simply cow

one of my first memories from arriving at the Simple Way last year within two weeks of setting foot in Potter street and then being dragged off to PAPA [People Against Poverty and Apathy altho in reality bearded tattoo hippy fest] and then to Wild Goose fest [or ticks in naughty places fest] and a Timoteo awards dinner supper was being dressed up as a cow and bundled into a van and taken to this delightful place called Chick – Fil – A for a free chicken meal [if you dressed up as a cow – cow parts downloadable and cutoutable from their website]… it was fun and crazy and Monkman and I went again later that night with some European girls who had stopped in to visit TSW and stocked up with chicken nuggets for potluck.

today is the anniversary of that day and so along with the beautiful Val dressed as a military cow, almost all the staff from the office so Coe and Sueihn and Beth and Janell and Christine, some friends and guests in the form of Daniel and Shane from the Hospitality House and Emily and then with our visiting photographer Travis we met up with the crazy decked out Lahr family [talking Chris in full body suit with dodgy udder and India with a cow hat face] and took over half of the local Chick – Fil – A and got free food [Travis bought his so we weren’t completely leechful] and took photos and then returned home – much fun and laughter and frivolity and spontaneity and it was so thoroughly needed on this day after a long and hard at times and busy week and will give us enough energy to at least make it to if not through a huge potluck happening tonite…

Wild Goose Hunting – Day 2 evening [of Josh Garrels and friends]

there were two external reasons why The Beautiful Val and i were amped for the Wild Goose Festival. one was a guy called Josh Garrels [who had offered his latest cd free on Noisetrade.com which is a great site for getting legal and FREE and often pretty decent music, and Val and i both love his cd – his stuff is just really great both musically and lyrically] and the other, a group called Gungor [altho also super amped to see Dave Crowder live as well] but when we saw the schedule it could not have been any worse as Shane was speaking at the same time and all of us had to be there to hand out free books afterwards as part of the session. long story short, our community went to some effort to hatch a plan so we could both make it to at least part of his show. just another fine example of how community can be so effective [even for something as trivial in one sense as getting to watch a favourite music artist]

[the p.s. of this story is that both Val and i decided to go help distribute books anyways and just catch the end of his show and Josh Garrels was pushed back an hour because of technological problems with earlier bands and so all of us got to see most of his show including a bunch of our favourite songs anyways… and then my buddy Dana went and invited him to come have a drink with us at our campfire afterwards and so got to vibe a little with Josh and hear some of his story which was pretty hectic, so good nite really…]

to read the next exciting installment involving a huggable australian click here.

be where you are.

this is a repost of a blog i wrote for my Irresistibly Fish blog a long time ago, which i thort would be a relevant blog to stick here too…

at this present point in time my wife valerie [aka the beautiful val] and i are living and working and interning and ministering with the simple way community in philadelphia…

before this i was a youth slash student pastor [disclaimer: no youth or students were slashed during my time there] at a vineyard church in stellenbosch, outside cape town in south africa for 6 years. i remember the one staff meeting we had in the first year or so of my being there and my boss chris-the-boss asked me if i could be doing anything in the world what would it be? without skipping a beat i responded ‘i would be doing this’ and i meant it…

my second last year there i had a sense it was my last year at the church and told chris so but then during that year i met tbV and we were going to get married and she still had a year of study to do and so i ended up doing another year at the church because it seemed to make sense. and it was a very tough year in many respects – SO MUCH GOOD stuff happened and great relationships with people and so i don’t think i’d change it, but i definitely think that i would not have been able to answer that same question with as much conviction and really meant it or believed it. and looking back, i don’t know how i could have played it differently, because i don’t know where else i was meant to be, but maybe i should have been more focused in making sure i was in the right place.

i say all this in introduction because if my friend chris-the-boss flew over to philadelphia and took me out for coffee and sat across the table from me and asked me if i could be doing anything in the world what would it be? then the answer would be – living and working and interning and ministering with the simple way community in philadelphia – with absolute truth and conviction.

is it easy here? no. is it always comfortable? not a chance. are there times of being frustrated and wondering what we’re doing and what impact we’re making and could we be doing this a lot better? absolutely. but there is a knowledge deep within me that this is where val and i are meant to be at the moment, and that feels amazing.

i know too many people who are simply in a rut of doing the thing they’ve always been doing. a bunch of my friends feel pulled to something else and yet they continue on day in and day out going through the motions of what they’re doing. some of them will get to that new thing place, i have no doubt of that. but i worry about the ones who ten years from now will be sitting in the same place doing the same thing [nothing wrong with that if it’s the thing you’re meant to be doing, not talking change for change sake] and talking about the thing they should be doing.

which is why i get super stoked by my friend chris lindemann. and my friend bruce collins. and my friends kleinfrans [he’s not] and michelle. and my friend megan giggles. and my sister dawn and her husband glen who just moved back to south africa when the easier option i imagine would have been to stay in the uk. and my folks who continue to live life and not simply exist or settle.

what about you? if you could be anywhere in the world doing anything in the world, would it be that?

the health board, the picnic and A BUNCH OF NUTTERS. [guest starring valerie luthor king jnr] part III

