There’s not much point sitting thru a whole 4 days of Forge material if you don’t let it penetrate your life.
More information is not what we need as Christians. Hell no. If we (or maybe its I) could only do half of the things I already know to do then maybe we’d really see the world changed!
So let me share with you some thoughts I have been mulling over during the last few days…
1. This whole area of justice and interaction with the poor is a major area of ‘failing’ for me. I don’t mean that in a ‘self flaggelatory’ way (did you like that creative use of words?) but it is an aspect of Jesus’ call that I seem to struggle to implement. I am inspired by guys like Steve McKinnon for whom this flows out of – he is an absolute local legend – I love to hear his stories, but I find I do not gravitate towards poor, powerless, marginalised people. I hear stuff, get inspired, mean to do something, then go and get on with life as I have known it.
As I reflected yesterday I felt like God was saying ‘just do something’. You will always limp along with good intentions unless you get off your arse and at least do something. So – I will do something. I am not sure what, I will pray about that, but something will happen.
I believe that often action inspires more action and passivity breeds inactivity and excuses. I am looking to do something that will fire me to more passion and probably more action.
I’ll keep you posted.
2. As I listened to Steve Said speaking of the other ‘major religion’ of our time – consumerism – I was galvanised again to really pursue the question of what it means to live a ‘Jesus’ kind of life – a counter cultural life in the burbs. What does it mean to live purely and not just be a stuff junkie, a shopping addict? Chris has some good ideas at the end of this post for how to assess the consumer thing.
I know that I have divided allegiances and while my motives may never be completely pure (I’m not an idealist any more!) I don’t want to be as subsumed in the culture as I feel I am. I am convinced that we are called to swim upstream in a society that seeks selfish interests above all else.
3. I really enjoyed Geoff’s presentation on his mission in Banksia Grove. I don’t think we do enough solid earthing of our stuff in scripture at times, but today he did that superbly.
However as he spoke I found myself reacting to the term ‘community development movement’ and I am pondering why. I see Geoff really owns it and it is an accurate description of what they are doing. Is it what we are called to do?… I probably resonate better with ‘disciple making movement’ or ‘kingdom of God movement’ – maybe because these describe my own passion, but also because what I see as the heritage of the phrase.
I think I feel ‘CDM’ is a social work term and I find myself at odds with the ‘language police’ of the social work environment who seem to want to be politically correct on everything. If I am correct it would be the social work field that seemed to be responsible for mutating ‘leadership’ into ‘facilitation’. I see facilitation as a valuable process, but it seems to have replaced ‘leadership’ in some settings – and we have suffered as a result. Facilitative leadership is one form of leadership, but it seems in social work settings to be the ‘right’ form.
That’s enough for now!