Circle of Hope: Recent Episodes
Circle of Hope
Circle of Hope is a church in Philadelphia and South Jersey with four congregations and dozens of cells. Weekly, we post audio from our Sunday Meetings to our podcast. Listen in and come join us!
For the very old RSS feed of posts visit: http://cohaudioblog.blogspot.com/
Sahily, Bebe, Mable, and Pedro share stories of confusion, grief, restoration, and blessing on Easter morning.
Julie gives a talk on the Five Steps of Repentance from Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg's book On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World.
Rachel gives a talk on the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in Luke 18:9-14 as part of the Parables of Jesus series.
A 3-part meditation on God's love and radical hospitality. A series of litany, reflection, and music.
Rachel gives a talk on the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 18:21-35 as part of the Parables of Jesus series.
Corinne gives a talk on the woman at the well as part of the Women in the Bible series.
Zach gives a talk on the Parable of the Sower in in Matthew 13:44-46 as part of the Parables of Jesus series.
Tess gives a talk on Marian Apparitions as part of the Women in the Bible series.
Disclaimer: The audio gets more clear about halfway through the recording (about 8:54).
Marcus gives a talk on the Parable of the Great Pearl / Hidden Treasure in Matthew 13:44-46.
Iboro and Julie have a conversation about Rahab in Joshua 2:1-24 as part of the Women in the Bible series.
Tess gives a talk on Mary and Martha in Luke 10:38-42 as part of the Women in the Bible series.
Kathleen Karhnak-Glasby gives a talk on Sarai and Hagar in Genesis 16 as part of the Women in the Bible series.
This talk was given at 2007 Frankford Ave. on February 28, 2022. Circle of Hope is an LGBTQIA-affirming church in Philadelphia and South Jersey.
Jonny, one of our pastors, prepared a talk on seven Biblical texts that are often used to oppress queer people and offers new perspectives as to why they do not condemn homosexuality. An article that he used for reference can be found here: ttps://drive.google.com/file/d/1CoPZeLk8UD3w7x1tm7WkduG5l3gCOOzx/view).
Note: this recording was edited to only include the prepared arguments and reading of the texts. Questions and discussions are not included to protect the safety of the people in attendance.
Julie gives a talk on the Shepherds for the fourth week of Advent. Scripture used: Luke 2:8-15
Jonny gives a talk on John the Baptist for the second week of Advent. Scripture used: Luke 3:1-14
Jonny gives a talk on the prophets for the first week of Advent. Scripture used: Jeremiah 33:14-16 and Luke 21:25-36.
Jonny leads us as we observe Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day. We want to create space for grief for all of the suffering and death experienced throughout the pandemic, and remember our dead who have left the earth but still walk with us in our faith.
Melissa Florer-Bixler, pastor and author of How To Have An Enemy and Fire By Night, speaks at our Fishtown congregation.
The Holy Spirit is calling us to bring healing and Jesus' love to everywhere and everyone, to make a space where people can practice the love they've been given. Ben White delivers a message for the final Sunday of our Pentecost Season.
Ben White delivers another talk at Newton Lake Park. This one on following the Holy Spirit, being attuned to God in our movement forward.
Ben White offers a talk at Newton Lake Park.
This season we've been celebrating the joy of Resurrection and the LIFE abundant we have in Christ.
Ben White hosts a Zoom meeting for his morning talk. We've started a new season recently called "Slightly Better Than Barely Hanging On is Pretty Good."
We are being super real about our need for connection with God and others. Isolation is decidedly not good for human beings. So we’ll use this season to go after connection with God and each other with gusto. No shame! We’re getting beyond the constructs and the hiding. We’re coming out and leading from our poverty, asking the questions that will connect us, doing the prayer that will ground us and expand our reach.
Ben White, our pastor at 3800 Marlton Pike, delivers a Sunday morning Zoom meeting on Mary as we celebrate Advent this season.
Watch our online meetings on Sundays at 5pm at youtube.com/circleofhopenet
Ben White, pastor of 3800 Marlton Pike in South Jersey, delivers another talk from a South Jersey park. Ben ponders Jesus wanting to make a connection with us.
Ben White, pastor of 3800 Marlton Pike in South Jersey, delivers another talk from a South Jersey park. Ben spends some time Mark 5:21-34 about Jesus healing a sick woman.
How is Jesus holding us together, how is he getting us through this? Ben White does another outside meeting at a local Jersey park. This week, he looks at Mark 10 and Jesus and the healing of Bartimaeus.
Be sure to check us out on YouTube for more talks and music at youtube.com/CircleofHope
Ben White delivers another talk outside at a Jersey Park, in our continuing season we're calling Jesus in the Storm.
Be sure to check us out on YouTube for more talks and music at youtube.com/CircleofHope
Ben White, pastor of our South Jersey congregation, delivers a talk (at Jersey park)in our latest season Jesus in the Storm. We're looking to the peace of Jesus this season during these trying times. Ben delves deep into Matthew 14:22-33.
Join us on YouTube live every Sunday at 5pm. Subscribe and get notifications at: youtube.com/circleofhope
Ben White, pastor of our South Jersey congregation, delivers a talk (at Jersey park) on our new season Jesus in the Storm. We're looking to the peace of Jesus this season during these trying times.
Join us on YouTube live every Sunday at 5pm. Subscribe and get notifications at: youtube.com/circleofhope
Our South Jersey pastor, Ben White, delivers another message at a local park. This time he ponders on love languages and delves deep into the Song of Songs.
From a South Jersey park, Ben White shares a talk on wisdom literature, especially proverbs.
Ben White gives a talk on perseverance outside at a local South Jersey park. He talks about the prophet Job and the book of Hebrews.
Season: God is Making All Things Right Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: God is making things right. Don’t get puffed up and fight your way into an exhausted lump in the dark of your isolation. God is making things right. Don’t give up on the people you love. Let them be who they are, and learn to love them as they are. They’ll probably change too. God is making things right. Don’t forget who you are because things come out of you that surprise and even frighten you. That part of you needs just as much tenderness as your enemy.
Season: God is Making All Things Right Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Lots of us try to protect ourselves in relationships now because of things we’ve gone through in the past. We all have relationship wounds, and when people get close to us they get close to our wounds, too. This can trigger even more conflict or avoidance in us! God invites us into a place of safety and security in him beyond our wounding, even as we’re still in the midst of healing and working things out. His vulnerable love shows us how to be OK in our own vulnerability.
Season: God is Making All Things Right Speaker: Gwen White Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St
About Talk: "I wanted to talk about sin because I think it’s a very misunderstood concept in current Christian thinking and I think a better understanding of it is freeing. Sin has its beginnings not just in bad behavior, but deeply buried in unconscious processes. Being able to name it or catching it consciously means I can release it and find new ways of being in the world. We are promised that we will be made new in Christ. This openness to seeing my sin is the way of living into my place within the New Humanity. God still likes co-working or partnership, not dominance with us. Even though, of course, God is infinite and we are finite, God, creator, we the creature—still God wants this loving exchange and insists on it—so God does not overpower us, but waits for our meeting, our understanding, our true presence as our true self." -Gwen White
Season: God is Making All Things Right Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: People do violence to bodies but Jesus came to change that. His work on the cross calls us to peace and tender care of our whole selves and others. There are many ways we can participate in his work of resurrection in our bodies this Lent.
Season: God is Making All Things Right Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: We are carrying death around inside is. We need to let God get it out. Jesus offers us a way but we hesitate to take it. Confession mortifies the flesh. It calls what is dead, what it is. We can see all the ways that we experience sin and separation from God in our bodies. The embodied disciplines and rituals of death are the very places we can experience freedom from what literally ails us.
Season: God is Making All Things Right Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: The answer to the question of bodily justice isn’t just acting like we aren’t living together. It’s not leaving each other alone. It’s not never interacting. The antidote to violence against our bodies isn’t never touching one another. It’s not fearing our bodies. The other side of being reckless with our bodies is seeing our bodies as a source of sin, instead of life. And that can lead to a very limited experience where we never learn to enjoy food, sex, dancing, all sorts of stuff that can lead to more life instead of life-diminishment and death. When we see our bodies as sources of sin, instead of abodes of God, we really are just slowly dying. We are moving from crucifiable bodies to ones that aren’t. We aren’t just graduating from our bodies into thin air. So for now, we aren’t going for a sterile environment. We can be both free and connected. We can actually use our bodies to deepen and further our lives, instead of being afraid of them.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St
About Talk: The Bible models trust in God that does not rest on whether we are able to be clear and certain about what to believe. Moving from seeing to believing is about moving from certainty to trust. Jesus himself performed signs and wonders so that people would see and believe, but he was calling people into something more—a relationship of trust. In John 6:35-40, Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe.” How do we trust when we cannot see? How do we believe when we have doubt? Our community is formed to resist that doctrinal certainty that will close out the space needed to work out that relationship and trust. We try to create a container and environment of love where faith and trust can flourish. We are trying to create a place where a dialogue of love holds us together, not the right ideas and certainty about them.
Note: Julie talks about 2 Corinthian 5: 16-21 but it is not read due to audio quality. Here it is in full:
So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave
About Talk: We need to move to something more. We need to move to a re-ordering. It’s not enough to tear down and destroy and uproot, we need to build and plant too. We need to create something new. We might need to take some of the rubble of the past with us and create something new together. At a church-wide level this requires time and discernment. The way our culture is moving might inform our process, or we may ask questions about the new institutional lies. God is in all things, so we may find God in cultural leaders, or we may find God in the void of their leadership as well.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: We are invited to trust Jesus in an experiential way. In fact, we really can’t become the new creation by keeping him at a distance. He claims to be the bread of life (John 6) because he is meant to be “eaten” and digested for our nourishment again and again. He offers his Spirit for this Life. Lent is a good time to explore the mystery and wonder of his promises.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Gwen White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: "I wanted to talk about sin because I think it’s a very misunderstood concept in current Christian thinking and I think a better understanding of it is freeing. Sin has its beginnings not just in bad behavior, but deeply buried in unconscious processes. Being able to name it or catching it consciously means I can release it and find new ways of being in the world. We are promised that we will be made new in Christ. This openness to seeing my sin is the way of living into my place within the New Humanity. God still likes co-working or partnership, not dominance with us. Even though, of course, God is infinite and we are finite, God, creator, we the creature—still God wants this loving exchange and insists on it—so God does not overpower us, but waits for our meeting, our understanding, our true presence as our true self." -Gwen White
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Paul Tillich said, "Language...has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone." Ben works with this contrast. It is good news that we can shift our perspective. Meeting God when we are alone helps us shift our perspective on all things. We see things that are unseen that are eternal.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Loneliness is a common human experience that seems to be growing in the world. It’s high time for an experience of God and ourselves that is as connected and communal as we really are. We are actually more in relationship than we are alone, and this is because Jesus is holding all things together. As we practice the presence of God through prayer and meeting together, our loneliness is touched with the truth of our belovedness. And we become connectors and unifiers with God.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: We aren’t going for perfect justice or right behavior. We are moving from the idea that only our perfect actions will save us, because our actions aren’t the sum of society’s evil. Let's practice “calling each other in,” rather than out. Because our cries for justice can sometimes feel like expressions of justification to overcome our guilt or to overcome our pain. It’s not that easy, though. But just because you won’t be perfectly woke, doesn’t mean there isn’t reparation to be had.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Rod White Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St
About Talk: Meditation is not just mindfulness, which is basically being in charge of your own relaxation. It is thinking and feeling with God. You might be thinking and feeling about God, and that’s meditation too. But the goal of meditation in Christ is oneness, communion, integration, love. Meditation is turning toward God who is with us. A lot of meditation is taught as turning away from anxiety as the main role of the practice. But Christians turn away in order to turn toward. Our meditation has an object: our loving God and our true selves.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Ben White Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St.
About Talk: How we respond to anxiety takes us back to the lack. The lack, the lack, the lack. Like a sore in the mouth, you just keep on tonguing it. The threat of lack is very motivating. Lack of enough warmth, food, comfort, soothing is all part of our universal primary trauma as infants and we keep chasing it. We need a radical change. That's the New Creation. Instead of trying like hell to satisfy our insatiable lack we can make peace with our desire and plan to trust God's abundance every day.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: In our culture we know a lot about how “more is more.” The excess often comes from a fear of scarcity. God invites us to look at our hearts and trust him for the abundance he offers instead. We can find it most simply and consistently in God’s loving presence. Rachel invites us to try a contemplative prayer practice that she calls SNL: 1) Stop the unconscious reaching for more, 2) Name the hunger or the fear and tell it to God, 3) Listen for the assurance from God that you’re okay.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Common spiritual wisdom might have us just try to overcome our feelings. But Christianity isn’t about getting over it. We don’t transform the world or ourselves by finding inner peace. A great way to continue to participate in the economy of excess is to no longer be bothered by it. But can we actually hold out our desire to be bothered by the lack of imagination, and then find our satisfaction in a new economy of desire with Jesus.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: When the core narrative in our hearts is that we don’t have enough, we strive for excess so we can stop feeling like there is not enough. We just want excess to provide relief. But that relief is elusive. Getting more doesn’t free us in the ways that we want it to. The reality Christ brought about as the new creation gets us to abundance no matter what—whether there is scarcity or excess. Abundance is different than excess. It is based on the love of Christ—who went to the depths of death to overcome it and bring about a new creation. We are free from being confined to our circumstances. The limited resources we experience in our world and even in our own hearts are no longer our point of reference/our point of view. We looked at 2 Corinthians 5:11-21, 6:3-10
A re-post from 8.25.19
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: The Bible is so much more than a rulebook; it is designed to lead us to wisdom. By recording the experiences of people relating to God over 1300 years, it invites us to embrace the sacred responsibility to discover our identity and calling in this specific time and place. The Bible writers challenge us to ask, “What is God up to now?” and to keep telling our story.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St
About Talk: We are more than our personalities. God is doing something in us as the new creation that will impact whatever we would name our "personality." It is more about a gift from God of our sense of being and purpose beyond ourselves. In general, "personality" is thought of as something coming from the inside out. Personhood is more of a quality coming from the outside in. God has given us the Spirit and a role in the mission of God to redeem the world.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: The systems of the world are insufficient. And they seem unchangeable. And so as a result you might feel like you can’t change, that you’re stuck being who you are—in your personality, in your shortcomings, in your weaknesses—and that there is no hope for you to get better. But we think there is, and that we’re expressing that hope now as we heal each other and move toward our wholeness, or true wellness, which seeks to not just make us cogs in this machine, but transformers of it, as we are transformed ourselves.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: What is personhood? Persons have a purpose. They are newly made for revealing the righteousness of God in themselves and in the world. We are not static—our personalities are not the end of our journey; we are dynamic—we can be transformed, especially by obedience to Jesus. There are so many ways we can do this. But we must do, not just be. We must accept that we are sent, we cannot stay. Our enjoyment of our new selves in Christ cannot be done alone, in isolation from each other, or from those who need to know our message of reconciliation for which we are sent—and they will know it by experiencing our doing with God. The old has gone, the new is here.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Salvador Dali and subatomic particles inspired Ben this week. Also Wegman's and Target. His idea was that community is like the three dimensional version of communion which could be imagined as four dimensional. There is something happening in a church that doesn't happen in other communities. They are similar but not the same. Communion is not dependent upon the capacity of the individuals; it is the reality that Jesus has created among us. It is new creation. Everyone is designed for communion with God and with the rest of humanity, and they seek it in various ways, but we cannot create it and community itself cannot achieve it. Jesus at the center of community is required for the communion we all desire.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St
About Talk: Julie Hoke talks about our need for connection and community, and how that connection is related to our communion with God.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: Our communion with one another and with God isn’t just an aid to make us feel better in our present circumstances. It is the fuel that we use to change our circumstances. The church needs to be a transforming agent, flipping the whole world upside down, and our little expression of it in Philadelphia is a part of that. We’re building it together. Let’s keep going.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Bethany Stewart Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Bethany talks about how the transformative love and power of Jesus brings newness to the communities that we form, and takes us to an expanded communion centered on Christ Jesus.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Go to the corner of your life, the place you always pass, and see something new. We are practicing revealing the New Creation—seeing the new things that are often ignored. The chief power against the unity of humanity is dehumanization. It is hard for a human being to treat another human poorly or support systems that treat them poorly if they know the other and see them for who they are. Because when they see the other, more often than not, they will love. Only when the other is papered over with dehumanization can a human hate another human. Dr. King knew this and set about removing the paper—helping more people see the humanity of black people in the United States. Our work as ministers of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5) is very similar. We must help people see the new creation and the new humanity for what it is. We are beacons, shining on the newness of what is often ignored.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: It’s a divided country and Jesus calls us to the ministry of reconciliation. The sin of racism is still so pronounced, and we cannot make things right on our own. Wokeness cannot replace the constructs of whiteness; we are called to move in the grace and mercy of God.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 29 West Tulpehocken
About Talk: Luke 7:36-50 - Jesus anointed by the sinful woman
Living as the new creation is a dynamic process; not static state. There is movement involved for it to be revealed. We are moving from our own rightness to the righteousness of God.
