Haiti

It has been distressing seeing the pictures coming out of Haiti this week. Donations can be made on-line, including by interact, at Canada Helps. The Primate's World Relief and Development fund is accepting donations ear marked for Haiti as is Oxfam. It is easy and it means so much.

Disheartening News from the Anglican Church of Canada news service

CIDA cuts to KAIROS programs will devastate human rights work overseas
KAIROS: Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives

The Canadian government’s decision to cut funding to KAIROS: Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives will have a devastating impact on KAIROS’ overseas partners and the thousands of marginalized people in local communities they support, KAIROS says.

KAIROS, a church based non-governmental organization that represents seven of Canada’s largest denominations, works on a range of social justice issues, including human rights in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

An official from CIDA called KAIROS executive director Mary Corkery this week to inform her that CIDA would no longer fund KAIROS because it no longer fits CIDA priorities. No other explanation or information was provided.

KAIROS’ current contract with CIDA expired in September, but it had received an extension until November 30th, the day it was informed of the cuts.

“We are disheartened that this longstanding relationship and decades of support by the Canadian government has been ended,” says Ms. Corkery. “KAIROS and the millions of Canadians we represent through our member churches and organizations do not understand why these cuts have been made.”

In a message to Bev Oda, Minister for International Cooperation, requesting an explanation, Ms. Corkery writes, “I know of no precedent for the Canadian International Development Agency ending a decades-long funding relationship with a major Canadian organization without notice in writing, with no reason and no transition plan”.

The CIDA-funded overseas program received matching financial support from KAIROS’ member churches, church-related organizations and other donors. Since 1973, KAIROS, and the church coalitions from which it was formed eight years ago, had received funding from CIDA to support partners working in regions experiencing some of the world’s most egregious human rights violations.

KAIROS work is highly regarded in Canada and overseas. As the November 30th deadline approached, KAIROS member churches, its partners and other organizations had been writing Ms. Oda to request that she approve the KAIROS contract which has been sitting on her desk since July awaiting her signature.

One of those letters came from a Colombian group, the Organización Femenina Popular (the Popular Women’s Group), which has been awaiting CIDA funding through KAIROS.

“As you know, we work in regions in Colombia where armed conflict has resulted in the denial of women’s basic rights. The economic support from KAIROS and CIDA permits us to implement programs which include legal and health services, community kitchens, and other humanitarian assistance that have saved many lives and given possibilities and opportunities to hundreds of women, mothers, wives, daughters, sisters and entire families,” Yolanda Becerra Vega, OFP Director General wrote to Ms. Oda.

“In addition to the impact overseas, these cuts are a loss for Canadians,” says Ms. Corkery. “KAIROS educates Canadians across the country about Canada’s work for international development. Our work in Canada and overseas expresses Canadian values in upholding human rights, and is informed by excellent analysis of our partners in the Global South.”

The KAIROS contract that just expired received a positive audit and excellent CIDA evaluation this year. KAIROS submitted its new program proposal for 2009-2013 to CIDA on Feb 15th 2009. It went through a lengthy approval process within CIDA up until the Minister’s level and has been waiting for approval from the Minister since July 2009.

The government’s decision comes a week after 57 people were massacred in politically motivated killings in the Philippines, including two lawyers from a human rights organization supported by KAIROS, and just days before Prime Minister Stephen Harper heads to China.

Media contact:

Adiat Junaid
Communications Program Coordinator
KAIROS: Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives
(416) 463 5312, ext. 223
1 877 403 8933, ext. 223
ajunaid@kairoscanada.org
www.kairoscanada.org

Posting Secrets

Faith and Leadership has a very interesting article on young people and the confession of secrets here.

Give me that old time funeral

On my first day as chaplain, I received a phone call asking for my help organizing a memorial service for a member of the faculty who had died the month before. His close friend asked me to help him organize something 'with grace and dignity that was religiously neutral.' Since then I have organized many services for people whose connection to the church was tenuous at best but who had ties to the university or college. These services took place on campus or at a funeral home. When I was ordained people in the parish began to ask me to do funerals and the funeral homes too began to ask me occasionally to do services for people with no church ties. I still do far fewer funerals in a year than many of my colleagues in full-time parish ministry but I suspect that I've done proportionally more funerals for people who have died young and tragically.

