David Von Stroh: The Common Good and the Built Environment

Although urban development in the last half century has mostly followed the pursuit of the private, individual good, I propose that urban development must shift towards the pursuit of the common good because this will result in the most sustainable and satisfying outcomes.

Download David’s Integrative Project Paper

Vangie Rand: What the United Methodist Church Can Learn from Electronic Dance Music

Shannon Presler: The History and Trajectory of Space for Extraterrestrials on Christian Theology

Reconciliation is the dream of hope. We are to dream redemption until the day we die.

During this current season of eastertide, the  church my husband and I attend in Seattle has been collecting stories of resurrection. This is one of such stories. Like the rhythm of the triduum (Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday), redemption is only possible because one has experienced death and the grave. This is  a story of the relationship between death and resurrection, suffering and beauty, conflict and reconciliation; a rhythm that is so often unavoidable it can only be embraced. However, the beauty found in such a rhythm as Friday, Saturday, Sunday, is largely unknown until given an opportunity to experience it, and not just once, but over and again.

On such Fridays, we experience what could be described as the death of hope. In March of 2011, a death occurred in mine and my husband’s relationship with our former Pastor and his family. Several at our school describes themselves as having been ‘hurt by the church’. While my husband and I wouldn’t necessarily describe ourselves as such, in many ways, we do find ourselves located there. That is, as ones having been hurt and also having inflicted hurt on those whom we have disagreed, by our words, assumptions, distance, and silence.

Our Saturday of silence lasted for over a year, which is longer than my heart wants to admit. Saturday is characterized by silence, abandonment, disbelief, death, agony, grief, and tears. If you do not allow yourself to mourn during this time, the day has not served you well. There is something beautiful about the process from death to life that is unnoticed when rushed.

Last week, we began our journey toward Sunday; and reconciliation, the dream of hope, became feasible. Hope is often found in unexpected places. The span of silence was broken, and we began the long, hard work of moving from death to resurrection. Our words were carefully crafted so as not to inflict any more pain on one another than our already present wounds could bear. These words reminded one another of the love we once shared, and the goodness of the other that we had long forgotten. We realized that our need of one another was more than our need to agree.

In his book, The Wisdom of Stability, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove writes on the necessity of cultivating stability by rooting ourselves more intentionally in the place and people of our community; while acknowledging that conflict among those who do life together is inevitable. In the foreword, Kathleen Norris writes: “Sometimes the conviction that it is God who has brought two people—or a community—together is all we need to keep us in the struggle to nurture and maintain relationships of trust, respect, and love. Committing to such stability is never easy, but it is always worth a try.” Stability demands that when tempted to leave, we stay, and allow God to find us there. Likewise, with such stability is a commitment to seek reconciliation.

In retrospect, I wonder: “what would have happened if we had stayed?” If we had it to do over, given what we have learned, we wouldn’t have so easily left. Yet our journey through the pain of Friday, the silence of Saturday, and the resurrection of Sunday that has got us to this place was necessary for a deeper relationship of love and grace that we now have with this Pastor and his family.

If you have never given yourself to this rhythm, the fullness of my heart bears witness that reconciliation, whether with a church, friend or foe, is indeed sweet.

Reference: Wilson-Hartgrove, Jonathan. The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2010.

Stephanie Berbec is a first year MATC student focusing on Theology, Imagination, and the Arts. She grew up in North Carolina and attended Emmanuel College in Northeast Georgia where she pursued a B.S. in Christian Ministries. Naturally, she speaks with a southern drawl. Stephanie is married to her best friend, Steven, whom she shares many of the same interests: theology, coffee, photography, writing, reading, and road trip adventures.

The mission of the Aurora Commons is to provide a safe place of hospitality along Aurora Avenue where we seek to grow the relational capacity within our neighborhood so that, as we care for one another, we may share space, resources and the fullness of life. The Aurora Commons does this through fostering community, facilitating holistic renewal, and bridging resources.

Sometimes it is difficult to describe to folks just what the Commons “is”. It is difficult to express because we are guided by our sense of place on Aurora Avenue and by who we encounter in any given moment in this particular corner of the world. And everything is always changing – I’m always changing, you are always changing, the seasons are changing, the nature of this universe is forever in process. The Commons exists to be a space where everyone can play out their dynamic human experience in the midst of a safe, nurturing environment with people that desire to love them and be loved back in return.

If we are to be connected to the rhythms of place, then we are refusing to be like other set structures and social structures that have treated the bulk of individuals that come here as transactional.

For the bulk of individuals that come to the Aurora Commons, everywhere they go they’re treated as transactional. In most of their experiences it’s take a number, fill out this form, wait in line, do such a such service. Even a lot of churches go with this model where they have one way of helping people because it is so hard to deal with complexity and inconsistency of each individual story.

We’ve recreated systems and structures social service that are seen in other churches, but that respond to the individual need. Because we are allowing inhabiters to be creators and co-contributors to what we do, then it’s a lot more dynamic. Life is never dull here. With the Aurora Commons, we become who we are through the people that come here.

