new post at rude sermons from the 2008 Women in Ministry Conference.

thank you everyone!

We worked hard on some genuine handmade toddler thank-yous for all our AIDS Walk supporters but they were around for so long that Clare found them again and destroyed them with the enthusiasm of uninhibited youth. We may try again but in the meantime, here's a video thank-you and a shout out to Lucas & Cara, Grandmom & Grandad, Liz and Bryan, Fred and a special thanks to Gilda who remembered that Clare's mommy had a fundraising goal to meet too. :)

We had a bit of a struggle with the video thank yous too so I figured I would upload the whole saga...

what I wish he'd said

"Religion must always maintain a position from which to speak truth to power. Reverend Wright is speaking the truth as he sees it and as he sees fit; this is his call as a prophetic leader of a religious community in this country. It's his job. A prophet's words are often harsh, and condemning, sometimes hyperbolic, and always unwelcome. But that's his job. It's not my job. As a Senator and a candidate for the presidency, I am...power. And my job is to listen to those prophets, however unwelcome their words, to that truth that they see fit to deliver to those who hold political power. The mistake is in assuming that either I must echo these unwelcome words or refuse to hear them...the truth is that I, we, must stop and listen. This is a democracy where all voices must be heard."

Now why didn't someone write that down on a post-it and hand it to the man?

I'm a great mom...

...when I've had enough sleep.

lame live blogging

preliminaries and thank yous...I hate that old joke about "marrying up" and the success of a man due to his wife being a great asset. Boo.

"our problems are bigger than the smallness of our politics"...etc. Is this an apology for the tit-for-tat recently?

It's all about McCain...that's interesting. And consistent with the implicit apology and rhetorical move to refocus the campaign on its original message.

WE. The man loves the first person plural.

(And the chanting. Yes, we can.)

Lobbyists. Interesting, because Clinton made a big deal--mentioned it twice--about being "outspent 3 to 1" in PA...as if posturing as the financial underdog were at all plausible. Seriously.

80% reporting, 55% Clinton, 45% Obama. Sigh.

We can be the party that does where everyone has to agree...or we can be the hybrid cyborg party (a free JTB paraphrase): "we are not as divided as our politics suggest." It's still a good line.

"I'm not a perfect man, I won't be a perfect president." That's a far cry from Clinton's "being president is the hardest job in the world.....I'm ready on Day 1." just a bit arrogant, yes? Particularly in contrast.

mankind? I really wish people would ge with it and start amending to "humankind." It's not that hard.

All in all...no mention of "losing" while Clinton was all "neener neener neener." Gotta love the High Road.

the dots

When I first started teaching the toddler class at CCfB I had no clue what I was doing. Sure, one of the toddlers was my own daughter but it's one thing to handle your kid at home and another to try to handle two or three at a time in a space that's not your own. And try to teach them something about Noah, or Jesus, and produce some kind of passable crafty thingy. Not really within my particular form of spiritual giftedness. (I'm getting better at it; and more importantly, I've discovered I totally enjoy spending that time with our toddlers. They are beautiful little people.)

A couple weeks into it I called my mom, who teaches toddlers at Enumclaw Community Church, and said, you gotta help me out. Along with the predictable things like reminding me there's no such thing as an attention span at that age, and to be flexible and go with the flow, she told me about the dots. She got this from Happiest Toddler on the Block. You give dots--little dots with a marker on their hands--when toddlers do something specifically good. Within 2 weeks of introducing this system in the CCfB toddler class, I had these squirmy toddlers sitting and listening and drawing and sharing and singing and whatever-ing on cue. And when they run out of class back to church they proudly display their dots to show everyone how good they are. I love the dots. And so do they!

It's worked so well at church that recently I started doing this at home with Clare. We've had trouble lately with getting her cooperation in basic necessary actions like changing her diaper and brushing her teeth. Timeouts have worked pretty well with Clare (although the logistics of a safe and effective timeout are a little difficult in an apartment like ours). But they didn't seem to make a difference with her defiance at getting-ready-for-bed routines. Like me as a kid, she seems to figure she can take whatever we can dish out and to consider it a decent tradeoff for maintaining her defiant integrity. But now, she knows that if she cooperates with brushing her teeth, she gets a dot...and if she doesn't she gets a timeout. Once this double whammy was successfully communicated, we've had the easiest toothbrushings in our lives.

