Practicing Resurrection: The Gospel Of Mark And Radical .
Leader’s GuidePracticing Resurrection:The Gospel of Mark and Radical DiscipleshipJanet WolfSpecial Supplementary ResourcesDenise Smartt Sears
2019 United Methodist Women. All rights reserved.United Methodist Women,475 Riverside Drive, Room 1501,New York, NY 10115www.unitedmethodistwomen.orgThis Leader’s Guide and material from it may be reproducedwithout adaptation for noncommercial purposes providedthe following notice appears with the excerpted material:“From Practicing Resurrection: The Gospel of Mark and Radical DiscipleshipLeader’s Guide 2019 United Methodist Women. All rights reserved.Used by permission.” Copyrighted material within the bookcannot be reproduced without permission from copyright holder.All biblical quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from theNew Revised Standard Version (NRSV) of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Councilof Churches of Christ in the United States of America.Used by permission. All rights reserved.Excerpts from The Book of Resolutions of The United Methodist Church—2016.Copyright 2016 by The United Methodist Publishing House.Used by permission.2
United Methodist WomenPurposeThe organized unit of United Methodist Women shallbe a community of women whose purpose is to knowGod and to experience freedom as whole personsthrough Jesus Christ; to develop a creative, supportivefellowship; and to expand concepts of mission throughparticipation in the global ministries of the church.The VisionTurning faith, hope and love into action on behalfof women, children and youth around the world.Living the VisionWe provide opportunities and resources to growspiritually, become more deeply rooted in Christ andput faith into action.We are organized for growth, with fexible structuresleading to effective witness and action.We equip women and girls around the world to beleaders in communities, agencies, workplaces,governments and churches.We work for justice through compassionate serviceand advocacy to change unfair policies and systems.We provide educational experiences that lead topersonal change in order to transform the world.3
HIntroductionTABLE OF CONTENTSG.510Session 1:Faith We Can SeeSession 2:Engaging the Powers:Liberation and Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17Session 3:Sabbath Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25Session 4:Practicing Resurrection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32Appendix.39Special Supplementary Session . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45About the Authors.453
H INTRODUCTION GThe goal of this spiritual growth study, Practicing Resurrection: The Gospel of Mark and RadicalDiscipleship, is to encounter Jesus as liberator and to respond to Christ’s call to radical discipleship,so we can experience freedom as whole persons through Jesus Christ and live out a vision of societybased on the kin-dom1 of God.But what if this liberating Jesus does not fit with our long-held assumptions about who Jesus isand what it might mean to commit to discipleship in his name? Mark’s Gospel may surprise us withits fierce urgency, with stories of intense conflict and escalating violence, and insistence that there isno discipleship in Jesus’ name without radical personal and communal transformation.There is a short video clip from BBC Three that begins with a young white man praying in adimly lit sanctuary with stained glass. His accent is British and he is asking Jesus for help, notingthat he is desperate and has no where else to turn. Suddenly Jesus appears with blinding light andcomforting words: “I can hear you, my son. I have always been listening . . . I heard your prayerand I’ve come to help you.”Baffled by this robed black man with dreadlocks who says he is Jesus, the young white manexclaims, “You’re not Jesus!” He points to a portrait of a white-skinned, blond-haired and blueeyed Jesus on the wall of the sanctuary to underline his certainty.Jesus explains that the Bible is very clear about where he was born, in the Middle East, makingthe blond-haired and blue-eyed Jesus impossible. Jesus notes that his story should have been a clue:he was arrested by a mob of angry government officials and beaten for a crime he did not commit.“That . . . doesn’t happen to white people,” Jesus notes.The young man seems perplexed and so Jesus asks, “Would you like me to fetch white Jesusinstead?” “Could you?” the young man responds enthusiastically. And then Jesus counters, “No!There is no white Jesus! Do you want my help or not?”The young man considers the offer, begrudgingly agreeing that he supposes he would like helpfrom this Jesus. “After all,” he says, “black or white we’re both still Christians, right?” The lastcomment from Jesus comes, “I’m guessing now’s not the time to tell you I’m Jewish.”2This study invites us, as does Mark’s Gospel, into a journey with the Jesus who is Jewish, a memberof a systemically oppressed people who live with their backs against the wall.3 This Jesus does not fitinto many of the popular notions of a messiah, then or now. Like the pig herders and townspeoplein Mark 5:17, some people may beg this disruptive, disturbing, demanding Jesus to leave.This Jesus embodies the radical prophetic traditions, living into and out of God’s vision of shalom,God’s kin-dom, and in direct contrast to and in defiance of the violently oppressive powers ofempire. Again and again the Gospel of Mark encourages us to encounter this liberating Jesus from5
