intersections

2008 in Review

There is so much I could say about 2008. It has been, by far, the biggest growth year in terms of the Hollywood Church. And I don't mean primarily numbers (though the church grew by 20% this year). More people found faith, more connected to Christian community as something healthy and life-giving who never thought that would happen for them. We have more leaders in the church this year than last year. We've also had our setbacks: our mural project got stuck in the city-wide legal problems surrounding public art murals (it's a long story). We've had key people move out of town and some hit hard by financial and other life challenges. But I would say that overall, our life in the city as witnesses to God's reign is stronger than a year ago. More on this later, perhaps.

Our children are in a new school that is working out much better for them. We are all VERY pleased that Sophie started Kindergarten and Zoe is now in 3rd grade at Franklin Elementary.

In addition to this here are some other highlights of our year...

Travel

Obviously, the traveling Elysabeth and I have been privileged to do has been probably the #1 highlight of our year. In addition to traveling to Moscow (here, here and here) and St. Petersburg in October and Israel (here and here) in December, I went to

• Washington, D.C. in January for research meetings about PICOs ongoing work around health care reform.
• Princeton, NJ in June for the Envision '08 conference. (Also here).
• Orlando, FL in September for the annual Spectrum/Adventist Forums Conference.
• Columbus, OH in October for the Innovation Conference.

Community Beautification Grant
The Hollywood Adventist Church received a $10,000 Community Beautification Grant from the City of Los Angeles to paint an art mural on the wall of our church that faces the freeway. (More here and here).

Interfaith work
2008 was the year I got deeply involved in interfaith work. Some of the highlights of this was participating in the Memorial Day Interfaith Service at All Saints in Pasadena, meeting Robi Damelin and Ali Abu Awwad from the Parents Circle Families Form and being elected Treasurer of the Interreligious Council of Southern California (website).

Community Organizing with LA Voice/PICO
We have had another amazing year partnering with LA Voice in local community organizing, mostly around the crisis of affordable housing in Los Angeles. My participation in the national work really dwindled this year as I had so many other travel commitments, but I'm looking forward to getting back involved in early 2009.

Adventists Against Prop 8
I am so proud of the work our little group did in speaking out, as Christians, for the rights of gays and lesbians in California (website). This is a fight we temporarily lost, but our work united many good people who have either left the Adventist Church, have been on the fringes of the church, or who just never imagined that anyone in the church would stand for religious liberty and human rights in the way that we attempted to do. I am also very grateful to the leaders of the local Conferences and the Pacific Union who worked with us to allow a different voice to be heard in this debate. I'm glad my church can tolerate diverse viewpoints.

And of course, for me, one of the greatest highlights of the year was...

the election of Barack Obama the 44th President of the United States

BEST BOOKS I READ IN 2008

I've read a lot of books this year, as usual, but I really haven't read that many good ones. I'm not sure what that means. And I can't tell you how many I've started but never finished. Here are the cream of the crop from what I read this year, in no particular order. As usual, these are not books that necessarily came out in 2008 (though some are).

Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson

The Fidelity of Betrayal, by Peter Rollins

Wisdom Distilled from the Daily, Joan Chittister, OSB

Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright

Evangelism After Christendom, Bryan Stone

Here's to a healthy and joyful New Year!

Joy and Pain on Christmas Day

It's been a very different, but wonderful, Christmas for us this year. For starters, my wife's mother, Josiane, is with us. It's not rare for her to be with us, but this is the first time in a while she's been here for Christmas. It's made the holidays very special.

Secondly, as some of you know, we spent Christmas Day in Las Vegas with our dear friends Matt Taylor and Angie Kwik, where I performed their wedding and my girls were the flower girls. It was such a beatiful and classy affair. I've never encountered a more organized bride than Angie. Every detail was perfect. It was an absolutely beautiful day. You can see a short clip from the ceremony below (taken, by the way, by Elysabeth on my new toy I received for Christmas).
Angie Kwik/Matt Taylor Wedding from Ryan Bell on Vimeo.

The entire event was held in the Four Seasons in Las Vegas. We had the privilege of staying in the hotel for the two nights we were there and we felt so spoiled. We lived like royalty.

Contrast this with the news I received on Christmas Day, just hours before the wedding began. I received an email from another Hollywood member, Pierre Auguste, who shared that his wife Ruth's mother and brother were tragically killed that morning while driving to New Jersey from Boston, when a tree blew over and landed on their car. I can't imagine a more random and freak accident.

