And, increasingly, people experience the “more, faster, bigger, better” solutions of modern life to be too flat, too empty, too unjust to provide that help. Could healthy spirituality and community meet our needs?
Brown Line Church (named for Chicago’s Northside “L” train) is a community both in Chicago and online (reaching many beyond Chicago). Through Sunday gatherings for prayer & meditation, small group community building, and empowering individuals to contribute to justice and healing in the world, we try to help people connect with a God of love and find deeper, fuller, less self-centered lives — especially people who feel more at home culturally in progressive settings, rather than religious settings.
We embrace diversity in perspectives and religious/cultural backgrounds, we are committed to economic justice and anti-racism work, and we are LGBTQ-inclusive. Our guide in all this is Jesus. Many present “faith in Jesus” as an exclusive thing, over and against other religious or non-religious approaches to life, but our experience has been entirely different…
In the face of hopelessness, is there only strength and weakness? Are values and virtue not worth standing for? Vince closes our effort to give up “giving up” (for Lent) with some encouragements beyond our modern pulls toward nihilism. (Art by Morgan Sorensen @see_machine)
What do we do when we know we need communities and institutions to lean on, but they let us down? Hayley and Vince continue our Lenten tradition of giving up (for Lent) hidden beliefs that cause us to give up. (Art: Ethiopian Icon of Jesus washing disciples' feet)
Discord is an online platform for community. Join Brown Line Church’s Discord server to discuss our Sunday messages, connect with volunteer opportunities, ask for prayer, swap stuff, or just laugh at gifs people share.
We can tell intuitively that the most dominant stories framing our lives everyday are too empty and too unjust to be what life is all about. AND we can also tell intuitively when a story comes along that does capture what life is all about! Vince presents the New Testament's story of The Resurrection as one such story...