Archives For stewardship

Repaso: February 8, 2013

February 8, 2013 — Leave a comment

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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]

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Repaso: August 10, 2012

August 10, 2012 — Leave a comment


1. Vocational and cultural discipleship
Gideon Strauss has a great post at the Redeemer City to City blog about re-envisioning the meaning of work, including a reflection on the first annual Gospel & Culture Conference held late last year in New York:

Listening to Chelsea Chen perform on the organ of beautiful St. Bart’s church, and to Tim Keller and Richard Mouw outline an inspiring theology of culture, redolent with the gospel; hearing Fiona Diefenbacher’s heart break for the fashion industry, and Max Anderson offering a vision of hope for MBA programs; I thought to myself: this is the stuff of a cultural reformation. This is not just another fad, soon to blow over. This is not some utopian vision of heaven dragged down to earth by human hands, no matter the price. These people are committed to the slow, hard, nuanced work of bearing hope into every corner of their world, by living their everyday work out of motives shaped by the gospel.

2. The stewardship of transcendence
David Greusel is an architect specializing in places where people gather, including a couple of MLB stadiums. He’s also a theologically astute wordsmith. Here, he writes about architecture and art in a culture in which the church is “no longer the most important building in town”:

The big question for the church in the West is this: Can its stewardship of transcendence be recovered? To answer this question requires predictive skills that I lack. However, I can predict with confidence that the attitudes of the church toward art of the last 150 years will only drive it further from the mainstream and from the centre of cultural influence. To move back toward the centre of culture will require that we befriend (and become) museum curators, art history professors, critics, journalists, and publishers. This will require a generation of wise, spiritually grounded and theologically nimble missionaries.

3. Crossing borders within our own
In last week’s Repaso I included a post by David Kirkpatrick about seeing life through Latino eyes. Here’s a follow-up:

Few Christians would disagree with Samuel Escobar when he says, “The heart of ‘mission’ is the drive to share the good news with all, to cross every border with the gospel.” But when pressed with the need to cross ethnic borders within our own national borders, many are perplexed. They have a burden without a vision.

4. How fast is Usain Bolt?
Yes, Usain Bolt is fast. Really fast. But this video puts his speed in historical perspective, and it makes him seem even faster.

5. Guatemala wins its first Olympic medal
Guatemala won its first ever Olympic medal last Saturday, thanks to Erick Barrondo’s second place finish in the men’s 20 kilometer walk. As you can imagine, Guatemalans are pretty excited and proud. Honestly, though, I’m not sure which is bigger news — that this is Guatemala’s first medal, or that walking is an actual Olympic sport. Apparently, racewalking is quite popular in Latin America.

6. Comparing the continents
Some creative folks have created a series of infographics using the ubiquitous Olympic rings, which represent each of the world’s continents, to portray inequality of various kinds around the world. Here they are in video form:

Repaso is intended as a thought-provoking compilation of news and commentary from the past week 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: Andrew Rodriguez via nytimes.com]

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Resisting manipulation, seeking truth, and acting justly in an election year

May 3, 2012 — 6 Comments

Being an election year, it seems as good a time as any to reflect a bit on citizenship and civility. I plan to read several books along those lines between now and November, and I’ll share some thoughts along the way. One of the ones I’m most looking forward to digging into is Uncommon Decency by Richard Mouw. I’ve heard great things about it, and I wonder how it compares to Miroslav Volf’s A Public Faith, which I reflected on earlier this year. I might also re-read The Case for Civility by Os Guinness as well as unSpun by some of the folks behind FactCheck.org – an essential resource for making sense of “creative” campaign rhetoric.

In the meantime, I want to share a wonderful couple of paragraphs by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, from her book Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies (Eerdmans). It’s not a book about politics, per se, but it’s packed full of lessons that would serve us well in our political engagement for sure. In this excerpt she introduces a series of really good questions:

Any effort to find reliable reporting needs to start not with questions about the sources but with questions about ourselves. What are my responsibilities as a citizen? As a person of faith? As a consumer? As a leader? As a parent? As an educator? What am I avoiding knowing? Why? What point of view am I protecting? Why? How have I arrived at my assumptions about what sources of information to rely on? What limits my angle of vision? Have I tried to imagine how one might arrive at a different conclusion? How much evidence do I need to be convinced? What kind of persuasion works most effectively for me? How do I accredit or challenge authority?

The answers to these questions are not simply personal. Some of them involve serious theological reflection on the relationship between the Kingdom of God and the state, what it means to give Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s, and whether and how to participate in the conduct of worldly affairs. If you’re Mennonite or Amish, that boundary is drawn pretty clearly. But most of us, I think, are navigating the murky middle ground marked out between not-so-separate church and state, trying to resist manipulation, seek truth, and act on it justly in the ways that remain open to us. (pp. 59-60)

What have you found to be helpful in discerning how to be civil in the public square while being a good steward of one’s citizenship?

[Photo credit: isoc.com]

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Fighting poverty, planting trees

April 19, 2012 — 1 Comment

When I started writing for magazines, I set out to tell stories about the poor, especially in places I had been in Latin America and elsewhere. As an advocacy journalist, I wanted to use the platform I had to amplify the voices of those on the margins, in hopes of making poverty a bit more personal for those who’d read my words, and of showing the real possibilities for transformational development, justice and peace.

