Awaken Bowness Podcast

Acts Ep10: Non-Anxious Paul in an Anxious World

While Feliz, Festus, and Agrippa acknowledge that Paul is innocent, they are not motivated by doing the right thing. They're motivated by the need to keep the crowds happy and avoid conflict. 
Are you more like Paul, standing firm and non-reactive, or are you like the governors who are tossed back and forth on the waves of anxious attempts to 'keep the peace' and make everyone happy?
 
Mother Theresa says, "The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow - do good anyway." 
This is an invitation to stand strong, grounded in the truth because this neighborhood needs a non-anxious church even if it costs us (spoiler: it will cost us).
 
 
 
PS - I hope you chuckle as you hear me slowly discover that apparently the phrase is, do it anyway' and when you learn that I stood my ground even though Raven was laughing and screaming in a game of chase outside my door during this recording. :)
 
 

ACTS Ep9: Paul Performs theScript

A lot of people don't like Paul because they think of him through the 'clobber passages'. In this episode I suggest that we don't read Paul's letters before reading the Paul story in Acts. In Acts 20 and 21 Paul says goodbye to his friends and begins his final journey towards Jerusalem where he knows he will not return. He kisses and his friends who warn him that he will be bound in chains and carried away but he doesn't hesitate to walk the Jesus road. In 1 Corinthians 11:1 Paul says, "imitate me as I imitate Christ". Let's consider what it might look like to imitate Paul at Awaken, in Bowness.
 
Questions for discussion:
Do you read your bible? If not, why not? If you do, how do you read it? 
How might knowing the Paul story from Acts impact how we read Paul's letters?
What is the difference between reading the story and performing (or imitating) the story?
 

ACTS Ep8: The Image of God is Ordinary

The meaning of life isn't to find happiness or to find order and control. It's to find connection with the Image of God, perfect in Jesus and present in your neighbor. 
 
In Acts 17 Paul is in Athens and he's deeply concerned about all of the idols - so many idols - even idols to unknown gods! He argues with the philosophers that God isn't an idea - God isn't way up there or on the other side - God is here, not so far, and what a scandal that he might look like the Nazarene son of a Jewish Carpenter. 
After listening to this episode: What are your idols? What has the pursuit of your idols caused you to miss out on? Have you made God or Church or Community into an idol? 
 
What would change if you began to see by the light of Christ what the light illuminates right here and now? 

ACTS Ep7: Cut and Run

This is the Jerusalem Council episode.  This is the BIG CHURCH MEETING  - there was tension, conflict, drama -- do we need to make the 'new people' assimilate? Now that they're here, can we segregate? Which identifiers are essential? When a new person joins a community -- does the person change, or does the entire community change? Can we figure this out together, or should we just spit up? This podcast gets real - we talk about Awaken Identity and the urge within each of us to either cut and run or cling to control when we feel vulnerable. 
 
Discussion questions:
What are the Awaken identifiers in your experience?
When you're stressed are you more likely to cut and run or fight for control? 
Have you ever resisted a 'new thing' and then found yourself totally blessed by it once you opened yourself to it?
At Awaken we say, "because our God is a welcoming God, we welcome you" -- have you encountered God's welcome at Awaken -- have you extended the 'welcome' to Others?

Acts Ep6: The Politics of Respectability

We work so hard to be respectful and pure and upright and yet Christ gave up his respectability and power to be crucified as a criminal. What if we entered the the story and didn't try to escape it with a kernel of truth? What if we felt the discomfort, saw the truth and felt the pain? 
Questions for discussion: Where has there been shame in your story that you kept hidden? What has happened when you let the light in? How can we give up of our power and privilege to ally with those burdened by shame and exclusion? If we rush towards the pain instead of away from it -- could there be freedom? 
 
Books referenced in this episode:
Prophetic Lament by Soong-Chan Rah https://www.amazon.ca/Prophetic-Lament-Soong-Chan-Rah/dp/0830836942
The Booklet of Uncommon Prayer by Kenjo Kuramitsu http://kenjikuramitsu.com/resources/
Reconstruction the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove https://www.amazon.com/Reconstructing-Gospel-Finding-Slaveholder-Religion/dp/0830845348
 
Check out affinitymentorship.com and the John Howard Society

Acts Ep5: Changing Our Mind

In this podcast Nikayla interviews renown Christian Ethicist Dr. David P Gushee about his book, Changing Our Mind (2014).
In Acts 9 Paul is stopped dead in his tracks by the living Jesus and it radically changes his mind about the Jesus movement. The people of the Jesus movement have to radically change their minds about Paul. In Acts 10 Peter sees the living God tell him to radically change his mind about the Gentiles. A lot of the book of Acts is about changing our mind and you might even argue that the GOSPEL is about changing our mind about Jesus. 

