Awaken Bowness Podcast

ACTS Ep12: The Church is a Guest

This is the finale of the Acts series. I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Jon Coutts from Ambrose. Dr. Coutts is a devotee of Dr. Willie Jennings and has spent some time working in pastoral ministry so the book of Acts and the work of Jennings is a passion of his. We talk mainly about the sorrows and the surprises at the end of Acts. We ought not be discouraged in our many challenges and conflicts. The book of Acts is about the outworking of the gospel and it ends in further challenge and conflict. At the end, the work of the Church remains unfinished, the conflicts unresolved, the sorrow unrelenting, but it is in this 'in-between' that we encounter the power of the Gospel. Jennings' puts it like this:
"Paul lives between Jew and Gentile, speaking to both. Luke again reminds us of the tension that resides in the in-between space. This space, constituted by the body of Jesus, is ground zero for Christian existence. This is what public space means for a Christian. It is the space between commitments, allegiances, and alliances where we give witness to God’s sovereignty over flesh and blood, in space and time, and in the now. Public in this sense sutures inside/outside, native/alien, and Jew/Gentile through the bodies of disciples, like Paul. ... In the duration of time, opposition will rise up as some people begin to see the implications of this Jesus-message, that a new day of God’s reign has come that will bring together Jew and Gentile, diaspora concern and Gentile need, worshipers of the one true God and wayward worshipers of many other gods... This is the primal vulnerability that is church rooted in the new and uneasy social and political space created by the Spirit of God. This space requires disciples willing to live floating in baptismal water, their feet no longer held in place by the soft soil of kinship, empire, family, or even religion. These followers of the savior are held afloat by the Spirit working through love for one another." - Jennings (Acts, 185-194)

ACTS Ep11: Breaking Bread in the Storm

The book of Acts doesn't end in victory and celebration - there is less unity at the end of Acts than there was in the beginning. The struggle only increases and yet -- Paul is not pressed into despair. He boasts in his weakness, breaks bread with his enemies and holds onto his ancestral hope. Let's imitate Paul.
 
Discussion:
What are you 'waiting' for? 
What does it mean for us as believers that Acts ends in so much chaos and disunity among the believers? Has church unity been achieved more or less in the past 2000 years? 
 
In light of this, what does it mean to be known by Hope?

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