The Three

I’m trying something a little different today. For a while I’ve been thinking about how to revamp my fortuitous bouncing Saturday posts. I’m sure some of you think they’re perfect, but the reality is that each week only a fraction of people read and follow the links compared to other posts during the week.

One of the things I’ve never liked about the festival of links as I’ve done before, is the lack of engagement in conversation. So here’s what I’m going to try (trial version) for a few weeks: linking to three posts or articles and sharing some thoughts on each of them. The goal with this being that we can talk about those posts in the comments, and that you won’t feel as overwhelmed by only having 3 links to dive into. Alright, here we go.

1. The past few days I went to Willow Creek’s Leadership Summit. Howard Schultz of Starbucks backed out of speaking at the last minute and Bill Hybels took a few minutes to address the whole thing. I thought he did so with grace, class, and honor. The debate of homosexuality within Christianity and church is a difficult one, but what Bill did was as good as I’ve ever heard. He stood against sin, but sin for all people. This is how it should be. Here’s the video:

2. Jeff Goins said this week that writing can be dangerous. Here’s a couple quotes that stood out to me: “Every writer is an individualist. You can’t spend that much time in your own company and not think more in terms of self and less in terms of the community. This is the beauty and danger of the writing life.” And…”Ideas can be dangerous. They launch revolutions and upset the status quo. They can spread propaganda (whether it’s true or not sometimes doesn’t matter).”

I think we could take Jeff’s statement even a bit further. Art and creativity is dangerous. Writing is a piece of that. Why is it dangerous? Because it is creating a new future. It is creating something that did not exist before. You always have to the power to overturn the proverbial apple cart by creating something new.

3. And my favorite post of the week is from Matthew Paul Turner, as he wrote about The Great Evangelical Endangered Species. Yep, he wrote about old people. This is spot on:

Listen friends, no matter what age or experience we are in life, we need old people sitting in our pews. We need them. We need to learn from their wisdom. We need to engage their stories and honor the value of their history. Do we have to always agree with them? No. Do we have to let the old rule how we do all things. Of course not. But we must honor them. We must respect them. We must create healthy spaces for them to worship God among us, and not in some separate building as a part of the “non contemporary” service.”

I think when I first started in ministry I was ready to do whatever it took to reach young people, but I think I’ve come a long way to think that without the involvement of old men and women and their wisdom, just “reaching” young people will be a superficial thing lacking the depth needed to be something that lasts.

Feel free to share your thoughts on any of these in the comments.

Enjoy your weekend.