But something unexpected happened. In story after story — a community in Guatemala grappling with an unwanted foreign gold mine; a community in Costa Rica recovering from an earthquake; poor rural farmers in Mexico and Haiti and Tanzania trying to feed their families; those living in low-income parts of Phoenix — I discovered an unavoidable environmental theme. Whether the threat was cyanide in the water, bulldozing for an unneeded road, deforestation at the hands of locals and foreigners, or officials turning a blind eye to the careless practices of toxic industries in an urban neighborhood, I couldn’t escape the realization that the well-being of the poor is directly tied to creation care.

Of course, all of us benefit from creation care, but whereas you and I can insulate ourselves from the worst effects of pollution and contaminated water and deforestation, in many cases the poor — and particularly the rural poor — don’t have that luxury.

This Sunday is Earth Day, and you don’t have to be a raging environmentalist (or even a liberal!) to give some thought to what it might mean to honor our Creator by caring for what he himself has declared good. Consider the psalmist, who joyfully declared, “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world and all who live in it.” We are God’s handiwork, made in his image, but we’re also entrusted to cultivate and steward the rest of his good creation. I suspect Abraham Kuyper had this psalm in mind when he said his most famous words, “There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out,  ’This is mine! This belongs to me!’”

The good folks at Plant With Purpose (whose work I covered last summer for Prism) are curating a page over at the snazzy new World Vision ACT:S site for their Earth Day Challenge, providing resources and creative challenges for being more involved. It’s one of a number of campaigns PWP is part of this month, actually. I’d encourage you to check out the Earth Day Challenge and consider what it might look like to honor the Creator and to love our neighbors this Earth Day.

(Not to sway you or anything, but I really like the Trees Please! campaign.)

[Photo credit: Plant With Purpose]

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Weaving together belief and behavior

April 12, 2012 — Leave a comment

For many of us the college years are an especially formative time, shaping who we become as people and pointing us in the direction of a career. That is, at least theoretically. Each of us have different kinds of college experiences, of course, shaped by our own choices and priorities as well as by factors beyond our control.

I started college in the fall of 2001 at a state university as a business major because I thought that was as good a way as any to ensure I’d have a job when I graduated. And I chose the management concentration because as an eighteen year old I thought managing people sounded better than being managed. Halfway through my freshman year I’d come to hate it and had terrible grades, so I switched over to the major with the fewest math requirements.

Somehow it hasn’t all turned out terribly, which I attribute solely to God’s grace, but I do wonder how my college years would have been different had I made life-altering decisions based on even better questions than how to avoid math requirements — for instance, questions about the nature of the world, and God’s relationship to it and to me and to everyone else, and how a college education may actually be a gift to be stewarded for God’s glory and to be used for loving our neighbors.

I hadn’t heard of Steven Garber yet, but I wish I had. His book The Fabric of Faithfulness: Weaving Together Belief and Behavior (IVP) came highly recommended, and now I see why. Garber currently leads The Washington Institute in DC, “a place to explore common grace for the common good.”

In working with students over many years, Garber noticed that the university setting is often an environment that allows room for private beliefs and opinions, but it isn’t comfortable with affirmations of public truths, especially ones clearly connected to private, and deeply held, beliefs. Therefore, those students seeking integration of their deepest beliefs with the realities of the world around them are often frustrated, and at times they face a crisis of identity or even a crisis of faith. When integration is thwarted, dis-integrated cynics are born.

Garber’s work has been an effort to give students a vision, as the subtitle puts it, for weaving belief and behavior together into a fabric of faithfulness. Higher education isn’t to be used simply as a ticket to privilege, but, rooted in our deepest beliefs, a means of serving others, of seeking the common good.

How does one come through college prepared for a life with belief and behavior woven together?

He has found three crucial factors:

Over the course of hours of listening to people who still believe in the vision of a coherent faith, one that meaningfully connects personal disciplines with public duties, again and again I saw that they were people (1) who had formed a worldview sufficient for the challenges of the modern world, (2) who had found a teacher who incarnated that worldview and (3) who had forged friendships with folk whose common life was embedded in that worldview. There were no exceptions.

I think the wisdom in prioritizing those three things speaks for itself, but Garber illustrates it much more fully in the book, and he does so largely through different people’s vocational stories and by asking the big questions that only we can answer for ourselves.

Garber includes a quote from Jacques Ellul, the French philosopher and theologian, on the importance of working these things out while we’re young, before it’s too late:

You must take sides earlier — when you can actually make choices, when you have many paths opening at your feet, before the weight of necessity overwhelms you.

Though I wish I’d known about this book during college, I’m glad to know about it now, on the other side of both college and grad school, still working on figuring out the particulars of my vocation and how I could best steward it to serve the common good. Needless to say I highly recommend the book for everyone, but especially for those in their college years, or for those who interact with college students, whether as parents, siblings, teachers, pastors, or friends.

Weaving together belief and behavior is an ongoing process as we seek to be faithful in all areas of life, and Garber has given us some clues to point us in the right direction.

Develop a worldview. Find a mentor. Be in community.

[Photo credit: luna13.com; this is a Guatemalan woman weaving a traditional piece of fabric, which I think serves as a beautiful picture of what this sort of "fabric of faithfulness" represents. Check out WeavingWomen.org, an organization the photographer founded "in partnership with indigenous Mayan women to preserve traditional, sustainable weaving arts in Guatemala."]

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