I created a bios page on our site with my info and links to our Santa in Chains community art project. Say wha? Santa in Chains? Another interactive art installation with members of Church in the Cliff and artists with CityGallery. Think of this as a cross between a “secret santa” and a “chain letter”. Whatever. It’s an artful way …
Baptism in an Ecumergent Context
This Sunday I will baptize my daughter Perl Teresa Amory-Pinkerton at Church in the Cliff and invite everyone to join us for worship. This will be my first time to administer the sacrament of baptism and what a strange and glorious thing to be able to baptize my own little one, born almost exactly one year ago. In fact, I went …
Worship in Front of Ducks
I love worshiping at Church in the Cliff. I celebrate that our worship space is in a community center overlooking the pond. We don’t have the privilege of retreating to four walls which are all our own. And so we worship, right there in front of other people, in front of those who come in just wanting a drink of water, or to play a pickup basketball game. We sing in front of the geese and the morning mommy walkers. We break bread and drink coffee and sometimes, have shimmering transcendent experience of the Divine. All right there in Kidd Springs Recreation Center.
The Art of Cultivating Relationships
While it may be those on the emergent spectrum that really give voice to relationality and friendship as a spiritual practice, people on the Way have been doing it since the beginning of the Church –and have also have been humbled by the task.
New Leadership Team at Church in the Cliff
We would like to congratulate the new Board, which was elected unanimously a few weeks ago. The Board members are: Ross Prater, Moderator John Means, Treasurer Kristin Schutz, Clerk James Fairchild, Trustee Cara Stoneham, Trustee The Board met for the first time last Monday, July 13th and is off to a great start. The board will be posting bios …
Iranian Art Show Update
First, just an update from last week. Scott, Kristin and I have been prayerfully considering how our community could support Fereshteh and the other women in the Iranian Democratic Society who approached us about a potential speaker series/photo show. After hearing more of their story and reflecting on the very tight time frame (they hope to put this together for …
Tragedy and transcendence
In looking for art this week, I find myself pulled toward one of my favorites: Jean Michel Basquiat. Basquiat was a painter in the 1980s whose work was infused with music. Early in his career, he was in several bands in New York’s new wave/no wave scene. Many of his paintings revered the giants of the be-bop era. Like some …
Iran Art Show and Twitter
This week Scott, Kristin and I met with a group of Iranian American women who are human rights activists and survivors of political imprisonment. They are organizing an upcoming art show and speaker series to commemorate the thirty years which have passed since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and to tell the story of human rights abuses in that country, especially the 1988 Iran …
Music as Meditation
Our resident rock star, Paul Semrad, will be leading us this week in a conversation about how music can function as a form of meditation. Paul has been organizing our music team the past several months at CitC and incarnates the search for God in both the sacred and the secular. His mother was the music director at a local church so he grew …
Social Investment: City Gardens and the Working Poor
Each week I post one entry that relates to our ongoing conversation about how to love the world back to life. One of the joys of pastoring a church such as Church in the Cliff is how engaged this community is in social investment of various forms. We give money, we organize, we volunteer, we help each other, we enter into relationship with the …