Sabbatical - who and what?

I’ve just spent a few days with 48+ pastors and religious leaders. We were guests of the Louisville Institute and invited into fruitful conversation around sabbaticals. The 48 were the recipients of this year’s Sabbatical Grants for Pastoral Leaders. I’m hopeful for the future of the church given the quality of these women and men, and it was an honor (and fun) to spend time in their company.

We are from California and Kentucky, Minnesota and Maine, Illinois and Indiana, Michigan and Missouri, New Mexico and New Jersey, Wisconsin and Washington, New York and Nova Scotia, Virginia and Vermont, Maryland and the Virgin Islands, Pennsylvania and Oregon, Texas, Georgia and Alabama.

We were led in our discussion by David Wood and Eugene Peterson, and after their words have had more time to soak in, I’ll try to reflect on them here. Their conversation in and of itself was a gift. For now I’d like to leave you with a litany David composed. “What is a sabbatical for?” was his question. In seeking an answer, he harvested the verbs from our 48 carefully crafted proposals to get at the action of a sabbatical.

So, what is a sabbatical for?

To touch, to take up, to trust, and to travel.
To participate, to pursue, to perform, to pause, to plant, to practice, and, above all, to pray.
To write, to work, to walk, to weave, and to worship.
To embark, to explore, to exercise, to examine, to experiment, to engage, to enrich, and to enjoy.
To start, to stop, to strengthen, to see, to seek, to sit, to study, to sharpen, to serve, to search and to sleep.
To incorporate, and to immerse.
To understand.
To discern, to discover, to dance and to deepen.
To gather.
To return, re-orient, read, revive, rest, renew, recreate, reflect, rehearse, rejuvenate, reclaim, retreat, remember, revisit, replenish, refocus, reinvigorate, restore, reconnect, and to row.
To journal and to journey.
To be fed.
To create, to cook, to contemplate, and to celebrate.
To balance and to build.
To awaken, to analyze, to attend, and to affirm.
To follow and to float.
To mediate, to visit, to nurture, to hike, and to harvest.
To live, to listen, to learn.
And above all,
To love.

Notice there is no talk of
Cramming or juggling or dabbling or skimming.
Lots of talk of lingering, balancing, deepening and dwelling and reading.

There is no talk of
Preaching, but of listening;
Or of emailing, but of writing;
Or of teaching, but of learning;
Or of leading, but of following;
Or of calling, but of recovering one’s sense of being called.

(compiled by David J. Wood)

If I can experience even a portion of these verbs, I will have experienced sabbatical.

At the moment, in a word, I feel
Grateful.

Thanks to Sheldon, Jim and Keri of the Louisville Institute and to the many others who contributed to our experience.

Peace...

Sabbatical Plan

As I mentioned in my Welcome post, I received a sabbatical grant from the Louiville Insitute. I am so thankful for this gift, and honestly this sabbatical would not be possible if it weren't for their support.

We've placed a link to Preparing a Table of Welcome on our church's website. For those of you who are interested in the details, we've also posted a copy of the proposal I presented last September to the Louisville Institute for this grant. There may be more there than you want to know. Read what you like.

I've recently finished reading Danny Meyer's Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business, and I just started Linda Kaplan's My First Crush: Misadventures in Wine Country. These are a couple of the books that have been recommended to me by others as we've talked about my sabbatical. I'll write more about these reads later.

Peace...

Welcome

The table is central to our life and ministry as Christians in the world today. In his life and ministry, Jesus continually invited people to the table. The image of the Holy Banquet is present in the communion table, front and center in our places of worship each week, whether or not we celebrate the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. The image of sharing our daily bread illumines our life as a community of faith and inspires our ministries of service and invitation to the world.

I have been given the gift of a pastoral sabbatical from the congregation I serve. I also submitted a proposal for and was awarded a Sabbatical Grant for Pastoral Leaders from the Louisville Institute. I am extremely grateful to both First Presbyterian Church and the Louisville Institute for this opportunity. From April through June of 2008, I will embark on a sabbatical journey of immersion into the art and the essence of communion.

I've created this blog as a tool to both reflect upon and share some of my sabbatical experiences. In the coming months as I prepare for and enter into this time of sabbatical, I will make occasional posts about what it is that I am up to and from where I'm finding inspiration. I've already begun to delve into the initial reading list, and I'll try to keep a list here of some of the books that have been recommended to me along the way.

In synthesis, during my sabbatical I'm going to be working the wine harvest, learning as an apprentice in a professional kitchen, and baking bread and kneading theology with an old friend. I'll tell you more about my plans later. One of the early questions I have is - how will the visceral connection to the vineyard, the daily preparation of food, and the art of baking shape the way I approach the table, extend the invitation, break the bread, and lift the cup?

So, welcome to this table. My prayer during this Sabbatical time for me, my family, our friends, First Presbyterian Church, and the friends we will make along the way is...

Gracious God, pour out your Holy Spirit upon us and upon these your gifts of bread and wine.

Peace...