Monday, October 23, 2006

Church???

I want to share this with you and please tell me if you agree or disagree.

this comes from Eugene Peterson - you should read at least one of His books

American pastors are abandoning their posts, left and right, and at an alarming rate. They are not leaving their churches and getting other jobs. Congregations still pay their salaries. Their names remain on the church stationary and they continue to appear in pulpits on Sundays. But they are abandoning their posts, their calling. They have gone whoring after other gods. What they do with their time under the guise of pastoral ministry hasn’t the remotest connection with what the church’s pastors have done for most of twenty centuries.

A few of us are angry about it. We are angry because we have been deserted…. It is bitterly disappointing to enter a room full of people whom you have every reason to expect share the quest and commitments of pastoral work and find within ten minutes that they most definitely do not. They talk of images and statistics. They drop names. They discuss influence and status. Matters of God and the soul and Scripture are not grist for their mills.

The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shopkeeper’s concerns–how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money.

Some of them are very good shopkeepers. They attract a lot of customers, pull in great sums of money, develop splendid reputations. Yet it is still shopkeeping; religious shopkeeping, to be sure, but shopkeeping all the same. The marketing strategies of the fast-food franchise occupy the waking minds of these entrepreneurs; while asleep they dream of the kind of success that will get the attention of journalists.

The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are, instead, communities of sinners, gathered before God week after week in towns and villages all over the world. The Holy Spirit gathers them and does his work in them. In these communities of sinners, one of the sinners is called pastor and given a designated responsibility in the community. The pastor’s responsibility is to keep the community attentive to God. It is this responsibility that is being abandoned in spades.”

God be with us All

Sunday, October 22, 2006

let's see what happens when...

What if I just start writing. No Real agenda or point to make just a writing out my thoughts.

Hmmm....

Sometimes I wonder why the Bible says relatively little about things that we think are so important. Maybe we like so many pharisees and saducees are missing the point. Maybe not entirely missing the point but missing the point on certain issues. I wonder...

I love new ideas and new places to check out on the net so maybe now is a good time to intorduce to some great places I like to go and to invite you to check out a few great organizations.
No real order to these other than this is the order they came to mind.

International Justice Mission
- On a Mission to bring God's Justice to the World - give them $$$
(Not pocket change either the stuff you spend on yourself. Skip a meal out and send them a check)

while at iTunes check out the

CBC Radio Podcasts for the Program "IDEAS"
Emergent Village Podcasts

or listen to some sermons by John Piper. I really like a lot of his preaching.

So what else...

Places to do some reading of ideas worth hearing

The Other Journal
Broken Stained Glass
Pajama Library
the eBay atheist » Blog Archive » Willow Creek


Random thought:

Christianity needs to put its work clothes on. (heard in a Sunday Sermon)

Next time you hear a sermon about God wanting to bless your life ask yourself:
"If I lived in Sudan where the Muslim Gov't were trying to kill me or enslave me b/c I am Christian how would I interpret this sermon?"

God Bless you and be with you all