One more reason to quit smoking…

Malawi’s Child Tobacco Laborers

Reports have surfaced that thousands of children in Malawi who work on tobacco plantations are poisoned by absorbing nicotine through their skin — equivalent to smoking 50 cigarettes per day. Their small bodies are less able to metabolize the drug than adults, so the children suffer from nausea, vomiting, weakness, headaches, abdominal pain, and difficulty breathing. Poverty and hunger forces families to send their children to work on tobacco plantations, where they earn only 20 cents for a 12-hour day. Pray for the 80,000 children in southern African countries who work on tobacco plantations — may economic opportunities be afforded to each family, so that children have the chance to go to school instead of working in unsafe conditions.

from the Office of Social Justice,  Christian Reformed Church of North America

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The Skit Guys – God’s Chisel

from 4thpoint.wordpress.com  HT: Stanley Groothof

Bounded-set, center-set, Jesus and organized religion from Leading Church.com

Those who want to cast Jesus strictly into the center-set side of things, however, have difficulty with other passages. Jesus selects 12 apostles as his official representatives. We know that the circle around him was larger because in Acts there are two candidates who qualify as replacements. We also know from the church tradition of others who were eye-witnesses and ear-witnesses to Jesus’ life whom Jesus did NOT select for his twelve. Jesus talks about the father deciding who would sit on his right and left hand side. Again, this is bounded-set. In the famous “sheep and goats” parable of Matthew 25 Jesus tells a very bounded-set story.

via leadingchurch.com

Paul Vander Klay’s  whole post is quite relevant to recent dialogue I’ve been having about the relationship between AA and Christianity.

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Eduard Thurneysen on Pastoral Care

“No passage of Holy Scripture places the emphasis on man’s sinful wretchedness as such or makes it the exclusive subject of presentation and discussion. Rather, all its affirmations, even those concerning sinful man, testify to forgiveness and forgiveness alone.”
 
–A Theology of Pastoral Care (1962)

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“Why can’t the church be more like AA?” | LeadingChurch.com

When my friend asks “why can’t the church be more like AA?” he wants a place that doesn’t need all the overhead the church has. AA runs by borrowing space and needing just someone to organize and govern the meeting and a pot of coffee. The rules and rituals of the Big Book and other traditions govern and the thing moves forward. And it works if you work the program as he keeps telling me.

via leadingchurch.com

Excellent article by Paul Vander Klay.  Thanks, Paul!  Click the link above to read the entire article.

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R.J. Neuhaus on Leadership and Conflict

But, as a general rule, the operative assumption is that such conflict results from people seeking an importance and a vocation other than their own.  The appropriate action is for the pastor to recall them to their own vocation and strengthen them in it by the exemplary pursuit of his vocation.

Neuhaus, Richard. Freedom for Ministry. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979.

This sword cuts both directions.  At times the pastor creates conflict by seeking an importance and vocation not his or her own.

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McDonald’s Hits Africa

I’d like three Big Mac’s, a 55-gallon drum of root beer–and a very long straw.

from battlecry.com

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Thomas Merton on Peacemaking

Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed – but hate these things in yourself, not in another.

- Thomas Merton,

New Seeds of Contemplation

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R.J. Neuhaus on Christian Community

Community clutched is community lost. Our sacramentum, our pledge of allegiance, is not to our self-fulfillment in community but to the beloved community of God's promised Kingdom in which alone we will find fulfillment. Paul is emphatic in his assertion that it does not yet appear what we shall be. Therefore, any community conforming to what we now define as our authentic selves must be inauthentic. Such community is not a provocation to pilgrim venture but an act of closure. Community that is defined in terms of meeting our present needs suffocates in its very success. It does not breathe the air of promise. It denies our ultimate need to subject our needs to Christ.  Incurvatus est.

Neuhaus, R., (1979). Freedom for Ministry. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

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Richard John Neuhaus on Reconciliation

Reconciliation, then, is not an adjustment to limitations, nor is it a negotiated settlement. It is not reciprocal in the sense that man and God were enemies and have now worked out terms of settlement by which they can live as friends. The supremacy of God and the priority of God’s initiative in Christ are key to understanding reconiliation. He is not resigning himself to us, he is reconciling us to himself (Rom. 5). This transformation is dynamic and lifelong. True, the foundation that makes reconciliation possible has been laid “once and for all” in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The foundation, however, is not an end in itself but precisely that, a foundation upon which the transformation of ourselves and the world can be constructed. Here the distinction between justification and reconciliation is very important. Justification is accomplished fact, reconciliation is the continuing process. We proclaim justificatlon, we appeal for reconciliation. “We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” This is not to say that justification is God’s work and reconciliation is our work. It is God who justifies and it is God who invites and engages us in the living out of the justified life.

Neuhaus, R., (1979). Freedom for Ministry. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

The distinction Neuhaus makes between reconciliation and justification sheds light, I think, on the current brouhaha between N.T. Wright and John Piper.

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