Recently brought to my attention was the abiding and steady work of Broadway Christian Church in Mesa.  The Nov. 8 issue of “Church Executive” magazine carries a story by John Sloper, an ordained minister with Hospitality Solutions in Scottsdale. The one-time pastor and church camp director  thoughtfully lays out three distinct dimensions of ministry at Broadway.  Clearly things will work out where humble people go to  work with a goal of helping and then have trust that they will be furnishe with the resources to give out.

Broadway Christian has three separate ministries in place that go to serving people. They are food boxes, the Family Aid Ministry and Community Compassion. The beauty of the balanced outreach is that it is practical because some people may have food, but there are specific things that  threaten to doom daily life, like a car that has broken down, defective air conditioner or a lack of skills in negotiating social services.

In July, for example, Broadway provided food boxes to almost 400 families, or about 1,500 people. The demand has increased 250 percent in a year.   Sloper provides examples of people who come.  One is a man who lost his home and job. Then his wife left him in the stress of  it all. He was beset with taking care of their two daughters. They spent the summer living in a camper. The food boxes let him hold his little family together.

“Yes, there are phonies, playing the system and asking for food, but help is offered regardless, ” the article notes. “Volunteers are ready to pray with those who come in, so more than just physical needs are being met.”  The congregation is almost automatic in purchasing and bringing in what things are asked in church announcements.  They have put togther hygiene packets — 300 so far.  The food box minitry is entirely driven by volunteers.

The Family Ministry takes on the knotty issue of hearing daunting requests and finding a way.  Requests must initially be made on a hotline, and then six volunteers call those people to diligently  find out the problems and needs.  Such screening sorts out scammers.  With a can-do attitude and knowing where to go for  help, Broadway’s volunteers  are able to help with rent, gasoline, utilities help, transportation, etc.  Such help went to  600 families the past year. Family Aid funds come from nongovernmental sources and a November offering is very important.

Finally the Community Compassion leg, started a year ago, is about getting practical  help — fixing homes up, cleaning yards, making sure the AC is working,  getting a house up to acceptable standards, etc. Again a hotline is used to screen calls and sort out wants. To date 180 people have been helped in the first year. The costs are covered by the church’s budget.

“Cooperation is the key,” Sloper writes. “The three branches of community ministry try to work together.” The three ministries keep their distinctions and avoid duplication or redundancy with limited resources.  We salute Broadway Christian Church, 7525 E. Broadway Road, Mesa.

Perhaps, other faith communities can develop one, two or three similiar programs — start small but strive for quality and trust.

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 Predicatably, American right-wingers dismissed it and found every way to diminish the honor.   We have already shown that Obama can do nothing to please the extreme right whose only goal is to bring him down no matter what good the president might bring to America and beyond.

 They are like the surly dogs that bark and howl at everything. It has become laughable now to watch these  goons:  how they condemned Obama a month ago for wanting to address school children about excellence and staying in school; how the president made a well-meaning trip to Copenhagen, Denmark, to tout Chicago’s bid for the Olympics (when heads of state of other countries had done the same); and now their knee-jerk clamoring to deprecate the Nobel Prize, saying Obama had no accomplishments to merit it.

The Nobel Committeee  cited Obama for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”   Much is being made about how closely after the President’s inauguration came last January to the deadline for nominating candidates.  “How could so new a president have done anything to justify such an award?, ” his critics say.

Yes, the committee, heavily weighted in Europe,  was heartened by the refreshing new attitude and tone that the world has been witnessing  in the White House.  Gone was George W. Bush,  whose reckless and bullying actions in international relations, had sullied America’s reputation for eight years.  So Obama’s statements calling for multilateral global inititatives, a strong push to reduce nuclear armaments, efforts to get Israel and Palestinian talks going and his using  less hostile language in all levels of diplomacy set well with the rest of the world.  Not to mention his speaking skills and ability to project hope.

I had the chance to meet three Nobel Peace Prize winners through the years:  Norman Borlaug (1970), the agronomist who was the architect of the Green Revolution;  Mother Teresa of Calcutta  (1979); and the Dalai Lama (1989).  Once I received a short personal note from Holocaust writer Eli Wiesel, the 1986 winner.

The Nobel Prize group is so impressive. Some of the most famous names:  Albert Schweitzer, Ralph Bunche, Lech Welesa, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Anwar Sadat with Menachem Begin, Jimmy Carter, Martin Luther King, Mikhail Gorbachev, Linus Pauling, Elihu Roo, Henry Kissinger, Al Gore and Theodore Roosevelt.