I was intrigued, therefore, by the latest issue of Christian Century. The focus of the October 6th issue is funeral practices and the main article, featured on their website, is Thomas Long's piece "The Good Funeral: Recovering Christian Practices." In it he observes a number of trends in the past 50 years in funeral practices:

With surprising swiftness and dramatic results, a significant segment of American Christians has over the past 50 years abandoned previously established funeral customs in favor of an entirely new pattern of memorializing the dead. This new pattern is not firmly fixed (indeed, variations, improvisations and personal customizations are marks of the new rituals) but it generally includes the following characteristics:

• a memorial service instead of a funeral (i.e., a service focused on remembering the deceased, often held many days after the death, with the body or the cremated remains of the deceased not present)

• a brief, simple, highly personalized and customized service, often involving several speakers (as opposed to the standard church funeral liturgies presided over primarily by clergy)

• a focus on the life of the deceased (often aided by a physical display of photos and other mementos)

• an emphasis on joy rather than sadness, a celebration of life rather than an observance of the somber reality of death

• a private disposition of the body, often done before the memorial service, with an increasing preference for cremation

I would add to the expressed desire that the service 'bring closure.'

He goes on to suggest that while "[t]hese newer practices are attractive mainly because they seem to offer relief from the cosmeticized, sentimental, impersonal and often costly funerals that developed in the 1950s, which were themselves parodies of authentic Christian rituals," they represent a corruption of a Christian understanding of death. He suggests, "[c]ontemporary Christian funeral practices certainly need to be changed, but change should be more a matter of recovery and reformation than innovation and improvisation."

At the heart of what he sees happening is a significant shift in understanding of what the purpose of a funeral/memorial service is:

For example, the current shift to a memorial service with the body absent means that Christian death practices are no longer metaphorical expressions of the journey of a saint to be with God. The saint is not even present, except as a spiritualized memory, a backdrop for the real action, which happens in the psyches of the mourners. The mourners are the only actors left, and the ritual now is really about them. Funerals are "for the living," as we are prone to say. Instead of the grand cosmic drama of the church marching to the edge of eternity with a fellow saint, singing songs of resurrection victory and sneering in the face of the final enemy, we now have a much smaller, more privatized psychodrama, albeit often couched in Christian language. If we take the plot of the typical memorial service at face value, the dead are not migrating to God; the living are moving from sorrow to stability.

In response to the growing trend of people asking that there be no service at all when they die (just read the obituaries regularly and you'll notice it becoming much more common), I have said many times just as Long suggests that 'funerals are for those left behind.' So I was stung by his argument that these trends have a great deal to do with the loss of faith in the resurrection of the dead:

The fact is that many educated Christians in the late 19th century, the forebears of today's white suburban Protestants, lost their eschatological nerve and their vibrant faith in the afterlife, and we are their theological and liturgical heirs. It was not, of course, as if the whole of 19th-century Christian society woke up one morning and suddenly found that they no longer believed in eternal life. The loss of conviction about the otherworld came slowly and gradually.

These changes in theology coincided with the development of cemeteries set apart from where people lived so that the tradition of carrying the casket from church to grave ended and the two parts of the service were severed. And I would add to this that in most communities now, no longer do members of the family or extended community prepare the grave or fill it once the casket is lowered. Filling the grave by the mourners is an option here but it only happens in the Jewish section of the cemetery.

Long concludes his piece with a call for the church to regain its theological vision:

Surely the task before the church now is to retrace our steps and to recover the grand liturgical theater in which Christians embrace their dead with tender affection, lift up their voices in hymns of resurrection and accompany the saints to the edge of mystery. This will not involve a mere repristinating of funeral practices or a rejection of cremation, but a recovery in our time and in contemporary forms of the governing symbols of the communion of saints, the resurrection of the body, and the journey of Christian dead toward the life everlasting.

This article is excerpted from his new book, Accompany Them With Singing: The Christian Funeral, a book I look forward to reading.

I'm still mulling over Long's argument and I'd love to have a discussion about it with a group of clergy. I have some suspicions about how my colleagues might respond to his argument. Certainly the Roman Catholics have maintained much more of the traditional structure and theology of Christian burial. The personalizing trends he identifies are relegated to the prayer service the evening before. Most of us I suspect hear requests consistent with what he describes regularly - that the service be a celebration of the life of the one who died, that the high point be the powerpoint presentation of pictures, and that the music be from their favourite cd.

The problem with saying things like this is that it sounds like we're putting people down for requesting them. As much as I agreed with much of Long's argument I cringed to think of people I know and love reading it and thinking themselves criticized or dismissed because of the way they buried grandma. In fact, I put together my father's memorial service and it was pretty much as Long described the hypothetical service at the opening of his article.

