In 2005, Jenna Avellino and I decided to sell our art work (lanterns, handbags & home goods) at a craft show in Brooklyn. The cost; $150 for our spot plus gas, bridge tolls, and weekend stay expenses in NYC. Although we did pretty well as vendors, we talked about how it would be nice if we had a cheaper place to sell our goods, closer to home. We also knew that many of our friends were in the same predicament, and wouldn’t it be cool if there was a place for all of us to sell our work? Jenna and I knew that if we wanted this kind of thing to happen, we would have to do something about it. This is when we came up with the idea for Art Shop.

On our ride home from Brooklyn, Jenna and I brainstormed our ideas. Art Shop could be more than just a way for us and our closest friends to sell our work; it could be a part of Circle of Hope’s community development and a way for us to connect with our neighbors. Jenna and I also agreed that she and I should not make any money off of running Art Shop, and that we should instead find a need within our community to give to.

The first year we offered about 18 spots, in Circle of Hope Frankford & Norris’s tiny little upstairs PM space, for $15 per artist, and filled the room with 30 artists. We used the money from the vendors to pay for opening night food and beverages, decorations, and we were also able to purchase 3 new tables for Circle of Hope. It was amazing, and Jenna and I immediately planned to do it again the next year.

In 2006, we moved things down to COH Broad & Washington, as we were in need of more space for more vendors. We filled the place with 60 artists. That year we also raffled off one item from each vendor, to bring in money for Shalom House.

In 2007, we stayed at BW and used the hallways for more vendor space, filling it with 75 artists. The proceeds from the vendor fees and the raffle went to a family in need within our community.

This year, as Circle of Hope Frankford and Norris’s space has grown, we are moving Art Shop back up to the Kensington/Fishtown area. We’re anticipating over 70 artists. Something new this year, is that instead of using some of the vendor fees to pay for food, we have 15 wonderful friends and family members who will be baking our Friday night desserts for us, so that we can use that part of our budget to give even more back to our community.

So, come out, support your local artists, shop, and have fun. See you all at Art Shop!

Martin was co-opted by the first French kings as their saintly champion. His intervention from heaven was credited for Frankish military victories 100s of years after he was dead. Nonsense. Martin of Tours would best be known as the patron saint of EX-soldiers.

As a teenager Martin became a Christian even though it was a risky thing to do. Being a follower of Jesus was a distinctly odd thing to do in what the Roman Empire called Gaul, at the time. It was a particularly odd thing to do in his military family. He was supposed to be like John McCain and become a soldier like his father and grandfather, so he did. But he was a Christian, first.

One day he was at the gates of the city of Amiens with his soldiers and Martin met a scantily dressed beggar. He impulsively cut his own military cloak in half and shared it with the man. That night he dreamed of Jesus wearing the half-cloak he had given away. He heard Jesus say to the angels: “Here is Martin, the Roman soldier who is not baptized; he has clad me.” (see Matthew 25!) Here’s how El Greco painted the scene 1200 years later.

Before long Martin went out and got baptized. He was 18. He served in the military for another two years until, just before a battle in 336, he decided that his faith prohibited him from fighting. He said, “I am a soldier of Christ. I cannot fight.” He was charged with cowardice and jailed, but in response to the charge, he volunteered to go unarmed to the front of the troops. His superiors planned to take him up on the offer, but before they could, the invaders sued for peace, the battle never occurred, and Martin was released.

He went on to become a leader in the church, but not before he went off to be a hermit in the style of the radicals of the Egyptian desert. Like them, Martin did not want to see his faith totally co-opted by the powers that be. Christianity in Gaul was quickly becoming an arm of the state, as Emperor Constantine made it an official religion of the empire and began constructing church buildings that looked just like Romans law courts.