Obama was humble and reserved about the award, cognizant that his critics would say he did not deserve it — certainly not yet.  He wisely used it to say the award is for all those in the world earnestly working for peace on the many fronts in which he was leading the U.S.  He was wise to announced his financial prize was going to charity.

Such an award typically goes to old people whose body of work is clear.  The president has won the big one, so what is left?  Obviously, accomplising some of the major tasks that this nation and planet need accomplished.   Many who have earned awards  ”before their time” get a kick in the pants from winning it, and it gives them the license and go ahead to do great things to live up to their prize.

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It has been more than a year since San Tan Justice of the Peace Sam Goodman rejected the Maricopa County prosecutors’ arguments for one trial, but Prosecutor Barbara Marshall  appealed that ruling, arguing the five men’s stories and account needed to be shared in a single trial to prove Fushek’s pattern of sexual motivation. A Maricopa County District Court judge upheld that, and an appeal was filed.  Marshall voiced publicly that Goodman’s decision, if upheld, meant “our case has been cut off at the knees.   Late in September, Marshall and her team were informed the Court of Appeals had denied the requested reviews.

So the case goes back to Goodman’s court.  Fushek, who had ascended to be the second most powerful clergymen in the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix, as vicar general under former Bishop Thomas O’Brien, will be tried before separate  juries.  In 2007, he successfully won an Arizona Supreme Court ruling that allowed him to have jury trials, not trials before a judge. Goodman had previously ruled the trials would take place   in front of  his bench with his ruling on Fushek’s guilt or innocence. But Fushek successfully pressed for his own trials,  noting that he could be labeled a sex offender if convicted in a judge-ruled case.  And that could doom his ministry to families and children.

Fushek was first accused almost  five years ago, but the  long litany of rules, appeals and motions has stretched out disposition of the cases.  On Feb. 5, 2009, the Maricopa County Superior Court upheld Fushek’s case for  five trials to resolve the seven misdemeanor churges, brought by men who were teens in alleged incidents between 1984 and 1993.

 Together, they represent one count of assault, one of indecent exposure and five counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Maricopa Judge Joseph Kreamer ruled that the series of incidents were separate and that it would be unfair to bundle them together  as if they were all related.   “The court does not believe that the alleged offenses are based on the same conduct , or are otherwie connected in their commission,” he had determined.  Kreamer said the incidents took place across the expanse of almost a decade, in various settings  and were not related close enough.

That jibed with Goodman’s original decision. Goodman had decided the five trials would be booked from the oldest  incidents to the newest. Each trial would follow the other  “as soon as practical following the conclusion” of each previous trial.

   The first is contributing to the delinquency of a minor complaint by Carl Mawhinney, who accuses Fushek of  “numerous sexually related discussions” about his sex life betwen 1984 and 1988. It would be followed by a trial, on charges of assault and contributing  to the delinquency of  a minor between 1985 and 1987, brought by Marc Tropio. The third trial would involve charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and indecent exposure, between 1987 and 1990, brought by Marc Olson.  The fourth trial would involve contributing to the delinquency of a minor between 1989 and 1991 where Doug Cordano contends Fushek  discussed his sexual activities. The final trial would focus on a count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor between 1991 and 1993 brought by Russell Swingle.   Should the first case end in acquittal, motions to dismiss the remander are almost certain.  Will it be a case of “separate and conquer”?

Fushek was one of the highest ranked officials charged in the sexual abuse scandals that have rocked the Roman Catholic Church. In late 2007, Fushek, while on a paid leave of absence pending resolution of the charges, started a non-denominatinal church, the Praise and Worship Center in Mesa, with another former, now married, priest, Mark Dippre.  It was in defiance of orders of  Bishop Thomas Olmsted who had ordered Fushek to sit out ministry pending resolution of his cases.  Olmsted subsequently excommunicated both priests.

Goodman has scheduled a hearing for 9 a.m. Nov. 6 for the sides to come together to move forward on laying out terms for the trials.

The Arizona Court of Appeals has decided not to review special

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On Monday, the new vicar issued a press release to describe what his church was about:  “Prayer, not politics.  Community, not control. Love, not laws. Same sacraments, new spirit. Consider joining the Reformed Catholic Church, where ALL are welcome!”