[let me disclaim this post and say that nothing mentioned here is official ‘The Simple Way’ stance on these issues but rather my personal reflections and experiences]

OUTSIDE

i arrived at the health board meeting venue just as Monkman [aka Aaron Condon, my housemate] did and we did what all activists do to get ready for a protest – we played a round or two of new addictive card game golf and i totally dominated… but then people started arriving and chatting to us and so we put the game away [he hardly had to force me] and got chatting to some people…

fairly soon after that the occupy philly people arrived and started setting up tables and the first sign i saw someone from their group holding up was one which read “Nutter is the Antichrist” – now I’ve read the book a few times and I’m not sure if that is true…

my big problem with that is that you have immediately thrown your integrity as a reasonably protesting group out of the window and so it actually made me quite angry and not amped to be connected or associated with them at all – other signs like ‘Greedy Pigs’ or ‘Feed the poor, stupid’ and even ‘Nutter vs Homeless’ were less blatantly ridiculous but i am not sure how helpful they are either…

when the police arrived and this guy Jessie who was serving food [and would later feature in the Valerie Luthor King Jnr speech] turned around and shouted “No Donuts” that really made me change my opinion about Occupy Philly and think these guys are people we want to be in close partnership… no wait, REALLY? Did you really just say that? Not a statement/act that is going to make anyone want to listen to any of us with any kind of seriousness and just really not helpful as people trying to give the impression that they have anything valid to say.

INSIDE

then we got to go inside in groups of twenty to observe the meeting – i was in the second group and joined Val, Shane, Erica, Jamie Moffett, Sueihn and some others of our group were let in later, and was there for the start where they explained how the meeting was going to proceed and that there would not be commentary available to the public…

the health board reviewed the changes they had proposed to the previous 14 page document and as i mentioned before they all seemed pretty reasonable… they had just gotten started on reading through the ammended regulations based on that response document when one of the occupy people started their pre-planned interruption by shouting out “Mic Check” and then everyone in their group [somewhere between 20 and 40 people] repeats and then the person makes a series of statements [well scream-ments] and everyone repeats – things like “WE LISTENED TO YOU” “YOU’RE NOT LISTENING TO US” “YOU HAVEN’T GIVEN US A CHANCE TO SPEAK ON THESE THINGS” and so on… so completely disruptive and different ones of us [from the Simple Way and friends] had differing ideas as to how effective/right/reasonable any of it was [with some thinking not at all and others thinking up to a point] – one of the girls did a “Mic Check” and took a sandwich she had “made with her clean hands” that “she would eat” and put it on the table in front of Dr Schwartz, who was chairing the meeting, and invited him to eat it [he thanked her later for the sandwich altho i don’t think he ate it at the time]…

so that was all disruptive and completely disregarded the process that was happening up front [which was the intention] but it was a little later that it really started to cross lines – there was one particular guy in a green shirt who just got really louder and obnoxious – after declaring that he was a christian and that this process was very unchristian, he proceeded to call Dr Schwartz the antiChrist [so is it Schwartz or Nutter or are we talking antiChrists here?], swear at the board and spit [have heard at someone, have heard on ground] and then the group [who passed the Open Mic leadership from person to person] just became completely disruptive and the board eventually had to leave and continue the meeting elsewhere [with two occupy philly people present apparently, but not green shirt child]

and so the board left [having been really well composed through most of it and most of these are mediumly old ballies so good on them] and then Val went and approached the occupy group and made me so proud by speaking her mind in a controlled yet direct fashion and letting them know that by acting the way they did they took away her opportunity to hear the rest of the process – so they disempowered her, well us who actually were really wanting to know what was going on… and it’s hard to explain exactly how it all unfolded but she was really great and when donut-screaming Jessie tried to interrupt her the rest of the occupy group got on his case and shouted him down… [he eventually came to Val outside and apologised]

i went to green shirt guy and told him that the Jesus he said he represented was not the same Jesus i followed and while i was talking to him his friend kept on interrupting and not letting me speak and then called me an idiot [kinda made my point there, guy!] and he reminded me that Jesus threw over tables and told us to have swords which i’m not sure is a fully exegeted understanding of who Jesus is and the way He would have treated people in that meeting…

what was really cool was that before that all happened, during all the craziness, a couple of people linked to occupy [altho not necessarily directly from them] came over to us to see if we were okay [cos they sensed we were not happy with proceedings] and made an effort to talk and hear and dialogue and connect and a bunch of the occupy people [i think] came over to us and apologised [especially after Val spoke] and also thanked her for what she said, and we got to chat to a bunch of them outside and realised that we can’t blanket the whole group as a bunch of morons [which would have been easy to do because the few shouted loudly enuff to feel like they represented the many] because a lot of them are doing some really good things and have a lot of good to say and do and we can definitely pursue relationship with them…

so we have connected with some groups that do regular feeding and will look at building relationship and connection and hopefully together continuing to fight [non-violently and treating people with dignity and respect] for justice and to help those who are seen by many as ‘the least of these.’

