Queries from Darren Kenworthy, for annual sessions June 7 -9, 2024
As I have spent time listening and talking with committees, ministers and members of SCYMF over the past several weeks, I have been moved by the deep, powerful current of love that flows among you.
I'm not sure how evident this love is to those of you who are immersed in it. It is possible that the significant eddies, undertows, and occasional logjam that complicate negotiation of the Living Waters that surround and support you all as a community are threatening to dominate your attention. The kind of anxiety that focuses our attention on impediments to the free flow of love between us shouldn't be ignored. We should be attentive to them.
Further, as I have had opportunities to listen among you in the last few weeks, I have come to a deeper appreciation of what potentially creative tensions need stewardship. I see both systemic and interpersonal sources of wounding and conflict that call out for healing. The work involved may not be easy.
I would stress that as my awareness of the systemic and interpersonal wounding has grown, so has my confidence in the presence of the spiritual resources necessary for healing. We have to notice where the flow is powerful, and may carry us forward on our shared journey. I have a many questions for personal reflection, and a few for you all as a group. They might help you share with each other about times when the Living Water has flowed powerfully in your lives, individually, and as a group.
Queries to prepare for annual sessions
I have no attachment to these being the right questions. They are a starting place. Maybe, if we bring a sense of curiosity and wonder, generosity, and above all, love, we can discover together what the right questions are, and how to answer them through the way we live and seek community together:
When have you felt a sense of spiritual belonging with a group of people? What did it feel like? How have experiences of spiritual belonging shaped and given meaning to your life? What words evoke those experiences most vividly for you?
When have you experienced spiritual transformation, quickening or enlivening? What did it feel like? How did you make sense of the experience, while it was happening, and afterward? What lasting changes did it precipitate in your life? What words, images or stories do you find helpful in reconnecting with that experience, and in identifying the power that made it possible?
When you perceive a need for guidance, support, connection, or other spiritual resources that seem beyond your own capacity to generate, how do you seek them? What does it feel like to find and receive them? What words, gestures, or other expressions do you use to celebrate or express gratitude for these gifts? What helps you orient yourself towards and feel connected to their source? How do you name it? Do you find words adequate?
When you perceive these many spiritual gifts at work in another person, or in a group, how do you recognize them, how do you name them, how do you celebrate them? Have you had an experience of helping cultivate the workings of these gifts in the spiritual life of another person, or of a group? What preparations helped you? What did you find yourself noticing? Was there anything you had to set aside in order to allow these gifts to be fully realized?
How do you notice when you need help from other people seeking, finding or receiving spiritual gifts? What helps you notice when you are being called to help someone else, or a group of people realize their need? What helps you feel like you can ask another person or a group for help? What allows you to feel that you can offer help when you feel led?
In my listening among Sierra-Cascades so far, I have found three main tensions. They exist in any organization, and can be a source of dynamism when mediated by appropriate structures, such as elders or ministry & counsel, animated by a shared spirit, and grounded in trust. I offer my understanding of these tensions in the form of queries for the group, in recognition of the fact that they cannot be resolved, but can be a continual source of adaptation and renewal, as long as we are willing to continually live into the ever changing and necessarily multiple ways of finding answers:
Queries for discussion at annual sessions
How do we balance the impulse to seek and articulate an overarching sense of purpose and direction, perhaps by entrusting that function to individuals or groups with particular gifts, with the desire for independent expression and self direction on the part of individual people and separate congregations?
How do we foster a sense of belonging and shared identity, perhaps rooted in shared rituals, language, stories and songs, without allowing those tools of cohesion to become inadvertent modes of exclusion?
How do we build a sense of ease with one another, a sense of comfort, of home, perhaps through recognition and affirmation of what we do well, of how we love one another, and what we aspire to create together, while also allowing for, and deeply listening to expressions of unease, anxiety and discomfort, that call us to embark together on an exciting yet frightening journey of growth?
It is evident to me as an outsider who brings a spirit of love and hope to my work with you, that Sierra-Cascades is still in the process of working out how to use the opposing charges of the polarities expressed in these queries to spark healthy and enlivening cycles of adaptation and recovery.
Yet I can also see that all the gifts of the spirit needed to bring these forces into fruitful alignment are present among you, and if a way can be found to share deeply with one another, Sierra-Cascades can be a dynamo of generative change that promises a new creation."