Some 3 1/2 years ago, Carpenter would abruptly quit his Mesa parish and move to Long Beach, citing health and a need for change. Later he went public with his marked disagreements with his superior, Bishop Thomas O’Brien, head of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix.  At the heart of it was the church’s rejection of homosexuality.  He had been one of nine diocesean priests who had signed a letter called The Phoenix Affirmation, signed by 160 pastors of many faiths calling for the inclusion of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people in the full life of their faith communities.  The letter was produced by “No Longer Silent - Clergy for Justice.” All except one priest removed their names  by an order of  O’Brien or face disciplinary action. Carpenter complied, but he would later say “The Roman Catholic Church today barely seems like the same church I was ordained to served in 1995. ” Carpenter wrote that the environment of the  diocese had become a shart contrast to his early days as a priest.  “In the wake of the sexual abuse scandal and the death of Pope John Paul II, many of the church’s leaders seem more and more to me like the legalistic Pharisees whom Jesus condemned during his time,” he said.

 Carpenter, who came out public  as gay after moving to California, began ministering to people with HIV/AIDS.

In April, he wrote O’Brien to offer that he was leaving the Roman Catholic Church and embarking on helping expand the more progressive Reformed Catholic Church.  He was subsequently excommunicated by the bishop for being in scism with the  church.

Carpenter is now founder of what is called  the first Reformed Catholic Church congregation   in California.  It has been named the Community of  the Resurrection.  He was appointed Vicar of California and is empowered to grow the church in the state.   He is continuing his full-time ministry as a non-denominational/interfaith hospice chaplain.

“There is a growing number of disillusioned Catholics here and around the world who are eager for what the Reformed Catholic Church has to offer,” Carpenter noted last spring.

The Reformed Catholic Church (www.reformedcatholicchurch.org) will focus on the greater Los Angeles and Orange County area.  His Community of the Resurrectin was dedicated last Easter. He said is is open to “people of all faiths, ages, backgrounds and sexual orientation.”  Reformed Catholicsm descended from the “Old Catholics” who separated from Rome in wake of the 1870 declaration of papal infallibility. It is based in Columbus, Ohio. Said Carpenter’s press release, “It has experienced considerable  international growth in the past 10 years as many Roman Catholics  have become frustrated with the Roman church’s enduring opposition to the ordination of women, the inclusion of openly GLBT people, divorced and remarried people’s reception of the sacraments and optional celibacy for clergy.”  He asserted their clergy are validly ordained and share in apostolic succession dating from the time of St. Peter.

Sunday Mass is 10 a.m.  at McKenzie Mortuary, 3843 Anaheim Street, Long Beach.  Carpenter can be reached at (562) 708-7198 or frcarpenter@reformedcatholicchurch.org.

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Last November, an imam invited the Pastor Shields  “to speak alongside their imams from the capital city,” she said. “Walls fell, along with centuries of misunderstanding, prejudice and suspicion, as our two sides simply looked into each other’s eyes and talked.”  Participants exchange looks at pictures of each others’ children ” as we spoke of our common desire for following the ways of Jesus and Messiah, better known to them as Isa al Masih.  We often felt a common bond.”  Afterwards, the president of the Saharawi people invited both sides  for a joint dinner at a special diplomatic visitors center,  she said.

Conversations have continued over the year.  Now a team of seven will go next month for the dialogues on the topic, “Women and Suffering/Injustice.” Zahn’s group will spend a week living with the Saharawi refugees in the Sahara Desert “learning from them and of the injustice done to group of 160,000 people driven out and stranded in a country next to their own.”

Zahn said she hopes to tell the story of their work on their return. She had hoped to share her story in  the East Valley Tribune, in its  Spiritual Life Section, but that part of the newspaper was eliminated in January. Perhaps there are other avenues for the story being told.   “I can encourage Americans to reach out in understanding to thousands of Muslim refugees who are resettling in the Phoenix area,” she said.  Zahn estimates there have been 53,000 who have moved to the Valley since 1975, some 900 last year   from Iraq alone. “Real Life also works with over 100 of these Iraqi refugees, helping to resettle them in our community,”  she said. “It can break down stereotypes and fears that are typical of our two religions,” she said.

Her goal of conveying her story, she said, is to be able to “enlighten Americans and Arizonans to move beyond the comfort and security of their life of freedom and opportunity to reach out in compassion and justice.”

While Zahn, who heads the church’s Life With Purpose program, and her team are in Africa, members back at Real Life Christian Church will be participating in their own ”Global Challenge.”  For five days, they will eat only the rations that refugees like the Saharawi eat through the United Nations’  food provisions. That’s typically a cup of rice, a cup of oatmeal and some sugar and oil to last a day.   “They will pray for the Sararawi and the Peace Dialogs whenever they are hungry,” Zahn said.  “And at the end, we will ask them to give what they would have spent on food to Gardens in the Desert Project,” an effort that allowsthe Saharawi to have a family garden outside their camp tents.  For more information, call Zahn at the church (480) 861-5630 or jeanne@reallife.cc.  The church’s Web site is www.reallife.cc.

