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Jared Witt - July 23, 2018 A friend of mine recently told me about his decision to leave the massive congregation he had attended shortly after moving here to Orlando.
He had spent his whole life in megachurches, and to that point, he had been taught that bigger is always better and that growth equals success. But in his late twenties, on the heels of a career move, which had taken him several states away from family and friends, his own feelings of loneliness and isolation led him to start asking some more serious-minded questions about the purpose of church. Is the point really just to collect as many warm bodies in the auditorium as possible? For what? Should I be getting to know some of these people around me better than just a nod on Sunday morning? Evelyn MacDougall - June 28, 2018 I snored so loudly that I woke myself up.
Drool was actively falling onto my neck-pillow while on a bus passing through where the Alps jut across the meeting of Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Austria’s borders. Cliffs and icy mountain tops softened to bright blue rivers and lush meadows – all thriving in the shadow of the summer solstice. I wondered to which languages the cows and goats would respond. In the presence of such immense natural beauty, my drool wasn’t exactly what I wanted my seatmates or I to experience. However, I wouldn’t trade that puddle for the encounter I’d had the night before which I already exchanged for sleep. And I refuse to apologize for missing a couple hours of views on my seven hour bus ride. Jared Witt l May 10, 2018 My soul needs a biergarten.
It's a national health emergency in my country. Loneliness is epidemic. I mean that. Literally and officially: epidemic! I’m being neither figurative nor hyperbolic. Vivek Murthy, the former United States surgeon general, has written that loneliness and social isolation are “associated with a reduction in life span similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day and even greater than that associated with obesity.” Even Britain has recently appointed it’s first “Minister for Loneliness.” Jared Witt l March 22, 2018 One sees it in every farmer’s market, in every seasonally sourced restaurant, in every documentary about human rights in the clothing industry, in every Netflix show on the sustainable food movement (my favorite is Chef's Table). There is a deep desire, that is surfacing in communities all across the country, to re-humanize the things that we buy. And we’re starting at the most basic level: with the things we put on and put into our bodies.
It’s not like we all got together and planned this. There was no conference where grass-fed beef farmers in Wisconsin got together with “buy local” activists in so-Cal and said, “Alright, here’s what we’re going to do.” In fact, none of us who are a part of whatever this is can even fully say what binds us together or what the movement is called. Some of us have very high-minded ecological concerns. Some of us, just a gut yearning to live in a tastier and less artificial way. None of us even fully sticks to our ideals a hundred percent of the time (for my part, I can’t seem to quit the cheaply made queso sauce from the tex mex place near my house). But we know it when we see it. We can sense when a dish we’re eating was seasoned with a little bit of love. And we recognize each other from across the room. Jared Witt l February 15, 2018 “The geeks have inherited the Earth.”
Thus says Justin McElroy, one of the co-hosts of the wildly popular (and wildly nerdy) podcast, “My Brother, My Brother, and Me." He would know. He never expected to become a subculture celebrity when he and his three brothers from Huntington, West Virginia first started a podcast for their own amusement in 2010, where they would provide insincere but good natured advice, "Ask Amy" style, to equally insincere question askers and to somewhat more sincere inquirers on the “Yahoo Answers” platform (the latter remain anonymous, as they didn’t anticipate that their questions would become the fodder for a comedy show). "MBMBAM" (pronounced muh 'bim bam by its cult followers) now sells out major concert venues in cities across the country and boasts such esteemed guests as Jimmy Buffett and Lin-Manuel Miranda due to a cultural shift, which is tough to prove and yet everyone who has passed from high school into adulthood over the last couple decades is vaguely aware of it: Nerdy = cool now. Today is a big milestone in Castle Church’s young history. After dozens of sleepless nights, hundreds of prayers, and thousands of words of support and encouragement from family and friends, today, we
Castle Church Community Development Team l November 19, 2017 Castle Church has broke ground on its permanent digs—an 11,500 SQFT production scale brewery and taproom—set to open in early 2018.
But the church is the people and we’re tired of waiting, so we’re setting up a biergarten communion group right on site as the building is going up. We’ll actually get to watch the building and the community “growing up together,” week by week, as the physical space we’ve been dreaming of, and so many of you have supported, becomes a reality. Everyone is invited. Literally. This isn’t a bait ‘n’ switch. If you are made of some kind of tangible matter and take up physical space, you are welcome at our table. Aaron Schmalzle & Jared Witt l November 13, 2017 At Castle Church, we say, “If you showed up, you’re one of us,” and that was certainly the case this last Saturday as droves flooded east Orlando for our largest craft beer festival of the year. CCBC upped the festival ante again this year, adding to our solar paneled beer trailer a wind turbine, which means we are not only harnessing (ironically) the hottest thing in the solar system but the power of the wind to chill and serve our beer on 100% green energy. The line at our station was so relentless, they went through our festival parameter beer supply in just three and a half of the five scheduled hours, as a few thousand of our closest friends lined up to hear our story, spin a wheel for a chance to win a Beer for Life memberships (we had a winner!), and more importantly than all of that, to taste our brews.
Jared Witt l November 10, 2017 If your church disappeared tomorrow, would anyone notice?
My friend and colleague here in Orlando, Pr. Derek Hoven of Salem Lutheran Church, asks this question as he consults with other congregations that are in the midst of a leadership transition. Membership excluded, would anyone in your immediate neighborhood/town/world care if the whole thing just evaporated in a poof? Sometimes the question strikes people as a little harsh. But, then, sometimes questions strike us as harsh when it is not actually the question but the answer we’re forced to give which is unpleasant. Jared Witt l September 29, 2017 I love my generation. Can I just say that? All things being relative, I think we Millennials are thoughtful, evolved, emotionally intelligent, we mostly give the benefit of the doubt to people who are different than us, and we have high cultural IQs. And maybe the thing I value most in another human being, we’re funny. We have a sharp and caustic sense of humor. So much so, at times, our sarcasm presses the semantic borders of becoming a secret language. And this shouldn’t be confused with cynicism, as it’s sometimes perceived. We are sarcastic because we’ve noticed how you really shouldn’t care about everything that everyone says you should care about. And a lot of the things they say you shouldn’t care about, you should. Sarcasm is a tool which helps us dismiss the former so we can embrace the latter.
We also suck in some ways, if maybe not all the ways they would have you believe. Understand, most of the Millennial bashing we hear in the Boomer driven media is baseless calumny. Lord only knows where they decided that the generation which has worked more unpaid internships, and studied longer for less professional benefit, and graduated with more student debt than any other somehow has an entitlement complex. But there is, I'm sad to say, a kernel of truth to some of what they say. We don’t show up when we say we will. We don’t organize well. We don’t commit. We are very good at pointing out how the world could be better but don’t always put much elbow grease into changing it. |
Mashing in.On how Castle Church is stirring up a movement from a brewery in Florida. Archives
July 2018
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