Bumper Sticker of the Week

Montana Slim String Band

I've written in the past about my brother's band: Montana Slim String Band. They're on a national tour this summer and just released this fun acoustic video.

Liberal Left-out in the Outfield

I went to worship today at a Northern California PC(USA) church. Downtown, the historic congregation advertises 2 services online (as well as their 2008 Christmas Eve Service). As I arrived late (I am on vacation - one of my joys "going to church late since I'm not in charge") I discovered that the service was actually a small circle of a dozen folks gathered around the pastor. The sermon was on the text Exodus 20:1-17 (the giving of the 10 commandments), supposedly addressing the them of Sabbath Rest. What I heard of the sermon was actually a droning on about the foolishness of those that advocate creationism and the evils of their stupidity. The handful of faithful huddled around the pastor resembled a half-time gathering around the coach, seeking to reboot the team with verbose and borderline-violent comments about the "other team." I didn't stay. I found myself wanting more than a polarizing speech motivating me to stand tough against the other guys.

I thought about my recent past experiences in church, most notably one that was on the other side of the political spectrum, at which I heard a sermon about the evils of homosexuality and the liberal agenda in the PC(USA), which was supposedly to address prayer. Maybe our church traditions are bankrupt - on both sides of the spectrum? We don't seem to be able to say much besides "the other team is bad", "we've got to stick together," "the church is declining because of those that don't think like us." It sure seems that such half-time huddle talk is easier to reproduce than to dialog about what Jesus taught and how to live it today. (Jesus, who in my reading never actually blamed or simply attacked the other side, but rather invited all participants in the dialog to a new way of being and looking at the world. Those that rejected his inversion of the polarizing fight simply judged themselves.)

I left the church and walked downtown passing cafes filled with people reading the paper, talking about each others' dogs and living in the moment. I passed numerous walkers: out savoring the early morning air and calm with an urban stroll. They all seemed to be more in the moment, addressing the life that they're living, than getting angry about things that happened in the past or were done by the other team. The liberal, as well as the conservative evangelical churches I visited, both seemed to be left out, like a kid playing in the outfield grass while the game is happening in the infield. Maybe that's why our church attendance is actually in decline today? We seem to be much better at preaching politics and/or prosperity than we do participation.

Market Rearch

I recently worshipped at the San Rafael Sunday Farmer's Market.  It was an experience that brought some reflections on Church faith community worship.

At the market diverse people gathered together to search for fantastically fresh food that they hungered for.  The stalls were lined together with a tidal wave splash of multiple-colors, textures, shapes and sizes.  The seating area (pictured above) and located next to a quality espresso-making coffee stand was filled to capacity at 9am.  There wasn't any magical formula per say that maxed out the parking lot at a time when it's becoming increasingly easier to find a spot in most church parking lots.  The merchants offered what people wanted and repeatedly want.  Maybe the market has a lot to teach those of us wanting to help the church to change, to better address the context we live in today.

I'm not advocating that the church such do whatever our cultural context dictates, yet it does provide some avenues for action.  In the market aesthetics were important.  They didn't replace the quality of the goods for sale.  Yet they enticed people to leave the school-like stream of market shoppers swimming through the isles to pause and linger at a given stall and potentially make a purchase.  It was the same thing, nearly a ritual, that occurs every Sunday - yet an attention to aesthetics: appearance, color, space, smell, light made a difference.  I mean how much can you doll up a tomato?  And yet I was taken aback by the colors and shapes that were present.  Maybe that in part is something we're lacking, maybe through our deeply grounded and vital roots in the reformation traditions of our ancestors we through the baby out with the bath water.  We do need aesthetics to fathom and contemplate the divine.  We do want quality, to not just be told what to buy - or do - but to discover for ourselves, to be empowered to become full participants.  In the market that might be a seller sharing a recipe, or giving tips on what to do with food that's bought.  Maybe in the church we need to do more teaching, or empowering in terms of spiritual disciplines: ways in which the common person can be involved, creatively responding by faith to the world as opposed to passively listening to a sermon.  At this fish stand I heard such conversations emerging while I lingered for a few minutes.  Unfortunately my last Sunday worship experiences haven't included any sort of similar dialogs.

