The Baltic Sea

Ellen and Amelia at the Baltic.

Both are doing quite well, I think. Amelia has befriended another youngster--are we here long enough to call them MKs? And she is also very sweetly engaging a 6-year-old who is here with her parents.

Ellen is hard at work on her class and taking in lots of sights. And, I have to say, enduring my particularly annoying sense of humor quite well.

Tuesdays and Thursdays

Starting next week, Sandy and I will lead a discussion group at 4 PM on T & Th (that's 6 AM Tacoma time). I will preread some basic biblical/gospel material, then summarize it in hopes of generating question and answer discussion.

Please pray for the students that will come (we're hoping for 6-8, as they want an intimate, trust-building time), and for Sandy's and my leadership--wisdom, the right words, hearts for those who come, etc.

Busy Days

We've had fantastically full days. Sandy is logging stunningly high numbers of steps each day. (She has a pedometer.) She set her personal record yesterday--26,302, about 12 miles, and tonight (10:20) she's at 25,750, though I don't think she'll set a new record. [10:50--I was wrong. She tells me she's at 26,432. That means she'll be marching around the apartment until she gets 26,500.)

Today, all that walking was to take first a tour of the old town for a couple hours, then to ferry over to the Curonian Spit and walk to the beach. We left the house about 9:30, returned at 1:30 for about 15 minutes to get a change of clothes, then went to the beach and returned at 7:30. Peter took all of his naps (2, for a total of about 100 minutes only) and most of his meals while we were out and about. And he was barely fussy at all. He has a remarkably sweet disposition.

The start of the walking tour--in front of the drama theater, from the balcony of which Hitler made his famous speech in 1939.

One of Sandy's numerous steps. This next to a commemoration of the "terrible footprint." I guess Klaipeda means terrible footprint, and this supposedly comes from the story that when two men set off in different directions to find the spot on which to establish this new settlement, one was never seen again, but they found this terrible footprint that they took as a sign that this was the place to establish the settlement. Like many such folkloric things, it makes only the vaguest kind of strange sense, to me.

Peter and me in front of our of "old apartment." You may recognize that sculpture. That's our kitchen window right above my head.

And then, finally, at the beach.

Tomorrow, back to preparing for the work ahead.

Sweetness

We all went to the mall--the Akropolis, and Peter really turned heads. One woman took a picture with Peter and her daughter. Another pair of older women--what you'd think of when you imagine babushkas--said, in English, "beautiful baby." One touched his hand and he reached out to them and gently touched her hand.

A lot of people take long looks (you might think of it as staring), too. All has been sweet so far.

Who'd a thunk it?

This is particularly arbitrary and random, but when we got out to the arrival lounge at the Vilnius airport there's a young woman holding up a sign that says "Return to Forever." I mused on how Flora Purim used to sing that sometime ago she had a dream, etc., etc., etc., and to the show Al Esquivel and I saw in 1983 with a realigned group--Chick Corea, Al Di Meola, Stanley Clarke and Lenny White, and I thought, "Nah, it's not possible." Well, Ellen, our compatriot and fellow Faith Presbyter, came running up to me to ask if I saw that Chick Corea was coming to Vilnius.
Yes, they did play in Vilnius last night--the start of a world tour. Anyway, I thought that was fun.

Emergent in Lithuania?

We had our second orientation session today, and we've encountered a bit of an issue I've seen a little about in the US--the Emergent Church movement. In fact, someone here in the program suggested we read a book called unChristian, which, upon a quick skim of some chapters, looks like a treatment of this movement. From what I can gather, it is a movement that takes stock and heed of the kind of problem I talked about briefly in this blog last summer. (See several previous posts--here, here and here.) Namely, the postmodern mind (particularly of the younger, now emerging generations) needs to be addressed and therefore evangelized differently than earlier generations. This book, unChristian, is based on survey data of these younger generations.

Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill has written a nice overview of the Emergent Church. To summarize, he sees three strains. Relevants, basically orthodox and evangelical, want to update worship style to be more hip. Reconstructionists, basically evangelical, are dissatisfied with the forms (seeker, e.g.) and the content of Christian lives--Christians live like everyone else in society. Revisionists critique theological doctrine for not being appropriate to the postmodern mind. He notes that none are seeing significant conversion growth. He also worries that as the debate among the three intensifies, we'll end up with a variety of different denominations, some of which are more committed to figuring out the postmodern mind than sharing and preaching the Gospel.

He worries about the Revisionists and hopes for more Relevant work. I am intrigued by the Reconstructionists. According to Driscoll, they "are generally theologically evangelical and
dissatisfied with the current forms of church (e.g. seeker, purpose, contemporary). They bolster their critique by noting that our nation is becoming less Christian and that those who profess faith are not living lives markedly different than non-Christians; thereby, proving
that current church forms have failed to create life transformation. Subsequently, they propose more informal, incarnational, and organic church forms such as house churches."

Frankly, I don't understand this response. House churches seem uber-contemporary/seeker, etc., not more Christian. I guess that's because I incline toward the Relevants. In any case, Reconstructionists and Revisionists, if not Relevants as well, seem to be flirting with bending the church and the Gospel message toward the particular preferences/tastes (rather than the redemptive needs) of the target audience.

And here in Lithuania, I want to be careful that I don't participate in bending it so far as to value the postmodern mindset above the Gospel truth. Survey data? Sounds like a political campaign, and a potentially slippery slope to reifying the ephemeral desires of the individual audience members.

Please pray that we'll speak in ways that people understand, but not by giving them a wrong, incomplete, or inaccurate message.

We're Back, Part II

We're back in Lithuania. It's good and interesting to be here. I've never gone back to the same (foreign) place before, so it's curious to arrive somewhere and know a bit about what you're doing--how to get to the university, a little place to eat, the location of important points, etc.

Here, for instance, Peter is eating beet salad at Gero Appetito, a favorite from last summer.

He has eaten a wide variety of new things, and takes almost all of them quite happily.

That is Edita, the owner of Gero. She was very sweet with Peter, as women have been.

The kitchen staff took him right out of my hands.

People have been interested--some stare, many women stop to fawn. Our bus driver from Vilnius, Piotr--Peter, was very sweet to our Peter. He and Sandy even had a very stilted conversation in Russian during dinner. Later, he asked one of the Lithuanian-Americans how we came to have a black child. We haven't yet encountered anything that we can discern as hosility, but the four Senegalese LCC-IU students apparently have. So far, Peter is a magnet drawing many and various to us.

Okay, it's late (11 PM, though still light enough to be out), so more tomorrow.