the location of those who have been oppressed by systems and structures, theologies and practices.We are invited to side not with those who are powerful and privileged, but with those who areassaulted day after day by these powers of domination. We are invited to side with Jesus whoexposes the death-dealing powers of empire and calls disciples to practice a faith you can see.Jesus who seeks justice in a world of escalating economic inequality, violent political and militaryoccupation, and relentless systemic injustice.This leader’s guide is designed for Mission u, but it can be easily adapted for small groups suchas Sunday school classes and book study circles, or with larger groups such as congregationalgatherings and United Methodist Women’s retreats.This guide focuses on transformative or liberating pedagogy: learning that happens through theprocess of communal dialogue, rather than the traditional model of teacher and learners. In thistransformative community of collective wisdom, everyone is a teacher and everyone is a learner.The leader, then, is defined as an animator, one who seeks to bring to life, to create movement, ora facilitator, one who helps make the process flow and who helps shape a learning environment inwhich everyone is invited to be an active partner. This liberating pedagogy emphasizes processover product, openness over linear agendas, accompaniment rather than control. This requiresflexibility, creativity, deep listening, compassion, and a wild sense of humor.The study invites facilitators to prepare in a variety of ways:1. Commit to a daily practice of meditation and prayer, understanding that this may take manydifferent forms, including walks in the woods, centering mantras or breath prayers, openingourselves through readings that disrupt, and music that catches our hearts.2. Read the entire Gospel of Mark several times, each time doing so in one sitting. My friendand United Methodist elder, seminary professor, author, and distinguished Mark scholarTheodore Jennings, suggests we do so and then ask: “What would we say about Jesus if thiswas all we had to go on, if these were the only stories handed down?”3. Read the focus texts for each chapter in Practicing Resurrection before reading the content aboutthe texts. This will allow you to come to the stories with your own experience and ideas andthen, in conversation with this book, explore additional experiences and ideas.4. Read the spiritual growth text with a pen so that you can jot down questions, ideas, and linksto other resources in the margins while you are reading. Talk back to the text and note piecesof the text that are especially challenging, troubling, helpful, important for you.5. Begin a journal in which to jot down reflections, images, stories, notes about your encounterswith the stories of Mark, especially the stories of women, and your encounters with thisparticularly disruptive and demanding Jesus. Write down your responses to the PersonalReflection: Wrestling with Radical Discipleship sections at the end of each chapter.6
6. Place an empty box near the place where you read so that you can collect articles, newspaperclippings, comic strips, photographs, and notes about documentaries, video clips, songs, socialmedia, and other resources that might be useful in shaping your sessions.7. Define your social location, naming your citizenship status, geographic location, gender, age,education, race, ethnicity, family of origin, economic status, marital status, sexual identity,language, physical abilities, identifying what gives you privilege, power, and status in yourlocation. Consider whether or not you are privileged or targeted by the systems and structuresaround you. In my location, for example, those who are white, middle to upper income,somewhere between young and old, heterosexual, male, able-bodied (one of my friends prefersthe term “tab” or temporarily able-bodied) citizens with college educations are privileged,kept powerful by the systems and structures. Reflect on how your social location impactsyour hearing of and response to the Jesus of Mark.8. Engage in the participatory Bible study process. If you are someone with power and economic stability, you may do so without changing your social location (though it is infinitelymore powerful if you can relocate into partnerships with those in the margins), but it is highlyrecommended that you engage the voices and stories of those who have their backs againstthe wall, if not in person, at least through readings, videos, films, poetry, music, and otherforms of art. Test out this participatory Bible study process with a variety of texts.9. As you journey through this study in partnership with the Jesus of Mark’s Gospel, note marksof radical discipleship. Where do you encounter the following in the spiritual growth text andin Mark’s Gospel, and how might they define radical discipleship in Jesus’ name? What mightbe missing from this list?Radical discipleship in Jesus’ name includes: Nurturing beloved community, giving flesh to boundary-breaking, out loud loving; Living as liberated and liberating disciples, personally and communally embodying afaith you can see; Practicing proximity and partnership, listening to and learning from, shaping ministryamong and with those who are systemically oppressed rather than ministry to or for; Embracing salvation as radical personal and communal transformation here and now; Investing in justice rather than charity; publicly and collectively unmasking, naming,engaging, confronting, challenging, disrupting, dismantling and transforming systems andstructures, theologies and policies, empires and cultures of domination and oppression inus and in the world around us; Practicing resurrection day after day, living as a partner in the Jesus movement, refusing tobe complicit with or complacent about, silenced or sidelined by systems and structures ofdomination and death.7
