God has placed us in a family and/or body. We need each other to stay centered in Christ. The Board is appointing a Theology Committee that will take special interest in guiding this area, nudging us along in our journey of discovering the beauty of Jesus and his ways.
Posted by: Lil Goertzen
Church:
Date: October 29th, 2010
The Mercado family has arrived and is getting used to our “cold” weather – their 11-year old daughter is amazed at the ice in the ditches and is hoping to experience snow!
Just this morning over coffee with staff here in the office, Ruben shared of the difficult two months they experienced earlier this year. During that difficult time, on a trip to the US, he was put in jail overnight in Houston, TX because of visa problems with US immigration – as a result he was able to share Christ with the prison guards and led his Guatemalan jail partner to Christ! I pray that we will be inspired as we hear more of their experiences and the fruit of the God at work through His church.
Mercados will be spending time in Manitoba and Saskatchewan connecting with churches and ministering in various locations.
~ Darrell Kehler,
Region 2 Coach / Missions Facilitator
Posted by: len hjalmarson
Church: Aylmer, Ontario Aylmer
Date: October 29th, 2010
In the last two months one of the subtexts in my conversations and reflection has been solitude. It may have been provoked in part by an article in the UTNE Reader, September-October issue. The article by William Deresiewicz was titled, “Solitude and Leadership,” and was typically insightful and provocative. I’ll offer a few quotes and then some reflection, and then add another article, by Peter Block, to the mix. But I encourage you to read the entire piece. This first quote offers the focus of the concern in the article.
“America now has the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen. What we don’t have are people who can think for themselves; people who can formulate a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things, people with vision.”
The article offers that technology itself pushes us in this direction: toward quick solutions, away from the deep reflection that might observe a new way forward, a new way of thinking about the problem and its relation to a larger whole. Like Brueggemann, Deresiewicz intuits that the pace of our lives causes us to miss small openings: ” the space for imagination to expand and take shape is inversely proportional to the speed at which we live.” (Hopeful Imagination) Continue reading
Posted by: len hjalmarson
Church: Aylmer, Ontario Aylmer
Date: October 28th, 2010
The Apprentice Series is a collection authored by James Bryan Smith and published by InterVarsity Press. There are three titles in the series: The Good and Beautiful God, The Good and Beautiful Life, and The Good and Beautiful Community. This last title was just released. According to IVP, “The series is designed to guide readers in an apprenticeship with Jesus recognizing that we follow Jesus to become like Jesus.”
On the Series website the vision is summarized under four components of change.
“The Apprentice Series is based on a simple structure for producing change.. The first “element” is actually the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit that enlivens all our efforts to follow Christ—including the other three components of transformation.
“The second area where change can happen is in transforming our narratives. Narratives are the stories we live by that give our life purpose and explanation. Often our narratives are at work in our lives without our knowing it. We have narratives about God, our self, others and so forth. Many of us have narratives about God that do not match the narratives that Jesus revealed. We cannot change our behavior until we change the narratives that guide us.
Posted in: Books/Ideas, Discipleship Resources, Go Share,