Once again I was struck by the contrasts that we live with in our world. Here I was, standing in a beautiful hotel suite at the Four Seasons in Las Vegas, watching my daughters get their hair done, just hours before one of the most beautiful weddings I've ever been a part of, when another friend emails to say his wife's mother and brother have tragically lost their life. All on one Christmas Day. It was so difficult for me to hold both of those events in my heart at the same time. I wanted to push away the bad news to make room from the event I was about to participate in. How could I experience both of these at the same time.

But this is life, isn't it? Full of both beauty and tragedy. Joy and pain. Life as well as death. For my friends Ruth and Pierre and their family, Christmas will always remind them of the tragic loss of their family members. For Matt and Angie it will be their wedding anniversary. We are called to live with both of these realities and be with people through both of these experiences.

I was also aware in that moment that these two events on one Christmas Day represented the range of people's experience of the holidays. Some have warm and wonderful memories. Others hope the season will pass quickly.

How can people of faith be present to people in both sets of circumstances? How do these two experiences call the church to live with and for these members of our community? I'll be thinking about these and other questions for some time to come.

UPDATE: Here is a news story about the tragic accident.

Photos from Israel

 

(click image to enlarge)

What do you do at 4 AM when you can't sleep because your body thinks its still in Israel? Process and upload photos, of course. I will write another post later today, reflecting on our trip, the things we saw and the thoughts that are still running through my head about this amazing trip.

In the meantime you can browse some of our photos that I just uploaded to Flickr. There are 76 photos there, which is exactly 10% of the pictures I took, many of which are not fit to print! Ha! I will probably upload more to my Picasa account later, for the benefit of our friends who went on the trip, so if you're a real glutton for punishment, you can check those out later. I'll keep you posted.

Feel free to leave comments here, or even better, on the individual photos on Flickr.

UPDATE: I have now uploaded more pictures at my Picasa site. These are some of the same ones that I put on Flickr, but more. There are 252 pictures here.

Headed to Israel

 

On Tuesday, Elysabeth and I will be joining a few others from the Southern California Conference on a trip to Israel. This is billed as a "familiarization tour." We'll be visiting all the classic sites that are important to Christians. There is so much about Israel and the Palestinian territories that I want to explore, but I figure this is a basic introduction. And my wife and I get to travel together, so that's awesome.

I'll be Tweeting our trip, so if you want to follow our short updates, click here. You can subscribe to the RSS feed or join and discover the wonderful world of Twitter.

Keep us in your prayers as we travel. We have a 14+ hour flight direct from LAX to Tel Aviv on Tuesday, December 2. We return on December 9, so it's a short trip. Elysabeth's mom will be staying with our girls, so pray for them too! Ha!

Final Days in Moscow

Click to enlarge - click here for more pictures.

We are back home now. It's great to sleep in one's own bed again after days of tiring travel. Just wanted to give a quick update about our last days in Moscow.

On Sabbath I preached in the Moscow Central Church (above). As you might be able to guess, this church was originally built as a Presbyterian Church (balcony runs along three side and the pulpit is very high, as you can see). For someone who never preaches from a pulpit in the first place, this was a very unique experience. The church is now shared by the Adventists and a Baptist Church. This congregation has been meeting continually for 103 years. Elysabeth and I were so moved by this experience. The members were so warm and friendly and this history of the place was palpable.

That afternoon we went to the Pastor's apartment just outside the city limits of Moscow for supper. Then we drove to an incredible place in the village of Butovo called the Butovo Ordinance Yard, where the KGB secretly held and killed over 20,000 people from 1937-1938. Among those killed was the grandfather of Mike Pilkh, who graciously showed us the place and drove around Moscow on our final night. The entire site was a well-kept secret until very recently. It is sometimes known as the Russian Golgotha.

The opporunity to see this place, and the hospitality of Mike, Pastor Paul and so many others including our continual companion, Yaroslav, will remain in our hearts and our memories forever.

All our pictures are now online at Flickr.

More from Moscow and St. Petersburg

Just outside Church of the Savior on the Spilled blood in front of one of St. Petersburg's many beautiful canals.

See more pictures of our trip to Moscow and St. Petersburg here.

It's Friday night here in Moscow and we have one more full day to go. Tomorrow I preach in the Moscow Central Church, which is just about to celebrate it's 100 year anniversary (CORRECTION: this church is already 103 years old). Imagine the history this congregation has seen in the past 100 years: the last years of the Czars, two world wars, the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin, Stalin, Communism and the proscription of religion, Gorbachev, glasnost, perestroika and the eventual dismantling of the Soviet Union.

