Weekly Update

Dear Gatherers,

Traumatic events affect us in different ways. Indeed, for as many people as there may be in a community there are probably that many different responses to loss, pain, and distress. We see this in our own time. The pandemic, racism, sexism, and violence, an increasingly absurd political landscape, a wide-swinging economy, and so on have affected us all communally and personally. And the degree to which they alarm and exhaust changes day-by-day, minute-by-minute.

The Gospels give us a very similar in their depiction of how the arrest, execution, and resurrection of Jesus impacts his community. As we learned in last week’s study, the prospect of Jesus’s return to life didn’t incite Easter celebrations among the first witnesses of resurrection. Mark’s original text freeze-frames a group of terrified people. This week, we look at them individually to discover how the events (of only 72 hours!) shape their responses to what they’ve been through. Famously—or infamously—there’s Thomas, who doesn’t know what to believe. But there are others to consider as well: Peter, James, John, Mary Magdalene, Jesus’s natural family, even Judas. The Gospels portray these traumatic events as deeply personal, and refuse to let us to look away.

What can these stories teach us about our own struggles with trauma and loss? How do we locate ourselves among Jesus’s faithful—and fearful—followers? Don’t miss our second session with Rev. Dr. Zachary Moon, as he walks us through what how disciples dealt with the aftermath of their Leader’s loss and reappearance. Take a minute to read John 20:24-29 before to the study. That will be our stepping off point for the discussion, which begins at 7:30p CST via Zoom. (Click below to access the study.)

We look forward to seeing you all for a very rich and transformative conversation!

Peace,

Pastor Tim

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Dear Gatherers,

Imagine this. Over the past three years you’ve followed a dynamic preacher who espouses a lot of dangerously countercultural ideas. Joining his group completely changed your life—no small miracle because you came with a lot of baggage. In fact, everyone in his group tells that story. Some had dark and troubled pasts. Others were so poor they had nothing to lose. Still others were social pariahs. There’s no reason you should be together, love one another, and work tirelessly to live out the transformative message of your teacher and healer. But it’s an amazing project that embodies bold hope for the world and you can’t believe you’re part of it.

Then everything implodes. One minute everyone’s enjoying dinner. The next, your leader’s arrested, abused, falsely convicted, and publicly executed, with his corpse sealed in a borrowed grave for safekeeping. Now there’s no trace of him. The grave’s torn open. A stranger says your teacher has come back to life and wants to meet up. (He did predict this would happen, btw.) But seriously: Where is he?

Living through the Calvary and Easter aftermath had to be terrifying. Yet the disciples’ reactions offer up compelling case studies that can transform our own understanding of trauma. This month we’re blessed to have one of America’s foremost trauma and theology experts, Rev. Dr. Zachary Moon, guiding us through the events after the cross, starting with Mark’s Gospel, whose earliest drafts end with this: “Overcome with terror and dread, they fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid” (Mk. 16:8). We’ll spend November observing these believers who were fearful and faithful as they struggled to cope with loss and trauma in real time.

This just-for-Gather series promises to be one of our most unforgettable ever. We meet each Thursday evening at 7:30pm CT. Click on the link below to be there!

Join Zoom Meeting

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Meeting ID: 854 7235 5614

Or dial 1-312-626-6799 using the same meeting ID.

Blessings,

Pastor Tim

One of my best friends is atheist. Son and sibling of scientists, he lightheartedly identifies as a cultural Protestant, saying his family went to church “because that’s what people did. But we never embraced it.” We don’t argue about God. I say yes. He says no. Since neither can prove anything to the other’s satisfaction (after all, it’s belief), we leave it there.

Not long ago he texted a Mary Oliver poem. It was one of her prayer poems, advising, and inviting simplicity: “this isn’t/a contest but the doorway//into thanks, and a silence in which/another voice may speak.” I typed back, “Love this! Love MO!” Then, yanking his chain a bit (as we do), I added, “She shows up in American sermons nearly as often as the apostles.” He wasn’t surprised. “She understands the in-between,” he replied.

For Oliver and my friend, the natural world open doors to “thin places,” offering glimpses into something very real but impossible to describe. As modern Christians, we call these moments “transcendent,” a kind of experiential knowing that defies explanation. The “in-between” or “liminal space,” as it’s often called, is a mysteriously welcoming space. Its prominence in Christian thought comes from Celtic traditions that marked specific points on the landscape as “thin.” It’s but one of many gifts the Celts brought to our faith.

