Weekly Messages
The Holy Spirit: We’re Finding Our Way Again! (8)
As we've seen, we Christians - we lose our way! All the time. Again and again. Bummer. But it is just as much a part of our tradition - to find our way again when we lose it. And today is no exception. We have really lost our way! But across the planet, a movement...
The Holy Spirit: How We Lose Our Way (7)
It's a lesson about good news - and the bad news. The bad news: we've been really successful as a religious tradition. The good news: not so much any more. Picking up where we left off before our community meeting last week. It turns out in Christian history, that...
2015 Community Meeting
We take a break from our current lesson for our annual community meeting. We cover what work we did in 2014 to make NRCC a healthier spiritual community, and why we did it. We also talk about how we'll decide what work we'll do in 2015 (and of course, why we will do...
The Holy Spirit: How We Lose Our Way (6)
You've heard the expression: "nothing breeds success like success." In the case of spiritual acumen, that might not be so. In that case, it could be said that nothing breeds failure - like success. Surprised? Have a listen, Doug
The Holy Spirit: the Perennial Tradition (5)
Here is a quote from Richard Rohr: The Perennial Tradition encompasses the recurring themes in all of the world’s religions and philosophies that continue to say: There is a Divine Reality underneath and inherent in the world of things, There is in the human soul a...
The Holy Spirit: Normalizing Mysticism (4)
If we would participate in the movement afoot in our world today - to move from secondhand, institutional religion to firsthand, direct-encounter spirituality - then it would behoove us to pay attention to the mystics in our tradition. We've tended to honor them only...
The Holy Spirit: Messy, Untidy, Post-Institutional-Religion (3)
Life is messy. Institutional, organized religion would prefer we ignore that inconvenient reality. Institutions work so much better when truth is fixed and expectations are normalized. But organized religion is in trouble. And truth - and wisdom - and the sources we...
The Holy Spirit: the Developmental Journey (2)
In this second lesson on rethinking the Holy Spirit, we examine a couple of developmental models of the spiritual journey - and how they speak to our need to become skilled in discerning and dancing with the Inner Spirit of God. Weird words, I know. But hang in there....
The Holy Spirit: Quarks, and Heisenberg (1)
Of all the religious-jargon sounding parts of our tradition, the term "The Holy Spirit" is right up near the top of the list. We know it's religious (the words "holy" and "spirit" are right in it). But what does it mean? "Spirit," by the very nature of the word is...
Exploring a Relational Matrix for Spiritual Formation – Dr. Timothy Brock
By Dr. Timothy Brock I want to talk about some alternative ways of "doing church". We need a more healthy focus on relationships and how they grow us, support us and encourage us to be the person God wants us to be. Have a listen.
This Moment In Time (3)
The poet Shelly tells a story of Ozymandius, great Egyptian pharaoh whose inscription from the sands of the desert, "look upon my works and despair," acts as a morality tale for the rest of us. Finding significance in accomplishment is a fool's errand. So is any other...
This Moment in Time (2)
At this moment in history, Western civilization is reinventing society - and religion - to match our newly emerging worldview. This lesson hits on a bit of how that looks for the Christian church. Have a listen, Doug
This Moment in Time (1)
We begin a new lesson today about how this moment in history is playing out in the Christian church. It will be a peek beneath the surface of what we can see happening, and will begin questioning why it is happening. Consequently, this first introductory lesson is...
Tough Questions About God
Each first Sunday for the balance of the year, we are having a lunch after church to discuss tough questions about our religious life. The project coincides with my book, Rethinking Our Story: Can We Still Be Christian in the Quantum Era? Today's lesson is hopefully...
Enneagram and Types Review – Robin Camu
There are 9 Enneagram types and they are based on 9 sins (ways of "choking off the glory of God"). These have since been reduced to the 7 deadly sins. (Fear and deceit were left out from the 7 deadly sins) These 9 types are numbered 1 through 9 and are clustered into...
Revisiting Meditation – June 2014 (2)
A lot of people don't meditate because they think they're not very good at it. Who among us likes to start the day failing at something every morning?! But meditation (the mindfulness meditation we practice at NRCC) doesn't work that way. Turns out, the only you can...
Revisiting Meditation – June 2014 (1)
My last child is about to leave for college (43 more days). As I'm getting him ready to go out the door, I feel a sense of "finals-week" pressure. I've got to review 18 years of really important stuff with him as he finishes up his last few days of childhood. He and I...
Rethinking the Afterlife (7)
We conclude our lesson rethinking the afterlife with this -- if it is true that the texts on which we built our afterlife narrative were not what we thought they were -- shall we keep the afterlife as part of the Christian narrative? Yes, we conclude, but not the same...
Rethinking the Afterlife (6)
If, as we have suggested, the texts we Christians have cited to construct our afterlife story -- were not written about the end of time . . . Shall we abandon the idea of the afterlife altogether? Perhaps not. Have a listen, Doug
Rethinking the Afterlife (5)
Have you ever heard Jesus' parable of the sheep and the goats? If you have, there's a good chance you thought it was a parable about the afterlife - the final judgment before we all go on to eternity. It might surprise you that that's not what Jesus would have been...
Rethinking the Afterlife (4)
As we have been discussing, the Greco-Roman world view has influenced our thinking on the afterlife to separate the here and now from the here-after. It also made the afterlife a much more prominent part of our story than it ever was before. The message of Jesus...
Rethinking the Afterlife (3)
We pick up from our lesson before Easter, building a foundation for rethinking the Christian story of the afterlife. How we imagine what happens after we die, has a great deal to do with how we live. If Christians are, in general, not behaving well these days (pretty...
Easter 2014
Easter is the centerpiece of our tradition. In this time in which we are rethinking how we tell the Christian story, it would make sense that we'd do some rethinking of Easter as well. Have a listen, Doug
Rethinking the Afterlife (2)
The story we Christians tell about the afterlife is deeply rooted in our psyches -- so deeply in fact, that very few of us every think about it critically. However, it is certainly problematic, and may not be as "Christian" as we think it is. Have a listen, Doug...