Season: Everything Has Become New

Speaker: Rachel Sensenig

Location: 2212 S. Broad St.

About Talk: Loneliness is a common human experience that seems to be growing in the world. It’s high time for an experience of God and ourselves that is as connected and communal as we really are. We are actually more in relationship than we are alone, and this is because Jesus is holding all things together. As we practice the presence of God through prayer and meeting together, our loneliness is touched with the truth of our belovedness. And we become connectors and unifiers with God.

Season: Everything Has Become New

Speaker: Jonny Rashid

Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.

About Talk: We aren’t going for perfect justice or right behavior. We are moving from the idea that only our perfect actions will save us, because our actions aren’t the sum of society’s evil. Let's practice “calling each other in,” rather than out. Because our cries for justice can sometimes feel like expressions of justification to overcome our guilt or to overcome our pain. It’s not that easy, though. But just because you won’t be perfectly woke, doesn’t mean there isn’t reparation to be had.

Season: Everything Has Become New

Speaker: Rod White

Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St

About Talk: Meditation is not just mindfulness, which is basically being in charge of your own relaxation. It is thinking and feeling with God. You might be thinking and feeling about God, and that’s meditation too. But the goal of meditation in Christ is oneness, communion, integration, love. Meditation is turning toward God who is with us. A lot of meditation is taught as turning away from anxiety as the main role of the practice. But Christians turn away in order to turn toward. Our meditation has an object: our loving God and our true selves.

Season: Everything Has Become New

Speaker: Ben White

Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St.

About Talk: How we respond to anxiety takes us back to the lack. The lack, the lack, the lack. Like a sore in the mouth, you just keep on tonguing it. The threat of lack is very motivating. Lack of enough warmth, food, comfort, soothing is all part of our universal primary trauma as infants and we keep chasing it. We need a radical change. That's the New Creation. Instead of trying like hell to satisfy our insatiable lack we can make peace with our desire and plan to trust God's abundance every day.

Season: Everything Has Become New

Speaker: Rachel Sensenig

Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.

About Talk: In our culture we know a lot about how “more is more.” The excess often comes from a fear of scarcity. God invites us to look at our hearts and trust him for the abundance he offers instead. We can find it most simply and consistently in God’s loving presence. Rachel invites us to try a contemplative prayer practice that she calls SNL: 1) Stop the unconscious reaching for more, 2) Name the hunger or the fear and tell it to God, 3) Listen for the assurance from God that you’re okay.

Season: Everything Has Become New

Speaker: Jonny Rashid

Location: 2212 S. Broad St.

About Talk: Common spiritual wisdom might have us just try to overcome our feelings. But Christianity isn’t about getting over it. We don’t transform the world or ourselves by finding inner peace. A great way to continue to participate in the economy of excess is to no longer be bothered by it. But can we actually hold out our desire to be bothered by the lack of imagination, and then find our satisfaction in a new economy of desire with Jesus.

Season: Everything Has Become New

Speaker: Julie Hoke

Location: 3800 Marlton Pike

About Talk: When the core narrative in our hearts is that we don’t have enough, we strive for excess so we can stop feeling like there is not enough. We just want excess to provide relief. But that relief is elusive. Getting more doesn’t free us in the ways that we want it to. The reality Christ brought about as the new creation gets us to abundance no matter what⁠—whether there is scarcity or excess. Abundance is different than excess. It is based on the love of Christ⁠—who went to the depths of death to overcome it and bring about a new creation. We are free from being confined to our circumstances. The limited resources we experience in our world and even in our own hearts are no longer our point of reference/our point of view. We looked at 2 Corinthians 5:11-21, 6:3-10

A re-post from 8.25.19

Season: Someone Asked

Speaker: Rachel Sensenig

Location: 2212 S. Broad St.

About Talk: The Bible is so much more than a rulebook; it is designed to lead us to wisdom. By recording the experiences of people relating to God over 1300 years, it invites us to embrace the sacred responsibility to discover our identity and calling in this specific time and place. The Bible writers challenge us to ask, “What is God up to now?” and to keep telling our story.

Season: Everything Has Become New

Speaker: Julie Hoke

Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St

About Talk: We are more than our personalities. God is doing something in us as the new creation that will impact whatever we would name our "personality." It is more about a gift from God of our sense of being and purpose beyond ourselves. In general, "personality" is thought of as something coming from the inside out. Personhood is more of a quality coming from the outside in. God has given us the Spirit and a role in the mission of God to redeem the world.

Season: Everything Has Become New

Speaker: Jonny Rashid

Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.

About Talk: The systems of the world are insufficient. And they seem unchangeable. And so as a result you might feel like you can’t change, that you’re stuck being who you are—in your personality, in your shortcomings, in your weaknesses—and that there is no hope for you to get better. But we think there is, and that we’re expressing that hope now as we heal each other and move toward our wholeness, or true wellness, which seeks to not just make us cogs in this machine, but transformers of it, as we are transformed ourselves.