Re-envisioning RADICAL HOSPITALITY, guildworksiABRAHAM urban outreach brings a creative cultural initiative to the homeless, addiction-rehabilitation and incarceration communities. We're a vibrant, cross-pollinating guild of diverse spiritual voices building modern Interfaith community.

GUILDWORKS also encourages creative voicing of the Gospel, asserting faith’s substance through artistic means and dynamic conversation. GUILDWORKS provides a virtual and real community where likeminded artists interested in contemporary faith-based issues may dialogue with each other, generate feedback and reflect on specific projects and concerns–finding and creating as the early churches did, community to share and experience God. Artworks created in the GUILDWORKS are comprised of both function and aesthetic. Being faith-based works they contain calling, spiritual resonance embodied within as they come to fruition Deo Gloria, for the glory of God–engendering the essential covenantal call to Abraham “L’chi lach lech l’cha vaderech” Go out from your country and kinsmen…you will be a blessing and in you all nations will be blessed, similarly holding Jesus’ call to us to be Salt and Light.

For us in GUILDWORKS this is our starting place–ground of being and tabernacle  משכן‎ mishkan (dwelling place of the Divine). Witnessing salt and light in lived faith we are individually and communally transformed in God and Christ, the Holy Spirit through God’s grace. GUILDWORKS fellowships are shaped toward this joyful, transformative, invitational witness.

Creative and generative, pastorally cultivating worshipful communities we are also, mustard seeds in good soil, finding fertile ground worshipping with, while respectfully loving our neighbors as ourselves, mutually partaking of cultural and religious resources as fruits of the Spirit–offering gifts built of God for the people of God’s building(s).

GUILDWORKS PASTORAL CARE AND CHAPLAINCY COMMUNITIES

BENJAMIN B DEVAN has taught religion, philosophy, and African American literature at North Carolina Central University, Peace College, and a January term mini-course at MIT titled, “Religion: Bringing the World Together, or Tearing the World Apart?” He completed his MA in Counseling at Asbury Theological Seminary, his MDiv at Duke University, a ThM at Harvard in World Religions with a thesis on evangelical Christians and Islam, and is now a doctoral candidate at Durham University, UK, writing a dissertation on the New Atheism.

Michael CarterMICHAEL CARTER is involved in education from curriculum design and classroom teaching to speaking at national conferences which he’s been active in for two decades. His teachings posts have ranged from Kindergarten to University level. In the mid-1990’s, Michael was asked to develop an art program for Westminster Academy in Memphis, TN., one of the premier Classical Christian Schools in the U.S., where he eventually taught Art, History and Latin for several years. Currently Michael teaches art and creative writing at Trinity Christian Preparatory School in Charlotte, NC.

Jason A GoroncyJASON A GORONCY (PhD, St Andrews) is a Presbyterian Minister of Word and Sacrament teaching in the areas of theology, church history and pastoral care, and who serves as Dean of Studies at the Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership in Dunedin, as the adviser on local ordained ministries and local ministry teams for the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand. Jason has published in a number of academic and popular journals, has contributed to select edited volumes and is currently working on two monographs on PT Forsyth. His current research interests lie chiefly in Reformed identity, theological anthropology and ministerial formation.

ERLING HOPE currently serves as President of the Society for the Arts, Religion, and Contemporary Culture, NYC, and served as Artist-in-Residence for Andover Newton Theological Schools summer Institute for Theology and the Arts, 1999-2002, and served as Pastoral Clerk for Peconic Bay Quaker Meeting from 2006-2009. He is a tourist trapped in a local’s body and a third generation maker of things.

DEBORAH RISA MRANTZ is currently an MDIV seminarian at Andover Newton Theological School in Boston MA; she is also founder and principal creative of LOGOS GUILDWORKS MINISTRIES. Deborah’s work has developed over thirty years from formative arts-worship apprenticeships at Congregationalist Punahou School, continuing through Jewish theological work in sculpture and liturgical-ecumenical arts, maturing and culminating with work in the lexicons of language—publishing, printing, and cross-sensory digital design. In an inter-religious syntheses melding Judaism’s culture, faith and ethnicity with Christianity’s worship and contemplative life, Deborah articulates both these faiths re-envisioning God’s word, pastorally partnering the passion of the first Evangelists with Chassidic Judaism’s joyful witness, contemporarily voicing theological richness in the Hebrew bible and Christian Gospels.