Martin’s biographers described the life of the community he founded, which was so influential on the Celtic Church, like this:. “Many also of the brethren had, in the same manner, fashioned retreats for themselves, but most of them had formed these out of the rock of the overhanging mountain, hollowed into caves. There were altogether eighty disciples, who were being disciplined after the example of the saintly master. No one there had anything which was called his own; all things were possessed in common. It was not allowed either to buy or to sell anything, as is the custom among most monks. No art was practiced there, except that of transcribers, and even this was assigned to the brethren of younger years, while the elders spent their time in prayer. Rarely did any one of them go beyond the cell, unless when they assembled at the place of prayer. They all took their food together, after the hour of fasting was past. No one used wine, except when illness compelled them to do so. Most of them were clothed in garments of camels’ hair. Any dress approaching to softness was there deemed criminal, and this must be thought the more remarkable, because many among them were such as are deemed of noble rank.”

Apart from the camel hair, we have a lot in common with our ancestors in the faith from Gaul. I like to emulate passionate people who have imitated Jesus. Let’s keep up the good faith and good work! As a result, we can make some Spirit-inspired history of our own.

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Steve Biko, in his essay White Racism and Black Consciousness wrote “In time, we shall be in a position to bestow on South Africa the greatest possible gift—a more human face.”  His idea was not limited to just showing South Africa-but restoring to the rest of people on the planet the important worldview more communitarian and a more people-before-stuff way to live.

I’m grateful that we have lots of opportunities to not only learn about Biko, but about the larger context of people that he spoke from.  One of those is the upcoming West African Drumming Classes

In getting ready for the next round of classes, some friends and I spent a few hours last night building drums (photo set here).
It takes a lot of hard work and a long time to just put a djembe together, before you can even play it (and play many together).  It is not a very rapid process, and we had some great conversations last night about how easier it would be to use a fiberglass drum and throw a synthetic head on it (rather than having to stretch an African goatskin across hand-carved wood).

How often we face a similar temptation with our spirituality.  Do we really have to be a community?  Do we really need to pull 100′ of rope just to be able to play a drum?  Does it have to stink like a dead goat from Guinea?  Isn’t there an easier way to get transformation?  Isn’t there a way that requires less time or effort to follow Jesus.

I’m reminded of the old African proverb that goes something like “if you want to go fast, go alone.  If you want to go far, go together.”  I guess you could try to find an easier way, or attempt to invent some trick to “get there” quicker with Jesus.  Even if you could, would you really want to?

First the waiting part: Any woman who has suspected pregnancy knows about the waiting – waiting to find out if the new life has even begun. Then we wait for other evidence – a heartbeat, a “baby bump.” All this waiting culminates in the end wait: waiting for birth. I thought this baby would come sooner than he did. I was really expecting him. I was really frustrated. While I was obsessed with this “waiting” theme my cell was reading I John and I become interested in John’s idea of “abiding” in Christ. Doing some rudimentary research I stumbled upon the connection that “abiding” means something akin to “tarrying” – waiting in Christ. Waiting for Christ. Waiting in Christ for new life.

Next the following part: A woman in labor does not get to control the labor. We have to follow it. Those infamous contractions we experience are completely out of our control. Our body has a job: to open up the cervix so that the baby can descend. That opening is done by my womb but I myself don’t get to control the opening. My job is to stay loose, to stay relaxed, to follow the contractions to their end. Even when it was time for me to push (thank goodness – finally some control over the process!) I was still told to follow. The midwife gave me very, very specific instructions (chin down, tiny push, breathe through this contraction, etc.) and my job was to follow. This was my body, my baby, my “new life” experience but the work given to me was to slow down, to listen, and to follow.

So those are my two thoughts: wait and follow. You’ve probably thought them yourself before but since they’re particularly visceral for me this week, I wanted to share. I’m also including a picture of Brendan just because the waiting and the following (not to mention the pain) were totally worth it – he is wonderful.

We were really hearbroken. Chizuko’s untimely disappearance all but ruined summer vacation for Kate, my wife. She was pretty reluctant when I told her I placed an order with the hatchery for new chicks. Still, we learned from our mistakes and built a proper house to protect them. The second flock are thriving.