There were so many young families at the Market.  None seemed to be rushing off for church.  Maybe that's Southern Marin for you.  And maybe it's a lesson for the church: a school room for us to attend to in view of catching a glimpse of how the church might re-become more relevant for our culture and context.

Moving to Poissy

A week from today we'll be arriving in our new home, Poissy, France 

(located about 15 miles from the center of Paris).  We've been working towards this for about 2 years, and concretely for the past 4 months: moving, shipping, cleaning, chucking and renting.  Our children have alternated from crying when tired about "wanting to return to our old house in Oakland" to "I'm excited to move.  Can we do it today?"  So now the time is finally coming.  I think we're all a bit fearful and also excited to finally make the move after so many goodbyes and transitions.

Poissy is a town outside of Paris, known historically for a failed attempt of reconciliation between French Catholics and Protestants in 1561, a Peugeit car factory and (new to me) a liquor  made from distilled apricot pits (Noyau de Poissy) - I must try!  Poissy's 36,000 inhabitants are similar in make up to Oakland: diverse in culture, racial background, social class and wealth.

We go there because I've accepted a call to serve as pastor of the Poissy parish of the Eglise Reformée de France (the historic, native protestant church of France: the church of the Reformation and Jean Calvin: who was actually French not Swiss).  This community has diverse ages, enough children and youth for them to take on a building project for more room, and a multicultural perspective in membership and leadership. Although I have a vague idea of what I'll be doing, I don't really know until we go.

In thinking about blogging and exploring the use of technology and online social networking in this next season I'm not committing to any strategies until we assume our new context, and I am anticipating to:

1.  start a new blog in French

2.  continue Montewskewed, but with some tweaking: I want to focus it more, turning to the theme "thoughts on Fatherhood, food, faith and life in France."  Not sure about the bumper stickers, as they don't really do that in France....I might need to stock up before leaving.

Bumper Sticker of the Week

Summer Camp Memories

Now that I've stopped working I finally have the time to finish some past work projects. I guess that's the irony of work. We came with the youth of our church to Central Camp week 2 at Westminster Woods earlier this summer. It was great fun and here's a quick video that highlights some of what we experienced together.

Untitled from Monte McClain on Vimeo.

Bumper Sticker of the Week

Ode to Oakland 12 | the YMCA

Of everything I've experienced in Oakland I think that the Downtown Oakland YMCA on Broadway is perhaps the best image and metaphor of Oakland. Diverse people gathered

together to work out and seek greater health, have fun, build community and invest in the community of Oakland. You see every body type from overly thick to marathon-runner thin, every shade of skin color, babies to octogenarians, yoga disciples to body builders to swim lesson kids to those wanting to soak in a jacuzzi. Activities range from spin classes to dance classes, from groups meeting for dinner to night-out kid-friendly activities for parents desperate to have a night off. And the membership costs are on a sliding scale, ensuring that everyone has access that they can afford and then those that can financially empower others to be a part of the community can do so too. It's Oakland at its best.

Ode to Oakland 11 | The Views

I was at the Oakland Zoo yesterday and reminded of the amazing views of Oakland that I take for granted every day. Where else can you drive through an inner-city context and then be in a Redwood forest within 15 minutes without taking a freeway or leaving the city? I love the diversity of Oakland: people, food, shopping, body types, music, art...and the topography, geography and views. Here are my top 8:

1. Inner-city to Redwood Forest back to the Urban Jungle: Start at 880 & 35th Avenue. Drive up 35th over and past the 580 as it becomes Redwood Road. At the top of the hill, turn left on Skyline, stay left at the fork onto Joaquin Miller Road and continue down. At 580 it becomes Lincoln Ave., later it's Champion Street (at MacArthur) there turn right onto MacArthur then left onto Fruitvale and follow it back to the 880. Great driving view of the city.

