It only takes $34,000 a year, after taxes, to be among the richest 1% in the world.
Just finished reading a review copy of "The Road to Missional: Journey to the Center of the Church" by Michael Frost. I really enjoyed this book. As a pastor I have read more "missional" material than you can shake a stick at. Our leadership team is currently working through one of those books right now. Some love it, some hate it, some think it's just restating the obvious in new words. Frost's book does the church a great service as he works to help us understand "missional", the new buzz word, as more than a program or component that you add into "church". Frost works to describe what missional looks like as an ethos. It's a way of thinking that permeates everything you do in life...not just the way you run church. He does this by writing what he calls "...a small guidebook - a list of indicators which will highlight when the missional paradigm hasn't been fully adopted." Recently I met with a congressional office to deliver postcards from Mennonites calling for cuts to the military budget. The staffer listened politely and then said, “Well, you know that’s not exactly how people up here [on Capitol Hill] see things.”Read the whole article here.There are plenty of practical reasons why the military budget can and should be cut, which analysts across the political spectrum now point out. Over the past decade, the Pentagon’s base budget — not counting war spending — has nearly doubled, taking valuable resources away from other priorities. There are vast amounts of wasteful spending at the Pentagon, which cannot even pass an audit. Weapons systems regularly overrun their budgeted cost, sometimes by billions of dollars. A University of Massachusetts study showed that federal spending on education, health care and clean energy all produce more jobs per dollar than does military spending.Behind the facts and figures lie some challenging questions that are rarely addressed. How much spending on “security” is ever going to be enough? Do weapons keep us safe or sometimes put us in greater danger? What about the impact on others around the world? Are they safer because of U.S. military might?
"When I turn on the television and see “family values” conservatives jumping to Cain’s defense within hours of the first charges surfacing, or Penn State students rioting over the decision of their university’s Board of Trustees to fire Paterno, I have to ask myself, “What has happened to this supposedly Christian nation"?
I know that in the United States defendants are considered innocent until proven guilty. But I am not talking about the law here. I am talking about where our hearts incline, and whether they incline in a Christian direction."
Full disclosure. I didn't want to like this book. I've read several books that seek to remind us of how special we are to God. I see their place, but they also frustrate me. Usually as I read them I feel as if the author is trying to bring God down to us instead of reminding us of His greatness and power. They seem to forget that it is all about Him; it is His world, His story that we are living out for His purposes and His glory. Far too often these warm and fuzzy books tend to keep the spotlight on us instead of on God. So I didn't want to like Greg Paul's book. Here’s a bold claim: the church should put aside all other declarations when it comes to engaging the LGBTQ issues of our day, and start by gathering around the affirmation “We Are Broken.”... Arriving at this posture, I suggest, is the starting point for the engagement of this issue. Of course it is the posture that must be re-inhabited by the community of Jesus Christ whenever she is confronted by any fork in the road that comes when a church body is confronted with a new and or conflictual issue in culture. This posture, labeled by the words “We Are Broken,” is always the starting point for the process of discernment in Christ. We come together under the common agreement “We are Broken” and then invite others to join in as we seek the way forward for healing, redemption and new creation.You can read the whole post at Reclaiming the Mission. I like what he is saying, but am curious if others have thoughts or counter-points to Fitch's ideas. Leave a comment below and help me work through this in my own head. Thanks.
“The person who never makes a mistake and always manages to obey the rules is often a compassionless person, because he sees people for whom the wheels have fallen off and he wonders what’s wrong with them, but the person who feels that he has ruined his life often has more capacity for humility and compassion.” (Brian McLaren)
Everyone is posting something today, 10 years after 9/11. My heart breaks for those who lost loved ones on that day. As a pastor I walk through loss with people on a regular basis...it should never be trivialized. It's one of the reasons I long for the return of Jesus, when He makes all things new, when death dies, and life fully comes. So today I pray for all who ache due to what they lost on 9/11. But I thought Will Willimon's comments in Christianity Today poignantly share something that the church lost (or lost sight of) that day. Something less tangible than the life of a loved one, but something very profound. He writes...
On 9/11 I thought, For the most powerful, militarized nation in the world also to think of itself as an innocent victim is deadly. It was a rare prophetic moment for me, considering Presidents Bush and Obama have spent billions asking the military to rectify the crime of a small band of lawless individuals, destroying a couple of nations who had little to do with it, in the costliest, longest series of wars in the history of the United States.
The silence of most Christians and the giddy enthusiasm of a few, as well as the ubiquity of flags and patriotic extravaganzas in allegedly evangelical churches, says to me that American Christians may look back upon our response to 9/11 as our greatest Christological defeat. It was shattering to admit that we had lost the theological means to distinguish between the United States and the kingdom of God. The criminals who perpetrated 9/11 and the flag-waving boosters of our almost exclusively martial response were of one mind: that the nonviolent way of Jesus is stupid. All of us preachers share the shame; when our people felt very vulnerable, they reached for the flag, not the Cross.
September 11 has changed me. I’m going to preach as never before about Christ crucified as the answer to the question of what’s wrong with the world. I have also resolved to relentlessly reiterate from the pulpit that the worst day in history was not a Tuesday in New York, but a Friday in Jerusalem when a consortium of clergy and politicians colluded to run the world on our own terms by crucifying God’s own Son.
9/11 reminds us that the world is broken. And the only way that it will ever be transformed is by the life giving gospel of Jesus.
The U-Turn Church: New Direction for Health and Growth"How shameful to think that perhaps pagans, people with no faith in Christ,may be better than we and nearer to God’s reign.
Remember how Christ received a pagan centurion and told him, “I’ll go and cure your servant”? The centurion, full of humility and confidence, said, “No, Lord. I am not worthy that you go there. Just say a word and my servant will be cured.” Christ marveled, says the gospel, and he said, “Truly, I have not found such faith in Israel.” (Matthew 8:5–13; Luke 7:2–10.)
I say: Christ will also say of this church: outside the limits of Catholicism perhaps there is more faith, more holiness.So we must not extinguish the Spirit. The Spirit is not the monopoly of a movement, even of a Christian movement, of a hierarchy, or priesthood, or religious congregation. The Spirit is free, and he wants men and women, wherever they are, to realize their vocation to find Christ, who became flesh to save all human flesh. Yes, to save all, dear brothers and sisters.I know that some people come to the cathedral who have even lost the faith or are non-Christians. Let them be welcome. And if this message is saying something to them, I ask them to reflect in their inner consciousness, for, like Christ, I can tell them: the kingdom of God is not far from you, God’s kingdom is within your heart. Seek it, and you will find it."--Oscar Romero, taken from The Violence of Love.
The world cannot know the unsurpassable worth of human life without a people who consistently work to protect it - in the fetus, in the convict, in the immigrant, in the soldier, and in the enemy.Read the whole article here. Read the comments too.
Recently I received a copy of the book you see to your left - Small Groups with Purpose, by Steve Gladen. I have to admit I was a bit skeptical. Steve is the small groups pastor at Saddleback. He lives in a whole different "pastoral world" than me. They have over 3500 small groups in their church. That means that for every person I have in the pew on a Sunday morning, Steve oversees 17.5 small groups. But I have found that I really enjoyed and benefitted from reading this book. Steve doesn't present the "tried and true program" that will work for each and every church, but instead tells the story of what he has learned as they have wrestled with helping a church grow smaller as it grows larger.
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