Preparing the ClassroomYou may not have control over which room you will be using for your sessions, but you can shapethe learning environment as a welcoming space no matter what room you have. Explore the roombefore setting anything up, checking acoustics, electrical outlets, Internet connections (make sureyou can easily connect with any video clips or music you might want to use), lighting, temperaturesettings, possibilities for hanging things on walls and the door, potential locations for displays andresource tables. United Methodist Women has secured permission for you to reprint,play, or project the music and videos that are required in the four sessions, theappendix, and the supplementary session. During the Gathering Times, you mayplay the suggested songs or songs of your own choosing as background music only.Arrange the chairs in a circle with the resources you will need somewhere close by. Locate newsprint, easel, markers, and tape near your seat but a little behind the circle. Place a journal on eachchair. Composition books are available from grocery stores for less than a dollar each, and you willbe inviting participants to begin creating covers for their journals during the second session.Create an altar/worship table in the center of the circle, preferably on a low, round table thatis covered with a colorful cloth. Begin with only a few items, perhaps a cross, battery-operatedcandle/s, and a vase or bowl. Additions to the worship table may be made before each session,including items from participants.Locate a table or shelf to display books, magazines, articles, and other resources you might havebrought with you. These could include books from the bibliography.Identify a corner table on which to place all your art supplies: crayons, colored pencils, thinmarkers, chalk, pens, glue, tape, scissors, construction paper, blank white paper, poster boards,colorful pipe cleaners, and other craft items, magazines, newspapers, sticky notes, and index cards.Prepare wall space with room for newsprint and sticky notes for the following topics: Practicing amazement: Participants will be invited to share specific “signs and wonders”in each session so the list will grow. An alternative would be a bowl on the worship table andblank strips of paper so people could write their amazement on a strip and place it in thebowl; participants might be invited to take a slip of paper with them at the end of a session. Unlearning and letting go: Participants will be invited to concretely identify what theybelieve they need to unlearn and how they will let that go. Resisting in order to heal/healing in order to resist: Participants will be invited toidentify practical and concrete ways this is happening. Key words defined in the Introduction: Participants will be invited to explore themeaning of “kin-dom,” “justice,” “liberation/salvation,” “radical discipleship.” Jot downbrief descriptors after each. Parking lot: Participants will be invited to share their questions, struggles, and topics theyhope will be included in the discussions in this space.8
Supply List for Every SessionThe following items should be available at each of the four sessions: Newsprint with easelMarkersTapeJournals and pens (one for each participant)Books and other resources for the sessionsAltar/worship table and accompanying suppliesArt supplies: markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, chalk, pens, glue, tape, constructionpaper, blank white paper, poster board, colorful pipe cleaners, magazines and newspapersfor cutting, sticky notes, and index cardsSession DesignThe sessions in this guide are designed for four two-hour gatherings. Each session includes: centering thoughts, session goal, supply list, and preparation notes followed by an outline for the programitself, which includes a gathering time, opening and closing circles, worship suggestions, optionsfor engaging the texts, and concrete possibilities for personal and communal practices of radicaldiscipleship plus assignments/preparation for the next session. The Appendix also provides anoptional litany or reading for each session that you may use to close your time together.A special supplementary session is also included. This two-hour session provides additionalcontent as needed to engage with the study text and could easily be adapted for a church setting.ENDNOTES1. Please note the use of “kin-dom” in place of the traditional “kingdom.” This term was first coined by Ada Maria IsasiDiaz. It emphasizes relationality, community, and equity as the basis of God’s reign.2. “There Is No White Jesus,” Famalan, British Comedy Guide, BBC Three video, 1:58 minutes, accessed April 12, 2018,comedy.co.uk/tv/famalam/videos/15832/there is no white jesus.3. Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996; first published by Abingdon Press, 1949), 11.9
SESSION 1kFaith We Can SeeFCentering ThoughtsUse these quotes taken from portions of Practicing Resurrectionto focus your mind and heart on our topic for this session.EWe don’t know who wrote Mark. Theodore Jennings, United Methodist elder, theologian, andseminary professor, chooses to use a female pronoun when referring to the anonymous authorof Mark, noting that while we cannot know who the author was, we do know many womenaccompanied Jesus from the beginning to the end of his journey. Jennings writes that womenhave too often “been rendered invisible and anonymous by our male-centered histories, ourmale ecclesial leadership, our male academic and scholarly institutions. Thus, the pronoun ‘she’serves fittingly to designate one who has deliberately chosen this, the lot of women, anonymity,even in the community of Christ.” 