New Year, New Opportunities

I am now officially half way through my degree program at George Fox Evangelical Seminary. I have been enrolled in the Master of Arts in Ministry Leadership Cohort program and enjoying it very much. It is a Virtual Learning Community where we do most of our work in an online Moodle Teaching and Learning Environment with face-to-face gatherings for eight days once each semester. I have colleagues in my classes from Alaska, Colorado, Ohio (Go Buckeyes!), Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and elsewhere. It is a great group of people to learn with.

Along with my learning, I have continued to do contract work in various forms – from manuscript editing to website creation and the job opportunities for this year look even more promising. This year is looking like a fun year so far with contracts to do website content management, social media strategies and editing a children’s book. Some weeks I put in full-time hours on my contract jobs, other weeks it’s only a few hours – that’s the nature of contract work.

Anna and Andy (a guy reading Seventeen Magazine??) from Shoreline Vineyard

In the volunteer realm, I have been helping with the Youth at Vineyard Community Church in Shoreline since last fall and have taken on some new responsibilities this fall. VCC in Shoreline has been a great place for me to experience missional community and learn what it’s like to be a part of a smaller community church than what I experienced most of my adult life.

This next eighteen months will be a time of discernment for me. I am exploring God’s calling for what I should do when I graduate in the Spring of 2011. I have considered church planting, joining an existing church and helping it grow missionally, further education so I can teach, and writing. It’s possible I may end up doing a little bit of each, but I am seeking God’s direction as to my focus once I have completed my degree.

In the past I have been criticized for “doing too many things” for “not sticking with one thing” and pressured to conform to others expectations of what it means to be a leader. I have also been affirmed in the past for being a “big bucket” person, passionate and devoted to whatever work I am involved with, well connected to the community and according to a Strengths Based Leadership assessment, my leadership strengths are:

• Strategic
• Woo – whatever that means
• Connectedness
• Positivity
• Communication

I am part of a Spiritual Direction group with other women in leadership and this group has been a huge blessing to me. It’s not a support group, it’s not a Bible study. Spiritual Direction is a part of my spiritual formation – an especially important part during this season of discernment.

With the new year, I plan to continue to occasionally blog on things that I am learning in my classes and my experience working with youth in a missional community, as well as my journey of discernment.

Personal Branding

I attended a workshop on social media yesterday and we talked about personal branding and web presence. I’m thinking of moving my web presence to chapinchick.com, but know that the term “chick” is problematic for some. Many authors are using their full name, but mine is already taken by an artist. We already own chapin.com and have since 1992, primarily using it for our personal email. For those who follow me on twitter – it’s been ChapinChick since I first signed up.

One of the reasons ChapinChick came about is because we have four daughters and started referring to them as the Chapin Chicks a while back. So, chapinchicks@(whatevermail).com was useful when they were young and didn’t have their own email addresses. After they started creating their own email accounts, I switched to chapinchick@(whatevermail).com – and it’s kind of stuck with me.

I’m planning to update this blog site for the New Year and wondering if chicks really are cool.

Whatever I do, I hope to blog more often in 2010.

House Church, Anglican, Vineyard, Non-Denominational, …

“What is ordination?” my oldest daughter asked a few months ago as we attended my friend’s ordination celebration. My friend has been on staff at my family’s non-denominational mega-church for something like seven years. I think she was called pastor at her prior church, but I’m not sure. She acts like a pastor and has basically functioned on the church staff as a pastor for a long time. But, historically, my mega-church has held the view that women should not be pastors and only recently have they amended their view and begun ordaining women. My friend was the second woman to be ordained there. The lead pastor was wandering by as my daughter posed her question, so we asked him to help us understand. Artfully, he described ordination as a recognition of God’s calling on a person’s life and mentioned some passage in one of the books of Timothy, I think, about the laying on of hands. (I should have written it down.)

Atheism and Creative Love Theism

“Killing God?!” I received many warnings from concerned Christians about the movie The Golden Compass. I was warned to avoid the movie because the author of the books it was based on was an atheist and the goal of his books was killing God. I rarely take these type of forwarded emails seriously but decided to investigate this claim for myself. I googled the author and discovered indeed, he is an atheist. And indeed, the books do culminate in the killing of the “God” character called “The Authority”. But, I wondered, was this an assault on the God of the Bible? Was there really any danger to Christians if we watched such a film and allowed our children to watch it? Since I am not one who is easily motivated by fear, I took my kids to see the movie and we even bought the DVD. I have since bought the trilogy it was based on and read it from cover to cover. “The Authority” portrayed in Pullman’s trilogy is nothing like the God I have come to know and love. If the “God” portrayed by Pullman were real, I would want to kill him too! Where did Pullman get this idea of God from? Why are so many Christians afraid of Pullman’s view of God? Pinnock and Clark seem to have wondered something similar inspiring them to write Unbounded Love: A Good News Theology for the 21st Century.

Reflections on Trinity in Everyday Life – Trinity Sunday

“I wonder if he’ll accept my friend request,” I said to myself after clicking on that wonderful add-as-friend button on Facebook. I’d only met him once, and even though we had almost 50 friends in common, I wondered if he would remember me and want to be my friend. Seriously, when you have thousands of friends on Facebook – what’s one more? Then my mind started envisioning that he was just too busy to respond to friend requests and certainly too busy to respond to my personal message that I sent with my friend request – I don’t request to be friends with famous people unless I have met them and had a conversation with them.

"With God, All Things are Possible" Gye Nyame - Painting by Andrea Gladen

Whenever I met new people or request new friends on Facebook, for some reason I expect rejection. Even though I may be able to come up with rational and logical reasons why I might be accepted, emotionally I default to the expectation of rejection. So, I asked myself why? I did not ask this in isolation – though conversations between me, myself and I can be very engaging – I invited the holy Trinity to join me in this quest of self-discovery. This has become a spiritual discipline for me – it’s my personal variation of Healing of Memories, Theophostic Prayer, Victory over the Darkness, and Inner Healing. Jesus promised the Holy Spirit would lead us into all truth, and one place I need to know the truth is in my inner being. As David declared, You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart. (Psalm 51:6) I am confident it was the Holy Spirit that opened my eyes to see this pattern of expecting rejection. So, I set aside some time to process in prayer.