Our first core image is the Well. Join Anne as she expresses "why the well?" and "why the well?" in a week like these ones, in which images of devastation sear our hearts.

In the work artist Joy Banks created for us, she has given us a vision of God, a vision of what community in God looks like, and even a vision of who we are as a church community. We pray that the Spirit will use it to refresh our prophetic imagination about who we are and who God is calling us to be. The actions that we are being invited to take in our four images are very simple: coming to a well to satisfy our thirst, making time to gather around a table, planting and watering little seeds, labouring together to repair our nets. They are not dramatic actions: they are small, they are homely. But we see in Joy's images that something really good, and really beautiful, and whole, is coming into being throught thse small actions. Something is being cultivated, and that something looks an awful lot like kingdom, like kinship. We are made for this. And at the heart of this is Christ restoring us back to that kinship of the kingdom. Jesus stands in our midst with arms outstretched, stepping towards us, welcoming us, bidding us to come. "You are wanted, you are beloved, you are part of God's family."

The history of a church is difficult to record in a few lines. We would have to tell you about the time when our children were born, or when people joined our community, or when others left. We would have to tell the stories of challenge, frustration, breakthrough, joy and sorrow. The true history of a church is found in the collected stories of the people, and the story of a collected people.

Southpoint has sometimes thought of itself as an odd little church, flying under the radar. There is ease in being small and hidden. The parables of Jesus remind us however that the kingdom comes—and becomes—something quite substantial, both in size and in substance, through small things such as seeds and yeasts and churches. May the Spirit broaden our imagination for the kind of spacious and substantial growth that unfolds as we continue to devote ourselves to small things.

Seeing Ourselves Freshly through Our Four Core Images

Rather than crafting a doctrinal statement for Southpoint when its roots were planted almost twenty years ago, Scott Simpson, Southpoint’s founding pastor, and his leadership team chose four core images to communicate the heart of our community: a Well, a Table, a Seed and a Net.

Anne Baxter Smith has leaned into these images over the past 12 years as our pastor, weaving them into all aspects of our life together at Southpoint. 

We hold them collectively as a church and as we hold them, they hold our vision. They have widened our theological imagination. They help us to freshly sense our longings. They help us remember who we want to be and what we want to do. The provide common encouragement and motivate us to think creatively.
They have given us the courage to make radical changes.

In this series we are reflecting together on our four core images as reimagined by artist Joy Banks of Vancouver, BC, from whom we commissioned new pieces. How will what Joy sees in our community be enfleshed in her art? Today, we look at what lies at the heart of Joy's work: the image of The Welcoming Christ.

** https://joybanks.ca/

A brief meditation from our All In service wrapping up our Season of Creation with a discussion of God's regenerative agency in Creation.

Anne suggests that maybe groaning is having its day. 

Groans are powerful. Groans keep us from making peace with things that have no peace. 

In Romans 8, Creation, every microscopic part of it, is groaning. Humans are groaning. God's Spirit is groaning—an inexpressible groan, too deep for words.

When we groan, our bodies and breath take over. Our bodies show us what is becoming intolerable, what is violating our deep values and convictions. A groan is prophetic. A groan dares to call out what must no longer be. 

Last week, a super storm dropped an unprecedented amount of rain—a year’s worth—in a single day near Derna, Libya. Both dams in the city burst, washing twenty percent of the town into the sea. Folk acquainted with war, dislocation, and hunger now face the grief of thousands missing. It feels like the whole earth is groaning these days. 
Despite all this, creation continues to hope. From Romans 8: “For the creation is waiting in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.”
Could it truly be, after all we’ve done, that creation has not given up on us? That it sees potential in us? Is waiting for us, the collective children of God, to step up and become kin? Could it truly be that we are the ones for whom the earth waits? Waiting for us to become our true selves?

The groans are the deep work of the Spirit, birthing a new way of being. Through our collective groaning, too deep for words, something is being liberated—being born. It is time.

This is the season of creation. All over the world those who follow Jesus are figuring out how to be better kin to creation. Young people are protesting in London. Farmers are planting trees in Central America. Nuns are holding prayer vigils. Church leaders are signing treaties. The river is building strength, building momentum. 

We’ve been poking around in our Judeo-Christian Genesis origin stories these weeks, and Anne has found herself enamoured with a character in these stories, Adamah: earth, dirt, land, soil. In these origin stories, Adamah is often mentioned. Humans and Adamah are so interconnected—Adamah is the source of human form, abundance and provision for Adam. But Adamah is also cursed, unable to provide, negatively affected, by Adam and Cain's rash actions. “What have you done?” cried out God.

She was reminded of the words attributed to Chief Seattle: “Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth.”

Mark Wallace, professor of religion at Swarthmore University, acknowledges that when Christianity focuses on the vertical alone (a God "up there" saving individuals to a life "up there”) and fails to recognize kinship here and now—the sacred presence of God in all life and between all life—we  unwittingly at best, knowingly at worst, have encouraged the exploitation of nature. However, in his book, he builds a renewed theological scaffolding, showing how the Biblical witness reveals the world as “the enfleshment of sacred power”, and “God enfleshed in all life forms", even Adamah. “The earth is not dumb matter, an inanimate object with no capacity of feeling and sentiment, but a spirited and vulnerable living being who experiences the terrible and catastrophic loss”. 

What is it like to sit with this possibility, that the very ground under our feet, the soil, is infused with the divine, and senses and responds to our presence? That the senseless killing in the world—the wars, the genocides, the bombs—have caused the land itself to suffer? What is it like to sit with the possibility that the very ground under our feet can also sense the generosity of our love and care, and is responsive to our overtures of kinship?

** When God was a Bird – Christianity, Animism and the Re-Enchantment of the Word by Mark Wallace

This Sunday Anne takes on the dominant—and toxic—interpretation of the story of Adam's creation in Genesis 2. She discusses how it, in fact, invites us to see that God’s design was for us to be part of the net of kinship, not the exercise of human dominion.

Further, the humans and the trees are drawn from the ground by God for each other. There is an implied relational connection between the forest garden and the first human, a mutuality of care and kinship. God gave the forest garden, with its abundance of trees, to the human as home. God then gave the human to the forest garden to tend and care for it. 

How people treated the trees was interconnected with the way they treated God. Would they embody the wisdom of the Creator and respect the unique purpose of the tree, or would they treat it as a commodity to fulfill their own curiosity and pleasure? 

We share the same ground of being with the rest of creation. We are of the earth. We are of God.  

The path of domination is spiritually bankrupt. The pathway forward is mutuality of care and kinship.

Breathe in: "Be"... Breathe out: "Held."

Interviewed by Brent Unrau, Jess shares what she experienced during her journey with cancer, when, prompted by a rich inner vision, she reached out for help, breaking past her assumptions about what the response of others would be in her time of vulnerability.

Our pastor, Anne Baxter Smith, introduces and finds out a bit more about Madison Friesen. We are so excited to welcome Madison as our Community Life Coordinator. This is a get-to-know-you exchange between Anne and Madison so you can get to know him, too. : )