Beginning the Lenten Journey

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of the season of Lent on the church calendar. Traditionally, Lent is a time of fasting and lament, a reminder that we are finite bodies that live within space and time in a deeply broken world. We remind ourselves in this Lenten season that too often we are complicit in the injustice and brokenness of humankind. 

In this issue of our newsletter, we've curated three articles that seem timely for the beginning of Lent, that remind us that we are human, with bodies and hands and desires, and we also are loved by God in all our humanness. May Lent 2023 be a time of learning what it means to humans created in God's image and loved beyond measure by God.
 

Cultivating Communities works alongside cohorts of churches that are in close-proximity to each other, providing resources and helping them discern what it might look like for their congregations and their places to flourish. Our first two cohorts (one in the mountains of East Tennessee and one on the west side of Chicago) are now underway.

(Learn more about our cohorts and 
the Cultivating Communities Learning Journey)

Community Starts in the Heart If you want to build community, become an organizer of community. If you want to create spaces that facilitate building community, become a developer of community spaces. And if you want to cultivate community under Christ, learn to pray from the heart without ceasing by practicing intimacy with the Spirit in space and time. There is nothing strategic about this. There is nothing technical about this. There is nothing efficient about this. As we shed the many layers we’ve enveloped ourselves in as a defense, the Spirit gives us the gift of God’s presence, transfiguring our primal desires, ligamenting us together as a community in Christ. 
( via Missio Alliance )

AWAKENINGS 2023

Disruption in the Life of the Church. 
A brave space to have hard conversations that will awaken the Church.

The Missio Alliance National Gathering

Evanston, IL (Just North of Chicago) April 27-29

More info: https://www.awakeningsgathering.com/

PLUS, USE the Promo Code CC23 to get $25 Off the regular admission price

Faith Comes by Hand. Too many ministers have taken advantage of their position and mishandled those in their care. Better to rule out any risk of unholy hands at all, the reasoning goes. I sympathize with this concern. But I suspect the ease with which hands have been eliminated from ministry also reveals a practical gnosticism at work: the unexamined notion that bodies are obstacles to righteousness rather than its location. (via The Christian Century)