Get Her Words Out

My Useless Skills (First in a series)

Balancing coins on their edges.

PIF Question Three

Please describe your leadership style

My leadership style is grounded in the Reformed Tradition's belief in the priesthood of all believers.  A Minister of Word and Sacrament is called to participate in God's plan for redemption by equipping the saints to fulfill their part in that plan and nurturing the spiritual growth of the community which has been gathered by the Holy Spirit.

The leadership style that has been most meaningful in my own professional development is based on collegial working relationships united in a common goal.  As a result, when I am called to lead I seek to empower others and cultivate their leadership skills.  I want to serve as a resource and a guide to help them find their path to our goal; at the same time, I accept that the path they take might not be the one I would have chosen for them, but I trust that for them that path can be the one that most helps them to grow in Christ and in confidence.

In any of life’s interactions, but especially when I have been called to lead, the other person’s worth and dignity as a human being and a child of God are foremost in my mind. All people, whether they are young or old, whether their life’s journey has led them to be doctors or grocery clerks, lawyers or waitresses, have value and are important to me, because God created them and called them good.

Practically, that means that I hear, I value, I encourage, and I equip those I have been called to lead so that we may work collaboratively and reach our goals together.

In the church it is very clear that God is always doing a new thing; therefore to be called to the church means to be called to navigate waters of change swiftly and to do so with a pastor's heart.  I believe that God has gifted me with talents that enable me to thrive in those changing waters, where others often flounder.

Less Hair!

Thirteen inches to Locks of Love.

PIF Question Two

Please describe your present call and accomplishments:

An amazing thing has happened since I started living into my true identity: I have grown in confidence and have learned to see myself in a positive light, to believe that I can do this work and that I am called to it.  I believe that this growth has been reflected in a great improvement in the quality of my sermons and in my ability to provide pastoral care.  Until I could see myself as a person of value, I could never really treat others as valuable.  What convinces me that I am following the right path is that the farther I have gone down this path the more sure I have become of my call.

I know that God knows me and has always known who I really am, even when I didn’t.  Through both external and internal evidence I have come to believe that God has called me to the work of ministry.  Those two things together say to me that there are people that God needs me to serve, as the person that God truly knows me to be.

Knowing the people God has called me to serve are out there waiting for me, my present call is to be a prophetic witness for them; a witness to the people who some in the church would silence, and a friend to those who have been silenced.  I can only hope that my witness and my love can give them the courage to stand up and to speak about who they really are and to follow where God has called them.

Buffy Season Eight

The first issue came today, too cool.

Dawn has grown up quite a bit.

And an old friend (?) shows up.

PIF Answers

Even though I can't officially file a PIF (Personal Information Form, for you non-PC(USA)ers, the standard resume like thing for Ministers), somebody asked me recently to come up with a set of answers for the long questions.  Since that's one of the things I've been working on rather than writing here, I thought I would share:

Question One:

Please describe the characteristics of the church or organization you would like to serve, and the unique gifts, skills and experiences you would bring to the position:

Beyond any specific “the church would do this” ideas I might have, what’s important to me is that there be praxis and intentionality behind what the church does.   In other words, I want there to be a better answer to the question “why do we do this?” than “because we always have.”

The work of praxis, action and reflection, most often seems to begin with the worship planning process, but it has been my experience that when a church takes the “whys” of their worship seriously that ethic tends to spread out through all the work of the church.

Within the fairly wide bounds of reformed theology and Presbyterian polity, the specific things that a church does are less important to me than the idea that the people and the leadership of the church have the energy and curiosity to ask the important questions again and again.

It’s that kind of energy and curiosity that I bring to a church.  I love learning and I love sharing what I have learned with others.  My insatiable curiosity has lead me to study a wide range of subjects:  theology, theater, history, mathematics, emergency medicine and anything else that crosses my path.  I can weld a spiral staircase, write a poem, discuss topics in quantum physics and bake the best cheesecake in Montgomery, Alabama.

