So, so pleased for Mission Bay Community Church in San Francisco. This is the New Church Development community where Bruce Reyes-Chow, current moderator of the 218th general assembly of the PC(USA), is pastor.

This Sunday, MBCC will officially become a PC(USA) congregation. Here is their video invitation:

Very cool! I wish I could be there myself… Peace and grace to all the members of MBCC!

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Can’t improve it, so re-posting from my friend Landon in its entirety:

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Some backstory: Adam Walker Cleaveland, recent PTS grad and proprietor of pomomusings, is a candidate for ordination in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). As part of his final steps towards ordination, he must be examined by his Presbytery of Call, and part of that examination includes the presentation of a statement of faith.

These statements of faith are typically a page or so (single spaced), and cover things like who God is, humanity’s relationship to God, who Jesus is, what the Bible and Sacraments are all about, and so on. Its not easy to condence the basics of one’s religious beliefs to a single page, but those of us who’ve been examined by a presbytery for ordination are asked to do it, and he’s working on it.

Also, you should know about what twitter is: a social-networking tool that enables people to “micro-blog,” similar to status updates on facebook, using 140 characters or less. For those who love status updates on facebook, this is right up your alley, and you can access it through the web, through a number of apps, through SMS Text Messages, etc. (Adam also wrote about why one should use twitter at pomomusings.)

So Adam has been twittering about his writing of this statement of faith, and Shawn Coons of igeekrev suggested that those who know him try to use twitter to make a statement of faith, that is, to write one using 140 characters only.

The thing has taken off today, and is now called Twitter of Faith. Adam posted the particulars on his website, but you can also look at the facebook page.

The original challenge was:

Twitter of Faith: What do you believe? You have 140 characters - give us your statement of faith in 140 characters. #TOF

And here was my offering:

God is love, and lovingly empowers, forgives, redeems me. Thus I am God’s, and live to do the same for others, so that love might win. #TOF

You can keep up with the various postings about it here. Its pretty cool!

Update (11/23/08): I slept on the above, and really like it, but see that my first TOF leaves out Jesus Christ. I’m ok with that, but it is incomplete. So I offer this modification, which adds Christ but which makes it slightly different:

God is love, and in Xp lovingly calls, forgives, redeems me. Thus I am God’s, and live to do the same for you, so that love might win. #TOF

Take your pick. I like to place them together, but that’s against the rules.

There is now a post about this up on presbymergent, and the following blogs as well: wendy, mark, mycontemplations. Its taking off..

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From Jan:

“Most of all, we just want a community/spiritual connections to be real.”

Yup.

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Carol over at Tribal Church posted about a pastor-friend of hers who is moving to Arizona to accept a new call. She describes the situation thus:

He had multiple interviews with the church nominating committee, he preached for the congregation, he went through the excruciating congregational vote. Finally, he met with a clearance committee from his denomination.

A Pastor from the Committee said, “You have a blog.”

“Yes,” Pastor Friend answered.

“Well, that could be a problem,” Committee Pastor continued, “Some of your opinions are ‘out there.’ And you need to gain trust with your congregation. In order to do that, you really shouldn’t tell a congregation your opinion on anything for at least the first three years of your ministry.”

I have friends whom have been placed in this situation themselves, who are cautioned about blogging candor and their pastorates. Some have had the matter discussed by the Associate Pastor Nominating Committees they related to, whose members weren’t sure whether they wanted a blogging pastor, only to report to me that their lead pastor already blogs (albeit anonymously).

This is so so different from the posture that others take, such as Bruce Reyes-Chow. Bruce, who was elected Moderator of the General Assembly this summer, has a policy of transparency and openness.

I think this posture makes for healthier relationships, but it requires some skill and wisdom on the part of the blogging pastor. Not everything ought to be published on a personal blog; discretion is called for, certainly, and I’m certain that Bruce has it in spades. But not so others I know of.

The notion that someone should hold-back whom they really are, for three years, as an effort to build trust doesn’t make any sense to me. That doesn’t necessarily mean that one should broadcast their innermost thoughts to the world, willy-nilly, but something about the advice to this pastor is really off.

So there’s a certain something that is required for pastors who blog, and who do so transparently. I just hope that I’ve got it…

Carol has a healthy discussion going about this over at her post…

Thoughts? Offer them there or here, please!

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I was moved by this collection of 10 “last pictures taken” of the subjects prior to their death.

Some of those included are Will Rogers, Albert Einstein, Elvis Presley, Anne Frank, Abraham Lincoln, and Lady Diana. Also included is John and Jackie Knill, who were among the several thousand who perished in the Christmas tsunamis of 2004.

From the description of the Knills photograph:

On January 13, 2005 the bodies of Canadian couple John and Jackie Knill were discovered on a Thailand beach resort. They were two of the many victims killed from the December 26 2004 tsunami. Weeks later a Seattle man doing relief work found a damaged camera and discarded it but kept the memory card in the camera. After downloading the images he discovered pictures of the Knill’s enjoying their vacation, as well as shots of a huge wave approaching the shore. With each picture it shows the wave getting closer and closer to shore. The last picture taken of them before the wave hit (shown above) was shot just after 8.30 am on December 26.

Interesting Fact: The Seattle man that discovered the images recognized the Knills from a missing person’s web site and contacted the couple’s two sons in Vancouver Canada. The man then drove from Seattle to Vancouver to give the sons their parent’s last images.

The Lady Diana image is also fascinating to me, and there’s one of photojournalist Bill Biggart, who died at ground zero on September 11, 2001. I thought I’d pass it along.

(h/t Andrew Sullivan)

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Certainly, one aspect of my longing for a new administration has been my sense that we need to account for our use of torture (or “enhanced interrogation techniques”) in the Global War On Terror (GWOT). I blogged about my concerns about torture extensively, including its incompatability with Christian Ethics, its lack of utility as a tool for either protecting the homeland or prosecuting the GWOT, and the effects it has had on our relationship with other countries. More vital than our military might is the force of our ideas, and the hypocracy and moral injustice that our use of torture requires evicerates any standing we once had to be a “beacon of light for the world.” If that is something we think our nation ought to aspire toward, then the use of torture is simply incompatable (whatever else you want to say about the fact that Christian thought cannot theologically allow it, or the utter foolishness on relying on torture-derived information in a practical sense).

And so I am well pleased to read Josh Orton this morning, summarizing a portion of Obama’s interview on 60 Mintues last night pertaining to torture. Orton draws from this Think Progress report, which cites this relevant portion of the interview:

CBS: There are a number of different things you can do early on pertaining to executive orders.

OBAMA: Right.

CBS: One of them is to shut down Guantanamo Bay. Another is to change interrogation methods that are used by U.S. troops. Are those things that you plan to take early action on?

OBAMA: Yes. I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that. I have said repeatedly that America doesn’t torture, and I’m going to make sure that we don’t torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.

(emphasis in original at Think Progress)

And the video is also available on you tube:

Whatever your thoughts are on the election of Barack Obama to be our next president, I hope you can see this as a major advance, should Obama follow through with this, in America’s standing around the world. And even if it didn’t lead to that, it would be the right thing to do. Reconciliation can come, but it must follow a formal end to a policy that led us down that dark tunnel in the first place.

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