In this story of the woman washing Jesus’ feet, Simon is content with his rightness and he doesn’t learn to love deeply as one whose great debt is forgiven. The woman believed it was possible and came to Jesus with all that she had to express her faith and love. The forgiveness she received is the heart of living as a new creation.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Gwen White Location: 2007 Frankford Ave
About Talk: Teaching Pastor Gwen White talks about sin. It’s a very misunderstood concept in current Christian thinking and she thinks a better understanding of it is freeing. Sin has its beginnings not just in bad behavior, but deeply buried in unconscious processes. Being able to name it or catching it consciously means we can release it and find new ways of being in the world. We are promised that we will be made new in Christ. This openness to seeing my sin is the way of living into my place within the New Humanity. God still likes co-working or partnership, not dominance with us. Even though, of course, God is infinite and we are finite, God, creator, we the creature—still God wants this loving exchange and insists on it—so God does not overpower us, but waits for our meeting, our understanding, our true presence as our true self.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Rod White Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St
About Talk: Julie Hoke talks about the holiness of God working within her, and how we can posture ourselves toward our new humanity in Christ.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Rod White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Meditation is not just mindfulness, which is basically being in charge of your own relaxation. It is thinking and feeling with God. You might be thinking and feeling about God, and that’s meditation too. But the goal of meditation in Christ is oneness, communion, integration, love. Meditation is turning toward God who is with us. A lot of meditation is taught as turning away from anxiety as the main role of the practice. But Christians turn away in order to turn toward. Our meditation has an object: our loving God and our true selves.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Jesus’s baptism reveals some foundational truth for all of us: we are God’s beloved, too. Experiencing and resting in this identity happens through presence and prayer, and it might be the most important spiritual discipline of our lives. Being the beloved of God means that you are chosen, blessed, broken, and meant to be shared. Understanding who we really are enables us to bless the world like Jesus, too.
Season: Everything Has Become New Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave
About Talk: "It took me a long time of rewriting that script to really believe that God was pleased with me. It took me a long time to believe I could be someone else. I still think back at being a jackass in college and I still am embarrassed about it and who I am today." -Jonny Rashid What are you facing? What can’t you let go of? What’s making it hard for you to make a shift? It could be any number of things, personal, relational, political.
Season: Epiphany Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St
About Talk: The Magi show us that the long-awaited Messiah is no longer just a Jewish matter. A star in the east led these Gentile magi from their distant land to come worship the baby too. Jesus was born king of the Jews but He came for the whole world. And this revelation of God to the Gentiles began with these travelers who came to worship him as their king.
Season: Epiphany Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Epiphany calls us to bow down and worship the new king. Herod would not do it because he had organized his life to be worshiped, and he would not change. Epiphany calls us to change. The new king is here, and the whole universe is conspiring to expand the reach of his love. Let’s move toward him in worship in 2020.
Season: Epiphany Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: We are namers. This is the story of Epiphany. How many beautiful things happen in the world unnoticed and unnamed? How many beautiful people are in the world, in the United States and in Iran? How many might not know who they are, really? Epiphany means revelation. Something that is, is named for what it is. An epiphany means seeing and naming. That’s what the Magi did. They saw Jesus, they were overjoyed, and they worshiped him. They named him. Who he really is was revealed to them and they responded appropriately. So much and so many people need to be named in this world of woe.
Season: Epiphany Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: The Magi needed a supernatural occurrence, a dream, to tell them to go home another way. Matthew is being gracious with his audience—if you are not changed, that’s OK, you might need a little extra push. It’s hard to see the world differently. It’s hard to change. It’s hard to grow.
Season: Advent Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St.
About Talk: Entering into the story with the shepherds reminds us that nothing about our lives is separate from God—our work, the details of our circumstances, our particular bodies and experiences. In the midst of our responsibilities and tasks, a Savior is born. In the midst of the morning commute, there is good news for all people. Let the message of the angels get to you in those mundane places. The glorious, joy-filled news breaks through the darkness to reach us. Into the humble circumstances of our lives, Jesus comes.
Season: Advent Speaker: Rod White Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: Advent can be irritating because you want to do it because you don't. But the season still calls us to look up into the sky and around the next corner for angels.
Season: Advent Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: The angel's message to the shepherds stands them up. They have a purpose. They know who they are.. They bow from their fullness not just humility. And this message stands us up too. Jesus comes to bring our humanity into its fullness. By becoming human, God elevates all humanity. God elevates you. Stand up! Something new has happened and now we can do something new.
Season: Advent Speaker: Mable Bakali Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Mable Bakali compared our calling as Jesus-followers to Peter Parker’s reluctant teenage calling to save the world in the movie Spiderman: Far from Home. The good news is that we don’t have to drum up anything spectacular on our own; God is doing it. Our part is about showing up to our lives and engaging in the struggle. When we do that, we might even be surprised by joy.
Season: Advent Speaker: Gwen White Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St
About Talk: One could argue convincingly that the Christmas story is a story of fear. We could even say terror—let’s remember the famous circumstances of this visitation: Mary is a young unwed virgin. To announce the pregnancy as she must one possible result is that she would be condemned and killed. Another is that her betrothed, Joseph, deserts her and she has no means of income. Then let’s remember the follow up—she gives birth after laboring on a donkey as her oppressive government demands she journey regardless of her condition. Then let’s remember that after the birth she goes to the Temple as custom requires and an old man tells her that her soul will be pierced. Also in the child’s early life, she and Joseph have to flee to a foreign country as refugees as Herod’s men come to slaughter all the baby boys. Mary knew something about terror and about waiting for deliverance through it. The oppressive systems of our culture still press in. The darkness is still real and present. So we still must learn to wait for deliverance through terror. Mary was the first Christian in this regard. She was the first to give Jesus space to live inside her. And so this relationship began. It wasn’t about presenting a good image—that option was out from the start for Mary. It wasn’t about achieving moral or spiritual depth. It wasn’t about gaining skill or beauty. Or any achievements of any kind or any amount of hard work. It was about giving God space and letting God act. This sermon explores this giving of space and what it might mean for each of us to do the same.
Season: Advent Speaker: Hana Lehmann Location: 2007 Frankford Ave
About Talk: Advent is our ritual of remembering. Through the story of the annunciation, Hana helps us remember who Mary is and how that impacts how we know God. Leaning into the tension of colonial and revolutionary narratives, she explores the power of Mary’s imaginary throughout history through art and brings Mary into our contemporary context.
Season: Advent Speaker: Kevin Chao Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Kevin Chao leads us to consider how to go deeper into our waiting and engage our longing like Mary and Joseph did as they awaited the birth of Jesus.
Season: Advent Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: How do you wait in the face of terror? Will you listen to the angel in your dreams like Joseph and do whatever it takes to survive? Will you keep your tiny hope alive by evacuating your homeland? Is there some line you aren’t supposed to cross that you will cross anyway to get free from the domination of fear that will destroy you. What will it take for you to pick up everything and live in a new land, away from that culture of fear that will kill your child, the tiny child of your hope, the faith in Jesus still tender and growing within you?
Season: Advent Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: How can you remind yourself of what you’re waiting for. What has it all been for? If we pay attention to how we wait—like really crack it open and look at the inside of your waiting—we'll get John the Baptist' message. How do you wait with the discomfort of change is upon you? When John the Baptist is telling you, “Now is now. It’s time to move” What do you do?
Season: Advent Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St
About Talk: How does John the Baptist help us this Advent as we wait for deliverance? He reminds us to prepare our hearts. Repent. Turn around. Jesus is the light of life for all people. Everything else is darkness. All the expectations that are set up for us during this season, all the expectations we set up for ourselves, all of the ways we fill up our longings and try to satisfy them will not deliver us. Advent is an opportunity to pause and consider what we are waiting for; identify our deepest need and turn towards the Light.
Season: Advent Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave
About Talk: It sounds ridiculous, but there’s a reason Jesus tells us to have faith like a child. The children get it. The children know the hope that could come. They still see the world in the way that God does! I really think that. I think that’s why you have calls for faith, belief, and hope in the mysterious, even in godless Christmas movies about Santa.
Season: Advent Speaker: Bethany Stewart Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St.
About Talk: Prophecy is weird and most of the time we don’t know where to identify the prophetic or even who to consider as a prophet. Bethany takes the time to give us a more expansive view of the prophetic and highlights the prophecy of the Israelites’ freedom through the Prophetess Miriam and the deliverance that came through the delivery of Jesus many years later.
Season: Advent Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave
About Talk: The prophets wait for the impossible by remembering God’s faithfulness, and they participate in bringing about the faithfulness too. They wait actively and they do their part in bringing about God’s faithfulness. That’s how you wait for the impossible, not passively, but just as Miriam the Prophet does: with faith, trust, courage, and power.
Season: Advent Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Miriam, the prophetess, sings to us now. Reminding us who God is and who we are. We are still in expectation of the deliverance God will bring now. We wait in wonder at the life Jesus is living among us now. Our savior is very near. How is he transforming your waiting now. How is he delivering you from the horses and riders that pursue you? What are those. Let’s spend the week asking that question, paying attention to our waiting.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Rachel Sensenig: Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: People want to make meaning out of their circumstances, especially in hard times. We’ve discovered that a relationship with God makes meaning out of everything! But it looks more like relating and trusting than didactic answers. God is not controlling our choices, but Jesus implied that the glory of God can be revealed in all things. We’re looking to him for that kind of radical love and grace.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St.
About Talk: The fact that the Bible is diverse, ambiguous, and ancient prompts us to consider how the Bible behaves. The Bible leads us to gain wisdom. It is not meant to pick and choose verses to make into principles. It is an invitation to know God and God’s presence with us right now in our context—time and place. So rather than taking the Bible and making it into a principle (like Everything happens for a reason), we can explore scripture in the midst of our circumstances—over a lifetime—to ask the questions Who am I? What is God like? We can discern God’s way for our time—not by scripting that for us but by modeling for us a process that we now have to own for ourselves.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Megan Jackson Location: 2007 Frankford Ave
About Talk: People often make meaning of past pain, suffering, and grief by noting all the good that came out of that time in their lives. Sometimes our experience of suffering allows us to sympathize, to help someone else. Sometimes people see that the changes they were forced to make have helped them discover a new path, or facilitated some spiritual or emotional growth, for which we feel thankful. But mostly, I think that, when we look back at past suffering that was meaningful to us, it’s often because we felt the presence of God more dearly and more nearly than we do in our everyday lives. God is with us when we suffer, and God suffers with us. That’s the assurance we get—not a rationale for suffering, but a living God in the midst of pain and grief.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 29 West Tulpehocken
This all seems grandiose and hard to do on our own. But we’re not doing it on our own. We’re doing it together. We are creating a community where we are pursuing God’s kingdom and God’s justice right here.
Speaker: Rod White Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: We all have the Spirit of God given to us and we all have so much opportunity! We all need to build something to feel our true selves in action. It is not good enough to think faith or feel faith we need to do faith to be a human who lives by faith. We are God’s co-worker. We are God’s field, God’s building. Now that grace is at work in us, we also create. We build with care.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave
About Talk: This all seems grandiose and hard to do on our own. But we’re not doing it on our own. We’re doing it together. We are creating a community where we are pursuing God’s kingdom and God’s justice right here. It was evident this last weekend when we were cleaning up neighborhoods, assembling furniture for those who needed it, walking through our watershed, listening to those seeking sanctuary. We are creating an alternative community where we can actually let go of our nets, at least to some extent, because we are interdependent. We have a new of doing things. And so far, it’s the best we have come up with in this time and place. We are still tethered to the ways of the world, and that’s OK for a number of reasons: both practical but also because we want to meet people and connect them to what we’ve got going on if that’s what they are looking for. We need everyone here in on the project, sharing what they can: time, money, talent, but most importantly their heart. Let’s keep doing it together.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Gwen White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: There is a problem with trying to ‘live our dreams’ The goal is to carry the weight of the longing/need we feel. And that is a heavy weight. Most of our dreams, for how things could or should be, are based on our perceptions of what’s good/best which have their roots in our earlier childhood experiences. Psychologically we’re unconsciously set up to repeat old situations and try to find a different ending. So we want to be invincible, to never lose, to be prettiest, smartest, most admired or most loved. We easily fall into sacrificing our very souls for these dreams in the attempt to repair our losses all by ourselves. But we can’t repair what’s past by the power of our belief or the sweat of our brow. Struggling with Jesus in the midst of these cycles is the only way.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 29 West Tulpehocken
About Talk: When a conversation gets heated enough, or loud enough or long enough (both personally or a societal level), we become so invested in defending ourselves that our choice becomes who we are. Our opinion about the available options becomes a central part of our identity because we don’t want to be wrong. This leads us into conversation wars where two opposing sides are fighting to win. Jesus frees us from this kind of entrenchment. In a love that binds us together, we become our true selves in Christ. We are not the essence of our opinions. We are being transformed, but the renewing of our minds, by the love that binds us together. We can agree to agree. Our opinions are not our identity. We are being made new and we keep working it out in a dialogue of love.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: What if your opinion doesn’t matter that much? What do we gain by being right, after all? What do we gain other than division and isolation? In John 17:20-26, Jesus prays for us that we may be one as he and the father are one. “I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.” We can rely on Jesus, especially in the church to make God known to us. We are not eternally responsible, but we do have eternity to come to an agreement. Let’s hold our opinions loosely and creatively maintain the dialogue, trusting that Jesus is bringing us together completely in the end.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: We might correct a Senator's saying this way: everyone is entitled to their own opinion because we are working together to discern the truth. Your right to express your opinion isn’t enough, nor is your opinion being subject to the “facts,” which are not reliable anyway. We are working on discerning direction and vision together. You matter to that process and so does your opinion. Again, this is not just a right you have, and you have a responsibility to share. And it’s risky. You might get hurt, there could be a conflict, but it’s worth it. Your opinion isn’t inscrutable, but it’s invaluable.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Free speech is a good thing, but obsession with our autonomy leaves us lonely. We are more designed for togetherness, reconciliation, and unity. Jesus makes a way for that across the most impossible borders.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location 29 West Tulpehocken St.
About Talk: Jesus is inviting us to expand our vision for what’s “best” and who is our family. He is calling us out of fear of scarcity. Now we embody what’s best by being a big inclusive family together. Read Matthew 10:37-39, Matthew 12:46-50
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: On one hand, of course we take care of ourselves or our families as best we can. But we have to keep examining what we think is best because our assessment of what is best is not always based on something that we want to honor or obey. We are complex human beings so it is important to keep paying attention to what is driving our processes and our hearts. Jesus is freeing us from our individual orientation to a collective one, from being bound to save your life to being willing to lose it.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Ben White Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: We all know that the love of our family is not enough but we keep believing that it should be. The cultural narrative and our own desires conspire to keep us believing that somehow if we love better we can undo the lack we all feel. Jesus actually said something in Matthew 10 that makes it clear that "family first" is in conflict with "Jesus first." If your primary source of satisfaction is him, everything else goes much better, especially your family. It's counterintuitive, but letting go is one of the keys. One way to let go is to expand your sense of family beyond your blood relations. The village we create in Circle of Hope is living proof of the possibility. Read Matthew 12:46-50.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Because we redefine how we do family, we don’t have to juxtapose our service in the church, which is the village, with our care for our family. They work together, and ideally, with some seamlessness. This doesn’t solve all the problems of our family, but it does mean we don’t have to solve them on our own, and it gives us freedom to fail, because we’re doing it together. It also means that when we reenter our old family systems, we don’t have to act in the same way either. We can be new people.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 29 West Tulpehocken
About Talk: God doesn’t hate. God loves. And God’s love transformed us so God no longer regards us from a worldly point of view. The old is past, the new is here. Let’s keep bringing about our fullness in love, not in judgment.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: We can’t fully separate the action from the person without some kind of disembodiment, which Jesus isn’t doing. So love the sinner, hate the sin isn’t really possible. We need a whole new theology, more than a corrective band-aid. God gives that to us in Christ, who remakes us completely through love. He doesn’t hate at all; He loves all of us, and all parts of us into our fullness. Even our sin was aiming at something good. Our systems of justice and punishment are so tiny compared to the grace and forgiveness of God. We don’t need to separate our sin from ourselves because God has redeemed it all and in some wild way making good of it all. (Romans 8:28) There is no condemnation in Christ.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave
About Talk: Why is “love the sinner, hate the sin” a bad saying? God doesn’t hate. God loves. And God’s love transformed us so God no longer regards us from a worldly point of view. The old is past, the new is here. Let’s keep bringing about our fullness in love, not in judgment, taking the logs out of our own eyes, before we take the specks out of each other. That means we don’t call each other out for the sake of moral superiority, but we gently address one another in truth and love, knowing that love, not violence, is the best way to bring about the new creation, which Jesus is reconciling himself unto.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: God knows who you are. You are God’s beloved. You are God’s child. God knows that you will be like Jesus when he appears. God knows your heart and is pulling you by its righteousness and purity. God has your hope by the hand and will not let go. When we live from that abundance we move toward perfection and sinning no more (like Jesus’ call to be perfect in Matthew 5 and his call to the woman in John 8 after not condemning her). Love the sinner, hate the sin takes us by our hate and tries to drag us somewhere, but even if it’s toward God, it’s not very transformative. It is much better to follow your desire for God than your disgust for yourself.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Lots of people who try to help themselves are still really struggling. Does God not care about them? We need a better theology than self-reliance and privilege. And even with all the privileges, self-reliance doesn’t work that well. All of us need help beyond ourselves. And Jesus seems to prefer hanging out with the people who know they need help versus those who think they have it all figured out (Matthew 9). Jesus calls us to care for those who can’t help themselves very well. That is why the Church exists: to care for each other and the world. “Love each other as I have loved you.”
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Benjamin Franklin said “God helps those who help themselves.” If we are honest we can come up with some reasons why we are attracted to this wisdom. It would be so nice to not need God. But Christ has become for us wisdom of God. His way is self-giving love and self-sacrifice. Our way is not different if we choose to follow him. We humbly accept that we have nothing that we did not receive. We need help and we help each other be helped by the one who has the power to do what we cannot do by ourselves.
