How I Spent My Halloween Evening...

I spent it in the parking lot of Wellington UMC at the Trunk or Treat. I went as my alter ego, Mel's Mom, with black cat ears and eyebrow-penciled whiskers and nose. I also decorated the Prius's trunk with really cool pumpkin lights that I got on sale at Walgreens today. We had about 75 kids through from pretty princes to scary death masks. I gave a kid extra candy who had a skeleton mask that from time to time dripped fake blood (inside the mask) through some kind of a trick in the mask. I believe Jill, the pastor, told me that last year they received one family into the church and baptized two children because they had experienced the love of the church for the community's children through this event.

In the pictures, the lady with the Mad Hatter hat is Jill Daniel the pastor (and piano player extraordinaire.) Others are lay folks from Wellington (and Napolean too I think) The girl in the big band hat is Porsche, who has served on PPR as long as I have been ds here, and is now 17. The lady bug baby was darling, though real lady bugs are infesting many places around the district right now so it was good to be reminded that they can be cute, too. Especially when the lady bug is as beautiful as this child. All the children were quite beautiful tonight. However, when I asked the trick or trunkers, when they came to my plastic pumpkin candy container, what their trick was, they looked at me like I was speaking another language. For years I have asked T or Ters to tell me a joke as I handed them candy. And they have. Apparently this is not a custom in Wellington. Proving again, dear pastors, learn the culture where you live. Ah, always a lesson to be learned!

Liberty Community Chorus

I am really liking this Liberty community chorus thing. Tonight at rehearsal I experienced some extremely lovely moments that took me to that transcendent place that only art can.

First of all, we are singing exquisitely beautiful music. It does not get any better than Robert Frost poetry set to Randall Thompson composition. The concert, which will be performed on Monday November 24 at Liberty UMC (contact me for tickets!---there is a cost, sorry) has the theme Music Down In My Soul and although not all is sacred music, all the music does hold much, much truth. Gorgeous.

Second, it truly is a community choir. In the soprano section, there are several trained voices, some wobbly older voices, some obvious church choir members (some from Liberty UMC who are very nice to me), and a few folks that simply love to sing, but haven't had much choral experience. Tonight, an older woman who is one who fits into this last category, turned around and unabashedly asked my row neighbor, who has an incredibly beautiful voice and I would consider our section leader if we had such things, what a coda was. And my row neighbor took the time to explain it to her in a very non-patronizing way. Way neat.

Thirdly, there of course is Bryan Taylor, whom I have offered accolades here before. He is technically a great choral conductor. I have sung with many, many choral conductors in my life and what sets Bryan apart is not only his great sense of humor, but also the exquisite little metaphors and similes he uses to teach us how to sing. Tonight a couple of these word pictures really touched me. One was while we were rehearsing the Schindler's List songs included in the concert--one in Hebrew, one in Yiddish, and one where we simply "ooo" while the orchestra will play. We, meaning me, are not having an easy time with pronunciation. We know the music pretty well, but we can't seem to get the words right and we sound pretty timid and unsure of ourselves. Bryan asked us how many snow skiers were present...several raised hands. He then asked those there who had skied (I have not and don't ever plan to, thank you very much) to think about what it was like the first time they skied...how hard it was to trust that if they leaned forward and got the feel, that they would not fall every time and to trust that stance was the only thing that would allow them to ski. He told us just to trust, to have confidence and sing that Hebrew. We actually were lots better after he talked about skiing.

Then, in a very beautiful small moment, while talking to the sopranos about being more ethereal in our sound on a certain piece, he said that we needed to be the wind on which the bird could rise (his exact words)...no, there was no bird in this particular song. But I just love that picture. The wing beneath my wings sort of thing, but less cliche in a way. I think that really is a good illustration for ministry...that we who are leaders should be empowering of others so that they may rise to that place where they must go, where God calls them...in fact for dss, it is a good image, that we provide motivation, and confidence, and courage and open the way for creativity to flourish in pastors and churches, being God's instruments of lift and movement in a ministry of servanthood. I like it.

I also really like the Liberty Community Chorus experience.

A Shout Out to Jill....

Today I was under the weather and did not make the first charge conference that was scheduled...I did make the second one, at Napolean---Wellington and Orrick were there too. We have been singing at most charge conferences this year the hymn Victory in Jesus. That is a hymn I have sung all my life.

