Here are five things worth paying attention to this week. These are designed to expose you to a perspective you may not normally come across in your daily lives. 

1. Disability and the Way of Jesus, by Bethany McKinney Fox (IVP, 2019) is often quoted in our house. She is the founding pastor of Beloved Everybody, a church that provides safe spirituality and safe community for people with and without intellectual disabilities, and an amazingly creative and thoughtful designer of group experience that welcomes and unfolds mutual discoveries. Her book will awaken your thoughts about leveling the playing field, seeking out each person’s gifts while creating a much bigger tent of gathering.

2. Voices Together. The new hymn and worship collection, soon to be released to the Mennonite church, was introduced at the Mennonite Church USA convention in Kansas City. New and old music with beautifully clarified texts and more rich and varied musical treatments, fresh intercultural and intercommunal selections to deepen shared spirituality and worship. The team made the hymn sings joyous, refreshing and, above all, tantalizing with new possibilities for using the new resources.

3. MennoCon19. A wonderful gathering of Mennonite Church USA in Kansas City has us quoting, rethinking, reliving the study of Ephesians led by Tom Yoder Neufeld, the public worship session both morning and evening and the concert that presented The Mennonite Concerto with two pianos preceded by a choir singing the hymns woven within the concerto by composer Victor Davies. The spirit of this nationwide gathering lives on in all participants we encounter since. We met not just each other with gladness, but God met us in Missouri.

4. Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living by Krista Tippett (Penguin, 2016). We are finally getting around to reading the public radio prophet and pastor who prods a wide sweep of listeners to think more deeply about connected living in a fractured and alienated world. Even if you listen to her provocative show, her book is a great read.

5. Two shakers in our home state, both with high ratings on the Richter scale, and we are still talking about them since we were in Kansas City getting shaken up spiritually while people at home were being moved seismically. Birthday cards were still standing in a row on the hearth, so it was severe in some places and largely unfelt in others, even at 7.1.

David and Leann Augsburger are two semiretired people who co-lead a home-based church (Peace Mennonite Church, Claremont, California) and volunteer to welcome, care and connect people in the San Gabriel valley.