The Art of Authentic Ministry

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The July/August issue of the Messenger Magazine, which is the Church of the Brethren magazine contains an article entitled “The art of authentic ministry” and is about our community. I have posted the content of the article below.

The art of authentic ministry
Lancaster’s Veritas fellowship builds creative community

by Walt Wiltschek

The word “veritas” is Latin for truth or authenticity. And that’s exactly what the Veritas Church of the Brethren fellowship in Lancaster, Pa., strives for:  full authenticity in following Jesus Christ as a community.
    It might look a bit different than your average Brethren congregation: art gallery showings, coffeehouses, open mic music nights, and occasional mornings doing service projects out on the surrounding streets are all a regular part of ministry. Even worship looks different, with participants—including a significant number of young adults—sitting at round tables and talking about the sermon in the midst of the service.
    That all was appealing to Dani Longenecker, who came to Veritas about three years ago and now serves as treasurer and as a member of the “Servants Team”—the church’s leadership team.
    “I was drawn to the smaller faith community, the more casual worship service, and the time spent each week discussing the sermon and its application,” says Longenecker, who grew up in the Church of the Brethren but then had attended a Mennonite church before moving to the city of Lancaster. “We felt like we were a good fit for the Veritas community and vice versa.”
    Ryan Braught, Veritas’ church planter and founding pastor, says the vision for it started around 2005, when he was serving as Pastor of Youth Ministries and Nurture at another Church of the Brethren congregation. As he explored the shifts occurring in the culture, he thought that Anabaptist theology could “richly speak into the current cultural climate.”
    He began experimenting with ideas in that congregational context, and a couple of years later he decided to do an actual church plant. Veritas officially launched in Atlantic Northeast District in September 2009, eventually moving to its present location at “Community Room on King” in downtown Lancaster. It achieved fellowship status in the denomination in 2016.
    Braught says the central focus of Veritas essentially has remained the same since the beginning, with just the verbiage changing over the years: a “confluence of mission, discipleship, and community.” The current iteration of those values on the church’s website says its vision is “to be family, pursuing truth with honest expression, as we follow Jesus into the margins.”
    As Braught explains it: “We want to be a community that lives like an extended family. We want to be a community that lives in the ways of Jesus. And we want to be a community that lives as missionaries in the places where we live, work, and play.”
    One way Veritas achieves that last part is through its “Fifth Sunday Day of Service,” which, as the name implies, occurs on any month that has five Sundays, about four times a year. On those days the worship group—which averages 30 to 40 people most Sundays—leaves the building and heads out onto the streets, doing service projects with various local community organizations.
    “As part of the Church of the Brethren, one of Veritas’ core values has always been—in some way, shape, or wording—service,” Braught says. “We were looking for an entry ramp into serving together, and we thought the time that the most people gather together is on a Sunday morning. What if we took time on a Sunday morning, and instead of talking about the importance of serving—both individually and corporately—we actually got out of our seats and served together?”
    Recent projects (before the COVID-19 pandemic set in) included partnering with a local transitional housing nonprofit, helping another organization use recycled clothing to make “infinity scarves” that are sold to raise funds to fight human trafficking in Thailand, doing prayer walks around the city, and picking up trash at a local park.
    “People just show up on that fifth Sunday, decide which service opportunity they would like to participate in, and then get to work,” Braught says. “It allows for our conversations to not just be about the head, but allows them to work their way down to our hands and feet, allowing us to be the hands and feet of Jesus. It turns our attention outward into our Lancaster community and helps us from becoming too inward-looking and focused. And it provides avenues of service for people to get involved in at other times.”
    For example, he says, one of Veritas’ young adults started serving at Lancaster’s Transitional Living Center on a regular basis after helping there on one of the Fifth Sunday outings.
    Meanwhile, the art and music programs—typically on Fridays—fill a creative niche and draw a variety of people to Veritas’ urban space, which is also rented out to other groups to raise funds for the church. Veritas partners with the city for other special events, as well, such as the ArtWalk weekends that take place each spring and fall.
    It’s “a unique outreach of the Veritas community to the artistic community in Lancaster,” Longenecker says. “We connect through a once-a-month art exhibit as well as a coffee house monthly. Artists are also invited to share their experiences and specifics about their exhibit during a Sunday morning worship time.”
    Some of the exhibits are designed to raise awareness around particular justice issues. Braught says past shows have examined environmental stewardship and themes related to immigrants and refugees. An artist group within Veritas also puts together two shows a year around specific themes.
    As for the round tables in the worship space, Braught says it avoids the “spectatoritis” that can occur when people sit in fixed rows, encouraging people to talk and interact—part of what he calls a goal to have a “participatory culture”and “multi-voiced gatherings.” After the sermon—delivered by Braught or others on a “teaching team” that takes turns for several weeks each quarter—everyone talks about how to apply the words of the message.
    And members of the Veritas community sometimes share their own stories of seeking to follow Christ and serve others, going back to those values of community, discipleship, and mission. They sometimes call it “in, up, and out.”
    As it says on Veritas’ website: “It is easy to talk about faith and never get around to doing anything. So the continuing call is to ‘walk the talk.’”—a rather authentic thing to do.

Learn more about Veritas at www.veritas.community, www.facebook.com/VeritasPA, or www.twitter.com/VeritasPA.

