Here is some video shot by Kristin on her phone introducing our 3 interns for the summer.

Amber, Chase and Amber!

This is just an encouraging video to show how God wants to being out the beauty in our humanness, even when the world has counted some of us as out.

our first home!

Originally uploaded by urbanplanter.

Not sure how many of you knew this, but Anna and I bought our first house!

We are pretty excited and have a lot of work to do, but it’s exhilarating to own something in Vancouver!

Let us know if you are in town and want to stop by!

My new friend Jeremy who came out to Vancouver with Joe to shoot some footage of the open house for their documentary they are filming sent us some photos of Kristin, Julie, Tim and I during our interviews.

It’s nothing spectacular, but I thought some of you might be interested.

here is one photo for your viewing pleasure of Tim and Julie at Julie’s work. I hope to get some video outtakes to post as well.

I find that we cannot grow spiritually if we ignore our humanness, just as we cannot become fully human if we ignore spirituality. — Jean Vanier

This Thursday a few of my friends from resonate are coming by good old East Van to shoot some footage of the open house for a documentary they are doing on new expressions of church in Canada. Here is an excerpt from their website.

Over the next twelve months we invite you to journey with us in our attempt to capture to film what God is up to in Canada on our shift as the church. Focusing primarily on church plants and other new forms of church, this initiative is not a ‘how to’ but rather a ‘how it is’. Our hope? To discover, encourage and connect church leaders and communities…and have a little fun in the process.

We are really excited about this opportunity and I will let you know how the day goes!

Thanks to Kristin’s incredible creativity and imagination we now have a name for the open house monthly gatherings at Wise Hall. For now we will be using the incredibly literal 2nd Sunday, which obviously denotes the day of the month we regularly gather and shows that although we rarely meet on that traditional day of the week, we are not rejecting it…yes that is right the open house does actually gather on a Sunday. Of course it is in the afternoon (4:30pm), only once a month and we are not meeting in a church building, but yes we are maintaining that tradition in some sense.

So in light of all that gibberish, this is also an announcement that we are meeting this Sunday at June 10th to explore our humanity, specifically as Christians. It seems that there has been this theology floating around that our humanness is bad and that we should simply wait and hope, during our lifetime, for that day when we will be taken away from this earth and placed in heaven.

However, for some reason God created us and placed us in a time between the creation of man and the eventual re-creation of the world and we shouldn’t take that too lightly.

What does it mean for us to live between those two bookends and does our humanity have anything to do with it? Especially when for so long we have trashed our humanity and equated much of what goes on in the world as either sin or irrelevant.

So if you have a free Sunday afternoon, come on out and lets discuss a new way to be human!