The Great Controversy Story 3 (Campmeeting 2014)

Well, it's not the end of our campmeeting presentations yet, but it is the final part of my favourite discussion.  Thanks to everyone who participated.

This week, I share my understanding of the Great Controversy and what difference that makes to our understanding of God, life and the world.  My discussion begins with the question someone asked about our freedom to choose and how that relates to God's power.  For me, the center of all of this is "God with us"--where relationships matter more than power and/or "authority."  Power can never fix a broken relationship.  Thus God has to employ other methods to reconnect with humanity.

Next week we start exploring Adventist history and how the stories we tell about our past matter to our present.

Enjoy!


The Great Controversy Story 3

The Great Controversy Story 1 (Campmeeting 2014)

I must begin by apologizing for the late posting.  I had the podcast ready to go on Thursday and simply forgot to post it yesterday.

Today we get to one of my favourite stories: The Great Controversy.  This isn't simply a book, this is a narrative of God's ongoing involvement with humanity and the universe, the rise of evil and the vindication of God's character (which is to say the investigation by created beings of whether or not God is worthy of our love and devotion).  The Adventist answer is that God is worthy, but this is not without some serious investigation yet to come.  Questions remain.

After all that, we don't begin with the story.  We begin with our own stories.  In this episode, interspersed with relevant discussion, we briefly share our personals stories of learning about God and why we appreciate the Great Controversy understanding.  Next week we get more into specifics of the story itself, but this week lays the groundwork for that discussion.

Enjoy!

The Great Controversy Story 1

Getting Lost In Our Stories (Campmeeting 2014)

In today's podcast, we explore some different ways we can relate to our stories and how that impacts on our lives.  Although we've covered these ideas in previous podcasts, this presentation allowed us to put a number of ideas together in an interactive venue.  We wonder through Gonzales, Alford and the Great Controversy asking questions like:

Why do we get lost?
What happens when we get lost?
How can we get lost in our everyday life?
How can we get lost in our stories?
What does it mean to live in a "found" way?

We're looking for our other set of recordings which hopefully have the various audience questions, but in the meantime, I cleaned up the audio as best I could.  Thanks again for listening and enjoy!  Part 2, the audience participation portion, should be available next week.

Getting Lost in Our Stories

Living with Different Stories (Campmeeting 2014)

Great news!  Over a year later, I've finally found the recordings of our "Story" series of presentations from Campmeeting 2014.  The format is quite a bit different from our usual discussions--we had a plan for what we wanted to say, rather than simply discussing questions, and we had some good audience involvement.  Although we've covered much of the content elsewhere, these recordings are very different because we're trying to connect a lot of our ideas together into a more coherent series of presentations.  I'm working on cleaning the recordings up for posting over the coming weeks.

To begin with, I was finally able to track down the recording of our Sabbath morning presentation at The Wave from Campmeeting 2014.  We had a lot of fun with this presentation.  This episode, we talk about the difficulties we face when we start with different stories, and how that has impacted Dale and I on a personal level as we have worked and traveled together.

Thanks for joining us.  Enjoy!

Living with Different Stories

PS: If you have trouble keeping up with us on Facebook, you can subscribe for email notification of new podcasts via the box to the right of this post.

Also, if you've enjoyed our podcasts, please check out our new blog How Shall We Read?  We've decided to spend some time studying and discussing the question of Biblical hermeneutics (interpretation) while our church is doing so at a global level.  This is a question of importance for all Christians and Adventists--not just academics--so we will be reading and writing easy-to-understand (hopefully) summaries and analyses of relevant material.

Missing Paul Walker

Dale here. In the same week that we are marking the death of Nelson Mandela, David and I instead did a podcast trying to make sense of the impact of the death of Paul Walker.  The first reason for this would be that, well, Mandela died the day after we recorded.  The second reason is that the reaction to the death of Paul Walker is harder to explain, at least for me.

For the first time in a while the death of a celebrity impacted me.  I saw a post come up on Facebook, and immediately I thought "oh please let this be a hoax", but it wasn't, and it hit me.  At the same time, it wasn't supposed to - he's a celebrity, not part of my life, not the most amazing actor, and I'm supposed to be above this.  But I'm not.

In this podcast David and I try to get to the bottom of why the death of Paul Walker seems to have resonated with so many people, including myself, and what the implications of this situation are.

     Listen here: Missing Paul Walker

And for those who are just missing Paul Walker, here's a youtube memorial video for him, that incorporates some of the reasons why I think people miss him:

Thinking about Community: Applying Lessons from Language Revitalization to Faith Communities

I (Dale) spent the last two weeks recording Nuxalk in Bella Coola, while also working with language teachers towards understanding the steps to making the language a part of everyday life - making a community around the language.  The process brought to my mind many questions about community building in general.

Some communities are incredibly resilient in the face of outside pressure, while others melt away. Yes, you can blame the pressure, but when you look at a range of situations, the key factor seems to be not the amount of pressure on the community, but the stories that the community uses to hold itself together.  Kill the stories, and you destroy the ability to resist.  Take away the language, take away a voice, then teach a new language and a new voice--new stories--and recovery becomes very challenging.

This means that the strength of a community is in its mechanisms for passing on stories, for using them, for speaking--the strength lies in the community's ability to make those stories central to life.

In this podcast, we look at the idea of "church"--asking why and if church is working, assuming that the role of church is to build and strengthen a different kind of community rather than just be a window dressing for an already-existent community. I bring my experience working with language revitalization to bear on the question of the purpose of education, community, and what a recognition of this purpose means for how we regard gathering together.

   Listen to "Thinking about Community"

A question to get us started - what is the "work" that we do at church? what is it we accomplish, what are we trying to accomplish, how might we better pursue those goals?

Spectrum Review Part 5: Reflections on the Journey

This podcast closes our coverage of the 2013 "A Third Way" Spectrum Conference.  We've already covered the meetings and highlighted some of the ideas and speakers that stood out to us.  This week we decided to just share our stories and reflections on the journey across the border to Chattanooga--being Canadian in the South, the effects of sleep deprivation on Dale, observations of America from the outside, and finding yourself among family on the other side of the continent.  This was definitely the most fun we've had recording in a while.  I hope you enjoy it as well.

I don't know what we'll be talking about next week, but we already have a list of topics stored up from the conference and before.  Needless to say, we'll probably be referring back to our time in Tennessee for sometime to come.  In the meantime, enjoy.

Spectrum Review Part 5

Nietzsche, Paul, Story and Practice: Spectrum Review Part 3

This week we look at a few different things, continuing on the theme of language or story breaking down.  David briefly presents his experiences reading Nietzsche and how his writings kept taking him back to Paul, then we look at the question of how the way we live can be at odds with the stories we tell  We look at this question in the context of two of the other roundtable discussions from the Third Way Conference, on Adventist story-telling and on the history of pacifism within Adventism.  Both are examples of how the stories we tell, or forget to tell, can stand at odds with how we view the world based on our beliefs and lifestyle choices.

Specturm Conference Review Part 3

Our question this week - what are stories that you were told as a child that did not mesh with the way your family lived, or with the beliefs you were raised with?