Tag: response

  • Homeless Teenagers Among Us

    [Video enclosed]

    The poverty rate for those under 18 will soon hit 25% in America.

    This video from 60 Minutes broke my heart yesterday. While riding the trolley to work I listened to the audio and wept.

    16 million kids in our country are currently living below the poverty line. That’s an increase of 2 million in just 2 years as families slip from “middle class” into poverty.

    It’s where you live. In your city, town, suburb, gated community, or rural area. And it’s people who never thought they’d struggle. And certainly never thought they’d become homeless.

    As the video shows, millions of kids are now homeless. We hear about foreclosures and we think of the housing market. We forget that those are also displaced people. Families who lost everything.

    5 Ways You and Your Church Can Respond

    As I listened to this story, I thought about how can the church NOT respond?

    I thought about how churches and youth ministries could easily do a few things that could make a big difference. Ministry life just can’t go on as normal with a quarter of the families in our community unsure where their next meal might come from, or unsure if they can stay in their apartment another month, or unsure if they can even keep their families together.

    It’s one thing to preach Good News. It’s another thing to actually be Good News.

    What are some things you can actually do?

  • Start a food closet. There isn’t a church door in America that doesn’t get knocked on every week asking for food. If your church doesn’t have a food closet, start one. If the church doesn’t want one, just start bringing non-perishable food items to church every time you visit. They’ll figure it out when it starts to pile up.
  • Get out of your car and look around. In your routine where you drive everywhere, you won’t ever see the problem among us. Stop driving everywhere! Commit to start walking or riding a bike, and you’ll see things you never thought existing in your community. It’ll do your heart good.
  • Take a family in. There’s a part in the 60 Minutes piece above where they say that most families foreclosed on move into a neighbor or family members house. I know it’s easier to pretend you don’t see what’s happening. But a lot of people in a lot of churches have more bedrooms than people in their homes. Maybe you’ve got a big crib for a reason?
  • Convert some classrooms into temporary housing. It’s sickening how many churches have so much space that goes unused for 6.5 out of 7 days. Spend a tiny amount of money to convert under-utilized space into temporary housing for families so they don’t get split up. Convert a bathroom stall to a shower, buy some used basic furniture, and allow families a place to regroup for 60-90 days.
  • Open your youth room 5 days per week after school. There are some things that are so simple to do, yet we don’t do it because we get hung up by thinking too small. It would cost you nothing to have a volunteer staff your youth room after school every day from 2:30 – 5:00 PM. Hang some signs up at the middle and high schools. You already have space, just make it available to kids who need a safe and quiet place to study overseen by a caring adult.

    • How about you? What are some things you can do, as an individual or as a church, in the next 30 days?

  • Dealing with streakiness in the creative process

    I’m finishing my seventh year of daily blogging on May 25th. Over the past 2,555 days I’ve written 3,523 posts or about 2,000,000 words. Nearly every day over the past 2,555 days I have sat down at my computer and written something that was worth my time in the moment.

    Streaks

    So what has changed since 2004? An o-crap-this-better-not-suck-amount of people read what I write every day. And the amount that each post gets shared, tweeted, and emailed around is completely determined by the remark-ability of what I write. In some ways it is a self-created pressure cooker.

    It’s fun that the process doesn’t change but the response does. I have no ability to predict the outcome of each post. There are weeks or even months where my blog experiences a hot streak. Everything I write gets lots of feedback. (Even the stuff that sucks.) Conversely, there are weeks or months when nothing really happens to my posts. I just write and that’s it.

    Many days I press “publish” and I anticipate a massive response to something that seems brilliant to me but nothing happens. Then there are days when I write something flippantly and publish it with almost no thought and it explodes and goes viral.

    Same process. Same style. Different response.

    Some might find that infuriating or that it frustrates the process. Not me. I find it fascinating.

    The creative life

    Everyone claims to have been a Seinfeld fan all along. But, in the moment, the most popular way to talk about Seinfeld was that most people didn’t find it nearly as funny as the people in New York said it was. Seinfeld didn’t really become funny for most people until it hit syndication because when it was fresh they didn’t get it.

    Chances are that Shakespeare’s favorite piece wasn’t Romeo and Juliet. It was just what became most popular. The same is probably true with Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea or Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Sometimes for a creative what takes off is not what they have the most fun doing.

    Response to creativity is always streaky and unpredictable.

    So here’s a tip: If you want to write, just write. Don’t worry about the response too much. Just write, write, and write some more. Ultimately, you are the audience.

  • Church Leaders Love Status Quo

    Yesterday, a friend of mine sent me a link to a blog post by John Ortberg, a very successful author and pastor in the Bay Area of California.