2. View of the Hills and the whole bay are from the Sky Ride at Oakland Zoo (worth the $2.50 on a clear day).

3. View of the city from the rooftop of the Oakland Kaiser Parking Lot (free if you leave within 30 minutes)

4. View of it all while circling Lake Merritt

5. View of the rooftops of the urban jungle, including church spires, looking towards the hills from the Elliptical Machine Room at the YMCA on Broadway

6. View anywhere within Middle Harbor Shoreline Park

7. From the Mormon Temple parking lot (both SF and Oakland downtowns line up together)

8. At the top of Hiller Drive above the Claremont

Ode to Oakland 10 | Lake Merritt

Oakland wouldn't be Oakland without Lake Merritt. It stinks and still we go. It's been covered with signs, walls, construction stuff for months yet still the sidewalks and lake banks are filled with frolickers, runners, walker-pushers and tai chi doers. Located in the middle of the city it's a perfect living metaphor for the beautiful complexity that Oakland is: crime, skylines, the hills, parks, the new cathedral, urban decay that shows us not so much that beauty is in the beholder, but that each thing is beautiful.

Each day begins with numerous boot campers working out around the lake at the east end (pictured) and on the stairs as the sun rises, and ends with folks enjoying breath-taking views of the city at sunset (usually admiring the fog located across the bay in our more famous sister city). Is it any wonder that the take has been taken over by the immigrant Canadian Geese and their excrement? Maybe that too is an appropriate metaphor for the challenges that face our city: beauty that invites and in the invitation creates the problems that keep the city from becoming the beauty its destined to be.

Religion: appealing to the faithful or faithless?

I've been thinking all week about a recent church experience and the division that is so dominant in our church system. A friend was interviewed for a pastor job and recently asked can you work with both "pro-gay and anti-gay" people. Hmmm. What a question? And maybe it's actually going in the direction we most often avoid. We tend to always polarize, preaching to our choir: those that support our views, as opposed to dialoging with the larger community. When I encounter Jesus of Nazareth in the gospels he seems to be more about the larger inviting dialog to a new counter-cultural life-transforming community than recementing existing divisions and lines in the sand.

Newsweek ran an article entitled "losing their religion" this past week talking about the challenges of portraying faith on tv. Executives feel the pressure to either create entertainment that appeals to the faithful by maintaining some sort of orthodox context and lose the faithless, or work towards the faithless in creative new stories and incur the wrath of the fearful faithful. Maybe that's the tension the church should be in more. Maybe if we were in our leadership, teaching and community hospitality Christian worship could become more of a crossroads of beliefs and growth than an impasse of doctrine rigidity and moral certainty, all while professing and deepening faith. I know that's the sort of church/faith community I'd want to be part of.

My favorite show these days (The Wire) has a church character [the Deacon] addressing the problems of inner city Baltimore that recently summoned his vocation in a conversation with an inner city cop: "Church folks got to be all up in everybody's shit." The Deacon meant that it's his duty to be involved in other lives, knowing what's going on in order to empower collaboration through invitation to working together in integrative contexts. Maybe that's gospel for us today: living out a call to be with other (and maybe even everyone), rather than merely defining ourselves by what we're against.

Ode to Oakland 9 |

Community Educators & Educating Communities

When it comes to Oakland there's a lot of talk about education. The power of Oakland Unified School District was just returned to the city after exiting receivership and a take over (sometimes hostile) by the State of California. When you talk with people leaving Oakland, or thinking about making that choice, it's almost always around schools and/or crime. I've blogged a lot on it, torn from the challenges of education our children in public schools in the city, excited and at times overwhelmed by the inequity and systemic stuck-ness. And it's not just OUSD that educates our children.

We've been part of a cooperative preschool community for several years. As we leave that space and community I'm reminded that it does take "a village to raise a child." That we've been blessed to have our two children loved and known by other kids and families, and for our family to love and know other children and families. The diversity (cultural, class, financial, educational) of our city is amazing and shows up in our kids. It's also a huge challenge to those that work in education. How to you meet, respond to, let alone simply articulate the myriad needs that exist.

