General Board Trip

This weekend, I got to go to the board meeting of the Church of the Brethren General Board. This was an interesting experience, as it gave me a glimpse into the workings at the denominational level. While the General Board is not the only denominational organization within the CoB, it is one of the if not the largest organizations. It is responsible for most of the ministry that is conducted on a denominational level.

One of the things that I appreciated about the trip was the opportunity to meet with people who are higher up in the denomination. Our group got to meet with the district executives that were at the board meeting. Our meeting with the district executives gave me some good insight into the placement process within the CoB, which I think will likely be very helpful after I graduate from Bethany.

I also got the chance to meet up with a couple of friends from Camp Bethel who are now in Elgin. One of them is doing a BVS placement as a workcamp coordinator at the General Board. The other two are originally from Elgin, who went down and worked at Camp Bethel. I ended up going to a local microbrewery for a couple of beers with one of these friends. We had a good time, and got to catch up a bit.

Overall, the trip was really fun. At times, I was bored during the meetings, but such occurrences were few and far between. I think that this was a very informative trip, and one that has the potential to be very helpful as I move forward in ministry within the CoB.

My Weekend

This past weekend was pretty fun. I got to go down to Virginia to lead a high ropes group at Camp Bethel. Because of this, I also got to go down to the Bridgewater game on Saturday, which was a bit of a disappointment because we lost, but it was still fun. I got to have some really good BBQ chicken at the tailgate.
This Sunday was my birthday, which was pretty good. I got to play on the high ropes course for a bit, going over what we would be doing on Monday. I also got to get together with some old friends of my parents who gave me a pretty significant donation towards my trip to Kenya in January. So my birthday dinner was spent talking with them, which was pretty interesting.
The ropes group on Monday went pretty well, everybody at least tried and got up on the course a little bit, which is always an accomplishment. Nobody got hurt, either, which is also a really good thing.
Then I went up to see my sister and her husband yesterday evening. My sister was sick, so she spent most of the evening on the couch watching TV. Still, it was nice to get to see her and my brother-in-law.
The only bad part of the trip was today on the drive back. I got my first traffic ticket today for failure to stop at a stop sign, which I did do. It's just irritating because there was nobody coming, so I really didn't see the point of stopping. But, I guess I was due one eventually, I hadn't gotten one ever in the 9 or so years that I've been driving, and with the amount of driving I do, its surprising that I haven't gotten one before.

Ministry Formation

For my ministry formation placement this year, I'm working for the Campus Ministries office at Earlham College. It's been really interesting so far, even though it was a struggle at first to find things to work on. But as things have gotten rolling, its been really fun.

I've been getting involved with several different student religious groups on campus. This has been interesting, giving me a chance to meet and interact with different students. One of the big things I've been working on is running a weekly Bible study. These activities have been both helpful and at times frustrating. Yet overall, my placement seems to be going well.

I'm also starting to work on planning a Thanksgiving service for next month. I asked my supervisor whether there was usually a Thanksgiving service, and the idea seemed completely foreign to her. So I get to plan and lead a Thanksgiving service next month. It's the first worship service that I've ever planned for an entire college campus. My biggest concern is whether or not anybody actually shows up for the service.

Christianity and homosexuality

So I have this group on Facebook, Christians against a Federal Marriage Amendment. I started this group because every Facebook group on this subject that I found argued that all good Christians necessarily oppose homosexuality, or some variation of the same. I therefore decided to start a group for Christians who think homosexuality is not a sin, and that Christians should not support a marriage amendment to the Constitution.

I've received a couple of messages asking about my group. The first one wasn't too bad, it basically argues that Christians need to speak the truth in love, and for that author, the truth about homosexuality is that it is a sin. But the second message I got is the one that really bugged me. I just got it today, and the author of the second message suggests that I haven't read the Bible very closely, questioned whether I had done any research regarding this issue in Christianity, and then asked whether I had taken any courses on the Bible! Both of these authors seem to think that the Bible is very clear about homosexuality. Yet, as I read the text, it is not so clear.

The thing that bothered me the most about the second message was the apparent understanding that any reasonable Christian could have only one view of the issue of homosexuality, the view that homosexuality is a sin. This seems to me to be a very simplistic understanding of sexual ethics within the New Testament. The available literature on the subject of homosexuality in the Bible offers a diverse opinion, ranging from complete rejection of homosexuality to the opinion that the Biblical text does not comment on homosexuality within a loving, mutual relationship. I was also bothered by the implication that I have not studied the Bible, and that I need to take a course on the Bible.

This is not the only complex issue within both the church and the political arena within the United States that is simplified far too often, by both sides. For instance, I have been seeing a lot of political commercials on TV lately arguing that taxes should always be reduced. There is one political commercial that goes through a litany of times the candidate failed to vote for tax relief. Thus, the argument that I perceive from the Republican party is that any vote to keep taxes at their current level or to raise taxes will hurt the economy, and that any vote to lower taxes will help the economy. Yet, if taxes are continually lowered, the government will be forced to either cut services or borrow money, neither of which serve the needs of the constituents. There are times when tax cuts are appropriate, and there are times that tax increases are appropriate. Yet, the complexity of taxation does not come across in these ads. It seems to me that we, as a nation and as the church, need to regain the ability to discuss complex issues without resorting to the simplification and demonization of the opposing view.