When we got to the place tonight in the devotional time when I usually have us sing, I realized quickly I had not checked with pastor Jill Daniel if there were someone to play and just as quickly realized that Jill herself played and boy, did she play. Full out Southern Methodist! ! Wow!!! That's really all I have to say...just WOW. And the singing was mighty good too!!!

Counting Yard signs

Caleb and I just now counted the number of Obama and McCain yard signs we saw in the five mile stretch between our condo (45th and Jefferson) and his school (79th Terr and Main). This is an upper middle (Brookside) to lower middle (Waldo around school) area. We did not see any yard signs like this one in the picture. We DID see 41 Obama signs and 2 McCain signs. And one Ron Paul sign.

Cookie Questing and Becoming Comfortable with What I Have

Anyone in my family can tell you that I am a sucker for Christmas cookie magazines. I started buying them many, many moons ago, when only a couple came out about this time of year. I have always been on the lookout for new and exciting cookies to bake---I lean toward chocolate of course, and lemon and raspberry and nice looking ones that don't take much work. Every year over the last three decades I have sat and I pondered the pretty cookie pictures and I mark the front of the magazines with page numbers of the ones I want to try.

So far this year I have bought two cookie magazines, and I have tried one recipe. Peanut-butter, chocolate dipped shortbread cookies. Sounds good, but they really weren't all that good. Fact of the matter is, it's been five years since I really baked a new cookie that I liked any better than any I already had. So....either as a sign I am getting old or that I have come to a happy cookie place or that in some ethereal cookie way, I just realize I've gone about as far as I can go, I think I am done with trying new cookies unless one positively jumps out at me when I am stuck in the grocery line looking at a cookie magazine. So this year, I will make:

Pecan Tassies (maybe....My mother's recipe)

Shortbread Stars (from Fannie Farmer cookbook, probably acquired 20 years ago)

Raspberry Foldovers (from a magazine eight years ago or so)

Chocolate Raspberry-Crumb Bars (from a magazine eight years or so ago)

Maybe Rosettes (made with my mother's rosette iron...I didn't make them last year for the first time in maybe 30 years...a LOT of work...but with only 18 charge conferences, I may have strength enough to try again...)

And Starlight Surprise Cookies (actually I made a batch today...hence the picture above of a Starlight Surprise cookie)

Starlight Surprise Cookies have nothing to do with an outdoor theater here in KC of the same name (not Starlight Surprise Cookie Theater, just Starlight Theater). These cookies come from a recipe my mother made since I was a little girl...she would use Starlight Chocolate Candies---wrap a rich, wonderful cookie dough around one, put a "pecan meat" (as she would say) on top, bake and eat. Except even in the recipe book she made for me when I got married, she had stopped using Starlight Chocolate Candies and started using a little section of a Hershey candy bar. But we (I say we, because when I make these cookies, my mother is just over my right shoulder, which is where she shows up when her spirit senses that I need her or that it would just fill out my life more to have her present) still call them Starlight Surprise Cookies.

Cookie making and Christmas just go together for me. I think I have been invited to a cookie exchange in Corder this year, which I hope to get the date for soon and go to. But I think I may stop looking quite so hard for new recipes ...I won't become an old "stick in the dough" or anything, but maybe I will place my cookie quest energy into asking folks whose cookies I eat for their recipes if I really like their cookies instead of making Better Homes and Gardens and Pillsbury richer by buying magazines. Maybe.

Being the Mission

Today Paul Borden, author of Hitting the Bulls Eye and Direct Hit led a day of training for the district superintendents of Missouri and others who had been invited. He has had tremendous success in rebuilding churches and starting new ones and is widely respected. Our conference has taken the model that he offers and transformed it into what we are calling the Healthy Church Initiative, which our conference congregational development staff person Bob Farr works tirelessly to promote because of his earnest desire to see the church of Jesus Christ flourish in its embodiment in Missouri as the United Methodist Church. I have heard Rev. Borden before; this time I was even more taken with his deep commitment to turn churches around and to bring the "lost" to Christ. I put "lost" in parentheses for those reading this who would want me to do so. ;-) It is not this commitment to church renewal that I struggle with when I hear his approach. It is something else. I think I have a real rubber-meets-the-road ecclesiological difference with him, which I felt safe in voicing aloud today, and felt heard and respected.

