A Third Place Community Foundation
The Welcome Table Community CenterThe Welcome Table KitchenGardenPark and Orchard
The Welcome Table, a free universalist Christian missional community
918 691 3223
Join us for upcoming events:
Saturday May 26 morning at the community kitchengardenpark,
6005 N. Johnstown Ave., helping in the gardens, harvesting for the food pantry,
putting in your own bed with us.
Sunday morning 9:30 am, Day of Pentecost celebration of the
missional rebirth of the church, and our local expression of it, including
communion and common meal, at the Welcome Table Center, 5920 N. Owasso
Ave.
Tuesday evening, May 29, 7 pm, Turley Community Association
TownHall, and updates, at O'Brien Park Center, 6147 N. Birmingham
Thursday evening, 6:30 pm, May 31, neighborhood watch group,
at the Welcome Table Center, and volunteering at the gardenpark to harvest for
the food pantry
Saturday, June 2, 6 pm, join us as we march in the annual
Tulsa Gay Pride Parade downtown, one of the few if not only northside groups to
do so each year.
Sunday, June 3, 9:30 am, our missional community gathering for
study, worship, and common meal, as we celebrate Trinity Sunday, refreshing our
souls and the soul of our community for the service to and with and for others
in our wider community.
Looking ahead: Thursday, June 7, 10 am to noon, our Mobile
Food Van Giveaway Day, volunteers needed, at Cherokee School; it is going to be
a hot day so water, refreshments, and a place of shade for volunteers will be
needed as we give away some 7500 pounds of food in one hour to our
neighbors.
Saturday, June 9, at Horizon Unitarian Universalist Church in
Carrollton, TX, I will be giving the keynote address on "One Mission, Many
Communities: What The Post-Congregational World Requires of Us".
Saturday, June 16, 5-7 pm, come support us at the Odd Fellows
Lodge, 6227 N. Quincy, to our benefit dinner to help us raise funds for our A
Third Place Community Foundation. Help us also hold our monthly benefit dinners
with the Odd Fellows, and help us build community relationships and reflect our
area's increasingly multi-ethnic diversity. Celebrate what we can do working
together, by pausing to break bread together.
Commentary:
So I woke up on the eve of my own 40th high school reunion
from McLain High School in Tulsa, to more bad news about more cuts to common
schools here where we are already 49th of all the states in supporting common
schools, and I thought about what I have been talking a lot about lately, to
classes and on the panel discussions like the wonderful two hour plus
conversation we had for the Tulsa Health Department employees who are about to
come work in our area, all about the continuing fragmentation of community,
especially connected to the fragmentation of our schools, and from that the
fragmentation of lives, especially in our most vulnerable communities and lives.
But today it struck me not just as an assault on common schools and poorer
communities, but as an attack on democracy itself.
For the more we break up communities, the more we make it
difficult for people to come together on common ground, the more we will replace
our lives as members of communities with being commodities for corporations.
The more we forget that all our very missions are to create better communities,
especially for those "least of these", then we will cast away real freedom in
favor of a fake freedom. The real freedom being that which is a reflection of
God's spirit, that which brings people together, that which liberates us from
oppressions, that which is the blessed sacred soil from which souls are grown,
that which is inherently communal. I believe it was for real freedom that so
many died for whom we will, perhaps amid our all our parties on Monday, remember
this Memorial Day. It was not for the fake freedom to do as we will, to live
lives apart from our neighbors, to "die and let die".
So it is that the ultimate mission of our schools is not to
educate children; it is to make our communities healthier and stronger, and
educating children is the way that happens through schools, just as businesses
and churches and civic groups and medical institutions have the same mission and
all do that in their own way, so it is with schools; the very end of educating
children is not for the individual child but for the betterment of the
community. Our slogan should not be just that every child matters, but that
every community matters, for if it did then the education of children would
happen as a natural outgrowth of that focused purpose. When communities become
unhealthy, schools follow suit; to make schools healthier, you don't focus on
individual students and teachers and schools, you focus on the communities; to
do otherwise is to continue on the treadmill and continue doing the same things
you have always done, under new program names, or shuffling personnel, and
expecting different results. But focusing on communities is harder; it means
getting out of our boxes and out of our institutions; it means redistributing
the resources we have; and it is so much harder now that the racism and classism
and attacks on the working class economic base and resulting abandonment of the
area has resegregated and fragmented the community at large and its sense of
identity and purpose here on the far north edge.
