Seeds Queries & Advices
The Seeds Covenant
Queries and Advices for Seedy Mobs 2008
What is the Seeds Covenant?
Seeds describes conversations, connections and commitments that take place around themes of spirituality, community and mission that have emerged out of the life of Urban Seed and are now shared by groups of people who live close to each other and the poor, share regular meals and organise in order to publicly express the following:
Know the Word: (Spirituality)
We encourage each other to think and write, meditate and pray. This includes our approach to worship gatherings, bible study, and public conversations eg. city walks and seminar series.
Grow Home through Slow Food: (Community)
We seek to re-imagine the ancient vows of poverty, chastity and obedience for our lives and create a sense of shared community around an open table.
Go Engage: (Mission)
We explore ideas and practical means of Teaching, Healing and Casting out Evil in order for a group to engage in service to our local communities.
Seeds groups meet to discern the meaning of this charism using a Quaker based approach of queries and advices. A gathering of the ‘mobs’ is held at various times each year to celebrate our common connections and commitments.
These are the queries and advices we came up with for 2008.
Know the Word
What is the kingdom of God like? To what can we compare? Luke 13
Why do you not know how to interpret the present time? Luke 12
What are you discussing as you walk along?.....What things? Luke 26
Are you not misled because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? Mark 12
1. What is our honest experience of Jesus Christ?
2. What are the stories that found and shape our lives, our locality, our culture?
3. How will we discern the Living Word who speaks to us through the biblical story, prayer and the people and situations around us?
4. How do the questions from the gospel stories shape our understanding?
5. What are the connections between the story of the Bible, our world and ourselves?
Advices
· Start or support a Study Circle, a Seminar Series or a Worship/Meditation Gathering.
· Creating common rhythms of gathering in order to Know the Word is everyone’s right and responsibility.
· Beware of liturgy becoming exclusive and ideological/idolatrous.
· Any settled form of liturgy should emerge as the fruit of missional engagement.
Grow Home
Do you also want to leave? Did I not choose you twelve? John 6:6
Have you anything here to eat? Luke 24
If there were not (many homes in my Father’s house), would I have told you that I am going to prepare a house for you? John 14:2
What were you arguing about as we travelled on the road? Mark 10
6. Who are our kin/mob/family? (Mark 3)
7. In what ways will we or will we not ‘be there for each other’ as ‘family’?
8. How do our families of origin and previous experiences of community affect us now?
9. How can we practice the disciplines of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience in this locality?
10. What are our economic necessities? (home, household, village…etc.)
11. What does it mean for us to be the body of Christ? Where am I putting my own body?
Advices
· Live within a poor neighbourhood. Identify with the poor through developing relationships
· Seeds mobs are 2-15 people. This small scale creates the intimacy & flexibility of “communitas.”
· Informal, unplanned and incidental encounters are vital for a sense of community. Groups should seek to live with each other or within close proximity to each other in order to enable such connections.
· There is room for outsiders within the circle. Jesus’ included a traitor, violent terrorist & a tax collector
· Our ultimate need for home can only come through God.
· The only communities that work are those of necessity.
Go Engage
When I sent you forth without a money bag or a sack or sandals, were you in need of anything? Luke 22:36
How many loaves do you have? Mark 6:38, 8:5; Matt 15:34
Which one was neighbour to the robber’s victim? Luke 10
Do you want to be well? John 5
12. How does Jesus’ life, incarnation, death & resurrection shape our practice of mission?
13. Who is at our table? Whom are we offering hospitality?
14. Are we dependent on those we serve? Are we experiencing hospitality from those we serve?
15. What is my vocation/calling? What voices are shaping our choices?
16. What is ‘good work’?
17. In what ways can we put those considered least at the top of our priorities?
18. How are we deepening our understanding and practice of Teaching, Healing and Exorcism in light of the Word?
Advices
The Covenant group should be a space for conversation about vocational choices both big and small.
· Collective knowledge is generally helpful for discernment regarding choices of married or single life and in prioritising work options that will affect the community.
· Focus upon the mix of local, national and international issues. Where possible, integrate them.
· Do little things with a lot of love
· Practice holistic evangelism
· Community development is a great default position.
Jesus asks us questions, good questions, unnerving questions, realigning questions, transforming questions. He leads us into liminal and therefore transformative space, much more than taking us into any moral high ground of immediate certitude or ego superiority. He subverts up front the cultural or theological assumptions that we are eventually going to have to face anyway. He leaves us betwixt and between, where God and grace can get at us, and where we are not at all in control. It probably does not work for a large majority of people, at least in my experience. They merely ignore you or fight you. Maybe this is why we have paid so little attention to Jesus’ questions and emphasized instead his seeming answers. They give us more of a feeling of success and closure. We made of Jesus a systematic theologian, who walked around teaching dogmas, instead of peripatetic and engaging transformer of the soul. Easy answers instead of hard questions allow us to try to change others instead of allowing God to change us. At least, I know that is true in my own life.
Richard Rohr.
We have to keep looking for spiritual questions if we want spiritual answers. Henri Nouwen
Be patient with regard to all that in your heart is still unresolved and try to love the questions themselves like the closed parts and books written in extremely foreign language. Do not seek for the moment of the answer because you would not be able to live through it. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will live thereafter and gradually without realizing it, one day, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Marie Rilke
God, my God, with you it is always the same thing! Always the same question that nobody knows how to answer! While I am asking questions that You do not answer, You ask me a question that is so simple that I cannot answer it. I do not even understand the question.
Thomas Merton
There have been times when, after long on my knees in a cold chancel, a stone has rolled from my mind, and I have looked in and seen the old questions lie folded and in a place by themselves, like the piled grave clothes of love’s risen body. R.S.Thomas