What kind of disengagement would it require not to stay busy and not to stay tired all of the time?

“Abundance is the antithesis of accumulation.”

I was recently pulling together some material on Abundant Community for a friend.  As I was doing this, I came across the audio from a workshop held in 2014 at Broadway United Methodist Church on “Living Toward a Culture of Community and Abundance.”

John McKnight, Peter Block and Walter Brueggemann led us in a series of discussions around the topic of abundance – interwoven with poetry and thoughts from Mari Evans and others. It was an amazing experience. Ideas, action and changes from the ripples and waves created that day continue to be revealed in and around me.

Here’s a short excerpt from Walter, who does a powerful job of making themes and lessons from the Old Testament come to life and have meaning for our communities and families today…

The dominant gospel narrative, which is performed again in the New Testament, is to find the freedom and courage to depart from Pharaoh’s narrative.  It is not an adequate food narrative.

In the last 5-10 years, almost everyone now knows that Pharaoh’s narrative has failed.  But, it has such a grip on us that we continue to pretend that it is the only narrative in town. We bust our ass trying to make it work, and convince ourselves that it is still true.  If you go along with the system, somehow it will still work.

The sign of that is how incredibly busy and tired we stay all the time. Pharaoh wants his slave subjects to stay busy and tired all of the time.

The question for those who want to leave this narrative is: what kind of disengagement would it require not to stay busy and not to stay tired all of the time…because people who are not busy or tired have energy to think about alternatives.

Walter Brueggemann, August 2014

Walter then shares some insight into another narrative for us to consider.  It starts with this inexplicable bread called Manna.

It is the narrative of abundance.

#abundance #abundantcommunity

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Click here for the full audio feed…

The audio from the entire conference is included below:

The Abundance Festival Audio
Living Toward a Culture of Community and Abundance

Welcome – Rev. Mike Mather and Deamon Harges
Opening Poems – Mari Evans
Creating Connections – Peter Block
Walter Brueggemann
John McKnight
Peter Block
Closing Statements
Closing Poems – Mari Evans