What I really like about the dots is that they're symbolic. Like stickers, but even easier and cheaper. So I don't feel like I'm bribing her with food or toys or some kind of unsustainable system of increasing rewards. I also like that the dot is specific--it says, "You did what I asked and I'm proud of you, good job." It separates out praise for behavior from general and constant parental love. I hope that means that Clare will never feel like she has to perform in order to earn love...while at the same time learning to meet our not-unreasonable expectations and standards for behavior. We do after all owe it to everyone to civilize our little monkey child. And we owe it to her not to let all her teeth rot out of her head. And eventually get her out of diapers.

I can't even tell you how good it felt when we finally saw it click in Clare's brain that she had a choice: cooperate and get a dot, or tantrum and get a timeout. It was incredible, after weeks of toothbrushing standoffs, to see her suddenly sit still and open her mouth and let us brush her teeth and be so calm and pleased with herself afterward. I felt like such an incredibly successfully parent. You just don't get to feel that all that often. Most of the time you're just muddling through, getting it done, more or less, figuring that if you're not doing well you could at least be doing worse and after all at this point they're not gonna remember your horrible mistakes anyway, thank God. But this one moment, I felt like I'd been awarded the most elusive prize for good parenting ever: The Toddler's Award for Effective Parental Communication.

I think I deserve a dot.

AIDS Walk 2008

It's springtime!

Maybe that means allergies. Or enjoying the pretty flowers. Or cleaning out closets.

But it definitely means walking.

For the second year in a row, CCfB has had teams in the MS Walk and the AIDS Walk. Today was the MS Walk and several people were absent from PS 261 today as they were walking across the Brooklyn Bridge to raise money for the National MS Society.

Next month is the AIDS Walk. Clare and I did this last year--got on a train in Princeton Junction, met up with the CCfB team and walked through the Central Park alongside tons and tons of other people. Our fundraising goal in 2007 was $50 and it was met in ONE donation and that made us very happy...so I thought this year we would double it, send out an email, and hope for the best. You can check the sidebar to see how we're doing...and yep, that's right--we're nearly double our $100 goal for this year. Wowee! (That doesn't mean we wouldn't accept more, of course.) We're already working on our thank you notes. :)

This is one of the great things about CCfB...it's not just that we do these things, but that we do them because someone among us has a passion for this particular way of helping make the world a better place. This is why we walk to help raise money for organizations dedicated to alleviating the suffering caused by particular diseases, and it's why this past year we bought a cow and counted the homeless, and why we help support a small church in Mexico and Camp Shiloh. It's why we switched from disposable coffee cups to washing our own mugs after service and to fair trade coffee. It's why Joe can blog about his dreams of starting a tutoring program, and it's why I've no doubt that dream will come true too.

In a month or so I'll be posting pics of me & Clare and CCfB at the 2008 AIDS Walk New York. This time, you'll see Clare on her feet in her teeny little tennis shoes instead of bundled to my hip in my beautiful homemade Maya wrap sling. I expect I'll be a lot less exhausted afterward this time around.

currently thinking about

Vocation.

Language of "calling" is somewhat foreign to me, although I have learned to use the word in a way that fits well enough within my other theological commitments. But it is not language I grew up with. "Call" seems to imply a sense of God's intimate and detailed providential involvement, not just in the world, but in one's own individual daily life and decision making processes. But this language has also been somewhat formalized, so that potential pastors and ministers in many traditions talk not just about "call" in a theological sense but a practical one as well--one finds a call to this place or that place, this church or that church, this ministry or that. In this more formalized sense, when all the negotiations and handshakings and prelims are over and one is invited to accept a position somewhere, it is called a "call:" I've accepted a call to such-and-such Church in Wherevertown, USA.

But we don't do that in the CofC, really. So in trying to think theologically about vocation and calling in our ecclesial context, there are a lot of things to be sorted out. How does vocation relate to formal ordination, and how does the lack of formal ordination in CofC practice affect how we do or don't use language of vocation? How does a doctrinal commitment to priesthood of all believers affect our sense of ministry and the status of preachers, teachers, elders, deacons, and others specially "called" to serve the church in specifically designated ways that intersect with our strong sense of everyone's status as a minister? Do we or don't we give our preachers a special kind of authority and status? Is this or isn't it consistent with our doctrine? What exactly is spiritual leadership and spiritual authority, and how is this related to vocation and formal or informal ordination?

And how, in the midst of all of this, do we talk about the vocation of women within our churches?

This year's Women in Ministry Conference is set for May 12-14, at the Manhattan Church of Christ. The topic is vocation; and the list of speakers for this year is exciting--women who have been working through all of the above, not just by sitting in a chair in front of a computer and blogging about these theological questions, but by living them and working them out in the most intimate way possible. They embody their answers to these questions, and they'll be sharing the fruits of their experiences with us.