I've been repeatedly amazed by the passion of those who work in education in Oakland, life-long commitments (in many cases to the city that they grew up in) of educators to empowering the citizens of Oakland. Heroes for me, who recognize the sickness and stuck-ness of the system yet refuse to be complacent, hopeless or apathetic. They form a great cloud of witnesses I think of when I lose hope. Their example lifts me up to push on to finish the race we all are running together as a city community: Gary and Caroline Yee, Di-Di, Gail Murphy, Brook Pessin, Mel Stenger, Misato Araki. We should be hearing more about such heroes as a city. Katy Murphy at the Oakland Tribune does this to some extent on her blog: The Education Report

Ode to Oakland 8 | Oaklandish

Founded in 2000, this community of artists | renegades | organizers has got to

be one of the most under-noticed political gathering powers of Oakland. Their t-shirts are everywhere, worn with great pride.

Their great website says it all, in particular with the home page that directs you to shopping and/or community. [www.oaklandish.org] I believe that Oaklandish does more than our Mayor and City Council to increase civic pride, empower civic activism, and generate good energy for our always-struggling city.

Here's a blurb from their site that spells out the Oaklandish vision and purpose for both artistic creation and community organizing. (there's also a glimpse of their newest t-shirt)

Representing the strange luster & oddball spirit that is East Bay Life.

It appears that Oakland pride is quite contagious! It's nice to see the proliferation of different Oakland T-shirt designs currently hitting the racks. But as you know, our roots run way deeper than any screen-print could ever convey. The true purpose here is to creatively promote our enduring love for "original Oakland charm" in the face of a constantly mutating culture, population and landscape. When you rock the roots, you evoke all the hidden history & rebel spirit of The Town, in its many incarnations. This way successive generations of young Oaklanders can gain a deeper understanding of the place they call home. Thanks for helping to spread the local love.

Ode to Oakland 7 | Big Longs

Big Longs would have to be on this list. An Oakland institution, that supposedly is moving and/or becoming another store after a recent buy out, it's not called Longs Drugs. It is the place to purchase anything under the sun. From fresh fruit, to beer, to toothpaste, to nice Buddha statutes, to the fantastic (best one in Oakland) nursery, to the best place for ethnic/cultured fabrics, to multiple types of garden manure, to my favorite watch repair guy: this store has it all. [previous Monteskewed blog post]

It has my favorite parking lot to troll in search of good bumper stickers: I always find a gem there each time I come.

It often served as my "therapy" place of choice as I'd take a break and cruise the nursery section coveting the plants for sale (a licensed counselor probably would have been cheaper for me in the end).

It's also great because it's Oakland: the mix of people shopping and working there from all slices of life, class sub-categories, cultural backgrounds - shopping together and so often giving and getting good gardening tips while waiting in line.

Bumper Sticker of the Week

Ode to Oakland 6 | The Food

My wife and I went to breakfasts (yes plural, we did several places) Thursday with some good friends who are some of the most experienced East Bay foodies I know. Munching donuts with lattes at Pizzaola and talking about food I was reminded of how many great places for food there are in Oakland from expensive to cheap as in nationally known Taco Trucks.

It's not just about the food - which is great in so many places. It's also about the experience, from the decor to the space, to the location to the smells. For me one of the great images of this foodie creativity in Oakland is the ironing-board laden sidewalks in front of Bakesale Betty. (I think they look as fun and good as those fried chicken sandwiches taste).

So many places to experience good food from around the world: from Ethiopian lined Telegraph to the Central American experience of the Fruitvale District, from the places emerging in Uptown to the sit-down beauties of Rockridge and College Ave.

Some of my absolute favorites, that I'll miss in moving, including drinks on the terrace at Cesar's on Piedmont Ave., the pommes frites at A Cote, the pizza at Zachary's, the samosas at Shaan, and the chocolatines at La Farine. So much food. So many restaurants. Never enough money!!!

These foodie friends might start at blog on the 100 best food things in Oakland at www.oaklandeats.blogspot.com. I hope that they do !

