Thank You
I recently received this note in my email inbox:
“Also, just want to say, my child, who is transgender, will only listen to me share devotional readings from the emails you send out (versus any other I offer). Your views and care for the LGBTQ community have brought so much validation and hope to my child and to me as well. Thanks for all you do.”
It’s messages like these that remind us at Renewed Heart Ministries that what we do matters.
I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your support of our work.
Your generous support continues to enable us to provide much needed resources and support for help searching to find the intersection between their faith and their passion to heal our world. Your support enables us to proved a strong faith-based foundation for labors of love. It enables us to provide people with connection and inspiration as we compassionately participate together in the varied work of justice within our world today.
Quite simply, what we do is vitally needed both in our larger world as well as in our local faith communities. And we could not do what we do without you.
From all of us here at RHM, thank you.
Together, we will continue being a voice for change.
Recommended Reading for September
Proverbs of Ashes : Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us
by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker
Rebecca Parker was a young minister in Seattle when a woman walked into her church and asked if God really wanted her to accept her husband’s beatings and bear them gladly, as Jesus bore the cross. Parker knew, at that moment, that if she were to answer the woman’s question truthfully she would have to rethink her theology. And she would have to think hard about some of the choices she was making in her own life.
When Rita Nakashima Brock was a young child growing up in Kansas, kids taunted her viciously, calling her names like “Chink” or “Jap.” She learned to pretend that she did not feel the sting of scorn and the humiliation of contempt. The solitude and silence of her suffering-decreed by both her mother’s Japanese culture and her father’s Christian heritage-kept the wound alive.
It was the gap between knowledge born of personal experience and traditional theology that led Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker to write this emotionally gripping and intellectually rich exploration of the doctrine of the atonement. Using an unusual combination of memoir and theology in the tradition of Augustine’s Confessions, they lament the inadequacy of how Christian tradition has interpreted the violence that happened to Jesus. Ultimately, they argue, the idea that the death of Jesus on the cross saves us reveals a sanctioning of violence at the heart of Christianity.
Brock and Parker draw on a wide array of intimate stories about family violence, the sexual abuse of children, racism, homophobia, and war to reveal how they came to understand the widespread damage being done by this theology. But the authors also undertake their own arduous and unexpected journeys to recover from violence and to assist others to do so. On these journeys they discover communities that begin to give them the strength to question the destructive ideas they have internalized, and the strength to seek out an alternative vision of Christianity, one based on healing and love. Proverbs of Ashes is both a condemnation of bad theology and a passionate search for what truly saves us.
Last Week’s Social Jesus Posts
Articles posted each week at https://www.patheos.com/blogs/socialjesus/
Rejection For Doing What Is Right (Part 1 of 3)
“If your religion causes you to feel like you must reject your lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender non-binary, queer, or questioning kid, please find a different expression of your faith. Run; don’t walk. Don’t accept any expression of religion that calls you to reject your own children.”
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/socialjesus/2022/08/rejection-doing-what-right-part1/
Rejection For Doing What Is Right (Part 2 of 3)
“There is another way to interpret this week’s passage: to prioritize working for a safe, compassionate, just world for everyone, especially those presently marginalized.”
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/socialjesus/2022/08/rejection-doing-what-right-part2/
Rejection For Doing What Is Right (Part 3 of 3)
Our reading this week encourages us to recognize ahead of time that we may face negative feedback from those who are benefiting from the systems of this world, even when they are our relatives.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/socialjesus/2022/09/rejection-doing-what-right-part3/
UPCOMING EVENTS
SEPTEMBER 24, 2022
Good News Fellowship
(via Zoom)
Toronto, Ontario Canada
304.520.0030
Weekly Zoom HeartGroup on Wednesday Nights
“I’ve experienced paradigm shifts in my thinking that are transforming my spiritual journey.”
That’s what one participant recently wrote. Each Wednesday evening, Glendale City Church will be hosting a Zoom-HeartGroup led by Herb Montgomery. Our discussion each week will focus on the content in Renewed Heart Ministries’ weekly eSight articles and the Jesus For Everyone podcast published each Friday. The time of each Zoom session will be on Wednesdays at 7:00 p.m. Pacific/10:00 p.m. Eastern.
For more information and for the link to participate each week, contact RHM here.
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