    The blog post is titled, “Stop Trying to Change the World” and is aimed at people like me and you.

    Ultimately, we’re not the ones in the world-changing business. Our claims otherwise imply that history and humanity can be controlled and managed through human efforts. And–partly because of the law of unintended consequences–those attempts always end up doing more harm than good.

    Only God can change the world.
    Christianity is not first and foremost about creating values or establishing justice or championing righteous.
    It is about the greatest good:
    God Himself.

    Now, I understand that the blog title was written as a bait & switch to draw people like me into a discussion as his rhetoric quickly comes down from the bold title. And I understand that there’s a good chance Dr. Ortberg didn’t even really write the blog post since he likely has people to do that for him.

    But my thought for John Ortberg is pretty simple. I can see why you’d be against people in the church changing anything that might rock the boat. You’ve got it pretty good.

    Isn’t he breaking the rich-white-guy rule? Aren’t rich white men, based on his zip code he’s probably in the top 5% of earners in the United States, who live in comfortable suburbs full of gated communities supposed to either be all about social justice or just not talk about it at all?

    Speaking out against change… seems kind of out-of-place for a guy who writes books called “If You Want to Walk on Water You Have to Get Out of the Boat.”

    I don’t know which passage of Scripture leads Mr. Ortberg to say, “He says that because of the way power is widely viewed in our day, talk about ‘redeeming the culture’ or ‘transforming the world’ is largely understood as implying conquest, take-over, or domination. It means ‘our side will defeat your side by coercing everyone to do what we want.” The way I see church history, it’s precisely this tactic of seeking justice and serving the local community that lead to the rapid spread of Christianity! As the church cared for widows, orphans, lepers, and stood up for the oppressed, the church became an unstoppable force in culture because armies could destroy a community or people but the love that lived within and gave freedom both physically and in people’s hearts was unstoppable! Within 400 years of Christ, the emperor of Rome gave his heart to Jesus!

    Ortberg paraphrases the Jews in Babylonian exile as an example of God’s people being blessed for not changing the world. He neglects to mention why the Jews were in exile in the first place!

    The LORD, the God of their fathers, sent word to them through his messengers again and again, because he had pity on his people and on his dwelling place. But they mocked God’s messengers, despised his words and scoffed at his prophets until the wrath of the LORD was aroused against his people and there was no remedy. He brought up against them the king of the Babylonians, who killed their young men with the sword in the sanctuary, and spared neither young man nor young woman, old man or aged. God handed all of them over to Nebuchadnezzar. He carried to Babylon all the articles from the temple of God, both large and small, and the treasures of the LORD’s temple and the treasures of the king and his officials. They set fire to God’s temple and broke down the wall of Jerusalem; they burned all the palaces and destroyed everything of value there. 2 Chronicles 36:15-19

    And why did God hand them over the Nebuchadnezzar? Let’s see what those prophets, aka the Book of Jeremiah, whom God’s people mocked, had to say:

    • “I brought you into a fertile land to eat its fruit and rich produce. But you came and defiled my land and made my inheritance detestable.” Jeremiah 2:7
    • “I had planted you like a choice vine of sound and reliable stock. How then did you turn against me into a corrupt, wild vine?” Jeremiah 2:21
    • “Your own conduct and actions have brought this upon you. This is your punishment. How bitter it is! How it pierces to the heart!” Jeremiah 4:18
    • “This is what the LORD says: “Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight,” declares the LORD.” Jeremiah 9:23-24
    • “You are always righteous, O LORD, when I bring a case before you. Yet I would speak with you about your justice: Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all the faithless live at ease?” Jeremiah 12:1

    I could go on. But anyone can read Jeremiah and see that the Jews weren’t exiled to Babylon to be some kind of faithful presence among the Babylonians. The Jews were taken into exile because they sinned against God, making a mockery of the law, and suffered a 400+ year timeout!

    I’m positive I am reading Mr. Orberg’s words incorrectly. Certainly, no pastor and Christian leader really thinks that the church is not supposed to be an agent of change within its own community?

    Certainly, we are not called to maintain a status quo when thousands of people in our country are sold as sexual slaves, millions oppressed by banks in debt they can never get out of, our economy completely dependent on illegal immigrants for our way of life while not granting those individuals basic civil rights the majority enjoys, and churches who gleefully oppress and belittle the people they are called to reach.

    Certainly the church is called to help our country, a nation full of no-fault divorce, more than half the kids living in single-parent homes, crumbling schools systems, a prison system over-flowing, drug-addiction, porn-addiction, on and on… right?

    Are we?

    Or maybe I’m just immature and idealistic.