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

The Faliure of Religion

Years ago when I took my son fishing on Twelve Pole Creek I found a Budweiser can and noticed a small Rock Bass fish trapped inside. When smaller, he swam unsuspecting into the can and then, failing to find his way out, soon became too large to get out. When I freed him from the can, he had already begun to grow in a curve.

That true story suggests the way thousands have experienced religion. It held out for them promise for a fuller, richer life where problems could be handled and freedom experienced daily. In reality it brought additional problems—church politics, power plays, one more thing to do, and one more thing to become frustrated with. Instead of finding freedom, life seemed more stilted—they found themselves growing in a curve.

Much of what we see in the established church today has no fire. She has become ensnared in a kind of “institutionalism” that withers in the labyrinth of its organizational structures. But more serious than all of the above has been the people’s failure to find a worthy cause for which to live. People can live in churches for years and never discover any greater reason to live than a career, a few more possessions or a little more fame. You don’t have to be religious to pursue these goals.

Remember Jesus? He established the greatest adventure the world has ever seen and did it in the midst of massive religious failure. If we hear His call afresh today, we, too, can participate in a quality of life that makes new everything around us.

Harris Poll

more than half of Americans (51%) do not use Twitter or participate in either of the two largest social networking sites - MySpace and Facebook - this according to a recent Harris Poll

Mistake?

Is this cordial encounter a mistake?

TweetDeck

I just downloaded the beta TweetDeck. Cool app. It an easy way of staying in touch and connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook and more.

Check it out here