Hens might seem a strange pet, but they are beautiful. And you get eggs. Letting them out of their coop and watching them scratch and peck through the garden has been the best part of the day for me lately. It is a like a meditation. Everyday we say to our girls: “My, how big you are now! Only 8 weeks ago you came in the mail!” They were just tiny balls of fluff. And while we look forward to the eggs they will lay as big fat hens this spring, they are just perfect right now, even in their awkward adolescence. Loving a thing makes it beautiful.

Our new PM at Tuckahoe and Yorkship feels different than Broad and Washington. It’s not a big full room; it’s not loud. When you sing “Let all things their Creator bless!” mostly you hear your own voice. It’s awkward. After last week’s meeting one of us said “I was honestly scared by how few people were there” and I appreciated his frankness. It’s easy for us to feel like somehow we don’t measure up.

It’s true we’re small and vulnerable and there’s a lot about us that’s not there yet. But right now I think we’re beautiful. I see our Father adoring us in our smallness, diligently seeking out and noting each little increment of our growth, and joyfully awaiting the fruit we will produce as we mature. Being immature means being restless, excitable, incomplete, and mainly preoccupied with just surviving. Before long new people will come in, we will outgrow our meeting space, and we’ll get busier with more business, more acts of love. Then our smallness will be something we remember as we smile and say, “Remember how few people there were!” Let’s be at home with smallness while we’re still small.

Liz had put up the poster of the 5-year imaginations that people had graffitied during the Discerning Retreat on one wall of the room. Dan looked at it at one point and said something like, “We apparently don’t think of ourselves as a small, marginalized church fighting the man anymore.” There are so many big ideas on the paper it threatens to topple the wall! People have big ideas for what they apparently now think is our big network. A congregation budding in Camden seems to have put them over the edge into a new way of seeing Circle of Hope.

Well, honestly, let’s not bust any buttons being real big, yet. We’re not that big. We may be more capable than we ever imagined we would be, but the average car dealership has a yearly income greater than our whole network’s. So let’s be as excited about ourselves as we should be. Romans 12 says: “Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you. …In Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given us.” We are no more and no less than God has made us. We have our gifts to bring to the cause according to the grace received. We’re big, but no bigger than we are given to be.

I keep trying to tell people that they don’t need to be dismayed about getting larger as a network. We will always be small, too. We committed ourselves to a vision for how to be the church from the beginning — we always expected to be a network of congregations that each grew to about 200 people and then multiplied. We have always wanted to live face-to-face. We’ll probably keep finding inventive ways to keep that going.

Right now we are on the edge of figuring out how to be both a network of some size: three congregations that are face to face, and a network of cells and mission teams that share an organic life together. I hope you are up for the challenge, because it is pretty weird. A lot of us don’t have a feel for it, yet — even many people among the many, many people who lead our community in Christ.

The fact that we don’t get how we work sometimes surprises me. I think what we are doing is just common, biblical sense. It seems like what the first believers did in Acts. The Celtic church organized in a similar way. John Wesley basically lead the first Methodists to do what we do. All sorts of people movements all over the world look a lot like us (only better organized!). What is the big deal?  From what I understand, people have some fears born of where they used to live. For one thing, they don’t want to be some mega-whatever. I kind of missed the mega-church thing, but a lot of us didn’t. So we equate that big, American dinosaur with being irrelevant and anonymous in the body — the pastor on a jumbotron, some ideology taking over, professionals doing everything and finding warm bodies to fuel their programs. No one wants to be big like that. Similarly, but from the opposite direction, a lot of us have come from nowhere, wandering around alone or in a little pod of leftovers from the youth group and we are glad to get in a cell where we can be authentic. We don’t want to lose that.