EXECUTIVE MUSIC MANAGER AND INTERFAITH CONSULTANT

FRANK FREDERICKS is the Executive Director of World Faith, an interfaith community service network with chapters in six countries. Fredericks works as an Online Marketing Consultant and has consulted businesses, artists, and non-profits, including the Cordoba Initiative. As an active blogger, Frank contributes to a number of blogs, including the Huffington Post. He is an Interfaith Youth Core Fellows alumnus, UN Alliance of Civilizations presenter, and has been interviewed by Good Morning America, NPR, New York Magazine, and various international media outlets.

Guildworks  .comMunity Catalyzing Interfaith

For any cultivar of religious and spiritual endeavors, forging new ground of belonging for ministry that bridges our Abrahamic faiths while building vibrant, new communities–in an already burgeoning, modern, prophetic culture is both arduous and exhilarating. You are here.

You’re at the intersecton of three great Abrahamic faiths engaging with each other, with Jewish, Muslim and Christian adherents encouraged to enter into dialogue about faith’s most difficult questions, religions’ newly emerging, considered and re-examined answers (from conservative to contemporary theologies), to contribute to spiritual and worship communities’ cross-faith building-blocks for engagement in a culture of life. New places, paradigms existing squarely inside unique faith-specificity, while following the golden thread between them.

From the Wailing Wall of Solomon’s temple, to the dome of the rock at Al Aqsa, to the Church of the HolySepulchre–we’re called to tender openness and welcome for strangers entering our tents. And to cultivate compassion, mercy, lovingkindness in warm hospitality for others where shared fellowship informs lived faith. Where differences remind us not to turn away strangers–but to extend deep embrace from our common crossroads, to ‘pitch our tent among strangers’ and prayerfully, invite God’s grace entering through angels unaware. We’ll continue to bring LOGOS GUILDWORKS MINISTRIES online these next few months. As conversations ensue, interact via our youTube channel with different dimensions in faith-formation and pastoral care–our language and lexicon of the Good News of God’s word and work in the world. Please journey patiently with us. And Godspeed.

And in You all Nations will be Blessed

The LORD said to Abram, “Leave your land, your relatives, and your father’s home. Go to the land that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing to all nations.” GEN 12:1-2  We are all Abraham’s descendants. Jews, Christians and Muslims bring with them, together with their unique birthrights from the Father of the great Western Faiths, the longstanding, seminal sibling rivalries that run through the lines and life of Abraham’s family. And yet for all our differences, each of our three faiths believes in a God who is known and manifest to us as Divinely revealed. Mystic, martyr, messenger of the Good News, our seeds come from the fertile ground of the first man to understand God’s eclipsing, encompassing oneness. Jews and Christians live their lives in accordance to the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospel of Jesus Christ; Muslims live according to the five pillars of Islam and the word of Allah, which came through their last and final prophet, Muhammud. All of us though with different trajectories, revolve around the briilliant light that is One God. There is no God but God, and blessed is [s]HE who comes in the name of God.

Roz Dimon

Roz Dimon’s work at the Shelter Island Exhibit, Shelter Island Historical Society Barn: Dimon’s “PALE MALE: A Pilgrimage” was recently acquired by the 9/11 Memorial Museum for its permanent collection.

Beth Grossman

“They can try to destroy intellectual life in Iraq and we will keep making and sending more books.” Beth Grossman talks about collaboration with Iraqi friends on the book for the “Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here” at the International Print Center New York. The exhibit of 280 artists’ responses to the 2007 car bombing of the booksellers street in Baghdad are on view at 5 venues in New York.
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Ruh al’Alam

Applying a traditional Thuluth script verse. Placed above a mihrab in a small mosque in East London.

Michael Carter Lamb

MICHAEL CARTER contributes an exclusive original; collaborative work with founder Deborah Rise Mrantz. Ahava/Love will be available as supra-high quality Giclee repro on canvas, as the newest fine art addition to GUILDWORKS iABRAHAM la Bodega digital storefront!

Erling Hope

This past fall, Guildworks artist ERLING HOPE was part of a team created by Temple Adas Israel to re-envision the festival of Sukkot as a community-wide Jewish Harvest Festival. Erling Hope re-designed their sukkah.

Lil Copan

Mark One of quadriptych The Four Evangelists project by Guildworks artist Lil Copan.

Trinity Band

Felicidades! Trinity Band wins the Silver Dove Award (NL’s equivalent to the Dove Awards) for best album of 2012 for their album Que Mas.

