- jml talks about the role the different football codes (thugby, Aussie rules and soccer) have play in his life and what they say about your place in a community.
- Izaac lists 10 tips for hosting a college (or NTE) mission at your church. It’s a good list. And these kinds of missions (so-called) can play a good role in boosting the ‘work force’ in a local church and exposing students to a different ministry setting. I do worry that churches (or even an entire church ecosystem) can become addicted to them in bad way - rather than mobilising their own members. And I am irked by the suggestion that they are actually authentic ‘mission’, where we ‘put into practice what we have learned’.
- Al Bain shares some quotes from Graham Norton’s interview with Madonna on the question of love and realism:
It’s not that I ever believed in perfect love. It’s just that if you’re a romantic … like me … and every girl I know is .. every girl wants to be swept off her feet by a Knight in Shining Armour. Unfortunately we are raised on those fairy tales. Even if we are sophisticated, educated, intelligent, evolved human beings, we still in the back of our mind think that Mr Right is going to sweep us off our feet and take us into the sunset, and we’re going to live happily ever after…. In the back of our mind we believe that. But in the front of our mind we keep getting reminded that it’s actually not true. But in the back of our mind we keep believing it…. And so we keep getting disappointed. So it’s a paradox. You want that. But on the other hand if you’ve got a half a brain you know that it doesn’t exist.
- Continuing the theme of short term mission, here is Challies’ review of a book called Toxic Charity :
He contends that “what Americans avoid facing is that while we are very generous in charitable giving, much of that money is either wasted or actually harms the people it is targeted to help. …The compassion industry is almost universally accepted as a virtuous and constructive enterprise. But what is so surprising is that its outcomes are almost entirely unexamined.” It is not the Christian’s motivation he questions as much as the unintended consequences of rightly motivated efforts. “For all our efforts to eliminate poverty—our entitlements, our programs, our charities—we have succeeded only in creating a permanent underclass, dismantling their family structures, and eroding their ethic of work. And our poor continue to become poorer. … Giving to those in need what they could be gaining from their own initiative may well be the kindest way to destroy people.”
via Blog - Christian Reflections http://thegenevapush.com/blogs/xian_reflections/mirrors-29th-March-2013 (NB: to comment go to thegenevapush.com/xian_reflections)