For the past couple of days we've had time to tour around. On Wednesday night, after my teaching assignment was finished, we took a train overnight to St. Petersburg. Upon arriving on Thursday morning we immediately visited several important places. First, we went to the Church of the Savior on the Spilled Blood (which is not only one of those fantastical Russian cathedrals but has the most amazing mosaic covering the entire inside the church) and the Hermitage Museum (one of the greatest museums in the world where we saw some amazing Picasso and Matisse of the best Rembrandts, including my all-time favorite, The Return of the Prodigal. (My attempt at a photo of this painting at the right - and proof I really saw it. Click the link to see a much better picture). It drizzled all day long so we got pretty wet and tired, but it was so completely worth it.

Today, back in Moscow again, we visited the The Armory inside the Kremlin, which is a museum dedicated to the treasures of Russian History. The collection includes the carriages of Elizabeth and Catherine, two Empresses of Russia, crowns and thrones, and priceless gifts given by other countries to Russia throughout it's long history.

We also we to the State Tretyakov Museum where, among other amazing pieces of art, I got to see the original icon of Andrei Rublev, The Trinity (1410). Many of you know I have a print of this icon hanging in my office. To see this first hand was a very moving experience for me.

It's been a remarkable experience. To see more of our pictures, please click here for our Flickr site. We'll be back in Los Angeles on Sunday night.

See all our pictures here!

Walking around Red Square

Today was the first day we were able to get down to the center of Moscow. Paul Richardson, Elysabeth and I were accompanied by our friend Yaroslav Paliy. We traveled by bus and Metro to the Kremlin and Red Square. We didn't take the time to go inside the Kremlin today (hopefully in the next couple of days), but we did go inside St. Basil's Cathedral (pictured above). It has been very cloudy and overcast since we've been here but when we stepped outside I snapped this picture -the best of the day (click photo to enlarge).

This city is so impressive - all the buildings are massive and communicates so clearly the Soviet power. One observation I found humorous is that the tomb of Lenin, on one side of Red Square, faces GUM (formerly the State Department Store), the most impressive shopping mall I've ever seen. (Move over, Caruso!) Lenin must roll in his grave daily to look across at this monument to capitalism. Needless to say, a lot has changed in Moscow in the past 20-30 years.

For more pictures of our time in Moscow, click here.

Off to Moscow

In a few short hours I'll be heading to Moscow, Russia. For over a year now I've been thinking and planning for this trip. Paul Richardson, of the Center for Creative Ministry, graciously invited me to join him in presenting an Urban Ministry Conference to the Pastors in the Moscow Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.

The Urban Conference runs from Monday, October 13 to Wednesday, October 15. In addition, I'll be speaking in two of the churches in Moscow on Sabbath, October 11 and 18 and to a gathering of lay leaders on Sunday, October 12. All in all, that's a lot of speaking. It's been fun to organize my thoughts and I look forward to interacting with these pastors and churches.

Please pray for us as we travel. My wife, Elysabeth, is able to go with me on this trip, which makes it so much more exciting. We'll get a little time to tour around Moscow and hopefully St. Petersburg.

I will have some time on the internet so check back here for mid-trip updates. If you want to follow our experiences on Twitter, you can follow me here. Babette will also be Twittering here.

Off to Orlando

I'm leaving my apartment in about 30 minutes to head to LAX. I'm off to Orlando, Florida this morning to participate in the annual Adventist Forum/Spectrum Conference. We're going to be at this really swanky looking resort, so that should be awesome. This year the theme is "Christianity and the Public Square." We're hearing from Joel Hunter, Senior Pastor of Northland Church in the Orlando area, and Barry Lynn, Executive Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

I'm part of a panel tomorrow afternoon responding to Barry Lynn and a panel discussion on Sunday morning about our work in the public square. Should be fun. Looking forward to catching up with a few of you there.

Upcoming Travel

I'm entering a period of travel that has me a bit tired just thinking about it. However, it's all very exciting stuff. I hope I'll be able to interact with some of you on one or more of these trips.

• Spectrum/Adventist Forum Conference - September 26-28 - Orlando Florida
• Conference on Innovation - October 5-7 - Columbus, Ohio
• Moscow Urban Conference - October 13-15 - Moscow, Russia (we'll be in Moscow from Oct 10-19)
• Holy Land Tour - December 2-9

Elysabeth and I will be traveling together to both Moscow and Israel, which is a real blessing for us. It's been years since we've been able to travel together like that - 6 years, to be exact.

Post a comment below if you'll be at either the Spectrum Conference or the Innovation Conference. I'd love the chance to meet and catch up.