I really cannot completely articulate that difference and don't want to start taking potshots... I am tired of hearing potshots being taken...(what is a potshot anyway?...please, don't ask Caleb !!! He might enlighten us in ways I would rather not hear!)

I will lift one thing I heard today that represents that ecclesiological difference is when I heard him say, "we need our churches to adopt a missional approach to ministry and give up a relational approach." I listened carefully to hear what he meant by being a missional church. What he means, I think, is that each church needs to be very sure of its mission---and then make the hard choices to align all its ministries with that mission. Know your mission, be able to articulate it, eliminate everything that does not contribute to that mission, add only add new ministries that do contribute to the mission.

So far, so good. Sort of at least. But to say that the opposite of missional in this sense even is relational is where I have a real issue. It may be that it is his definition of missional with which I struggle. One of the contribution that the emergent conversation has made and can make for us is that it articulates what a "missional" church is quite a bit differently. It isn't so much that a missional church is a church which has a mission statement, or a that mission a thing out there that everyone buys into; emergent folks will tell us that the church IS the mission. The church, in the way it goes about living the communal life, or in the way it approaches the community is supposed to be the embodiment of Christ, is simply by being and stiving to be a community already has its mission. Think, perhaps, less We've a Story to Tell to the Nations and more They'll Know We are Christians By Our Love....not so much lovey dovey as what I really mean is "they'll know we are Christians by the way we live". Now that doesn't mean the church sits around missioning all over everybody that is already there, but it does mean that it is as much about being as it is about doing. I realize some will say that is a false dichotomy...but when we become busy about many things and do not always attend to the inner life; or when the linear "hit the bulls eye" way of defining church is the totality of what drives and defines our mission as a church, I don't know, friends, but I guess I miss the mystery somehow....if we believe that God can do abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine (yes, many of you know I DO have a favorite scripture and this is it) can we both recognize, as Wesley would have us, that we need to ) set goals and move toward those goals as a church, while declaring that indeed, "if we want to make God laugh, tell him our plans"? This is a very basic thing about how we are going about doing/being church right now that occupies my thinkign and leading and I am willing to live with the ambiguity.

I am so grateful for the kind of determination I see in a faithful man like Paul Borden. He always gives the glory to God for what good he is doing. His heart is so impassioned by the gospel that that is what drives him. I want to stay engaged so that I can articulate better how he pushes me to define my own ecclesiology which is quite different from his. For that engagement, I am grateful.

Fairyland

Fairyland. I first heard of this magical place about six years ago, while serving at Broadway UMC in Waldo, which, believe it or not, was not really that very far from Fairyland. Sitting at Prospect Avenue and 75th, Fairyland Park, filled with rides and a swimming pool and lots of places to picnic, was open from 1923 until 1977, when a wind storm wrecked parts of the roller coasters and Worlds of Fun became too much competition. I heard of Fairyland from members of Broadway, near my age, who recounted stories about the school picnics, the 25 cents admission price, and the great times they had there with their families.

I drive past that corner often, since when I travel from the office I get off Bruce Watkins highway at 75th to tootle on over to Kansas City Academy to pick up Caleb. Since finding out about the park that used to be there, I never pass that corner without wanting to get out and root around to see if I could fine a ticket stub, or a ride token, or even just a penny with "1950" marked on it to help me imagine what it must have been like. There is still a large patch of green there and a not for profit organization that aids the blind has built a great looking facility there.

Fairyland. I had not thought, however, too terribly much about it in detail, just wistful imaginings of girls in pigtails holding their daddies hands, and the waft of cotton candy in the air.

After last night, though I will be thinking about Fairyland differently.

Cana is taking a twentieth century American history class this semester, one of three courses she has at Penn Valley Community College. Two of those three classes are taught by African Americans...her history class being one. Yesterday, the teacher, in her late fifties, talked personally about what it was like growing up in Kansas City. She talked about Fairyland. She told the class that when she was a little girl, the only time black folks could go to Fairyland was on "colored people's weekend" when they were invited to come to "test the rides." Her mother would not let her go on those weekends, not just because of the ominous nature of that description, but also because her mom said, "if we can't go when we want, we won't go at all."

