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In times of unrest, Jesus often responded by tending to his immediate needs and those of his community before deciding what to do. As we emerge from this season of political unrest, the healing stories of Jesus show us that our response to this unrest is to begin with personal and communal healing. Doing so reminds us that God cares for all of God’s creatures, great and small.
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The gospels tell us that Jesus practiced nonviolence and taught his followers to expand their preconceived ideas about who was welcome at God’s table. Despite this inclusive theology, we are currently in the midst of another rise of Christian Nationalism—a belief system rooted in mythological lies about American history and the Divine. We invite you to join us this Sunday as we unpack the lies of Christian Nationalism by centering the life, teachings, and politics of Jesus.
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Fehlende Folgen?
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What role should churches, and specifically our church, play in addressing the challenges of loneliness in our faith community? We invite you to join us for the last sermon of this series as we explore how following the religion of Jesus should transform our relationship with ourselves and each other.
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We all want to be accepted and belong to a supportive circle of friends. However, our desire for relationships and community are often in conflict with what we actually prioritize, and we are now learning that children are noticing this behavior and mirror it. How can we close the gap between what we say we want and what we actually prioritize? How might we prevent our children from developing habits that promote social isolation? What we see in the gospels is that Jesus invites us to view ourselves as a family of families, interconnected and embodying the compassionate instinct that we were born with.
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What does it mean to be someone’s friend? How does friendship expand our experience of the Divine? As humans, we all need the social connection of friendship to help prevent us from feeling lonely. To be sure, making friends and keeping friendships alive is not easy. However, as we see in the friendships between David and Jonathan and Jesus and his disciples, friendship is essential to our spiritual growth.
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For those of us who struggle with loneliness, the obvious “solution” to our challenge would be to go and spend time with people. If only it were that easy. While there are several practices that we should adopt to address our longing for community, the most important one is somewhat counterintuitive. Jesus teaches his disciples that we must first deepen our connection with ourselves, which builds the foundation upon which we establish new or strengthen existing relationships.
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Rugged individualism and self-determination are among the core values that dominate American culture. These values have simultaneously incentivized many of us to prioritize our vocations or social obligations at the expense of and for the benefit of our relationships. The result is that far too many of us struggle with loneliness and long for connection and belonging. As the writer of Ecclesiastes makes clear, our feelings of loneliness are not new, and the antidote to loneliness is human connection.
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Jesus’ way of radical compassion is, in fact, radical. In his parables on forgiveness and love, he encourages his followers to forgive those who have wronged them as many as seventy-seven times and to love their enemies! Given our polarized society, is this kind of compassion possible or even practical?
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Jesus’ path of radical compassion is not limited to grounding ourselves in the truth of our belovedness and recovering our compassionate core. In its truest form, compassion always moves us to compassionate care towards others. As we see in the story of Jesus and Zacchaeus, compassion for others can break boundaries, dismantle stereotypes, heal, and transform both others and ourselves.
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Compassion can be misunderstood as mere tenderness or sentimentality. Self-compassion moves us to ask ourselves, “What do I need to help alleviate my suffering?” The answer to this question changes depending on the circumstances. Sometimes, we need to rest in our belovedness. At other times, when we need to protect or provide for ourselves and our loved ones, self-compassion can be fierce. We find an example of such fierce self-compassion in the story of the Prophet Miriam and the actions she takes to save her brother and, in the process, her people.
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The speeches of Dough Emhoff, President Barack Obama, and Gov. Tim Walls gave us a very different portrayal of masculinity and, unsurprisingly, raised the alarm of some Christian conservatives. In this episode, we discuss what progressive Christian masculinity can look like, and we critique the toxic masculinity of “biblical patriarchy.”
