Colourful Dreamer

The rest of these two mornings was led by Budi Tjahjono. Budi is the International Advocacy Director for Franciscans International . I first encountered Franciscan International at IPTOC-JFOC in 2005 in Canterbury. Fr. John Quigley OFM, the then Executive Director spoke and invited any who wanted to visit their office in Geneva. I was going to Geneva, so took him up on his invitation. FI is sponsored by the Catholic Conference of the Franciscan Family (CFF) as its official representation at the United Nations. The Conference of the Franciscan Family is made up of the Ministers General of the First Orders, the Third Order Regular, and the Secular Franciscan Order, and the President of the International Franciscan Conference of the Sisters and Brothers of the Third Order Regular. And the Society of Saint Francis has been invited to be part of the International Board of Directors and to be involved in their work. the current Executive Director is Blair Matheson TSSF (one of us ...

The last two mornings were led by Paulo Ueti ,and Budi Tjahjono who helped us explore our third theme - Sharing our Good News. Paulo is the Theological Adviser and Latin America Regional Director of The Anglican Alliance. Paulo encouraged us to look again at our understanding of who Jesus is. He asserts that most of us are probably strongly influenced by Roman imperial imagery. As I write this we have just had Christ the King Sunday, a Sunday filled with imperial imagery if we are not careful. If we look on the internet for images to use, they mostly show Jesus as "emperor"! – We see it in the Christian Nationalism in the States and spreading out from there. This is something I have been confronted with every Christ the King Sunday. Who is Jesus? Paulo used Luke 24.13-35 (Road to Emmaus), as his recurring text. He suggested that this story was added later to encourage the Christian community to not be drawn into the power struggles of the Roman Church and civic hierarch...

As I have reflected on these sessions, I realise how much Jeff has affected me over these last few years. Certainly he has made the urgency crystal clear. Inspired by his contribution in 2018 I took a motion to our synod asking for the then leadership team to offer some leadership around this. And they did, and I got pulled into that, broken shoulder and all. And I made sure my parish observed the Season of Creation each year, and that we as a parish thought bout how to reduce our carbon footprint. But Jeff was talking about something more. Because all of that still treats creation as something other. Something that I can use to exploit for economic gain, or to care for to avoid the economic hardship that is coming. That is where most of the conversation sits. But he is inviting us to both critique the underlying assumptions around this and then to go deeper.  In the question and answer time at the end of the first session we talked about the underlying assumption withing "western...