Speaker: Rod White Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St.
About Talk: We all have the Spirit of God given to us and we all have so much opportunity! We all need to build something to feel our true selves in action. It is not good enough to think faith or feel faith we need to do faith to be a human who lives by faith. We are God’s co-worker. We are God’s field, God’s building. Now that grace is at work in us, we also create. We build with care.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: So can we take the good from this bad saying? You can help yourself. You have the stuff it takes to do positive, life-giving things. But you aren’t alone. God helps too, the community around you helps too. You aren’t entitled to help, but you are freely given it, so freely give it away. Own your power: know you have it and you aren’t anonymous or weak, but you can co-collaborate with God to do good now.
God is the author of goodness, and we help spread God’s love by sharing in that goodness. We should then expressively and conspicuously do the good work we do for ourselves and for others because it is a reflection of God. People might meet God through our good works, but they also might just be blessed. That would be great.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: The world tells us to be good to maintain the status quo. Fall in line, don’t rock the boat too much. Jesus calls us to something much deeper and bigger and better: freedom to know our value and wholeness in God! Knowing that we are already loved and that God has already made us good can free us to love and serve and give extravagantly. Don’t worry about being good, be in love.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Gwen White Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: Teaching Pastor, Gwen White, ponders what it means to be good, and that we need the sustaining and transformative power of Jesus who offers us wholeness and oneness with God. God offers a love that surpasses the need to be good in order to be loved, that love comes without simply doing the right things. It's a gift we can accept freely. Additionally, she recounts her trip to the Ukraine and the work that the Mennonite Central Committee is doing there, and how the love of Jesus inspires us to do great things.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Casey Bien-Aime Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Casey Bien-Aime answers the dominant culture’s wisdom about morality. Do we really have to fight so hard to be a good person or can we be with goodness and bring forth the goodness that is bubbling up in us from God? She brought her story about her need for control in preparation for her maternity leave. God’s goodness is the source of our goodness. Jesus’ invitation is to be with him.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Sometimes this phrase gets used to rationalize or minimize terribly difficult circumstances. The illusion is that God is controlling everything, so we should be able to control and “handle” everything too. Yet nothing could be further from the truth in Jesus, who comes in to a hurting world to be killed by the powers instead of winning in a worldly kind of way. If we want to follow God, the invitation is to feel more than control, and to relate to God in our suffering and ask for help, as Jesus did. It is about holding God’s hand more than holding a handle or a tool that provides easy answers. We are invited into a great mystery through Christ—the mystery of victory over the world through suffering love.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 29 West Tulpehocken
About Talk: When we believe God gives us only what we can handle we are assuming that God wants us to handle things. But our hands are very small and anything we can handle isn't enough. God certainly wants us to handle more than we can fit in our own hands or our own capacity. We have more capacity with God than on our own; more capacity than we can even imagine. How do we cultivate the trust that leads to our increased capacity in times of trouble?
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: God doesn’t burden you with all of your problems, and on your own they can seem overwhelming. We can find rest in intimacy with God, a love relationship with the Body of Christ, and through spiritual practices like contemplation. So, our lives will often give us more than we feel like we can handle, but God is faithful, walking with us in our suffering, and God is present within us and within God’s body.
Season: Things Jesus Never Said Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Most of the stuff we believe we don’t actually believe. We unconsciously skip over big assumptions. This can’t be a fault because it is so basic to our human brains. We can, however, pay attention to our assumptions and see if we are being led more by the wisdom of the world than the wisdom of the cross (1 Corinthians). Christ has become for us wisdom from God, so we look to him first for our assumptions. This old saying has all kinds of sayings that come from other sources. The effects can be disastrous for faith. Let’s look to Christ for our definitions, not principles about God.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave
About Talk: Jonny Rashid, pastor at 2007 Frankford Ave., answers questions from the audience on a wide range of serious and fun topics from theology to the best food in the city.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Rachel answers questions from the crowd. The questioner audio is difficult to hear, so here's a summary of questions asked and comments made:
- You were asked to speak the the Praxis Gathering. What was that all about?
- How are we going to multiply this congregation. What's the rubric?
- What does it look like to tithe in 2019, in this economy, in our largely impoverished city?
- How can we get creative about fundraising to expand our reach and mission? -Story about Richard Wurmbrand (tortured for Christ vs by Christ joke), how he gave his broth to someone sicker than him every 10th day in prison. -Jesus talks about money the most because it has power over us. Tithing is worship and a way to get free. -Scarcity mentality vs reality. We take care of each other through the mutuality fund when people can't tithe. But everyone gets transformed by giving. -Modern "widow's mite" story
- How do find wisdom in sacrificial giving? -Story about a family in Ukraine that shared everything out of their cupboards cheerfully. The importance of being a cheerful giver. -This topic of sharing money was huge at our Stakeholders meeting yesterday. Perhaps that means that God is speaking to us directly about this and we are moved to keep listening and responding.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Rachel Sensenig answers questions from the crowd. The audio is a bit hard to hear, when it comes to the questions, so here is a summary of the questions and other comments made during the meeting to fill in Rachel's answers:
- What happens after we die, especially if we don't believe in God? Are we eternally condemned?
- How can I fully trust God to take care of me when I've heard all these great promises about God's care that haven't come true? I heard that God would protect me from sorrow and loss and I'm experiencing so much of it. -How I learned that nothing is wasted through battling MS (Carrie) -Some of the things we go through (like my boyfriend dying) can be used to comfort others (Kyle)
- Is God with everyone, and how? Do we have a choice in that or not?
- Why should we read the Bible? -Ellen and Josh answer
- When is Jesus coming back and what is he waiting for? (Because it's getting pretty hopeless here, especially for creation)
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: There is something universal about the desire to be seen and known as uniquely who you are. But the demand for authenticity can be a terrible burden as much as an empowering credo. Jesus knows this paradox first-hand. He identifies with us and shows us how to persevere in submitting to our sacred purpose. Creative and non-creative types find their purpose in making whatever they make to reflect the glory of God.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: "How do you tell the difference between your intuition and God speaking to you?" Rachel talks about how we can genuinely hear God speaking to us in our lives.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: Jesus suffered to relate to us. But he suffered too, to show us the cost of following him. He suffered because reparations need to follow injustice. Because evil is in the world. Because the wrongness in the world needs to be made right.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Tessa Librada Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St.
About Talk: Tessa talks about her experiences in teaching and her study of history and how that affects her relationship to the Bible and its many stories and cultures.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Rod White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: The Lord's life from beginning to end is suffused with prayer. His example and his teaching (as in "The Lord's Prayer" - Matt. 6) demonstrates this. Part of following Jesus is also praying. Development Pastor Rod White talks about what praying means and some good disciplines for practicing it.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Gwen White Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Dr. Gwen White answers the questions "Why do we share with MCC?" and "Why care about anywhere but here?" Gwen White is the Board Chair of the Mennonite Central Committee U.S. and a teaching pastor with Circle of Hope.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Kristen Snow Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: Kristen Snow talks about how nature teaches us something about how to treat it and ourselves. She is part of our Watershed Discipleship Team.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St
About Talk: You might have gotten the message that being angry is not acceptable for a Christian—much less being angry with God. There are so many things to explore behind this question: the problem of suffering and evil, the nature of God’s will, the nature of free will of human beings and spiritual ones. Even as we sort through the big questions, what about our hearts? When it seems God is nowhere to be found, working through our anger can help us to locate God again, perhaps in surprising ways. Being honest about our anger can help us sort out where to locate the mystery of why the world is so unfair and seemingly arbitrary.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: "Rosa Parks sat on the wrong seat of the bus and triggered a revolution. Others may have tried the same thing before and got arrested, beaten, or worse. Should I risk similar things? Putting my family at risk with me?" The Civil Rights Movement was an expression of the gospel of Jesus in tune with our Anabaptist ancestors in faith. We should not be surprised if the call of Jesus requires resistance and rebellion from the values of the State. We should do whatever we’re called to do to bear witness to suffering with nonviolent direct action, like Rosa, because it expresses the work of the cross that embodies the Lordship of Jesus. This is why we organize ourselves together as a church in cells, with a common fund, and in many other direct avenues of change through our compassion teams. We can be encouraged that our citizenship is in heaven, and we are bringing a kingdom that cannot be shaken here now. (Hebrews 12)
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St.
About Talk: Circle of Hope comes from a long line of believers who understood that freedom doesn’t come through the state but through the grace of God in Jesus. They followed Jesus with radical allegiance to his teachings and his actions. We explore what it means to be a proactive peacemaker.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St
About Talk: Julie talks about discerning truth in love in the midst of a culture that is calling out injustices wherever they're found.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: "When, if ever, is a Christian free of obligation? How is obligation linked to freedom?" Short answer: we are never obligated to do anything; we do what we do out of love. But love could easily feel like an obligation. What do we do? We must live by the Spirit. Every situation is different, and we are different in every situation. We need to be in step with each other and with the Spirit (Galatians 5) to figure it out. We pray, we do what feels right and we talk about it. Repeat.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: So is Christianity fundamentally colonial? No. But it is not formless enough to not influence the cultures that it enters—but it is not a culture unto itself so as to replace the cultures that it touches. We need to learn those differences so that we don’t impose our faith violently, but also so that have enough substance to be able to make a disciple.
Season: Someone Asked: Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave
About Talk: The extent of our life diminishment ranges from the socio-economic to the political to the ecological but also intimately to our relationships, our marriages, our lives together. Our capacity to diminish life is extensive. We even diminish life in an effort to alleviate sin! Our condemnation, and perhaps quickness to do it, is as sinful as that which we are trying to end.
The solution here is to give life and join Jesus in sustaining it. Call out the best in each other, even when we are at our worst. Lift each other up. Tell us we can do better and you believe in us. Remind us that Jesus conquered the grave and we can overcome our own despair and life-diminishment and join him in waking up the rest of the world. That’s the work we are engaged in. Let’s be life-giver, not life-takers.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: It's not as distinct as we may want it to be and that's ok. The diversity of experience of the gift of discernment (which is really what we are talking about) is present in the New Testament too. We have some tools for how to do it in community. It starts with running the bases.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 South Broad St.
About Talk: "Are we gifted with spiritual gifts when we are formed or born, or as we grow and develop as a person? And how do we keep our eye out for them and learn what our spiritual gifts are?" Spiritual gifts are beyond what’s in our genes or personalities. They are supernatural gifts of grace from God to continue the work of Jesus in the world, and they reveal our deepest identity and purpose! It’s important to find out what they are so we can do our essential part in the Body, and demonstrate the reality of the limitless love of God right here and now.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Rod White Location: 2007 Frankford Ave
About Talk: The Lord's life from beginning to end is suffused with prayer. His example and his teaching (as in "The Lord's Prayer" - Matthew 6) demonstrates this. What do you know about how Jesus prays and what he teaches about it?
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Gwen White Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St
About Talk: Dr. Gwen White answers the questions "Why do we share with MCC?" and "Why care about anywhere but here?" Gwen White is the Board Chair of the Mennonite Central Committee U.S. and a teaching pastor with Circle of Hope.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: "What does 'Without worship we shrink?' mean, and why worship anything beyond gratitude?" We are made to worship. "Without worship we shrink" is a description not a prescription. When were you last aware of being fully connected, awed, or delighted? That was a moment in need of naming. Worship is about naming and remembering. We say "thank you," but it's more about the you-ing than the thanking. Gratitude TO God is the worship that stops our shrinking. Our connection to God in all things through Christ is what makes us big, demanding that centrality from ourselves makes us small, it shrinks us.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Scott Sorrentino Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: The original Anabaptists were people who “re-baptized” (AKA ana-baptized) at the risk of being put to death by the state church. They were radicals who really wanted to do what Jesus said without any compromises for theological systems or political interest. They fled Europe and settled in the Lancaster Valley where they encountered the spiritual fervor of the second great awakening and formed into the River Brethren which eventually morphed into the Brethren in Christ. We are all about peacemaking, believer’s baptism, mutuality and radical discipleship of Jesus.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: "How do you re-approach the Bible after a fundamentalist upbringing, and how does it actually work?" The Bible is so much more than a rulebook; it is designed to lead us to wisdom. By recording the experiences of people relating to God over 1300 years, it invites us to embrace the sacred responsibility to discover our identity and calling in this specific time and place. The Bible writers challenge us to ask, “What is God up to now?” and to keep telling our story.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: The original Anabaptists were people who “re-baptized” (AKA ana-baptized) at the risk of being put to death by the state church. They were radicals who really wanted to do what Jesus said without any compromises for theological systems or political interest. They fled Europe and settled in the Lancaster Valley where they encountered the spiritual fervor of the second great awakening and formed into the River Brethren which eventually morphed into the Brethren in Christ. We are all about peacemaking, believer’s baptism, mutuality and radical discipleship of Jesus.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St.
About Talk: Julie Hoke answers questions from the audience on a variety of topics from faith, life, church, and more.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: A reason to use a term like "Kingdom" is that it connotes a lot of power, and that is a good thing for its adherents, and a bad thing for those in power who oppose it.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: As residents of a world superpower, we often feel pressure to pick the best product or determine what other people should do. But faith is more than a rational, cognitive or consumer choice. Rachel shared how choosing Jesus was more like Jesus took hold of her (Phil 3), and the all-surpassing grace of Christ is reflected in every culture.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location 29 West Tulpehocken St.
About Talk: It's a Sunday of Ask Me Anything! Jonny Rashid visits West Tulpehocken and is asked questions from the audience regarding all types of topics from faith, life, church, and more.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: It's a Sunday of Ask Me Anything! Rachel Sensenig visits Marlton Pike and is asked questions from the audience regarding all types of topics from faith, life, church, and more.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Ben White Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: It's a Sunday of Ask Me Anything! Ben White visits Frankford Ave and is asked questions from the audience regarding all types of topics from faith, life, church, and more.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Ben White Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: It's a Sunday of Ask Me Anything! Ben White visits Frankford Ave and is asked questions from the audience regarding all types of topics from faith, life, church, and more.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: It's a Sunday of Ask Me Anything! Julie Hoke visits South Broad and is asked questions from the audience on all types of topics regarding faith, life, church, and more.
Season: Someone Asked Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: It's a Sunday of Ask Me Anything! Julie Hoke visits South Broad and is asked questions from the audience on all types of topics regarding faith, life, church, and more.
Season: Moving with the Spirit Speaker: Roby Anstett Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St.
About Talk: Psalm 90:4, 14-16; Genesis 1 God is in everything, including us. Therefore, our experience of God and awareness of God must transcend our solitude and prayer life. Not in a contradictory way, but rather, complementary.
Season: God is an artist, and so are we Speaker: Bryant Burkhart Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: God expresses her love for the world in much the same way as a potter expresses love for the clay they are shaping. When a potter is shaping clay, they are listening and feeling and responding to the needs and idiosyncrasies of the clay in front of them. In much the same way, God is present to us and being influenced by the particular hurts and hopes and desires of our world right now. This mindset is present throughout the Old Testament, and perhaps best exhibited in God’s coming to humanity in the form of the human Jesus.
Season: The End of Alienation Speaker: Shawna O'Neill Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Shawna O’Neill tells her story of being the older brother in Luke 15. The love of the Father is so much greater than we can imagine.
Season: Rewards of Risk Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: When everything goes wrong, on what will we rebuild? Is anything strong enough? In the book of Ezra, the returning exiles rebuild their foundation for a new temple on God's enduring love. But the moment is bittersweet because the loss of what was is present in the new. That's how it is isn't it? Joy and sorrow right next to each other—the light of Christ in jars of clay...
Season: Moving With the Spirit Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 29 West Tulpehocken
About Talk: Acts 9:36-41 In moments when the stakes are high, when our emotions are high, when there is internal or external pressure, taking a pause to be still and to pray can keep us from operating like we are on our own. We may need to “clear the room” to become aware of the Spirit of God within us.
Season: Rewards of Risk Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Another world is possible. The Spirit gives us the hope we need to imagine another possible future. Jesus redeems us from the captivity of death, in an echo of Isaiah's redeemer from the second section of the book that bears his name. The impossible hope of resurrection gives us the courage to imagine a different future, for the world and its domination system...and even for ourselves. We too can be new. The spiritual gifts the Holy Spirit gives the body will be enough for our transformation.
Season: God is an artist, and so are we Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: Jonny Rashid: "Learn from me and my own mistakes. A pickle is art. You are a piece of art too. It has nothing to do with being scarce, being hard to approach, being difficult. It has everything to do with the fact that God made you to make things. So unlock your creativity. Don’t feel pressure to make something beautiful or worthy to be hung up in a museum. Create as a matter of your life. And note that the things you make are artistic in their own right. And then develop your mind and your heart to see God in them. Pray for vision, pray for clarity, pray for the eyes to see. And may we as a community call out where we see God in one another’s creations. Let’s keep opening our eyes, our minds, our hearts, and taking the risk to make something believing that we too are artists in our own right."
Season: The End of Alienation Speaker: Christina Kallas Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Christina Kallas, director and founder of Philly AIDS Thrift, explains why the LGBT community is welcome in the church.
Season: The End of Alienation Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Music helps us feel things, it helps us to connect. Even pop songs are like prayers that way. Let’s use music to talk to God, to experience God’s nearness and glory together.
