day 1: pretty in-tents, carpet burns and street buzz

so we have finally arrived at the simple way after some great time with the heinemans who looked after us so well – erica [aka amy winehouse] aaron [aka A-Ron or the Beard] and beth [aka stephanie from the Bosch, seriously] picked us and our mountain of stuff up in their van at starbucks where we were dropped off by steve this morning [coconut mocha frappaccino – yum!] and we went tent shopping for the festivals we are about to attend [so that was a pretty intense welcome to the way] and we got a kick-bum ten person tent and some material for the afghanistan sky scarves [shane claiborne thing happening at both festivals – we are all under the same sky vibe] and some banners that beth is working on…

then we headed home for toasted cheese sandwiches and got to bond a little with the people we are sharing the house with and then they all went off to work and we chilled a bit and there are rumours that i may have assumed a kind of sleep position in our room on the floor [no bed] while val read but there was not much else to do…

then we got a call from erica and beard that they had found a bed for us and so we climbed into her tiny mini and drove a few roads away to decide between the large and the queen size and so we opted to pay a little more so we could get a queen size which was strapped to the top of the car and then we managed to get it back and upstairs to where we are staying so we now have a bed and at the moment a scary brown undersheet and a pink oversheet and some pillowcaseless pillow which i’m sure will be sorted by tomorrow…

went and saw hospitality house which is what i will be managing and visited the office and got a parcel for our friend Gnomus [naomi] and got a bit of a walk round the neighborhood and met with darin and his wife meeghan [darin was responsible for the whole interview process] and hung out with a few of the local teenage girls who were pretty amped my name is Fish [decided to go for that for street cred and cos americans seem to struggle with heaing and saying ‘brett’ a lot in my experience] and made a good impression with them cos later when we hung with darin he told us that he’d been walking down the street and been accosted with “hey have you met valerie and fish yet” from the locals… so we’re in…

evening was spent eating spinach spaghetti [green spaghetti strands – yum] and salad and helping the guys cut blue scarves for shane who hung out with us and crafted some juggling balls for a workshop he is running at the one festival and eating chunky monkey ben and jerry’s ice-cream left over from shane’s wedding a couple of weeks ago [those who know ben and jerry’s will be smiling and nodding appreciatively] and then we spent a few minutes on the roof checking out an amazing moon and listening to the sounds and watching the sights of this very vibrant diverse neighborhood [i think the roof which comes complete with barbecuing possibilities is going to be a place we hang out a lot] before heading inside to become acquainted with email and head to bed in a minute [as i type that the train down the road trains past]

so ja, that’s a bit of a peek into our first day here – as we were picked up by the people we’re going to be staying with i had a big goofy this-is-going-to-be-great grin on my face most of the way home – nervous when you move into a new digs but i think we’re all going to get along really well…

tomorrow night or friday we are going to be heading to the Papa Festival just to check it out [shane and erica are speaking and shane is doing a juggling workshop] – http://www.papafestival.org – and then next week from wed we will be attending the whole of the Wild Goose festival [wild goose being celtic image for holy spirit]- http://wildgoosefestival.org – where we will be helping out in some way – saturday there is a local football league awards banquet and sunday we have challenged another local ministry to a game of kickball which tbV and i both got signed up for in our absence [like baseball but with your foot instead of a bat apparently] so lots of vibe happening…

we have been given a week to kinda find our feet and connect with each other and the place and so on before we start our specific job descriptions which should be good for us, but tomorrow starts with 8am community prayer which i have really been looking forward to…

the way of the simple way

was busy doing some research online for my book and came upon this passage from ‘the irresistible revolution’ which talks about how the early simple way people saw the simple way – may give you a better idea of what we’re looking at:

“An Experiment in Truth
Coming out of college, my friends and I had a hunch that there is more to life than what we had been told to pursue. We knew that the world cannot afford the American dream and that the good news is that there is another dream. We looked to the early church and to the Scriptures and to the poor to find it.

So about thirty of us from Eastern College continued dreaming together about another way of doing life. Most of us were getting tired of talking and were ready to live. We went to the ghetto. We narrowed our vision to this: love God, love people, and follow Jesus. And we began calling our little experiment The Simple Way. In January 1997, six of us moved into a little row house in Kensington, one of Pennsylvania’s poorest neighborhoods, just minutes from old St. Edward’s cathedral. It felt like we were reinventing the early church for the first time in two thousand years. (We were quite ignorant.)

We had no idea what we were getting into. We had no big vision for programs or community development. We wanted only to be passionate lovers of God and people and to take the gospel way of life seriously. People sometimes ask us what we do all day on an ‘average day’ at the Simple Way. It gets a little crazy since our lives are full of surprises and interruptions. I’ll do my best to describe it to you.

