AGAPE* (Dave Scherer)
AGAPE* has inspired youth from Brooklyn to Bosnia with his relational ministry “Hip Hop Outreach.” Combining rapping, dancing, storytelling and his fluency in Spanish, this Minneapolis-bred music minister connects with his listeners in a way that they really “get it.” In recent years, AGAPE* has worked with critically-acclaimed producer Ant (Atmosphere, Brother Ali) and grammy-award winning Billy Steele. On his recent CD “Rise Up,” he tackles issues of faith and justice with help from Chris Brown’s producer Ra Charm. While AGAPE* loves performing in football stadiums, his main gig is rocking church basements and youth gatherings. He would love to help old ladies in your church throw their hands in the air like they just don’t care. Have your people call his people!
On Going to Church (Excerpt)
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I come to church—and would whether I was a preacher or not—because I fall below my own standards and need to be constantly brought back to them. It is not enough that I should think about the world and its problems at the level of a newspaper report or a magazine discussion. I must have my conscience sharpened—sharpened until it goads me to the most thorough and responsible thinking of which I am capable.
All Our Relations
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Community has been lost in today’s world. People have become so engrossed in their own wants, dreams and desires that they don’t worry about helping anyone else. One of the truest definitions of community is fellowship, and we can’t have fellowship going about life on our own.
Amongst Native culture, the importance of community is prevalent throughout their history. This becomes evident as you learn of the many different Native customs and beliefs, yet come across one common expression in nearly all Native nations and tribes. For the Lakota people the expression is Mitakuye O’yasin, for the Cherokee it is Ahwensa Unhili, and in English it translates to All Our Relations.
Community
September 2013
“We have all known the long loneliness, and we have learned that the only solution is love, and that love comes with community.” —Dorothy Day
Articles
On Going to Church (Excerpt)
I come to church—and would whether I was a preacher or not—because I fall below my own standards and need to be constantly brought back to them. Read more »
All Our Relations
Community has been lost in today’s world. People have become so engrossed in their own wants, dreams and desires that they don’t worry about helping anyone else. Read more »
Who Knows You?
Some of the old New England graveyards are serene little pockets of neglect. Their slate tombstones lean at odd angles and the elegant calligraphy is barely legible, spelling out obscure colonial names like Ozias and Zebulon. Read more »
From Your Minister
Though the extended community of Unitarian Universalists is a profoundly important one for me, if I had to name where I’ve learned the most about how to create deep and grounded community, it would not be church of any kind. Read more »
REsources for Living
What communities do you belong to? Very likely there is the community of your family, and your neighborhood might or might not feel like a community… Read more »
Community
“We have all known the long loneliness, and we have learned that the only solution is love, and that love comes with community.” —Dorothy Day Read more »
Dreaming in Circles
It is said that if a group of people sleep arranged in a circle—heads at the center and feet out like spokes—they create a dream circle. Read more »
The Light of the Faith
Imagine stepping into the sanctuary of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva, Illinois. With narrow rows of wooden pews and the bright glow of stained glass along each side of the meetinghouse, you might think you had gone back in time. Read more »
Vision
July-August 2013
“There are always flowers for those who want to see them.” —Henri Matisse
Articles
Clarity of Hindsight
Knowing what you now know, would you do it all over again? Whatever it is. Marry your spouse? Pursue your career? Buy that house? Go to that college? Enlist? Join the Peace Corps? End that relationship? Plant that crop? Invest in those stocks? Read more »
Finding True Identity
Filled with the holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert. (Luke 4:1) He’s really not much different from us, the man who walked deep into that desert. Read more »
Possibilities and Limits
We are on a dismounted patrol to the top of some ancient ruins. A short walk, but the ground is loose and steep. Rocks and dirt slide down as we walk up. The only way to make it up a steep hill while laden with gear is to look ahead but watch where you put ...Read more »
Solemn Te Deum for Peace
Can you imagine it? Palestinians and Israelis settling down together in their common lands bound together by the silver covenant of Jordan… Read more »
From Your Minister
In the dream, I am alone in a round stone tower. I do not want to be there, but I am trapped in its dark, damp, cold, airless space. And then, almost in a whisper, comes a soft voice, Keep looking there is a door. And suddenly the door is there. I can see light, ...Read more »
Thank You!
