musings

There's something healing and right about openly acknowledging one's failures when they happen. But who can be trusted with such info? Finding a person you can trust & truthfully share can take a lifetime. Most never find that person. The result makes life much more difficult. Why? Because they'll never experience the pinnacle of understanding & healing. But if one seeks & finds, life becomes a two-way street where sharing, giving and help is practiced life tumbles. And it often does.Nobody lectures here. They simply tell stories with the candor only found in trusting, transparent relationships. When 2 people build a relationship on these they can feel comfortable openly “telling” where they went wrong and how day by day they are trying to do right. They convey where they find the strength, understanding and hope. Sometimes one will take the responsibility for another and make themselves available day or night if a need arises. There's not much more to it than that. Healing happens. Miracles are made.You can't help thinking that something like this is what the church was meant to be and maybe once was before the church became an institution alike big business.AA understands all this well. No matter what far a place alcoholics end up in, either in this country or overseas, they know that there will be an AA meeting nearby and at that meeting they will find strangers who are not strangers to listen to the truth and to tell it. Would it ever occur to a Xian in a faraway place to turn to a church nearby in hope of finding the same. Would they find it? If not you wonder what is so Big about a church's business today

Lessons From Missional to the Tea Party

http://bit.ly/qayL0H

‎Twenty + yrs ago a group of deacons & young leaders struggled via committees, meetings, & one on one discussions 2 shift the church's thinking from a building priority budget to a missional priority budget. This was in the middle of a period when the church chose to spend 1000s of $s more than necessary in replacing a boundary wall Everyone understood it needed replaced. But everyone thought it w...ould be replaced with a similar cinder block wall. Instead the leaders chose to hire an expensive masonry & have the cinder block wall replaced with a fancy hand-laid stoned wall. This screamed to the church's priorities. Those of us fighting 4 change referred 2 this new wall as the 'wailing wall.'

It took 2-3 yrs to convince these leaders otherwise but at the end of the day there were huge advances. -- soon this same church began allocating $20k to an annual missions budget - and sent it's own members overseas 2x a year. Now 2 decades later this same church has returned to a building priority budget.

Different era, different leaders, different ideas. Funny how, with time, we cycle through orders of importance