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The End of an Era.. of sorts.

/ Dennis A. Gray / Leave a comment

Well… it’s done.

Pastor Don McCallum has preached his last service at Kortright Presbyterian Church. After 18 years he and his family have about a month to complete moving exercises and then he will be a part of Knox Presbyterian Church in Listowel.

It was a good service. There were songs (including one specifically written for the occasion – a copy to be posted later this week), and videos, and memories, and the presentation of gifts ( a book of memories and a bicycle – highly appropriate). But most importantly, there was release.

It’s the hardest part of change – letting go of the past. Allowing those who wish to move on to do so.  As a species humans do not generally welcome change, we would much prefer to surround ourselves with the familiar and the security provided by knowing exactly what to expect each day.

And yet, without change there is no growth, and I have come to realize that Kortright has come as far as Pastor Don is/was able to take it.   He came to KPC at a time when much healing was required and he guided them through that healing. He held their hands as they took their first steps into becoming an adult congregation. He has done his job well.

But the complexion of Kortright is changing. New people are arriving each month (we’re back up to the number we had before the move) and there is a different expectation now of what the future might hold. It is time for Kortright to leave home and set out on it’s own- so to speak.

Congregations are not teenagers, however.  It would be rather impractical for the entire congregation to move out of 55 Devere Drive and seek out new adventures, leaving Pastor Don and the building behind awaiting the arrival of a new flock. (Interesting concept though, might be a skit there)  So, as practicality dictates, it is the pastor who moves on.

Moves on to face new challenges of his own as the congregation he leaves behind begins the process of figuring out who we are and who we want to be. A process we have already begun. But an era has ended, the McCallum Years are complete.  Now only God knows what the future holds for either of us.

I eagerly await the arrival of the new era.

Thank you, Kwai Chang Caine

/ Dennis A. Gray / Leave a comment

This may sound a little strange to some of you, but I am truly saddened by the passing of David Carradine.  No, I’m not morning the lost of a great action figure like some, nor did I think of him as a role model the way he is being portrayed by others.  And yet, truth be told, without him my life might have taken a very different turn.

I was 18 when Kung Fu came to television. Carradine’s charater Kwai Chang Caine fasinated me. The juxtaposition of passive demeaner and explosions of violence was something I had never considered.

At the time I was part of a Christian High school group; I didn’t really believe, I was just madly in lust with one of the female members of the group.  Kwai Chang Caine however, caused me to seriously examine the question of spirituality.  I sought out instruction in Eastern philosophy and eventually wound up learning from a Buddist instructor at the same time that I was attending a Baptist congregation.  He often commented on the teachings of Jesus and thought that the Jewish rabbi must have been exposed to Buddist teachings at some point.

His take on Jesus’ teaching was, however, somewhat different from what I was learning in the Baptist church. When I would tell him what my pastor had told me a passage meant he would often respond with, “Really? But that’s not what He said.” It was this exposure to non-Christian examination of scripture that caused me to take a serious personal look at the Bible rather than just accepting what I was told it meant.

Eventually both the girl and the Buddist moved out of my life – but Jesus remained. And so did a desire to fully understand the context of what Jesus was saying.  All of which has, of course, contributed to who I am today.

Even though he played a relatively small role in my spiritual development, I followed Carradines career with more than a passing intertest. It is said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” and Kwai Chang Caine was the motivation for that first step. And so I find myself feeling a small measure of indebtedness to the character and the  actor.

When I learned of his death however, it was not any of the King Fu scenes that came to mind.  (No I don’t buy the suicide angle, neither do I think the asian Mafia had him killed.) No, my favorite Carradine moment will always be the Superman speech from Kill Bill 2. It’s a great commentary on the nature of masks and identity.  I think it stuck in my mind because of the fact that Superman is one of the most widely distributed archetypes of Christ, which puts an interesting slant on the commentary.

(For the more sensitive among you – brief bad language advisory.)

Endings and Beginnings

/ Dennis A. Gray / 1 Comment

I’ve been putting off writing this for some time now, but I can’t put it off forever. It’s just that writing about it seems to give it so much  finality.  But then, experience has demonstrated writing about it brings acceptance as well, and since not writing about it won’t stop it from happening, I may as well get on with it.

Pastor Don McCallum is leaving KPC.

