Thoughts on Eating Well

The Eat Well Food Tour sponsored by *culture is not optional (*cino) and the the Office of Social justice for the Christian Reformed Church. Rob and Kirstin lead the workshop at Many Peoples Church in Roger's Park last night I attended the workshop after Reconciler,so I arrived a bit late and missed the beginning of the workshop. When I arrived they were talking about bananas and how their ubiquity as food has a story one that includes diverting economies and land for the production of a product that was exported. The banana we know it is only one variety and was cultivated for its ease of transport. Incidentally it is among the blandest of bananas. the Cultivation and export and import of bananas continues to be a troublesome aspect of current practices in the food industry. The term Banana republic is related to this story of injustice and how politics of certain countries can be centered arround this cash crop.

One of the emphasis of this workshop is that remembering and telling stories of food can help us evaluate our practices around food as well as become aware of our connection with food, whether good or bad, and thus allow us to either pursue a certain relationship to our food that we wish to perpetuate or bring us to be able to an awareness of negative relationships to our food. The other aspect of this story telling is to lead us into seeing how our relationship to food can or does fit into the Christian Biblical narrative of the coming reign of God and God's transforming saving work in Jesus Christ. Seeing Christians as participants in this saving and transformative work of the coming reign of God.

Rob and Kirstin then invited those present to share stories of food and eating from their families and childhood. There seemed to be two general types of stories told, one of raising at least in part ones own food, and the other being stories of not only not raising ones own food but eating primarily or only prepared foods. A third type of story was of having a particular special food that differentiated one's family from others.

Kirstin pointed out that bound up with the eating of primarily prepared foods or of ingredients that required relatively little preparation and cooking is bound up with womans liberation for some. Less time in the kitchen meant women could pursue other interests and activities. It also opened up for some like Kirstin's Father, the opportunity to cook because he enjoyed it and was an opportunity for interaction between he and his children as he invited his children to participate in the process of cooking, having the taste or taking them along to the grocery store to chose the ingredients of a meal. I interpret this that to some degree the food industry allowed for a lessening of some of the necessity of food acquisition and preparation and thus opened up opportunities of choice and desire to more widely enter in. The down side of this is that food becomes a consumer commodity. Food is reduced to commodity and our interaction with it is limited to being a consumer, divorcing ourselves from a sense of where our food comes from and how it gets to our mouths and stomachs.

This workshop is designed in part to confront this sort of disconnection that seems to be promoted by Agri-Business, and the industrialization of food production. In illustrating this they told stories of how mono-culture food production and food subsidies, automation and genetic modification of seed has lead to the dominance of one system of food production that lessens a farmers choices and reduces the number of people needed to work even a very large farm and one in which it makes it difficult for children to inherit a farm. The recounted stories told to them as they have brought this workshop to rural farm communities of the loss of communal interaction between farmers, how the industrialization of the farm creates analogous atomization and alienation in rural areas as it did and does in industrial cities.

This story of Agri-Business, and subsidization of mono-cultural food production by the government as having a deleterious effect, also has a parallel and alternative story of promotion of greater yield efficiency and better crops, and thus better life for the farmer and for society. This story was told in my family even as we found that the family farm would disappear when my grandparents died, which happened the land that was the family farm is now a neighborhood of Kingsburg, California. This story was told even as we knew that none of the family would continue to farm because it was a story of how both coming to the states and the growth of the cash crop and mono-culture brought us out of subsistence level of living where (back in Sweden in the 1800's) inability to feed ones entire family and potential starvation were real possibilities to a life of great abundance.

Even so there was a critique of this move from for my grandparents and mother a mixture of subsistence farming and cash crop to merely cash crop and mono-culture. My grandfather resisted the raising of a single cash crop even though that would have yielded him the greatest profit. He even kept vines of muscat grapes that he could have sold to wine makers but he as a teetotaler refused to sell for making wine, and which he could use for raisins but were considered an inferior grape for raisins and an unacceptable table grape because muscats are very seedy grapes. His forty acres had raisin grapes (variety unknown to me) muscats, nectarines, plumbs and peaches. I remember my grandfather critiquing farmers who would tear out perfectly good trees or vines in pursuit of the latest in demand cash crop. in my childhood a dairy farm was converted entirely into cornfields, most likely with government subsidy, I know know but didn't make alot of sense to me as a child. More and more I remember hearing about and seeing every few years fields that had been for the production of a variety of plants for food entirely being transfered over to a single crop. My grandfather was quite disdainful of this practice and also defended it as the wave of the future. He refused to take part yet he also knew that the cash crop had eventually allowed him to no longer need to have his own cow or raise his own chickens both to feed his own family and to sell eggs and chickens to his neighbors. He was able to live much like someone who lived in the city, which he and my grandmother had the first several years of their marriage until they took over the family farm.