This Thursday, after our detailed historical tour of northern Europe—and unsettling discoveries about everything from white supremacy to violent conquest—we end our Traces series on a spiritual note. Celtic Christianity, like many African, Asian, and Indigenous American practices, is remarkably intuitive and practical. It draws together classic religion, nature, and human experience in very potent ways. And I’m sure you’ll be inspired by what you learn of it, no matter if you do or don’t believe. So make space to join us this Thursday at 7:30pm CDT via Zoom. You’ll be glad you did!

Join Zoom Meeting

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Meeting ID: 868 3638 6014

Or dial 1-312-626-6799 using same meeting ID.

Peace and blessings,

Pastor Tim

Dear Gatherer Friends and Family,

The writer of Ecclesiastes famously sighed, “There is nothing new under the sun,” prefaced by a tried-and-true observation: “Whatever has happened—that’s what will happen again” (Eccl. 1:9). Lift the lid on today’s headlines and you’ll find centuries of similar stories. Every day brings another round of resisting our worst impulses in a quest to do what’s best. St. Paul put it plainly: “When I want to do what is good, evil is right there with me” (Rom. 7:21).

Every good idea, it seems, has an evil twin. Yet people often express shock when these vulnerabilities play out in the faith arena. Since church and theology are about God, many seem to think it’s God’s job to keep our work perfect. Yet people of faith are no less vulnerable to hateful ideologies and wicked practices simply because they’re human. When we want to do good, evil is right there, even in faith. Nothing new under the sun.

How did original biblical principles get re-packaged into unbiblical ideologies about race, gender, and identity? How is it that the KKK felt no conflict about carrying crosses? Why do current supremacist cults organize as “churches”? How can so many extremists calling for war and violence end their rallies praying “in Jesus’s name” (as happened on Jan. 6 and earlier this week at the Michigan capitol)?

None of this is new. Today’s white populist movements (in the US and abroad) are frothed in a toxic brew of Christian separatism and primitive tribal culture first seen in Dark Ages Europe. This week, as we continue our November study “Traces,” we’ll look at pre-Christian Europe to learn our present warrior mentality and clannish behavior are directly tied to a past long gone. It’s fascinating to note a lot of we hear today—not only in the public square, but also from many pulpits and religious media outlets—is rooted in primitive tribalism. Nothing new… Swing by this Thursday at 7:30pm CDT to learn more!

Join Zoom Meeting

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Meeting ID: 868 3638 6014

Or dial 1-312-626-6799 using same meeting ID.

Blessings,

Pastor Tim

Dear Gather Friends and Family,

We open a new study series this Thursday—a monthlong adventure we call “Traces,” as we explore Christianity’s slow movement through Northern Europe. As always, the Three Amigos—Gather’s own mythologist Tony Perez, our resident theologian Dr. Shea Watts, and I—will lead the search for meaning in a history whose importance and intrigue has long got lost in the mist.

Too often Christianity’s spread into the farther regions of Europe is framed simply, as a civilization saga. In church legend, these places are pictured as uncivilized nowheres. But Christianity didn’t spill into a religious void. On arriving in what we now call the Balkans, Prussia, Scandinavia, and the UK, monks and missionaries encountered people with their own sets of deeply imbedded beliefs and reliable faith narratives. Conversion had spiritual benefits, of course, but it also offered advantages that superseded spirituality and faith, since joining the church enabled many far-flung groups to consolidate greater territory and power. (Ask Charlemagne…)

Why should this matter to us? For starters, the Christianization process was not as one-sided as we may imagine. Along the way, certain “primitive” beliefs and practices leached into Christian life. Seasonal rites and customs embraced by pagan religion became liturgical mainstays in Christian worship. Ideologies about nationalism, ethnic supremacy, gender roles, along with distinctive types of mysticism brought new flavors and flaws to the Christian project.

There are reasons why the first Europeans to land in America imagined God as an angry white man, why they believed pinkness endowed them with divine right to murder, enslave, and impoverish people with darker skin, why they conflated evangelism and conquest to establish the bogus “doctrine” of Manifest Destiny. These same impulses explain how current supremacist groups call themselves “Christian,” how many sects persist in denigrating women and denying their freedoms, how violent language has become so common in churches and pulpits that so-called “worship” often sounds more like paranoid ravings about being “at war” and “under attack.”

