A Few Good Posts

I don’t make a habit of doing the ‘Friday link’ thing – I’m not organised enough, to remember what I’ve read. However, I’ve been struck by a some posts by a few of my favourite bloggers this week:

Firstly, Onesimus had some great things to say about success in the church:

Success has nothing to do with the church Jesus established.  As the Body of Christ, the Presence of Christ right here in this local place, the church’s concern is simply to be Jesus, which means to be his love, which means to do to others what we would have them do to us, which means to love even our enemies.  Anything more or less is a symptom that the church has been taken over by an alien agenda, an alien purpose, dare we say an alien spirit?

Western Christianity has no category for martyrdom.  We are so oriented towards and seduced by our host culture’s worship of success that persecution and martyrdom would seem the opposite of achieving God’s ‘blessing’ on our ministries and on our lives.

The call of Jesus on a life is a call to die, not to succeed.  The call of Jesus on his church is to give itself  away, not to grow from strength to strength.  And even if we ‘succeed’ in the world’s eyes, it means simply we have been given more resources to give away.

Some of the more triumphant voices in the world mission scene could do with grappling with these ideas.

The other post which struck me was from Mark, who wrestles with the issues of wealth and poverty:

Some people will advise missionaries from richer nations going to live in a poorer country that they should buy all the things they need to feel at home, in order that they not burn out. Often this is justified by reasoning that this is what the local people expect of outsiders, and that if they tried to live at a lower economic level their discomfort and uneasiness would be obvious to those they’re living with. On the other hand some people do try to give up their wealthy lifestyle and live as close as possible to the people they are serving, but in many cases they are only able to keep this up for a short time before returning to their home country.I don’t know where the balance lies, and it will certainly be different for every person and situation, but I’m convinced that the area of wealth disparity is something that cross-cultural missionaries cannot just give simplistic answers to, but need to continually wrestle with.

On a far more serious note, Archdruid Eileen has compiled some advice on using twitter:

Don’t just follow Christian leaders. Firstly because their lives tend to be fairly dull – hopping around from conference to conference, constantly telling everybody how blessed they are. Secondly because they’ll never post anything really interesting on Social Networking unless they’re certain bishops. If you follow lots of Christian leaders you’re really replicating the “real” Twitter world, where everybody re-tweets anything posted by Stephen Fry or Jonjo Shelvey, and hopes that proves they’re real friends.

By the way, the picture isn’t relevant to any of this – I just like it. It’s some sort of kingfisher that we saw in Bangladesh.