The CLF applauds the vision of the members of the congregations listed below. We are deeply thankful that they have chosen to hold special collections during their services to benefit the CLF’s Prison Ministry. If your bricks and mortar congregation holds special collections, we hope you will consider joining them in supporting this life-changing ministry. Read more »
On Living (Part I)
Living is no laughing matter: you must live with great seriousness like a squirrel, for example I mean without looking for something beyond and above living… Read more »
REsources for Living
What if you had x-ray vision like Superman? What would you use it for? Of course, real x-rays let you see through skin and muscle to the bones underneath, but they wouldn’t let you look through the walls of buildings to see what the villains were up to inside. But never mind. It’s our game ...Read more »
Rebirth
June 2013
“Nothing remains as it was. If you know this, you can begin again, with pure joy in the uprooting.” —Judith Minty
Articles
Finding Life in the Land of Death
If I were trying to develop and deliver a talk about the history of Unitarian Universalist opposition to war and war-making institutions, I could have hammered this out and gone right back to dipping peppermint Jo Jo’s in milk and watching Dr. Who on Netflix. Read more »
Dancing into the Heart of God
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi was born in 1207 in Afghanistan, which was then within the Persian empire. Read more »
Annual Meeting
The CLF Annual Meeting will be held on June 27, 2013 at 6:00PM Eastern Time by teleconference and screenshare. That means that CLF members can call in to a conference call number and participate by telephone. Read more »
From Your Minister
Before rebirth, there has to be birth. I have never given birth, but I have been privileged to witness two human babies, six puppies, three kittens, and a few birds and turtles enter the world. And I suspect all of us have watched documentaries of the same kinds of thing. Read more »
REsources for Living
Perhaps you have seen the bumper sticker: “Born OK the first time.” That’s where we UUs tend to come down. You don’t need to be born again. We don’t hold with the notion of original sin, that babies are born carrying the sin of Adam and Eve’s rebellion. Read more »
In My Own Worst Season
In my own worst seasons I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. Read more »
Rebirth
“Nothing remains as it was. If you know this, you can begin again, with pure joy in the uprooting.” —Judith Minty Read more »
Creation
May 2013
“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
Articles
The Adventure of Creativity
The main point of the sermon was that I really don’t care whether there is a shred of historical truth in the story of Jesus. What I care about is that it’s a good story, and it contains truths about life—about how to live my life. Read more »
The Garden of Eden
I was nine or ten when my mother gave me permission to plant and tend my first garden. She was a gardener too. In addition to ten children, my mother raised several lavish beds of exquisite purple and gold irises. I’ve associated irises with her ever since, and so they’ve always been my favorite ...Read more »
Where I Come From is Like This
When I was twenty-three, I felt myself skating over the surface of my life. So focused on who I was, I wasn’t paying attention to where I was. Beauties would pass me by. I would find my mind in tomorrow already, not noticing today. Read more »
From Your Minister
Thomas King poses those questions after sharing a completely different kind of creation story than Genesis, a Native American story involving mud and rain and animals and humans and deities, all engaged in the messy process of co-creating a world of balance and connection and ongoing, meaningful relationships which are fraught with conflict. Read more »
REsources for Living
It seems that for as long as we’ve had people, we’ve had stories of creation. As human beings we like to have an explanation of where we come from and why things are the way they are. The world is created through the splitting of a great cosmic egg, or a great cosmic monster. Read more »
Another Kind of Knowledge
I believe there is only one power, one shaping urge, but I also believe that it infuses everything the glistening track of the snail along with the gleaming eye of the fawn, the grain in the oak, the froth on the creek, the coiled proteins in my blood and in yours, the mind that strings ...Read more »
Awakening
April 2013
“A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Articles
Swimming in the Deep End: Merging with the River
Walking along the American River I came upon a tiny cove. I sat on some boulders near where the cove and the river met. In front of me the main body of the river rushed by at thousands of gallons a minute. Read more »
On Mortality
It seems that the older I get, the more I understand the way mortality shapes our perception and our willingness to be fully in this world. It’s not something I used to think about directly too scary but now I often find myself reading the obituaries, musing on what I would want my own to ...Read more »
On Mortality
Until I turned forty-six, it was easy to imagine that growing old was something that happened to others, that death was a long way off. While I hope death is a long way off, I’m coming to accept that it will happen to me, that none of us no matter how healthy or fit will ...Read more »