[a new friend of ours Robert Martin who drove an hour to be with us wrote this blog on his experience and captured it well]

the HEALTH BOARD, the picnic and a bunch of nutters. [guest starring valerie luthor king jnr] part I

[let me disclaim this post and say that nothing mentioned here is official ‘The Simple Way’ stance on these issues but rather my personal reflections and experiences]

so the situation is a little complex for those outside of the loop but in a nut shell, very simplistically as i see it, there are two issues [and you can see our well worded response, as The Simple Way, here.]:

the first was yesterday which was the health department passing some new regulation(s) related to serving food to people on the streets and the second was mayor Nutter of Philadelphia [actual name, somewhat unfortunate, unless you’re a nearby journalist or angry activist] advocating the banning of public feeding specifically in two places [which coincidentally just happen to be two major tourist spots as we head into tourist season, one of which is the site of a new museum which is about to open] [and by ‘coincidentally’ i mean ‘not coincidentally’]

now my beautiful wife Valerie was at the public meeting last week which was open to the public to receive comment on the health board stuff and it seems like that is where the mess happened because they only let 40 people in at a time and she waited 2 and a half hours and didn’t get in – so a lot of people clearly were not able to be heard the way they were expecting to.

but, as i understood it from the explanation given at the beginning of yesterday’s meeting, this meeting was public in terms of the public being able to sit in, but there was not space for comment from them – this was simply a board meeting where they looked over the proposed changes to the regulations based on public comment.

and [until the meeting was horribly interrupted and then pretty much shut down by the eloquence of the occupy philly members – see part III] from what i heard [realising that what they say and put into regulation and how those regulations are acted out can be two very different things] a lot of it made sense to me and seemed to be a really good thing.

the gist of the regulations are not about stopping outside feeding of people [as green shirt man shouted at one point] but rather trying to ensure that all food served to people on the streets of Philadelphia is prepared and served in a healthy fashion. there were one or two small things i wasn’t sure about in terms of what they shared, but for the most part it really seemed like they were doing what they could to make it easy enough and cost effective enough to serve food well to people on the streets.

for example, they are wanting one certified trained person to be there every time food is given out, but they are offering the training free of charge, at their venue or at the organisation/group’s venue that is giving out the food and even offered to train trainers so groups/organisations can train their own people. they asked for food to be prepared within four hours of being handed out. they backed off on the previous regulation which basically didn’t allow for someone to prepare food in their own kitchen and take it out. and some other stuff.

they worked through a 14 page document and i really didn’t hear any huge alarm bells in terms of things they were trying to pass that would make it specifically harder to serve food to the homeless and call me a traditionalist, but i don’t think it is the worst thing in the world to put things in place to try and make food given out regularly more safe and healthy for those receiving it.

as mentioned, the meeting was interrupted and so we never got to hear the end of it as the board [after putting up with a LOT of disturbance, some really rude and offensive, to me at least] left and continued somewhere else, which was a pity for those of us who were trying to hear what they were deciding upon.

for the part about the picnic, read here…

‘on unglamorous redemption’ – a post by the beautiful val

the beautiful valerie [tbV] doesn’t write often [enuff] but when she does it is usually worth reading and paying good attention to and often being challenged by… this is something she just wrote about our recent trip to camden…

you can read it here…

choc of the bushveld

so last nite was our first date nite opportunity for tbV and myself and so we headed off with A-Ron for an introductory tour of the railway which we can climb on literally just down the road and which takes us into the centre of Philly [where A-Ron was attending his meditation time] and so we headed off and walked around a lot of the city, tried unsuccessfully to get a second South Africa to US plug adaptor and then walked past this chocolate shop about 100m and then came to our senses and walked back and entered Max Brenner – the bald man does chocolate – shop.

we decided to have some pizza first just so as to not dive straight into the decadence which i think was a great idea and we had a bacon, pepparoni, something something that was pretty good [altho not as good as the Crispy Pizza pizza we had in our first week here, must go back there] and they brought us a glass of water each and kept filling it any time it attempted to get empty [which is pretty bad marketting i think as water potentially fills you but definitely stopped us from getting other drinks and helped us feel better about spending money on chocolate].

and then we ordered a two person sharing platter which had a bit of a taste of everything which was pretty schweet and looked a little something like this.

a flame filled pot so you can heat up your marshmallows and a choc filled heating pot so you can fondu your strawberry, banana, heated marshmallows, and much much more…

it was completely incredibly amazing – in fact, i could have walked into the restaurant and walked out and been happy cos the wave of chocolate smell that hits you is phenomenal, but apart from one wrap thing which had banana in [i like banana but more by itself than in things altho the banana sundae on waffle bit was amazing] everything was so flippin nice. definitely not a place we can go back to often cos it was a little pricey, but for the first date nite in americaland it was just right.

val is not even a huge fan of chocolate [preferring sour sweets] but she had the biggest smile on her face for most of the evening and was very happy. for the kids they have a syringe [a big one] filled with chocolate so you can inject it straight into your mouth.

headed home for a great game of kucky sahn with E-Beth and A-Ron while tbV read Terry Pratchett’s latest “I shall wear midnight” which E-Beth won [cool to have housemates who dig it!] and then headed for bed to be reminded of what we in the middle of, with some hectic goings on outside our window…

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]