Living Waters

My Righteous One will Live by Faith

But My righteous one will live by faith HEB 10:38(Blog moderated by Susan H.)  So,living by Faith. Not theoretically or hypothetically, but deeply living in the fallow ground of God’s presence and being, and the cool, cranky carbon-emissions covered streets of Cities and broken back-alley neighborhood nooks.

Freighted With Divine Concern

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “Justice is not a value, but a transcendent demand freighted with Divine concern. It is not only a relationship between man and man, it is an act involving God, a divine need…Its validity is not only universal, but also eternal, independent of will and experience.”

2011-2012 GIMILUS CHASSIDIM FELLOW

Please download Craig Goodworth Liminal Ground proposal

Craig Goodworth, 2012-06-05 15:27:

Minyan

Art created in community and collaboration, parallels a distinction in Judaism between individual prayer and communal prayer. In Jewish tradition, communal prayer requires a minyan. A minimum of ten Jewish adults (traditionally still men) is required to perform certain rituals or recite particular prayers. Going as far back as the shift from temple to synagogue in Babylonia, it was believed wherever ten were assembled either for prayer or study, the Divine Presence dwelt.

GUILDWORKS MINISTRIES Founder and Executive Director, Deborah Risa Mrantz observes, “Community (–whether solely among humans or Divine and Human presence together) remains a prime number in Judaism’s customs and culture; minyan requires the individual participate in context of communal endeavor and a ‘greater scope’ of human flourishing–the whole being more than the sum of its parts. Abrahamic faiths share the seminal building blocks of their Communities’ collective striving; this remains foundational to monotheism even where individuated theologies diverge and these three faiths differ. Communal sensibility is a DNA shared throughout Abrahamic cultures; (worship and wisdom, Divine service and Deeds of Mercy and Lovingkindness) are an entwined double-helix—genetic raw material that continues to be shaped in Jewish culture. Orthodox Christianity and Jewish Minhag and Sulha to Hadith emphatically articulate the need for prayer, worship and judgments to be rendered in context of a greater life in the Spirit and Community.”

As in Jewish prayer, aspects of LIMINAL GROUND required and received a minyan. The project was generated both physically and spiritually in conjunction with at least ten others. Collaborators in the LIMINAL GROUND project include:

• 1 A Trappist monk at our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey in Lafayette, Oregon, who talked to me about every person’s need to reconcile the desert and the city, unknowingly planted the seed for LIMINAL GROUND.

• 2 GUILDWORKS MINISTRIES Gimilus ChassidimFellowship, and the Schlactus family who endows funding for this Fellowship; Lil Copan who named in my art a “resonance, challenge, witness–and refusal to break down into any sort of easy category,” and who introduced me to the Christian based, Abrahamic LOGOS GUILDWORKS MINISTRIES. GUILDWORKS founder, Deborah Risa Mrantz with whom conversations on theological arenas in Abrahamic faith helped deepen and widen LIMINAL GROUND.

• 3 Kit Danley, President of Neighborhood Ministries, whose vision and values allowed for this creative contribution. Jeremy, educational director at Neighborhood ministries, and a buddy I grew up with, whose advocacy and practical collaboration made this project possible. Jorge, the pastor whose practical service and sweet spirit sustained me in exhausting work. Kyle from Phoenix who gave me 30 plus hours of manual work helping with the installation of the show, a day of field research and two half-days of donkey hauling.

• 4 Jarod, grain inspector, who provided me with 800 gallons in grain and corn. The on-site contractors who assisted me in the use of excavated materials in the project.

• 5 Fellow artists and friends Lucien Saxton, Shawn Skabelund, Jessie Reid and Ian Danley who engaged in hours of processing questions that arose for me – between art and religion, material and spiritual, practical and conceptual, personal and social.

• 6 The Center for Peace and Justice at George Fox University where I serve as the artist practitioner in residence 2011-2012. I wouldn’t have taken on the risks in this project had I not been exposed to the Quaker peace testimony.

• 7 The participants in both events who risked sharing their stories witnessing to borders and boundaries. And Wayne’s message about living faithfully in the gap.

• 8 Marco from Phoenix and Nathan and Chris from Christianity Today, all who contribute forms of documentation that give the project “post-show afterlife” (online accessible/living and evolving memory).

• 9 Johnny and Stephanie at the Hope House who will use the grain and corn responsibly in their efforts at urban farming, helping to sustain these communities.

• 10 My wife, who’s determined I follow the work where it leads, despite the costs.