Who will be a witness by Drew Hart. A Book Review

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A few months ago, in the middle of the lockdown during this COVID-19 pandemic, I became aware of a book study that was taken place with people from literally all over the world. They would be reading the book, “Trouble I’ve Seen: Changing the way the Church views racism” by Drew Hart. Having talked to Drew a few times, and having a desire to read the book, I jumped at the chance to be in the book study. It was an incredible time of learning, growing, and having life changing and formational conversations with people all over the world

It was during this book study that I became aware that Drew was working on his next book “Who will be a witness?: Igniting Activism for God’s Justice, Love and Deliverance”. So when give an opportunity to become part of the book launch team, to read and review the book, I jumped at the chance.

You see one of the big reasons that I wanted to read and review this book is because of the questions that I was left with after reading his first book. The questions being: what now? what am I supposed to do? What next steps can I take in confronting racism in my own life and in the life of people around me? What practical, hands-on tools and ideas can I take and apply. What next?

After reading this book, I have some of those questions answered. Drew has provided me with some tools to put in my tool-belt (so to speak). Some next steps to take in my own life, and in working with the Veritas.

As I reflect back on the reading there are 5 chapters that stood out to me the most. First, chapter 2 and Drew’s insightful exploration into what he calls Liberating Barabbas. The faithful exegesis he does in this chapter confronts the way that many Christians read the story of Barabbas and the connection to Jesus death on the cross. As if the only way to read the story is that Jesus takes Barabbas’s place (and therefore our place).

Chapters 6, 7, and 8 gave me handles on ways to move forward to work for justice in the world, to confront my own brokenness, racism, and sin, and ideas on how to help the Veritas Community to partner together in the Kingdom work of racial justice. These chapters have stretched my imagination and challenged me to broaden my thinking and ideas on how to apply what I have been learning.

But probably the best chapter (and honestly the most surprising chapter in the entire book) is the last chapter, chapter 9 entitled “The Politics of Love” where Drew talks about the importance of the ethic of love in the work of being a witness to God’s justice, love and deliverance. He does an amazing job of calling Followers of Jesus to love people- even their enemies- as Christ calls us to. At times it is very easy to forget that our enemies aren’t against flesh and blood, but against the powers and the principalities. And Drew reminds us, that as we close the book, begin working for justice in the world, to not forget the most important tool in our tool belt, as people seeking to live and be like Jesus, is love. And that is probably the most challenging call of all.

Everywhere you look: Discovering the church right where you are- Book Review

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A few weeks ago I signed up to be a part of Tim Soren’s book launch team for his new book, Everywhere you look: Discovering the Church right where you are. The reason that I wanted to sign up and be a part of the book launch team (besides the opportunity to get a book out of the deal) is that I was really interested in what he was saying regarding the ability to see and discover the church right where you are..in your neighborhood, and not just in a building that you go to once a week to gather with people for an event. And instead, as he says, “to find the mega-church in your neighborhood”

One of the first things that struck me in the book was his story of talking with his kids about the importance of words. The words make worlds. And how the contemporary usage of the word church (going to church) conveys all the wrong things. And that he thought his kids to talk about going to the church building, or church gathering but not going to church, as that is a theological impossibility. I resonated with that strongly because I remember having the very same conversation with my kids when they were younger.

The second thing that struck me was the question “What is the church for?” So often we talk about what the church is (or what the church isn't) that at times we can fly right by the question of what is the church actually for (or what is the purpose of the church). I love the quote from Fleming Rutledge that gets at that question, “The calling of the church is to place itself where God is already at work.” And another statement that he made regarding the why of the church strikes at my heart and motivation behind what I do everyday. He says, “The church was never intended to be the why, and when we try to make it so, we lose every time.”

There is a lot more that is could say regarding this book. But I will say this, if you are ready to challenge your paradigms regarding church, that you are willing to be challenged to have your eyes open to the church that is “everywhere you look”, and interested in playing a role in the moving forward of God’s Kingdom right where you live, work and play, then pick up a copy of this book. I promise you, you’ll have new eyes to see the church in brand new ways.

Book Review: Not My Jesus by Bob Fabey

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The above video from the movie Talladega Nights is a comic look at how we make Jesus into our own image. While it is comic in this video, if we are honest with ourselves, each and everyone of us, in some way, seeks to make Jesus into our own image, instead of seeking to be made into the image and likeness of Jesus. Even just this week a writer put this out on Twitter.

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In the book “Not My Jesus” the author Bob Fabey seeks to get behind this concept of why we seek to make Jesus into our own image, instead of the other way around. He peels back the layers of the white, American, consumeristic, Jesus by taking us to the Scriptures to show us what Jesus was truly like. Which allows us to answer the question that Jesus is asking, “Who do you say that I am?” Farley, then says that once we truly understand who Jesus was and is, then we can begin to live a life, through the power of the Holy Spirit, that reflects this Jesus, and not the Jesus of our own making.

Probably the most poignant part of the book, for me, and super relevant for our time, is the chapter dealing with the importance of loving people, and not making them out as the “other”. When we make someone or a group of people, the “other” we can scapegoat them for all the world’s ills (then Nazi Germany and the Jews, and many modern day parallels), and once we have made them the “other” we can treat them in any way we want, and justly it in our minds. Farley puts it like this, “When people are The Other, they are less than.” But the Jesus of the Scriptures, the Word of God made flesh, has become “the other” for us and for all, so that we could be full of love, grace, compassion and mercy for all who are made in the image of God.

I would encourage you to read “Not My Jesus” so that it can help us confront how we have all made Jesus into our own image, and seek, through the power of the Holy Sprit, to flip it around so that we could be made more and more into his image and likeness.

(I was provided this book by the Speakeasy Book program free of charge for an honest review.)