Faith as a Way of Life

Christian Scharen, director of the Faith as a Way of Life project at Yale's Center for Faith & Culture, is working on a new book. Tentatively titled Gathered to be Scattered: A New Vision of Pastoral Leadership For Faith As A Way of Life, the work seeks to:

"develop, sustain, and legitimize reflection on Christian faith not simply as a set of propositions to believe, commandments to obey, or rituals to perform but as an integral way of life."

You can browse some early drafts here:

Summary
Preface
Introduction - Pt. 1
Introduction - Pt. 2
Introduction - Pt. 3
Introduction - Pt. 4

In the Preface, Scharen acknowledges the difficulty of concrete theological reflection on the concerns of daily life; we quickly defer to a "primary language" of "feelings, experience, and pragmatism."

To aid the practice of theological discernment, he passes along a simple template penned by his colleague Miroslav Volf. In any given situation we might ask:

god.
who is god.
what is god doing in the world.
how is god achieving this.

us.
who are we.
where are we going.
how are we supposed to get there.

connecting the two.
what should we ultimately trust.
how should we order our loves, provisional and ultimate.

Vocation Bulletin Board

The past issue of Connections, Centered Life's monthly e-letter, featured the following activity:

Use colored push pins to create a vocation bulletin board, a map of congregants' Monday-Saturday callings in God's world

Purpose
To visualize the congregation turned inside out, a gathered AND scattered community.

Summary
Use colored push pins to create a vocation bulletin board, a map of congregants Monday-Saturday callings in God's world.

Steps
1. Find a large cork bulletin board.
2. Locate relevant maps. Depending on the desired degree of detail, gather some combination of neighborhood, city, region, state, nation, and world maps.
3. Gain knowledge of the locations in which your congregation lives out its scattered callings.*
4. Insert push pins to as visual representation of these callings.

* For example, you might conduct a congregational audit or just make pins available and invite folk to push them in where appropriate.

Tips
1. Consider using colored push pins to distinguish types or domains of calling (e.g., home = blue, workplace = green, community presence = yellow).
2. Add commentary (use yarn to make a line to an explanatory call out blurb) for some of the pins. For example, consider rotating photographs or narrative descriptions that give a face to the pins.

References

Activity inspired by a snippet from: Dickhart, Judith McWilliams. Church-going Insider or Gospel-carrying Outsider? A different view of congregations. Chicago: Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 2002. Out of print.

"The main point of this book is that lay members, who have information about the world, are Gospel-carriers into their daily places. Another step in re-balancing vision is to visually demonstrate this concept by re-drawing the congregation's boundaries to include its members daily places. Ask members to construct a pin map that includes both their home places (blue pins?) and work places (green pins?). Use the map to imagine ways to announce the Gospel to people in those scattered communities." p. 121