Trying to follow

I attended the CCDA conference in St. Louis this past week (thus the brief blog hiatus). It was an incredible conference and a very encouraging experience. I didn’t do much in the way of notes and things, so I don’t have a lot to post for you. However, I did find some old CCDA video on youtube, and this one from Wayne Gordon is right on. It’s about the often misquoted passage, “The poor will always be among you.”
The video is 40+ minutes long, but just listen to the first five minutes and then decide if your sucked in or not. Verse references below. (also a few other old CCDA videos in the player below)

Matthew 26:11
The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.

Deuteronomy 15

15:11 There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land.

Leviticus 19:9 ” ‘When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. 10 Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the alien. I am the LORD your God.

bonus…

Dear Greg (or Gary, sorry I can’t remember) and others,

I met you briefly at Peavey Park in South Minneapolis last Wednesday. I was hanging out with some punk-rocker anarchist folk, eating dinner with homeless and having an all-around good time. You came by and politely offered us flyers to an event for youth you were having in October. You were kind and cordial and I appreciated listening to the conversation between some church-goers and anarchist, two groups I thoroughly enjoy hanging out with that tend to have some nearly polar opposite values.

The flyer you handed out was impressive. Glossy on both sides and well designed, it advertised a big event for middle school kids and their parents. If the gloss wasn’t enough, the flyer was even more enticing by offering free hoodie sweatshirts for every kid that came and $6 for every parent that brought their kid. Free money and clothes, my initial thought was it’s brilliant marketing. Credit card companies offer free stuff all the time to get people signed up, and you were giving the exact types of things the people your targeting actually want. I was impressed because you had said you surveyed people in the neighborhood and the largest response you had was that people wanted something safe and fun for their children. Your are meeting a need of the community. Meeting the communities needs with brilliant marketing and large events, I have to say I was impressed. But, then I started getting uncomfortable.

I wasn’t quite sure what this discomfort was, until you left and the folks I was hanging with started talking. They were on to your scheme, they were skeptical of your ‘evangelism’ and ‘preaching’ tactics, and they hadn’t even been to your event, just had seen many others like them. That’s when it occurred to me, you weren’t sharing the ‘gospel,’ rather you were treating Jesus like a commodity, you were in a business venture.

Someone once said, “What you win them with is what you win them to.” The means (your party) are inextricably tied up in the ends (believing in Jesus) that you hope to accomplish. Your desire to have this event and ‘win people to Jesus’ will more then likely win them to a Jesus other then the Jesus I see plainly in the bible. If someone chooses to sign-up at your event, they are more then likely going to be choosing to follow the ‘jesus’ you’ve displayed to them. They’ll choose to follow the Jesus of free hoodies and free money. Jesus, from what I can tell, never enticed people to follow him. It wasn’t ‘come follow me, and I’ll give you a free pair of sandals.’

I worry that those you entice to following ‘Jesus’ at your event, will start off with such a skewed picture of what this ‘Jesus’ character is about that they will never really be able to see clearly the real Jesus we meet in the gospels. I worry that when the free money and clothes stops coming, they’ll get tired of following this ‘Jesus.’ They’ll stop following your Jesus, which I don’t think is the same as the real Jesus we encounter in Scripture; and my fear is that if they stop following that Jesus, like so many, they’ll stop looking for or considering Jesus all together.

Please consider your event, your marketing, and your Bible, I think you’ll find there is some tension there that needs to be reconciled. I think you all are doing a great thing, listening to the community, trying to meet the needs of the community, pointing to Jesus as a source of hope and truth; I think your hearts are in the right place, which is why I felt it was worth the time to encourage you to think hard about how your are bringing people to the faith. May God be with you and may your efforts be blessed.

in Christ,

Ariah Fine

While talking about the computer software, there are two types, application and system software. Different software tools are being used in development of application software. Now days, large number of companies is working to develop mobile phone software and anti virus software, as demand for these software are very high in market. A large variety of software data is available on different sites as well.

This is more question time for the readers then me giving answers.

In a discussion at the house the other day, and a couple email conversations with some readers, I’ve started to rethink what topics, facts, concepts, etc. are essential to the Gospel.

There’s all kinds of cliches and sayings about the gospel: “Preach the gospel at all times, and when necessary, use words.” There’s all kinds of things we spend far too much time talking about and others we simply neglect. So, take a minute to think about this. I’m wondering, if someone were to come up to you and ask you write now, “What is the Gospel of Jesus Christ?”

What would you say?

There was quite a bit of conversation last week after I posted about the benevolent act of Philip Workman, a man executed in Tennessee last week for murder. The initial comments put me deep in thought and I’ve been trying to think through my values and ethics and trying to make sure I’m not holding double standards. This is not a direct response to those comments, but it was provoked by those thoughts. Today, I simply wanted to write a brief devotional thoughts post about some of the heroes of the Christian faith.

Moses seemed to often be in the right place at the right time. As a baby, when his fellow Hebrew tots were being killed off, Moses managed to get in with Pharaoh’s family and grow up as royalty. Then he grew up, learned a bit about his history, and in a moment of zeal kills a guy. He lives as a fugitive in the desert for about forty years and then goes on to lead one of the greatest freedom movements of ancient times, the exodus of the Jewish people out of Egypt. Moses was a murderer, though never captured and convicted, and he then went on to be a famous leader and a pillar of the Jewish and Christian faith.

David is the original Cinderalla-story: Shepard boy becomes Israel’s great King. Every kid in a church grows up hearing about how David slays Goliath. And we don’t really see it as murder, it’s the epic good vs. evil story, redemptive violence at its finest. So, most wouldn’t agree that David qualifies as a murderer for that. But the other story we don’t teach many kids in church, is about David committing adultery and then having a man killed to protect his crime. And as repentant as David might have been, David was a murderer. David even recommended the death penalty for a person who committed a crime such as his, but the sentence was never carried out. David is remembered as one of Israel’s Greatest Kings, which seems to overshadow his death-deserving crime.

Paul is, next to Jesus, probably the most influential forefather of the Christian faith. The guy wrote half the New Testament, established churches all over the Roman Empire and was a martyr for the faith. Paul was so special, Jesus even paid him a special visit after he’d already ascended to heaven. By his own admission Paul was a murderer of Christian’s prior to becoming one himself. The fact that Paul’s murderous campaigns were one of the greatest original threats to Christianity does not seem to phase us now as we lift him up as one of the founding pillars of our faith.

Jesus himself was more or less a fugitive for part of his three years of ministry. He constantly avoided certain areas and had to duck away from persecuting crowds (how he managed that is a mystery to me). And Jesus, who maintained his innocence until the very end received the death penalty.

The point of this short run down of Biblical figures was not to make a statement that murder is okay, by no means do I think killing someone is ever a good idea. It was a chance however to reflect on how four of the greatest figures in the Bible were or were treated as criminals, and yet we are able to look through that, around it, in spite of it and see the great good that was accomplished through them as well. I have the great honor to work with many youth who in their own moments have made grave mistakes and they are paying a price for that. However, I would hope I, and no one else, ever stamps a permanent label on them that keeps them from having a second chance and keeps others from recognizing each benevolent act that they make. Here’s to every murderer who has turned their life around and contributed to the well being of humanity, I applaud you.