I think that many of my choices about food have been informed by this conflicting story, memories of a different time of a mixture of farming on 40 acres(raising chickens, vegetables, having a milk cow, and fruit) and the advance of the cash crop towards mono-culture which had raised the standard of living of the average farmer but was also leading the extinction of the small family farm. I feel that my choice to become a vegetarian and my choice to once again become an omnivore as well as choosing to take part in a CSA and still largely cooking and eating vegetarian is due in part to the critique of mono-culture agriculture that agri-business and government subsidies create.

Priestly Goth Preaching Chronicles XV

Saturday night was Nocturna at the Metro, for its 21st anniversary celebration. 21 years ago, Goth wasn't exactly new, Bauhaus had been broken up for four years, Sisters of Mercy had formed and split and continued on as Andrew Eldrich's baby. Dead can Dance had released their 4th album and their first album had come out in 1984. The Cure had there 7th album out. I had just met Alex who identified as Goth and Roman Catholic and through that friendship discovered my own affinity with Goth. Goth was not new but not yet old either. At the club I had an extended conversation with a friends boy friend about the lack of anything new in music and art. Ironic perhaps as we were at a club that was celebrating that Goth has been around longer than a good portion of the Goths at the club had been alive. Perhaps it was why he wanted to talk with me about it, and with someone near his own age, who also remembers a time when there wasn't Goth, and was born before there was Punk. He longs for the time when music was new, Punk and Goth bands were doing new things, inventing music that had never been played. The excitement of a new album or single, which opened up new things new worlds. He was also in Poland during the Solidarity revolution and immigrated to the states in 1989. He talked alot about the corrupting influence of consumerism that kills newness in art. Much of his critique of western capitalist democracy and its effects on creativity I could see, though I pushed a little on the need for things new, arguing for the value of the recombination and attempting to do similar things in different or paired down ways (His example was the White Stripes, which he holds with some contempt). I am not convinced that newness and originality are the only or even primary evidences of creativity, and I question both the consumerist and Avant-garde cult of the new. Yet, at one point he said something that illuminated this cult to me in away I had never seen it before: He said " that each album revealed new things to him he remembers, but now there is no meaning." The search for meaning I can understand, much more than simply the pursuit of the latest ordinal, new thing. What we didn't get into because he wanted another beer and I wanted to dance (I go to clubs to dance, after all), was why meaning is connected with newness and originality. And could something like Goth, or Punk be perpetually new without being original.

In light of that conversation the conclusion of the lectionary text from Second Corinthians yesterday rang out "So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!" My sense is that this newness St. Paul is talking about is very different from the newness of either the consumerist variety or that of the Avant-garde. though it seems to me that many Christians do see newness in this way, as my friends boy friend sees it, as people talk about looking for that new thing God is doing in the world. I wonder if we have simply taken over this cult of newness and applied the language of Scripture that speaks of all things becoming new.

In so doing I think we miss that what many are looking for in new things and ever new things is meaning, in the face of the banality and meaninglessness the everyday world often give us. In the passage of 2 Corinthians this exclamation about all things becoming new, is connected with being in Christ, and follows a discussion about appearances seeing things from another view than the human point of view. This newness is then is about what God has done in Jesus Christ and thus having a new point of view, from the stand point of the cross.

I preached on Sunday basically about this new and different point of view, that is beyond appearances, and what can be seen with the eye or demonstrable, observable. The Lectionary texts from Samuel being sent by God to find the Son of Jesse God had picked for the next King of Israel after the failed reign of Saul, and the parables about the farmer and the Mustard seed, pointed to an another way of seeing, a reminder that we are to seek to have God's pov, and not hold on to our human points of view. Newness spoken of in 2 Corinthians then comes from this letting go of what our human faculties and our fallen and creaturely attitudes and perspectives. The life death and resurection of Christ gives us a new perspective that is God's perspective on the world and life and reality, that turns even our concepts of newness on their head.