One of greatest examples of who we are is by our kitchen. We have a communal kitchen and we stock the refrigerator by putting out list of food items. We also ask our friends and Commoners to bring food here. It’s all of us stocking fridge. Some of the Commoners who come who don’t have homes will get food from the Food Bank.  It creates an invitation for everyone to be a part of the Commons’ kitchen. So someone will say, “Hey I’m going to the Food Bank, and I”m going to get eggs and ingredients” The food is communal is here.

Our only rule is if you make food, make it for more than yourself.

At the Aurora Commons – and everywhere, really – we are all in need of one another, whether we know it or not. Whether we are housed or not housed, addicted or not addicted, abused or not, lonely (and we all are) or not lonely, we need one another. I am a person of great need – and the Commons was created just as much for me, as it was for anyone else.

Watch President Keith Anderson and Professor Dan Allender share their humble thanks in the videos below.

To learn more about The Seattle School Donors, visit theseattleschool.edu/partners.

Jordan Rickard is the Manager of Financial Development at The Seattle School. In this role, he strives to cultivate financial resources in support of The Seattle School’s mission. Jordan earned a Master of Arts in Theology & Culture from The Seattle School in 2008.

Megan walking an abandoned street in St. Bernard's Parish after Hurricane Katrina.

I talked to my friend Laura yesterday after not talking to her for a year. She had gotten married and moved to KY with her new husband. I had decided to risk it all and move to Seattle for this Graduate program. She called and quickly jumped into the very loaded questions of how are you/ how is your school? I just laughed. How do I begin to find language around these questions that could suffice for a time that has been so transformational.

I attempted to try and explain the process of deconstruction that happens in your first year, and the hope of rebuilding from a new kind of foundation, but even as I spoke this out loud it made no sense. When does demolishing ever make sense anyways? There is nothing polite about breaking paradigms and ideals that you’ve lived under to keep you from risking everything. It always leaves a heap of debris.

It reminds me of the volunteer work I did after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. We would go to worst districts where the levees had broke and consumed neighborhoods with a fury. Many of the houses we had to gut all the way to the bone just to see where we could began to build from. It was strange to see what was once a home so anorexic. I remember feeling so overwhelmed by the violence of the storm, even fearful of the vacancy that left once lively neighborhoods hauntingly still like a zombie town. Where do you begin to start with heaps of rubble that are twice the size of you, and all you have is a measly shovel? This is a question I come back to as I face the broken pieces of my story.

My first-year processing has been full of shoveling, often surprised by the lack of work I had done around my story before I arrived here. I have, at times, felt a bit stunned like looking at the flooded house needing to be gutted and not knowing where to begin. Deconstruction has looked like having my house gutted, a painful, but necessary process to get to the foundation in order to rebuild. It has been a year of clearing out fantasies of my story that sat like soggy, moldy furniture; it has been about seeing what I could salvage from the wreckage.

The scriptures say that ‘our body is a temple of the Holy Spirit,’ and we know that Jesus spoke of the temple ‘being torn down and rebuilt’ (John 2:19). I am by no means a theologian, but cannot help but think of this years process of tearing down, and the hope of ‘being raised’ as the Gospel message. I would have never, before this year, understood the necessary process of ‘tearing and healing,’ (Hosea 6:1) or being gutted to be filled as what it means to be acquainted with Christ, or as part of the process of suffering, death, and resurrection.

O my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
no reply.
Now we wait in agony, pain, tension, tearing of flesh. We go to hell and darkness.
And wait.
My soul waits, yes, my soul waits for the morning, more then watchman wait, my soul waits.
Shh…don’t rush the resurrection.

Megan Peters is a first year MACP student. She grew up in Louisiana, eating crawfish and drinking sweet tea. She loves to write, finger paint, make music, and dance till the break of dawn. You will most likely find her in absorbing conversations, hitting happy hours, or chasing sunlight.

Watch Part 2 here.

Jev Forsberg: Participation in Violent Videogaming as Profound Mimetic Discharge

This project strays from the traditional phenomenological analysis of violent videogames, and focuses instead on their telos – or function – in the world.  Using Rene Girard’s understanding of ‘mimetic theory’ and the function of the ‘scapegoat mechanism,’ as well as Jacques Ellul’s notion of the ‘necessity’ of violence, I reflect up what a ‘Christian’ response to violent gaming could look like.  Over-and-against the the historic ‘Evangelical’ response to violent gaming, I base my conclusions on a framework based on categories of reflection, meditation, and non-violent Christology.

Download Jev’s Integrative Project Paper

Jason Bowker: An Ordinarily Radical Restructuring of Church

In light of our increasingly post-Christian world, the church must re-ground itself in theologically imaginative theory and practice in order to continue its presence as a people of good news, peace, justice, and restoration for the world. My integrative project is my best attempt at re-imagining a new way to do and be church, through a theoretical and practical examination of the five foundational principles that will serve as the core of my future churches.

