Baptized for This Moment A Congregational Guide to Lamentation and Response

In Baptized for this Moment: Rediscovering Grace All Around Us, Stephen Bouman explores how congregations may best respond to the many public crises that confront us today—mass shootings, terrorist attacks, hurricanes, flood, wildfires, tornadoes, even the debilitating effects of chronic and deep-rooted problems like racism and community violence. He describes in practical detail the ways congregations can create spaces to lament, develop living liturgies, build public mission tables, and engage with others in discovering the transformative power of grace all around us.

• Everyone who draws breath has ground zeros in their lives.
• How easily our lamentation may turn to anger, to xenophobia, to talk of walls, to racial and religious profiling.
• The church is constantly called to persevere in Hebrews 10: 24-25: “Let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another.”
• We Christians cannot avert our eyes from desolation, nor let the short attention span of today’s culture move us on too quickly from the small and large disasters that traumatize our fragile world….
• Our lamentations are not the isolation and depression of wounded entitlement or private grief, but the community at the foot of the cross moving outward in solidarity and love toward the sorrow of the world.
• Here must be the first response of the Church in the face of any of the tragedies we now find afflicting us: Show up. Listen. Tell stories. Pray.