Elgin’s Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren made news last week for its new Peace Memorial Garden, where burials happen the Brethren way: simply, peacefully, sustainably, together.  Members Jay Gibble and Roger Anna, who have been instrumental in bringing about the garden, are quoted.   New Associate Pastor Audrey deCoursey was also interviewed for the article, which included a brief introduction for the community.

The following are websites and blogs helpful for progressive ministry. These links, and more, will also appear in the right-hand column as this page grows.

Hospitality for the Coming Age, a website devoted to innovations in and theology of Christian hospitality

Spectrum Magazine’s Blog, publication of the Seventh-day Adventist Association of Adventist Forums

Fidelia’s Sisters, from the Young Clergy Women’s Project

Plymouth Center for Progressive Christianity, based in Minneapolis, has been setting the trends for the religious left for decades

The Beatitudes Society, a recent organization mobilizing seminarians to come into their own as future leaders of progressive Christianity

Welcome to this brief, online introduction to a person as likely to defy presumptions as anyone you may ever meet. Audrey deCoursey embraces an identity of seeming contradictions: she finds her purpose in life through radical, progressive activism that is simultaneously rooted in the Christian religion. She is a pacifist interested in studying genocide, a feminist who enters beauty pageants, and a science major who went into religion. She is an extrovert who would more gladly listen to the stories of people she meets than be the center of attention. She holds herself and others to high standards but understands why we as humans do not always meet them. She puts herself out into the world in hopes of guiding others’ perceptions of her, but also as an invitation for others to share themselves. In this, she sees herself as a person in love with the world in all its fullness, ever seeking its restoration and healing.

Part of this unique mix may have come from her experience of growing up in Chicago: an urban center, with its solidly liberal politics, that is also grounded in the responsibility and downright friendliness of the Midwest. It is a place that teaches its citizens their appropriate scale as humans in the world. deCoursey has spent most of her life in cities: Oak Park and Chicago, Illinois; Portland, Oregon; the San Francisco Bay Area, California. Some of her favorite places, places where her heart truly comes alive, are in small towns and wilderness areas: central Kansas, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, northern Indiana, coastal Oregon. And she seems to grow increasingly unsettled when she has spent more than a year or two without traveling abroad, a habit that has thus far taken her to five continents.

At the center of deCoursey’s practical theology is a belief in the centrality of stories and language in shaping our worldviews. She spends happy hours writing – both fiction and nonfiction – and reading or listening to the stories of her loved ones – both ones she has met in person and ones she has met only through the page. She absorbs the world through analysis of the ways words, sounds, and aesthetics encode and translate/unlock our experiences. She deems symbolic communication the ultimate blessing (and tragic flaw) of the human species, in its allowing us to achieve our purpose of intentional, appreciative connection. She believes that it is stories that weave us together as communities, and that it is in community that our lives are lived most fully.