Elihu Intro Post
I know, I know the blog thing is totally a thing of 2015. Clearly, I am late to the party. Blogs are one of the many things I am a late adopter of. If you are still reading this, I hope you will find the thoughts listed and discussed here as generative and give you a deeper character sense of who I (Evan) am and what kind of culture we have at Elihu Community Ministries.
This blog post will fall into one of two categories. One will be reactions or stories regarding loneliness and social isolationism as they relate to Seattle Washington. I am passionate about Seattle and the pacific northwest. Seattle is a great city with world class vistas, interesting people and fun stuff to do. The Pacific Northwest has some of the best outdoor and nature scene in the United States. However, Seattle and people in the Northwest across demographic groups are struggling. We have so many people who are lonely and isolated here. Despite having such a high standard of living we are people who do not cultivate deep relationships well. Our senses of one-ness and community-ness are strained. On one hand we have tons of high paying jobs, and in the other tons of people with depression. This is a problem that we as an organization want to address. We want to address it with the next major category of this blog; Christian Spirituality.
We are at our core a Christian organization. We are not trying to convert everyone we meet, neither are we trying to connect only with other Christians in Seattle. However, Christian spirituality is our method and our 'why' to this work. Before I go on too much further it is important to recognize that Christian spirituality is a broad term that has numerous different expressions here in Seattle, on each Continent and in history. I know that at this point in history faith-based or non-secularized thinking is not highly valued in the greater cultural conversation. Christian spirituality has a long history of impacting and shaping the ethics of people in America. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, sometimes it's hard to clearly determine. Therefore, regardless of your faith background or lack thereof, I think the dialogue happing in Christian spirituality is going to impact you and impact the lives of people in Seattle.
This led us to a highly contentious point of how my Christian spirituality impact my politics. Somewhat complicatedly it is against my code of ethics to endorse a particular political candidate or a political party. Elihu is not a political organization, and our funds are not used to support local, state or national politics. I will say however, that Christian Spirituality has a long and vibrant tradition of critiquing people in power and their misuse of power that is contrary to God's ethics. As such I will spell out positions which very harshly critique a political establishment.
That is all for now. I hope that is a good general overview. If that overview got confusing, I hope some of the following posts will give you an idea of what our ideology and thinking is. Additionally, if you have questions or thoughts shoot us an email, comment or give us an old fashioned messenger pigeon.