Download Jason’s Integrative Project Paper

Andy Cheung: The Intersection of Faith and the Self: Re-examining the Christian Identity in the Asian American Context

Complications in identity formation for Asian Americans can be attributed to factors stemming from the multidimensional context in which they live. The paper introduces the particular challenges in identity development for Asian Americans and how the use of Christian identity creates additional fragmentation in the self. The hope is to spark conversations leading Asian American Christians to a re-imagining of faith and the self.

Download Andy’s Integrative Project Paper

Stay tuned for parts two and three!

I’d take a cool compress with me
And lay it on my hot, heaving heart
I’d go to her
And say:
You don’t have to imagine Orion is your lover
Or let the dust constellations keep you company
In their slow, moving, isolated, mesmerizing dance
Calling out your despair.
I’d look at her despair and say: that is an injustice
against the joy in you.
I’d say: There’s someone with you
Who knows better
Than your parents do.

I’d say: little girl, you are nice
And you can misbehave.
I’d say: when someone bigger says they know a lot
You can disagree, and,
You can have a different opinion than your big scary daddy.
I’d say: you’re mom is afraid and
There’s room for you to hurt
But not in front of her,
So take a deep breath
And let your agony go
Somewhere I’ll show you…

Your agony is a hot, roaring river
Full of spiny fish
That scream and holler.
They love themselves, those fish,
They had to fall in love,
and with the pace, the tempo, of that raging river.
But that river flows to the sea
And the sea is cool, it cleanses.
Those fish don’t want to go
Because they like their bright colors.
Those colors and the boiling water defend them from
Being seen,
Which is like being liked or hated.
The vicissitudes of being liked and hated
Get to drain down to that clear water too
And you can be who you are
which will change
and that’s okay.

When you are afraid of letting yourself
Nuzzle up to who you’re becoming
I want to tell you something:
Don’t be afraid, and get right closer.

Jocelyn Skillman was born in the Seattle area and attended the University of Puget Sound where she studied Comparative Sociology and Ancient Greek. She is involved in sketch comedy in Seattle and loves yummy food, gibberish, and playing pretend!

I didn’t start out with a belief in the kingdom of God that was bold.  My “kingdom” was tribal – white, narrowly defined evangelical, middle class, and pretty safe.  But I met people and read more scripture until my understanding of the kingdom grew into something larger than the tribal ghetto in which I was birthed in faith.  I stood with Tom Skinner one morning in a college chapel and he said, “Keith, you know, the Kingdom of God doesn’t look like this.”  He didn’t mean the white, suburban and rural middle class students who sat on the seats in the gym weren’t part of the kingdom, just that the kingdom needed more seats for others who weren’t in the room.

This past week, I announced the formation of a Presidential Task Force on Intercultural Credibility.  Our current strategic plan calls us to develop movement toward intercultural credibility. The choice of these words was intentional.  Combined with our mission statement, “intercultural credibility” is the continual movement as an institution to inspire belief in people from various cultural perspectives that we “train people to be competent in the study of text, soul, and culture in order to serve God and neighbor through transforming relationships.”

This work is foundational to our mission, it is not simply an add-on to our work. It is foundational to our mission because it is foundational to the work of the kingdom of God.  It is theological; it is biblical. Text and soul and culture.  We don’t come to this task today only through the lens of soul or story or experience.  It doesn’t stop with my experience or yours alone.  We don’t come to this work today only through the lens of a cultural value, a politically or socially correct cultural more that somehow reflects the ethos of sophisticated Seattle alone.  We don’t separate text-soul-culture as we do this work.  We are committed to it because we are called to be agents of reconciliation, people of justice, followers of Jesus, obedient to the call and kingdom to which his redemptive sacrifice calls us.

There are at least four essential elements in the work ahead of us:

• To create critical self-awareness within our community.
• To lead us into an increasingly nuanced conversation in curricular and co-curricular content and institutional policy and culture.
• To help us develop shared vocabulary around terms like culture, difference, racism, reconciliation.
• To help us to continue to develop a shared strategy of steps needed to be taken to move us toward intercultural credibility.

Some of us have been on this journey for a long time.  We have seen communities take one step forward and multiple steps backward.  We have seen our country do the same.  We have seen our school do the same.  It is not a task that will be “completed” when we create policies, curriculum, and change our culture.  Why then do we persist?  Because we have been won over by the teachings of Jesus who has won us over to something that is here and now and out of this world.

Keith Anderson serves as the President of The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology as well as a teaching professor. He received his D.Min from George Fox University and has been a mentor for leaders in churches and higher education for the past 30 years.

The Annual Report is also online! It looks great on your PC, smartphone, or iPad and is full of videos, interactive charts, and more. Take a peek at our Annual Report and see what a great year 2011 was for The Seattle School.