A local church to us has started loving our city. The concept appears to be to undertake small acts of random kindness amongst the local community, including picnics in the park, making over somone’s flat after a fire, and paying more than necessary to a local business when buying a product.
I’ve no idea if it has any relationship, but this kind of thinking appears to be linked to the notion of Servant Evangelism which grew out of the work of Steve Sjogren at Vineyard Community Church in Cincinnati. To cut a very long story short, Steve started doing deliberate small acts in his community to get the church to have a better name - such as washing people’s cars for free and distributing cold drinks in hot weather - eventually leading to exponential growth in his church.
It is a radical idea: if you are kind to people, they might not think you are just a bunch of religious freaks. And you know, I have a lot of sympathy for the sentiment. In our culture, ‘church’ is a minority sport whichever way you look at it. Whilst many people when questioned say they have some religious affiliation, the reality is that few actually interact at all with the institution on any real level. So for me, the issue is not about trying to change people’s understanding by offering a set of theology, because most people are not the slightest bit interested in Christianity. If we are to have any moral influence on society, we have to prove that we are a positive influence not a negative influence and that can only be done when people’s first thoughts of ‘church’ is positive rather than negative or neutral. For me, the only way we can do that is by costly and sacrificial service, so that people remember the after school club, holiday activities, debt counselling (or whatever) that Christians have selflessly offered their communities.
On the other hand, I’m somewhat uncomfortable about the notion of using cans of cola as a hook for evangelism, because what we do is as or more important than what we say we believe anyway.
Comments?
Posted in Theology, Uncategorized | 5 Comments »I have listened enough to Socialists, or even to democrats, saying that the physical conditions of the poor must of necessity make them mentally and morally degraded.  I have listened to scientific men (and there are still scientific men not opposed to democracy) saying that if we give the poor healthier conditions vice and wrong will disappear. I have listened to them with a horrible attention, with a hideous fascination. For it was like watching a man energetically sawing from the tree the branch he is sitting on.
If these happy democrats could prove their case, they would strike democracy dead. If the poor are this utterly demoralized, it may or may not be practical to raise them. But it is certainly quite practical to disfranchise them. If the man with a bad bedroom cannot give a good vote, then the first and swiftest deduction is that he shall give no vote. The governing class may reasonably say: “It may take us some time to reform his bedroom. But if he is the brute you say it will take him very little time to ruin our country. Therefore we will take your hint and not give him the chance.”
If clean homes and clean air make clean souls, why not give the power (for the present at any rate) to those who undoubtedly have the clean air? If better conditions will make the poor more fit to govern themselves, why should not better conditions already make the rich more fit to govern them?
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Eugene Peterson is the genius who completed, mostly by himself, pretty much the only readable translation of the Bible into American English. It’s called The Message. He talks about that, and about story and other things, in this video of an interview with him last year. He said:
But the imagination is almost, not quite, the same thing as faith. It’s that which connects what we see and what we don’t see and pulls us through what we see into what we don’t see. Now when that imagination then becomes/involves trust and participation it’s faith. But imagination is the training ground for that. So that’s why I think novelists, poets–we ought to ordain them.
What roles do story and imagination play in making the world a more just, peaceful place?
Posted in Art, Quote for the Day, Theology, faith, story | 8 Comments »(that turned out not to be true–and what I’m learning now). the Glenn instigated Synchroblog. From Rachel’s comment in this thread.
Rachel wrote:
Here are a few things I learned from church that didn’t ring true:
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Glenn Hager kindly invited me to participate in his synchroblog. Thanks Glen!
His subtitle was “(That didn’t prove true, and what I am learning lately)”
So a coupla lists–and a tiny bit of a justice and compassion slant (I’m not making this stuff up)
What I learned in church:
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The fourth in our series of five posters from Tim Nyberg
Shane Claiborne shares his thoughts on Jesus and megachurches in his book The Irresistible Revolution…
In fact, Jesus and his disciples would probably get into trouble in most fancy churches. They’d probably be turning water fountains into wine fountains, inviting kids to swim in baptistries, ripping holes in the roofs when the crippled can’t get in the doors, flipping over the cash registers in the bookstores - at which point a trustee would scold Jesus and ask, “Jesus!?!? What, were you born in a barn?” And Jesus would nod.
Shane makes a great point. But what do YOU think about megachurches?
Another poster from our favorite artist-provocateur Tim Nyberg
Of course none of us would ever say we believe that God loves Americans (or Westerners, or white people, or the rich and powerful) more than all other people. But as Donald Miller reminds us in his book Blue Like Jazz, “What I believe is not what I say I believe; what I believe is what I do.”
So as individuals, as communities, as nations and systems and institutions, DO we believe that God loves us more than the other people? And what would it look like to believe, and thus live, differently?
Posted in Art, Theology | 4 Comments »