Very few of the funerals I do are in the church or for people with strong ties to the church and so it isn't surprising that they do not reflect a traditional Christian understanding of death. So perhaps this article raises for me a whole different set of questions about how Christian clergy should/could respond to the requests of people on the edges or outside the church for burial (and one could add weddings and baptisms of their babies).

Having said that there are a couple of contemporary trends that really set my teeth on edge. The first is trend to call services 'a celebration of life' and the second is the word 'closure.' When I'm sitting with a family and they have that "gutted, we've been hit by a truck, sitting on the verge of tears" look about them and they tell me that they don't want the service to be somber because they want it to be a celebration of mom's or grandpa's life I want to ask them, why are you saying this? why are you trying to do this to yourself? I know that they won't be capable of pulling it off, that they are going to enter crying and spend most of the service trying and failing to hold themselves together. And there is nothing wrong with that. Why do we think it is inappropriate for funerals to be sorrowful? Occasionally people will say that they know their loved one is with God so it isn't right that they grieve. I always want to say, and have said in some funeral homilies, that Paul said, 'we do not grieve as those who have no hope, ' not, 'we do not grieve.' Somehow instead of holding together the grief and the hope that we have in the face of death we have lost the ability to acknowledge the grief. At least rhetorically. At the service grief usually has its say.

As to the word 'closure' I wish it could be banned from the English language. I was at a conference on grief once where the speaker said the word wasn't helpful because people didn't want to close off the dead person. She said it can get in the way if you tell someone who is grieving that they need closure because it sounds like what you are saying is that the person who has died shouldn't still really matter to them. Amen sister! Better to say that what we are trying to do is make some sense of the death, that we are trying to find a new way to relate to the person who has died, that the relationship we have with them is being transformed, and that the funeral is helping to do that.

And yes, I'm aware that that reflects the attitude Long identified that the funeral is about the living and their issues but I'm okay with that. Because as much as I think our funeral practices, like our wedding practices and everything else that we do, should be about teaching people how to look at the world in a distinctively Christian manner I also think we are there to care for people in their time of sorrow.

The Witness of St. Francis

A moving post about St. Francis and L'Arche over at Faith and Theology. Read it here.

Updated:

Ben Myers has another posting on L'Arche here.

It took my breath away

I always really enjoy the blog Magpie Girl but this post took my breath away.

Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Today is the anniversary of my confirmation, many, many years ago. It is also the Feast of the Falling Asleep of Mary in the old Anglican prayer book, the Feast of the Assumption in the Roman Catholic church (where I was confirmed) or simply the Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

It was a beautiful day the day I was confirmed. Blue clear sky, no wind, hot. A typical Winnipeg summer day. The confirmation took place at the regular 11:00 AM Mass if I remember correctly and afterwards there was a little party in the garden between the church and the rectory. My most vivid memory of the day is the smell of the chrism, light, sweet, fragrant, on my forehead.

As I said the office this morning I remembered the sweetness of that day and gave thanks....

O God, you have taken to yourself the blessed Virgin Mary, mother of your incarnate Son: Grant that we, who have been redeemed by his blood, may share with her the glory of your eternal kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen

Critical Hospitality

Over at Church for Starving Artists there is a very interesting post on how critical hospitality is for the life and thriving of congregations. There is a great little coffee spot in Lethbridge, The Round Street Cafe, that has this spirit of hospitality and it is always lively. It is a good lesson for churches to learn.

Barbarians at the Gates

Over at The Journey Home Paul has some interesting comments about the barbarians in our midst. He concludes:

What, I wonder might be the shape of the struggle to come, for us, between civility and barbarism, and what its monument of record, whichever the outcome?

In Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth, Leslie Newbiggin said that we must proclaim the gospel in public conversations in every discipline because in so doing we will be offering hope into a future that will not belong so much to the secularist or pluralists but to the barbarians. According to Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, the barbarians are already among us, creating a society which might more accurately be described as hedonistically consumerist rather than secular but is clearly not at ease with itself and is searching for something more. The reduction of the options to the secular alone - whether in law or elsewhere in our public sphere - will not fully satisfy or please.

Read the rest here.

Chasing Francis

After reading Maggie Dawn's comments yesterday about the novel Chasing Francis by Ian Morgan Cron I went down to our local Christian bookstore and bought it. It isn't a heavy read and I just finished it. It was a good read in many ways...'creaky' as Maggie described it in others.