Season: God is an artist, and so are we Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: We can use visual art to deepen ourselves and connect to God. Jonny relays how he grew up in a tradition that didn’t value art at all, sometimes even calling it idolatrous, iconography that showed God was in violation of the commandment that said not to make graven images of God. Somehow that tradition never articulated that systematic theology, which certainly depicted God in a certain way, wasn’t equally idolatrous. Nevertheless, that’s certainly how Jonny learned his faith—intellectual, cerebral, didactic. But it took about a decade of doing the same liturgy with the same art to realize, no, there’s actually something spiritual and evocative happening here that deepens. It’s more than just ideas. It’s the something that can’t quite be expressed, and because, for Jonny anyway, it’s using a grammar that he's not used to. So it takes a while, it takes some time. Jonny's suggestion for you might be to sit with some art this week, maybe alone, maybe in your cell, and write about, pray about it, feel about it. Maybe you can move to freeing yourself to create some art to and see what you experience and learn that way.
Season: The End of Alienation Speaker: Aaron Bergmann Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St
About Talk: Aaron Bergmann explains the Passover within the Christian context and how it relates to us as followers of Christ today.
Season: Moving with the Spirit Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St.
About Talk: James 1:17-21 We have so many words in us and so many ways to say them. And with social media we have so many new realms in which to speak them. When James talks about our words and our tongues, he is cautioning us to consider the power they have. “The tongue is a small flame of fire, a world of evil at work in us.” But when we cooperate with the Spirit, it can also be a world of good—to create, revive and restore.
Season: God is an artist, and so are we Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave
About Talk: The different portraits of Jesus in the Gospels, but not limited to the Gospels, exist in harmony not competition. Likewise, the different portraits of Christ in the world live in harmony too. We keep looking for where God is going to show up, and keep listening. God reveals Godself in many ways and I want to keep opening my eyes to them, while being proud of how God has revealed Godself to me and to us. I think we generally err on being arrogant about our own experiences, or so self-effacing we can’t even say what’s going on in our lives without feeling like we’re oppressing someone. Let’s hold to what has given us, allow dialogue to bind us, listen to the cloud of witnesses across time and space, move with where the Spirit is going next.
Season: The End of Alienation Speaker: Rod White Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: It’s impossible to follow Jesus without praying. Rod says we can use just about anything to communicate with God—memorized prayers, The Lord’s Prayer—the important thing is to show up for that spirit to Spirit connection. Our Circle of Hope Daily Prayer is a tool that is especially designed for you. Read it at: circleofhope.net/dailyprayer
Season: God is an artist, and so are we Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: May we face music with a sort of redundancy and repetition, so that it implants on our hearts, and maybe even changes the cynic in us, the one who might never utter the words above if they weren’t set to music. May we as a community then put to music the things that seem too expressive to merely be imprisoned in prose. May our voices and melodies season the earth as salt seasons food.
Season: Moving with the Spirit Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St
About Talk: Luke 18:18-23 and Luke 19:1-10 When we are looking for how the Spirit is moving, we are working out a relationship with God, not to rules or principles. We actually need to relate to Jesus to see what we should do because he knows our hearts. And when we read the Bible we are reading to relate to God and to ask God to relate to us through scripture. It is not a rule book to apply. Relating to Jesus, through the Spirit for us, is how transformation happens.
Season: Rewards of Risk Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Reading old stories like the one about Ruth, in our family photo album called the Old Testament, is a great way to practice empathy. If we can identify with Ruth, Naomi, Orpah, and Boaz, we can definitely identify with all sorts of people, especially those who are unjustly treated at our Southern border who are migrants just like Naomi and Ruth. We can even identify with those unphased by their treatment. Flexing our empathy muscles makes us more generous with ourselves and more connected to God for what we really need. We want to make love happen.
Season: The End of Alienation Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Early on, Greek philosophy about the soul and body being two distinct, separate entities (with only the soul being immortal) seeped into Christian theology. This led to a devaluing of the body and sexuality in many ways. But Jesus and the Bible writers hold up the connection within a covenant of love. We are called to take ourselves seriously and care for the body and the soul together as God does for us.
Season: The End of Alienation Speaker: Jeff Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Jeff Sensenig tells his story about waking up to the stark realities of racism, and the importance of anti-racist work. The call is especially for followers of Christ engaging in ideas about the new humanity. Let’s keep hearing the call to listen and take action together.
Season: God is an artist, and so are we Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: We want to talk about us, as a community, and imagine how we tell it in our time and place. Circle of Hope, at large, has a way it wants to tell the story. And we have a specific way that we are telling it to our people today. So the question for us to answer is what do they need to hear and how can we share it? The best part, and the advantage that we have, is that we aren’t really creating an “us” and “them.” We’re the ones we’re talking about. How do we tell the story of God to ourselves? How do we need to hear it?
Season: Moving with the Spirit Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St.
About Talk: With the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on all believers at Pentecost, God is no longer seen as an external resource but a constant internal presence that offers intimacy and real transformation. So when we listen and cooperate with the Holy Spirit, we are saying ‘yes’ to God. And that happens moment by moment, day by day.
Season: God is an artist, and so are we Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: So the image of God and being created in it means we are creators too. It’s a vocational idea, more than a static idea. We reveal God to the world. And it is an important time to do that. People have a hard time seeing God and we contain the secret for God’s revelation in us. We then have to make things, build things, create things that reveal God.
Season: The End of Alienation Speaker: Alex Murray Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Alex Murray is one of our worship leaders who organizes to reverse the effects of climate change. He speaks on how more time in nature can bring us closer to God and others, and how regular people can make a difference.
Season: Rewards of Risk Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: We need stories of freedom to remind us of who we are and who God is. We can get stuck in between our past and what God is delivering us into. "Were there no graves in Egypt that you brought us into this desert to die?" ask the Israelites, when their back is against the Red Sea and the army of Pharaoh is coming for them. God gives us hope to do something bigger than our fear in similar situations in our lives. God says, "I will fight for you, you need only be still." And from that stillness comes action. Frederick Douglass was our inspiration on this Juneteenth weekend but there are many more.
Season: Trinity Sunday Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Sometimes it really is as simple as listening to God and doing what he says, even when it sounds ridiculous or too obvious. He knows what we need; he is a good Father.
Season: Moving with the Spirit Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St.
About Talk: Jesus can help us move through the uncertainty of transitions and newness in faith. We say "We’re called to move with what the Spirit is doing next" because we have this crazy hope, based on the resurrection of Christ, that God does always want to do a great new thing in and through us. It doesn’t erase the goodness or difficulty of the old things, but it does call us to keep moving on in hope, for ourselves and others. Jesus told Mary Magdalene, “Do not hold on to me” because there was more to do, and in the future they would be even more connected, heart to heart, spirit to Spirit.
Season: Rewards of Risk Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Our human relationships are not utterly distinct from God's relationship with us. Our vulnerability in loving another is present in God loving us. God created us for love and with love comes risk. The ancients who wrote Genesis knew this and did not hide it. Though many Christians have hidden it, imagining God as more in line with divine ideals from other sources, we can share our experience of love and know that it’s source is in God. God is not like us, but we are like God.
Season: The Resurrection Changes Everything Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: What we’re trying in Circle of Hope is not just to teach a theology, one that is even less doctrinal than it is social, but to actually live it out. Rather than point to Jesus who came to us 2,000 years ago, pray that you can live in a way that shows the world he is alive in you today.
We hope that we can relate to others in a self-giving way, in a relational way, that makes room for the other right in us. That means across gender, racial, economic, cultural, and religious lines. If we can be that kind of Circle of Hope, we really will show the world the love and embrace of Jesus and we might even do some teaching about the Trinity.
Season: Eastertide Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St
About Talk: The Spirit of God is present in the words and actions of the Body of Christ, the church. God has given us each other and we are meant to share our lives together and to be in dialogue with each other. Our dialogue helps to knit us together and draw us out of the places we are stuck; the loneliness of our own looping thoughts and fears, self condemnation, cynicism—whatever it is. As we talk and act together, the Spirit of God moves.
Season: The Resurrection Changes Everything Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: Pentecost worked because there was a truth that was revolutionary, it drew people in. Moreover, people stayed to understand it because it was delivered to them in a language they understood. And they continued to movement because that truth was applied in a body of believers.
Season: Pentecost Speaker: Rachel Sensenig, Bethany Stewart Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Jesus planted a seed of fire in the earth that is destined to renew and transform us and the whole world. Like our proverb says, we are called out to be a living organism, building community together in love. The Holy Spirit enables and empowers us! The tough thing about being an organism, though (as opposed to an organization) is that we are rather fragile and vulnerable; we suffer when parts of us are not caring for the whole, because every part is essential. However, organisms are also extremely powerful; the life force undermines death all the time. We are subversive like that, so we need not be shaken. We can suffer the fire of transformation because the power of eternal life lives in us.
Season: Life in the Spirit Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: What is the difference between these two spirit words? How do they work of each other and dance? Ben thinks it is a lot. We shared stories of being inspired. We think it has a lot to do with who you are. Your aspirations may be part of your inspiration (no they definitely are). Let’s not separate what the Spirit is bringing together. It’s a mess, yes, but it is the best way to be alive.
Season: Life in the Spirit Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Join us in the refrain: "God is alive! Jesus is working in our dialogue as a community. We’re giving it up to the Holy Spirit!" Say it again for the people in the back. "God is alive! Jesus is working in our dialogue as a community. We’re giving it up to the Holy Spirit!" Ben told stories of how being together breeds revelation and naming it makes it more real. The Holy Spirit among us means that we can be a different sort of people in the world—people who actually talk about what’s real inside us and discover how often we are being brought together. You are not alone, but you can deny your togetherness, because everything is deniable. But that doesn’t mean you should do it.
Season: Eastertide Speaker: Rod White Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St
About Talk: Jesus compares himself to a dying seed. New life always comes from death in the plant world, usually in us too. Jesus will raise us up and strengthen new shoots in us. Some of us could start following Jesus for the first time right now, like Kim or my cell apprentice or my friend who became a lawyer. Some of us are hearing a call of newness that’s moving us from where we have arrived now. Now is a good time to respond, to lose your dormant life, precious as it might seem, and grow something new—receiving the eternal life Jesus offers, just like we were meant to live.
Season: The Resurrection Changes Everything Speaker: Jordan Burdge Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: The Ascension, rather than being a sign that God has abandoned us, moves us to look more deeply to see the ways in which he is present in our own lives—especially in our sorrow, loneliness, and longing for wholeness—and in the world around us. This is the basic meaning of being witnesses, not that we bring to the world our certainty about God, ourselves, the truth, but we bring an invitation to join us in our quest to find God.
Season: Eastertide Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: What seemed like an ending turned out to be an incredible new beginning. The disciples were worried about all that they lacked, but Jesus had won them the victory and was giving them power to be his witnesses right where they were, and all over the world. It turns out that heaven and earth are much more closely connected than we may have imagined. While we fear scarcity, God is giving us abundance through his Spirit.
Season: Life in the Spirit Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: What better way to celebrate that Jesus is alive than to look at all the really hard stuff Jesus gave us to do? We have been focusing on what life in the Spirit makes possible: radical forgiveness, a prejudice toward simplicity, impossible generosity and this week, enemy love! These are all really hard! They make the world such a better place, and they give us something worth running for, but goodness, they are hard. We need the Spirit to empower us. And the Spirit does empower us. It’s Pentecost Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve. Let’s use the power we have been given.
Season: The Resurrection Changes Everything Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave
Season: Eastertide Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: We are meant to go deep with God. We need to have actual encounters with God to do that. Sometimes this feels like an epic experience, like Thomas had with Jesus, but more often than not it is the regular everyday seeking of God that makes us deep. Belief takes practice, and we’ve designed our church for that kind of spiritual development. That means that just showing up at the cell meeting, the Sunday meeting, and sharing your resources as regularly as you can will make you deep. The ritual, the rhythm, the structure of life together with other seekers is like the trellis that your tomato plant of faith can grow on. Jesus said, “Blessed are those who believe without seeing!” and that is a shout-out to you. Let your deep call to Deep every day. The epic moments might happen sometimes, but a relationship with God is even deeper than our perceptions.
Season: Life in the Spirit Speaker: Interview with Shane Krusen Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
Season: Eastertide Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 5720 Ridge Ave
About Talk: Jesus’ presence and purpose among us compels us to keep going and making disciples. We are moving this congregation to make room for the next person—both literally, and in our hearts. Each of us needs to sort through what we are lugging along that is not from God. Only take what is good. Move with what is from Jesus and leave the rest behind. Let’s embrace the disruption so that we do not lose sight of the mission our Lord has given us to keep going and keep making disciples. The move doesn’t do that for us, but we can use it to help us do that.
Season: Life in the Spirit Speaker: Scott Sorrentino Location: 3800 Marlton Pike, 6pm meeting
About Talk: We probably won’t be able to organize a revolution to supply the hope that the world needs. We aren’t smart enough, in Scott’s opinion, and we don’t agree enough to come up with a big institutional solution to even one problem plaguing the world. Success for Christians more often comes through weakness. We probably won’t get strong to change the world. We will get small and practice loving, especially those the world finds hard to love. Like Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arch International, who died last week. He spent his life loving disabled people. That is the more common and more reliable Christian hope. Even if our dedication to kindness does not spark an international movement, it will be worth it.
Season: Life in the Spirit Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike, 1030am meeting
About Talk: In Matthew 19:16-26, Jesus has an encounter with a rich young man who can’t let go of his stuff. We can find ourselves in similar difficulties with letting go. If we adopt as a community a prejudice toward simplicity this becomes a communal problem to solve and not just a personal moral failure. The Spirit helps us do the hard stuff. We want to grow up and become perfect (think more “complete” than “super good”). God is growing us up together. This is already happening. Every act of generosity, every sacrifice for others is a sign of the Spirit at work in the world. Let’s go for more of that.
Season: Eastertide Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Jesus says this hard thing to one of his favorite people. Why? Because his work isn’t done yet, and Mary needed to see how important she was to the mission. The comfort of Jesus’s presence and friendship is meant to be shared with the whole world; it’s not just an individual thing. You and I are the antidote to loneliness.
Season: The Resurrection Changes Everything Speaker: Gwen White Location: 2007 Frankford Ave
Season: Life in the Spirit Speaker: Rod White and others Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Should we preserve the word "evangelical?" Does it apply to us? What good news do we have to offer? What seed has been planted in us that is growing new shoots? Jesus said, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” How do you think we are living this?
Season: Life in the Spirit Speaker: Rod White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Jesus compares himself to a dying seed. New life always comes from death in the plant world, usually in us too. Jesus will raise us up and strengthen new shoots in us. Some of us could start following Jesus for the first time right now, like Kim or my cell apprentice or my friend who became a lawyer. Some of us are hearing a call of newness that’s moving us from where we have arrived now. Now is a good time to respond, to lose your dormant life, precious as it might seem, and grow something new—receiving the eternal life Jesus offers, just like we were meant to live.
Season: Eastertide Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 5720 Ridge Ave.
About Talk: Julie talked about 1 Samuel 1-2. What we do in the midst of disappointment is crucial for our faith development (and that of our children’s). For years, Hannah suffered disappointment and sorrow, longing for her circumstance to change. When we let our sorrow and disappointment get into God’s hands, we ask God to hold it with us. We can be upset and tell the truth about it, face the shame and turn away from isolation, pour out our hearts to God and make a commitment to the One who hears us.
Season: The Resurrection Changes Everything Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: If we are going to have any hope of making disciples of our loved ones, we need to start with Timothy’s humility—figure out how you are going to meet them where they are. We need to take advantage of the allies that we have, like Lydia, and include her radically in the mission—see what good they already offer. We need to see slavery and be emancipators, freeing people from their bondage and knowing that true freedom comes from Jesus and his Spirit. Give them something tangible and practical back.
Season: Eastertide Speaker: Gwen White Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: This message on forgiving points us to Jesus’ disguised invitation to growth embedded in all our hurts. When we are hurt by someone, we can use it to learn more about our unconscious selves: what we value, what we fear, etc. Although not easy, reflecting on our impulses to attack or to withdraw can while seek God’s help to forgive can bring new growth and turn our sorrow into joy. Abusive relationship are a very different thing and those who are caught in an abusive relationship should seek help in order to change relationship patterns before any forgiving is attempted. The research of Everett Worthington was used to help us practically apply Jesus’ words to Peter to forgive seventy times seven (Matthew 18).
Season: Eastertide Speaker: Joel White Location: 5720 Ridge Ave.
About Talk: Joel White is on the Leadership Team of Circle of Hope. He leads the Capacity Core Team that oversees our finances, buildings, and staff according to our mission and vision. He talks about what it means to structure our life as the church in a way that helps us live into the Kingdom of God and reveal it to the world around us.
Season: The Resurrection Changes Everything Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
Season: Eastertide Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2212 South Broad St.
About Talk: But the question for us is what keeps people from entering in to our community? What unwritten rules are there? What customs do we have that others might find prohibitive or difficult? What do we need to do? What can we let go of? I think it’s a good discernment question for every cell among us. How can we keep moving toward inclusion? How we can keep expressing Paul’s dictum: what matters is faith expressing itself through love.
Season: Life in the Spirit Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Through the resurrection of Jesus and the coming of the Holy Spirit we have a mission greater than ourselves and capacity beyond our individual limitations. We are risen, too, and given new life and purpose to participate in making disciples of Jesus.
The apostle Peter is a good example to look to. You can see his development and his humanity all throughout the gospels. And his transformation in Acts, as he submitted himself fully to the Spirit of God at work in him. People around him were transformed in Christ.
Season: Eastertide Speaker: Ben White Location: 5720 Ridge Ave.
