Feb 5 - UpperRoom - About Face (Indigenous)

The upper room project meets the first Monday of each month (6:-8:30pm) to engage with spirituality and justice as struggled with and fought for by the Prophets and Jesus. We meet upstairs in the Shine Café/Bar (74 Kingsway Glen Waverley) with gallery space, discussion corners, opportunity for practical response and pondering space.

We hope the upper room will be

• Space to rest/relax with your tribe
• Be challenged by the prophetic call of compassion
• Connect with heartbeats for living

There will be food, wine and friends plus

• a gallery space for photos and other art.
• activist space - activities, information and people deeply into that topic to meet
• conversational space - multimedia and communally led (an interview, music, texts, a place to chat)

Please bring your friends - all are welcome

This Monday we will be looking at indigenous issues from the point of view of the About Face project. About Faith And Culture Exchange. It is a 3 week exposure run by the UCA and Congress. Where you have the privilege of living with an indigenous community to listen and simply be. It is not a work party, not a holiday but an exchange of cultures that hopefully will send ripples of reconciliation and understanding through you and your communities. This month we will have people who went on About Face 7 last year (plus a couple from other years) willing to share their stories, plus Age who helps with the project and we have invited other indigenous friends who may or may not see this as a space for them. (We recognise that inviting indigenous people into our space on our terms is often not a safe place for them and feeds the imbalances of our colonial past. It is a much more the way of Jesus for us to take the dangerous journey into indigenous places on their terms.)

A big thanks to our friends at Narana Creations who have lent us local indigenous art for the night (for sale if you are keen). Cya there.

Palm Sunday Action - Don’t be a Nuclear Fool!

Below is all the info in an email from our friendly neighbourhood Vic Peace Network.

The web site for this action is http://www.nuclearfoolsday.org/
Age

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The Conscience of the state

Martin Luther King Jr.

Worthy of Satire

Stephen Colbert, of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

2007 Sweatshop Awards for excellence

Please find here a fun and effective way of sending a message to fashion companies to get their act together to make sure that those who make their clothes in Australia get a fair deal.

Your vote sends a message to the particular fashion label.

Please consider helping out by posting the below message from FairWear on any web-sites you are associated with, or by simply forwarding the message from FairWear.

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Designer Simplicity?

These days, in searching for an upper room to call my own and re-thinking many things I take for granted, a theme seems to re-emerge.

A question to the emergent church. To anyone who has ever goggled ‘Ghandi’ or ‘solar panels’ and above all, to myself……

Is it just me, or is ’simplicity’ becoming a pretty trendy thing to do? Not that that’s a bad thing (nothing wrong with a bit of canvas bag usage, bike riding or organic chocolate) but if ‘living simply so others may simply live’ is the thought in many a heart, isn’t it time we asked ourselves ‘who in the world can really afford organic chocolate anyway?’

Certainly not the wide majority we are living simply in solidarity with.

What is true Christ like simplicity and what is just finding a lifestyle that works (and is readily accepted by a like minded community members) and attaching meaning to it as an afterthought?

What’s a radical call to be counter cultural and what’s merely placebo for my western white girl guilt?

Does anyone else occasionally catch themselves in a moment of disillusionment in the face of something I can only articulate as ‘Designer Simplicity?’

That’s not to say there isn’t an exciting energy that at times surrounds efforts to live more simply.
I heard recently, of an Australian family who eat only rice for one day a week to always remember the many people in the world who have nothing else in their tummies, another family in west end lives entirely without electricity…..

Many people are experimenting with many amazing things, but still I wonder at how the majority of times, when ‘three or more are gathered’, expensive coffee and decadent cake seem always to be on the menu …..?

Feeling a little disturbed,

Cars