abundant life | Tim Høiland

1. Lausanne’s new leader
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you may remember that last spring I did a series of posts on the Lausanne Movement, focusing on the important contributions of René Padilla, Samuel Escobar, Carl Henry, and Chris Wright at different points in its history. This week the movement named its new leader, a young(er) Korean-American guy named Michael Oh:

Oh is president and founder of Christ Bible Seminary in Nagoya, Japan, a vibrant and growing seminary in Japan, which is making an impact among young Christians seeking a renewed vision for the next generation of Christianity in Japan. He has been involved in Lausanne since 2004, serving as keynote speaker and part of the planning team for Lausanne’s Younger Leaders Gathering in 2006, and as a member of the Lausanne Board since 2007. He will be formally installed at The Lausanne Global Leadership Forum in South Asia in June.

2. Nicaragua as paradise
Nicaragua, considered the second poorest country in the western hemisphere, hasn’t been particularly high on tourists’ lists of destinations. While living in Costa Rica, I took a trip to Managua to work on a story, but some Ticos tried to dissuade me. Anyway, one wonders what luxury resorts would do for Nicaragua’s reputation (and its economy, for that matter):

What transforms a country from tourism pariah to hot destination for wealthy travelers? First, you need a place for opulence-seeking people to stay. Last week, one of Nicaragua’s richest men, Carlos Pellas, opened Mukul, the country’s first full-fledged luxury hotel. Nicaragua, with its charming colonial city of Granada, active volcanoes and reliable Pacific waves, is already popular among backpackers and surfers. And it is a new favorite among travel writers… Nicaragua hopes to follow in the footsteps of other spots—think Vietnam, Colombia and Croatia—that have overcome difficult histories and made the transition to upscale hot-spot. Its Central American neighbors Costa Rica and Panama are attracting luxury-resort developers.

3. Vocational stewardship
Amy Sherman shares ten great ideas for encouraging vocational stewardship in local congregations, related to her great book Kingdom Calling. Thanks to Bob Robinson at (re)integrate for re-posting the list (and to Katie for pointing me to it). I particularly like this part:

Conduct “commissioning” ceremonies at appropriate times for different individuals/groups in the church who serve in particular vocations. For example, at the start of the school year, you could invite all congregants who are engaged in the educational field to come forward to receive a word of blessing and prayer. At a Maundy Thursday service, consider bringing forward congregants whose vocation involves them bringing succor to the suffering: medical personnel, social workers, counselors. At a Thanksgiving service, consider honoring the flock’s farmers and others engaged in industries that help ensure that food gets to hungry people.

4. Better partnership in mission
Jeff Haanen has an interview in Christianity Today with Brian Howell, the author of a recent book on short-term mission trips and how to make them better:

As an anthropologist, I’m absolutely for people traveling and encountering what God is doing in other parts of the world. I am for people understanding more about their own culture and the cultures of others. To the extent that these trips are a significant vehicle for people to do that, I am for them. I am not for the narrative that has typically driven these trips: “We are going because there’s this tremendous need out there that we have to meet. And there’s this burden that we have as the wealthy country to go and do something in another place.” I support transforming this narrative so that it becomes, “How can we connect with what God is doing in other parts of the world? How can we learn to be good partners with Christians already in these places? How can we participate in what the church is already doing in these countries in effective ways?”

5. Abundant life

Abundant Life from The Work Of The People on Vimeo.

Repaso is intended as a thought-provoking compilation of news and commentary related to the intersections of faith, development, justice and peace. As always, I welcome your thoughts on any of the links and ideas in this roundup!

[Photo credit: centurion-magazine.com]

While researching my upcoming piece for PRISM, focused on the story behind our tomatoes, I picked up Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (Penguin). I’d already been familiar with his pithy, succinct mantra: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. And I’d flipped through Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual (Penguin), an abbreviated version of IDOF, so I more or less knew what to expect.

Basically, this: we in the West eat terribly, consuming things that our predecessors wouldn’t recognize as food, and it’s part of an institutionalized system with a lot on the line, so it’s no wonder we have so many diet-related health problems (diabetes, heart disease, obesity, etc.), and that we really, really ought to reconsider our ways.

The first two sections of the book were slow-going for me, as Pollan explains and deconstructs “nutritionism” and the Western diet more generally. An in-depth explanation of the difference between omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids among other things isn’t exactly riveting reading, at least to me. But he had to cover that ground to set the stage for the third and final section, focused on “food rules” — how to eat well when the odds of doing so in the West are stacked against us. That’s where his three-part mantra comes into play.

Our food choices take place within the context of networks of “social and ecological relationships,” Pollan says, and our food rules need to take this unavoidable interconnectedness into account:

When most of us think about food and health, we think in fairly narrow nutritionist terms — about our personal physical health and how the ingestion of this particular nutrient or rejection of that affects it. But I no longer think it’s possible to separate our bodily health from the health of the environment from which we eat or the environment in which we eat or, for that matter, from the health of our general outlook about food (and health). If my explorations of the food chain have taught me anything, it’s that it is a food chain, and all the links in it are in fact linked: the health of the soil to the health of the plants and animals we eat to the health of the food culture in which we eat them to the health of the eater, in body as well as mind.

As Christians, we might add spiritual health to that last line, believing as we do that we are to love and worship God not just with our hearts and minds but also with our bodies. And given our context, loving our neighbors and being good stewards of the creation in which we live — both at the core of the Christian life — requires coming to terms with the interconnectedness of our world, and asking hard questions about how our actions in the produce aisle and around the dinner table and everywhere else either contribute to the common good, or operate at cross-purposes with it.

How do you understand your food choices as a way of loving God and neighbor? What might the “abundant life” Jesus brings have to teach us about food and its relationship to the health of ourselves and our communities — not as fad but as spiritual discipline?

[Photo credit: Goshen Farmer's Market]

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Repaso: February 8, 2013

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

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