Well, the music is beginning to solidify for the Songs to Pray By album I recorded March 24th with City Church Eastside.  Tomorrow I’ll be playing with the band at the Festival of Homiletics and we wanted people to have the chance to hear the album.  On top of that we were asked to submit a track to the Wild Goose Festival benefit CD.  So here’s a link to that first song, a raucous take on the Celtic song, Be Thou My Vision.  The download is free for now, but I do ask for your email so I can reaach out to you when the full CD is released.

Also save these CD release dates:

June 19- Atlanta
June 20- Charlotte
June 21- Wild Goose Festival

Back in seminary I attended church with a few couples from Cinci, so Kelley and I had our eyes on it in 2004 when I graduated. But it fell off the radar as things in SW Atlanta began to really get traction. Our time in Atlanta is impossible to summarize in a few sentences. But suffice it to say we enjoyed some great experiments, learned and taught in amazing seminary settings, saw deep life change through several shared faith communities, curated worship and arts in churches around the city, shared countless meals, laughter and love with all sorts of wonderful folks in our inner-city community and played a part in building a vision and approach in SW Atlanta for community-based youth leadership development.

Then about a year or so ago, news that our Presbytery would be pulling denominational funding from Neighbors Abbey combined with other seemingly random closed doors to wake Kelley and me up to the possibility of relocating. With some counseling, prayer, and over many tears and beers we decided to short sell our home, to look for a new spot to raise our kids, and for me to lead from within a more stable team framework as a specialist in arts and worship curation. I also knew I would be releasing both my first worship album and my first book in 2012, so such a job would need to be stable and well-integrated with our family life. We started searching in November 2011 and hoped/expected the search to lead us toward Minneapolis or as far as Seattle or Porlandia.

But that same time a committee of folks from Northminster Presbyterian Church were searching for an entrepreneurial thinking artists to direct the transformation of their two 12 year-running contemporary worship services. Located in Finneytown, OH a small community adjacent to Cincinnati (about 15 minutes from UC, and less than 10 from the Northside district), Northminster is home to a farmers market, a vibrant 100+ youth group, a staff of three other pastors, and hundreds of musicians. When one of the pastors, Nancy Ross Zimmerman first called me about it, I thought, “Cincinnati? We belong further west than that.” But as the friendship unfolded they were just the kind of place Kelley and I had been looking for. So, many Skype calls, conference calls, and a weekend family visit later we decided it was where we were being pointed to next.

But, since this is a blog, I’ll try to also be a bit more transparent.

• I’m nervous to be part of a big old church. I’ve spent a lot of time since seminary being critical of overly organized religion. From our first dates I have experienced Northminster to be very hospitable, engaged in their socio-economically diverse context, and inviting transformation. But first dates are just that… (They’ll probably be saying the same about me by mid summer).
• And I’m not romantically inclined toward Ohio. Yet there are lots of festivals and music that I’m hearing about, and I was pumped to discover most of my architect and design friends LOVE the city- so there’s a lot for me to learn.
• I’m apprehensive about moving off of a diverse inner-city block, away from third wave coffee and indie music venues… and yet I’m even more weary at the prospect of staying on our corner here in SW Atlanta, with the state of burnout we’ve reached. I’m psyched that I’m heading to a church where last bullet of their vision assessment reads they expected their worship curator could “be a non-conformist.” So who knows how that will all play out.
• I’m scared to know if God was behind all this. If you know me well you know that even though I’m a follower of Jesus I don’t feel comfortable blaming all the bad or good in life on God. Somewhere, in the ether that is life’s creative mystery, I believe that pain cannot simply be a divine curbing mechanism, nor success a proof of God’s endorsement. I’ve lived next to too much undeserved suffering and watched too much ambition-skewed visions of success. All that said—I think this opportunity is a God-send, and I’m holding loosely to any convictions otherwise.
• I’m curious about the opportunity to collaborate with some of interesting people in/near Cinci: Bart Campolo, Walter Breuggeman, Peter Block, Will Samson, Mandy Smith, Aaron Klinefelter, Cam Cochran, Jill and Jona Hicks, Ric Hordinski, and Linford and Karen with Over the Rhine, to name a few. I’m not sure if it’ll work out to see any of them often, but its an interesting new horizon.
• I’m also intrigued by the ways that this path brings me to Midwest (I was born in Grand Rapids) and a church community that is more similar to where I grew up. I return a different person politically, culturally, and spiritually, but I’m also willing to admit that I might learn more about integrating my upbringing into my lived story by being in a healthy incarnation of large Midwestern church. I’ll need some customized braces to guard against some of my classic knee-jerking.