About Talk: What’s it like to live in the resurrection life? What does it feel like to respond to Jesus’ call to help others, love, know and serve him? It kinda feels like your everyday life. Nothing changes and everything changes. But the power is real and we are practicing seeing it and trusting it. If Jesus is alive then he is doing stuff we can’t always understand. But what we do understand we can act on and if we are not ultimately responsible, then why not? Why not try and be as responsible as we can be? We in Circle of Hope have organized ourselves in cells to do just that. Regular folks like Peter the Apostle. Doing our best. Together. With Jesus.
Season: Lent - We Need to Feel It Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 5720 Ridge Ave
About Talk: Jesus knew scripture and was making something new with it. He wasn’t locked up by it. He was living and breathing it. It was flowing out of his mouth like fresh air. He is the living Word. So when we relate to scripture, we are relating to it through him. He is the center of how we understand everything in the Bible. As he revealed himself throughout his ministry, he was the Light breaking in to the rigid controlled, systems of belief and law, bringing himself to humankind.
Season: Lent - We Need to Feel It Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave
About Talk: You can imagine the cosmic events that we are walking through this week, toward the cross and onto resurrection, as incomprehensibly huge. Telling the story is one way to participate in it. To make it make sense to people practically. Helping to photograph that event by naming Jesus out loud is another way.
Season: Lent - We Need to Feel It Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: We often live in defense mode because we are afraid of judgment, punishment, or the great “other.” Game of Thrones channels all that fear. Jesus faces it when he rides into Jerusalem in complete vulnerability, coming out as his true self, undefended. His love for humanity is bigger than the evil that temporarily kills him. They tried to shame him, but he was not disgraced. Because of his love in us, we can come out and love freely, too.
Season: Lent - We Need to Feel It Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: We have a sense of ourselves in community. Who we are in relationship with others IS who we are. There is no other way to be human. No matter how isolated we are or feel, we are still very connected to the world. But we need to feel it. Loving your neighbor as yourself is a way to be connected on purpose. To claim your connectedness as part of your identity (especially in Christ) is a way to get free from the immense powers of darkness that threaten to swallow you up (like the black hole at the center of M87 that scientists photographed and released this week).
Season: Lent - We Need to Feel It Speaker: Calenthia Dowdy Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: In springtime, the new plants and flowers push up even through cement sometimes. Disruptions are good and necessary for our growth, too. God is always trying to do a new thing (Isaiah 43:16-21) and we have not obtained it all yet, so we need to press on and be willing to be uncomfortable (Philippians 3:4-14). For example, why do racial divides still exist in the kingdom of God? Why do we not worship together more? Let Jesus disrupt your cultural habits this Lent. May you encounter the Lord himself in your discomfort, just like the disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24). The one who brings transformation is with us.
Season: Lent - We Need to Feel It Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 5720 Ridge Ave.
About Talk: The giant sequoia trees need fire to release seeds from their cones. Three-hundred foot redwood trees have shallow, wide root systems that intertwine and fuse together with one another to withstand the elements. These trees illustrate deeper truths about life in Christ, reminding us how new life is possible when the fire of suffering seems to burn and we are weary of “being strong.” Jesus showed us the way to new life is to die to ourselves, to give up trying to get better on our own, to do things on our own capacity. He offers us himself and a whole new way of being strong in our weakness.
Season: Lent - We Need to Feel It Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: The Hebrew word for strength in Mark 12:29-31 is meod (meh-ode). Maybe the best definition is “muchness,” but that is unfortunately not an English word. Let’s make it one. Love the Lord with all your muchness. Not all your ideal-amount-ness. Just your as-much-as-you-have-ness. (Let’s make up so many words using hyphens!). Let’s explore our sense of not-enoughness so we can claim this story as our own: “I have connection to infinite love. Jesus is the source and I have received from him. It may feel like just a little bit sometimes, but that’s all he asks me to give. All of my muchness is all I have, nothing more. So I can give what I have been given.”
Season: Lent - We Need to Feel It Speaker: Pat McGowan Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Pat tells two stories from his week. One was a surprising experience of God. The other was a surprising reaction to something that could have gotten him all jammed up and probably would have made him miss the experience he had in the first story. God is shining all the time but we are often distracted, darkened and undone in ways that make us miss what God is doing. Dialogue is one way to shed some light. And dialogue is our specialty.
Season: Lent - We Need to Feel It Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 5720 Ridge Ave.
About Talk: We are at a tender point in the Lenten journey. Many of us are weary. Let’s stay together in this a little while longer. Resist the urge to cover up your pain or move on. There is something more lasting, more full, more freeing than our temporary habits of avoidance or relief. Tonight we are letting our sorrow, our suffering, our grief draw us to the deeper healing, forgiveness and wholeness that Jesus offers. We follow the Psalms of Lament to write our own expression of grief and to call out to God together.
Season: Lent - We Need to Feel It Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: We need to feel it in our minds. Our minds are often elevated to the top of our self-hood but they are not our essence. Our minds need transformation to love God as Jesus calls us to do. The murkiness of our minds, the unconscious motivations, the forgetfulness—all of it needs Christ’s light to shine on it. If we choose to repent of letting our thoughts control us we take our thoughts captive. This possibility is a hopeful promise for those of us who feel stuck in patterns of thinking. Jesus can deliver us from ALL that oppresses us, even our minds.
Season: Lent - We Need to Feel It Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 5720 Ridge Ave.
About Talk: The practice of centering prayer allows us to get to that deep place of love and belonging that our hearts long for. It is not limited to the “felt” presence of God but is rather a deepening of faith in God’s abiding presence, through his Spirit. It is a place that remains untouched by the conflicts we face. And as we let our whole hearts be enveloped in God’s love there, we are more able to love God with all our hearts and the rest of our lives can flow out of that center.
Season: Lent - We Need to Feel It Speaker: Scott Sorrentino Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength” could seem like a demand. But what does love feel like? What is it like to receive? What is the difference between receiving and giving? They are definitely not very distinct. But don’t take monotheism for granted. There are a lot of other things out there being worshiped, and demanding your love. "Hear, you chosen people, the Lord your God." It requires something from us, but that something is letting go. It requires nothing, but an active sort of nothing.
Season: Lent - We Need to Feel It Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: In the Bible, Martha learned that God would rather have us relate to him and be with him and humbly learn from him than anything else. Our capable acts of service are good and important, but not as crucial as actually relating to God and receiving his love for us. Centering prayer is a way to receive God’s love and wisdom. It is a way for our false selves to be transformed. Lent is a great time to try some new ways of relating to God. We end up learning that we are intrinsically beloved, that we completely belong in God’s family beyond anything we do to try to please him.
Season: Lent - We Need to Feel it Speaker: Wes Willison Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: How does God meet us in our minds? This week, we talked about attention and imagination, God’s wisdom working against our foolishness. What we think about matters to God, and God gives us the mind of Christ through the Spirit.
Season: Lent - We Need to Feel It Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: We’ve all been trained to “go through the motions” in order to get by. That might be useful for earning a paycheck or getting your laundry done, but there’s no need to perform with God. Jesus came so we could know God and be united with him in love. Lent is an opportunity to know God with our whole hearts, bodies, minds, and souls; to sink into the reality that he is with us and on our side. Centering prayer is a tool to live in that reality of deep belonging and connectedness. It helps us cut through the fears and desires of our egoic minds and get to the untouchable hope at the center of us through Christ.
Season: Lent - We Need to Feel It Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: We are layered and we want all the layers to get the light in Lent. If we let the light into all of us, we can love and be loved on so many levels. We are not limited to one mode or way of being human. Reason and logic have risen to the top of the pyramid of what it means to be a human for whatever reason, but we need to feel it in all our parts. This week, we need to feel it in our hearts. What do we do when our hearts are overwhelmed? How do we set our hearts at rest in God’s presence? Ben has a few ideas to help you considering 1 John 3:16-20.
Season: Lent - We Need to Feel It Speaker: Gwen White Location: 5720 Ridge Ave
About Talk: This message on forgiving points us to Jesus’ disguised invitation to growth embedded in all our hurts. When we are hurt by someone, we can use it to learn more about our unconscious selves: what we value, what we fear, etc. Although not easy, reflecting on our impulses to attack or to withdraw, while seek God’s help to forgive, can bring new growth and turn our sorrow into joy. Abusive relationship are a very different thing and those who are caught in an abusive relationship should seek help in order to change relationship patterns before any forgiving is attempted. The research of Everett Worthington was used to help us practically apply Jesus’ words to Peter to forgive seventy times seven (Matthew 18).
Season: Lent - We Need to Feel It Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: There are other means of knowing that we do not pay as much attention to as whatever is at the very tippy-top of our consciousness. Our thoughts are often just the froth of our human experience yet we can easily begin to believe that we must draw our sustenance form that froth. Am I happy now? Am I happy now? Lent is an invitation to feel it deeper than that. We need to feel it. All of it. And the painful comes with the sublime. Jesus invites us into being fully human and Lent is our communal season for practicing that. Lent is human practice. Let’s give it a try.
Season: Lent - We Need to Feel It Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: Our faith needs to offer tangible results, even physical results. It's maybe why we love stories of miraculous healing, provision, why at Circle of Hope we're into social justice and personal transformation. Our lives should change and the world should get better. Tangible results count.
Season: Lent - We Need to Feel It Speaker: Rod White Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: In the WATER stage of our spiritual development, it is a mistake to despise the fragments. A good example of how we should grow is to watch a whale feeding on krill. We are like spiritual whales feeding on the bits of grace reproducing in the ocean of grace in which we live. Like in Psalm 42: Deep calls to deep / at the thunder of your cataracts; / all your waves and your billows / have gone over me. It is an image—could you say the same thing using another animal or another picture?
Season: Lent - We Need to Feel It Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Our experience is way more complicated than we can express. The different parts of ourselves do not always add up, shape up or make sense (not to us or anyone else). Jesus is aware of this, when he exhorts us (quoting Deuteronomy) to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. We have many layers, modes, ways of being human. Lent is an opportunity to practice paying attention to all those different parts. All of our knees need to bow. All of our corners need light.
Season: Lent - We Need to Feel It Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 5720 Ridge Ave.
About Talk: For being our primary vehicle to move through this world, we often have a hard time listening to our bodies. The point of the pain is to get our attention. If we listen to it, it will tell us something about the source of our pain. Our bodies are powerful communicators. They tell us a lot about what is going on. Lent is a chance to pay attention; to stop moving so quickly that we miss the signals that would direct us to the source of our need. A little suffering during this season can launch us on a journey to get to the source of our weakness, our sin, our lack, so that we can be strengthened in our innermost being with what we really need.
Season: God With Us Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: We don’t want mutuality and submission and, even ‘obedience,’ to be seen as expressions of oppression or domination. We want to participate in creating a community where we are “right-sized” enough to freely relate and love each other, as we relate and love God.
Season: Remembering Our Stories Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: The power of story to transform may be underrated so we’ve spent a season telling stories about who we are which may be undersized in our self understanding. We are bigger than our own experience. As the Body of Christ we share our stories. “What is for me is also for we” and vice versa. This week there were three stories of how divine inspiration and calling get expressed in diverse ways. Inspiration from God cooperates with our own gifts and discipline. It takes preparation and perseverance to hear from God; it rarely comes totally out of the blue. It comes right into us in our peculiar lives, emotional and peculiar, just as they are.
Season: Season of Epiphany Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 5720 Ridge Ave.
About Talk: Mark 10:46-52. People are really searching for connection and meaning (Mitski’s music video of Nobody). The darkness of isolation and existential crises is lifted with the healing Jesus provides. The ability to see ourselves, others and the world the way God sees us is the result of God’s mercy and miraculous healing. When we ask for what we need, Jesus will help us to see clearly—often through our cooperation in the Body of Christ. Instead of staying where we are by the side of the road, we get up and follow, moving with Jesus on a mission bigger than ourselves, into the heart of people’s need.
Season: Joyrides, Potholes, & Pitstops Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: If you’re trying to do anything good with your life, you’ll probably hit a “crisis of limitations.” This can involve feeling lost or at least hopelessly detoured. Take heart that THIS is the invitation to the spiritual journey. Jesus chose a crisis of limitations, too, as a gateway to joy! And he is present to lead us now.
Season: Remembering Our Stories Speaker: Scott Sorrentino Location: 3800 Marlton Pike, 6pm meeting
About Talk: Scott talks through some common obstacles to prayer. We can tell a lot about someone by how they pray. The Lord’s Prayer in Luke 11 would probably be better called The Disciples prayer; it’s great for shaping us and our prayer. But there’s more. We can learn a lot about Jesus from his prayer in John 17. Scott helps us meditate on it in this message and conversation.
Season: Remembering Our Stories Speaker: Gwen White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: This message on forgiving points us to Jesus’ disguised invitation to growth embedded in all our hurts. When we are hurt by someone, we can use it to learn more about our unconscious selves: what we value, what we fear, etc. Although not easy, reflecting on our impulses to attack or to withdraw can while seek God’s help to forgive can bring new growth and turn our sorrow into joy. Abusive relationship are a very different thing and those who are caught in an abusive relationship should seek help in order to change relationship patterns before any forgiving is attempted. The research of Everett Worthington was used to help us practically apply Jesus’ words to Peter to forgive seventy times seven (Matthew 18).
Season: Season of Epiphany Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 5720 Ridge Ave.
About Talk: Mark 9:1-12. We are given amazing experiences with God so that we can go do something with them. Even when we want to camp out on the mountain top, the movement of the spiritual life and development is to take what we have been given and make something with it, trusting that it is enough, even as it is not everything. Our understanding is limited. Jesus keeps moving and keeps revealing things as we move with him, even (and perhaps especially) when that means moving into harder places.
Season: Joyrides, Potholes, & Pitstops Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
Season: Remembering Our Stories Speaker: Kendra DeSimone interviews Jeffy Thomas Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Jeffy Thomas fell into paper cutting and simple line drawing by accident but he can’t shake the habit. His business selling his art is his passion project (check out cuttink.studio). He doesn’t make too much money for it but it grounds him in a way that nothing else does. He tells his friends, “This is how I pray.” Figuring out how to keep at something that brings you joy is not so easy. Jeffy got us going on that dialogue.
Season: Remembering Our Stories Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: God’s people tell the story. We are limited to our own experience. That’s part of being human. That goes for the people who wrote the Bible, too. This is good news because it helps us understand the strange parts of the Bible that are hard to reconcile with the witness of Jesus, and it invites into the story and into the storytelling. We tell the story now, too. In honor of this good news three stories: St. Valentine, The Burial of Stephen (based on Acts 7 and 8), and Melissa Powell in Nigeria declaring, “If the children don’t eat, I don’t eat.” All three stories have the theme of sacrifice.
Season: God With Us Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: The most daring thing I’ll say is that God is with us now and with you now. You are the bearer of the Hope of the World, Jesus Christ, We hold Jesus together. And we can share that. That means that when people get to know you, they get to know the author of Hope, Jesus, through you. You can offer hope to someone, and you can receive hope. I pray that our community can be that source of hope for the whole region. Keep sharing it. Keep turning the tables. Keep restoring and redeeming the world. You have the gift to do it because you have a keen sense of the desire of the world. Jesus fulfills our desire.
Season: Joyrides, Potholes, & Pitstops Speaker: Ben White Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Our desires are often tangled up in a big ball of WANT at the center of us and it’s hard to distinguish one desire from another. How do you see people’s desires leading them around unconsciously?
Season: Season of Epiphany Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 5720 Ridge Ave.
About Talk: God in all God’s magnitude, glory, and power still chose to relate to you, to love you, to name you as a child. There’s no judgment, condemnation, and there’s no need to be ashamed. That feeling of shame and insecurity you have, that self-deprecation that you hold, it’s not holy, it’s not of God. And we have to tell ourselves that every day. It’s easy to preach it, it’s hard to believe it. You’re a child of God, the beloved of God. Receive that truth today. And don’t do it alone. Encourage one another, edify one another, exhort one another. Love each other so that you know that God loves you. It’s hard to receive that sometimes, but if we do, it will be much easier to not be ashamed of it.
Season: God With Us Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: God is with us now and with you now. You are the bearer of the Hope of the World, Jesus Christ, We hold Jesus together. And we can share that. That means that when people get to know you, they get to know the author of Hope, Jesus, through you. You can offer hope to someone, and you can receive hope. Keep sharing it. Keep turning the tables. Keep restoring and redeeming the world. You have the gift to do it because you have a keen sense of the desire of the world. Jesus fulfills our desire.
Season: Joyrides, Potholes, & Pitstops Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
Season: Remembering Our Stories Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Three Fiery Women - Brigid of Kildare, Martha of Bethany and Nicole of Toyota: Three women leaders in three different centuries, the fifth (Brigid), the first (Martha) and the twenty-first (Nicole). The challenges for each are distinct but not without their similarities. Ben tells stories to inspire us. Brigid planted monasteries to help spread Christianity in Ireland. Martha figured out how to change her mind. Nicole embraced the power of her influence. Their stories are ours too. Not just because we have experienced similar things but because we belong to each other and our stories are for sharing faith, hope and love.
Season: God With Us Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: John 1:35-51. We need to keep moving toward remembering and knowing and naming and seeing. God is with us so that we can know and be known. Let’s spread some of that simple knowledge to one another, trusting that the listening, the relating, the fearless knowing will break down barriers that we put between us. The barriers rooted in our stereotypes of people from Nazareth. The barriers that might make us jump to assumptions about what Nathan Phillips was doing, or the ones that might make us just consume our information from people that appeal to us. Can we listen? Can we see? Can we name each other? Just like Jesus did with Peter, calling him Cephas; just like Jesus did with Nathanael, seeing him under the fig tree? God is with us; let’s be with each other.