A lot of this was brought home at a wonderful grassroots
meeting yesterday as we began at our The Welcome Table Center a process of
creating from the ground up a disaster response network (which will be basis
for doing the same thing for a neighborhood health network and possibly
incorporation itself) for our area as we approach this August the one year
anniversary of the wildfires and evacuations. It struck me during our work how
much things have changed in the community over the years, and not because it is
no longer so ethnically homogenous, but from the loss of community groups,
especially the connections through schools. My father was part of our mapping of
our neighborhoods, and as we went through our areas, I was reminded that once
upon a time, even when we had a thousand more people living in our area than
now, that we knew so so many more people, because then we went to school
together, and even if we didn't go to church together we sometimes did things
together as churches, and we played on and against each other in sports teams,
and we had civic groups, and we had teachers and law enforcement and even
medical professionals and even business owners who actually lived in our
neighborhoods where they worked, and all of that is now gone. Now we have
children from one small neighborhood who may go to ten different schools, some
all across town, some right in their own houses, and more and more they are
being educated by corporations instead of communities.
We have been preaching, and community organizing and resisting
against that, but today it went deeper for me. Today I thought about the tragic
irony of how democracy is being destroyed by the very thing which gave it birth.
As so often what we are successful at carries within it the very seed of what
works against us and our mission. Democracy rose up in the heart as part of
what Harvard historian Conrad Wright called the historical process of
individualism, from the families who moved out of the original close compounds
in early Puritan New England, moved to "the frontier" and began to grow a
culture that fostered individual family units, and individual property rights,
and expected to have individual voices heard in decisions affecting them. Even
moreso, they created a culture of individuals who sought the right, and felt the
responsibility, to voluntarily form associations and communities of
self-governance. But in places where there is not an increasing abundance of
land and opportunities and the ever-presence of "newness", forces that created
individualism and provided it healthy soil, and which then gave rise to
democracy, then the impulse toward individualism and the orientation of life and
our institutions to foster it for its own sake becomes ironically and tragically
the very means for the erosion of democracy which relies not on individuals but
on individuals becoming more than themselves through voluntary associations,
through groups dedicated to the common good, groups that fall under the rubric
of public, of private, of non-profit, and of profit.
The more people experience their lives as being on their own,
especially in areas of struggle and hardships and abandonment, the more
fragmented the sense and reality of community will be, and the less involvement
there will be in the common good, and the less democracy there will be. As the
bumper sticker on the front door of our community center says, "Democracy is not
a Spectator Sport" but so much of our culture and governmental decisions and
corporate decisions are aimed at creating spectators, not activists, and aimed
at pitting the least against one another in a kind of sport. It is one of the
reasons why our neighborhoods have half the voter turnout in percentages of
registered voters than do the neighborhoods on the southside.
This Sunday is not only one day in Memorial Day Weekend; it is
also in the church year, that frame for seeing life in a different and
alternative way, a different time zone so to speak full of different values, it
is the day of Pentecost, the day we celebrate the birthday of the church, the
lifting up of the biblical story of how the fragmented followers of Jesus were
still unsure of their mission, dispirited, fearful, but yet coming together as a
community, because that is something deep down they knew was where their healing
would be; and on that day, the Jewish Festival of Weeks fifty days after
passover, the story recorded in Acts describes God's spirit descending to each
and every one, bringing visions and truth to every one, male and female, young
and old, but in different languages, yet languages they each could understand;
they received a spirit that gave a new birth to their community and to their
mission to bring their good news of liberation and healing to those beyond
themselves.
This Pentecost we need a rebirth of missional understanding to
all of our institutions, not just to the church; we no longer live in a world
where we can continue doing the same thing in the same way as we have been and
expect major different results; all of our institutions need to begin turning
themselves inside out, upside down, and not waiting for people to come to them,
and be like them, but to take their spirit to the people, and to receive back an
even greater spirit from the people they encounter especially in the areas of
greatest struggle and scarcity. We must recreate community, we must resist the
many ways we are encouraged to make our lives primarily about us, and in doing
we will help give a new birth to democracy itself and help it shape not a new
land and new peoples but a renewed land and renewed peoples.
The first step is to do what those followers of Jesus did;
they simply showed up, they came together, for it was an indication of who they
were, and Whose they were. Trust that the Spirit will come, will emerge, once
you show up.
Blessings, thanks for all your work and your partnerships and
your gifts, and as ever, more soon,
Ron
1 comment:
Great blog, thanks for posting this
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