Today we’re excited to feature the third episode of the Listening in Place Project with Cassie Carroll (Master of Divinity, ‘16), which we feature monthly here on the Intersections blog. After graduating from The Seattle School, Cassie launched Listening in Place, a venture in which she is collecting stories from church planters, practitioners, pastors, social entrepreneurs, and theologians throughout the United States who are practicing new, innovative, and compelling visions of what it means to be the church.
In this episode, Cassie talks with Mark Scandrette, an author, speaker, activist, and prominent Christian leader who has lived in San Francisco’s Mission District with his family for nearly 20 years. Mark has authored several books, including Practicing the Way of Jesus and Soul Graffiti, and he’s one of the presenters we’re excited to see in a few weeks at the Inhabit Conference.
Mark shares about how his current activism work was sparked when a young neighbor in the Mission District was shot and killed by the police almost two years ago. That tragedy galvanized Mark and his neighbors to be more involved in advocating for justice in police reform.
Mark: “I mourn that I didn’t come into awareness about my privilege and some of these inequities and injustices earlier in my life.”
That idea of learning from our mistakes, no matter how old we are, prompts Mark and Cassie to talk about “wearing our wounds well” and learning from mistakes by diving in and getting in over our heads.
Let your compassion take you to the far edge.
Mark also shares a bit about his most recent book, FREE: Spending Your Time and Money On What Matters Most, and his heart to help church leaders reimagine their calling and express it in innovative, authentic ways.
Mark: “Lisa and I are on kind of a lifelong project to figure out what it means to be fully alive to God and integrated as people in a particular place.”
You can learn more about the vision behind the Listening in Place Project here, and read more from Cassie’s time with Mark over on the Listening in Place blog. And for more from Cassie, check out the presentation of her Integrative Project, “The Pastoral Both/And: A Complicated Story.”
Music courtesy of bensound.com.
https://soundcloud.com/user-958825369/listening-in-place-project-mark-scrandrette