The Thursday just past was US Independence Day – the annual celebration of that country’s declaration, and eventual winning, of independence from English colonial rule.
That occasion got me thinking about freedom, in the patriotic, “land of the free and home of the brave” sense. This eventually brought me to a few questions: What freedoms do I really have? Which ones matter most to me? What would I be willing to do to preserve them?
After today’s service, we’ll be holding our Annual General Meeting. In three weeks, Jonathan Mason will be leading our service and kicking off our annual pledge drive. The fact these events were coming up got me thinking about our church’s finances, and more particularly about what we’re doing with what we have and what our members give.
At the end of October, I travelled to Washington, DC, to present training at and attend the OWASP Global AppSec Conference. On the Sunday before the conference, I had the opportunity to attend the first ThreatModCon, a one-day mini-conference focused on threat modelling.
At that event, I was privileged to hear a presentation by Avi Douglen. Avi is a leader of the OWASP Israel Chapter, and a member of OWASP’s Global Board. He’s a security consultant and threat modelling practitioner, and is one of the signatories of the Threat Modeling Manifesto, created and published in 2020.
Avi’s presentation is titled “The Threats to Our Community,” and I’m going to share with you much of the content from that talk.
As I listened that day, it became clear to me that the threats he spelled out – and the countermeasures he recommended – would apply to any community that relies on mutual trust and respect to function. Communities like ours. So, I asked for a copy of his slide deck, to use in a future talk at my church – he was surprised by the request, but agreed immediately.
In October, Avi spoke for an hour – I’m going to try to do his ideas justice in less than 20 minutes. We’ll see how that goes.
Before I begin, I need to provide a general content warning. While I won’t be going into details of any, I will be namingmany abusive behaviours. If this could be triggering for you, I welcome you to remove yourself from this space to protect your well-being.
(John talked impromptu to the slideshow, so no script this week, the slideshow is available in this PDF).
Meditation / Conversation starter
Taking into account all aspects of our life together, what can we do to identify and respond to threats to this community’s well-being?
As we were driving home from last Sunday’s service, I was thinking on what I should talk about this week.
During that service, we celebrated Clay’s years with this church as our paid minister, and we acknowledged that phase of our community’s life was coming to a close.
During the Notices that day, Ted reminded us all of the need for members to step up and fill the void Clay’s retirement has created. We can no longer sit back and let him come up with all the ideas week after week, because – simply put – it’s not his job any more.
The ‘theme’ or ‘slogan’ that popped into my head during last Sunday’s drive home was simple: “One Community – Many Voices.”
We reached out to Jean, to see if she might be willing to join us again today, but we were unable to get in touch. I considered simply playing the recording of her talk from our website, but ended up going in a slightly different direction: I’ll be playing a recorded TED Talk from 2016, on a similar topic.
Our songs today are from Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” a performance by the Temple University Symphony Orchestra and Temple University Combined Choirs on April 1, 2016. The performance was filmed at Verizon Hall in the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadephia, and was conducted by Andreas Delf. Opening Song:- “O Fortuna” from start through to 2 minutes, 45 seconds.
When I signed up to lead today’s service, I figured it would be easy to come up with things to say. I mean, after all, there’s no shortage of writings and opinions around the Church’s appropriation and subjugation of non-Christian customs and occasions.
As I’ve mentioned a few times in the past, the themes and musings present in the services I lead tend to reflect things that are on my mind at the moment. In this case, it happens to be birthdays. Mine is this coming Tuesday. It also happens to be one of those “milestone” birthdays – I’ll be turning 55.
I grew up in a rural part of Connecticut, in the northeastern United States. My home town, Plainfield, was small, the population was almost entirely white Europeans, and – as far as those in authority in my life were concerned – everybody was cisgendered and straight.
As was the social norm of the time, when someone we knew was gender non-conforming, we were all expected to act as though that fact didn’t exist. Our parents referred to their gay and lesbian relatives and acquaintances as ‘eccentric,’ and to their life partners as ‘roommates.’
We were indoctrinated to the “fact” that being cisgendered and straight was the one true “lifestyle choice,” in much the same way we were indoctrinated to believe our mainstream Christian sect was the one true religion.