The Beauty of a Neighborhood by Amy Luchetti

The Beauty of a Neighborhood
By Amy Luchetti

We were happily living in Pennsylvania near our families when my husband, Lenny, got a phone call from Indiana. My first words when he hung up were, “I’m not moving to Indiana.”

We moved to Indiana six months later.

Since we had been married 12 years and never owned a home, I started to dream about my dream home. When we went to look at houses in Indiana, Lenny said he wanted to show me a new subdivision near the university where he would be teaching. “No way!” I said. “I want old and quaint.” A new subdivision didn’t fit my vision of a mature tree-lined street with Bungalows, Tudors and Victorians. I declared that I wouldn’t move where every other house looked the same.

We moved into our newly built home in the subdivision a few months later. And our house looks exactly like our neighbor’s house two doors down. To their credit, they built first.

                               
                                               Our house on the far right and Wayne and Jan’s on the far left.

We chose this neighborhood because there was a community pool and playground for the kids.  My husband could ride his bike to work and we could continue living with one car (not sure why that was so important to us). Plus, the university offered an incentive for building there.

It may not have been my dream home with the attic or wide front porch and character I desired, but it has become the most beautiful home and even more beautiful neighborhood to me. The character is found in the people of our neighborhood. We have officially lived here longer than any other place in our married years (7 years now), and I grow more and more in love.

Let me paint a picture of our neighborhood. We take care of each other’s kids, pets, and plants. We borrow each other’s tools, games, and bikes. We car pool each other’s kids to school, practices, games, and concerts. We chase each other’s dogs down the street and look out for each other’s kids.  Our kids get knocks on the door all the time. And I send my kids knocking on doors when I need a cup of sugar, butter, or a spice.  My daughter goes to a friend’s house down the street for homework help and ends up staying for dinner.  My oldest son cuts lawns in the neighborhood while my daughter babysits the neighbor kids.  My youngest son enjoys making his rounds and visiting the neighbors, causing us to knock on doors searching for him. There’s not only the neighborhood pool, ponds, and playground, but also a neighborhood fort. It’s kind of secret, set back in the wild territory of brush and trees by the
un-manicured third pond. Its location makes you feel like you are out of the neighborhood and in some far away land that can become anything the mind wants to imagine that day. 

                                                          

               
                                                           Sam and neighbor Seth at the fort

Then there are the dear people on my street. Miss Veronica across the street comes over for tea. She has a warm and big personality that lights up a room.  Sam, our youngest son, beelines across the street when he spots her to get occasional bear hugs. We get together with Travis and Courtney, the cute young couple across the street, for coffee and dessert dates when the kids are tucked in bed. We celebrate some Easters with our neighbors next door, the Millers, when neither of us is travelling to visit family. It was Grace who taught our family to dye Easter eggs with crayons and homemade dye.  They also host the annual Christmas potluck dinner and caroling.  Every year I feel like we are upholding a timeless tradition when we all bundle up and head out their door to go Christmas caroling, song sheets in hand.  I think how my kids will hopefully look back on these traditions with fond memories and appreciation.
 
                             
                                                       Miss Veronica over for tea with my mom, Lia, and me

                                                
                                                            Courtney and Travis with Zach and Lia

                      
                                                         Grace, Noah and Zea with our kids dyeing eggs

                                                            

                   
                                                                    Annual Christmas Caroling

Then there’s Wayne and Jan. Wayne and Jan host the July 4^th street picnic with the highlight being the annual decorated bike parade. Kids decorate and race their bikes down the street while adults line up and cheer, clicking their cameras. Wayne and Jan host the potluck soup dinner in the fall, too.  And Miss Jan is known around the neighborhood for passing out regular-sized candy bars at Halloween and serving hot apple cider.

                     
                                                                    July 4^th annual bike parade about to start

 

                      
                                                Miss Jan (in the witch’s hat) serving hot cider

I guess I’m feeling reflective because Wayne and Jan, the glue of our neighborhood, are moving next month. They started the connection for all of us by hosting the first July 4^th picnic on our street.  I believe our street is the way it is because of their intentionality in gathering us together and starting traditions. They are adopted family to us and have attended our kids' concerts and games. They have prayed for us faithfully. And they will be sorely missed.  

We met the lovely family moving into Wayne and Jan’s house. When I asked what made them decide to move here, they said it was hanging out with the families on our street. One neighbor told them he could tell who was at the door by the knock. Some may find that down-right creepy and incredibly annoying, but I find it pretty cool.  Apparently, the new neighbors thought the same, because I think that statement about the door knocks is what sold them on moving here.

