Season: Advent - Welcoming the Stranger

Speaker: Ben White

Location: 3800 Marlton Pike

About Talk: We are strangely entertained. What is normal to us is not the normal to which we aspire (or even to our former selves from a decade or two ago). Advent is for clearing out the heart and head from as much distraction as possible. This goes against the grain like Isaiah goes against the grain of those who consult with familiar spirits and other gods. What lights us up today that actually makes us dark? Our chirping smartphones come to mind. Putting these aside could help us welcome Jesus and other strangers this season.

Season: Advent - Welcoming the Stranger

Speaker: Jonny Rashid

Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.

About Talk: For Christians, the prophetic and the non-prophetic, it’s OK to feel a little bit out of home here, a little bit lonely like Isaiah may have, a little bit misunderstood. Seek to understand each other to welcome each other, to love each other. But don’t look for it in totality. You might not get it here. The world is designed to misunderstand the people that want to change it. You will find trouble in the world. The world will hate you like it hated Jesus, but take heart, Jesus is bringing us home. Bringing us together. Let’s keep looking for those people that need a people, that need a tribe, that need a home. Those prophetic people in the world that need a place that they can rest. The kingdom of God is made up of people who are lonely, dissatisfied, and alone. If you are too comfortable, let God discomfort you as you find your home in God and in us.

Season: Journeying Together into Promise

Speaker: Jonny Rashid

Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.

About Talk: The question for us is what keeps people from entering in to our community? What unwritten rules are there? What customs do we have that others might find prohibitive or difficult? What do we need to do? What can we let go of? I think it’s a good discernment question for every cell among us. How can we keep moving toward inclusion? How we can keep expressing Paul’s dictum: what matters is faith expressing itself through love.

Season: Stories from the Bottom

Speaker: Rachel Sensenig

Location: 2212 S. Broad St.

Season: Necessary Losses

Speaker: Scott Sorrentino

Location: 3800 Marlton Pike

About Talk: Scott reflects on Psalm 19. His brilliant insight is that the “law of God” is more like the “way of God.” It’s not as much a list of don’ts as a list of dos. From gravity to our basic agreement on justice across time and culture, God’s law is knit into the fabric of creation and we can celebrate it. We can even hold ourselves up to it for examination because we know what we were made for and we want to correspond even more than we already do. Gratitude for the way things are, the way God has made them, is a good way to get through when you are stuck.

Season: Necessary Losses

Speaker: Ben White

Location: 3800 Marlton Pike

About Talk: Many messages we receive offer us a vision of our transformation that is wholly dependent on our own action. It seems if we only discern the lessons hidden in our pain we will be happier by not making the same mistakes in the future. It is a demanding vision that pretends to be a comfort for difficult times. Jeremiah’s “Book of Comfort” in chapters 30-33 is actual comfort because it pivots on new revelation from God. Israel would return from their Babylonian captivity. No one could imagine such a marvelous thing! We too can receive new revelation from God. It just so happens that in moments of crisis we are most ready to receive that revelation. This is probably where the correlation between pain and transformation begins but it is not a causal relationship necessarily. Loss opens us up and then we can see what God is already doing—God’s plan form the start.

Season: Celebrating the Transhistorical Body

Speaker: Julie Hoke

Location: 5720 Ridge Ave.

Season: Celebrating the Transhistorical Body

Speaker: Julie Hoke

Location: 5720 Ridge Ave.

Season: Necessary Losses

Speaker: Ben White

Location: 3800 Marlton Pike

About Talk: Jeremiah wants to wake people up to what’s happening so they can get through the disaster. It’s tempting to deny reality and then we don’t grow through the struggle. Jeremiah wanted his people to change the way they were relating to God and imagine a better world with him. Words weren’t enough. He had to demonstrate it. And he did, in lots of colorful ways. Jesus was the ultimate demonstration, a human life perfectly expressing a love and hope that was a true alternative. His death was the most effective demonstration of a world different form the one we live in. We, as Christ’s body living here on earth, carry the mantle of imagining another possible world. Jesus called it the Kingdom of God. We’re trying to live in it now.

Season: Necessary Losses

Speaker: Kendra DeSimone interviews Kim Hewlett

Location: 3800 Marlton Pike

About Interview: Kim Hewlett grew up in a nominally Christian home, but then she became a Christian in a Youth Group and her life changed. Jesus got to her even if the moralistic and Christian culture of the church didn’t totally make sense to her. She didn’t really fit in at home or the church so she kind of felt like she was on her own. This became even more true when she went to Bible college. The rules seemed silly and she didn’t believe everything she was supposed to, but she kept finding faith that was sufficient for her. Hebrews 11:1 was her guide. “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”