Missional Christianity

In class the other day we were having a conversation about missional Christianity, specifically in regard to A. Wayne Schwab's book, When the Members are the Missionaries. Someone brought up the fact that missionaries are people spreading the gospel in foreign lands. Her comment started me thinking, and here are my musings in abbreviated form:
To be a missionary, is to be one whose life is shaped by a mission. The common understanding came from the idea that people were sent on a mission by the church. I love missions in the sense of people going to a different cultural group—I have friends that are serving in other countries and I admire, appreciate and support their ministry among the people they serve. However, I think that understanding the word missionary in this way has been detrimental to the people of God because the mission is not the church’s mission primarily. It is first and foremost God’s mission to the entire world as revealed in Christ and God calls all of us to participate in this mission as missionaries. This is an essential part of the Christian faith—“For God so loved the world that he sent his Son…”.

Green resources

My wife has been teaching me a lot about living responsibly in terms of the food and goods we consume. We now produce less than a 13 gallon bag of trash each week (and we're praying that our city will continue to move in a direction that allows us not to use bags as they do in a few neighborhoods). We eat locally grown food and I can't tell you how cool it is to know the persons who produce your food and that it is cheaper than eating a lot of processed food. It helps, of course that we grow about 25% of the food we eat--mostly vegetables--and we cook from scratch 90% of the time. It's also cool to know that the majority of the food we eat has not been grown or treated with harmful chemicals or harvested in a way that exploits people and natural resources.
So, here's some cool resources if you're interested in living a greener and more socially responsible lifestyle:
1) paperbackswap.com and swapacd.com: at these sites you can get books and cds respectively that someone else no longer wants and pass on those you no longer want reducing the number of new books and cds that are produced and keeping some from ending up in the landfill
2) simpleliving.org--a website that shares tips and ideas for living a simpler life--reducing our consumption and living within our means
3) fairtradefederation.org: A site that will help you locate "Fair Trade" goods. "Fair trade is an organized social movement and market-based approach to empowering developing producers and promoting sustainability. The movement advocates the payment of a fair price as well as social and environmental standards in areas related to the production of a wide variety of goods."(from Wikipedia)
4) tenthousandvillages.com: a network of fair trade shops with locations throughout the country. Most of their goods are crafts from developing countries including baskets, clothing, art, musical instruments, jewelry and home decor items. The cool thing here is that the tag on each item tells you where it was made and often how it was made and sometimes gives a story about the persons that made it
5) greenguide.com, greenlivingtips.com, greenlivingideas.com, nrdc.org/greenliving: websites that offer advice and guidance for living a greener, more sustainable life.
Mother Earth News is a print magazine offering the same kind of advice.
6) freecycle.org: website that lets you get rid of unwanted items or get things others no longer want. Great thing is they are regional sites so the listings are from people in your area
7) craigslist.com: online classified ads/garage sale. pay version of the above. Where we buy everything we can. the prices are great, the variety is awesome, items are usually in good condition, and you're not participating in the production of more disposable goods

The ways you can change your lifestyle are many and of varied degrees of difficulty; from the food you eat to the cleaners/chemicals you use to the way you build your home.
For us, this has become a way of living out some of our most basic beliefs: We are called to love God who first loved us, the God who created the earth and loves it, so part of loving God is loving God's creation; and we are called to love our fellow human beings which means not buying and consuming goods that are produced in ways that exploit other people, to the greatest extent we can. As a part of our society it is nearly impossible to avoid this entirely, but we have taken steps to be more conscious of this and to make the best decisions we can.

A great read

I'm a preacher in case you haven't figured that out. It's what I do, it's part who I am. It's a dangerous profession because people, including myself, sometimes think you speak for God and because you're mucking around in people's lives. It's great; I love it; and it regularly scares the crap out of me. Today I came across a blog entry, now published in a book, from the blog real live preacher in which a pastor describes very well the dangers of being a pastor. Read it. it's funny, poignant and worth thinking about.

Pictures from the Bay Area

From the Asian art museum:





From the Tea Garden in golden Gate Park: