how she grew up in places where the distinction between Christians and others, or “non-Christians”, was very clear. She lived in places in Africa where Christians were very much in the minority and were sometimes persecuted to various degrees. And then in France, where it’s not as culturally common to self-identify as Christian, and she found “living her Christian walk” to be a simpler, more clear-cut endeavor. She described her confusion and frustration over Christianity in America—a Christianity that she sees as being very divisive and superficial. She talked about knowing people here who use lots of Christianese—the God-blesses and the Praise-the-Lords—but in whose lives she fails to see God reflected. She elaborated about this a bit more before looking at me and asking, “So what do you think?”

This caught me a bit off guard and I wasn’t really sure what to say. This may be, in some ways, because there’s also a part of me that craves for circumstances in which living out of my faith is, even if not easy, very simple and clear. I too can feel bogged down by how to live my life, participating in our society as I currently choose to do, and genuinely follow Jesus. How do I serve God and others with my money AND pay my mortgage, student loans, and, admittedly, sometimes buy shoes? How do I serve God and others with my time AND work full time, go to school (thank God a thing of the past!), and work on my house? I don’t know if I’m getting any of this right! Working these things out can be daunting and complicated—certainly for me, at least. But as I thought about it more over the past week or so, I began to realize that this is why community is so important. This is hard! We need each other to challenge, support, and love each other…to mutually care about living this life together, to reconciling with each other and our neighbors, to seeking justice for our communities. I wouldn’t want to try to do it without you—and it’s good to be reminded of that.

Just one word and forgotten are the heartaches

Published
by
admin
on June 1, 2007
in Action, Circle Venture, Community, Dialogue and Partnerships
. 3 Comments

by Shelley Crognale

Running a thrift store may seem like its all fun and games, but really its serious business. I vividly recall sitting in Rod’s office after agreeing to explore the role of managing the second Circle Thrift and admitting I was scared. With tears in my eyes, I expressed how risky it felt. Rod tried to reassure me, “It will be okay if it fails!” It wasn’t until much later that I realized that what I felt was the fear of success, not failure. What would happen to me if this thing took off?

I have been playing it safe for a long time. For as long as I can remember, actually. I don’t even know how to ride a bike, for goodness’ sake.

I think it’s all mixed up with living half of my childhood with a sometimes recovered, a sometimes recovering and an often sick mom. She was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was 13 and died when I was 23. The process of agreeing to lead Circle Thrift on Broad, though it may seem totally unrelated, has really been healing for me. Until very recently, I had this gut feeling that God just couldn’t be trusted. He seemed nice enough on the surface, how nice can a guy be when he lets your parent suffer and die? How could I believe that he would take care of me? I have two little kids and had just quit my job to spend more time with them. Saying Yes to leading the next Circle Thrift felt like a big risk to this little lady.

But the last several months I have been astonished at how God has honored my Yes. I have five responsible, fun, amazing employees who truly exude the love of God to every person who ventures down the stairs. I have Martha, a true friend and an amazing leader. She gives me tips, advice and guidance plus perspective, passion and energy. And it still blows my mind to think of the team that got this place fixed up and off the ground. There just ain’t enough vouchers to say thanks.

Last weekend, a pipe busted and the store flooded. I am talking puddles. On Monday, Martha and Dane spent a few hours shop-vac-ing the place and my cousin Jason and I gave it a good mopping later. This was a downer, but in the end a few bags of donations were all we lost. We also found out over the weekend that we are once again the recipients of a bigtime donation from the high-end and way cool store Anthropologie. Their donation to the first location netted so much money that we started to dream about the second store. And here we are.

Lately I have found myself humming the hymn, “In the Garden” (If you haven’t heard Over the Rhine’s version of it on their album, Films for Radio, you should check it out). In it, Charles Austin Miles describes a vision he had of the scene when Mary encountered the risen Lord. In 1913, Charles Austin Miles described it this way: “I read the story of the greatest morn in history. The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, while it was yet very dark, unto the sepulcher. Instantly, completely, there unfolded in my mind the scenes of the garden, where out of the mists comes a form, halting, hesitating, tearful, seeking, turning from side to side in bewildering amazement. Falteringly, bearing grief in every accent, with tear-dimmed eyes, she whispers, ‘If Thou has borne Him hence.’ He speaks, and the sound of His voice is so sweet the birds hush their singing. He said to her ‘Mary!’ Just one word and forgotten are the heartaches, the long dreary hours, all the past blotted out in His presence.”

I have been in the dark, in the mist and felt all those things: halting, hesitating, seeking, bewildered, faltering, amazed. It took a long time to hear, but I feel like Jesus has spoken my name. And I know that I am His own.

What Can We Do?

Published
by
admin
on May 22, 2007
in Action, Circle Venture, Community, Dialogue, Family, Partnerships and Peace
. 1 Comment

By Brian Baughan

Unless my memory fails me, Ghazwa al-Doori is the first Iraqi I have ever met. We introduced ourselves at the end of one of the workshops held at the AFSC Symposium on Iraqi Refugees this past Saturday. A thirty-something woman dressed in a traditional headscarf, she had shown up to the conference with her sister, with whom she lives in New Jersey.

Ghazwa and her sister were born in the United States during a time when their father was receiving a college degree. Needless to say, they are luckier than the majority of Iraqis. I had gathered that although they had spent most of their lives in Iraq, they were able to resettle here long before things really turned for the worse back home. The story is much different for their brother and other sister, who are refugees in Jordan and face an imminent deadline on their visas. Ghazwa told me that when she talks to them on the phone, she is overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness. If only they could make it over here from Jordan, they could all cram into Ghazwa’s small apartment. But she knows that’s not in the cards. “They’re alone. We’re alone. What can we do?” she said.

Ghazwa’s story was one of several heartbreaking accounts I heard Saturday. The stats were very hard to hear, too: 750,000 Iraqi refugees are now in Jordan, 1 million in Syria, and thousands others scattered throughout the Middle East and other countries. In Iraq, there are another 2 million internally displaced people. It’s the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world, and some are even calling it the worst mass displacement in the Middle East since the exodus following the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948. Making this worse is the fact that the U.S. occupation, along with sectarian violence in Iraq, is directly responsible for the tragedy.

We all have an endless number of distractions—both pointless and worthy—that divert our attention from the human cost of the war in Iraq. As Peter Lems, head of the AFSC’s Iraq Program has observed, even the peace movement has turned blinders toward the domestic situation, as protesters have lambasted the Bush administration and bickered with others over supplemental spending bills.

It’s hard to do anything when the quagmire seems unsolvable, or the legislative measures are just too confusing. But is forgetting the plight of U.S. troops an option? Or, for that matter, the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have died, the hundreds of thousands who are no longer safe in their homeland?

The finger-pointing that accompanied the recent supplemental bill debate reminded me of Jesus’ stern words about the infighting among his own community: “To what, then, can I compare the people of this generation? What are they like? They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling out to each other: ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not cry.’” (Luke 7:31–32)

Peace-loving people can easily assume an air of righteousness, yet all the while sound like screechy, bratty kids in the marketplace. This symposium was different. I felt fortunate to be able to hear out a bunch of thoughtful, caring analysts and service workers who did not sound bratty, whose stubborn devotion remains with the least of these. It also felt good, in an ironic sense, to have my heart broken by those sad stories. I guess it was clear that this was the beginning of an appropriate response to dirges that had not evoked tears for years.*

We’re left with Ghazwa’s question, “What can we do?” One of the workshop leaders stated plainly what is perhaps the most appropriate answer, which is we do what we can. It is an approach that Circle of Hope’s close partner, the Mennonite Central Committee, has taken for years through its international relief and advocacy work, and what our congregations and Circle Thrifts are trying by providing funds to support MCC. Let’s keep moving.

Doing what we can will also be on the minds of the residents of Shalom House, a new Circle Venture mission team and peacemaking community, as we prepare to move into our new home in Germantown this July. A central piece of our mission will be to include Circle of Hope in its peacemaking work, so now is a good a time as any to share your ideas here about what’s in our power to help and advocate for the Iraqi refugees.

*Below are two interesting links that help paint a revealing picture of Iraqis who have remained in their country in spite of the chaos that has enveloped them. (Iraqis, it seems, also like to blog and post videos on youtube. Go figure.)

www.bl.uk/iraqdiary04.html
Published through the British Library, Saad Eskander, the director of the Iraq National Library and Archive, has documented his struggles holding down his post in the midst of dwindling funds and car bombs in his neighborhood.

http://hometownbaghdad.com/2007/05/17/episode-29-nothing-but-guitar/
Hometown Baghdad is more real than any “reality” show I’ve seen. Rather than dealing with cheesy competitions and drunken hookups, this series of videos records well-to-do 20-somethings as they slowly disperse, forced to leave behind the homes they love for a more stable life elsewhere.