Jim Wallis just visited Missoula.
Missoula is a hot box of social activists paralleled by a slurry of right-wing evangelicals - and just for spice a few folks whose main goal is to prove, in intricate detail, how our government was directly in charge of 9/11.
I love it here.
I'm currently in a coffee shop that 'ol Eric Meyer used to work at, next to a bar named Charlies whose fumes, joys, and sorrows are felt and smelt through the adjoining wall.
Wallis had a crowd of about 1,000. He spoke to a small group of students before the lecture and I was really quite impressed.

Saturday I helped lead a follow-up workshop. I helped come up with the liturgy. This Brueggeman part of it and I thought that I would share it.

REFORM OUR DEFORMED LIVES (Walter Brueggeman)

L: We name you by your name, harbinger of liberty:
hear our prayers for liberty.

(Reader 1) We are mindful of those caught, trapped, held, imprisoned
by systems of enslavement and abuse, by ideas and
ideologies that demean and immobilize, by unreal hopes
and ungrounded fears.
(Reader 2) We ourselves know much of un-liberty, too wounded, too obedient,
too driven, too fearful. Be our massive way of emancipation and
let us all be "free at last."

L: We name you by your name, power of peace:
hear our prayers for peace.

(Reader 1) We dare ask for the middle wall of hostility to be broken
down, between liberals and conservatives in the church,
between haves and have-nots, between victims and
perpetrators, between all sorts of colleagues in this place,
and in all those arenas besot with violence, rage, and hate.
We know we are not meant for abusiveness, but we stutter
before our vocation as peacemakers.
(Reader 2) Transform us beyond our fearfulness, our timidity, our
excessive certitude, that we may be vulnerable enough
to be peacemakers, and so
to be called your very own children.

L: We name you by your name, fountian of mercy:
hear our prayer for mercy.
(Reader 1) Our world grows weary of the battering and the vicious
cycles that devour us. We seem to have no capacity to break
those vicious cycles of anti-neighborliness and self-hate.
We turn, like our people always have, to you, single source
of newness. Waiting father, in your mercy receive us and
all our weary neighbors.
(Reader 2) Remembering mother, hold us and all our desperate friends.
Passionate lover, in your mercy cherish all our enemies.
Gift giver, in your mercy embrace a all those who are
strangers to us, who are your well-beloved
children. Make us, altogether, new.
L: Hear our prayers for liberty, for peace, for mercy.
(All) Form us in freedom and wholeness and gentleness.
Reform our deformed lives toward
obedience which is our only freedom,
praise which is our only poetry,
and love which is our only option.
(All) Our confidence matches our need, so we pray to you. Amen.