This Sabbath is the last of 2009. Where do the years go? As my family and I prepare to celebrate our fifth Christmas in Hollywood we have been remembering God’s blessings in our lives. When I think about those blessings, what I see in my mind’s eye are faces: your face and the dozens of others that have blessed us these years.

Every Christmas we’ve spent in Hollywood has been different. Some have been punctuated by intense and painful personal loss, with others filled by genuine joy. Last Christmas I had the privileged of uniting Angie and Matt in marriage (Happy Anniversary, you two!).

When I think about our two girls, Zoe and Sophie, I’m reminded that they’ve spent more than half of their lives with you. Zoe was only four (4) when we moved here and Sophie had just turned two (2). Now they are becoming young ladies. Nothing makes me happier than to watch them interact with so many of you who they consider big brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandmas and grandpas.

2009 has been a challenging year for me. It didn’t have the “Wow” factor that 2008 did, when the church grew so quickly and our Missional Action Teams were cranking out all kinds of new ministries. This year has been a little more “steady as she goes.”
But I think we’ve grown deeper this year. Last January we sat in the chapel together and asked ourselves what we wanted to see in 2009. Overwhelmingly we said we wanted to go deeper in our relationships with God and each other. We certainly have not yet arrived at that place, but we’ve made some significant steps, such as the next Missional Action Team being prepared for the new year.

Our leadership had deepened in a big way. This year we’ve welcomed Nathan French to our team. He has led out in our Peace & Justice ministry in ways that we could not have imagined before he arrived. This coming year is only going to be better, as we develop a non-profit organization to extend our community work and deepen our commitment to justice through our partnerships with LA Voice, Imagine LA and others.

We also started a brand new venture this year called Cinema Divina and so welcomed Julia Alty to our staff. Her imagination, personal magnetism and hard work have already begun to bear fruit in many creative projects that will only grow in 2010. God has brought so many talented and creative people to this place at this time. I’m on the edge of my seat with anticipation about what God will do next.

I also want to thank Cecilia Luck, who has stepped into the very large vacancy left by Lennox and has already proven herself more than capable of administering the church and our relationships with our partners in the community. Scott Arany has assumed the other half of what Lennox was doing and is already making plans to grow our worship and music ministry in directions we’ve only been able to dream about until now. Pastor Wayne Jones continues to serve as a volunteer member of our staff and uses his incredible social work background to serve the members of our church in ways that even make me tired. Finally, our church board faithful keeps us focused on our mission and provides essential accountability. Thank you to all our tireless leaders who make this ministry possible! I can’t imagine doing this without you. I wouldn’t want to.

I hope you’ll pause for an hour or so this coming week and think about this past year and what it’s meant to you. Think about the important people in your life and take a minute to thank them for what they’ve done to make this year special to you. Think about the ways God has grown you in 2009 through the trials and through the good times and give thanks to God!

May you be richly blessed this week wherever you are, and whomever you’re with.

Merry Christmas!

Ryan

The pastor’s journal

Only two more Sabbaths in 2009. That’s remarkable, really. I’m finding it hard to identify the markers that divide one year from the next. That’s actually one of the beautiful things about the Christian seasons. They help us mark time. And not just any time, but sacred time. They help us measure our days by the narrative of God’s life among us. So we recall, last Advent, and last Lent and last Easter, where we were as a congregation.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about where we are this Advent as compared to last. The one thing that seems constant around our church is that very little is constant. Things are always in flux. I’ve heard many of you joke that if you miss one Sabbath the whole church might be different: new people in attendance, new romances formed…you name it.

But beyond many of those changes I feel like 2009 has been a year of maturing for us. We haven’t grown all that much in numbers—maybe 5%. But we have grown immensely in our maturity as a congregation. Our leadership team has grown. We have new ministries that are serving God’s kingdom in Los Angeles. We have a staff of six amazing leaders this year, whereas last Advent we had two. And our growing staff has not made our church top heavy, in my opinion. They have instead broadened the base of the ministry we’re able to perform. For this I am immensely grateful!

In 2009 we spend serious time in reflection and discernment…again. That discernment process has led to some concrete goals for the 2010. Next week in this space I’ll write a bit about my hopes and dreams for 2010. In the meantime, what are you thankful for as we are about to log 2009 in the history books? Where has God been at work in your life this year? How have you grown? What have been your setbacks? Your victories?

