Receiving the Spirit with Humility:
The Active Presence of the Holy Spirit, Week 9
by Adam White
Which do you prefer, giving or receiving?
For me, I would much rather give than receive. I have gotten better with this over the years, but my preference to giving and my aversion to receiving are two issues I still wrestle with every so often. It is not that receiving something from others, be it help, complements, or a gift, is above me. I get that we all need help, remember?
Haw Creek Commons Easter Egg Hunt
by Karen Doucette and Holly Roach
Last Saturday, the day before Easter, we had a neighborhood Easter celebration with an egg hunt, and lots of activities for kids and families. We were fortunate with fabulous weather, had a nice turn out with about 90 people, and got to show off our latest additions to the Haw Creek Commons community - 4 rapidly growing baby chicks! Kids took turns bouncing wildly in the bouncy house, played games including a water balloon toss, and got their faces painted. It was good to meet so many families from the neighborhood!
Read MoreFreedom from Failure:
The Active Presence of the Holy Spirit, Week 8
by Adam White
Nobody likes to fail.
Even just reflecting on the words “fail” or “failure” bring back memories from school assignments, sports performances, and life moments that still find ways to linger in my mind. You have heard of a cloud of witnesses; I think of this as a cloud of failures. I think we each have our own cloud of failures that arise and follow us around during certain periods of time. This cloud can stay with us for quite a while if we let it hover over us and pour down things like doubt, insecurity, and fear.
52 Weeks of Neighboring
by Matt Johnson
We were created in the image of the Triune God, designed to be in meaningful relationships that form community, and we are taught by Jesus to love our neighbors as ourselves. While these truths are good news, living into them is very concrete, sometimes difficult, and easily forgotten. We struggle to love our neighbors.
SoCe Life, a hub of the Missional Wisdom Foundation, is a non-profit organization located in the South-Central neighborhood of Wichita, KS. The founding belief of SoCe Life is that everyone is gifted, and as individuals share their gifts for the benefit of others, they experience wholeness and the community becomes stronger. This belief drives the daily work of SoCe Life, connecting neighbors based on gifts and interests.
One in the Spirit:
The Active Presence of the Holy Spirit, Week 7
by Adam White
It may be hard to admit, but I have not always paid the closest of attention to the lyrics and meanings behind the hymns and songs that are sung in church. However, in the last year discovering their meaning has been a practice I have attempted to grow as a form of prayer. Regarding our missional relationship with God’s Spirit, I don’t think there is a song that better captures that dynamic than the hymn “They’ll Know We Are Christians by Our Love.”1
It has everything! Within the hymn text we find the unity of our identity within the Spirit and a prayer that our worldly divisions might be restored...
Happy Tents
by Meredith Ball
Happy Tents is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting families today. For the past few years we have been working to help families see every day life from a different view…God’s view. When we look at our families through God’s eyes, we see God at work.
We believe that through God’s grace and the Holy Spirit’s guidance, we can see a glimpse of eternal life within the moments in our family life. Each week, we write a devotional on our website to capture these moments from our tent in hopes that it inspires you to see God at work in your tent. Sometimes God’s work is funny, sometimes it is sad and sometimes is stretches us into new relationships or understandings. Though we do not know where God will show up in our family, we constantly know that God is at work in each of our lives individually and together.
Living In, Guided By, and Bearing Fruit of the Spirit:
The Active Presence of the Holy Spirit, Week 6
by Adam White
We all need help.
I do not know specific predicaments you may face, but needing help is a truth for all of us. I don’t think I truly embraced the reality that I needed help, holistically, until I met, and committed my life in sacred union with my partner, Blair.
Hear me out—I knew I needed help before that time and sought support from others for certain issues that surfaced throughout my life. For instance, I desperately needed help with math during high school and sought out a tutor—Thanks, Mrs. Pyle, for making sense out of Algebra for an ADHD teenager, no easy task! Or when I struggled with the pain of my mother’s suffering due to dementia, I needed support from friends, family, and ultimately a counselor.
A Christian in a Hijab
By Anastasia Marcum. Anastasia participated in our pilot program for Clarify in Asheville last summer. For Lent, Rachel has chosen to wear a hijab in an attempt to appreciate the Journey of Muslim women in America. She is blogging about her experience, and we are honored for Rachel to share with us here.
Read MoreJoining the Dance:
The Active Presence of the Holy Spirit, Week 5
How, then, shall we live?
For me this is the central question of all theology. If we spend ten breaths talking about what the Spirit of God is, we should spend ten hundred talking about how that understanding should shape our behavior and ten thousand walking, along with Christ, doing whatever it is that our theology calls forth from us.
Truly, how, then, shall we live?
The Holy Spirit is like the breath.
The Holy Spirit is like the womb.
The Holy Spirit is in the swirl of the Trinity's dance.
