Lay Forum

Following Common Dreams 2 Conference in Melbourne 15-18 April 2010, Gretta Vosper, Key Note Speaker and Author of “With or Without God – the Way We Live is More Important than What We Believe”, will visit Brisbane 1st & 2nd May.

Saturday 1st May Wesley House, 140 Ann St Brisbane
10 am to 1 pm Lecture and workshop
Gretta Vosper “What’s Left to Worship, what it is we take forward.”
$20 ($10 concession)

Saturday 7.30 -9.30 pm Wesley House, 140 Ann St Brisbane
Gretta Vosper “With or Without God, the Simplicity of Integrity”
$20 (10 concession)

Sunday 2nd May
Gretta Vosper – Homilies at St Mary’s Community in Exile
9.00 am and 5 pm

Sunday 2nd May
6.30 – 8 pm Coffee and Conversation with Gretta Vosper
$5 – West End Uniting Church

REGISTRATIONS to Rodney Eivers, email eiversrh @ telstra.com
Ph 3273 2049 (register early as seating may be limited- pay at the door)

Sponsored by
Lay Forum Uniting Church, Progressive Spirituality Network, SoFiA and St Mary’s Community in Exile.

Rev Dr Francis Macnab of St Michael’s Uniting Church, Melbourne has for many years sought to nurture in his parishioners a Christian faith which fits comfortably with the experiences and scholarship of the current era. He shares with the Uniting Church Lay Forum of Queensland the value of providing a safe space in which members can explore what it means to be a Jesus person in this 21st century.

The Lay Forum invites you to meet Francis Macnab from 7.00 to 9.00 p.m. at Raymont Lodge, Cadell Street, Auchenflower, Tuesday 10th November 2009.

Booking is not required and the evening is free of charge although donations to cover expenses are invited. A figure of $5 per person is suggested.

Rodney Eivers, Co-convenor Uniting Church Lay Forum

For further details: eiversrh at telstra.com

Anita Farber-Robertson, in her book, “Learning While Leading“, (Alban Institute, 2000), draws on the work of Chris Argyris and Donald Schon to unpack the reasons people in the church avoid honest dialogue and learning, and provides an alternative approach that might be helpful for us here.

Argyris and Schon developed what is now known as “action science” as they worked with companies to increase professional effectiveness. They were intrigued by the level of “designed blindness” in organisations, in which rational people can see the flaws in the thinking of other people yet are unaware of their own incongruent behaviour.

Four social virtues are pivotal in constructing our interactions with others: being helpfully supportive, respecting people, being strong, and maintaining integrity. The difficulty we face is that these values can be expressed in ways that stop real engagement with our thinking and that of others.

Continue reading Models of Social Virtue

Book Review: Frost, Michael (2006). Exiles – Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture. Massachusetts, Hendrickson. 330pgs.

From the title Michael Frost promises a challenging read – and he delivers.

In particular Michael’s Part III on Dangerous Criticism really hooked me.  This is, for me, the peak of the book and a challenging one to boot, ranging from a critique of the legal nature of the corporation to human rights atrocities in Darfur to social collapse through environmental exhaustion. 

I was most taken by his insightful development of the critique of empire approach and then its incisive application as mentioned.  Frost has a somewhat conventional theology, which in a sense makes the above critique all the more trenchant and remarkable.

I found this a bumpy yet warm book. Bumpy from the perspective of my progressive theology and warm in that it was incisive and inclusive both of which I deeply respect.

Continue reading Post-Christian Exiles – book review

This web site, and the group that has commissioned it, is currently named “Lay Forum”. There is some debate about the usefulness of that phrase. Here’s my thoughts on the pros and cons of continuing with the term.

The English word, “Lay” comes from the Latin word laicus, and the Greek words, laos (people) and laikos (of the people). As the New Testament was written, this word would have referred to all people, without any distinctions related to status or office. With the development of a clergy culture, and the privilege associated with that culture, the word lay came to mean “not clergy”, with overtones in some cases of uneducated, untrained and disempowered.

The Uniting Church’s future seems to be moving away from the clear cut delineation between the ordained and the not ordained. We have capacity to commission lay celebrants for weddings, funerals, baptism and eucharist. Many of our congregations are pastored by people who are not ordained, many of whom have no interest in being ordained.

So why set up a group called the Lay Forum? My observations tell me that the move was an effort to kickstart a movement that bypassed the control mechanisms often associated with “placement” in the Uniting Church. Australian author Gerard Arbuckle in his 1993 book, “Refounding the Church: Dissent for Leadership”, observes that the people who most resist prophetic examination of the foundations of any institution are the people who have the most to gain by keeping things as they are. The people who initially formed the Lay Forum, I believe, realised that something had to happen among the people.

Continue reading What Do We Mean by Lay?

Question and Answer
from the weekly column of John Shelby Spong

Dear Pastor, (who asked to be kept anonymous) writes:

I struggle with reconciling my “personal” experience of God when I can no longer hold to a personal God. How do you, or would you, help a member of a congregation you are serving understand the dichotomy of progressive religion?

Dear A minister in the Deep South

Thank you for your question. I know the mindset of the state and community in which you live and work and I know the struggle that goes on in many clergy between their integrity and their desire not to offend the common wisdom of the world in which they live.

The first thing you need to do is to recognize that for most people religion is not a search for truth, but a search for security. Security is not well served by opening up questions for which there are no answers. You must begin by accepting people where they are. A good pastor, however, does not leave them there forever, for that means they will never grow.

