Posts Tagged: "Reconciliation"

Celebrate The Victory And Embrace The Burden

Brian Dolleman - January 16, 2017 - Life With God, Uncategorized

My church celebrates MLK Day each year. Yesterday, our friend Tiffany Bluhm spoke in all three services. She’s an immigrant – adopted from an orphanage in Delhi, India and raised by a white family in an all-white community (for the first 10 years of her life). Tiffany and her husband Derek adopted their son Jericho from Uganda in 2013. She’s passionate about the subjects of race, reconciliation, and justice.

In the morning service, while talking about the Martin Luther King holiday, she said:

I hope you don’t just binge-watch HGTV tomorrow on MLK day. Celebrate the victory… and embrace the burden.

After nodding my head and saying amen, I took my bulletin and wrote down a short list of suggestions – other things to… Read More

He Told Me He Was Muslim & Asked If He Could Attend My Church

Brian Dolleman - July 29, 2016 - Life With God, Uncategorized

For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. —2 Corinthians 5.19

A few years ago, I noticed a new family at the church – husband and wife along with their three kids. They were good at slipping in and out of church quickly… but I hunted them down, introduced myself, got their names. I made it a point to chat with them – even if just for a few seconds – each Sunday.

After a few months, the husband asked if we could meet. He seemed like he had something heavy to share with me. At lunch, he told me how he had served time in prison – about a decade. After getting out, he met his wife. She’s the one who got the family coming to church.

Then he got to the point. He said, “In prison, I… Read More

We Gotta Pay Attention

Brian Dolleman - July 7, 2016 - Life With God, Uncategorized

It’s hard to pay attention to something (or someone) you’re not close to. Closeness invites attention.

God is the creator of all human beings, with all their differences, their colors, their races, their religions. Be attentive: Every time you draw nearer to your neighbor, you draw nearer to God. Be attentive: Every time you go farther from your neighbor, you go farther from God.

—Saint Dorotheos of Gaza

Wow.

This is particularly convicting in our day because we have become so damn gifted at villainizing the other side. Whether it’s the other political party, the other faith, the other quarterback, the other skin color, the other sexual orientation, the other…

It’s as if we’ve become so hyped-up on detailing all the reasons why the other is our enemy that we completely forgot Jesus’ command to love our enemies. And neighbors. And brothers. Everyone, really. The command is to love.

“Our life is love, and peace, and tenderness;

and bearing with one another, and forgiving one another, and not laying accusations one against another;

but praying one for another, and helping one another up with a tender hand.” —Isaac Pennington

We gotta pay attention.

Tom Berlin said, “Being church means moving from the fortified position of… Read More

Cops, Convicted Felons, Communion, & Church

Brian Dolleman - April 21, 2016 - Life With God, Uncategorized

*picture above: Barry (left) and Don (right) at church together last night

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Cops, convicted felons, communion, and church… these concepts might, at first glance, seem like they are worlds apart, but if we pause and think about it long enough, we’ll see how beautifully they go together.

Barry shared his story at church last night. He committed a violent crime when he was 13 years old, was sentenced to die in jail – life without the possibility of parole. The youngest in our country to ever receive this sentence, Barry was placed in a Washington state adult prison at the age of 15. It is a miracle that he is out today. Because of the work of Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative, the laws have been changed making life without parole sentences no longer possible for children.

After serving 29 years in prison, Barry Massey was released because of these new reforms. He has never stepped foot inside a high school, and has never driven a car, having spent his teens, twenties, and thirties behind prison walls.

Don, a Seattle police officer who attends our church, was also at the… Read More

Coretta

Brian Dolleman - April 20, 2016 - Life With God, Uncategorized

*from A.J. Swoboda’s book A Glorious Dark

* * *

I think of the Christmas my mom and I flew to Atlanta to visit my dad while he was in treatment. Near the end of our visit, we walked around old downtown Atlanta on a Sunday morning. We entered this old church building that Mom said was famous. It was my very first, however fleeting, experience of being a racial minority—we were the only white people in the whole place. I learned at that point in my life that black people seem to love God way louder and more rhythmically than white people do.

Black people worship with their… Read More

Yes. This Is Still An Issue Today. (Segregation In The Church)

Brian Dolleman - January 19, 2015 - Life With God, Uncategorized

The headline of an article I read last week shocked me. It announced:

Sunday Morning in America Still Segregated – and That’s OK With Worshipers

It was the findings of a study conducted by LifeWay Research – and here’s what they had to say…

Sunday morning remains one of the most segregated hours in American life, with more than 8 in 10 congregations (86%) made up of one predominant racial group. And most worshipers like it that way.

Two-thirds of American churchgoers (67 percent) say their church has done enough to become racially diverse. Less than half think their church should become more diverse.

Researchers also found churchgoers who oppose more diversity do so with gusto. A third (33 percent) strongly disagree… Read More

Racism & Reconciliation In The Church

Brian Dolleman - January 18, 2015 - Guest Posts, Life With God, Uncategorized

Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day – and with that theme in mind, here are two posts I think are worth your time…

This post, Everything I Know About Racism I Learned in the Church by Christena Cleveland. The opening paragraph reveals one of Christena’s earliest memories of church:

Exasperated, she yelled at the top of her lungs, “Get in here, niggers!!” Being six and all, I had no idea what the word nigger meant; I just knew that it referred to me and… Read More