On some level I think we often think that by seeking the new thing that we are preaching the Gospel which claims that God did a new thing. Yet, we miss that it isn't newness as the next thing, as originality that is part of the message of the Gospel, but of being brought into the perspective of God, which then shows even our own ways of seeing newness, to be empty without depth, unable to get to the heart of who we are and of the world. In Christ is the very meaning many seek. Yet, how to communicate it when so many of us are as caught up in the fleeting meaning of having to constantly peruse the next thing. the newness offered in the Gospel and in union with Christ is about vitality that can only come from the source of life, not that of originality. It is newness from a non-human point of view, one that is beyond appearances and our expectations.

A Disapointing Fizzling and Dying Emergent Church Movement?

(Author's note: I had intended to say somewhere in this long post that these are admitedly simply observations and musings on Emergent Church and the latest controversy all made from a distance and already with a critical eye. If I have missed some nuance or a thread of thought in Emergent I am more than willing to be made familiar with that and be corrected in any misperceptions. Just point the way and give me some evidence. I also have edited some things for clarity and grammar. LEK 6/11/2009, 10:00 am.)
I am commenting on the controversy that rippled through the interwebs around the future of the emergent church movement(EC). I discovered this when I went to the blogs of Julie and Mike earlier this week though it is now a controversy about seven day's old, and erupted while I was fine tuning recent changes made to Reconciler's liturgy, writing a sermon, going to weddings, and anxiously following the fund raising progress of *cino as they sought to purchase property in Three River's Michigan. I don't know that I exactly have a great deal at stake in this debate, though I recently admitted to my friend Tripp (he also has weighed in on this question), that I might just be emergent after all. I have a very conflicted view of the Emergent church, The up/rooted cohort here in Chicago was part of the early conversations that lead the formation of Reconciler. Most of our members have come to us through links from emergent blogs and the Up/Rooted website. Mike and Geoff (and then after we started Nanette Sawyer of Wiker park Grace have been encouragement to us as we started an Ecumenical church plant, and seemed to get the ecclesial point, and the need for ecumenical work. So, I am in someway involved in this conversation/movement, but one might say once removed from it.

I am not surprised that there are those who are ready to pronounce the "Death of Emergent" (Oh so postmodern a thing to do) nor surprised at expressions of disappointment. I might have passed it over without much thought except that people I know seem very troubled by it. As I have retraced what has been said on both sides, both the defense and the expressions of feeling the Emergent has run its course or that it has failed to do something or other, makes sense due to the character of the "movement". I have both wondered and admired that many in the movement simply attempted to provide structure while attempting to skirt, what I have called, in an ecclesiology paper written in seminary, the logic of separation. the EC folk have attempted more or less successfully to not split off into its own thing, another denomination, or subset of Christians. Even so I think one should keep the current expression of disaffection in context and remember that to some degree the movement is itself a movement of disaffection it was just a matter of time before people would become disaffected with it as well. Now I hope Mike and Julie and Geoff and Nannette, don't misunderstand me, for there certainly is plenty to be disaffected with in American Christianity, and I don't fault the disaffection, but it is the logic of separation, the schismatic and protestant ethos that seems to be one of the things in the Emergent Church movement isn't willing to question, and I think this can give rise to misunderstanding. This unwillingess to look at this fundamental logic of Protestantism has also kept me from jumping on the band wagon, and causes me to now sheepishly admit that I find myself somehow in the whole emergent ethos. I don't trust Protestantism (even an emergent kind) and think it is flawed at its origins, thus I'd suggest that for the Emergent church to truly move forward it must radically question its Protestant assumptions, something I do not see it doing and as far as what I have read recently seem quite willing to fall back on Protestant, schismatic and individualistic assumptions. Not that I have a solution, I am just out here trying to puzzle out how one raised as a Protestant questions the very structure of his faith and makes any movement towards anything else.

Another thing I observed in the conversations was either a pretty vague sense of what the church is and thus fairly feeble articulations of what is (or maybe) the relation of the Emergent to the church and denominations and congregations is. Either I saw an un-reflective ecclesiology or an assumed free/believer's church ecclesiology that asserts that the church is just the collection of all the believer's in Jesus Christ but then also uses "church", in contradistinction to the all believers reference, for any and all human structures these believers pragmatically and at times sinfully produce in attempting to follow Jesus. The Kingdom of God is then something different and almost unrelated to church. It is perhaps no surprise that I find this thinking untenable. But mainly it was the way this ecclesiology and theology of the kingdom was simply assumed and thus never articulated clearly, that had me wondering when will Emergent folk take seriously the more robust and truly incarnational and sacramental understandings of "church"?

