How One Church Blessed Their Community

J.D. Greear tells a great story here.  May there be more stories to tell like this.

Check out some books by J.D. here.

Modern Day Foot Washing

(HT: Jason Kovacs)

Fairness

Speaking of justice and mercy...

I found this short movie from Rob Bell to be greatly encouraging.

As a stand alone piece of work, I love what he did here. I don't recommend Rob's books, but I'll recommend this video.

(HT: Mark Wolter)

Total Church - Chapter 4 Quotes

"This means it is never enough to address people’s felt needs. Felt needs can be a good point to start because the gospel addresses the human condition in all its complexity. But people do not as a rule express God’s judgment as a felt need. People are blind to their true plight. They do not see their greatest need, which is to be reconciled to God through the gospel. If we do not keep people’s eternal plight in mind, then immediate needs will force their way to the top of our agenda, and we will betray the gospel and the people we profess to love. The most loving thing we can do for the poor is to proclaim the good news of eternal salvation through Christ. It is by no means the only loving thing we can do for them, but it is the most loving thing we can do. It would be a crime of monumental proportions knowingly to withhold such good news."

"The big question is, why is the church in the West failing to reach the poor and marginalized in our society? If our churches do not reflect the reality Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 1, then we have to ask ourselves, concerning the message we have proclaimed, the way we have proclaimed it, the church cultures we have created, the expectation we have of church members, whether in some or all of these ways we have been untrue to the message of the cross. We have left room for boasting. Instead of nullifying status, intellect, and wealth, we have valued these things too highly and so nullified the message of “Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2).
Conservative Christians are right to oppose any downgrade in the doctrine of substitutionary atonement.6 But we must examine our-selves to see whether we too are robbing the cross of its power."

- Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Total Church, p. 78 and 84

The Message and the Medium

Dan Edelen writes today:

Joe Carter at the Evangelical Outpost asked this question this week:

If the medium affects the message, how will the Christian message be affected by the new media?

When I reflect on my life, I can’t remember many sermons that stick out. Even the words of my favorites hymns don’t always surface in memory when I need them. I can’t remember more than hazy concepts from the blogs I’ve visited. Viral videos? Web 2.0? Dancing 3-D holograms? Heck, I can’t even tell you the movies I’ve seen in the theater in the last five years.

But I can vividly recall every single time when life beat me up and left me for dead by the side of the road and someone in the name of Jesus took me up, cleansed and bound my wounds with his or her own hands, and made certain I was cared for.

The medium of the Christian message is you and it’s me. It’s the cup we hand in person to the parched and thirsty soul.

Fifty years from now, no one will remember the name of that blogger, the genius behind that YouTube video, the author of the Web 2.0 site. Nor will we remember what all the hoopla was about.

What we will remember are those people who were there for us in tough times. Those people who invested their lives in ours by showing up on our doorstep in our bleakest hour. Those people who took the time to be Jesus for us when we needed Jesus the most.

Read the whole thing.