Yesterday, Grace Cathedral…   and now for something completely different — Cornerstone Community Center smack down in inner city Fresno.  The walls of the community center were decorated with grafitti and hubcaps, definitely a different feel from the cathedral last night (both had their charm).  Many of the folks in Fresno were connected to groups working on college campuses (one of the sponsors was Intervarsity Christian Fellowship), and it is so encouraging to see folks like IVF and YWAM (Youth With a Mission) showing up in full force as we plot goodness and re-imagine what it means to be the Church today.  We were hosted by our friends at the Pink House in Fresno (where about 30 folks are now living!), along with several middle-age families that have relocated to the inner city there in Fresno to become missional neighbors.  It’s fun to see folks young and old breaking the cultural inertia of upward mobility and moving to abandoned places of the empire to practice resurrection there.  One friend we reconnected with used to work at a high-paying corporate job and left it all to use his gifts in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the US (running a clinic for some of the 47 million folks who have inadequate medical care)… he said, “I’ve finally found what I was made for.  I’ve been working my whole life to get to the ghetto.  I feel so alive.”

One of the gifts of the tour is that it is a good excuse for folks to come together and conspire and dream – and remind each other that we are not crazy, or at least not alone.  That’s what this project has been all about – working together to become midwives of the Kingdom… for the world is pregnant with something beautiful.

Chris wrote a great piece on “The Irrelevancy of Relevancy (and Vice Versa)” for the Fermi Project. (We realized we trespassed by posting it here yesterday–oops–because Fermi is a paid subscription magazine. So feel free to visit that site and download the essay.)
And Shane just posted a few thoughts on the election and where we’re at on endorsing a candidate – find that on the God’s Politics blog.