Advent Peace,

Ryan

How can we learn to live as new people in the midst of an old world? This is not only our challenge. It is our calling.

You may have missed it, but over the course of this past year, our congregation has come full circle on the discernment process that began four years ago. In January 2009 we conducted another thorough survey of the church membership. Throughout the Spring and Summer several listening groups met to discuss in depth what they were seeing in this snapshot of our church. This Fall the Church Board took all that information—the survey/snapshot and the copious notes that the listening groups—and went away on a day-long retreat. Through prayer, Bible reflection and lots of conversation we began to distill what we were hearing down to one primary challenge.

We asked ourselves, in the development of our congregation’s life, what is the next major missional challenge that we are facing? Put a different way, “If we are to continue to grow into a congregation that bears witness to our friends and neighbors concerning the reality of God’s kingdom, what is the next step along that journey?”

To answer that question we took many steps over the course of a year, in the midst of dozens of other events and activities, to listen to you.

Last night, the board voted on a question that we feel captures what we’ve been hearing from you. This question is loaded, but we think it represents a serious adaptation that is required if our church is to grow misisonally. Here is:

“What kind of relational structures would we need to create in order to foster intentional covenant community that forms us, by the Spirit, in the image of Christ as a communal witness to God’s kingdom in our neighborhood?”

I am not going to attempt to unpack that question right now. I would love for you to live with it for a while. Take it home. Read it over and over. Think about it. What does it mean to you? And if after reading it a few times you’d like to be a part of a very special group of people who will work over the course of several months on understanding this question and innovating a new phase of our congregation’s life, then please contact me at the church office or by email.

2010 is going to be a great year! God is preparing us for some amazing work and I’m honored to be on this journey with you.

Advent Peace,

Ryan

Each year it strikes me with renewed force just how far our culture’s celebration of Christmas is from the events recorded in the Gospels upon which Christmas is based. While trees and lights and gift giving and receiving is wonderful (the most wonderful time of the year) this is not what Christmas is about. Nor is it about that warm Christmas feeling some of us long for. When you read the Biblical narratives about the coming of Jesus into our world you realize it is anything but sentimental.

What we must always keep in mind is that Christianity is about things that happened in history. These are concrete realities and while we must always work to read our place and time in fresh ways in light of these ancient stories, we must not make the mistake that so many Christians have made through the years, of lifting timeless spiritual principles out of the text as though they had no relation to people’s life in a particular time and a particular place.

Lennox asked me recently something he’s asked me a few times before: “When did you become political?” What he told me he meant was, when did I become interested in the systems that make up our lives? I take politics to be the set of ways we order our lives as human beings in community. I don’t remember what I told him, exactly, but what occurs to me now is that the Gospels politicized me. Really reading the Gospels again made me political. My contention is that you can’t read the narratives of Matthew, Mark and Luke, in particular, and not at least ponder the fact that Jesus message was in some special sense, political.

We’re going to see a bit of that this Sabbath morning when our text is Luke 3:1–6. Give it a read (or two or three) before worship and see for yourself that Jesus is stepping into a politically charged environment and from the very beginning, John’s words are a direct challenge to the existing order of things.

Grace and Peace,

Ryan

Several of you have written to me to say you’ve missed our email newsletter. Some of you keep up with us from a distance and we appreciate hearing from you and knowing that our ministry is somehow an encouragement to you where you are. I regret that I let the newsletter slip from my list of priorities. But in keeping with the new (Christian) Year that starts this Sabbath, I’m making a new resolution: I will send a (semi) weekly newsletter.

*****

We are through the long season of Ordinary Time and this Sabbath we begin the journey anew. Starting again with the narratives about our coming God we enter the story of the saints of old who waited patiently and actively for Messiah. Advent is about hope, expectation, patience, and finally the joy of expectations fulfilled.

But we have the awkward and unclear task of living in between two great moments in history. On the one hand we look back and celebrate the coming of God into our world in the person of Jesus, the Messiah. As a helpless baby, born to a poor, unmarried Palestinian girl, God met the human family at its lowest point and immediately challenged the power structures of the day.

And yet, though Messiah has come, and through his life, death and resurrection has inaugurated a new world, we await the final chapter of this story. As my friend and author, Charles Scriven says in his new book, The Promise of Peace, “we live, all of us, in the space between our dreams and disappointments.”* This is precisely what Advent is about. It is about this “space” and learning to live well in that space, as a witness to the final fulfillment of God’s dream for all creation.