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“Ah, I will do a good deed,” I thought. “I will take it home, call the Arizona Motor Vehicle Divsion, tell them I found a plate, give them the plate numbers. They’d contact the owner to come and get it. Probably a car owner in the neighborhood. ”   Over the years I have found probably a half-dozen wallets plus ATM cards left behind — and returning things to their grateful owners is a great feeling.  The Golden Rule at work.

Of course, it works best when government and law enforcement are not  there to gum up the works.  Government long ago lost common sense.

Well, the DOT employee quickly told me I could take it to an MVD office.  She would not contact the owner of Arizona plate 527-DTV (expiration Aug. 09 ) to come get it from me.  “But wouldn’t that owner like to have a plate back? It probably just fell off this morning. It would save that person a lot of trouble. That’s how I would like things handled. I have no mischievous motives.”

“Nah, it doesn’t work that way,” she said. Of course, the government that is always trying to protect us would never think about letting me know the owner.  So much like the  extremeness and silliness in the enforcement of the medical law known as HIPPA (the Health Insurance and Portability Act) that wouldn’t allow you know Grandma is being treated for bed sores or a hangnail.  Privacy laws gone amuck.

THE MVD lady said the owner would probably contact them and get issued new plates — for which the state would reap revenue. If the owner got his/her own plate back, that owner might be spared the fee.  So I have a nice slab of aluminum and two sturdy screws.  If you know your neighbor lost a license plate in Tempe near Broadway Road and McClintock Drive Thursday or Friday and hasn’t contacted the state folks yet, maybe I can help.   Again it is plate 527-DTV, expiration August 2009.  I am considering taking it back to the spot where I found it and lean it agains a light pole, as people often do with snappy hubcaps.

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Friday’s Forward, the national Jewish newspaper, carries a story called “Operation Coming to America?”  Not if caring, thoughtful people stop such brutal madness.  “Our doctors had circumcised over 80,000 men (in Israel) in a very short time,” boasted Dr. Inon Schenker, who represents the Israeli doctors plotting to rip foreskins from American males on the pretext they’ll be safe from HIV/AIDS.   He thinks he and his doctors can save thousands of lives by helping prevent heterosexual transmissions of the disease.  How much of this is simply these Jews wanting simply more millions of males to look sexually like them to try to reduce the stigma and objection to circumcision?

These misguided medical people would try to convince men to get in line for assembly-line circumcisions and lose the most sensitive, protective structure of their penises on some guarantee they’ll be innoculated from HIV/AIDS. Why not step up the real ways to avoid AIDS — condoms, appropriate and safe sexual behavior and personal hygiene.   These doctors think they can take advantage of America’s sheer ignorance and myths about the foreskin — such mindless notions like the foreskin is needless and disposable, notions like they make it hard to stay clean, notions like women prefer  that folding skin gone (talk about shallowness) or notions and nonsense that it should be amputated earlier than later.

Expect a huge outcry if the CDC really give serious consideration to Operation Abraham in what ever secularized name it might take if offered as a procedure in this country.  The literature is full of research that has discredited the African mass circumcisions. Some trials were halted early because they could not  show the results that were sought.   Fortunately, circumcision rates in the U.S. have been falling dramatically in recent decades through education, social justice efforts, common sense and recognition that circumcision is simply culturally driven cosmetic surgery typically visited on the helpless and tied down — infants.

Intact adult males should not fall for this tripe.  Circumcision means less penis, removal of a missing part, the loss of about 15 square inches of nerve- and blood-rich tissue that has many roles.

 The CDC must not be caught up in the screwy “medicine” that allowed circumcision to get started in the U.S. in large numbers in the late 1800s — ideas that an exposed penis glans was somehow good.  Circumcision has no  value.  We know Jews working hard to get Judaism to move forward in dropping one more of the harsh requirements of the Hebrew Bible that could not continue as the human race moved forward in a more caring way.  One can readily see that HIV/AIDS fighters are going after the wrong thing to stem the disease.  It’s not the foreskin, a  normal, natural structure God put on males and all male mammals.   We don’t pull teeth to prevent tooth decay or remove tonsils in the event they might have problems.  We don’t encourage women to get masectomies to prevent breast cancer later.

An Aug. 29 New York Times article by Roni Caryn Rabin (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/weekinreview/30rabin.html?_r=3) does an excellent job at pointing out the sordid historical scenario of the relentless effort of circumcisionists to gain traction for a repulsive procedure.