Season: Joyrides, Potholes, & Pitstops Speaker: Jane Clinton Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
Season: Remembering Our Stories Speaker: Scott Sorrentino Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Scott reflects on Jesus preparation of his disciples for when he would no longer be with them. It’s a big chunk of the gospel of John called the final discourse. Scott tuned in to John 16. Jesus knows the disciples won’t be able to hold it together. He wants them to trust him and trust the Holy Spirit to guide them. We too probably won’t keep it all together this year, that’s okay. We can trust Jesus to be with us as he promised and trust the Holy Spirit to guide us. We don’t have to snap right into action all the time. If we do that it will likely just be scattering like the disciples when Jesus was arrested unless we are waiting and listening and setting our hopes on things as big as God’s imagination.
Season: Remember Our Stories Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: We’re celebrating the power of story to transform without demanding conformity. Listening to someone else’s story, real or imagined, is a way to share courage, hope, love and faith. What is ours could be bigger than what is just mine or yours. Three stories about worship and what it does to us: one in honor of Mahalia Jackson on her death day, one imagining David as he wrote his most famous psalm and one song written by a friend giving real comfort in a time of great terror.
Season: Season of Epiphany Speaker: Julie Hoke Location 5720 Ridge Ave.
About Talk: Change is hard. You might relate to the apostle Paul when he says, (Romans 7:15-20, The Message) "What I don’t understand about myself is that I decide one way, but then I act another, doing things I absolutely despise. So if I can’t be trusted to figure out what is best for myself and then do it, it becomes obvious that God’s command is necessary. But I need something more! For if I know the law but still can’t keep it, and if the power of sin within me keeps sabotaging my best intentions, I obviously need help! I realize that I don’t have what it takes. I can will it, but I can’t do it. I decide to do good, but I don’t really do it; I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway. My decisions, such as they are, don’t result in actions. Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time."
Season: God With Us Speaker: Gwen White Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: This sermon on forgiving points to Jesus’ disguised invitation to growth embedded in all our hurts. When we are hurt by someone, we can use it to learn more about our unconscious selves: what we value, what we fear, etc. Although not easy, reflecting on our impulses to attack or to withdraw can while seek God’s help to forgive can bring new growth and turn our sorrow into joy. Abusive relationship are a very different thing and those who are caught in an abusive relationship should seek help in order to change relationship patterns before any forgiving is attempted. The research of Everett Worthington was used to help us practically apply Jesus’ words to Peter to forgive seventy times seven (Matthew 18).
Season: Joyrides, Potholes, & Pitstops Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Read Acts 26:9-23. Paul is explaining a road trip moment that transformed his life. Jesus met him on the road and pointed out that his actions were not only wrong-headed, they were hurting him. Talk about “kicking against the goads” or a time you were stuck in a pothole of resistance.
Season: Remembering Our Stories Speaker: Ben White interviews Michael Schaffer Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
Season: Joyrides, Potholes, & Pitstops Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
Season: God With Us Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: God in all God’s magnitude, glory, and power still chose to relate to you, to love you, to name you as a child. There’s no judgment, condemnation, and there’s no need to be ashamed. That feeling of shame and insecurity you have, that self-deprecation that you hold, it’s not holy, it’s not of God. And we have to tell ourselves that every day. Easy to say it, but hard to believe it. You’re a child of God, the beloved of God. Receive that truth today. And don’t do it alone. Encourage one another, edify one another, exhort one another. Love each other so that you know that God loves you. It’s hard to receive that sometimes, but if we do, it will be much easier to not be ashamed of it.
Season: Epiphany Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: The Magi needed a supernatural occurrence, a dream, to tell them to go home another way. Matthew is being gracious with his audience—if you are not changed, that’s OK, you might need a little extra push. It’s hard to see the world differently. It’s hard to change. It’s hard to grow.
Season: Epiphany Speaker: Jimmy Weitzel Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: The wise men followed the star to find Jesus.They were being led by Jesus without even knowing it. They had a little seed of faith starting this journey and it was pretty miraculous!
Season: Advent - Welcoming the Stranger Speaker: Interview with Dan McGowan Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: When Dan was in his early 20s he experienced his first panic attack and it changed him forever. It seemed like death was always very close. The process of coming to terms with his anxiety, his need for psychiatric medication and his growth as a Christian have all been intertwined. He has a special need for hope and though it seems tenuous at times, he has it, even in the midst of chronic terror.
Season: Advent - Welcoming the Stranger Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: The shepherds were just minding their business, doing their hard work, the long night shift, when God interrupted them. Read the account in Luke 2:8-20. They got personally included the best news ever—that God was here—and it motivated them to move toward Jesus.
Season: Advent - Welcoming the Stranger Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Mary received this strange news of God being born in her. She humbly receives the favor of God from the blinding, almost unbearably bright, Gabriel. We know that exposure—it is elemental to the human experience. It can feel lonely to be your own peculiar self. But we are not alone if God is with us and God demonstrates are anti-alone-ness by giving us others. God gave Mary, Elizabeth, and Joseph and they became a lot like the nucleus of a cell, which is the basic unit of togetherness in Circle of Hope. We share this wonderful news and we receive Gabriel’s “do not be afraid” in community. God unstrangers us all the time and sees our ability together.
Season: Advent - Welcoming the Stranger Speaker: Ben White in conversation with Pat McGown Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About: The church is much older and diverse than we often realize. There is a rich embodied tradition of tradition and ritual that has been buried in some sectors of the church by a more academic faith. Pat grew up suspicious of non-biblical tradition (especially Catholics) so the season of Advent is new for him. He discovered how useful it was, as an antidote to his chronic boredom and an outlet for his imagination. It is still a challenge but one he has accepted because he has learned that the BIG community of faith is better than his personal experience alone.
Season: Advent - Welcoming the Stranger Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
Season: Advent - Welcoming the Stranger Speaker: Rod White Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
Season: Advent - Welcoming the Stranger Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: We live in an age of elevation of the artificial—from flavoring to virtual avatars. Advent is a time for embracing the really real. Jesus came to earth as a human to be really real with us. We can respond by getting real with ourselves and seeing all the clutter and fakeness that shapes our lives. Let’s strip it back and see what real connection looks like.
Season: Advent - Welcoming the Stranger Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
Talk is based on Matthew 3.
Season: Advent - Welcoming the Stranger Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: As we welcome each other this Advent season, may we be humble enough to listen to each other and know each other. Receive your commission from God. Be welcomed into God’s fold. It is a gift freely given to you, the fruit of your acceptance of it, is your life-altering humility. Life is complicated, but grace is free. You aren’t entitled to it because of your upbringing, because of your background, your skin color, your gender. Freely accept it, and then freely give it away. Welcome someone else as they are. Let their humble inclusion lead to their transformation.
Season: Advent - Welcoming the Stranger Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: We are strangely entertained. What is normal to us is not the normal to which we aspire (or even to our former selves from a decade or two ago). Advent is for clearing out the heart and head from as much distraction as possible. This goes against the grain like Isaiah goes against the grain of those who consult with familiar spirits and other gods. What lights us up today that actually makes us dark? Our chirping smartphones come to mind. Putting these aside could help us welcome Jesus and other strangers this season.
Season: Advent - Welcoming the Stranger Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: For Christians, the prophetic and the non-prophetic, it’s OK to feel a little bit out of home here, a little bit lonely like Isaiah may have, a little bit misunderstood. Seek to understand each other to welcome each other, to love each other. But don’t look for it in totality. You might not get it here. The world is designed to misunderstand the people that want to change it. You will find trouble in the world. The world will hate you like it hated Jesus, but take heart, Jesus is bringing us home. Bringing us together. Let’s keep looking for those people that need a people, that need a tribe, that need a home. Those prophetic people in the world that need a place that they can rest. The kingdom of God is made up of people who are lonely, dissatisfied, and alone. If you are too comfortable, let God discomfort you as you find your home in God and in us.
Season: Journeying Together into Promise Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: The question for us is what keeps people from entering in to our community? What unwritten rules are there? What customs do we have that others might find prohibitive or difficult? What do we need to do? What can we let go of? I think it’s a good discernment question for every cell among us. How can we keep moving toward inclusion? How we can keep expressing Paul’s dictum: what matters is faith expressing itself through love.
Season: Necessary Losses Speaker: Scott Sorrentino Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Scott reflects on Psalm 19. His brilliant insight is that the “law of God” is more like the “way of God.” It’s not as much a list of don’ts as a list of dos. From gravity to our basic agreement on justice across time and culture, God’s law is knit into the fabric of creation and we can celebrate it. We can even hold ourselves up to it for examination because we know what we were made for and we want to correspond even more than we already do. Gratitude for the way things are, the way God has made them, is a good way to get through when you are stuck.
Season: Necessary Losses Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Many messages we receive offer us a vision of our transformation that is wholly dependent on our own action. It seems if we only discern the lessons hidden in our pain we will be happier by not making the same mistakes in the future. It is a demanding vision that pretends to be a comfort for difficult times. Jeremiah’s “Book of Comfort” in chapters 30-33 is actual comfort because it pivots on new revelation from God. Israel would return from their Babylonian captivity. No one could imagine such a marvelous thing! We too can receive new revelation from God. It just so happens that in moments of crisis we are most ready to receive that revelation. This is probably where the correlation between pain and transformation begins but it is not a causal relationship necessarily. Loss opens us up and then we can see what God is already doing—God’s plan form the start.
Season: Celebrating the Transhistorical Body Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 5720 Ridge Ave.
Season: Celebrating the Transhistorical Body Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 5720 Ridge Ave.
Season: Necessary Losses Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Jeremiah wants to wake people up to what’s happening so they can get through the disaster. It’s tempting to deny reality and then we don’t grow through the struggle. Jeremiah wanted his people to change the way they were relating to God and imagine a better world with him. Words weren’t enough. He had to demonstrate it. And he did, in lots of colorful ways. Jesus was the ultimate demonstration, a human life perfectly expressing a love and hope that was a true alternative. His death was the most effective demonstration of a world different form the one we live in. We, as Christ’s body living here on earth, carry the mantle of imagining another possible world. Jesus called it the Kingdom of God. We’re trying to live in it now.
Season: Necessary Losses Speaker: Kendra DeSimone interviews Kim Hewlett Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Interview: Kim Hewlett grew up in a nominally Christian home, but then she became a Christian in a Youth Group and her life changed. Jesus got to her even if the moralistic and Christian culture of the church didn’t totally make sense to her. She didn’t really fit in at home or the church so she kind of felt like she was on her own. This became even more true when she went to Bible college. The rules seemed silly and she didn’t believe everything she was supposed to, but she kept finding faith that was sufficient for her. Hebrews 11:1 was her guide. “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”
Season: Journeying Together into Promise Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
Season: Journeying Together into Promise Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave
About Talk: Jonny Rashid: "God is doing something in us, and I hope you can feel it, and I hope you can experience it. And experience is in a palpable enough of a way to share it with someone else. Why do we share it? Because this existential despair that you feel. This emotional labor that you hold, other people hold too. What we have here is a community, a church, that can share that burden. We can lighten each other’s load, as we are both conscious of this fulfillment of hope, while we’re holding on to a remnant. We’re participation in this cosmic revelation of hope, while tangible, right here in our community, expressing it."
Season: Necessary Losses Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Reminding yourself what you’re made for is probably a daily task. It’s easy to lose track of your purpose. Writing it down is helpful. Circle of Hope’s vision, what we’ve been given to do is, “We create an environment where people can connect with God and act for redemption. Loving the thirsty people of our fractured region, we keep generating a new expression of the church to resist and restore with those moved by the Holy Spirit.” That’s big! It’s big enough for everyone to fit in. It might be enough for you, but if you can’t find your way into it, find your way into something. What satisfies? What sustains? What gives?
Season: Celebrating the Transhistorical Body Speaker: Roby Anstett Location: 5720 Ridge Ave.
Season: Celebrating the Transhistorical Body Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 5720 Ridge Ave.
About Talk: Give away your money, relate to people that might help you change the world, but use your voice: Defend the vulnerable like Day does in the Catholic Worker. In a world of endless voices, make your voice heard—it is meaningful. Share it with the world; voice your opinion, you have a lot to contribute to the general discourse. Don’t just deconstruct either, try to offer a vision of different world altogether. Protest and tear down, but promote and plant too. We are doing both in Circle of Hope and we need the partners to do it. Serve with us and make a difference. Your time and your voice are important to the work that we are doing. I hope you feel that and know that.
Season: Stories from the Bottom Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Sundar Singh was a despairing young teenager in India asking for a revelation of God when Jesus revealed himself to him. He renounced his Sikh and Hindu traditions, to the horror of his family, and gave himself fully to the love of God. He donned the yellow robe of a Indian holy man, a Sadhu, to share the love of Christ everywhere he could. He leaves us the wisdom of a Christian mystic who can speak to the anxieties of our 21st century life.
Season: Journeying Together into Promise Speaker: Ben White Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
Season: Journeying Together into Promise Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: It is not the state, the oppressor, of the chief social agents that offer us or author this path toward liberation and reconciliation. But God alone, who become like us, incarnate, in order to reconcile all things unto himself. Our community is an expression of that reconciliation and that liberation. People might find unity and freedom right in our cells, right in our meetings. They might be freed from what oppresses them and invited them to love their enemy, thereby liberating their enemy from his or her own captivity.
Season: Celebrating the Transhistorical Body Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 5720 Ridge Ave.
Season: Necessary Losses Speaker: Gwen White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: We are plagued by senseless rules and systems of thought that dehumanize us. We are taught by our culture to doubt ourselves and submit to greater forces. When we submit ourselves to anything but Jesus we lose our souls. Gwen gives us courage to take our souls back by telling the truth.
Season: Celebrating the Transhistorical Body Speaker: Mary Ward-Bucher Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
Season: Journeying Together into Promise Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
Season: Celebrating the Transhistorical Body Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 5720 Ridge Ave.
Season: Stories from the Bottom Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Francis of Assisi was glad to go from the worldly “top” to the bottom when he embraced the life of faith as a young man. As the son of a wealthy Italian merchant in the 12th century, he had the best of everything and lived the high life, but when he landed in prison en route to battle he started asking deeper questions. He saw Jesus in the poor and broken and loved him. He felt like God was asking him to rebuild the chapel on the outskirts of town, and it was symbolic of a deeper call to rebuild the church from the inside out, from the heart, from a moment by moment relationship with the living God. He started making disciples of Jesus who were attracted to his irrepressible joy. He and his brothers lived off the land and relied on God to provide as they went around preaching and taking care of people.
Season: Enoughness Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Courage is more than doing some heroic act. Ordinary courage is about moving with what moves you; acting on what you know. Jesus gets into a practice of courage by giving us a big task that requires it, but also sets up the context in which it will thrive: the church. The Great Commission in Matthew 28 helps us find our courage and it feels good to act upon it. Jesus reassures us with his presence as we figure it out. That might be enough for some, but Ben explores more of the intricacies and practicalities too.
Season: Enoughness Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: It’s very easy to get stopped, shut down, quenched. Cynicism, sarcasm, apathy, oppression, out own wounding—all of it acts together to hold us back from doing what we know; acting on what we know we can’t not do. That movement is experienced differently by each person, but we are all moved. Everyone, Christian and otherwise, has a sense of purpose welling up in them. Jesus activates that and gives us a context in which to express it. When we feel like backing off, when our nerve is about to fail, Jesus says, "Lo I am with you," and he’s all we got a lot of the time.
Season: Journeying Together into Promise Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
Season: Enoughness Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: It’s just a fact of our limited experience as human beings that we don’t know what will happen tomorrow. Embracing that limitation and depending on God is a way to experience the enoughness Jesus has for us. When Peter put Jesus up to paying for something Jesus didn’t need to pay, Jesus told Peter to go catch a fish and in its mouth he would find a gold coin. Let’s not get over how ridiculous this is. Let’s let the wonder of that moment spill into all of our surprises. We do not know what God will do. And that is good news because we are often certain that God will do nothing or we have to do everything. God will do something and want to be ready to receive it.
Season: Journeying Together into Promise Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
Season: Enoughness Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: It’s a product of our moment in history that we feel restrained and hurried. We need results now. We need to get there, get better, get faster, now. Jesus gives us eternity now to counter that sense of rush. We have forever to get where we are going. That openness is key to enjoying the passage of time and actually moving toward transformative growth. Jesus promises freedom, even beyond death. If we start there, we will really get somewhere…in time
Season: Tasting the Fruit of the Spirit Location: 2212 S. Broad St. Speaker: Rachel Sensenig
About Talk: Rachel Sensenig answers questions from the crowd.
Season: 2007 Frankford Ave. Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: We did an Ask Me Anything on Sunday. We spoke about technology, ambition, speaking in tongues, the Bible, disciples and morning routines, the problem of pain and evil.
Season: Tasting the Fruit of the Spirit Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
Season: Enoughness Speaker: Scott Sorrentino Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Who we are and how we think is quite developed even before our earliest memories. Welcoming those memories with some intention is a way to respond to Jesus when he calls the little children to himself in Luke 18. There doesn’t have to be much of a point to your stories. Jesus isn’t making a moral point about children. He is loving them as he loves you, all of you, even that which you have not yet remembered.
Season: Enoughness Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Jesus says in Matthew 11 that his yoke is easy. This is only true if we recognize the alternative burden of self-reliant uber independence and the overwhelming sense of personal responsibility characteristic of “empire thinking.” Empire thinking is what we who were raised in a culture, largely defined by building and maintaining empire, suffer from. Submitting to Jesus in concrete ways like participating in community is a way to be freed to a new way of thinking, radically new, not just a rearrangement of what is.
