Three is a Magic Number

We often met at The Center for Changing Lives in Minneapolis.  Part of the sign was captured above our heads.  How appropriate for this group! Tomorrow is my last day of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) internship.  Since mid-May I've been serving The Recovery Church and Mounds Park United Methodist, both in St. Paul. CPE is a funny thing... In my case, I worked in addiction and recovery ministries.  Then in addition, I spent 8 hours per week doing interpersonal processing with a supervisor and 8 other colleagues who were placed at other community-based settings--refuge services, homeless shelter, hospice care, inner-city programming for kids, etc....       Recovery coin that was presented to me and my aunt's ring.  Both important to me this summer. One goal of interpersonal processing is to predict what it would be like to work as colleagues in the future.  And then we help each other work out our kinks.  We ask each other really hard question

Each semester I blog about my major learnings. My spring classes ended in May.  It's August now, and I’m finally getting around to my post.  Blame it on senor-itis. In the spring, I had a full schedule: Worship, Methodist Polity and History, Social Justice and Scripture, and the second half of internship at Solomon's Porch.  While these classes seem really disconnected, I had three really interesting integrations occur in me. Low and High I spent a lot of time thinking about “low” and “high.”   In the religion world, we use these words in cool ways. For example, “low Christology” emphasizes Jesus’ humanness/ministry first and then moves to the mystery of incarnation and divinity.   “High Christology,” on the other hand, emphasizes Christ’s divinity first and then moves to his humanness and ministry. And another example, “high liturgy” or “high church” describes worship that is highly scripted and prescribed, often formal in nature.   “Non-liturgical” or “low church”