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| Google Maps rendition of the major stops on my journey. You can continue to view the evolving map here. |
One of the reasons why I have done so much planning already is that I early on made the decision to apply for a 2019 Lilly Endowment Clergy Renewal Grant. You can read about the program from the Endowment's point of view here. As a part time pastor, a sabbatical of the scope that I was thinking of was simply not feasible. I knew I wanted to travel, and that I wanted to do so as a pilgrim, but three months of travel is not cost free, even when done as simply as possible.
When I looked at the application, however, I was severely daunted. The detail required was pretty high, there were a lot of pieces, and it looked like any missing or not up to snuff piece would automatically result in not being considered. But as I thought about it, I began to see the grant process as a huge opportunity.
First it required both my community and me to talk and think about where we were, what we'd been about in our ministry together, including both my journey and theirs. It made us look at how our faith had developed together, how my theological education (which was my only experience before coming to them) my previous church as a layperson, and their needs and direction had interacted with each other. And it helped us discuss concrete hopes for what this sabbatical can bring to both of us.
For us, it was all about context, as I wrote in the narrative portion of my application:
"In Seminary my eyes were opened as I discovered so many contexts to apply to my understanding of scripture: historical context, context of original audience, literary context of the individual books and the books as they related to each other, the concerns of the time, even the context of the language across time and across translation. Moreover, as I chose to go to a seminary outside my personal cultural context, I found that the experience of studying and deeply listening to people who had very different life experiences, very different contexts than I, was transformative. My time as a white student at Howard University School of Divinity was a rich and wonderful time for me. In addition to learning exegesis, it changed me deeply and helped me to understand more fully the struggles of others, and to think about the experience of others when trying to process my understanding of scripture from an ancient context into a contemporary context.
So once I knew that context was what was going to be the overriding theme I thought through what kind of contexts would be helpful, and we finally decided that travel to the places where the bible happened, and where the church grew, and where important church history happened would allow me the chance to get visual, experiential and kinesthetic context of the places that Jesus, Paul, the church, the reformation, and the predecessor denominations of the United Church of Christ and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America grew up, in Europe. So this trip will take me to Israel, to Greece, to Italy, to Germany and Switzerland, to Strasbourg France, and to Leiden in the Netherlands and Scrooby Hall in England, to look at the origins in Europe of Christianity, Evangelical Protestantism, Reformed Protestantism, and the Puritan movement. The map above traces the locations that I will be visiting.This focus on context, both on the historical context and personal context, is something that the churches have appreciated in my preaching and teaching. We have a book group that has read a number of books about context, including Marcus Borg’s The Evolution of the Word, and Amy-Jill Levine’s Short Stories by Jesus, which engages the parables within the context of Jesus’ first century Judaism. For the last three years we have been using the Narrative Lectionary, which presents Scripture within the larger context of the biblical narrative. I love this approach and the community has responded enthusiastically, applying the lessons to their own context, and to talk about how context shifts happen. This renewal will let me gather a kinesthetic, special, and visual context of the bible and my faith." (from my Lilly Endowment Clergy Renewal Grant Application)
