1. Stephanie Smith is a great 20-something writer who recently wrote a post on our attention-craving nature for Relevant Magazine. For her, there is a distinct difference between building a platform and building a kingdom. I hope we’re all first concerned about building the Kingdom, anything else is selfish.
“We can either use our voices of influence for our own self-promotion, or for a sacramental purpose: as an avenue of grace extending beyond ourselves. I’ve learned that when it comes to social media and ministry, the message is not about buzz and blog stats. It’s about life. In this age of information overload, we don’t need any more influence-hungry marketers. We need people who are able to articulate life-giving truth with elegance and clarity.”
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2. Bryan has been a faithful reader and commenter here for several years, and this week he wrote a post that I really enjoyed. He comes from a church planting perspective and feels that too many people are more concerned about planting a church in the trendy parts of Portland instead of reaching people no church is reaching. He describes this mentality as “take off your skinny jeans and put on your carhartts” (what a great line).
“I wonder then, what if we were to make that our point in planting churches, to be outposts of people seeking to live out radically different values – where we use our resources not just for ourselves and our families, but for our neighbors and those less well off. What if instead of trying to build a cool gathering we went about first trying to build groups of people who want to see the best in their neighborhoods, and what if instead of focusing just on the hip neighborhoods we asked, where are there needs and how can we be part of the solution?”
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3. A professor of mine at Multnomah is also a well-known writer/author beyond being a great teacher. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my classes with him and I also enjoyed a piece he wrote for Christianity Today last week. While Portland has been leading the charge as an example for how churches can work with our cities, I think Metzger poses a question worth pondering: If all of this wasn’t making the news or if it all was offending to the city, would we still pour our love out anyway?
“Will we allow ourselves to be exploited for the least’s sake? We’ll have to move beyond accessing the brightest and best ‘ideas for the common good’ and live among brokenhearted lives. We need to enter into such solidarity with the marginalized, so that if they go down, we go down with them. As we identify with people broken by systemic evil heart to heart and life on life, they will teach us how great our own need for Jesus really is.”