For the most part, most of us didn’t care much about church structure before Circle of Hope got to be who we are and we still don’t care — so we are content to be whatever part we end up being as God leads us along. That’s what I’m glad we are doing — letting God lead us along.

We are listening to God and staying creative. We want to extend the Kingdom – that may force us to organize for larger. We want to live in the Kingdom – that will definitely force us to stay small. This year our big goals have powered us into being a more effective network. Since we accomplished our goals – planted the beginnings of another congregation, hired Liz to invent good administration, hired Jeremiah to give gravity to generating compassion, made some network offices, even – we’ve got a new look that people are noticing.

I’m not sure what all that new energy will come to. But one thing I’m happy about is this: finding ways to handle the opportunities of being larger has freed the pastors and Cell Leader Coordinators to spend better attention on being small – caring for our cells and the congregations they form. Our 46 brave Cell Leaders are leading the charge for transformation where it will always happen best: person to person in living room or coffee shop, (or maybe even huddled in the mezzanine on Broad St.), with Jesus in the midst.

Now I have a completely rational and incredible fear of mice (for real, so don’t mess). It doesn’t matter to me if they are living or dead…I get quite panicky inside (looking at this picture even makes me anxious). But, as no one else seemed willing to take care of it, I did what was necessary and cleaned up the mess. I choked down my fear and removed our deceased friend…the space instantly felt more welcoming. (By the way, CJ Reynolds suggested, tongue in cheek, that we leave the mouse there and attempt to raise it from the dead as a part of our worship time…ta-da!)

I’ve been working with a lot of what was wrapped up in the imagery of that mouse. Ideas of heading from one place (like congregations in Philadelphia) to another (like Camden). Ideas of maybe not quite making it (do we really have what it takes?) and dying on the floor (will we grow from the 40 people that were there last night to the 140+ we hope to be?). Ideas about overcoming fear, about doing what needs to be done, about messiness, and about being welcoming. There’s a lot to think about.

What’s really great is that we all exist in a place of grace where we have time to work through the questions that plague us. We have a loving God who fills us with joy and peace and gives us hope.

Paul writes in Romans 15:13, Oh! May the God of great hope fill you up with joy, fill you up with peace, so that your believing lives, filled with the life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit, will brim over with hope!

Last night’s Camden (Tuckahoe and Yorkship) “soft-launch” was great. We had so much fun…there was so much love present. Above all, we were filled with joy and peace and we are brimming with hope for what’s next.

There are three more “soft” public meetings until our official launch on November 2nd. I’m hoping that I don’t have to clean up a mouse every week…more than that, I’m hoping Circle of Hope in Camden makes it where we’re headed as we follow the resurrected Jesus into what’s next.

When a cell multiplies I’m have a similar sense of those feelings-the gratitude, the joy.  God works similarly, and I try to drink it in.  This week our network is experiencing something a bit larger than one cell multiplying-a new congregation is being born.  The “soft launch” of a new Public Meeting at Tuckahoe & Yorkship in Camden is this Sunday at 6pm.  I am grateful today for Nate & Jen Hulfish and the rest of the formation team as well as the dozens of people who are coming along side our wonderful Birthing God to help this new congregation into the world!  The grand opening will be on November 2nd, and it calls for a celebration.

Here’s a South American alpaca dam giving birth to her new cria!

Next weekend (Oct 10-12), we’ll be celebrating that birth at the Discerning Retreat as well as other major happenings (or births) this year.  We finally unleashed the Director of Operations (hooray Liz!), our first fulltime Circle Venture (hooray Jeremiah!), Rod’s 4mo sabbatical 12yrs in the making, the purchase and 5week long rehab of 2233 Frankford Ave for Circle Thrift (hooray volunteers!), and we’re in the midst of renovating 2007-09 to expand the home of the Frankford & Norris congregation.