Who knows what the years ahead will hold for us? I can’t say enough about how much we’re already missing Atlanta the place, the people, and dreams of what could have been. I do bless the future work that the presbytery, and my neighbors, and other great partners will be continuing after we have move and I wish y’all the best.

We’ll be pulling out on May 30th, and have an open house planned (hosted a couple blocks from our home by our former community/housemates) for Saturday May 27 May 26th from 1-5pm (that’ll be up on Facebook soon)… If your in town that Memorial Day weekend it would be great to see ya! But if you’re nearer to Cinci and wanna meet up for chili, icecream, or donughts, I’ll see you in June!

And like Bartley the Scrivener
I’ve abided months of sermonette after sermonette of the addressed person’s trespasses,
late bills, possible eviction, UHAUL left overs.
You name it.

I’ve begun to check the obituaries
expecting to find that,
not only did she mysteriously die months ago leaving a trail of unpaid bills,
but that she suffered from dyslexia
and simply entered my number instead of hers-
interchanging a
15 for a 51
or a 934 for a 943.
Like a pigmy born the wrong place at the wrong time,
one of us confused with the other
and left to the damnation of the ignorant collectors!

Either that or to read that she was killed by Goths and Vandals whose numbers she had listed fraudulently to evade responsibility for her expenditures, but who’s zero sum religion required a sacrifice.
And my newfound freedom,
no fault of my own,
by grace alone
just a stroke of dumb luck.

Some days,
I hope for the disability,
others for the displaced revenge.
But its always one or the other.

Isn’t it embarrassing how death seems the only legitimate closure available to my imagination?

All the while
I keep running into promising friendships
who see
invitation,
curiosity,
and interdependence as threat.

These folks grow lonely
and remain exposed,
content to be stubby promising vines.

I’m sure I’ve been both of these over my life thus-far. Nevertheless I hope for a strong vineyard of the former.

I’m dreaming about a big morning
but all I know right now is that everything I’ve loved is dead and buried.

the chief priests, with the elders, the teachers of the law had reached a decision.
But they had run out of coffee beans
and so they waited for someone to make a quick run to Starbucks
before making any public statements.

A certain man from Cyrene, Simon, the father of two boys,
was passing by on his way in from the country,
and they dragged him out of his car and forced him to carry Jesus’ cross.
Next they dragged Jesus to The Place of the Skull.
And the police search helicopters were circling overhead.

The people stood watching, and the politicians and business leaders even sneered at him.
They said, ‘He saved others; let him save himself if he indeed the Chosen One.’
The soldiers (with M-16s over their shoulders) also came up and mocked him.
They offered him blackmarket painkillers and said, “If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself.”
Meanwhile a lady’s iPhone kept going off.
The ring tone was catchy Katie Perry tune from about two years ago,
the one where she was riding on a long swing.

One guy next to Jesus yelled, “Aren’t you the Christ? Save yourself and us!”
Another yelled back at him, “Don’t you fear God?”
Jesus interrupted the argument, saying
“I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.”
And as I pulled out of the driveway our neighbors’ shit was thrown out on the lawn,
the marshal was just doing his job because the bank
was foreclosing on their slumlord
even though the he was still taking rent from them and sitting at home,
no where to be seen.

Jesus yelled, “Dear woman, here is your son,”
and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.”
And from that time on, John took Mary into his house, as if she were his own mom.

It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three-ish,
for the sun stopped shining. And then the special curtain was torn in two.
When I plugged my portable hard drive into the Pro Tools last night
there was this pop and smoke came out of it;
my friend and I looked at each other, both afraid of the worst.

Then Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”
When he had said this, he breathed his last.

I remember sitting with my wife’s grandpa in his last days while he was gasping for air.
A tube blocked up his laboring throat so that he couldn’t talk.
But his eyes, they spoke volumes.

So today when the beauty
of music,
art,
design
and family
truly do spill over my apportioned serving sizes
I am convinced
that gifts
(those things we oughtn’t bet on)
are really all there is.

I want you to be free to know,
one day at a time,
your life as it shall become.
Trust your eyes and the scent of things
and give your feet over to that lit-path alone,
one step
at
a
time.

Don’t take;
not my advise,
another’s advise
or anything else born from outside your discovery.
Instead, eat what bread falls around us all.
‘Just enough to last from breakfast
and to stretch into a dinner with unexpected guests when necessary.

When we pulled away from the house this afternoon
there were vultures circling overhead.
Ready to take
what was to become theirs.
But the life is gone from that.

this was the difficult hard-
wiring we each received as children.

but the warmest remembered ritual
he and I still both enjoy
is rooting for the underdog
until they
lose