Migration, Trade and Brutality-”Casualties of the War on the Countryside”
Because of the fact that it is not economically viable to farm coffee–because of policies tied to the cheap coffee you and I drink–families are sending their lifeblood out of Coatzóspam to look for work elsewhere.
The young women and men go to Oaxaca City, or Mexico City to look for work. They go to northern Mexico–many of them find work as migrant agricultural laborers on the vast “factory farms” in the northern Mexican states of Sonora, Sinaloa and Baja California.
“The missionaries brought the Bread of Life, but we choked on the packaging.”
Clearly, we American Christians had wrapped the gospel in some heavy-duty cultural packaging, in a misguided attempt to protect the Bread of Life from worldly contaminants. Our message, shrouded as it was in the trappings of WASPy Christendom, was impossible for some people to digest, suffocating the spiritual life out of people Jesus suffered and died for. Isn’t it ironic that so much of the New Testament is focused on liberating the gospel from its cultural baggage so it could truly be good news to every tongue, tribe, and nation, and yet we have the gall to call our narrow western worldview biblical; that we who worship the incarnate God are so quick to distance ourselves from the wider world around us, calling it unclean?
The Apostle Paul and the heart of church planting (and pastoring)
The heart of church planting (and pastoring) is to present everyone – everyone – mature in Christ. That means the heart of God is for everyone – believers and non-believers – to grow in knowledge of him, through faith in Jesus. Church planting is not just about reaching non-believers. Church planting is not just about reaching believers. Church planting is about presenting “everyone mature in Christ.” Church planting is about proclaiming him and “warning and teaching everyone with all wisdom” and doing so by “struggling with all his energy”. In other words, church planting is not only about regeneration (i.e. new conversions). Church planting is ultimately about glorification (i.e. ultimate maturity in Christ).
Don’t let the introvert use their design as a crutch for mission. “God didn’t make me that way” is a crutch. Instead, show them what mission could look like. Find another introvert, or functional extrovert, that can aid them in steps of what mission might look like for them. Don’t just tell them; have someone model it. The introvert is an image bearer and desires to see disciples made; they just don’t know what it looks like for them. It’s not because they’re stupid, but because the church has historically modeled what it looks like to be an extrovert evangelist.
Don’t give up on the introvert. Just because they don’t live out the mission as you might, does not make them any less a child of God, nor does it make them any less of an evangelist. You’ll have to be patient with them, that’s okay, God has been patient with you your entire life and you still suck.
My guess is, you’ve encountered some sort of word story in the last couple of months: a Bible study, a sermon, a commentary, a quip about agape love or a defense of a biblical viewpoint you’re not sure of. But sometimes it’s hard to wade through the muck and know when you’re being short changed. How can a lay person (or pastor) know whether a word study is legitimate? Here are some bad ways to do a word study, courtesy of Dr. Jennings of Gordon Conwell and Dr. Grant Osborne of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
The Premonition— God’s Early Warning System
From a Christian point of view, there are some things to be said about all of this. It reflects clearly enough, since there are hundreds of thousands of stories through the ages like the ones I just told, that SOMEONE knows in advance what is going to happen, and that same SOMEONE sometimes conveys knowledge of this information to persons who have a direct stake in or deep investment in the matter.
Pregnant Teen Wins Abortion Battle
Attorneys filed a lawsuit on the teen’s behalf earlier this month arguing that her parents “are violating her federal constitutional rights to carry her child to term by coercing her to have an abortion with both verbal and physical threats and harassment.”
Ghost writer: New app to keep you tweeting after death
‘LivesOn’ will let users pursue ‘life after death’ on their social media profiles, letting the deceased communicate with loved ones. LivesOn will keep posting after you kick the bucket, following the example of the DeadSocial platform.
Due to be launched in March, the LivesOn application will keep tweeting after you pass on. The service will utilize advanced analysis of your main Twitter feed, to carefully select appropriate subjects, likes, or articles that would have been likely to interest you, posting them on your behalf for your friends to read.
Warehouse worker packing stress balls punched his boss in face
A man who packed stress balls for a living punched his boss in the face and threatened colleagues when he was sacked, a court heard.
Darren Baldwin, 44, hit the warehouse manager who dismissed him and then produced two knives when other staff tried to step in.