Listening For Our Song
On sabbatical in East Africa, I heard a story of a people who believe that we are each created with our own song. Their tradition as a community is to honor that song by singing it as a welcome when a child is born, as a comfort when the child is ill, in celebration when ...Read more »
Making a Fist
For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,I felt the life sliding out of me,a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.I was seven, I lay in the car… Read more »
From Your Minister
When did you have your first moment of spiritual awakening one which you knew consciously as spiritual awakening? I can still remember mine vividly. I was just out of college, working as a secretary, drinking too much on weekends because I couldn’t think what else to do, talking endlessly with friends about the elusive purpose ...Read more »
REsources for Living
What does it take to become enlightened? What is required in order to awaken to the truth of the universe? How do you go from your ordinary I wonder if we’re out of milk? frame of mind into a higher consciousness? Read more »
Awakening
“A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Read more »
Everything We Need
We already have everything we need. There is no need for self-improvement. All these trips that we lay on ourselves the heavy-duty fearing that we’re bad and hoping that we’re good, the identities that we so dearly cling to, the rage, the jealousy and the addictions of all kinds never touch our basic wealth. Read more »
Freedom
March 2013
“To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”
—Nelson Mandela
Articles
Freedom Is a Funny Word
I doubt that any concept has greater currency among Americans than freedom and its synonym, liberty. Read more »
Laughing into New Life (Excerpt)
Being in the tomb doesn’t mean there is an absence of life, but, rather, the dominance of death. Read more »
The Flying Trapeze and the Fine Art of Freedom (Excerpt)
I’ve attended the circus exactly three times in my life twice as a child and once as an adult. The first two were the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey circus (under the big-top, the Greatest Show on Earth) and the third was Cirque de Soleil, held in an auditorium theater. Read more »
Carrying the Language of Freedom
This year what has taken hold of me about Passover is not so much the story itself, but the very fact that the story is reliably told and retold, generation after generation, at the family Seder. Read more »
From Your Minister
In the early 1990s I interned in the Church of the United Community, a tiny storefront congregation in the Marcus Garvey Center in Roxbury, Massachusetts, triple yoked between the United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, and Unitarian Universalists. Read more »
REsources for Living
The Passover story is, of course, a story about freedom. It’s the story of how the Israelites went from being slaves in Egypt to being free people with a land and a religion of their own. But I wonder when exactly in the story it is that the Hebrew people finally become free. Read more »
From “For Memory”
Freedom. It isn���t once, to walk outunder the Milky Way, feeling the riversof light, the fields of dark… Read more »
Freedom
“To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” —Nelson Mandela Read more »
God
February 2013
“God has no religion.” —Mahatma Gandhi
Articles
A God We Can Believe In
At home on a bookshelf we have a massive folio-style slipcover book titled Cabinet of Natural Curiosities by Albertus Seba, a pharmacist in eighteenth-century Amsterdam. Read more »
People Ask About God (Excerpt)
People go astray in their search for God because they do not take the right starting-point. We should never begin by asking, “Is there a God?”– as though God could be something outside of ordinary experience; or, to put it in the old-fashioned way, something outside of Nature. Read more »
If I Were Asked
If I were asked to confess my faith or my beliefs out loud, and I were scrambling for some place to begin, I would start in the desert, in the lonesome valley, and say that first of all and ultimately we are alone. Read more »
Sun/God
Your missionary ancestors told Indian people that they were worshipping a false god when we prayed to the sun. The sun is the most powerful physical presence in our lives. Read more »
A Prayer
World that is my home,Spirit that matters,Speak to me in the voices of Ralph Waldo Emerson,yes, and Florence Nightingale… Read more »
Reflections on God
We asked each of our ministerial interns to share a reflection on what God means to them. Here’s what they had to say. Read more »
From Your Minister
“Are you there, God? It’s me,” Meg.”Yes, and if you don’ mind, I’ll keep calling you Margaret. It confuses me when you young people are always taking nicknames. It’s hard enough learning one name for each of you!” Read more »
REsources for Living
If you were going to look for God, where would you look? Would you go up on top of a mountain? Would you look in the crashing ocean waves? Read more »
Touching our Strength
We touch this strength, our power, who we are in the world, when we are most fully in touch with one another and with the world. Read more »
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