You know how sometimes you realize the value of something when it’s gone? That’s not the case with our neighborhood. I realize how unique and special it is, and that it probably won’t be duplicated anywhere else we may live. I appreciate it right here and now. I am thankful that our children are being raised here. I am thankful for this beautiful neighborhood.  

How does one get to live in such a beautiful neighborhood, you may wonder? After seven years of living in such a neighborhood, I believe IT can be summed up in two words:  

Intentionality & Traditions.

Just the other night my husband and I were out walking our dog. He mentioned how much he liked our neighborhood and that he had no regrets moving here. He asked me if I had any regrets.

 No. No regrets at all.

 

Doctor of Ministry in Transformational Preaching

MLK's Powerful Practices for Preachers

The Christian preaching of MLK Jr. didn’t merely inspire a congregation, which would be no small task; it inspired a movement, the Civil Rights Movement. It wouldn’t be stretch to assert that King’s preaching was the primary, if not sole, initiator of social transformation in America during the 1960’s.


Although the zenith of King’s preaching sits on a mountaintop that is more than a half century in the distance behind us, there is so much that contemporary preachers can learn from “the Preacher King” and employ today. And, who knows, maybe the Holy Spirit will use our preaching, like he did King’s, to bring about the social transformation so many of us crave.

Whole volumes have been written on the powerful preaching practices of King. Most of those are worth the time and money. In this brief article, however, I will sketch out only four of those practices. We will explore how these practices are evident in King’s Dream Speech, in particular, but they are unmistakably mixed into the corpus of his best sermons.

Know Your Context: King was a man of his time. He had a pulse on what was going on in his congregation, community, region, nation, and world. One gets the sense from hearing King preach that he thought and prayed long and hard about how a given biblical text or topic might intersect with the hopes and hurts of people in his day and age. Sermons, at least the best ones, are not only true to the biblical text but to the contemporary context in which they are proclaimed. One of the ways to tell that a sermon is highly contextual is that it will not be nearly as powerful if preached the same way in a different context.

King preached powerfully to the historical situation of his day. In the Dream Speech he said, “It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment.” King himself discerned the “urgency of the moment” in his contextual preaching. He read broadly, conversed with a diversity of people, and, then, put the Gospel in a contextual container from which the people of his day could drink.

After you exegete the text for the sermon, spend a faithful amount of time prayerfully reflecting on how the text intersects with what is going on in the lives of people in your congregation, community, region, nation and world. Your best illustrations and applications will surface from this interface between text and context.

Develop A Mantra: Most college and seminary professors “preach” to students about the laziness and ineloquence of repetition in academic writing. “Don’t say the same thing the same way twice,” they beg. Perhaps that’s a wise practice for writing, but not for preaching, as King proves. He carefully crafted and repeated mantras with significant impact. The most famous mantras from the Dream Speech are, “I have a dream” and “let freedom ring.” These mantras still evoke passion and reflection today. Another mantra in the Dream Speech, and one that doesn’t get as much notice, is “we can never be satisfied” with the status quo of segregation.

When you finish writing your sermon, read through it several times looking for a phrase or sentence that captures the essence, or focus, of the sermon. Then, identify the best locations in the sermon to repeat the mantra. There is no hard and fast rule regarding how often to repeat the mantra, but 4-6 times in rapid succession or 7-10 times spread out are good rules of thumb.

Offer Winsome Challenge: King had the capacity, like the Christ he proclaimed, to speak hard truth with delightful grace. Jesus “came from the Father full of grace and truth” (John 1:14), and all truly Christian preaching will embody the same. King courageously challenged the injustices of his day without softening the blow of his words. He voiced in the Dream Speech:

“But one hundred years later [after the abolition of slavery in America], the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an shameful condition.”

King challenged but also found a way to connect with people on the opposite side of an issue from him. Although many whites and some blacks didn’t agree with his message or tactics, they could not deny, and were often won over, by King’s winsomeness. Here is a snippet of winsome grace from the Dream Speech:

“And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

The hard, brutal truth that King shared was sifted through his love for people and God. Winsome messages can come across as fluff. Challenging messages can come across as angry. Try to embody winsome challenge, or grace and truth, in the development and delivery of your next sermon. As you read through your upcoming message, ask yourself “Does this need more grace or truth, more winsomeness or challenge?” Then, add a dash of either or both. Your delivery demeanor may also need one or the other or both. Watching the delivery of your sermon, as painful as that may be for some of us, can reveal if we need more grace and/or truth.

Employ A Metaphor: King was, well, a king at imagery. He used the metaphor of a dream, a mountaintop, and a bad check in his Dream Speech. King found a way to concretize concepts so that they were hard to forget. Metaphorical imagery imprints ideas on the heads and hearts of human beings. King knew this and employed it with noteworthy impact.