Season: Enoughness Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Jesus likes nicknames. He has earned the right to make you small with a diminutive “y” at the end of your name. He’s probably the only one who could do it if that annoys you. In the face of big change, it helps to be as small as we are. You might be tempted to make yourself big, or think that being big is the only response to scary bigness, but Jesus let’s us be small. He accepts our tiny faith, small as it is, and does big things with us.
Season: Tasting the fruit of the Spirit Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
Season: Tasting the fruit of the Spirit Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Based on our culture’s obsession with excess and being sole proprietor of our desires, self control sounds boring, wimpy, and repressive. Rachel said that, in fact, cooperating with the Spirit of God is a courageous journey that leads to great freedom. What comes to mind first for you when you think of self-control?
Rachel read Philippians 2:1-8 (paraphrased) and also Philippians 3:12-21.
Series: The Prophetic Imagination Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
About Talk: “As for our losses and gains, we have seen how often they are inextricably mixed. There is plenty we have to give up in order to grow. For we cannot deeply love anything without being vulnerable to loss. And we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go.”-- Judith Viorst
At North Broad, this end of an era will be an opportunity for you grow and develop. To let go of the things that need to be let go of, and to move into what God has next for you.
Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: The Israelites never stop telling the story of their liberation. It is who they are and it is who God is no matter what happens today or tomorrow. They were chosen and the continually choose their chosenness by telling and retelling that particular, fantastic story. We can choose our own stories too. How we tell our stories from our past informs how we see the story unfolding before us. We often only see the dark, or so too much of it at least. Jesus invites us to see the light, and he promises that it will light up our whole selves, down to the very roots.
Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: If we are rooted and established in love it changes our relationship with enough. If we decide that there is enough, we will have more capacity to share what we have and enjoy what we receive. If we get stuck in evaluation mode instead of the overflowing mode that Jesus offers us, we won’t be able to see any light; we will be full of darkness and no matter what good happens we will only see bad. Retelling our stories and choosing what to remember and highlight is one way to get there.
Season: The Prophetic Imagination Speaker: Jonny Rashid interview Alex Correia-Sareyka Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
Season: FAQs Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Women are enculturated to step aside but that didn’t stop Deborah (Judges 4 and 5) and Miriam (Exodus 14 and 15) from leading their entire people in unprecedented way. (Also, shout out to Jael who was not a coward despite some commentary attacks). Women are often flattened out in our stories (most often by sex), but they are dynamic parts of the story (even the bad ones like Jezebel in 1st and 2nd Kings). When we make space for these multifaceted women to speak we reclaim their fearsome inspiration and make space for all who need to be heard in a new way.
Season: Tasting the Fruit of the Spirit Speaker: Gwen White Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
Season: Tasting the Fruit of the Spirit Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
Season: The Prophetic Imagination Speaker: Jonny Rashid interviews Shelby Smith Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
Season: The Prophetic Imagination Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
About Talk: We’re not just looking for people who want a revolution, exclusively, though we obviously will welcome you. We’re looking for people who want to create a community that is a radical expression of how God is leading us, not unlike Moses created. I think when we do that, we will bump into a lot of resistance, our own sort of Solomons. The world is going to counter our counter, but we should keep singing, keep grieving, and keep building the thing we have here. Social action is a part of that work, but it is a result of it, not the sum of it. We’re creating a new culture. It takes work because of how we’ve been enculturated. We’re used to how things work, it’s hard to change. I think we’re off to a great start though and I think we can do it together.
Season: FAQ Speaker: Tristan Gorman Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Jonah is more like a parable than a history. All the details are exaggerated and it’s so ironic. Take another look if you haven’t recently. Jonah gives Tristan motivation to evaluate how he walks his talk. Am I doing what I say I want to do? Does my practice achieve my intent? How can I move effectively in God’s direction.
Season: FAQ Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike.
About Talk: Disappointment with God is kind of a foregone conclusion for people who are praying their heart’s desire. In Luke 18:1-8, Jesus tells a story to help us to always pray and not give up. When we feel like giving up (because we all do—even those early disciples Luke was writing to) it helps to accept that we are chosen and loved rather than evaluate if we are based on the outcome. Results-based praying is just bad relating and God wants a relationship with us. Tim Geoffrion, in his book Saying Yes to God, which we are working through on the Daily Prayer, encourages us to evaluate the benefit of our relationship with God as a whole. Is your experience of loving God worth the occasional disappointment?
Season: The Prophetic Imagination Speaker: Andrea McIntosh interviews Kerri Hartnett Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
Season: The Prophetic Imagination Speaker: Joshua Grace Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
About Talk: We all have a default “language” of conflict and we adapt to situations. When we form relationships and communities based on love, God helps us grow past our “default settings” into collaboration.
Season: Following Jesus in Our Context Speaker: Ben White Location: 5720 Ridge Ave.
About Talk: Our emotional landscapes are often very small. The source is lack of expression. We so easily get stuck in the rut of the daily grind. We don’t realize there are mountains within us that could be very freeing to explore. The Psalms are a good place to expand our maps. They express the full spectrum of human emotion. Psalm 85 gives us a good example. Ben split it into past, present and future. Past: start with what you know about God from the Bible but even moreso from your own life. You need the reminder. Present: fully express what you’re feeling. God can handle it. God wants to handle it. Future: receive the promises that ensure that this is not it. There is much, much more
Season: Frequently Asked Questions Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
About Talk: In short, what do we do when the church fails us? Well, be reassured that Jesus takes it seriously and reserves harsh language and consequence for those responsible. For those who must leave, Jesus is still with them. But we have a process for forgiveness, reconciliation, and healing.
We won’t be perfect, but don’t let your cynicism overtake you even though the church will almost invariably fail you. The redemption and the healing that can follow is worth remembering and worth waiting for. And it’s worth enacting.
Season: FAQ Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: The center of our community is a dialogue of love. We need to ask questions and be open to others because it expresses who we are and what we are trying to do. Questions responded to: What is the most exciting thing and the most scary thing about being a pastor lately? What would you do if you weren’t a pastor? What is the gospel? What do we do to relate to people who are hateful? How do we deal with doubt? How do you stay humble? And probably more!
Season: FAQ Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: We covered a lot of interesting questions, including big ones about sin and the problem of evil. Not exactly way down at kid level but a good start to a lot of conversations. We want our whole life to be an ask me anything. God wants to hear our questions too. Wondering is not an inconclusive task.
Season: Growing Deep in the City Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2212 S. Broad St.
About Talk: The purpose of solitude and silence is for prayer—for connecting with God. The literal translation of the words ‘pray always’ is ‘to come to rest.’ The invitation of solitude is to come to rest.
Season: Frequently Asked Questions Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
From Jonny Rashid about his talk: "I’m much less interested in answering questions of salvation and the afterlife, because I think Jesus effectively warns us against making such judgment. But I do live in the present moment and I’ve hitched my car to Jesus and to Circle of Hope. Practically speaking, it is helpful or me to have specificity to direct my passion. I also believe I’ve been put in a time and place and God has given me something specific to do. I’m less interested in if I’m right, than I am in doing good. I say this a lot, but I’m interested in growing the church because I believe in the mission and vision of Circle of Hope. It’s a more detailed and specific container that holds my faith in the great container of Christianity. There might be other people doing other great things. I’m less interested in competing with them, and not very interested in making everything the same, but I do have a specific thing I’m doing."
Season: Frequently Asked Questions Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
About Talk: Our salvation then is not in the aristocrats who are in charge, but in the saving grace of Jesus. Though some political advocacy, however impure it is, may occasionally be appropriate, the peaceable community that we form, right here in Circle of Hope, needs to triumph. Rather than trying to reform the inherently violent system, may we repent that Christians arrived too late to the scene (or worse, aided and abetted its formulation!) stand with the oppressed, but also create safe communities for them to thrive (not unlike what we see in Acts 2). The hope for the world is in the incarnation of Jesus as it expresses itself in the Body of Christ. Our alternative communities of faith provide an opportunity for peace and justice based on Whom they are related to, one that the state can never rival or match. They are what one author calls, “divine economies,” or whatever another “the upside-down community.” It’s what we’re trying to call Circle of Hope.
Season: FAQ Speaker: Ben White interview John and Sherry Londres Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: John and Sherry Londres were married in 1984. Their story of togetherness is inspiring. We want to honor marriage and learn from those who have succeeded at it, especially in a time when divorce is so common. John and Sherry’s unassuming faithfulness to God and one another reveals some really practical ways to think about fidelity and love as intention and not just feeling.
Season: FAQ Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: When Jesus says stuff that troubles us, it might be the point. If you are troubled you feel just like his original listeners and you are probably getting his point. Taking it out of context and trying to understand a couple of verses out of context makes it black and white in an unhelpful way. Reading the context and considering it all together is very helpful. It grays it up and allows us to engage. Appreciate the story. Don’t just stop when you are confused or frustrated, keep going and it might get a little more clear.
Season: Frequently Asked Questions Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
About Talk: Doing the Bible is a group project and studying the Bible should take a lifetime. We’re working on something together, for the sake of the time and place we live in. The Bible is an inspired and authoritative text, and a piece of revelation that God gives us. Think about that inspiration like you might a song. If you wrote a song for someone, you might say that it was inspired by them. That’s how the Bible is inspired by God. Passionate people in love with God wrote words about God, and those words have a rich tradition of helping people follow God and Jesus throughout history. Like many powerful books they’ve been used for evil, but they have such admiration in the Christian tradition, that followers of Jesus should probably give the Bible a fair shake.
Season: FAQ Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Something is sacred not because of its essence but because of its use. On a personal level, our building functions like our spiritual gym. A place that is special for our development. Going somewhere is helpful just for the disruption of couch homeostasis. On a missional level, our buildings function as our welcoming place to “show off” our story as it fits into the big Story of Jesus’ resurrection life. Getting in on something bigger than yourself is essential to being obedient to Jesus. We should develop the desire and capacity to do something as big. We might not be there yet but we can each do something to get us there.
Season: Loving This Place Speaker: Jess Shoffner Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: Henri Nouwen and Paul (Romans 8:18-21) suggest that we are part of a larger body in Christ. We are not only bound with each other but all of Creation! We all go through cycles some good, great, and not so great, but we are moving together. To remain deeply connected together with Jesus, we consider what is around us, things that are alive that we see everyday. What are we tending to on a daily basis? Remaining deeply takes effort. We move ever so slightly toward each other and to our place to be changed. There is a sweet balance when considering the effort necessary to start the momentum and the ease of riding it out! When there’s resistance in the ride out you lose momentum. Effort and ease or cultivation and wildness are not opposites but partners! Look for the cycles and spirals that surround us and be encouraged that we are not alone. We have the mountains, the yarrow and the waters with us! Most of all lean into the body of all creation, especially when it feels like too much effort. We are in this together with God.
Season: Pentecost - How does being the church make my life better? Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
About Talk: I think we see the painful consequences around us of not loving our neighbors. We can see families being torn apart, people not being welcomed and included. The political climate we find ourselves in, and we have for a long time, is not one that honors the moral of the Good Samaritan story. Jesus is plain about what it means to move into the age to come: love God, love your neighbors. But we too often don’t see that around us. We are taught to fear each other, and certainly fear those who are different; that’s why so many people can turn a blind eye to a person in seeking asylum and refuge, or even turn a blind eye to families being torn apart. We aren’t really accustomed to being good neighbors, left to the teaching of our public leadership. But we have another idea. The entire Gospel of Luke, and the whole New Testament, is about bringing people together. It’s about loving people who are different than us, as if they weren’t.
Season: Moving Out Speaker: Interview with Corinne Bergmann Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
Season: Moving Out Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Get a good answer to “Why do you do the dishes?” and you will be a lot happier, healthier, and more whole. When you don’t feel like doing something, how do you find the motivation to do it anyway? Life in community requires this sort of practical motivation. How do we figure out how to say "yes" to what is required and not just "no" to the demand or "yes" only because of the threat of consequences. Finding our way into a happy, healthy "yes" is an art. In Acts 6 the 7 men who were chosen were not chosen because they liked doing administration or because they were good at feeding people. They were chosen because of their Spirit fullness and wisdom. A marker of that Godly wisdom is this art of saying "yes."
Season: Loving This Place Speaker: Joshua Grace Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: Littering and plogging help us understand that for some problems and callings, blame on individuals and self-improvement are limited Western paradigms that Jesus calls us beyond. If Jesus’ baptism can be understood as a connectedness to a place, our baptism and calling can also be to love our place in a connective way where incarnation outpaces gnostic docetism, symbiosis brings us beyond consumers surrounded by commodities, and sustainability can bring us beyond our self-centeredness. Fireweed, a local, nutritious, and edible pioneer species, demonstrates our purpose to remediate damaged places and propagate hope for Christ’s harmonious calling.
Season: Pentecost - How does being the church make my life better? Speaker: Tricia Fussaro Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
Season: Pentecost - How does being the church make my life better? Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
About Talk: Jesus frees our mind to see value in things that aren’t rooted in utility, production, or economic opportunity. He gets us to creatively think about the world in a new way. Jonny mentions all of this not necessarily to advocate for a utilitarian faith, but also not to advocate for one with no tangible benefit. Christianity needs to make the world better and it needs to make our lives better. But our minds must be transformed and renewed for us to see the true benefit of it.
Season: Pentecost - How does being the church make my life better? Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
About Talk: Being the church, we hope, instills us the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation. We hope it deepens your friendships. We hope that it helps you notice people you might not. We hope it gives you a common mission and goal, too. We pray that you find some meaningful companionship among us but also that you might deepen your own ability to do that.
Season: Moving Out Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: We’re moving out with the Holy Spirit where we are inspired. The prayer the believers pray after John and Peter are released from prison in Acts 4 demonstrates three things for our prayer in the face of our fear 1) They were making something new 2) They were making something new together 3) they were making something new together that reminded them of who God is and who they are. We can follow them in this generative, connected, personal prayer. The Bible is about real people a lot like us. Our fear and opposition is different but no less real.
Season: Pentecost Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 5720 Ridge Ave.
About Talk: Peter’s main message was: Salvation is found in Christ alone, for there is no other name, under Heaven, given to humankind whereby we must be saved. We may be tempted by other names that don’t save. Julie gave some examples from the news (Kim Kardashian, #ParisSpiderman, the name of justice) and personal (money/status, our own good name, the names of our children). What other names don’t save? How does our society teach that these names save us?
Season: Loving This Place Speaker: Joshua Grace Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: That time God said it was very very good was not just a long time ago. God sees Good right now. God sees Good in you that you may struggle to see in yourself. God is in love with this place, with us, with you. For us to help re-harmonize, we need to reduce harm to move a culture from being in charge to loving this place in a way that makes everyone healthier—even the insects, the plants, the air, and the water.
Season: Faith in Practice Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2214 S. Broad St.
About Talk: The concept of Sabbath was about trusting God to sustain life so people could rest, play, and worship. It was a good idea, but the Hebrews could never really stick to it for all the reasons that people struggle to do it now: fear of not having enough, trying to control things, and blind ambition. God relentlessly loved and pursued them anyway. Now the complete work and presence of Jesus makes real rest possible, and it’s still connected to the heart issue of trust in God to provide for our deepest needs.
Season: Pentecost - How does being the church make my life better? Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
Season: Moving Out Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: In Acts 3 Peter, hot off some big movements in the Jesus movement on Pentecost, gives what he has to a man who asks him and John for me. “Look at us! Silver and gold I have not, but what I have I give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk!” You might not have that same healing ability, but the Spirit has gifted you with a lot. It’s our job to know what that is and give it in similarly bold ways. Knowing what we have is an essential skill for moving with the Spirit.
Season: Pentecost Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 5720 Ridge Ave.
About Talk: Peter and John had confidence that they were given the Spirit to carry on the work Jesus had begun. What were they doing here? What is God’s mission?
Season: Made Alive Again Speaker: Joshua Grace Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: Commemorating Pentecost walks us away from linear time. We reflect on Acts 2 while they were reflecting on Shavuot (receiving the Torah, becoming a nation to serve God, wheat harvest). The birthday of the Church forms us now. The Torah and Pentecost both formed people for the future, which we are part of. Feel with wind of God and the fire burning in you and us as we discern this week in our cells.
Season: Pentecost - How does being the church make my life better? Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
About Talk: The theology we hold, the worship we participate in, the community we’re developing needs to have a tangible and palpable improvement in your life. Your life should get better because you’re a Christian and you participate in community. That doesn’t mean it will get better in the ways you think it should; or that you will have prosperity in terms of health and wealth just because you follow Jesus. But, if all that can be promised is a bunch of disappointment and heartache, that isn't a great pitch for Christianity. So the question this season might be a little off-putting to some of us: How does being the church make my life better?
Season: Moving with God Speaker: Ben White interviews Tony Vega Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
Season: Moving with God Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: The miracle of Pentecost is even more specific than all those different people groups listed in Acts 2. The Holy Spirit translates everything—everything can be employed to communicate God’s love. And God tailors the communication just for you. The speaking happens in your heart and uses the geography of your emotional map as dialect. Knowing yourself and your own heart language is part of the process. One way to get stuck is to stay on the surface. Get still, be bored, make room for what’s in there to come up and the Holy Spirit will be there too.
Season: Christ Across the Barriers Speaker: Ben White interviews Martha Grace and Jess Shoffner-Mints Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
Season: Made Alive Again Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: If we want to be able to say with the apostle Paul at the end of our lives, “I have run the race; I have kept the faith!” we’ll need to take little leaps of faith along the way now. Leaping can feel risky and uncomfortable, but leaping with Jesus connects us to the movement of God all around the world. It saves us from fearful isolation. Attending to our inner lives and caring for each other are ways to do it right now.
