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Tag Archives: New Year’s Eve

3 Things “To Do” in 2014

According to Jean Vanier, the founder L’Arche, argues that three activities are absolutely vital to create community: 1. Eating together around the same table. How can think creatively to foster this in 2014, especially in our larger churches? I think we have a lot to learn from immigrants and ethnic churches on this! 2. Praying together. What might it look like to pray more as a lifestyle as a community, outside our prayer meetings? How do we infuse prayer in a way that everyone participates and no one feels intimidated? 3. Celebrating or having fun together. “By celebrating,” Vanier writes, “I mean to laugh, to fool around, to have fun, to give thanks together for life. When we are laughing together with belly laughs, we are all the same.” (see Living Gently in a Violent World, p.17).  We have an intergenerational New Year’s Eve Party each year at New Life. We dance, party, sing, eat, laugh, and dress up. Read more.

3 Things "To Do" in 2014

According to Jean Vanier, the founder L’Arche, argues that three activities are absolutely vital to create community: 1. Eating together around the same table. How can think creatively to foster this in 2014, especially in our larger churches? I think we have a lot to learn from immigrants and ethnic churches on this! 2. Praying together. What might it look like to pray more as a lifestyle as a community, outside our prayer meetings? How do we infuse prayer in a way that everyone participates and no one feels intimidated? 3. Celebrating or having fun together. “By celebrating,” Vanier writes, “I mean to laugh, to fool around, to have fun, to give thanks together for life. When we are laughing together with belly laughs, we are all the same.” (see Living Gently in a Violent World, p.17).  We have an intergenerational New Year’s Eve Party each year at New Life. We dance, party, sing,. Read more.

Parties, Dancing, Laughter and the Contemplative Life

  A hermit saw someone laughing , and said to him, “We have to render an account of our whole life before heaven and earth, and you can laugh?” Sayings of the Desert Fathers This coming, at New Life, we will bring in New Year’s Eve, starting at 6 p.m. with food, a couple of dance lessons, games, a brief time of worship around midnight and then dancing till 2 a.m. We have done this for the last nine years. Each year I struggle with the few nasty e-mails we receive (this year they are national). A voice in my head argues, “Every other church in NYC is praying and you are leading your people to a party!, you worldly compromiser! What are you mad?” Geri is the one who patiently encouraged me to break from the pack years ago and “allow” an intergenerational, pleasureable, clean, fun event as part of our spiritual formation/discipleship here at NLF.  Most of us leaders are “pleasure/delight deficient”,. Read more.