In October, we’re Zooming across Europe with the missionaries We’ll pay close attention to how Christianity adapted as it spread to new communities and how they introduced ideas and assumptions many presume have been present in Christian texts and theology from the start. (Not so.) Don’t miss this Thursday, at 7:30pm CDT, when we begin our travels in second-century Persia and Greece, where new religion and nationalism collide. I’m very excited about this series and look forward to a lively discussion! See you on Thursday.

Join Zoom Meeting

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Meeting ID: 868 3638 6014

Or dial 1-312-626-6799 using same meeting ID.

Blessings,

Pastor Tim

Dear Gather Family and Friends,

The Revelation of John is indubitably the most cinematic book in scripture. With most of its content describing a series of visions, its images are gripping, often closer in nature to ancient monster tales than we’d expect from biblical texts. It’s also an exquisitely sophisticated work, toggling between celestial and earthly scenes, crisscrossing through time, evoking numerous legends and metaphors from other texts and first-century events.

At its core, the Revelation is a brilliantly constructed, theological treatise on the eternal struggle between Good and Evil. The writer paints pictures that its intended readers—seven severely persecuted churches in modern-day Turkey—can seize on for hope and strength. But let’s get real. That’s not why people obsess over it. John’s visions also appear to open glimpses into a dark, dystopian future filled with omens signaling the sudden return of Jesus, followed by an epic battle to restore justice and peace to a wayward world. With film, video and cable news stoking fertile imaginations, it’s become very popular to focus on the horrors John describes, rather than the hope he conveys. (This take also sells a whole lot of books and movie tickets, turning many doomsday prophets into current-day profiteers.)

Did John really mean to scare the wits out of us and launch an End-of-Time guessing game? Might his agenda have been far more fundamental? Because while we can argue interminably about the storyline, there’s no denying the Revelation’s ultimate outcome. In the end, love wins. Since this is the main point of Christian teaching, it makes sense for this strange volume to close the New Testament.

Having just re-read it—which can be done in one sitting; it’s not long and a real page-turner—I recalled a song from my youth: The wicked shall cease from troubling / The weary shall be at rest / All of the saints of the ages / Shall sit at his feet and be blessed. That’s the Revelation in a nutshell and that’s where we’re headed, in asking, “What’s up with Revelation?” Join us this Thursday at 7:30pm CDT. You’ll find out there’s a whole lot of good news in this text—more than first meets the eye!

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Meeting ID: 847 1086 9833

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See you this Thursday at 7:30p CDT!

Blessings,

Pastor Tim

gatheraop@gmail.com

312.399.3910

Dear Gatherers,

I’ve been thinking about a conversation I had several years ago with a mainline Protestant pastor. “We don’t evangelize,” she said with a stern expression. As a newcomer to the tradition, I was clearly out of my depth. Still, I had to ask, “How does your community grow?” She looked at me through squinty eyes, as if I’d posed a riddle. “That’s a good question,” she said. Then she changed the subject.

With many evangelical Christians painting themselves so far into a right corner, a devout intolerance for evangelism has surfaced among moderate and progressive believers. To avoid identification with cousins who adhere to narrower social and political views, many Christians have decided talking about their beliefs is intrusive or (God forbid!) impolite. Sharing faith with someone who may be seeking a deeper spiritual experience is taboo. Too coercive!

But data keep telling us mainline Protestantism’s resistance to evangelizing is a serious mistake. Numerous studies, including a significant 2020 census by the Public Religion Research Institute, shows early stages of migration toward progressive churches, with mainline non-evangelical Protestants bucking an overall decline among white Americans as the only Christian category currently trending upward. (Churches of color have proven remarkably stable over the past 15 years.)

The numbers confirm what many of us already know anecdotally through experience. Disaffected people are seeking, and finding, homes in more affirming faith communities. But does that suggest we can take it easy and not bother following the command of Christ to spread the word? No! In fact, it substantiates a very real need exists all around us. It’s time to step out of the shadows and start talking about faith, because a lot of folks are listening for our message of unconditional love and social justice, i.e., the kingdom of God exactly as Jesus declared and taught. Open hands, open minds, open hearts—we talk about these things all the time, and in some churches we even sing about them. But do we risk holding too little in our open hands, thinking too small in our open minds, and loving too few in our open hearts simply because we’re afraid to open our mouths? It’s time to break the silence.

