Amy Durfee West’s Blog
What’s a Methodist lawyer from Colorado doing in a Baptist seminary in Pennsylvania?

When I came to Philadelphia I planned to sell everything, pay off all my debts, and start over. I was able to sell an investment property last fall, but the house I lived in did not sell. I took it off the market and rented it out, at about half of my monthly payment. The equity in it is locked up, and I need to protect it by continuing to cover debt service.

I had thought I could just get student loans to fund this operation. I can, but not for anything in excess of what the university defines as my school expenses. That leaves a gap between income and expenses. I have been covering the gap, but I’m running out of things to sell.

I started looking for jobs last winter. I signed up for night and weekend classes for spring semester, so there would be time to work. But I haven’t even gotten an interview, much less a job offer.

I decided that the best solution is to re-launch Durfee West P.C. I am licensed to practice law in Pennsylvania now, and I’m still licensed in Colorado. I reactivated my malpractice insurance, got an office in an executive suite, ordered some business cards, and have started getting the word out that I am back in business.

I am looking forward to plying my trade again. Although I love school, I also get a great deal of satisfaction from my law practice. As a solo, I can decide how much I take on, whom I represent, and what hours I work. I am accountable only to my clients, and myself, not to an employer whose goals may not be the same as mine. I am comfortable and happy in the business world, in a lawyer role. It’s good to be back.

As for juggling work and school, I’m sure I can handle it. I worked full time for most of the years that I was raising a large, active family. Since I started my solo practice in 2002 I have had to balance the needs and priorities of multiple clients. I have mechanisms in place for getting help when I need it, and I am a professional. I’ll make sure I don’t drop the ball. School will be one “client,” and there is time for others.

When I was in Denver I rarely saw clients face to face. Almost everything was done by phone, fax and email. I have people in Denver who can meet with clients if necessary. It’s a four-hour plane ride, with frequent daily flights, so if I really need to be there physically it can be done. My practice is entirely transactional. With no court appearances to cover, there’s no reason I can’t have a “virtual” practice in Colorado. I still have my Denver office number, and I have a toll free fax number. This should work out just fine.

It is possible that I’ll keep doing this after I graduate.  I may have to be self-supporting in whatever ministry I enter in the future. There may be some further connection between the new skills I am acquiring in school and my work as a real estate lawyer. I am open to all possibilities.

About five years ago, one of the partners in a law firm where my first day on the job was my 29th birthday came up to me and said, “You haven’t aged.” I thanked him, and that really was nice to hear, but I was thinking, “Yeah, if it weren’t for the wrinkles, the gray hair, and the middle-aged spread, I’d look exactly the same as I did at 29.” In that five years I’ve slowly gotten even fatter. It’s time to face facts.

After years of obsession with weight when I was younger, which actually skidded dangerously close to anorexia when I was 14, I keep hoping I’ll just learn to be an intuitive eater, and have the body mass I consider best without having to weigh and measure my food and count calories. This hope is pinned in part on what happened in 1994, when I trained for a long bike trip, got into great shape, gained muscle and dropped a lot of body fat, seemingly just from riding the bike. However, in 2005 I trained for another long bike ride. Even before I started training, I had been working out close to 8 hours a week. That time, though, by the time the ride was over I was very fit and healthy, but still fat.

I keep seeing ads on the internet saying “Lose all the weight you want by obeying this one simple rule!” I know what the rule is, and it’s not “buy this latest weight loss fad and eat or drink it,” it’s eat less, exercise more. I have decided to give in to the laws of physics, and to ingest less energy than I expend, which does, sadly, involve counting calories (sigh). I started in mid-May, and I’m making progress. Two months ago, I had a pair of denim shorts that I couldn’t squeeze into at all. A month later, I could get them zipped if I laid down on the bed, but I couldn’t breathe when I stood up, so they went back in the drawer. Last Friday they were still a bit snug at first, but I zipped them without having to lie down, and I wore them all day with no ill effects.

I have worked out, off and on, for my entire adult life. Sometimes the “off” periods lasted many months, though probably never an entire year.  I took my first weight training class in 1976, when the idea of women lifting weights was quite avant garde. I feel great when I exercise regularly, and when I get back with it I always wonder why I ever stopped. I’ve started doing yoga, which I like very much.  I like walking, hiking, and biking.  I didn’t bring any of my weights to Philly, but I have some resistance bands, and what they used to call “calisthenics” are now referred to as “body weight resistance” exercises, meaning you use your own body weight to engage the large muscles, build muscle, and get the heart rate up to burn fat and improve cardiovascular health.

But what about that middle aged spread? In the last few years I have begun to think that may be more about not getting enough fat in my diet than eating too much. I think the “politically correct” high-carb, low-fat diet is extremely unhealthy, at least for me. People who tend to store extra fat in their abdomens may be carbohydrate-sensitive. In those people, consuming excess carbs and storing them as fat leads to inflammation, insulin resistance, and “metabolic syndrome,” all of which are precursers to type-2 diabetes. After years on that very diet I was tired all the time, cranky, and prone to colds and sinus infections. (I was also working full time as a lawyer and raising 5 kids; I’m not saying my health issues were all caused by diet.) A couple of years ago I started attending to what fats I was ingesting, instead of reflexively cutting all kinds of fat.

I am living proof that you can gain weight, or carry too much weight, on “healthy food.” But there is a difference. I don’t have as big a belly as I did. I have less abdominal fat. That’s the dangerous kind, the pre-diabetic kind. Aesthetics are one thing–where would we be without our vanity? But since I’m in the middle of a career change at a rather advanced age, my number one goal is to put a decent number of years into it once I graduate. To do that, I need to be healthy.

Even though I’m watching my energy intake, I’m also deliberately taking supplemental fat. Not a lot, mind you, and I don’t add much fat to food. But I take spoonfuls of coconut oil and an oil blend called Udo’s. Coconut oil has gotten a bad rap. Yes, it’s high in saturated fat. So are brain cells and nerve cells. For proper cognitive function, nerve function, and hormone balance, human bodies need fat.  Human beings are omnivores, and we can survive on pretty much anything that’s handy, at least for a time. My ancestors in Ireland lived on potatoes and cabbage. But the optimal diet has fish oil or some other source of Omega-3 fatty acids, and it has natural saturated fat–no transfats. I eat organic butter from grass-fed cows. Grass fed butterfat is high in Omega-3’s and it has conjugated linoleic acid, which some body builders take as a fat burning supplement.

My intention is to lose fat and preserve muscle. It’s wrong to watch “weight” alone, without paying attention to body composition. I have proof of that. In 2003, after a traumatic personal loss, I lost my appetite for an extended period of time. Twenty pounds came off very quickly, because I was hardly eating anything. (I tried to eat, but I couldn’t force myself to chew and swallow. It was actually scary.) But my body was larger than in 1994, when I weighed nine pounds more.  That experience also allowed me to prove, inadvertently, that crash diets make you fat. A lot of the weight that I lost on that “crash diet” was muscle. When I finally felt like eating again, I pigged out, and I ate things that I don’t normally touch, like white bread, and candy. I regained all the lost poundage, and kept gaining until I stabilized at 10 pounds more than the starting point, but it was fat, not muscle. My metabolism had tanked. I was cold all the time. I was weak. And I had a big round belly.

It is more important to move than to restrict food intake. A fat person who exercises is healthier than a skinny one who doesn’t. However, the option of being a skinny non-exerciser is not open to me. Barring some devastating, wasting illness, my only two choices are to be a chubby exerciser or an exerciser who, because of nutritional discipline, is also lean. Exercising while cutting calories spares muscle tissue. More of the weight lost comes from fat. And that, as I said, is what I want.

One Tuesday last month I went to a prayer meeting at my church at 8 a.m., then spent the rest of the day in court. Twelve people who had been arrested as part of a nonviolent civil disobedience exercise in January at a Philadelphia gun shop were on trial for disorderly conduct, defiant trespass, blocking a public right-of-way, and conspiracy. Most of them are clergy, and all are religious.

The group calls itself “Heeding God’s Call.” They had been trying to get the gun shop to enter into a voluntary code of conduct for gun merchants, and they resorted to civil disobedience when the gun merchant refused. (At the trial, he claimed he was willing to sign on to 9 of the 10 points, and that he believed one of the points violates federal law.) The procedures in the voluntary code are intended to reduce the number of weapons that are sold lawfully but end up becoming “crime guns.” Gun traffickers pay “straw buyers” to purchase weapons, which are then resold to people who could not lawfully obtain them directly. One of the ten points in the code of conduct is to limit buyers to no more than one gun a month. Is there a legitimate need for a private buyer to purchase more than twelve guns per year per gun shop?

About 300 people came to watch the beginning of the trial. There was a delay of several hours while court personnel found a courtroom large enough to accommodate most of the spectators. The United Methodist Bishop for the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference, Peggy Johnson, was there for much of the day.

On average, there are 300 gun fatalities a year in Philadelphia. Many more people are shot and wounded. Many guns sold in Philadelphia become crime guns in New Jersey, Delaware, and New York, which all have stricter gun laws. Of the over 800 licensed gun dealers in the City, only ten percent have sold crime guns. Of those, only a handful are willing to sell multiple guns at a time to a single purchaser. The gun shop that the protestors targeted is in this group. A few weeks after the trial, the gun shop owner was quoted in the paper as saying he has never sold an illegal gun.

I was very interested in the defense strategy. All twelve defendants were representing themselves, though they had two lawyers working as “consultants” who did all the lawyer stuff (entering into evidence, examining and cross examining.) This self-representation allowed each defendant to combine testimony regarding the defense of “justification” with a five minute closing statement that each defendant personally wrote. The statements were very powerful and moving. They all told stories of being personally affected by gun violence, and of feeling they had to do something about it, to save lives. That was the essence of the justification defense.

The prosecutor was obviously in a difficult position. The City isn’t really opposed to regulating guns. Far too often, guns purchased by straw buyers end up killing or injuring Philadelphia police officers. Ordinances mandating all the procedures in the voluntary code were passed by City Council, but have been challenged in court. Evidence from the City’s own briefs in that case was used by the defense in this one. In this case, however, his job was to enforce the ordinances that these defendants allegedly violated. He didn’t do a very good job. (I, and many others, were praying for that result.) He was not prepared to address the justification defense. His cross examination was annoying and repetitive. He completely failed to make the case against two of the defendants. He had no witness who testified to seeing those two at the scene, not even the arresting officers.

The judge found all ten of the remaining defendants not guilty, and set them free.

“If the Americans are doing it, and they’re not accountable, then who’s going to come to your rescue?”

-Moazzam Begg, Detainee #558 in Guantanamo Bay.

Moazzam Begg’s statement, made after years of detention without charge, echoes the sentiments of many Americans and much of the world who have traditionally viewed the United States as a pillar of the rule of law.  (From Bill Moyers Journal)

A ninety-minute documentary by award-winning filmmaker Sherry Jones describes how the U.S. devolved into its own worst enemy after 9/11. The entire film may be viewed online, in three parts, here. Drawing on interviews, archived news sources, and recently declassified documents, Ms. Jones explains how the U.S. abandoned the rule of law and engaged in state-sanctioned war crimes.

As a lawyer, I am especially horrified by the “War Council” of five men who gave the Bush Administration the supposed legal cover it needed to authorize atrocities. As a citizen, and a Christian, I am utterly devastated that the current administration keeps dancing around the justice issue. At some point, the criminal culpability of Bush, Cheney, Rove, Ashcroft, Gonzales, Addington, Rice, Bybee, Yoo and others who ordered or justified this “dark side” of the “war on terror” will be attributed to the current administration. Under international law, refusing to prosecute war crimes is, itself a war crime.

There are bright spots in the documentary: military lawyers who put their careers on the line to try to stop the torture. But this just makes all the more heinous the actions of the torturers and their enablers.

In my post entitled “writing” I talk about how legal arguments must be supported by legal precedent. I have read some of the “torture memos,” and they are striking for their utter lack of legal foundation. The authors (usually John Yoo, or Dick Cheney’s counsel David Addington) just made things up. Worse, they deliberately ignored legal precedent that flatly contradicted the opinions that they gave.

The idea that a memo like this can give legal cover to an unlawful act is mind boggling in its fatuousness. It defies common sense to think that I can escape criminal liability for a crime just because my lawyer told me I wouldn’t be prosecuted, pardoning me in advance, as it were. It’s a completely novel, and unfounded, legal theory. The average person on the street can tell you it isn’t so. For that matter, everyone knows that the defense of “I was just following orders” doesn’t work. What evil, twisted thought process deprived these people of their ability to think and reason? And how did George W. Bush, a self-proclaimed Christian, descend to this level of depravity?

I handed in my last take-home final on Thursday, May 14 at 5 p.m. As expected, the last three weeks of school were extremely intense. Yet, once it was finally over, I felt let down. It seemed strange not to have any externally-imposed deadlines. I should have been happy, but instead I felt disoriented and disconnected, and I was depressed for a few days. Of course, I was exhausted, mentally and physically. In the last 10 days I’ve been sleeping a lot, and reading novels, and watching movies. I’m starting to get re-oriented.

My strategy for handling the work for six classes had been to keep plugging relentlessly, all semester. I was always behind on reading, and I tended to use a “just in time” strategy for tests and papers. I didn’t even have assignments “docketed” until after Easter. Then I sat down with the syllabus for each course, and wrote a list of what was due, and when. Or so I thought. On May 4, at 5:15 p.m., I was almost done with the reading for the second half of the Holistic Ministry class when I got online to check the point value for the “reading log” that was due at 6:30. There were “sample book reviews” posted on Blackboard. I wondered why. Then I checked the syllabus, and saw that a two-page review of any one of the books for the class was also due that day at 6:30. That was not on my “master list,” and it had completely slipped my mind. I grabbed a book from the stack, wrote up a review, and got to class on time.

The good thing about that is it didn’t take much time. I’m not sure it was the best possible book review. (It probably wasn’t), but it came and went without disrupting my schedule very much. In another class, Greek Exegesis, I had not left enough writing time for the first paper, and had resolved to put in more time and be more organized for the second one. About a month before the due date I got books from the library and started reading and taking notes. But I got stuck in research mode, and could not get myself to start writing. Finally, on Saturday night, three days before the paper was due, I put down all the books and notes, made myself sit at the computer, and started free writing, without footnoting, just so I’d have a starting place. I had another paper due one day after the Greek paper, and, apart from checking out some library books, I had not even started that one. That had me worried.

The “free writing” strategy worked to get me to stop researching and start writing. It also helped me uncover what I thought of the subject, rather than simply reporting what the published commentators thought. It helped me find a personal point of view. The teacher had said to translate the passage first, read closely, then write what I thought it meant. It was OK to read background sources, but I was not to consult any commentaries before forming my own opinion. I used that preliminary written “thesis” as the basis for the free writing.

That was interesting, and it was a good learning experience (which, as my daughter Lily has pointed out to me, should be my main reason for being in school.) But the paper took forever to finish, and the specter of the Old Testament Historical Books paper that was due next haunted me. I started to worry about running out of time, especially since I also had to finish a take-home final that was due the same day as the Greek paper.  The Greek paper was supposed to have a May 12 postmark. I mailed it at about 2:00 on May 11, after first handing in the take-home test that was due by 9:15 that night. Then I cleared the decks for the OT paper, due the next day.

I had done about 8 hours of reading and research for the OT paper over the weekend, but most of the work  was still ahead of me Monday afternoon. I decided to finish taking notes (and running to the library to copy journal articles) before going to bed Monday night. I think I spent about 8 hours at it. The next day I got up early, after four hours of sleep, and started writing. First I wrote the bibliography, and then I made a separate Word document with the footnote form for each reference. I had attempted to follow the advice to come up with my own thesis before reading commentaries, but I don’t think I had one written down.  It had been cumbersome and inefficient to add footnotes later to the first draft of the Greek paper. I did not have the luxury of time for this paper, so I put them in as I went. Having the footnote form ready to cut and paste (right font size, right format) was very helpful.

The paper was due by 9:15 Tuesday night. I got a first draft written by about 4:00 (in 11 hours), and it was in pretty good shape. I knew it wouldn’t take long to finalize it.  I took a shower, had something to eat, printed out the draft and edited it. Part of that process was to check footnotes against the first draft of the bibliography, and cross off any references that I didn’t end up using. I had it finished by 6:30. Ten pages–almost twice as long as the Greek paper (though both papers were within their respective prescribed page limits)–in much less than half the time.

After that I still had to write a spiritual autobiography for Spritual Formation class by 6:30 Wednesday night, and a take-home final for Introduction to Pastoral care, due at 5:00 on Thursday. During the last lecture time, on May 7,  I had drawn up a calendar of the next seven days, mapping out when I would be doing what. I based it on an estimate of how many hours I needed to complete the five things that were due during finals week. The next morning I made a color-coded chart, and taped it to the wall next to my computer monitor.  I had to revise it a bit as the week went on, but it ended up being a pretty accurate road map.

Sometime towards the end of the week, I got an email from my writing and Greek teacher, Debbie Watson. She asked me if I’d like to be a writing tutor in the fall. I said yes. A week or so later, the Admissions Director called me, and asked me to start working with a new student who will be starting at Palmer in the fall. I had expected to have all summer to consider a strategy for being a writing coach, but I didn’t mind. It’s great to have something new to learn, and to think about.

I know I write well. I have spent almost 30 years in a profession that requires clear, precise thinking and writing. That has come in quite handy in seminary. The main difference between legal research and writing, and seminary research and writing, is that in seminary they want to know what I think. In fact, there is a unique type of writing in seminary called the “reflection paper.” The paper is supposed to show that the writer actually read the assigned text, but, more importantly, it is supposed to demonstrate how the writer interacted with the text and responded to it personally. After the objective and dispassionate world of legal writing, this took a bit of adjustment. It’s not that lawyers don’t feel strongly about their subject matter. Passion is essential to any pursuit. But the primary purpose of legal writing is to persuade, and in order to persuade, there must be evidence, and, in the law, the evidence is prior legal decisions. My personal opinion, and my feelings, were never relevant.

The fact that I’m a good writer doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll be able to teach it. As I think about how to teach, I have been going back over the texts from the seminary writing class, and I’ve been reading articles about teaching composition. After one very intensive year in seminary, I understand what students need to be able to do in order to succeed, and I have started thinking about how to get them there. With this first client, I will have the luxury of time. Before all the confusion and newness and busyness of fall semester, we will have some time to get to know each other, and I will be able to personalize a program for that particular writer.

The Admissions Director, Steve Hutchison, told me my client was never advised of any problems with writing before now. Steve said he’s seeing more and more applicants with good grades whose “personal statements” demonstrate writing skills that do not come up to graduate level standards. I’m sure that writing can be taught, and I’m wondering why no one ever bothered to work with this student (and others) before. However, I also believe it is never too late.

Talk about world music–street performers on location all over the world somehow perform Stand By Me together. Click Here.

I continue to be very curious about specifically what I might be called to do when I’m finished with school. I had been thinking my skills and abilities would best be served in some kind of high profile social action, perhaps working for World Vision or UMCOR, or being a lobbyist or an economic development consultant. But all fundamental social change starts at the grass roots. It begins with small groups of committed people who “walk their talk.” I am taking Introduction to Pastoral Care, Holistic Ministry, and Spiritual Formation (and three other classes) this semester. These three classes overlap quite a bit, and they all offer me much food for thought. Shane Claiborne keeps saying he’s not trying to start a “franchise” of “the new monasticism.” I think he’s just saying it’s not about starting a new church, or creating any organization that would be bureaucratic, hierarchical, and institutional. The first Christians were none of those things. They were just people living together and loving each other. But I don’t think he would object to having that kind of ministry appear, organically and spontaneously, everywhere that it’s needed.

The economic crisis, the environmental crisis, the energy crisis, resource wars, and other serious issues of the day all cry out for the same solution. People need to stop, take stock of their values, and begin putting time and attention into things that really matter, now and in the future. They need to love God and love their neighbors. Their neighbors need them, and they need to be in covenant relationships and real communities. So many families (including mine) get caught up in a trap of working harder and harder for money and possessions, spending more and more money, consuming and wasting, and having little time for friendship, companionship, family life, or God. Most of the things that individuals and families could do to correct these imbalances would also be good for the environment and would promote domestic and world peace.

That all makes me think that maybe I’m not supposed to be doing any big thing. Maybe I should relocate to a blighted area, start getting to know my neighbors, start a community garden, set up a small, informal after school program, start a Bible study, etc. See what the neighborhood needs. See what God wants me to do. But I could have done that without going off to get two new Masters degrees first. I even considered doing it, before I decided I was being called to Palmer and Eastern. So why am I here?

So much of the discussion today is about value, not values. Aid well spent can be an example of both, values and value for money. Bono on Carnival, Lent, Easter, and how God is working in the world. Read More.

The National Day of Prayer is May 7. Here are some large and small ways that people of faith can become the answer to their own prayers. Read more.

Palmer Theological Seminary’s motto shows how different it is, and how difficult it is to pigeonhole it as “liberal” or “conservative.” Palmer is theologically orthodox, but not fundamentalist. It has progressive social and political values, but it is not “liberal” in the sense of falling in line with any particular political ideology. It holds and advocates traditional Christian moral values and teachings, while at the same time denouncing social and corporate sins that are often overlooked by, or even condoned by,  the Christian Right. Palmer’s motto, “The whole gospel for the whole world through whole people,” captures this distinctiveness. I knew about the theological orthodoxy before I came here. I wasn’t entirely sure my “Proud Member of the Religious Left” bumper sticker would be welcome, but I think it is.

The Bible tells how God desires, and is calling all humanity into, a whole, healthy, loving, creative, reconciled relationship with God and with one another. People are made in God’s image and likeness. God is the Creator. God is Love. If we are created in God’s image and likeness, then human beings are destined and designed for realization of our potential as creatures who love, create, and have abundant life.

The whole gospel is the entire good news, as set forth in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. The Bible gives us a story of God’s mercy and love, and of God’s longing for God’s creation to be restored to wholeness. The Bible contains thousands of verses dealing with poverty and injustice, in addition to (or as part of) the parts about repentance, forgiveness and salvation. To read, preach, and live the whole Gospel is to try, as much as possible, not to leave out anything. As Ron Sider says, Jesus spent an awful lot of good preaching time healing people, feeding them, and loving them instead. If it was important to him, then it must also be important to us if we are to claim that we are his disciples.

The cross can be a helpful reminder of the two aspects of the greatest commandment (love of God and love of neighbor), and of the fact that the two dimensions are inseparable. Christians are called to both a “vertical” relationship with God, individually and as the Church, and a “horizontal” relationship with one another. This necessarily requires that Christians be aware of, and engaged in reforming or replacing, evil social and political structures, and it requires that the Church work to alleviate the suffering caused by injustice and oppression.

Each side of the Evangelical/Ecumenical debate leaves out part of the Gospel. Both sides are able to show that their positions have biblical support, but neither is able to claim “whole Gospel” support for choosing between Word and Works. Holistic ministry embraces a both/and rather than either/or approach to mission.

Part of the “split” comes from a perceived soul/body dichotomy, from seeing “the world” as evil and the soul as existing on a different, higher level. This idea that spiritual reality is superior to physical, and that soul is more important than, and superior to, body, is not biblical. By his actions of healing and caring for people’s physical needs, Jesus gave equal priority to restoring people to physical wholeness as to repentence and atonement. Indeed, many of his healing works made it possible for people who had been ritually unclean to return to full participation in society. Furthermore, the evidence for repentance and atonement is a fundamental change in the way people behave, and treat each other. Zacchaeus offers an example of that. He didn’t just believe, he did things that showed that his life had been changed and that he had decided to follow Jesus.

The whole gospel, then, is not simply a matter of memorizing rules, or, as the tract publishers like to say, of simply accepting Jesus Christ as one’s personal savior. It’s not just the good news that Christ died for us, which is not to say that’s not important. It is a lived, practiced, committed horizontal and vertical love of God and love of neighbor.

The whole world is everyone, and everything. The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it. God made it, all of it, and loves it all. God’s desire is for God’s shalom to come to everyone and everything. A Gospel for the whole world eschews false dichotomies between the Church and the World. It recognizes that faithful environmental stewardship is inextricably linked to human rights and human welfare. It rejects divisive discrimination against, and marginalization of, any groups of people, on the basis of any classification that forgets that in Christ there is no male or female, no master or slave, no Jew or Greek. Every human being is made in the image and likeness of God. As a matter of simple common decency, Christians should agree that every person in the world has the right to a safe, secure, healthy, productive life. It would also go a long way to proving that Christians serve a Lord who desires salvation and abundant life for everyone.

Whole persons recognize that love of God and love of neighbor includes a healthy, respectful, humble love of self. I cannot give with empty hands. I cannot lead anyone where I myself have not gone. Love is not an emotion, but something practiced deliberately in relationship. By allowing my loving, reciprocal relationship with God to heal me and make me more whole (by allowing God to love me, and by trusting God) I both “practice what I preach” and gain more capacity to serve God by loving others. A whole person is congruent. Her public and private selves are in alignment. She is committed to taking good care of her whole self, body, mind, and spirit. Whole persons imitate Christ in their spiritual disciplines and in their ministry to others. Whole persons make a commitment to kingdom values and kingdom ethics, in their business practices, in their civic life, and in their emotional life. Although God can use our broken and damaged aspects in God’s own, mysterious ways, Christians have an obligation to be the best they can be.

However, I have to agree with Professor Al Tizon that the motto is missing an important piece. None of this is possible without the Church. The Church, despite its brokenness and imperfection, is how God has chosen to usher in the kingdom. Christian perfection is a process that occurs in community. People cannot achieve wholeness in isolation. They have to be members of a loving community in order to grow and mature. By the same token, church members need to take care that congregations and denominations reach for wholeness, and for solidarity with all Christians everywhere. This is an essential element of “The Whole Gospel to the Whole World through Whole Persons.” People are not going to buy the idea that our Lord is the Prince of Peace, or that God is love, if we can’t even manage to treat each other with love and respect.

When God looks at his Church, he doesn’t see denominations. He doesn’t see race, class, income level, sex, sexual orientation, fancy or plain buildings, vestments or blue jeans. He sees the “one, true, apostolic, universal church,” the body of Christ. Although individual congregations and denominations may have, or emphasize, different gifts and different senses of what they are specifically being called to do, the Church as a whole must do all it can to bring about reconciliation and unity among all Christians.