Season: Leaps of Faith (spiritual formation thru the ages) Speaker: Ben White Location: 2214 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Nathanael (in John 1:43-50) was a serious guy with some serious gifts even though he hadn’t done anything yet. Jesus saw him for who he was and called him to do big stuff. You too have something to offer, especially if you can let Jesus see you and offer yourself to him (harder than it sounds, right?)
Season: Christ Across the Barriers Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: It is not the state, the oppressor of the chief social agents, that offer us or author this path toward liberation and reconciliation. But God alone, who become like us, incarnate, in order to reconcile all things unto himself. Our community is an expression of that reconciliation and that liberation. People might find unity and freedom right in our cells, right in our meetings. They might be freed from what oppresses them and invited them to love their enemy, thereby liberating their enemy from his or her own captivity.
Season: Christ Across the Barriers Speakers: Pat McGowan interview Raleigh Booze Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
Season: Leaps of Faith (spiritual formation through the ages) Speaker: Israel Vasquez Location: 2214 S. Broad St.
Season: Joy in the Resurrection Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
About Talk: It’s so easy to not do something if we think we can’t. We live in a world with epic expectations, but I want to live in a world that acknowledges that many things for many of us take courage and take hope. And when we do, it may very well be an act of God.
Season: Leaps of Faith (spiritual formation thru the ages) Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2214 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Some of the Bible writers talk about the life of faith as running a race. Rachel talked about the midlife point around the 40s as an opportunity to focus on your race and do what the writer of Hebrews advises in chapter 12: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross,scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart."
Season: Joy in the Resurrection Speaker: Rod White Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
About Talk: How do we get reproducing Christians to grow in this territory in which we are planted? Normally we might assess who is doing well and who isn't. But Jesus has a deeper way that he demonstrates as he “prays among the weeds” on the cross. We also pause in the middle of the blaming and power grabbing to take on the beauty of solitude, forgiveness and confidence in our eternity as we pray with Jesus in the weeds.
Season: Christ Across the Barriers Speaker: Ben White interviews Alison DiGiacomo Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
Season: Christ Across the Barriers Speaker: Ben White, Nancy Brennan Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
Season: Made Alive Again Speaker: Dominique DuBois Gilliard Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
Notes: At the beginning of the talk Dominique is referring to the story of Exodus, namely chapters Exodus 1:8 to 2:10.
Season: Leaps of Faith (spiritual formation through the ages) Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2214 S. Broad St.
Season: Joy in the Resurrection Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
About Talk: You can share your story, you can be yourself, and not be condemned or judge. The key to our building community is that mutuality. And you’re creating those spaces in your cell. People want to be known and known without shame. I think that’s exactly what we are offering. People think they find freedom through individuality and isolation, especially in the United States. But we find that freedom in community, in that moment where you can be yourself, and be OK. Jesus has big plans for us and wants us to grow personally and change the world. But he does through his love, not through his demand or condemnation. Not through shaming us, but through knowing us and loving us. And that’s what we are trying to do, offer the freedom to be known and loved with no judgment, and no shame.
Season: Christ Across the Barriers Speaker: Interview with Jeremy Avellino at Marlton Pike's 7pm Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
Season: Christ Across the Barriers Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Doubt and Faith are not opposites. They are twins. Tennyson said. “There is more faith in honest doubt than in half the creeds.” Doubt is a helper to faith, not something to be ignored. We deal with them together in a part of ourselves that is much less conscious than we realize. Jesus knows this and he entered into our experience of doubt. He had a full human experience. He knows what the darkness looks like and how it feels, even inside of his own person. In Matthew 27:46 he asks a very doubting question, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” We don’t have to pretty this up with theological backflips and biblical references. We can let Jesus join us in our humanity even in our doubt. His faithfulness as demonstrated in his death, and God’s faithfulness to lift him up out of death is a gift to us now too.
Season: Joy in the Resurrection Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
About Talk: We want to keep practicing resurrection this season in order to make what is too often abstract into something lived, something real. We can plainly see resurrection in the world around us and in ordinary things. Jesus transforms Nathanael just by getting to know him. Jesus, the Son of God, comes to earth to relate to us and to know us. And receiving that gift, that simple acknowledgement, is transformative. Do you feel ignored? Do you feel made invisible? God sees you and Jesus knows you.
Season: Leaps of Faith (spiritual formation thru the ages) Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2214 S. Broad St.
About Talk: The “second half of life” is an invitation to a whole new journey. Remember the last two chapters of Homer’s Odyssey? Odysseus was called to connect his little island to the mainland and offer up his main tool of production to be repurposed. What are your main “tools” / skills / gifts that you’re honing right now? How do you think God could use them later in your life? How could they be used to connect people to the kingdom of God (the mainland) and bring us together right now?
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Wes Willison Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2214 S. Broad St.
Readings from: John 9:35-41 and John 12:12-36
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
About Talk: What united the Jewish people on Palm Sunday today is what united the people on Saturday at March of our Lives: the common awareness that something is wrong in the world. The solution to that wrongness needs to be equally uniting too. We are shouting out, like Jesus said the stones would. Jesus inaugurates a new Kingdom that exists both over and under the world around us. It doesn’t need political power to rule. It’s subversive because it’s spread through love and peace, not hatred and fear.We extend that Kingdom in our own right, right here, as a congregation. We’re doing that work of sharing the radical love of God in community, and in our cell movement. That’s why we have cells, to keep telling this story and giving access to a God that offers a new vision to the world. We also extend that radical way of doing things, not through conquest, violence, or a new President, but as it is inaugurated in our lives.
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Scott Sorrentino Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Joshua Grace Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Bethany Stewart Location: 2214 S. Broad St.
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
About Talk: Our loneliness exposes a vacuum in us; the need to relate, the need to commune, the need to be together. Human relationships are there an expression of our need, even when they aren’t a fulfillment of them. Who is the fulfillment? God, the person of Jesus Christ in whom God incarnated. The best way to see him revealed is in the body, in the community. That’s why we focus so much on being a cell church and trying to get everyone in the cell movement. Cells can change the world. They are meant to build community and bring us closer to God. But remember, this community won’t always work out. But God is still faithful. God is still available. God is still accessible.
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: At the risk of sounding ridiculous, our hope will actually lead us somewhere. Hope is not a feeling as much as it is something we demonstrate. Our life of faith is a lot like the man born blind walking around town with mud on his eyes, hoping to see. He demonstrates his hope by walking over to the pool of Siloam to wash. He participates in his new vision. Most of our touches from Jesus require us to move with them for much longer before we can actually see what it all meant. Our transformation is often more subtle but no less worthy of praise. Once we get some vision we become better hopers, but if we’re in the middle of the transformation we can’t see how it is all going to work out. That’s ok.
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Joshua Grace Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Gwen White Location: 2214 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Gwen noted that it’s hard to hang on to our faith in Jesus. It’s hard to hang on to ourselves in Christ (as saved / healed / victorious) because our brains are hard-wired for negativity and fear in order to ensure our survival as a species. We naturally remember what hurts us, what threatens us, and what to avoid. Our brains do not remember the good unless we work at it (faith!) She suggested noticing and elongating the moments of goodness in our lives in order to re-wire our brains. (Neuroplasticity proves that this is possible! We can re-train our brains!)
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
About Talk: Our loneliness exposes a vacuum in us; the need to relate, the need to commune, the need to be together. Human relationships are there an expression of our need, even when they aren’t a fulfillment of them. Who is the fulfillment? God, the person of Jesus Christ in whom God incarnated. The best way to see him revealed is in the body, in the community. That’s why we focus so much on being a cell church and trying to get everyone in the cell movement. Cells can change the world. They are meant to build community and bring us closer to God. But remember, this community won’t always work out. But God is still faithful. God is still available. God is still accessible.
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 5720 Ridge Ave.
About Talk: The passage read was hard to hear. It is John 9:16-34.
John 9:16-34 (Common English Bible)
16 Some Pharisees said, “This man isn’t from God, because he breaks the Sabbath law.” Others said, “How can a sinner do miraculous signs like these?” So they were divided. 17 Some of the Pharisees questioned the man who had been born blind again: “What do you have to say about him, since he healed your eyes?”
He replied, “He’s a prophet.”
18 The Jewish leaders didn’t believe the man had been blind and received his sight until they called for his parents. 19 The Jewish leaders asked them, “Is this your son? Are you saying he was born blind? How can he now see?”
20 His parents answered, “We know he is our son. We know he was born blind. 21 But we don’t know how he now sees, and we don’t know who healed his eyes. Ask him. He’s old enough to speak for himself.” 22 His parents said this because they feared the Jewish authorities. This is because the Jewish authorities had already decided that whoever confessed Jesus to be the Christ would be expelled from the synagogue. 23 That’s why his parents said, “He’s old enough. Ask him.”
24 Therefore, they called a second time for the man who had been born blind and said to him, “Give glory to God. We know this man is a sinner.”
25 The man answered, “I don’t know whether he’s a sinner. Here’s what I do know: I was blind and now I see.”
26 They questioned him: “What did he do to you? How did he heal your eyes?”
27 He replied, “I already told you, and you didn’t listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too?”
28 They insulted him: “You are his disciple, but we are Moses’ disciples. 29 We know that God spoke to Moses, but we don’t know where this man is from.”
30 The man answered, “This is incredible! You don’t know where he is from, yet he healed my eyes! 31 We know that God doesn’t listen to sinners. God listens to anyone who is devout and does God’s will. 32 No one has ever heard of a healing of the eyes of someone born blind. 33 If this man wasn’t from God, he couldn’t do this.”
34 They responded, “You were born completely in sin! How is it that you dare to teach us?” Then they expelled him.
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Joshua Grace Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2214 S. Broad St.
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Andrew Yang Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Wes Willison Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2214 S. Broad St.
About Talk: We really want the universe to make sense. But as much as we try, it just doesn’t. Things are way out of control from our perspective. (Gunfire lockdown drills in our schools right now are one example.) The chaos of the world can easily trigger our already fearful hearts and wounded minds. Our own failure, shame and blame has a very limiting effect on our understanding of reality. How do we turn around (metanoia) and see our present from the future that is coming in? Jesus-followers are the presence of hope-filled, glorious future that restores heaven and earth. We are called to live in that kingdom now. Lent is an opportunity to have our minds transformed to live in reality with Jesus.
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
About Talk: The reality is the world is full of suffering and full of pain. Can we explain it? No. But it is there and we want to do our part in alleviating it.
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: We really want to get what we deserve, even if we know we don’t deserve anything good. We get stuck in this conclusion and we get blind to all the good that is coming to us. The religious people concluded something about Jesus and the suffering of the man he healed, which made them blind to the miracle and to who Jesus really is. Our conclusions need to be un-ended. Jesus is great at this. His end (goal) is to make himself the only conclusion. Your story isn’t over yet but when it is, it will be Jesus who makes the conclusion, not you. Don’t end it prematurely. Don’t cut off what might yet live.
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Lent is the season for slowing down and letting the recurring questions simmer. Which way is up, which way is down, how fast must I go? What do I really know about anything. Jesus unbalances our conclusions about how the universe works in John 9. Suffering is NOT a product of sin. What goes around does not come around. Now what? It’s a mystery, it’s worthy of 40 days of meditation, but receive the good news that Jesus sees you, and your suffering is not your fault.
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Rod White Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2214 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Our biggest area of spiritual blindness might be the way we try to avoid pain. Lent is an invitation to go there, and become open to the awareness that Jesus is there, in our darkness, able to lead us through.
Season: Lent - Rest for Our Weary Souls Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
About Talk: Our own fulfillment, found in Christ, is why we work. Working doesn’t solve our existential dilemmas, but it develops more meaning if we find our meaning in our unity with Jesus. Lent is about freeing yourself of what seems to cure your condition in order to move closer to the One that cures you.
Season: Jesus transforming the Habit Cycle Speaker: Joshua Grace Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
Season: Postures of Jesus-followers Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2214 S. Broad St.
Season: You can be a light in 2018 Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
About Talk: In a way he could have only done, Richard Twiss authentically helped people follow Jesus. Lydia planted the church in Philippi. The question we have to answer is what work are we given to do today? How are we, as Circle of Hope, uniquely positioned to share the Gospel?
Season: Let's Start at the Beginning (Genesis 1-11) Speaker: Benjamin White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
Season: Postures of Jesus-followers Speaker: Joshua Grace Location: 2214 S. Broad St.
About Talk: We mostly limp as Jesus-followers and that is not just OK. It is where God can really shine through. We are recovering from something (sickness, injury, disappointment, resentment, or being intoxicated on success). When we let God embrace our weakness, we live out of God’s wholeness—because Jesus shines through us.
Season: Jesus transforming the Habit Cycle Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: If you’re feeling overwhelmed, and your stressed and worried? Rather than try to tackle huge issues that seem insurmountable. Start small. If you’re big stress is all of the things your worried about, make it a list, and just take care of one. It might be just one for the week. It may trigger a few more healthy choices.
Season: Let's Start at the Beginning (Genesis 1-11) Speaker: Julie Hoke Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: Telling a family origin story helps us hold on to a sense of who we are and what we are doing. Julie talks about the origin of the newest Circle of Hope congregation that meets on Ridge Ave. Why do we multiply cells and congregations? What is growing up in Northwest Philadelphia?
Season: Jesus transforming the Habit Cycle Speaker: Joshua Grace Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
Season: Postures of Jesus-followers Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2214 S. Broad St.
The passage being read is difficult to hear. It is: Luke 10:25-37
Season: You can be a light in 2018 Speaker: Jonny Rashid Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
About Talk: Don’t worry about how long it takes to get you to what’s next. Let yourself be ready for what you can do. Mordecai convinced Esther to act by saying she was in the right place at the right time. By astutely using her beauty, charm, and political intelligence, and by taking one well-placed risk, Esther saves her people, brings about the downfall of their enemy, and elevates her kinsman to the highest position in the kingdom. Esther becomes the model for all of us who lives as strangers and exiles in this world.
Season: Let's Start at the Beginning (Genesis 1-11) Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
Season: Postures of Jesus-followers Speaker: Rachel Sensenig Location: 2214 S. Broad St.
About Talk: Our economically-driven culture is so into productivity that we are trained to base our identity on what we DO. But the Bible writers express that who we are is deeper and more secure. From the creation story through the movement of the early church, humans are called to receive their rest and strength from God. Jesus describes us as branches on a vine that is him. We know that it takes a long time for branches to bear good fruit; they must endure pruning and seasons of waiting, where the growth is far beneath the surface of what’s visible. So maybe the first posture of a Jesus-follower is learning to be still, and find ourselves IN Him.
Season: Jesus transforming the Habit Cycle Speaker: Joshua Grace Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: While wealthy Christians have spent centuries making Jesus’ direction around money to be complex, he speaks pretty plainly about it—especially during the Sermon on the Mount. Treasure is what you’re afraid of losing, heaven is the Reality unfolding right now, and our hearts get displayed by our devotion. We’re going against our programming and socialization when we take steps into a new economic design pattern with Jesus.
Season: You can be a light Speaker: Gwen White Location: 2309 N. Broad St.
About Talk: Gwen White focuses on how we all need to get good at giving and receiving apologies. Bad apologies crack relationships. Good apologies can reconnect people who have been separated by hurt. A good apology has three parts: 1) I'm sorry; 2) It was my fault; 3) What can I do to make it right with you? There are psychological reasons that we humans resist apologies, but Jesus is clear about His expectation that we "win one another back" all the time. The goal isn't to assert who is right and who is wrong, but to mend connections, to bring people back together. We all really want good apologies. But they are hard to find. Even more, Jesus tells us that we can forgive others for the hurts they cause us, even when they do not apologize. This process of reflecting on our choices deeply when someone hurts us or is hurt by us can be an opportunity for our growth in understanding ourself and others. But we can't force the process and make it go too quickly. We ought not apologize for things we are not responsible for, but we can use the power of an apology lovingly to understand others and ourselves more deeply with the aim to reconnect. Forgiveness for others comes from our own personal and intimate experience of God forgiving us. Mercy is only possible in this context.
Season: Let's Start at the Beginning (Genesis 1-11) Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
About Talk: The sin of Cain in Genesis 4 had nothing to do with the grain or fruit that he offered God. It was about his refusal to go with the nature of reality that God was revealing to him. We want God to make sense. We want there to be a reason that meat is a better sacrifice, but there is not. Cain’s experience of ultimate reality appears to be as arbitrary as our own. God finds Cain and offers him consolation but he refuses it. His resentment grows into murder and the aftermath grows into war with Tubal Cain’s invention of weapons of war. Jesus sees the connection in Matthew 5 that God warned Cain about. We must master our resentment or it will destroy us all.
Season: Postures of Jesus-followers Speaker: Rod White Location: 2214 S. Broad St.
About Talk: The key issue of getting into the deep water with Jesus and finding that you can have a sustainable life of faith, hope and love is all about prayer. Rod White reveals the problems and offers a new look at Psalm 23 to offer some direction for how to get into the deep water of faith.
Season: Let's Start at the Beginning (Genesis 1-11) Speaker: Ben White Location: 3800 Marlton Pike
Season: Jesus transforming the Habit Cycle Speaker: Joshua Grace Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.
About Talk: We have been conditioned to think our way into wholeness and to think ourselves through blockades to faith. Jesus begins with the question “Do you want to be healed?” this time, which gets at “what do you love?” To re-orient our spiritual journey from what we love gives meaning to expressions like worship and gathering as a cell, and inspiration and courage can be received as the Holy Spirit equips us.