i like jesus...

made me laugh, but also made me think... i come from a place where chrstianity has always been a apart of my life, someone says "jesus loves you" and that has a definite meaning to it for me, but what about others who haven't had this long standing idea of jesus, how does that phrase work out for them?

water for life? or life for water?

something that's stuck with me for a few weeks... we operate in central, apparently it's a scary place. maybe i'm blind, but i don't always see the scary side as much as i see the potential for live, grace and freedom from oppression, but the thing that's stuck with me for the past few weeks is we decided to put a lock on the tap of our front garden outside the church office. (i say we, because i was part of the meeting where the end result was a tap lock, but let the record reflect i was vociferously opposed to the idea.)

doesn't seem like much does it? one lock on a tap. we're on water restrictions after all. who even noticed? nobody in the congregations i'm sure. but what about the people for whom the tap at the methodist church was their only source of water, those people who have no home and in the middle of winter wash themselves in the freezing water? i've seen this with my own eyes. do we even care about them?

widjet said in his last post "Welcome to our church, keep out... Jesus loves you, get off my lawn..." so i suppose all i'm saying is, ja, Jesus loves you, but you can't use our fucking water.

it's stuck with me because i don't know what to do with this feeling of helplessness when i hit these walls of opposition we seem to always face when we want to reach out in love rather than in scared protracted protection. any thoughts?

bricks and jelly... (the overview)

over the years the church has often gotten the idea of tradition and faith confused. on the one hand we have things that are tradition - practices that are useful and serve a purpose to bring life and healing to a place and people at a certain time, and then there are the teachings of Jesus - timeless principals that no matter who's listening, where or when they are, they always bring life and hope to those who hear them. the confusion comes when we use the one as if it's the other. traditions are like jelly, mould-able, wobbly, if you poke your finger in it it will break, it's important to have jelly in a faith community like ours, but we must never confuse it with the brick of faith in Jesus and what he taught. bricks are hard, have edges, you can build a solid structure from it. Jelly on the other hand it terrible to build with.

the trick comes when we use both. you need to put the brick in the jelly, and not confuse the two, sometimes we may need to look at the jelly as well and get a new flavour, make more because the old jelly has been eaten up or simply the people here and now just don't like it's flavour of this particular jelly.

bricks and jelly...

Choose community?

Sitting in my office, reading a book by the window, with the nice warm sun on my face, learning from a man who changed my life. It's a book of freedom, in the silhouette of a cage of burglar proofing... Who's free then huh?

Welcome to our church, please keep out...

Jesus loves you, get off my lawn!