Acts Ep4: But The Bible Clearly Says

In this podcast you'll be introduced to two important Jesus followers: Stephen and Philip.
The early Christian movement will challenge social norms so radically that Stephen will be executed for it and Philip will be led by the Spirit to baptize a gender variant foreigner from a racial minority. The Bible CLEARLY says that eunuchs AND foreigners are not allowed to participate in the assembly of the LORD but here we got Philip baptizing and fully affirming the place of this person within the assembly because the Spirit told him to do it! What do we do with that? If the purpose of the Bible isn't to guide us towards certainty or a certain answers, what is the purpose of the Bible? 
Warning: There was a strange glitch in the recording and it sounds like we recorded this with an electric potato but hopefully you'll be so entranced by the brilliant content you won't notice. Next time it'll be better sound quality! Thank you for listening and sharing.

ACTS Ep3: Marriage, Money, and Power

"We don't really need the church, because we have each other!" - Ananias and Saphira, probably
 
When the local church makes marriage the end-goal of discipleship instead of an act of worship it becomes an 'energy draining vortex that seeks to capture all our imaginative capacity for intimacy' (Willie James Jennings). What if the marriage we celebrated most was the marriage of heaven and earth found in the local church community? Imagine the sense of belonging, safety, vulnerability, intimacy! It'd be a revolution and I'll tell ya what -- a lot of folks wouldn't like it. Listen to Nikayla unpack the Ananias and Saphira (one of the only married people mentioned in the NT) story and get ready for the single people in the community to call the Apostles out on their hypocrisy in Acts 6. 
 
Let's be a Church that pours love and welcome and time and treasures and talents INTO the Church instead of staying safely back to watch and only show up when we think we need to (ought to?) or when we think the church has something to give to us. 
 
Acts Commentary by Willie James Jennings https://www.amazon.com/Acts-Theological-Commentary-Bible-Belief/dp/0664234003
affinitymentorship.com
The Booklet of Uncommon Prayer by Kenji Kuramitsu at evangelicalsforsocialaction.org

ACTS Ep2: The Kin-dom of Christ and the House of Commons

In this episode, I interview some of the members of a Christian intentional community that existed in Bowness for 9 years. I ask Megan, Steph, and Lee about what inspired them, what was difficult, and where they saw God. There was a lot of laughter and a few tears as we reflected on how incredibly difficult it is to be a family of God that practices radical non-violent hospitality in a neighborhood like Bowness. It turns out, they found Jesus in the lost and the vulnerable and Steph even went as far as to call it ... magical. 
If you're interested in expressions of community living, our parish church in Bowness is always interested in new and creative ways of living in community together  from co-housing to co-neighbouring and we are all simultaneously afraid and inspired by the call of Jesus to be a new and peculiar people in this place.
 
Books I highly recommend which were cited in this episode include:
God is Stranger by Krish Kandiah (I accidentally said his last name as Kandish, sorry Krish) https://www.ivpress.com/god-is-stranger
Ada Maria Asasi-Dias who came up with the term 'Kin-dom of Christ' instead of Kingdom with the help of a franciscan nun names Georgene Wilson in Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the 21st Century
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CMC6AEO/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0
Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CMC6AEO/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0

ACTS Ep1: The Elisha to my Elijah on the Day of Pentecost

In this episode we look at Ascension and Pentecost and how it alludes back to Elijah and Elisha. Nikayla shares about the wildly destablizing and disruptive movement that was the early Jesus Movement.
 
In this episode Willie Jenning's commentary on Acts https://www.amazon.ca/Acts-Professor-Willie-James-Jennings/dp/0664234003 was cited as well as his book
The Christian Imagination: The Theology and Origin of Race https://www.amazon.ca/Acts-Professor-Willie-James-Jennings/dp/0664234003
and Soong Chun Rah's book The Prophetic Lament https://www.amazon.ca/Prophetic-Lament-Soong-Chan-Rah/dp/0830836942
and Lisa Sharon Harper's The Very Good Gospel https://www.amazon.ca/Very-Good-Gospel-Everything-Wrong/dp/160142857X