Read MoreThe WaySide Community
by Diane Rheos, current Launch & Lead student
The WaySide Community came about when pastor Linda Quanstrom had two unconnected conversations with church members. Diane Rheos is a Launch and Lead participant and had been sharing with her about Missional Wisdom and her search for intentional community. Soon after, Nathan and Laurel Howard mentioned to her that they had been researching intentional community. "Miraculously" at the same time, the lease on the Fremont United Methodist Church parsonage came up.
A new community carried by the flow of generosity.
It's amazing how fast our first four months have gone by! We began The WaySide, our intentional community, last November. Our house is located in the parsonage of Fremont United Methodist Church, in Portland, Oregon.
The Womb
The Active Presence of the Holy Spirit, Week 4
by Andrea Lingle
When I was a kid, I could beat seminarians in Bible trivia. It depended on the version, but most of the time, I could win against a team. This was not the social boon you might imagine. I read through the entire Bible, including the genealogies, before I was twelve. I memorized piles of Bible verses. Incidentally, many of them focused on obedience and kindness; well played, Mom, well played. I had the answers. I could recite creeds, prayers, and doctrines, and I knew they would keep me safe.
Read MoreFriendship House
by Matthew Floding, Director of Ministerial Formation, Duke Divinity School
Friendship House is a residential ministerial formation opportunity at Duke Divinity School, Vanderbilt Divinity School and Western Theological Seminary (MI). In each of these, divinity or seminary students live in intentional community with persons with an intellectual or developmental disability. Our life is ordered around the community building blocks Jean Vanier articulated (founder of L'Arche communities), Eat Together, Pray Together, Celebrate Together!
The Breath
The Active Presence of the Holy Spirit, Week 3
Do you know what I find frustrating? When people tell me to try something without a great deal of explanation. I want to know what I should be looking for. I want to know what I am in for. I want to know.
But that is not how we learn to breathe is it? When you emerged into the world, covered in the paraphernalia of birth, you had one task: to breathe. You coughed, snorted, and wolfed down lungs full of the one thing your body cannot go an hour without. Air.
Haw Creek Commons Natural Playground
by Katey Rudd
The natural playground that we spotlighted as just a dream a few months ago has now become a reality!
The playground includes a trail system, outdoor kids’ chapel and education space, three tiered platform, a slide embedded in the hill on the trail, a log bordered sandbox, a log balance beam system, four tunnels to grow hops for a local brewery, and two nature tables to inspire children to use nature to make temporary creations.
Read MoreThe Dance
The Active Presence of the Holy Spirit, Week 2
By Andrea Lingle
You know those moments in life that expose you for the faker you are?
I have no clear understanding of the Trinity.
There. I said it.
I have an understanding of God as an unknowable entity to whose operations we apply different names.
God is...
Missional Imagination in Action
by Rachel Wells
Missional Imagination is one of the most popular, most talked about courses in Missional Wisdom Foundation's online learning program, Launch & Lead. In this course, students are encouraged to actively look for places in which God is already breaking into the world, and ways in which they can join in and continue that work. It is my privilege to be married to the instructor of the course, the ever-eloquent Dr. Bret Wells, so I hear about Missional Imagination often. Bret and I also talk with our children daily about finding ways to see Jesus at work and in others.
Read MoreA Life and Death Matter of the Holy Spirit
The Active Presence of the Holy Spirit, Week 1
By Adam White
“Theology is truly a matter of life and death.”
This is what my then-professor, Dr. Joerg Rieger, said to all of us students on the first day of our Systematic Theology class at Perkins School of Theology in the fall of 2012. My immediate reaction was thinking – “I don’t think I signed up for the right course…I wonder if there is enough time to still swap classes. I hear Prayer and Spirituality is being offered this semester.”
Reports from the Spiritual Frontier
by Benjamin Yosua-Davis
Reports from the Spiritual Frontier is a podcast series dedicated to telling the stories of people who live and work on the spiritual margins of our culture. Benjamin Yosua-Davis strongly believes that our religious pioneers may currently possess the greatest insight into what it means to follow Jesus and be the church in the 21st century. His goal is to provide a place for those pioneers to share their wisdom and experiences with the wider church, as we all figure out how to be faithful in our changing religious landscape.
Read MoreWe at the Missional Wisdom Foundation have struggled with our elevator pitch almost since the beginning.
How does one describe all of Missional Wisdom’s various projects?
Our work touches a lot of people in a lot of ways and in a lot of places, and it can be hard to connect all of the pieces without a whole lot of explanation. We tried various metaphors to describe our mission in general terms, but never quite hit on a summative image.
Recently, we settled on a single, simple sentence:
A Practice of Photography
by Ryan Klinck
As we prepare to begin a new series of devotional thoughts in a couple of weeks, we are taking this time to spotlight some new work of several Missional Wisdom Foundation staff members.
This past semester at Perkins School of Theology, I led groups of students through a spiritual practice that I designed for a final project in my Spiritual Practices and Pathways class. This spiritual practice interwove aspects of lectio divina, silence, iconography, and film photography into prayer space. Many students were moved by the experience, especially during a time when they were overwhelmed with finals.