Circumcision is a tribal barbaric practice allowed to continue because thinking parents don’t recognize it for what it is:  a violation of the human rights of their son, a violation of their genital integrity, a violation of every person’s sovereignty of his own body.  It should be a decision each male is allowed to decide as an adult — and a tiny percentage of males allowed to choose as adults choose it.

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Civil rights legislation, establishing Social Security or Medicare, or safety rules in the workplace are some of the issues where a Congress in 2009 would be stalemated and impotent.  We have morphed into gridlock, helped in large part by the frenzy that talk show demogogues especially have accomplished.  Their pinhead followers, non-thinkers and trogloydytes march to their beat, and you just feel sorry for their being stooges.  Yet they storm Congressmen’s meeting and are only intent in killing dialogue for change.

A solution to expand health care  really would seem doable. Yet, any observer of the American scene recognizes that we have a huge segment of  the population that simply oppose social policy changes in the U.S. in the 21st century.  Not even a perfect new system would be allowed.   Their only goal is to discredit and throw roadblocks in the way so that the major party cannot and will not succeed at leading.

The polarizing of America seems complete. Among my friends on both sides, there are clear indicators by how they think, what the react to, what they say that determines which side of the line of demarcation they fall on.  I wonder so often about what made them that way — why they cannot see.  I have largely concluded it is how they are wired, with their family rearing and degree of intellectual environment secondary.  I can easily spot the “conservative, authoritarian types” that see genius in Dick Cheney, Bob Burns, Joe Arpaio, Russell Pierce or Karl Rove.  Order and no taxes are paramount for them.

For starters, I sometimes think that President Abraham Lincoln and the Union should have just let the South go and have not fought the Civil War.  Maybe The Great South, with its haves and have-nots,  should have been allowed to implode, shamed into change, treated to harsh trade sanction by the rest of America and the world. What might  such a nation look like today?  Would its hardcore conservative values have made it a kind of  reactionary world of all-white, continued servitude, a place where there are black-and-white answers to everything?  A kind of Taliban-light world?  So often, I regard the Old South as a drag on American development and progress.  The rogues gallery of political demogogues that have come ouf the South is immense.   Nixon took full advantage of the “Southern Strategy” to win the White House.  Surely, under that scenario of having let the South go its own way, the  intelligentsia and the best and brightest would have escaped north and west like has happened all through history, whether it was Europe in World War II or Iran today.

Alas, the American media has allowed the health reform debate to move from discussing the merits of proposed legislation to coverage of the organized disruptions of Town Hall meetings. It’s been quickly evident that the mostly angry white “agin’ it” folks have the same talking points — spew the same tripe full of fear of their medical fate and financial ruin.  They don’t offer constructive ideas to accomplish legislation that will remove us from the International Hall of Shame as the only major First World nations without comprehensive health coverage.

They whine and fuss at Town Halls — diverting discussion from real issues of health care to extremist issues about abortion or those phantom  ”death panels” that would choose which people would bee no longer worthy for care. For the most part, all who are interviewed spout that the system needs to be reformed.  Conservatives say it should be a measured, slow-moving, thoughtful process —taking it to the 2010 or 2012 election cycle where any major legislation dies because all lawmakers sights are on geting re-elected.

Bottom line, we all have bodies.  We all want to be healthy. Good health is a right of  humanhood.  Why should we develop the most sophisticated gadgets like GPS that can guide us through streets but no sound system to lead us through life – healthy, wealthy and wise?

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Carpenter was excommunicated by Bishop Thomas Olmsted in May for “putting himself in scism” with the church by affiliating with the Reformed Catholic Church in California where he is in the process of becoming the tiny Catholic movement’s vicar for the state.  He had served Christ the King from 1997  to 2006, then abruptly resigned as  parish priest and moving to California. Carpenter had spoken out publicly against policies of Olmsted including the bishop’s position against homosexuaity.  Carpenter, for example, was one of nine priests ordered by the bishop in 2004 to remove their names from the Phoenix Declaration, a letter Arizona clergy signed calling for full acceptance of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people in the life of faith communities.   “Something died as a result of the personal and public showdown” with the bishop, Carpenter would say.  Since Olmsted arrived to lead the diocese in 2003, his actions have had a ‘chilling effect … throughout all Catholic parishes and institutions concerned about outreach and ministry to LGBT persons,” he wrote.  Olmsted made public his letter of excommunication in May and said he was praying for Carpenter’s “reconciliation with Christ and His Church.”

The KJZZ feature which can also be seen and head on the Web site, www.kjzz.org, is titled, “Ousted Catholic Priest Starts Over.”

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