I do wonder if ecclesiology is what is at stake at the moment, especially as emergent is gaining more adherents among Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists etc., who believe the church is more than the collection of believers in Jesus Christ, who see form and structure as somehow a component of what it means to be church. I wonder if the growth of the emergent movement in these other groups who are not believer's or free church evangelicals, creates an instability in ecclesial assumptions. (I think this is related to Julie's post on language we use and our experiences What if church is structure and as spiritual institution is something one is supposed to be apart of is part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus, well then if Emergent Church affirms or in someway embraces this view then Nick and others like him may not have a place to go, and this is a question he is asking about emergent. I happen to believe that the church properly conceived is what makes a Christian, there is no being a follower of Jesus Christ apart form the church, However, I can sympathize with Nick's concern (And in fairness he has clarified his points here and here and seems a bit overwhelmed by the reactions of others, and as for me I am more interested in those who took some exception to his disappointment), I have not always held the above belief. I can see the appeal of emphasizing Jesus and downplaying church but as I see it now in so doing one is rejecting the Body of Jesus Christ, which is then also a rejection of Jesus Christ in someway. I certainly can understand that rejection, I at times think that it be the easier less painful path, but I am not willing to ignore that much of Scripture, tradition and history of Christianity. However, if church as institution and structure is simply a pragmatic thing why be committed to it and wish to change it? Why have church at all if it is not necessary for faith in Jesus Christ? However if you believe that the church is something to be committed to even if that commitment is expressed in seeking to change and reform it, well you are going to need a better ecclesiology if you are going to face the truly disaffected who don't see changes and are willing to take Christian spirituality and belief in Jesus as something that can exist without church.

Related to this question of ecclesiology is sense of identity. Clearly both detractors and defenders in the discussion both have or had a strong identity as Emergent. Which seems to me to belie any denials of the Emergent Church as a movement or a new subset of Christian. This is perhaps natural and inevitable, that as one works to change things and finds resistance, that a new and different identity is found. But like I have been questioning denominational identities based on 1 Corinthians 1:10-31 and that our identity is to be first foremost maybe even only Christ, I would question the degree to which an emergent identity is being struggled over, and held onto. The strength of this identity is troubling. Again this is not something I necessarily have a solution or an alternative to, though it is the hope of the vision we had when we started Reconciler that these identities that were other than and more than Christ would be held more lightly. At least it is a hope that has grown in me out of planting a church like Reconciler. You see it seems to me that some of the pain expressed and the great desire to defend Emergent would be much less if Emergent were just a tool in the hands of Christ, it could pass and have its time and it would be fine. Maybe emergent is dead or just much less useful than it was? Maybe it will remain useful for some but something others move beyond? If our identity is truly that of Christ does it really matter? Does it really matter whether I am emergent or not, or if Reconciler is or is not an emergent church? Should we not be more concerned about whether we are or are not growing into the Body of Christ and being built into the temple of God that is the Church? If emergent helps us to grow into the Body of Christ and to be built into that structure founded upon the apostles and Christ then it is a good thing if not it's just another human sectarian reality that will either found another form of Christianity, possibly heretical, or fizzle out and become a historical oddity in the history of the Christian faith. My hope and prayer for all who are in the Emergent church is that it is a tool of the Spirit for the joining together, building into the temple of God, of knitting together as the Body of Christ, and a means of being grafted into the Olive tree of the Israel of God.
I saw glimpses of other things going on in this discussion, but this is already a long post.

Imagining spaces with *CINO

I realized today that I had posted on *Culture is Not Optionals(*CINO) effort to get a space in Three River's Michigan on the community's blog a couple of times in May, but not here. Some of you probably have seen me post about this on facebook a couple of times. *CINO is looking to acquire an old school house in Three Rivers Michigan as a center for *CINO. For all the details of this project and the fundraising you can go here Whether you are a regular reader or just stoping by for the first time, I encourage you to follow the link and if this seems like a worthy cause to contribute to the cause. They are very close to raising the full amount they need to close on the property. I don't usually use this blog to help fund raise but I think this is a worthy cause, and soon hopefully the Community of the Holy Trinity and *Culture is not Optional will be partners working closely together, so I know these people and am looking to work with them.