Season: God is Making All Things Right

Speaker: Rachel Sensenig

Location: 2212 S. Broad St.

About Talk: Lots of us try to protect ourselves in relationships now because of things we’ve gone through in the past. We all have relationship wounds, and when people get close to us they get close to our wounds, too. This can trigger even more conflict or avoidance in us! God invites us into a place of safety and security in him beyond our wounding, even as we’re still in the midst of healing and working things out. His vulnerable love shows us how to be OK in our own vulnerability.

Season: God is Making All Things Right

Speaker: Gwen White

Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St

About Talk: "I wanted to talk about sin because I think it’s a very misunderstood concept in current Christian thinking and I think a better understanding of it is freeing. Sin has its beginnings not just in bad behavior, but deeply buried in unconscious processes. Being able to name it or catching it consciously means I can release it and find new ways of being in the world. We are promised that we will be made new in Christ. This openness to seeing my sin is the way of living into my place within the New Humanity. God still likes co-working or partnership, not dominance with us. Even though, of course, God is infinite and we are finite, God, creator, we the creature—still God wants this loving exchange and insists on it—so God does not overpower us, but waits for our meeting, our understanding, our true presence as our true self." -Gwen White

Season: God is Making All Things Right

Speaker: Rachel Sensenig

Location: 2212 S. Broad St.

About Talk: People do violence to bodies but Jesus came to change that. His work on the cross calls us to peace and tender care of our whole selves and others. There are many ways we can participate in his work of resurrection in our bodies this Lent.

Season: God is Making All Things Right

Speaker: Ben White

Location: 3800 Marlton Pike

About Talk: We are carrying death around inside is. We need to let God get it out. Jesus offers us a way but we hesitate to take it. Confession mortifies the flesh. It calls what is dead, what it is. We can see all the ways that we experience sin and separation from God in our bodies. The embodied disciplines and rituals of death are the very places we can experience freedom from what literally ails us.

Season: God is Making All Things Right

Speaker: Jonny Rashid

Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.

About Talk: The answer to the question of bodily justice isn’t just acting like we aren’t living together. It’s not leaving each other alone. It’s not never interacting. The antidote to violence against our bodies isn’t never touching one another. It’s not fearing our bodies. The other side of being reckless with our bodies is seeing our bodies as a source of sin, instead of life. And that can lead to a very limited experience where we never learn to enjoy food, sex, dancing, all sorts of stuff that can lead to more life instead of life-diminishment and death. When we see our bodies as sources of sin, instead of abodes of God, we really are just slowly dying. We are moving from crucifiable bodies to ones that aren’t. We aren’t just graduating from our bodies into thin air. So for now, we aren’t going for a sterile environment. We can be both free and connected. We can actually use our bodies to deepen and further our lives, instead of being afraid of them.

Season: Everything Has Become New

Speaker: Julie Hoke

Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St

About Talk: The Bible models trust in God that does not rest on whether we are able to be clear and certain about what to believe. Moving from seeing to believing is about moving from certainty to trust. Jesus himself performed signs and wonders so that people would see and believe, but he was calling people into something more—a relationship of trust. In John 6:35-40, Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe.” How do we trust when we cannot see? How do we believe when we have doubt? Our community is formed to resist that doctrinal certainty that will close out the space needed to work out that relationship and trust. We try to create a container and environment of love where faith and trust can flourish. We are trying to create a place where a dialogue of love holds us together, not the right ideas and certainty about them.

Note: Julie talks about 2 Corinthian 5: 16-21 but it is not read due to audio quality. Here it is in full:

So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Season: Everything Has Become New

Speaker: Jonny Rashid

Location: 2007 Frankford Ave

About Talk: We need to move to something more. We need to move to a re-ordering. It’s not enough to tear down and destroy and uproot, we need to build and plant too. We need to create something new. We might need to take some of the rubble of the past with us and create something new together. At a church-wide level this requires time and discernment. The way our culture is moving might inform our process, or we may ask questions about the new institutional lies. God is in all things, so we may find God in cultural leaders, or we may find God in the void of their leadership as well.

Season: Everything Has Become New

Speaker: Rachel Sensenig

Location: 2212 S. Broad St.

About Talk: We are invited to trust Jesus in an experiential way. In fact, we really can’t become the new creation by keeping him at a distance. He claims to be the bread of life (John 6) because he is meant to be “eaten” and digested for our nourishment again and again. He offers his Spirit for this Life. Lent is a good time to explore the mystery and wonder of his promises.

Season: Everything Has Become New

Speaker: Gwen White

Location: 3800 Marlton Pike

About Talk: "I wanted to talk about sin because I think it’s a very misunderstood concept in current Christian thinking and I think a better understanding of it is freeing. Sin has its beginnings not just in bad behavior, but deeply buried in unconscious processes. Being able to name it or catching it consciously means I can release it and find new ways of being in the world. We are promised that we will be made new in Christ. This openness to seeing my sin is the way of living into my place within the New Humanity. God still likes co-working or partnership, not dominance with us. Even though, of course, God is infinite and we are finite, God, creator, we the creature—still God wants this loving exchange and insists on it—so God does not overpower us, but waits for our meeting, our understanding, our true presence as our true self." -Gwen White

Season: Everything Has Become New

Speaker: Ben White

Location: 3800 Marlton Pike

About Talk: Paul Tillich said, "Language...has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone." Ben works with this contrast. It is good news that we can shift our perspective. Meeting God when we are alone helps us shift our perspective on all things. We see things that are unseen that are eternal.