Preaching Polarization: the easy way out

My family and I went to worship at the church I grew up in yesterday to say goodbye and be commissioned. It's a faith community that has chosen to leave the Presbyterian Church (USA) to join the Evangelical Presbyterian Church because of a disagreement over doctrine, specifically in terms of stances regarding sexuality, ordination and how to articulate and profess Christian faith in a pluralistic world. While I haven't made the same doctrinal choice and relational position in terms of the church denomination that I've grown up in, I still can call that church home. I was overwhelmed by the greetings of folks whose children I grew up with, the support and the genuine enthusiasm for our family and the way in which we are choosing to follow Jesus by moving to France. I was struck during a commissioning prayer time by the reality that life isn't black or white, that relationships are confusing and messy (that's what makes them so rich) and that life is much more a labyrinth sort of road composed of twists and turns, then a road with a fork that either has a "good" or "wrong" path to follow. A dimension of my perspective on that is well articulated by an article in today's SF Gate on the Labyrinth at Grace Cathedral.

As the service went on and the preaching began I was overwhelmed. The sermon was intended to be upon prayer, how to, why and what for. Yet it proceeded to be an enthusiastic encouragement to pray and to do so often [to which I say amen!] that was brought to a climactic conclusion by a sudden polarizing proclamation that the PC(USA) is evil for its stance in terms of working towards the ordination of gay and lesbian followers of Jesus and for some of non-black-and-white articulations of Christian faith in a pluralistic world. I respect the difference of opinion, and actually believe I'm pushed to deeper faith and more thoughtful world-view perspective through the dialog in diverse understandings of the teachings of Jesus and the "Christian tradition". Yet I was disappointed for the sermon on prayer slipped into a polarizing war-crime, or rally around the pole speech about how the PC(USA) is evil and God-rejecting liberals who blow with the wind as opposed to the morally righteous and justified ones that have left that behind. I felt personally attacked as what I believe was lifted up as anti-Christian, and almost evil. I wondered what that had to do with prayer? I wondered how such polarizing talk of good versus evil can lead us to a deeper understanding and experience of community as followers of Jesus. I don't think that it can or does.

I probably make a similar more, on the other side of the spectrum. And I wonder do we have to rally the troops against someone else, or the "opposing side" or is there not anything deeper in the teachings of Jesus that push us towards a both/and understanding of the implications of his ethical teachings and spiritual guidance which we often embody in our moral choices and political actions? It seems like such finger-pointing is simply the easy way out, denying that the world in which we live, and navigate as people of faith is more like the twisty turns of a labyrinth than the straight lines and black-and-white choices of a forking road.

Ode to Oakland 5 | Fairyland

This is one of my favorite places in Oakland. So many good memories for us - ranging from fun times to E breaking her leg at the age of 2. It's a unique place - open for more than 50 years - that reflects the spirit, passion and potential of Oakland. I'll miss walking through the shoe to enter the land of keys, dragon slides, bubbles, that incredibly slow train and so many memories.

I love the puppet shows. Amazing. The kids love it. It's great conversation time for adults. It's also the best parent people watching in Oakland: you can see the sleep deprivation on the majority of parental folks there.

It has one of my favorite vegetable gardens in Oakland: always beautiful and filled with good organic stuff.

It also has a great selection of native plants at bargain basement prices. An well-kept secret.

Ode to Oakland 4 | The Mormon Temple

I wouldn't actually say that the temple is pretty. I think it looks much more like a missile silo. And it's the thing that our kids always identify and use to articulate where they are in Oakland. It's definitely one of the best places to visit for Christmas lights during December. I think it's like the manger on steroids. Architecturally I think it's a nightmare. I struggle to understand how it was allowed to be built.

I love the Temple because it's so vocal. You can see the missile-resembling turrets from across the bay as you approach SFO. It's also one of my top 5 views of Oakland. I love to get a slurpee at the 7-11 at Champion and MacArthur drive up the hill, park in the parking lot, and take it all in. A perfect break. (Of course my cell phone camera doesn't quite do the view of Oaktown and SF out through the Golden Gate justice.)