So much of what we preach about is conceptual at best and downright esoteric at worst. Listeners often get lost in a sea of ambiguous ideas. We flesh out these ideas with metaphorical imagery. King could have simply said, “We have come here today to seek our inalienable rights as American citizens.” Instead, he used metaphorical imagery:

“But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”

As you write your next sermon, think of metaphorical imagery you can employ to concretize the concepts, and ground faith in the realities in which people “live, and move and have their being.”

Is there metaphorical imagery from sports, science, marriage and family, dating, elementary school, the medical profession, your last trip to the dentist, shopping at the mall, or from any arena of life that will align tightly with the thrust of your sermon? Employ a metaphor and watch your sermon come to life for people.    

Social Media as a Spiritual Discipline?

I just spent 5 minutes scrolling through Facebook. Now, I feel as dirty as a teenage boy who looked at porn for the first time. Where’s the shower! Seriously, even casual engagement with social media can often leave us feeling angry, hopeless, jealous, inferior, self-righteous, desperate, and judgmental. Social media can leave us filthy without us even realizing why. I wonder about the impact of social media upon divorce, violence, division, and depression. Would the world be better off without social media?

Well, I’m not ready to throw the baby out with the bath water and here’s why. God has always found a way to inhabit our way of life. In an ancient world that revolved around religious cultic practices and governmental law, God established the religious sacrificial system and 10 commandments to govern his people, the Israelites. To reach 1^st century Jews, God came to us as a first century Jew named Jesus. God has a way of employing the tools of a particular culture to reach that culture. He forms people right where they “live and move and have their being.” Social media is where we live. But can God redeem it?

What if we engaged social media not in ways that make us feel dirty but in ways that foster our formation? Maybe social media can be for us a spiritual discipline like fasting, bible study, and worship. I’m convinced,  that while social media can certainly be a means of oppression and depression, it has the potential to be a premier tool God uses to deepen our faith and increase our love.

Let’s explore just a few of the many ways we can engage social mediums like Facebook and Twitter as a spiritually formative discipline. Please comment by sharing some ideas of your own, maybe even stuff you’re already practicing. If more and more followers of Christ practice the ideas below, as well as the ones you’ll present, social media won’t feel so dirty. I confess that I’ve fallen into the trap of allowing the popular practices of social media to deform instead of form me. But as we head into the new year soon, I’m turning over a new tweet!  

-Take a Prayer Scroll: Scroll through your Facebook feed prayerfully. Read the post of friends and family members trying to discern the hopes and hurts beyond their posts. Then, pray for them as led by God’s Spirit. If you come across a shared story from a news network about racial violence, a natural disaster, political shaming, or some other painful reality, pray for God’s intervention. The typical knee-jerk response, at least for me, is to post my words for the public to see instead of voice my prayer in private for God to hear. Let’s pray before we post. Or, let’s pray and not post. Try to start your day with a prayer scroll. Perhaps you can commit the first 10-15 minutes of your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram diversion to prayer.

-Celebrate Others: Let’s be honest, so often what we post is a not-so-veiled attempt to get people to notice our wisdom, accomplishments, cute kids, wonderful spouse, home décor or articles (like I’m doing nowL). Of course, this is not an entirely dirty use of social media. We should be able to share what’s going on in our lives with family and friends. But, what if we focused more on highlighting the wisdom and achievements of others more than showcasing our own? It would drastically change social media. I know people whose use of social media is entirely focused on celebrating others. You know someone like that? Imitate that person. The next time you are on Facebook, celebrate someone else by sharing their post or liking their picture. When you open Twitter, retweet someone else’s profound statement, book announcement, or thoughtful article. You get the idea. Or simply offer an original post or tweet that celebrates another person or group. Try to celebrate others via social media at least 5-10 times daily.

-Speak for the Oppressed: Social media is full of rants, which is why some of us take an occasional sabbatical from it. But the negative ranting is no reason for us not to use social media to speak up for those who can’t, won’t or don’t speak up for themselves. In order to get a hearing in a sea of ranting, we will need to expose injustice in thoughtful, gracious, forthright and loving ways. “Jesus came from the father full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Grace and truth are good guidelines for social media engagement. Be a voice for the people for whom Jesus was a voice. Post or tweet something that exposes the plight of the poor, mentally ill, persecuted and socially ostracized. Expose the ugliness of human trafficking and drug addiction, as well as political policies and economic systems that marginalize people. Be a voice for the voiceless and invite your Facebook friends and Twitter followers to do the same.       

Jump in. Help us out. Add your ideas.

Lenny