It is the story of Chase Falson, a pastor of an Evangelical megachurch in New England who goes on pilgrimage to Italy with his uncle, a Franciscan, when his faith goes off the rails. Spending time in the places where Francis ministered in the company of Franciscans helps Chase reimagine and rediscover his faith.

There were a number of things I appreciated about the novel. I too have found that old certainties have become less solid to me over time in ministry. People's lives and God's grace just don't seem to fit all the nice categories I used to have. And I too have found comfort, challenge, new insight from returning to the lives of the saints. I say returning because unlike Chase who is thoroughly shaped by a Protestant evangelical sub-culture my early formation took place in Catholic communities.

There is a lot of good material about Francis and Franciscan spirituality as well for people, especially folks interested in the Emergent Church movement. But if I had a basic criticism of the novel it is the same one that Maggie made:

There are pages where the story has to stand still while a sermon is preached or a lesson delivered. I wonder if there isn't something inherent in the form of fiction that demands that you can't absolutely make a point and still have fiction that lives and breathes.

There is a certain irony when Chase returns to his church and tells them that they need to stop treating the faith as if it is principally a matter of the head instead of something transcendent because much of the novel does read like a lecture on Franciscan spirituality. He says that they have to show people the faith and not load them up with books and yet the first thing his uncle does when he arrives in Italy is load him up with books. His journal which runs through the novel reveals much more about what he is reading than it does what he is experiencing. The most compelling parts of the book for me are instead when Chase goes to Mass and when he serves in a soup kitchen and then AIDS hospice.

It strikes me that there is a difference between Christian fiction and fiction written by Christians that has to do with whether or not the primary focus is make a point or to tell a story. In Chase's words:

"I'm beginning to see that there's a difference between art that trusts beauty's simple power to point people to God and Christian art that's consciously propagandistic. My Uncle Kenny, with whom I spent most of my time in Italy, said something profound--that you can make art about the Light, or you can make art that shows what the Light reveals about the world. I think the latter is what we want to do."

Yet I think in many ways Chasing Francis is still an example of the former. Graham Greene and Frederick Buechner would be better examples of the latter.

What do we value most?

A friend just sent me this link to a blog posting about a church and a whole community that got the boot in Germany to allow strip mining. What this says about the state of the world is really distressing. He suggests some interesting things about the connections between technology and individualism too.

Unchurch Week 3

We held our third week of Unchurch last night and I'm still stoked. Becky and I have been preaching on foundational stories, the birth of Moses, the burning bush, and last night the passover. I looked at Exodus 12 and talked about the way in which the people were called out to fulfill their vocation as the people of God. I started by looking at something Jon Levenson has written about - that the freedom given the Hebrews is not freedom as we usually think of it. It is not freedom from constraint but freedom to serve God. It is leaving the service of Pharoah who is oppressive to serve God who is loving and righteous. At the end of that chapter are instructions for how the foreigners are to be treated. There is only one Torah for Hebrew and foreigner so foreigners can participate in the passover if they first are circumcised. So the distinction between who is in the community and who is not is not racial, biological, or even based on participation in a significant event like the exodus but is rather the willingness to serve God. And it is the willingness to be a part of the community. I finished by looking at Martin Luther King's last sermon the day before he was martyred. He talked about the way in which Pharoah planted seeds of disunity among the slaves and called on African Americans to remain a community in the face of opposition and in those famous closing words he spoke of knowing that he was serving God and how he had seen the promised land.

Our discussion afterwards was incredible. My favourite element of Unchurch is the response to the word in our conversation. The starting off point was someone's objection that God would choose some and not others and that He would kill the first born of Egypt. So we had a long conversation about the problem of reading troublesome texts. And then the issue turned to who belongs to the community and who doesn't and what happens if you feel like you are the kid Jesus didn't pick to be on his team. We're getting to know each other better and people are speaking more and more personally about their struggles with faith, the church, Scripture. I don't know where this is going but I am so grateful to be a part of it. The only problem is that I can't fall asleep Monday nights anymore because my brain is going a mile a minute.

Being found out

This morning, when I left the house, I found an envelope stuck between my doors. In handwriting I recognize is a message: "Do not open until August 11th. Yes, you read that correctly. Be sure your sin will find you out."

