The Jeff Street Baptist Community at Liberty’s identity as an “Outsider Church” has been primarily shaped by our long-term faithfulness to our urban location. In the wake of recent neighborhood “revitalization” we wonder what our future will be. Is God calling us to stay put (as Jeremiah advised the Jewish exiles in Babylon, “build houses, plant gardens!”) or should we relocate? Is it possible to retain our oddness, our radical edge, our outsider identity without close geographical proximity to human need?

As I “Listen In On the Outside,” learning from those who voluntarily or otherwise live on the margins of their culture, I hope to be energized, informed, and equipped to lead our community into a future of discerning and following God’s leading. In particular, I will listen:

to the Voices of Outsider Artists (on an Outsider Art Road Trip with my son, and hands-on at an "Art in the Rough" workshop);

to the Voices of the Outsider Church (visiting local “fringe” churches, three New Monastic communities, committed, as they are, “to the abandoned places of the Empire,” and Christians in China, hosted by one of my dearest friends);

to the Still Small Voice Within (through altered art, reading, family vacation in the Pacific Northwest, and daily spiritual practices, for example, praying with icons that I will create at an altar that I will have altered).

“The maintenance of oddity…is the first task of the preacher,” says Walter Brueggemann. May I, through this sabbatical, be equipped to nurture oddness in my beloved community!