The books we mentioned in the podcast were:
The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr
Mediocre by Ijeoma OluoThe Loft Conversations podcast has now become The Progressive Christians Podcast - and has its own podcast feed! So please use the links below to subscribe to the new feed to keep up with the latest progressive theological discourse.
https://open.spotify.com/show/5HrRpHbClmrZrwMZPf8Huj
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-progressive-christians-podcast/id1763114936 -
The cultivation of compassion is a process of recovery—of retrieving the compassionate instinct that has become buried and obscured, either in the moment or over time. In this way, self-compassion, personal restoration, and healing are essential components of Jesus’ spiritual path of compassion. Our tradition teaches that every human being is created in the image of God, and thus, God’s compassionate instinct lives within us. We are most fully alive when we live from this essence.
www.TheLoftLA.org
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The persuasive power of the Black Church tradition has been center stage during the first two days of the Democratic National Convention. The speeches of Senator Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock and Michelle and Barack Obama found their footing in the black preaching tradition. In this episode we discuss the connections between the Black Church tradition and progressive politics.
The Loft Conversations podcast has now become The Progressive Christians Podcast - and has its own podcast feed! So please use the links below to subscribe to the new feed to keep up with the latest progressive theological discourse.
https://open.spotify.com/show/5HrRpHbClmrZrwMZPf8Huj
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-progressive-christians-podcast/id1763114936 -
The cultivation of compassion is a process of recovery—of retrieving the compassionate instinct that has become buried and obscured, either in the moment or over time. In this way, self-compassion, personal restoration, and healing are essential components of Jesus’ spiritual path of compassion. Our tradition teaches that every human being is created in the image of God, and thus, God’s compassionate instinct lives within us. We are most fully alive when we live from this essence.
www.TheLoftLA.org
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Jesus’ spiritual path of compassion invites us to stay grounded in the truth of our belovedness. But all too often we become disconnected from this truth and forget. In moments of stress, anxiety, or loneliness we can even begin to think that perhaps we aren’t worthy of being loved. However, Jesus invites us to remember who we are and whose we are so that we can reground ourselves in the sacred Source of Compassion whenever we feel lost.
www.TheLoftLA.org
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The Loft Conversations podcast has now become The Progressive Christians Podcast - and has its own podcast feed. So please subscribe to the new feed to keep up with the latest progressive theological discourse. The show will continue to appear in The Loft Gathering feed for a few weeks.
Has Western Christianity weaponized marriage and made those who are single, especially women, feel as though they are “bad” Christians? What should progressive Christians think about the Harris/Walz ticket? And breakdancing at the Olympics - wow!
Mentioned in the podcast:
Funky Friday podcast featuring Kirk Franklin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbTAUsXheyg -
To practice a Christianity that models itself after Jesus’ teachings is to follow a spiritual path of transformative compassion. Indeed, compassion was fundamental to Jesus’ ministry and the primary lens through which he engaged his community. What might this compassion look like today? How might compassion transform our relationship to the Sacred, to our communities, and ourselves?
www.TheLoftLA.org
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This Sunday, Dr. Kyle Brooks leads us in an exploration of Ephesians 3:14-21, with emphasis on the 20th verse–which speaks to how God’s power within us enables us to do more than we can ask or imagine. Rev. Dr. Brooks, a native of Detroit, MI, serves as the Visiting Assistant Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Diego. His work broadly explores the communicative conditions of religion, politics, and black expressive cultures. In his teaching, his courses reflect his wide-ranging interests within the realms of religious studies, theology, creative arts, and Africana studies.
www.TheLoftLA.org
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We are pleased to welcome Rev. Blair Trygstad Stowe back to the Loft, to lead us further into a conversation about what evangelism can look like in our tradition and community. (Spoiler: Our conversation will lead to the communion table, because we believe in the abundance of grace.)
Rev. Blair Trygstad Stowe is an ordained elder in the Cal Pac Annual Conference of the UMC. Rev. Blair has served at churches big and small, historic and brand new, in rural, suburban, and urban contexts across Southern California, Georgia, and Massachusetts. She is currently working on a PhD at Boston University with a focus on evangelism, contemporary missiology, and feminist practical theology.
www.TheLoftLA.org
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