Continue reading GOD and Progressive Religion

YOUR INVITATION
TO THE FIRST PUBLIC MEETING
OF THE LAY FORUM IN THE UNITING CHURCH!!
SUNDAY MAY 17th @ 2 30 TO 4.00 PM
Albert Room (front), Raymont Lodge, Cadell Street, Auchenflower

As the progressive voice in the UC we need to meet to get to know each other well, to share ideas on our future directions and to create a sense of real unity of purpose. We plan a few meetings each year to do this.

This first meeting is a hello and feedback meeting. The hello item will be where we introduce ourselves briefly and meet both old and new friends, knowing that we already have many things in common, in particular how the progressives can contribute towards a healthy future for the UC. The feedback item is where we provide a brief report on the progress of the Lay Forum so far but then move to the important part- we need your opinions and advice on:.

1. How we can establish a committed and active progressive community in the UC?
2. How we can take advantage of the immense amount of talent in our group?
3. How we can involve the younger age groups or even form a Young Lay Forum?
4. Do we need a better structure in the Lay Forum?
5. Are our priorities right?

The management group would value your opinions and discussion on these issues, even if you are unable to attend this particular meeting.

But please be warned we will be asking for volunteers for:

A group to help Rodney Eivers organise future meetings of the Lay Forum, and
A group with internet expertise to help Reg Collard and Duncan MacLeod operate our website.

We are sending this message to all on our Lay Forum email group and to other potential supporters. We don’t have a formal list of members yet, but your name is on our list of nominal members or supporters, so please accept this as a personal invitation from the management group of the Lay Forum. Should you have friends who may be interested feel free to invite them.

The meeting will be in the Albert Room, Raymont Lodge, Cadell Street, Auchenflower. We look forward to seeing you there!

Rod Jensen (Lay Forum Convenor)

There will be no need to give notice that you will be attending. Just come as you are.
Further information may be obtained from Rodney Eivers ph. 3273 2049 (eiversrh@telstra.com) and about the Lay Forum in general from our website
Uniting Church Lay Forum

http://www.layforum.unitingchurch.org.au/

People interested in following this site’s progress can subscribe to updates in two ways, email and RSS software. This means that you can be informed about progress on the site without having to visit the site to check on progress. When you see that there’s been a new post, then you can visit and interact through comments.

Email

The most popular subscription method is likely to be by email. On the right sidebar of the site you’ll see a form where you can enter your email address and click “subscribe”. You’ll be taken to a new window, as below. Type in the letters you see in green, and click “Complete Subscription Request”. There’s just one step left now. You’ll be sent an email checking that you actually want to receive the email updates. Click on the link in the email or cut and paste it into an internet browser. Lay Forum site update emails will have details at the end of each message, telling you how to unsubscribe. The email system is powered by Feedburner, using the RSS feed for posts that we’ve set up.

RSS Feed Readers

At the top of the site you will see an orange image with the word Posts. Beside it is a blue image with the word Comments. These link to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, formated in XML format. They can be accessed through RSS Reader software such as Google Reader or iGoogle, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox Live Bookmarks, Mac OS X RSS Reader (Apple), Bloglines, NewsGator online, NetNewsWire (Apple), Outlook 2007, FeedReader or Vienna (Apple).

This site has been set up so that anyone can read the material on it, and a range of people can contribute on a number of levels.

Anybody anywhere in the world can view this content, unless it has been banned by some zealous government for whatever reason. The data, including WordPress software, our text and images, articles and comments, is stored on a server hosting the unitingchurch.org.au domain name.

Access to behind the scenes, however, is restricted to people with user names and passwords. In WordPress, the software we are using to run the site, there are five different levels of access to the site.

Administrator – Somebody who has access to all the administration features, including editing posts, changing settings and adding links.
Editor – Somebody who can publish posts, manage posts as well as manage other people’s posts, etc.
Author – Somebody who can publish and manage their own posts.
Contributor – Somebody who can write and manage their posts but not publish posts.
Subscriber – Somebody who can read comments, comment, receive news letters.

Administrators at this point are Reg Collard and myself. Paul Wildman is an author.

We anticipate that we will have a range of authors who have the capacity to write well. If we had someone who needed help with their articles, for grammatical or legal reasons, we’d invite them to be a contributor.

Users who are registered with the site are given a user name and a password for logging in.

Any questions, comments or suggestions?

The Lay Forum site is up. Not quite running.  Reg Collard and Paul Wildman are working with me to bring this site to life, adding pages, posts, links, images and design. It’s a work in progress. Leave your suggestions in the comments space below and we’ll see what we can do to put them into action.

To find your way around this site:

On the left sidebar we currently have a list of permanent but editable pages about the Lay Forum. Under “Articles” we are adding longer opinion pieces, research, sermons, prayers etc. We have a search bar (with the magnifying glass next to it). There’s a Sitemeter counter – click on that to visit our stats page. “Meta” is for people who are registered as administrators or authors for the site.

On the right sidebar we currently have a brief introduction to the Lay Forum site, a list of recent posts, archives, and a range of links categorised by Education, Research Resources, Sources for Progressive Christianity.

In the middle the default is a list of the most recent five posts. A ‘post’ might be a short opinion piece, a news article, a summary of a longer article, a poem. Ideally these should be no longer than 600 words. They may include images and video. Posts are automatically archived for future reference.

Our intention is to gather a team of authors who can write posts and articles. Examples of articles that might get us going are:

What do we mean by “Lay”?
This is the Word of God. What do we mean by that?
Can we find healthy alternatives to the usual concepts associated with ‘sin’?

We’d like to see people engaging on the site through leaving comments in response to articles, posts and one another’s comments.