Catch the Vision
Hello, I’m Michael.
My vision for ministry is to help people of faith build communities of justice, joy, compassion, and peace.
THE BELOVED COMMUNITY
As a pastor and community leader, I want to help congregations understand Jesus’s announcement of the incoming “reign of heaven” in concrete terms. The phrase Beloved Community was the language Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. used to articulate his understanding of God’s dream for the world.
The Beloved Community is a global vision in which all people share together in the abundance of God’s good Creation. It’s about our ability to respond to conflicts nonviolently. It’s about becoming mutual caretakers. It’s about the beauty of us all being empowered by God’s Spirit to discover the ways our gifts and skills as individuals fit with the wider hunger and need of the world around us. In short, the Beloved Community is a vision of the love of God come to life among us, the Word of God made flesh.
By helping communities learn to turn faith into practice, my goal is to help the Beloved Community become a reality—not just for our human communities, but for all Creation.
With All Creation
The Beloved Community is a theological vision for how humans can live together as a community. It is also an ecological vision for an ecosystem at peace, where humans live with a deep reverences for our place within the entire web of life, as mutual caretakers with all Creation. In other words, the Beloved Community is part of the larger dream of God for a Beloved Creation.
The Beloved Community is not just a vision for a just world; it is also a vision for the full realization of the human self. It is both a vision for the calling of Creation and our individual callings. Ultimately, the question of our individual callings is about gaining a deep reverence for the way the Beloved Creation is yearning to come alive within each of us.
You are made up of the same stuff as the world around you, a world yearning for redemption (cf. Romans 8:19-21). The quest to discover your truest self, then, can be seen as your participation in Creation’s yearning to be set free. Ultimately, the question of your calling is about gaining a deep reverence for the way the Beloved Creation is yearning to come alive within you. Your deepest joy is not incompatible with your participation in building the Beloved Community. Instead, I believe, your deepest joy can only be found as a participant in God’s dream for a Beloved Community with all Creation.
My vision, then, is to encourage and support people of faith to participate in turning God’s dream for a Beloved Creation into a reality by learning practices of justice, joy, compassion, and peace.
