This week is Pastors Week at AMBS. It's a four day event, bringing in pastors from all over Canada and the US. The theme this year is Imagining a New Old Church with Diana Butler Bass as the keynote speaker, author of Christianity for the Rest of Us. She studied 50 churches that were described as having vitality and found that one of the common denominators was intentional Christian practices. She is also debunking the myth that mainline churches are in decline. It has been an exciting week thus far and I'm looking forward to the remainder of it.
As part of Pastors Week, participants are also given the opportunity to attend workshops on any number of topics. Yesterday I attended a workshop called "Where have all our Sabbaths gone?", led by our professor of spiritual formation. It was a great time of discussing the importance of Sabbath and brainstorming ways of incorporating daily, weekly, yearly, and lifetime Sabbaths into our busy lives. One point that I found interesting was thinking about putting margins on each day, creating white space on the pages of our lives for prayer, reflection, and worship. One idea for a weekly Sabbath was to create a "Sabbath Break" in the place of adult Sunday school. Even our Sunday morning at church has become so incredibly hectic that no one seems to get a break. Creating a quite space where people can escape to journal or practice centering prayer is a great way to offer people the space that they just can't seem to find in their daily lives. Another interesting idea is to think of retirement as a lifetime Sabbath. Often retirement is this empty space that we fill with any number of things that we dream about doing once we have time, but what difference would it make in our lives if we think about retirement as Sabbath and prepare for it in this way?
...in the book of Exodus we read, "In six days God made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day God rested, and was refreshed." Here the word "refreshed" literally means "and God exhaled." The creation of the world was like the life-quickening inhale. The Sabbath is the exhale. Thus...all creation moves with the rhythm of the inhale and the exhale. Without the Sabbath exhale, the life-giving inhale is impossible. ~Wayne Muller in Sabbath.
http://www.dianabutlerbass.com/
As part of Pastors Week, participants are also given the opportunity to attend workshops on any number of topics. Yesterday I attended a workshop called "Where have all our Sabbaths gone?", led by our professor of spiritual formation. It was a great time of discussing the importance of Sabbath and brainstorming ways of incorporating daily, weekly, yearly, and lifetime Sabbaths into our busy lives. One point that I found interesting was thinking about putting margins on each day, creating white space on the pages of our lives for prayer, reflection, and worship. One idea for a weekly Sabbath was to create a "Sabbath Break" in the place of adult Sunday school. Even our Sunday morning at church has become so incredibly hectic that no one seems to get a break. Creating a quite space where people can escape to journal or practice centering prayer is a great way to offer people the space that they just can't seem to find in their daily lives. Another interesting idea is to think of retirement as a lifetime Sabbath. Often retirement is this empty space that we fill with any number of things that we dream about doing once we have time, but what difference would it make in our lives if we think about retirement as Sabbath and prepare for it in this way?
...in the book of Exodus we read, "In six days God made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day God rested, and was refreshed." Here the word "refreshed" literally means "and God exhaled." The creation of the world was like the life-quickening inhale. The Sabbath is the exhale. Thus...all creation moves with the rhythm of the inhale and the exhale. Without the Sabbath exhale, the life-giving inhale is impossible. ~Wayne Muller in Sabbath.
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