Über Thoughtfulness

Most of us can quickly name at least one person who is extremely thoughtful, and our minds turn to these wonderful friends as we count our blessings this time of year. If only we ourselves could be so thoughtful, we think . . . we do try to be nice and kind to everyone, but when God queued us up to receive our gifts, we decide that maybe He didn’t put us in the über-thoughtful line.

Beyond Bethlehem: Join Ginghamsburg UMC and UMCOR to Address Refugee Crisis

If you think about it, Jesus’ earliest travels weren’t about ministry. Mary and Joseph fled Bethlehem for Egypt; it would be years—and a number of moves—before they returned to Nazareth with their young son Jesus.

Their migration had little to do with ministry . . . and everything to do with survival.

When you consider our Lord was himself a refugee, how can we look away from the global refugee and migration crisis in our world today? Wars, conflict, and persecution around the world have forced more people to flee and seek refuge than at any other time in recorded migration history. Earlier this year, the United Nations reported that nearly sixty million people worldwide had been forcibly displaced . . . that’s one in every 122 human beings now considered a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum.

In response, Ginghamsburg UMC (Tipp City, Ohio) and United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) have teamed up to assist displaced peoples in crisis. This initiative, known as Beyond Bethlehem, will:

• Help people transform where they live, their place of origin
• Provide safe passage along the way for those who move
• Welcome and assist with integration and belonging when refugees reach a destination
• Support those who return home either voluntarily or because of forced deportation

Beyond Bethlehem launched in advance of the Advent season, to remind everyone whose birth we celebrate . . . and who spent his earliest years as a refugee.

How You Can Help
• Use Advance # 3022144
• Download free assets to promote in your church bulletins during Advent and beyond
• Consider different ways your church, your family, and you yourself might give financial resources

And remember, 100% of all financial gifts go directly to help the displaced—not one penny is spent on administrative costs!

When we serve them, we serve him. Learn more here.

 

Grace and Gratitude in Unusual Places

“Therefore, I say to you, don’t worry about your life, what you’ll eat or what you’ll drink, or about your body, what you’ll wear. Isn’t life more than food and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds in the sky. They don’t sow seed or harvest grain or gather crops into barns. Yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you worth much more than they are? Who among you by worrying can add a single moment to your life? And why do you worry about clothes? Notice how the lilies in the field grow. They don’t wear themselves out with work, and they don’t spin cloth. But I say to you that even Solomon in all of his splendor wasn’t dressed like one of these. If God dresses grass in the field so beautifully, even though it’s alive today and tomorrow it’s thrown into the furnace, won’t God do much more for you, you people of weak faith? Therefore, don’t worry and say, ‘What are we going to eat?’ or ‘What are we going to drink?’ or ‘What are we going to wear?’ Gentiles long for all these things. Your heavenly Father knows that you need them. Instead, desire first and foremost God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. –Matthew 6:25-33 (CEB)

When I go to the gym for my daily workout, I am confronted by a deck of televisions; luckily, they are closed-captioned so everyone can listen to whatever they want and read the screen, if they choose. My favorite stationary bike is in front of one that is always set to one of those home networks, where in fifty-five minutes or less, people miraculously find a new house, renovate three-thousand square feet for a pittance, or flip a condemned property for a ridiculous price. The worst thing, however, is the way I think these shows intend to make the viewer feel: Your house isn’t enough—your home doesn’t have the right paint color, you need a marble bathroom, your closets aren’t walk-ins. . . . the list goes on.

On first blush, watching these shows—albeit for the amount of time it takes me to burn a few hundred calories—made me come home, look around, and think, What if . . .?

Beyond Politically Correct

You run into some friends you haven’t seen in awhile and in catching up, you discover they are adopting a baby boy. “That’s wonderful,” you say. “Where did you get him? Will you get to meet the mother? Do you know why she gave him away? How long will it be before you get him? Gosh, my friend at work had to wait years for the adoption to go through. And oh, was it expensive. Hey! You know what’s going to happen, right? Now you’ll get pregnant!”

Hopefully none of us have grilled someone about adoption as relentlessly as this, but most of us have to admit that at least one or maybe two of those phrases have come out of our mouths upon hearing about friends’ plans to adopt. There’s a better way to talk to your friends about the adoption process.

Five Ways Your Church Can Support Adoptive and Foster Families

The biggest encouragement for adoptive parents is the feeling that their church “gets it”: That church leadership thinks adoption is awesome; that they love and want to help foster kids; and that they are cognizant and supportive of couples who struggle with infertility. Sunday morning messages on adoption-friendly topics are a start, but there are a variety of ways you can create an adoption-friendly church.

God first loved—and adopted—me

by Paul Franklyn

When our daughter was five years old, she began to understand what we meant by the existence of her birthmother. We realized one evening during an Advent bedtime story that she grasped how someone other than us gave birth to her. As she listened to a story about the birth of Jesus, she startled us with a remark that Mary was the birthmother of Jesus.

How Megachurches Have Killed The Practice Of Prayer

It suddenly dawned on me last Sunday: Prayer is not media-friendly.

In this past year, I’ve visited over forty different types of churches, writing up my experiences for a regional newspaper. I then post the columns on this blog and write a more thorough analysis of what I saw and experienced.

Many of the places I visited are quite large, often multi-site. Messages come from the lead pastor, nearly always a charismatic and photogenic younger man. Most are live-streamed, using multiple stationary cameras along with an ever-moving boom camera to help keep the TV/Web-streaming audience engaged.

Few of the worship services I attended had time set aside for prayer. None of those with live-streaming do. Why? Churches web-streaming their services dare not practice silence or quietness. Music, movement, words and enthusiasm must fill each millisecond. It’s the nature of media — silence in a broadcast is the kiss of death.

 

Almost all the very large churches I’ve visited follow the same worship formula: no spoken greeting, but opens with 20-25 minutes of very loud music accompanied by dancing girls. High-speed video announcements follow and then a 30-45 minute sermon by the big-name pastor which is usually done by video. Perhaps another song and a dismissal. While money is earnestly desired, the act of receiving the offering and dedicating it to God as a part of worship has nearly disappeared. Membership covenants that mean a pledge of a certain income percentage keep the coffers full. And prayer is nearly non-existent.

That’s what hit me so hard on Sunday, June 14, 2015. Much of that service was spent in prayer, both corporate and private. We acknowledged the presence of God in prayer. We confessed our sins together, first with a written prayer, second with private prayer. We prayed for the world at large and then for those closest to our hearts. We prayed together the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples. We were still. We had silence.

There were no cameras. There was no broadcast. It was just us.

Most find prayer a difficult discipline to master, coming easy to few, if any. It is also an essential discipline for those who wish to move to spiritual maturity.

Most megachurches work diligently to channel people into smaller home/study groups. I assume prayer takes place there. However, the practice of prayer is not modeled or experienced in the larger worship gatherings. Those who get their entire spiritual nourishment from webcasts have never seen any more than a token prayer.

I’ve written before about how megachurches have accidentally killed Christian community. It appears another death follows their ever-enlarging territory. We are all the poorer because of it.

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Christy blogs at ChristyThomas.com.