What I have discovered in the course of following my call is that I also love sharing what I have learned.  I was amazed to learn that I never feel quite so alive as when I am leading worship, preaching, or teaching.  I had always thought of the learning as an end in itself, but I am closest to what God created me to be when I am sharing my knowledge and skills with others.

Googlebombing

                       Jill Filipovic and internet searches                                

      

This is a crosspost to effect a Googlebomb, correcting an injustice against a feminist blogger.

Jill Filipovic, who blogs at Feministe and Ms. JD, is a NYU law student who has been the subject of cyber-obsession on a discussion board allegedly populated by law students. The discussions regarding Jill Filipovic (and many other female law students) are sexist and sexual in nature, rating the women's physical attractiveness and fantasising about sexual contact, both consensual and non-consensual. Neither Jill Filipovic or any other of these women contributed, or gave their permission to be discussed, to the discussion board in question.

Jill Filopovic's name and class routines etc have been regularly posted to this board, and at least one of the pseudonymous board-members claims to be Jill Filipovic's classmate.  Photos that Jill Filipovic posted (with full rights reserved) to an interent photo-storing and sharing site have also been posted to the sleazy discussion board without her permission. This is a horrendous invasion of Jill Filipovic's privacy, a violation of copyright law, and calls the ethics and character of the alleged law-students participating in these discussions on the discussion board into question.

A major side-effect of an already nasty situation is that the sexist, objectifying cyber-obsession threads come up on the first page of internet search results on Jill Filipovic's name.  To an inexperienced user of the internet, it may even look as if Jill Filipovic and other female law students chose to compete in these Hot or Not rating competitions, instead of having their pictures posted without permission.

This post is an attempt to balance those internet results to point to the significant writings of Jill Filipovic instead, using the Googlebomb tactic and also linking this post to social networking sites (eg. del.ici.ous, Stumbleupon). Please feel free to copy any or all of what I've written here to your own blog in order to help change the top-ranked search engine results for Jill Filipovic. If you don't have your own blog then please at least link to one of Jill's this post[s] listed below at your preferred social networking site and give it the tag "Filipovic" (as well as any others you think appropriate).

I have linked to these sites in this post:
Jill Filipovic's bio page at Feministe
Jill Filipovic's blog posts at the Ms. JD blog
Jill Filipovic's article about these scummy lawschool sleazebags at Feministe
Jill Filipovic's article at Ms. JD: When Law Student's Attack

If any of the other female law students stalked by the same sleazy site wish to copy this text with names altered, you hereby have my full permission to do so. All other rights reserved. (C) 2007 tigtog

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Back to the Art Museum

I went back to the DAM yesterday to look at some art:

And to sketch out some of my own (with apologies to Degas):

It's About Time

I actually have a sermon to work on!!

And two months to write it.

I am going up to Michigan to preach at a "Breaking the Silence" service at the end of the National Day of Silence, April 18th.

Right now, the text I'm working with is Esther 4:10-14:

Then Esther spoke to Hathach and gave him a message for Mordecai, saying, “all the king’s servants and all the people of the king’s provinces know that if any man or woman guest to the king inside the inner court without being called, there is but one law – all alike are to be put to death.  Only if the king holds out the golden scepter to someone, may that person live.  I myself have not been called to come in to the king for thirty days.”

When they told Mordecai what Esther had said, Mordecai told them to reply to Esther, “Do not think that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews.  For if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father’s family will perish.  Who knows?  Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.”

What I've been thinking about is how Esther is faced with a life and death decision, whether to speak or to keep silent.

And I've been thinking about how many LGBT people across the country are faced with similar decisions, whether to speak out and face all of the things that can happen to LGBT people in this country or to keep silent, remain in the closet and live with the pain that causes.

And in particular, how many people are there in our seminaries, our pulpits and our pews are faced with that kind of choice?  Is it better for them to remain silent about who they truly are so that they can keep their voice in the church, or should they tell the truth, be the people that God created them and called them to be and risk being silenced by powers and principalities?

Any thoughts?  Any ideas about other texts that I should look at?

As I work on this, I also can't get this out of my head: