The Beautiful Reality: Highlands Ranch, Colorado

At their best, religious and spiritual communities help us discover this pure and naked spiritual encounter. At their worst, they simply make us more ashamed, pressuring us to cover up more, pushing us to further enhance our image with the best designer labels and latest spiritual fads, weighing us down with layer upon layer of heavy, uncomfortable, pretentious, well-starched religiosity.
Brian McLaren

On Friday, we left Mission Viejo at 5:12am and traveled 1000 miles, through the deserts, the valleys and the Rockies to get to Highlands Ranch just after midnight. We only ran out of gas (!) once...just 2 miles from Cedar City, UT. That's right: the Prius went 450 miles on one 11-gallon tank of gas.

We are staying with our great friends, Dale and Stacy Fredrickson, whose children Trey (7) and Iree (3) are our godchildren! Here we are 3 years ago at Trey's baptism in Rifle, CO:

We got the opportunity to participate in the Wildflowers service last night, a church-within-a-church community that meets once a month on Saturday night at St. Andrew United Methodist Church. Dale and Stacy cast a vision, organize, delegate and facilitate the service. Last night we worshipped outside and we had a phenomenal view of the Rockies (see above).

Yesterday morning, we got to sneak into the United Methodist annual conference and listen to guest speaker Brian McLaren address the assembly of pastors. McLaren has been a vital theological conversation for both the Aireys and Fredricksons. Dale introduced me to McLaren sometime back in 2001 or 2002. We read his little book More Ready Than You Realize together and Lindsay and I read his New Kind of Christianity trilogy and Generous Orthodoxy early in our theological/spiritual pilgrimage together.

McLaren was a pastor at a large church in the Washington DC suburbs and educated himself into a kind of Christian faith now largely labeled "emergent," meaning a forward-thinking, progressive version of following Jesus. McLaren is passionate about re-forming and re-framing our connection to the God of the Bible, taking the focus off what happens in the church building and living out a "gospel" in real time that is far more holistic than most contemporary expressions of Christianity: social, political, economic and spiritual. God invites us ALL into The Beautiful Reality, an amazing dance that EVERY living thing participates in. God wants us to join in on the healing and redemption of the whole world...not just our souls.