Hey, I was just telling Ari that I kept expecting someone to push back about my vision :)
Having an ASL interpreter on standby comes from my experience at CWM -- that we had found an agency that supplies interpreters and found an interpreter who would feel comfortable in our queer church, so we knew that if someone approached us needing an interpreter we could hire one.
Sorry for the assumptions about foreign-language singing. I admit that it comes out of my feeling really uncomfortable when we sing African songs because I feel like we're just doing it because it seems like a good liberal idea, and it feels weirdly culturally appropriative because we're just going in and picking out this thing from another culture with no context and no other connection to that culture. Singing something I can't pronounce, that I barely know what it means, fills me with frustration and some small amount of discomfort, so that's my prejudice(?) speaking.
Latin I think could arguably be "from the cultures and traditions of those in our congregation" if some of the congregants have grown up with that kind of music -- either in other churches they've been in or in performance settings. It would still make me uncomfortable unless it had the English translation right under it (I like some Taize music, and I like singing in the non-English -- when I can pronounce it, which I can't always with French for example -- but only when I know what it means).
And there are things in this that I think require the congregation to be made up entirely of people as dedicated to this vision as you, AND to not have any other demands on their time.
Say more about this?
In my head, the church of my vision has more resources (people, money, etc.) than CWM does, and CWM is definitely struggling to do parts of this vision which I have seen it do in the past, but rereading my vision I'm struck that I phrased most of it as ideas, not dictating specifics that would require specific amounts of resources but allowing the congregation to discern how it can live into that particular vision.
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Date: 2009-10-20 11:52 pm (UTC)Having an ASL interpreter on standby comes from my experience at CWM -- that we had found an agency that supplies interpreters and found an interpreter who would feel comfortable in our queer church, so we knew that if someone approached us needing an interpreter we could hire one.
Sorry for the assumptions about foreign-language singing. I admit that it comes out of my feeling really uncomfortable when we sing African songs because I feel like we're just doing it because it seems like a good liberal idea, and it feels weirdly culturally appropriative because we're just going in and picking out this thing from another culture with no context and no other connection to that culture. Singing something I can't pronounce, that I barely know what it means, fills me with frustration and some small amount of discomfort, so that's my prejudice(?) speaking.
Latin I think could arguably be "from the cultures and traditions of those in our congregation" if some of the congregants have grown up with that kind of music -- either in other churches they've been in or in performance settings. It would still make me uncomfortable unless it had the English translation right under it (I like some Taize music, and I like singing in the non-English -- when I can pronounce it, which I can't always with French for example -- but only when I know what it means).
And there are things in this that I think require the congregation to be made up entirely of people as dedicated to this vision as you, AND to not have any other demands on their time.
Say more about this?
In my head, the church of my vision has more resources (people, money, etc.) than CWM does, and CWM is definitely struggling to do parts of this vision which I have seen it do in the past, but rereading my vision I'm struck that I phrased most of it as ideas, not dictating specifics that would require specific amounts of resources but allowing the congregation to discern how it can live into that particular vision.