I laughed as I read the note and rejoiced that my vacationing friends are thinking ahead to my birthday. I recognized the bible verse from when I was a kid and we would drive on the weekends to the lake. Every week we passed a pretty little white country church by the side of the road with a big sign outside which read, "Be sure your sin will find you out." I always thought the church was pretty but to a non-church going kid there was nothing welcoming about the sign. I used to think that going to church was like going for my yearly check up at the dentist: "Be sure we'll find those cavities." Maybe they were just being descriptive as certainly our sins have a way of turning around and biting us but I rather think not. This is about as inviting to me as the church not far from here that used to have a sign which read, "by invitation only." And I don't think they meant Jesus' invitation, "come unto me all ye who are weary...."

Pentecost

Today is the Feast of Pentecost and I'm off to preach at Christ Trinity Lutheran church. It is actually the fifth anniversary of my ordination to the diaconate. I was ordained a deacon and Andrew Horne a priest on Pentecost at St. Augustine's Anglican church in the evening. It was a stinking hot day and there were over 400 people in the church and I was wearing the new alb my parish had had made for me - heavy raw silk. We sang My Song is Love Unknown and Jesus All for Jesus. It was a marvelous day! Three days later we had a foot of snow.

Robbie is doing a little better. He's still coughing in the evening and morning but he's sleeping through the night now and has a lot more energy. I really struggle with the coughing - it sounds like he's coughing out a lung. But I'm grateful that his lungs seem to be clearing and the renewed energy suggests that his heart is beating better. He hasn't had any adverse reaction to the heart meds either so that is encouraging. His vet says that we'll know whether or not he's responding by next week. Thank you to everyone who has let me know that they are praying for us. And thanks to M for bringing me meals on wheels last night! Never let it be said that it is only the Christians who know the value of bringing comfort food to folks.

Today's reading

"The question which, for the Catholic Church in Britain (and other Western countries), is today the absolutely paramount make-or-break question must be: Does this community have the resources (of symbols in the Liturgy, the material environment, devotion in the home), the language (in philosophy and literature) and the conviction (in doctrine and morals) to restore a broadly based public faith to the society in which it lives? No other issue in the Church is worthy of consideration with the same seriousness as this. The task the question sets is the vast one of depotentiating the effects of individualism and overcoming the dislocation of both religion and culture in our time."

Aidan Nichols, Christendom Awake: On Re-energizing the Church in Culture

Diana Butler Bass

I'm working on a long post about all the movies I've seen lately but in the meantime just a quick note to say that I'm attending the Anglican clergy conference at the Lethbridge Lodge these days and our speaker is Diana Butler Bass.

It has been very interesting. She started by telling us the story of how she became interested in why some mainline (read liberal) congregations were flourishing when the common story line was that conservative churches grow and liberal congregations fade. She draws a much more nuanced picture of the differences between churches adding a distinction between established and intentional churches and between modern and post-modern churches.

So then she talked about different individuals and where they would fit on these three axis (represented visually with tinker toys!). She suggested that Jerry Falwell would represent a Conservative Established Modernist and Jack Spong a Liberal Established Modernist. When she moved in to talking about post-modern intentional Christians she quoted someone who had been at one of her talks who suggested that as people move towards this that the conservative liberal labels mean less and less.

Gotta get to the hotel. Robbie is suffering from some congestive heart failure so I stayed home to walk him and get his lungs clear. But I don't want to be late for the session and I have to stop and get a latte!

Mega churches

One of my students just sent me this link and I thought it was really funny. We've been talking this term a little about mega-churches and why people join certain churches. So here are the Hills trying to decide what they are looking for in a worship experience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtI2pa2m5cg

Welcoming the Stranger

The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the U.S., the Most Rev'd Katharine Jefferts Schori, concluded some reflections with this beautiful text:

Celtic Rune of Hospitality
I saw a stranger yesterday;
I put food in the eating place,
drink in the drinking place,
music in the listening place;
and in the sacred name of the Triune God
he blessed myself and my house,
my cattle and my dear ones,
and the lark said in her song:
Oft, Oft, Oft,
goes Christ in the stranger's guise.

I followed the link to this reflection from Tobias Haller's blog In a Godward Direction. Here is his own beautiful ballad on the welcoming of strangers:

Home Town Prophet

When Jesus went to his home town
the people gathered round;
he spoke to them in words of grace,
but they didn’t like the sound.

“Why don’t you do a miracle,”
they said, “some magic trick;
like cure a leper, raise the dead,
or heal someone who’s sick?