So, we will use this time, over the next four weeks, to learn how to wait well. Starting with this Sabbath, we will discover that God’s Kingdom can’t wait. It is forcing its way into this world. It’s time for us to tune in.

_____

*Charles Scriven. The Promise of Peace (Pacific Press: Nampa, ID), 2009.

It’s hard to imagine that this is the last Sabbath of the year. The Christian Year, that is. If you’ve been around Hollywood Church for a while you know we order our lives by a slightly different calendar than the one the rest of the world uses. Instead of shaping our lives around Memorial Day, Independence Day, Mothers’ and Fathers’ Day and Valentine’s Day, Christians form their lives around Advent and Christmas, Easter and Pentecost. Perhaps the major part of our discipleship is learning to live out of a different narrative.

In the Christian calendar, the first Sabbath of Advent marks the beginning of a new year, remembering together the significant movements of God’s story as told in the New Testament. So this is the last Sabbath of the year and next Sabbath begins a new year and the beginning of the four weeks of Advent. I’ll write more about Advent in the coming weeks, but at its most basic level, Advent is a season of anticipation and longing. It is a time when, in solidarity with the saints of old that waiting for the first coming of the Messiah, we await the second coming of the Messiah, to put our world to rights once and for all.

As you read this, I am in New Orleans, Louisiana for the annual meeting of the Adventist Society for Religious Studies (ASRS). This is a weekend of firsts for me. My first time in New Orleans. My first time attending ASRS. I’m here at the invitation of the incoming president to moderate a panel discussion of my friend, Samir Selmanovic’s new book, It’s Really All About God. Very soon I’ll be announcing a book discussion group on this book and I hope you’ll join me for that.

In the meantime, please keep Elysabeth and me in your prayers as we travel this weekend. We hate to be away from you on the Sabbath, but we are confident that God is with you and you will be blessed in our absence.

Grace and Peace,

Ryan

For the past four years our congregation has placed a major emphasis on leadership development. I’m not sure we always thought of it in those terms. We didn’t announce after a board retreat: “We will focus for the next four years on leadership development.” Instead, our commitment to being a missional congregation—that is, a congregation that sees itself as sent for the sake of the world—simply demanded a different kind of leadership and leadership structures. In that sense we’ve been building the bridge as we walk on it.

I often tell people that when I first came to Hollywood to be the pastor and people would approach me wanting to “help” I would tell them, “There’s nothing you can do to help.” What I meant was that the challenges were much greater than that. We didn’t need helpers at that point as much as we needed leaders. We’ve worked hard at creating an environment—even a structure that sometimes doesn’t look very structural—in which leadership can emerge in the right places, where it’s needed for the challenge at hand.

Mireya was one of the first people to approach me about helping. She was the first one I told, “I don’t need your help. I need your leadership.” She didn’t see herself as a leader. Two years later she was in our first group of recipients of the Emerging Leader Award. We created this award to recognize the leaders that have emerged in our congregation in the past year or two. It’s purpose is both to show appreciation to those leaders and also to lift up the qualities of leadership that we want to see more of.

The Emerging Leader Award is given to members of the Hollywood Adventist Church who have demonstrated leadership in mission in the context of the Hollywood Community and the Hollywood Adventist Church. In most cases, these are individuals who saw a need or an opportunity and responded to God’s call on their life without waiting for someone to ask them to help.

So today we celebrate the gifts and passion that God has stirred up in four of our members. The growth and development of our congregation is in direct proportion to their willingness to be used by God in ministry.

Grace and Peace,

Ryan

The weeks seem to run together so quickly this time of year, especially with the sun setting in the middle of the afternoon, now (do you hate these time changes as much as I do?).

There are only three more Sabbaths in the year and then begins Advent (Nov 28). It’s hard to imagine. And with every passing week our opportunity to live in and serve God’s world grows. I want to catch you up on one exciting development that I hinted at a few weeks ago.

Many of you will remember that back at the end of March we formed a ministry called Cinema Divina and created a short film entitled “The Perfect Day” in a mere 48 hours (from initial writing to final editing). It was fun and exhausting and really stretched our artistic community.