We’ll also have time to take advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime grant from the Lilly Endowment to subsidize part of the cost.  We’ll take what the cells have been inputting-answers to those basic questions we do every year “where is God calling us to go, who is God calling us to be?”-and discerning further refinement.  We’ll experience in a special way how God is taking little bits from many places and turning them into something that can be known.  We’ll be away together to listen, to worship, to discern, to share, and to be one.  There are just a few spots left-you don’t want to miss!

Sometimes I’m not sure if we come alongside God or God comes alongside us when this new life arrives.  I am grateful that so many of us are in that mix!

In the last month I’ve had some things affecting my life that were out of my control. My bedroom became infested with bed bugs, which, are apparently one of the worst pests you can have in your house. The infestation probably had a more psychological than physical effect on me though. Discovering bugs crawling all over you while you sleep can do that. Simultaneously, I had some school enrollment issues, which led me to believe that I might not be able to complete the program I’ve begun. Being halfway though it, with over $20,000 in loans, this was upsetting to me. Poorly responding to these situations, I became very negative, thinking that God was trying to send me a message about my life and how I was completely off base with my endeavors; where I live, and what I want to do for a career. Then remarkably, things became resolved in a relatively easy manner. On that day God spoke to me clearly saying, “The main thing you need to change is how much you trust in me.”

But, unlike the dog, I don’t feel like having a bite of home-cooked Alpo and taking a nap. Much the contrary, I have already been flooding my friends with new ideas and recharged convictions. I’m eager to see what God will do next.

Just this morning, the reading from Celtic Daily Prayer, which many people have begun to use with me, led me to 2 Kings 2:11-14 which describes a lot of what I feel.

As they were walking along and talking together, suddenly a chariot of fire and horses of fire appeared and separated the two of them, and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind. Elisha saw this and cried out, “My father! My father! The chariots and horsemen of Israel!” And Elisha saw him no more. Then he took hold of his own clothes and tore them apart.
He picked up the cloak that had fallen from Elijah and went back and stood on the bank of the Jordan. Then he took the cloak that had fallen from him and struck the water with it. “Where now is the LORD, the God of Elijah?” he asked. When he struck the water, it divided to the right and to the left, and he crossed over.

The idea of Elijah’s cloak/mantle moves me for two main reasons, right now:.

1) I am so grateful to the people who took up my “mantle” while I was away: Nate, Tracey, Ben, and Nathan, in particular. And the staff needed to do so much of what I would normally do: Joshua, Liz, Jeremiah, Kristen, Amanda. They did very well, don’t you think?

2) I am excited to know that God will be present in what is next. Elisha is freaked out about Elijah’s strange, wonderful and powerful departure. He’s left with the cloak Elijah had thrown around him earlier as a symbol of Elisha’s future as an agent of transformation and truth in Israel. But Elisha hadn’t really worn it yet, and he hadn’t moved into what is next.

When he struck the Jordan, maybe he was throwing the cloak away in frustration or fear. I doubt that, but the result might have been the same, anyway. Maybe he was striking the water as a test to see if God would show up for him when he used the “magic cloak” pulsing with Elijah’s prophet power. I doubt that too, but the result might have been the same. I think he struck the water with an honest cry of anguish and loss, “Where are you now, God?” God was in Elijah, but that was the past. “Are you here, now?” The result was very exciting.

While on my pilgrimage, I saw a LOT of where God HAS been. The more I learned about the Celts and felt the power of the places they made holy, the more impressed and inspired I became. I think they responded to their era in many of the ways we need to respond to ours, too. I am ready to strike the water and see where God is.

What will happen in the new buildings on Frankford? What will happen in Camden? What will happen as Broad and Washington moves into a new era, as our neighborhood keeps changing around us, as we learn to use the amazing capacity we have built up over many years, and as the next disaster arrives to test us? What will Circle Thrift, Circle Counseling, and all the other mission teams of Circle Venture do? What will Shalom House and all the other intentional communities create? What will all the Cell Leaders cause through their amazing disciple making and pastoring? What will God do with my next fifteen years? I am excited to find out.