He said, “When prophets worked God’s might
in Israel of old,
it wasn’t for the Israelites
but those outside the fold.

The leper was a Syrian,
the bread a Sidonite’s,
God’s grace was shed on strangers
rather than on Israelites.

It seems a prophet gets high praise
except in his home town...”
They took him to the cliff’s high edge
intent to throw him down.

“See here,” they said, “we’ll hear no more
this blasphemy you say!”
But passing through the midst of them
he went upon his way.

— Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG, Feb 8, 2007

Leisure, the Basis of Humanity

Well I did my talk at the library last night and it went well. We had a good turnout and the discussion was interesting. I talked about workaholism and the way technology is involved in keeping us enslaved to work.

I don't think the technology is inherently bad (after all I'm on it right now and loving every minute of it). But I did talk about the way it changes people's perception of time and what is timely. And I talked about an environment of work addiction that distorts our priorities and relationships.

One of the things I find really sad is that clergy are often among the worst for this. A pastor who used to be here told me once that he was dreading some clergy meetings he had for his denomination. He said he was 'sucking gas fumes' and he didn't look forward to having to listen to all these clergy brag about how hard they were working and how successful they were at building the kingdom. A number of years ago I went to a ministerial meeting exhausted from a really difficult funeral for a student. When I told them one responded by saying, 'your tired? I've done .... funerals in the last two weeks.' Then another said, 'well I've done....' and another 'well, I've had .... meetings and ....services....' You get the picture. Someone said to me once that they found it depressing how often clergy brag about breaking the commandment to keep the sabbath.

I know I do the same thing. I over-commit and I forget about good priorities. I'm usually convicted of my sin when I find out that someone was in distress and didn't call me because they knew I was 'busy' and didn't want to 'bother' me.

At the beginning of my talk I remembered the Rev'd Dr. Roy Gellatly who died Dec. 26th. Roy was a retired Presbyterian minister in our community who with his wife audited courses regularly at the university. You'd see him everywhere at community events and he exemplified what we have tried to do in the lecture series which is to provide a place for people from the community and our campuses to come together to discuss matters which affect our common life. He was also always ready for a conversation and never seemed to be rushing to something. I only knew him in retirement so I thought maybe things had been different when he was in active ministry. At the memorial service for him though, when his children spoke about their relationships with him, it was clear that he had had time to spend with them too when they were growing up.

I want to find ways to put a fence around my work and technology that allows me to spend more of that leisurely time with people.

Little Parish on the Prairies

I had the Sunday off this week. Once a month the lay readers lead the service and today was the day. On the Sundays I'm not responsible for the service at Ascension I often help out with the Sunday School or do pulpit supply for one of ECM's sponsoring congregations (the chaplaincy is sponsored by the Anglican, Evangelical Lutheran, Presbyterian, and United churches). Today though I got to enjoy sitting in the pew.

This morning I got thinking about the Mystery Worshiper on Ship-of-Fools.com. I always enjoy reading it but today I started to wonder what folks would say if they were reporting on our little parish.

Our church began as a mission to the Japanese community following the war. Many Japanese Canadians had been interned in this area and ended up staying when the war was over. Our congregation has always been small and was never especially wealthy. Most of the folks made their livings farming or working in the trades. Most of the church and its furnishings were built by people in the parish and when the old hall burnt down they rebuilt it too.

Looking around this morning I wondered how the report would read on us. What would the mystery worshiper say reminded her of heaven and what reminded her of 'the other place.' As I was shivering I decided that one could legitimately criticize the lack of heat. But what would strike her as heavenly? So much of our worship is informal, announcement time is often a mixture of parish notices, personal words of struggles and blessings, and community events for those who live in Coaldale. People have been known to offer an addition or correction to the sermon and the passing of the peace isn't finished until Norma says it is finished. We don't sing the service and there is no choir. Our organ is old and I'm told we need to get it fixed.

There are churches in our diocese that do gorgeous liturgies with spectacular music but we aren't one of them. But I can honestly say that I have never been anywhere that understood more about what it is to 'worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,' as we sang this morning. When I look around at the people of the parish and think about the beauty of their lives, of their warmth and generosity to each other and to people in the community, I am very grateful that I am called to serve them. The mystery worshiper wouldn't know how much they care for each other, how generously they give to help those in need, or how kind they are to the children in the parish. Those are the things that you learn when you live with people. I know that the mystery worshiper would be made welcome and maybe she would say that, that the warmth of the fellowship reminded her of heaven.