The Margins

When a staff person in a church is approached by a church member with a criticism about another staff person, that staff member should ask four questions:

1. Have you personally talked with the person mentioned?

2. Would you like me to go with you when you do?

3. What is your intention in raising this criticism with me?

4. Do you intend for resolution and reconciliation or just complaining?

What if truth spoken without love
Is the greatest lie of all?
What if certainty offered hatefully
Is quicksand after all?

Did Jesus once dismiss the Bible quoter
As the very devil himself?
Suppose our hearts can twist
Saving truth into a damning words
Even as they leave our mouths.

What if truth spoken without love
is the greatest lie of all?

From John Frye (via Scot McKnight)

I am convinced that the time has come for Christians to develop an exit strategy from the public schools. Some parents made this decision long ago. The Christian school and home school movements are among the most significant cultural developments of the last thirty years. Other parents are not there yet. In any event, an exit strategy should be in place.

Al Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in his latest book, Culture Shift: Engaging Current Issues with Timeless Truth. (Via Out of Ur)

“Church becomes a defense against falling into the arms of the living God.”

Will Willimon in a lecture at Fuller Seminary

“We know from our own lives that we overlook the unhappiness around us. If we were fully aware of all the things the people around us struggle with—in our family, in our office, in our place of work—and if we were fully aware of the cries of the hungry, the degraded, and the suffering in the whole world, it would almost overwhelm us. Therefore we repress it and act as if we didn’t see it. During the Third Reich we closed our eyes and ears to the treatment of Jews and the rumors of concentration camps. For if we had seen and heard something, it would have led to the dangerous duty of protesting. We didn’t want to subject ourselves, though, to these dangerous protests. Therefore, exactly like the priest and the Levite, we made a wide detour around that screaming injustice and acted as though we had not seen it…

It is not because we neither saw it nor knew of it that we neglected to come to the rescue in love. It is exactly the opposite: Because we had no love, we saw nothing and looked for nothing.”

From How to Believe Again by Helmut Thielicke

Collecting food, like collecting toys for tots at Christmas, is the easy part – logistically demanding, perhaps, but fascinating fodder for the promoter and entrepreneur. Devising new methods of distribution, on the other hand, methods that enable the poor to participate in reciprocal exchange, methods that require mutual investment on the part of both donor and recipient, methods that offer honest compensation for honest work – such would be a transformation of historic proportions. The hard part does not lie in the creation of new models – food-buying coops, food for community service, wholesale outlets – such models are there for the researching. The hard part is the re-thinking of a well-entrenched give-away mentality and the restructuring of an established one-way charity system. A hunger-free zone may be possible but a dependency-free zone? Now that is a much bigger challenge.

From Bob Lupton’s Urban Perspective discussing a Kansas City initiative to create America’s first “Hunger-Free Zone” (This quotation is from the January publication which I receive via email–it is not yet posted to the site I linked to here but should be up soon)

I saw why I detested and resisted owning my privilege. It was like suddenly discovering that my lineage, the DNA of my being, had been pumped full of tainted performance-enhancing drugs. It degraded my accomplishments, diminished my successes, and polluted an innocence that had told me that all I had were well-deserved prizes won by virtue of my individuality—my savvy, discipline, brains, guts, and hard work.

I realized that I had subconsciously struck a deal: I’ll do justice for all, as long as I can look in the mirror and see the squeaky-clean face of goodness. Innocence. Helper. Giver. Solution.

Chris Rice in Grace Matters

Justice is what love looks like in public.

Tavis Smiley quoting Cornel West (from Christine Scheller)

Sometimes in leaning over to speak to the modern world, I fear that we may have fallen in! When, in our sermons, we sought to use our sermons to build a bridge from the old world of the Bible to the new modern world, the traffic was only moving in one direction on that interpretive bridge. It was always the modern world rummaging about in Scripture, saying things like “This relates to me,” or, “I’m sorry, this is really impractical,” or, “I really can’t make sense out of that.” It was always the modern world telling the Bible what’s what..

The modern world is not only the realm of the telephone, the telegraph, and allegedly “critical thinking,” this world is also the habitat of Auschwitz, two of the bloodiest wars of history, and assorted totalitarian schemes which have consumed the lives of millions. Why would our preaching want to be comprehensible to that world?

From William Willimon’s On NOT Reaching Our Culture Through Our Preaching

“Michael Wilkins, professor of New Testament and dean of the faculty at Talbot Seminary, regularly asks two questions when he speaks to groups about discipleship…The first question is, ‘How many of you can say, in the humble confidence of your heart, that you are true disciples of Jesus? Please raise your hand.’ Wilkins says that people are genuinely confused as to what they should do. Most do not raise their hand. Some put it up hesitantly and then quickly pull it down. Then Wilkins proceeds to a second question: ‘How many of you can say, in the humble confidence of your heart, that you are convinced that you are a true Christian? Please raise your hand.’ Immediately most hands go up without hesitation.”

From Transforming Discipleship by Greg Ogden