We hang out with kids and help them with homework in our living room, and jump in open fire hydrants on hot summer days. We share food with folks who need it, and eat the beans and rice our neighbor Ms. Sunshine makes for us. Folks drop in all day to say hi, have a safe place to cry, or get some water or a blanket. We run a community store out of our house. We reclaim abandoned lots and make gardens amid the concrete wreckage around us. We plant flowers inside old TV screens and computer monitors on our roof. We see our friends waste away from drug addiction, and on a good day, someone is set free. We try to make ugly things beautiful and to make murals. Instead of violence, we learn imagination and sharing. We share life with our neighbors and try to take care of each other.

We preach, prophesy, and dream together about how to awaken the church from her violent slumber. Sometimes we speak to change the world; other times we speak to keep the world from changing us. We are about ending poverty, not simply managing it. We give people fish. We teach them to fish. We tear down the walls that have been built up around the fish pond. And we figure out who polluted it.

We spend our lives actively resisting everything that destroys life, whether that be terrorism or the war on terrorism. We believe in another way of life – the kingdom of God – which stands in opposition to the principalities, powers, and rulers of this dark world (Ephesians 6:12).

Since those early days, we’ve made plenty of mistakes and have never learned the secret to not hurting each other. We have described the layers of our common life as an onion, at the core of which are the partners who covenant to love and cherish each other (the hardest and most beautiful thing we do), and each of us shares healthy responsibilities and expectations. We’ve hashed out our nonnegotiables and tried to understand those we do not agree with.

New folks have brought energy and imagination, and we’ve seen new visions born. Our programs revolve around the needs and gifts in our community and are always changing. They never define us, for we set out not to start programs but simply to be good neighbors.
We now have so many partner communities and organizations that it really feels like a movement much bigger than the Simple Way. And we are just one little cell within the Body, very full of life but only a small part of the whole. Cells are born and cells die, but the Body lives forever.”

read the rest of the book passage here [http://www.catalystspace.com/content/read/the_simple_way]

from ‘the irresistible revolution’ to the simple way

so if you are reading this then you probly know me – brett FISH anderson (owner of No_bob, the world’s most famous stuffed dolphin, who doesn’t bob!) or else the beautiful Valerie (formerly duffield, now anderson almost for 2 years – whoohoo!) – and know that in a week’s time we fly towards Philadelphia to live in and minister alongside the simple way community – www.thesimpleway.org]

i have been asked to take a 6 month sabbatical from online ministry so things like the weekly thort for the week i have sent out for over 20 years and the magazines and online sites i write for will be taking a bit of a break so we can ease into the simple way and be focused there as we live and build relationships and minister to and with them.

but i am hoping to be able to use this specific blog as a means of talking about the adventure that we are about to embark on so that those people who will soon be far away from us will be able to have some idea of what we’re doing, what’s it all about and how it is going.

first step – for those of you who have not read shane claiborne’s book “The Irresistible Revolution” i would strongly encourage you to start there. [whether you are a Jesus follower or not, if you want to really understand what we’re up to it’s a great book to read – lots of stories of holy mischief shane has gotten up to with his friends – and so it is a great and interesting read for anyone i would imagine – it is one of my top three books with the other two being “No Compromise” which is the Keith Green story and “Everybody gets to play” by John Wimber]. But really, it is a life-changing book and i highly encourage you to make a motion to get hold of it somehow!

second step – get hold of a bible and read acts 2.42-47 which follows on from Pentecost Day after Jesus has risen from the dead and left His disciples to return to His Father and He sends the Holy Spirit and Peter steps up and preaches a sermon and 3000 people become followers of Jesus. This passage talks about that group of people – the early church – and how they lived and fellowshipped and ate together and were just church and how every day people were being added to their numbers. This passage caused me much wrestling ever since moving to Stellenbosch 7 years ago and when i read TIR the two really just clicked together.

i resigned from my job as youth/student pastor at the vineyard church in stellenbosch [where i was for 6 years] at the end of last year believing God wanted us to wait on Him for the next thing we were going to do and one day tbV was checking out the simple way site and saw there were opportunities to visit and even to volunteer with them – so i sent an email and the next day i got one back from a guy called Darin and the following week we had a skype chat which became a series of skype chats until about 6 weeks ago we both got an invitation to volunteer with the simple way for 19 months starting 15 June 2011.

we are the first foreigners who have been invited to get involved for so long there and both val and my ‘job descriptions’ are new to the simple way so thy have kinda been designed around us and so we will figure out together exactly how they work in the first few months we are there – val will be doing crisis management/emergency services and also community development whereas my chief focus will be people who come to check out the simple way and running the hospitality house where they stay and then communicating with them before and after and also hopefully doing some writing for their magazine called ‘Conspire’.

one really cool thing is that we get to join the community at a festival called ‘The Wild Goose Festival’ shortly after arriving there and so we will be helping out somehow at the festival which takes place in North Carolina so that will be a good way to connect and get our hands dirty i think and also hang out with some incredible people from across the country.

so that’s a rough idea of what it’s all about – i will keep this blog purely for simple way related thorts and experiences – i have called it ‘the simple weigh’ because the other one was already taken and because a lot of this journey will be about weighing up life and the bible and the church and trying to figure out how to do each of them better… we are going to learn, and experience, and adventure and hopefully conspire and be involved in some holy mischief and so on…