I think of myself as anything but racist. I was taught by my parents not to be, even when there were those in our family whose jokes made me sick to my stomach and who thought they were mighty funny when they would start talking in dialect. My two colleagues in the district office are both black; good grief, I listen to the black gospel selections from my Ipod almost every day! I'm cool with all of this. Until I remember, I am a creation of white privilege. I see the world, especially American history, through those eyes. How many times have I offended friends by not remembering that and by assuming my view is their view too?

Fairyland Park did not desegregate until 1964, ten years after Brown vs. the Board of Education; a year after the March on Washington; the same year as the Civil Rights Act passed Congress, a year before the Voting Rights Act did. Kansas City could in no way be called "cutting edge" when it came to integration. There were protests for two full years before the privately-owned Fairyland was integrated, and then over protests by many white folks in the community. Over those two years there were many arrests of persons trying to buy tickets. Most of the objection was that there would be "mixed swimming" in the pool there.

Now, I will look at that green space at the corner of Prospect and 75th, surrounded by houses owned and lived in by African Americans, and I will not feel the same. I will still want to stop, but this time to not only remember the sounds of squealing teenagers making that last long loop on the Wildcat roller coaster, but I will also remember the determination of the black kids who for two years tried and tried and finally made it into the gates. I will continue to notice that there is still a "color line" at Troost Avenue, as I draw closer to my kids school and my old church, and I will remember that my children, blond at birth and light skinned still, have been children of privilege, attending a private school within the boundaries of one of the most challenged public school districts in the country. It is all a web intricate in history and held strong by prejudice. At least I can try my best to understand that my backward look at past events is skewed by my own privilege. And I will try to remember.

Such a Beautiful wedding! as Mrs Soames would say (apologies to Thornton Wilder)....

It has been a rather, well, busy last 10 days or so. Some of these days were ones that if someone were to tell me, as many do, that "I wouldn't want your job" I would have agreed. Today was not one of those days. Because today, I got to perform the marriage of Allison and Joshua Shandy at her parents home north of Odessa. I have not performed a wedding for three and half years, maybe longer, and I have never performed one any more beautiful than this one. The weather was perfect, the bride, beautiful, the music lovely (including a stunning moment for me when, for the processional, iPod played through speakers played the hymn Praise to the Lord, The Almighty) and both fathers led in prayer in the midst of the service. The colors for the wedding were black, champagne and red.... Here is a picture of Allison, Josh, their attendants and parents after the wedding.

Those are apple trees, laden with red ripe fruit, on each side of the arbor. And so, of course, last night after the rehearsal I had to come home and download from Itunes a John Rutter recording (Elizabeth Hampton setting I think) of the early American poem Jesus Christ the Apple Tree. Below is the text to the poem. Which is what I will leave you with, except that the reception was held in the barn out back, the bride sang along with Michael Buble's rendition of The Very Thought of You for the first dance, and we all ate homemade beef stew and cornbread and drank orange Crush and root beer. Proving that although huge bucks and "keeping up with the Jones girl's wedding" can make for an outlandishly expensive cookie cutter wedding and reception, today's wedding was truly beautiful--a gorgeous night, photos taken by the family, a grandpa singing Let Me Call You Sweetheart on his acoustical guitar for the processional (thanks Pete, for another lovely memory) and gobs of thrown rose petals as a beautiful bride and her red-headed husband walked down the grassy aisle is so much more pleasing to the soul.

1
Jesus Christ the Apple Tree
The tree of life my soul hath seen,
Laden with fruit and always green:
The tree of life my soul hath seen,
Laden with fruit and always green:
The trees of nature fruitless be
Compared with Christ the apple tree.
2
His beauty doth all things excel:
By faith I know, but ne’er can tell,
His beauty doth all things excel:
By faith I know, but ne'er can tell
The glory which I now can see
In Jesus Christ the apple tree.
3
For happiness I long have sought,
And pleasure dearly I have bought:
For happiness I long have sought,
And pleasure dearly I have bought:
I missed of all; but now I see
'Tis found in Christ the apple tree.
4
I'm weary with my former toil,
Here I will sit and rest a while:
I'm weary with my former toil,
Here I will sit and rest a while:
Under the shadow I will be,
Of Jesus Christ the apple tree.
5
This fruit doth make my soul to thrive,
It keeps my dying faith alive:
This fruit doth make my soul to thrive,
It keeps my dying faith alive:
Which makes my soul in haste to be
With Jesus Christ the apple tree.