1 Following Jennings’ lead, I will use the pronoun “she” for theauthor of Mark as a reminder of the ways in which we silence, dismiss, and invisibilize womenin the Bible and the church—the ways in which leftover patriarchy lives in us so that we arestill startled by the female pronoun for a Gospel writer (page viii).In Mark, discipleship is this fierce and “holy impatience,” 2 an unwillingness to continue withbusiness as usual, with getting by, with going along with the way things are. Twenty-seven timesMark, the shortest Gospel, uses the word “immediately” (NRSV). Mark pushes us forward,pushes us out the door, and pushes us into the streets. We hear her push expressed by whatDr. Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the “fierce urgency of now,” a decisive moment inwhich we must respond (page 10).We are called into a radical discipleship that tears through the structures that get in the wayof healing happening, including structures and policies in the church that maintain narrowtheology, exclusionary policies and practices (page 47).We are called to work together persistently, passionately, creatively, courageously. We are calledto be willing to take risks and be outrageous so that new channels of healing might be opened(page 44).10
Session GoalIdentify our social location and reflect on how that shapes our hearing of and response to theGospel of Mark and Jesus’ invitation into radical discipleship.Supply List Music for the Gathering Time (see suggestions below)Copies of The United Methodist HymnalHandout with the words to the prayers and other readingsBiblesRecording of Lucinda Williams “Born to Be Loved” found online at:youtube.com/watch?v tbCT1HT2nD4&feature youtu.be Create a poster with the images of “Faith We Can See” that are noted in the study text:Leymah Gbowee and her women’s prayer movement in Liberia; South African liberationmovement; civil rights movement in the United States; Movement for Black Lives; StandingRock; Poor People’s Campaign in 1968 and 2018; United Methodists’ Affirmation andReconciling Congregations; sanctuary movement including No More Deaths. You maywant to supply a blank poster board next to this one so that participants can add drawingsor images of other examples obtained from magazines, newspapers, and the Internet.Credit: “Born to Be Loved.” by Lucinda Williams. 2010 UMG Recordings, Inc.Preparation Notes1. Review your writings about your social location and how that might impact your engagementwith the texts and Jesus’ invitation to radical discipleship. Ask yourself: Are you among thegroups targeted by the systems of oppression, or are you among the groups privileged bythos
Practicing Resurrection: The Gospel of Mark and Radical Discipleship, is to encounter Jesus as liberator and to respond to Christ’s call to radical discipleship, so we can experience freedom as whole persons through Jesus Christ and live out a vision of society based on the kin-dom. 1 of God.
May 02, 2018 · D. Program Evaluation ͟The organization has provided a description of the framework for how each program will be evaluated. The framework should include all the elements below: ͟The evaluation methods are cost-effective for the organization ͟Quantitative and qualitative data is being collected (at Basics tier, data collection must have begun)
Silat is a combative art of self-defense and survival rooted from Matay archipelago. It was traced at thé early of Langkasuka Kingdom (2nd century CE) till thé reign of Melaka (Malaysia) Sultanate era (13th century). Silat has now evolved to become part of social culture and tradition with thé appearance of a fine physical and spiritual .
On an exceptional basis, Member States may request UNESCO to provide thé candidates with access to thé platform so they can complète thé form by themselves. Thèse requests must be addressed to esd rize unesco. or by 15 A ril 2021 UNESCO will provide thé nomineewith accessto thé platform via their émail address.
̶The leading indicator of employee engagement is based on the quality of the relationship between employee and supervisor Empower your managers! ̶Help them understand the impact on the organization ̶Share important changes, plan options, tasks, and deadlines ̶Provide key messages and talking points ̶Prepare them to answer employee questions
Dr. Sunita Bharatwal** Dr. Pawan Garga*** Abstract Customer satisfaction is derived from thè functionalities and values, a product or Service can provide. The current study aims to segregate thè dimensions of ordine Service quality and gather insights on its impact on web shopping. The trends of purchases have
Chính Văn.- Còn đức Thế tôn thì tuệ giác cực kỳ trong sạch 8: hiện hành bất nhị 9, đạt đến vô tướng 10, đứng vào chỗ đứng của các đức Thế tôn 11, thể hiện tính bình đẳng của các Ngài, đến chỗ không còn chướng ngại 12, giáo pháp không thể khuynh đảo, tâm thức không bị cản trở, cái được
RESURRECTION by NEVILLE GODDARD There is nothing to change but our concept of self. As soon as we succeed in transforming self, our world will dissolve and reshape itself in harmony with that which our change affirms. 1. CONTENTS 1. P R A Y E R T H E A R T O F B E L I E V I N G, p. 3 2. FEELING IS THE SECRET, p. 32File Size: 831KBPage Count: 126Explore furtherBehold! The Power of Resurrection Sermon Outlineluzerneumc.orgTHE PURPOSE AND POWER OF HIS RESURRECTION Study .sermons.faithlife.comTHE POWER OF THE RESURRECTION (Easter Message)cdn.pbc.orgRESURRECTION POWER – USE IT OR LOSE ITlofj.comExperience the Power of the Resurrection Every Daywww.crosswalk.comRecommended to you b
Required Texts: Harris, Ann Sutherland. Seventeenth Century Art and Architecture, 1st or 2nd edition will work, only 2nd edition available in book store Harr, Jonathan. The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece. Optional Text: Scotti, R.A. Basilica: The Splendor and the Scandal: The Building of St. Peters’s; Barnett, Sylvan.
