[Oe List ...] overlap and overload and

[David Dunn]

Dick Kroeger posted this note to the Dialogue listserv...and just for the
sake of comprehensive coverage, it needs to be before the OE Community
listserv members as well.

This is a call to the Order Ecumenical, is it not.

David


**** 
From: Tikkun/Network of Spiritual Progressives <community at tikkun.org>
Reply-To: <Tikkun at mail.democracyinaction.org>
Date: Mon, 8 May 2006 00:20:24 -0400 (EDT)
To: <kroegerd at aol.com>
Subject: Clergy Cabinet (advisory board) for NSP in formation--help us find
the right clergy for this.

Who do you know who ought to be on our Clergy Cabinet (advisory board)?

The Clergy Cabinet meets once a month on a phone conference call and gives
us advice about how to best build the Network of Spiritual Progressives.

 

The issues include:

1. How to deepen our spiritual understanding and share that with our
membership without appearing to be prosyletizing for any given specific
religious perspective.

2. How to support the liberal and progressive voices in our churches,
synagogues, mosques, and ashrams and provide them with a way to function as
an alternative voice both to those who are supporting the materialistic,
militaristic, and narcissistic assumptions of the dominant society in which
we live, but also to provide an alternative to the chicken-heartedness of
many of the good people in each religious community who think that "unity"
or "saving the denomination" requires that they soft-pedal their own highest
vision of the good for fear that they might antagonize those who disagree
with them. 

3. How to develop ritual. prayer, meditation, and forms of spiritual
togetherness in an interfaith organization like ours that seeks to avoid
lowest-common-denominator forms that really satisfy no one, and yet that
speak across traditional religious boundaries. For example: how to have
spiritual content to a local meeting, or to a local demonstration or public
event that fits these needs.

4. How to  reach into religioius communities not adequately represented in
the NSP to date.

5. How to build church, synagogue, mosque or ashram related NSP local
chapters without dominating them as "the clergy" in them--or how to put
together a clergy support group of NSP clergy in a given area.

6. How to best advocate for the Spiritual Covenant with America and build
the links to the best in our own religious traditions.

7. Reflecting on what a Sabbatical Year could be if we were to seek a
society in which this Biblical injunction was taken as seriously as some
people now take injunctions against homosexuality--and assuming t hat we
sought to have the same Sabbatical Year for everyone in the society, so that
the entire society was, as the bible intends, resting from work the same
year as everyone else.

8. How to use our skills to provide support and healing to people within the
NSP so that they can be more effective allies in building a spiritual
politics.

9. How do we build a New Bottom Line into the functioning and thinking that
goes on in our own churches, synagogues,mosques and ashrams.

And much more.

So, are you a clergy person who should be in this? Or do you know someone
who ought to be?  If so, please ask them to send an email to
RabbiLerner at tikkun.org telling about themselves.

We are looking for clergy who:

1. Read and resonate with the analysis and the Spiritual Covenant with
America that are presented in Rabbi Lerner's book The Left Hand of God:
Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right.

2. Read and felt comfortable with an organization as described in the Q&A
about NSP   www.spiritualprogressives.org/q-and-a

3. Are excited about the NSP and see it as one of the most hopeful signs of
the possibility of a real religious left revival in the 21st century

4. Are not afraid to publicly identify with the NSP and tell others that
they ought to join it, donate to it, and help make it work.

 
So, if you know some ordained clergy (Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu,
Buddhist, etc.) who fit this (or you yourself are such), please:

Send an email letter to RabbiLerner at tikkun.org describing their own path,
why they want to help advise and build Tikkun, and what parts of The Left
Hand of God they most resonated to and what parts they had doubts about or
completely disagreed with (and why). And tell us about your own spiritual
path and how affiliation with NSP works in conjunction with your spiritual
life.

A first meeting of the Clergy Cabinet will take place face-to-face at the
NSP conference May 17-20 in D.C. (more info on the conference:
www.spiritualprogressives.org).