I’ve been a believer for just about 35 years now, and for the last 14 years Don McCallum has been my pastor.  Before that there was a long line of individuals in a variety of denominations starting with the Anglican minister who gave me a copy of Nietzche’s ‘Beyond Good and Evil‘ as a confirmation gift when I was 13. (Interestingly enough, a young man named Davian is sitting at the desk behind me reading that very book as I’m writing this.)

If you check out my Facebook profile under religion it reads “Anglican/ Baptist/ Pentecostal/ Presbyterian with definite Jewish sympathies ” and that’s only a list of the major influences.  I was even blessed to have a Messianic rabbi as one of the early mentors (hence the ‘Jewish sympathies’), but for sheer longevity and range of interaction no one has been as large an influence on me as has Don McCallum.  It’s been one of the most productive and enjoyable relationships which I’ve ever had the privilege of taking part. That’s what makes change so hard.

But change is what growth is all about. If nothing changes there is only stagnation and that isn’t good for anyone or anything, and so the best way for me to get through this is embrace it and pray that it is only the ending of one phase of the relationship. Indeed, I pray that it is the beginning of a whole new phase of relationship;  for Don, for me, and for Kortright Presbyterian Church.

When Don first told me he was leaving (almost a month ago–worship planning works 4 months in advance, so we needed to know) it started me thinking about when Pete, Phil and Jim left. For those of you who don’t know, Pete Olsen was our youth pastor, Phil English was our worship pastor, and Jim Klaas was our discipleship pastor.  Each one, in turn, felt that the time had come for them to move on to other things. Each one had their influence on me, on Kortright and then moved on to influence others.  Now Don is leaving as well. The paranoid side of my insecurity is starting to wonder if it was something I said!?

But then I believe God began to show me a pattern.

It started when we moved to Devere Drive on our 25th anniversary. There was a general feeling of malaise at Scotsdale Drive.  Pretty much everyone felt we were in a rut and needed something new to kick us back into high gear.  Since space was an issue we started looking for a new building. It took more than 5 seemingly fruitless years, but then one day the old University Village School just seemed to drop into our lap. We tendered an offer, it was accepted, and we moved to the promised land.

And that’s where it ramped up a notch. The promised land metaphor was bandied around quite a bit. In fact, it was bandied about a lot. There was even talk of making a ‘crossing of the Hanlon Expressway video’.  But I don’t think any of us truly appreciated how much of a wilderness experience moving here was really going to be.

As expected there was an immediate drop off in attendance. Then shortly thereafter Pete and his wife Cindi were parachuted into the Northwest territories. (Well, not literally, though I’m sure Pete would have thought it a cool idea.) Other things began to change as well. Phil led us through a paradigm shift in worship which included the establishing of a worship planning team, Jim tried a variety of discipleship ideas but found the small groups dynamic was shifting. New people started to take leadership roles and we found things like bannering, and liturgical dance working their way into our midst. One thing after another came, or went, or was replaced as we struggled to discover our new identity in this new environment.

We changed our vision statement, our mission statement and our motto. A new goals directive was adopted, by a group of elders that was much changed from the one that left Scotsdale Drive; with the addition of more new elders next month, that dynamic will change again.  As I have already mentioned, along the way Pete, Phil and Jim moved on to bigger and better things. Now Don McCallum is doing the same. We’ve gone from 4 pastors to no pastors in three and a half years.

That’s when it hit me. We had forgotten one little detail about crossing the Jordan. One aspect of moving to the promised land had completely escaped our notice.

Nobody that left Egypt ever got to the promised land!!

Well, except Joshua and Caleb; because the promised land was such a new thing that it required a new way of thinking by those who were going to inhabit it.  The old ways would have worked against the new thing that God was trying to do. (And did, as it turned out.)

Now I’m not saying that an entire generation needs to die off before KPC will get its act together, however much it may seem to be taking that long.   But I do think we failed to notice the fact that sometimes to be effective change needs to be complete, total, even massive in scope.  It may require massive change because there are massive changes happening in the world we have been called to reach.  Every generation is different than the one before it, but most sociologists agree that the scope of change from one generation to the next is increasing exponentially.

I’m beginning to believe that God wanted to do far more with Kortright than we had ever imagined.  We were plateaued and going nowhere, just rolling along maintaining the status quo. For us to move forward we needed to go someplace we’d never been before and as much as we might have great affection for some of the things we wanted to bring along, they were slowing us down, miring us in the muck at the bottom of the Red Sea. What hurts most is to think some of the things holding us back might be people we truly love and care about.  But it may well be that the status quo is holding them back as well. It may well be that if they are going to grow, they need to be somewhere else.

And so it would seem that more changes are required than we thought. For the descendants of Israel, moving into the promised land took a lot of hard work and more than a few battles had to be fought. There were many casualties along the way. But it was worth it, because in the end a new nation was born.

And I think it will be worth it for Kortright as well. God is reinventing us into something completely new.  It has occurred to me that by the time we reach our 30th anniversary in Sept of 2010 we will have spent the last 5 years bringing about a new location, a new paradigm of worship, a new mission statement, a new vision statement, and new goals directive, a new youth pastor, a new children’s ministry director, a new music director, a new technical director, a new session (board of elders), and a new senior pastor.  By our 30th anniversary God will have all but totally re-invented Kortright Presbyterian Church. It will still be the same community of people, but a new version of that community with a new vision for the future.

Which is why I have decided that, for myself anyway, I’m going to call it Kortright 3.o

I know it’s incredibly geeky, but that’s the way I find myself thinking about it. As we cross the 30 year mark it will be as if we are entering into a whole new version of Kortright – version 3.0 – still very much the same place but with a few updated features, and a few new ones, some unproductive features removed from the menu, a little debugging done along the way, resulting in an improved spiritual experience that makes Kortright a greater and more effective community than it is right now.  And that’s exciting!

And I’ll be writing about all of it here, from one gray man’s perspective. Nothing about the future is going to be very black and white I imagine, just myriad shades of gray.  But I’ll comment on it here under the tag ‘Kortright 3.0’.  And I invite you to comment on the process as well. There will need to be many conversations about what is happening at KPC; I’d like to start one of them right here.

If you’re from Kortright then please pass around the link to this article. Let’s use the comment feature to start a dialog about what is happening at KPC. If there is enough traffic I’ll transfer all of this to a blog of its own. For now I’ll archive everything to a new menu page called – you guessed it – Kortright 3.0

This is an ending, there’s no doubt about that, but it is also a beginning; I’m excited to be here as the future unfolds.  In the past I was usually the one moving on; but God has given me a home at Kortright and so this time I’m staying while others do the moving. 

A new experience – this is going to be a great adventure.

 

First Day out of Das Boot

/ Dennis A. Gray / Leave a comment

I know I should have posted this on Saturday, but I’ve been too busy enjoying the freedom. 
Das Boot is History!

I went to see the physio-therapist on Friday and after talking for a while about what my doctor said on Thursday the decision was made to go ahead and loose Das Boot.  She warned me not to over do it, wear really solid footwear, and put the boot back on for a while if I feel the foot getting weary or sore.  Makes sense doesn’t it.

So what’s the first thing you do when your foot is out of a cast for the first time in almost three months?  Go to the Toronto International Bicycle Show of course!

Late Friday night my brother Alex called me and reminded me that the show was on this past weekend.  So Saturday after band rehearsal we headed down to see what there was to see. It was really a great afternoon.  Since both of us have fairly busy schedules we don’t get a lot of time together and so it was definitely good to have the time to spend just talking back and forth, sharing a Tim’s, just hanging together for a while. It’s like the commercial says,

Lunch at Tim Hortons – $10

Tickets to the Bicycle show – $13

Spending time with my brother – Priceless!

That said however, the show itself left me less than fulfilled.  I don’t know where the Toronto show fits on the bicycle equipment manufacturers schedule, but I’m willing to bet it’s a way down the list of “places we have to be”.  I was very disappointed in the low turn out from the big bike and accessories players.  The vast majority of the booths were local bike shops, and while I don’t begrudge them the chance to increase their public face, what I was hoping to see was a showcase of the newest and best innovations in the development of cycling gear. The stuff was there, but you had to worm your way past the bikes they wanted off the shop floor to find it.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that it was a waste of time or money – it wasn’t. There were a few things that really impressed me.  Shimano had a great display, and Thule was very well presented, but there were few other large manufacturers.  The Trek display was just the local dealer with a large rack of bikes.  I should have suspected it when the event was advertised as being sponsored by Shimano.  So basically, it would appear they were able to buy out the show.  They sponsored the BMX demos and the like so I guess they owned it.  At least, it certainly looked that way to me.