What might happen if we overcame our dreads about evangelism? That’s the question we’ll ask this coming Thursday at 7:30pm CDT. Sign on and join the discussion. You’ll be glad you did!

Join Zoom Meeting

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Meeting ID: 847 1086 9833

Or dial 1-312-626-6799 using the same meeting ID.

See you this Thursday at 7:30p CDT!

Blessings,

Pastor Tim

Hello, Gather friends and family.

About a decade ago, the United Church of Christ launched a print and TV campaign with this message: Never put a period where God has placed a comma, reflecting the UCC’s tagline: God is still speaking. Some of us UCC vets may have heard this so often we don’t pay it much mind. But together, the two slogans pack quite a punch.

We can’t ever put God in a box. Thinking we’ve got God all figured out and know exactly what God wants or plans to do will find us sipping a toxic cocktail of foolishness and arrogance. Scripture repeatedly shows this, both in word and example—none more explicitly than Isaiah 55:8-9, where God flat-out says, “My thoughts and my ways are not like yours. Just as the heavens are higher than the earth, my thoughts and my ways are higher than yours.”

1. Got it. But if it’s not all signed, sealed, and delivered in the Bible and tradition, how is God continuing to speak? We’ve not had any reports of booming declarations from the sky. Not even a still small voice whispering from a windy cave. No divine social media presence, either. If God really is still speaking, how’s that supposed to work? A few questions are in order.

Might God speak through us? It could be we’re the living, breathing, walking, talking media that embody God’s word and will and way in the world. That’s a pretty radical idea. But it’s hardly new. Paul told his friends in Corinth, “You are like a letter written by Christ… not written with pen and ink or on tablets made of stone. You are written in our hearts by the Spirit of the living God” (2 Cor. 3:3).

What kind of mail are we delivering to the world? When folks open us up, what do they read? How do we become these living letters that spill out good news of unconditional love and grace? That’s the focus of this Thursday’s Bible study. Our virtual pastor, Shea Watts (fresh off his and Kat’s trip to Scotland) will have a lot to share with us on this topic. Don’t miss it!

Join Zoom Meeting

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Meeting ID: 847 1086 9833

Or dial 1-312-626-6799 using the same meeting ID.

See you this Thursday at 7:30p CDT!

Blessings,
Pastor Tim

Something to Think About This Week

Are you satisfied? Did you impulsively answer, “Of course not. Never!”? As participants in a relentlessly commercialized, competitive, capitalist culture, we’re conditioned to be discontent.

Think of the pressures we’d be rid of if we actually lived as though winning wasn’t everything and our success wasn’t measured by job title, income, looks, popularity, education, address, and innumerable other ways the world assigns worth. You know who succeeds when we get worked up about such things? The people who sell us stuff! Their satisfaction depends on our chronic dissatisfaction. They constantly send us the same message: Contentment is for people who have no ambition or drive. You need more, they insist—and you must spend all your time and energy getting it. What might happen if we turned our competitive drive down and cranked up the contentment meter?

When St. Paul famously wrote, “I have learned to be satisfied with whatever I have” (Philippians 4:11), he was talking about more than material possessions. In fact, he connected satisfaction with peace of mind, because contentment grows out of how we think. Writing these words from prison, Paul hands us the key to contentment two verses later: “Christ gives me strength,” he says. True satisfaction and peace come when we admit what we have for now is enough, because with Christ there is always more. “I can face anything,” Paul insists. Even with the likelihood of execution staring him in the eye he had the peace of mind to prove it.

This Sunday We’re All About Satisfaction

So, again: Are we satisfied? Are we at peace? This Sunday’s live worship experience will celebrate satisfaction in joyful music and testimony, sacred word and meal. Join us this Sunday at 5pm CDT at William McKinley Park, at Pershing Road between Damen and Leavitt, near the outdoor basketball courts. All you need is a chair and/or blanket for seating. We’ve got the refreshments covered. The weather outlook is beautiful—almost as beautiful as the contented, peaceful folks who make Gather what it is. And for those who can’t be with us in person, make sure you tune in to the live feed on YouTube!

Come for the worship. Stay for the dance. (And bring friends!)

I look forward to being together as we Gather in the park!

Peace and blessings,

Pastor Tim