Now, just over seven months later, Cinema Divina is entering its next stage of development, along with an entire “Media Ministry,” under the leadership of our newest staff member, Julia Alty. Julia first visited our church just 18 months ago and in that time has become one of our most active leaders. The 48-hour Film-A-Thon was her brain child and now she’s been charged with developing the entire structure of a full-fledged media ministry here in our congregation. This ministry will bless not only our church and it’s worshiping life, but also reach out well beyond the borders of our church to bless thousands of other people in various ways. Please join me in welcoming Julia as a part of our church staff. Her job is to be an organizer so don’t be surprised when she talks to you about this (yes, you!)

You will be hearing more about the Media Ministry and Cinema Divina this morning and in the very near future. If you want to be a part of this effort, even if you’re not a writer, actor, director, cinematographer or in anyway involved in “the industry,” please come join us for a breakfast meeting, one week from tomorrow (November 15) at 9:00 am. RSVP to Julia.

Grace and Peace,

Ryan

This Sabbath (October 31, 2009) is very special day. The world knows this weekend as Halloween. It’s always been a strange holiday for me. One which, because of my upbringing, I never fully entered. But there are many fun and harmless things to enjoy during Halloween. Our kids have been having a great time dressing up and spending time with their friends. I’m sure tonight will be excellent, as well. I hope you have a safe and enjoyable Halloween.

In the church, however, this day is often known All Saints Day. Each denomination that remembers All Saints Day does it a bit differently. This year, as we were preparing our worship calendar, I was tempted to skip over it, thinking, of all days, this one relates less to Adventism than all the others. But as I read the texts for today I completely changed my mind. Today is a day to remember first of all, that we are called to be God’s saints. Secondly, it is an important reminder that we are where we are today because of the saints that have gone before us. We don’t have to venerate people or pray to them to be mindful of the fact that we are living in continuity with a “great cloud of witnesses” as the author of Hebrews puts it. Or, in the words of one of our hymns this morning,

“For all the saints who from their labor rest / Who Thee, by faith, before the world confessed / Thy name, O Jesus, be for ever blessed, Alleluia! Alleluia!”

This morning we sing for all the saints. We stand in recognition and remembrance of those who now rest from their labors; who, in times past, have confessed Jesus before the world and now rest in the blessed hope. And we sing and pray for ourselves this morning - also saints - and all those saints who will trust Jesus because of our witness. We stand in solidarity with all these people today, across time, recognizing that God is bring all things together in Christ, in a world where God will live completely and all tears and sorrow will be wiped away.

Grace and Peace,

Ryan

I don’t know how your week has been, but mine has been a roller-coaster, you might say; highs and lows. Every week is like that, I suppose, but perhaps this week has been a bit more extreme. So I spent a good part of this week trying to catch up on some rest. But there have been some really great developments I want to tell you about, too.

This morning I hosted a group of six Presbyterian church leaders at our church. Four pastors, one lay leader in charge of children’s ministry and a denominational leader akin to our Conference President. All of them are from the same Presbytery in South Carolina. They have been doing some traveling on a Lily Endowment grant learning about missional church. My friend and mentor, Alan Roxburgh brought them to Hollywood and we spent the whole morning talking about our missional change process. I showed two of the three Stained Glass episodes, created by Melody George, talked to them about our last four years and walked them around our neighborhood. I think they were tremendously blessed and encouraged to see the work we’ve been doing and I know I was blessed to share our story again to a group of people that I don’t normally get to talk to. I mean, how cool is it that a group of Presbyterians came to our little Hollywood Adventist Church to learn about missional change?

As usual it’s been a week of inspiring and hope-inducing conversations. We have some members in real seriously need. But God has placed us in each others lives to care for each other. The amazing thing is that every time I turn around, that’s exactly what you all are doing.

There are also big plans afoot in a several different areas that you’ll be hearing more about shortly. Imagine LA has officially assigned us our family and we should be meeting them for the first time very soon. The church board has authorized us to move ahead with developing a non-profit organization to support our work in the community. Nathan French and Kori Galvan will be attending a training by the Ohio Conference in Ohio in about a week to learn what steps we should take next. And, most recently, there are plans falling into place to significantly expand the work of our media ministry, affectionately known as Cinema Divina. Please pray for all these ministries, that God would provide resources to match the dreams God has planted in our hearts.

As always, there are many ways for you to be involved in the live of the Hollywood Adventist Church. If you’re looking for a church home or just want to get more involved, please let me or one of the leaders know and we’d be honored to help connect you in the right way.

Grace and Peace,

Ryan