The problem is, it’s not just the bike show.  In Toronto, this is increasingly the case with trade shows aimed at the buying public.  It is no longer about building the dream, pushing the envelope, trying to out perform the competition in who can put on the more impressive display.  It’s only about holding the flea market.  Which in and of itself is not a bad thing, but even in this I saw very little that I could not have acquired for a similar price at my local bike shop.

I realize some will accuse me of being over nostalgic here, but I remember going to these kind of shows when I was younger and the understanding was that the purpose was to inspire me to dream.  I would get a chance to see in person all the great stuff I’d only seen in magazines.  I could touch it, feel it, smell it; it was an experience in of of itself going to these shows.  Not so much anymore.  Now the Toronto shows feel more like a trip to a discount mall, only not as appealing.

I will give credit where it is do however; as usual Gears Bike Shop in Mississauga did a great job.  Their display rivaled even that of Shimano.  But most importantly, unlike many other vendors at the show they didn’t have the elitist air about that that seems to permeate cycling culture here in North America.  I’m happy to report they treated this over-weight, hobbling on a crutch to protect my ankle, 50-something with as much respect and dignity as I could hope to be treated anywhere.  In too many of the booths I was greeted with the usual enthusiastic indifference. Not so at Gears, I felt like they were just as interested in helping me as anyone else, and when the subject of my injury came up they even had a few moments for that as well.  Well Done!

Bicycle-Friendly Guelph makes an appearance at the Toronto International Bicycle Show

Bicycle-Friendly Guelph makes an appearance at the Toronto International Bicycle Show

Another thing that I was surprised to see was not only a number of Guelph venders (WIKE Trailers for example) but also the city of Guelph itself, promoting the Royal City as a bicycle friendly place to live.  They had a great display, right at the entrance, decked out with a European style cargo bike, banners, decals, maps, and plenty of information on the initiatives Guelph has in place to promote increased cycling infrastructure. I felt more than just a little proud.

All in all, it was an acceptable afternoon. Alex picked up a few things for his three-wheeled recumbant, I met a friend or two and had a chance to get out and about for the first time in nearly three months. Spring is in the air, and if my achilles tendon continues to cooperate I hope to be on my bike by the end of April.

So keep a good thought and if you have not already done so, click on the banner at right and sponsor either myself or one of the other members of Team Kortright in the Ride to Conquer Cancer.

At last… Some freedom

/ Dennis A. Gray / Leave a comment

Good news from my physiotherapist today. I can start to put weight on my left foot!

Now of course this doesn’t mean I can go around running marathons or anything, but I can move from one room to the next with only the one crutch or my cane. Which makes me much more mobile. Struggling to keep my balance on one foot and the like while I was on the ‘no weight at all’ restriction was a real challenge some times. Now I can use the left foot (still in the storm trooper boot of course) to balance myself out, so I can stand for a while and do things. And as long as the single crutch or the cane is taking most of the weight (75%) I can walk a few steps. For long distances I need both crutches.

Of course with this also comes a new set of exercises. I’m starting on the stretching exercises now to keep the scar tissue on my tendon from hardening and restricting my range of motion. There is some discomfort after the exercises which is why I have to stay off my feet for a while after I’ve done them, but it will, as they say, be worth it. I’m beginning to feel more optimistic about being able to participate in the Ride to Conquer Cancer in June.

It also means I’ll be able to get out a bit more, though for the most part I’m still looking at taking cabs most places. Problem is… it’s winter. If it was anytime in late spring to early fall, I’d just hobble my way on crutches to the bus stop and off I’d go. But snow, ice and crutches aren’t a terrific mix. I’m concerned about making it to the bus stop safely. So until the snow clears, or they allow full weight bearing on the foot I need to pick my rides carefully.

Speaking of which, I really want to thank those of you who have been helping me through this. The rides, the visits etc. have all been just great. I have a new appreciation for the simple joy of just being able to talk with someone over coffee for a while. Thank you so much.

Well, I guess that’s it for now. I’m off to Guelph Little Theatre tonight to watch “The Curious Savage.” Apparently it’s a pretty good show. Nice sound effects.

Until next time… Shalom.