Blog Carnival: Community Community is getting to be a buzzword that hardly seems recognizable. It has become permanently connected with a metrosexual worship leader at the hip church which has an outreach into some impoverished place. But is that community? Yesterday I wrote about Facebook's social networking site. Did you know that there are more than 300 million active users and that 50% of their active users (returned to the site in the last 30 days) log on to Facebook in any given day and that the average user has 130 friends on the site? Is that community? Do we really have a community or do we talk so much about it and request friends by the busload because we desire it intensely? We were made for community. Creator said it was not good for that first man to be alone. Even Creator was not alone. We need to walk with others. We need our village. We need them to not only walk with us a...
I didn't sleep well last night. I kept waking up, wanting to write. Those nights are annoying, particularly when I am working 12 hours the next day so I have no business getting out of bed to write. But here is the thing that kept bugging me...what if God is calling us not to greatness, but to smallness? Yeah, weird thing to keep a person awake, huh? Our group that went to the Leadership Summit are praying for ways that we can put what we learned into practice. Look around your neighborhood-there is so much need. Look around your coworkers-enough need to depress you. Look around the world-so much need it can paralyze. And then I think about this thing with callings... What if it isn't about being called to a thing, but to be like Him? What if it doesn't matter where I am or what I do but how I do it? What if His only desire is for me to respond to this broken world as He does? Right where I am? Jesus stopped to love the kids, he held up important people to talk to a woman, ...
When I was a child, I would hear of missionaries dying, literally, to bring Jesus to people. There was something romantic about being that serious about one's faith, and even about being chosen by God for those trials. In my child's mind anyway. It was the most fascinating thing to me, their faith, and I prayed that I would be able to do something that great for God. I still have a heart for the persecuted church and our brothers and sisters who struggle to bring Jesus to places where it can be deadly. But as an adult, the situation is not nearly as romantic. One individual in the news today is Pastor Saeed Abedini. Pastor Saeed is an Iranian American who converted from Islam to Christianity. That in itself is dangerous, but he also was a pastor of an underground church of thousands and sought to bring others to faith. Iran, being a Muslim country, tolerates a Christian minority, but has distinct disdain for con...
Comments