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Peace,
This morning (my birthday) I was reading some poetry to my wife today outside under our lovely birch tree in our front yard. Sitting under this tree have been the launching pad of some of our most stimulating conversations. With a cup of coffee or glass of wine, an endless line of wonderful friends have sat with us under this colossal tree over the years. It reminds me of what Eden must have been like.
Anyway, I stumbled upon this next passage, which captured my thoughts about aging and stirred in me a bit of an existential moment. read more
By Holly
I think I too often focus on what it means to “be in the world, but not of the world,” rather then trusting God with my circumstances and relationships. Jeremy and I were talking about this phrase the other day and we decided we don’t like that it still suggests a definite separation of the secular and the spiritual. This idea reminds me of the scene in the Two Towers where Merry and Pippin are with Treebeard and they can no longer convince the Tree Hearders to fight Isengard. Pippin suggests that they return home to the Shire
where life is comfortable and beautiful. Merry painfully reminds Pippin that if the evil is not defeated, there will be no Shire. They have to live in the tension of being a part of this reality and fighting against it. They can no longer turn back.
If God’s Kingdom is here and now, how can we be salt and light to the world in dark places? I often struggle with this tension because Christ is calling us to be open to all relationships and to be bold about our life in Christ. We have to take risks with people and be praying about where God can use us in every day life. Too often I think like Pippin and want to turn to what is comfortable and easy but at the same time I know that I would never go back to my old life. This calling is difficult and it is a reality of God’s Kingdom. I think too often Christians clump together instead of scattering ourselves around our cities, to be a part of culture. We are of this world and God is calling us to go beyond it to seek first His Kingdom and to bring as many people as we can with us. When we take risks and trust God, His victory becomes a reality that we have the opportunity to take part in. The Tree Hearders finally decide to fight Saruman because Merry and Pippin decided to persevere and take a stand.
By Corey
One of the things that I love about Missional Church is that I have an opportunity to be around people with different fields of study. Being a marketing major I often take classes with economics students, future accountants, and other business students. On the other hand, Missional Church is filled with theology majors, communication majors and myself, the lone student from the business department. As we have talked about consumerism and materialism in our class it seems that marketing and advertising get accused for much of the blame. This is something that I hear often and don’t take any offense to. However, I do think that the marketing gets an unfair share of the blame and I want to suggest that we shift that blame elsewhere.
The first thing you learn in business school is the law of supply and demand. Grounded in Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” theory, a business student learns of the inverse relationship between price and quantity on the demand side and the direct relationship between price and quantity on the supply side. All that to say, each business student is taught that to keep the doors open a business must sell products that the customers actually want. Therefore, the customers are the driving force of what is sold, not businesses.
I believe that businesses sell benefits not products. When this approach is taken the customer, once again, holds all the power. Take for example, a new pair of shoes. A person does not buy a new pair of shoes just to have them; a person buys a pair of shoes for the benefits. Whether it is to improve one’s self image or to keep one’s feet dry, consumers look for these benefits when deciding what product to purchase. Further, it is the marketer’s job to make sure that the customers’ desired benefits are met. As a marketing student I am not interested in making sure our country is more obsessed with consumerism, I am interested in giving people what they want.
It is not the marketers and advertisers that are behind the unhealthy consumerism, it is our culture. The business side of consumerism is a by-product of our culture and therefore at the mercy of what our culture wants. I suggest that we begin to shift the blame to ourselves for a culture that is fascinated by individualism and consumerism. And as our culture begins to shift away from consumerism the marketing and advertising will as well. After all, the first rule of business is supply and demand.
-cz
By Trevor
A lot of what we have read about and talked about in class is how a church sends out its members to do incarnational ministry, but what about the church doing incarnational ministry as the church in a local community? How does a local church live missionally in the local community it is in. When I think of this idea, the best example that I can think of is what Millwood Presbyterian Church is doing in the Millwood community.
I am a member of Millwood Presbyterian and have interned for the Senior Pastor and I continue to marvel as to how this church in a dying denomination is impacting the surrounding community and being one of the few Presbyterian churches to grow. And what I think is the result of this uniquely growing church is its ability to live missionally within the community. Both the pastor and the youth pastor sit on many school boards within the district as well as spearheaded after school programs when the local elementary school didn’t have the funds. But the church itself is also rooted into this community. the church is the location of the local farmers market, a key contributor to the local 5k run, and holds a community food drive as pictured. The list is endless in its continual impact exemplifying the roots the church has in this community. And because of this, the membership of this church continues to rise while the neighboring Presbyterian churches are fading. This church and others doing a similar ministry show that there is another way for the church to be the church to a community. The Missional lifestyle can be applied to the church as a whole just as the individual members can. But the way the church does it is in a much different approach.
