All Church Retreat, October 8-10, 2021

Speaker: Jonathan Tran

Friday Night (Session #1)

Title: “The Joy of Christian Discipleship: Between Joy and Dispossession”

This first talk will introduce the broader themes, and will use Mark’s rich young ruler/“we have left everything to follow you” story to portray Christian discipleship as life eked out between joy and dispossession, where the promised preponderance of joy often meets the harsh realities of costs paid along the way. Specific attention will be given to career and vocation and their effects on family as a place where this dynamic between joy and dispossession gets lived out. Painful stories of the cost of Christian discipleship will be pitched against a larger backdrop of the eternal joy of Christian discipleship.

Saturday Morning (Session #2)

Title: “Life on the Razor’s Edge Between Hope and Despair”

This is the first of a two-part talk about the Christian journey between hope and despair. It follows the Psalm’s imagery where faith hungrily searches for hope amidst the many reasons for despair. It differentiates the substance of Christian hope from the shallowness of American optimism, especially as promised in the empty dreams of consumer capitalism. It relates a number of heavy-hitting stories where despair seems to steal the show, until hope emerges to tell a different story.

Saturday Morning (Session #3)

“Between Hope and Despair Lived Out Amidst Racial Capitalism, the Climate Crisis, and the Abuses of the Christian Church”

This second of Saturday morning’s two-part sequence applies the dynamic of hope and despair to three sites where hope is tested. First, Jonathan discusses the prospects of genuine antiracism amidst the culture’s increasing tendency for canceling reasons for hope. Second, Jonathan turns to the climate crisis, first trying to describe just how critical the situation has become and then pointing to reasons for hope given by the Christian practice of joyful dispossession. Third, Jonathan shows how the very thing God uses to introduce and sustain hope, the Christian church, has become perhaps our greatest reason for despair. Amidst these three harbingers of despair, Jonathan returns to the Psalms to show that substantive hope grows not in the absence of reasons for despair but indeed in the very presence of them, concluding by offering reasons for hope at each of these three sites.

Saturday Night (Session #4)

“At Home On the Way: Between Alienation and Home”

Jonathan’s concluding message portrays Christian spirituality as unfolding on the way between alienation and home. He relates the wilderness wanderings of the Hebrews and the pilgrim journeying of the church as being at home in se (“on the way” in the Latin). He recounts different ways he’s tried to find a home throughout his life as an immigrant, and how amidst “being at home in se” career and community sometimes compete with and sometimes complement one another. He describes how the Christian’s pilgrimage into the infinite life of God (the unending love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”) means that the dynamic between alienation and home constantly calls us to something more while gathering us with fellow travelers along the way.