Great Commission Air

I had a great lunch today with Robert and Jennifer Rice. They have ministry, Great Commission Air, that provides air transportation for Christian missions and humanitarian relief, primarily in Guatemala. This involves anything from flying supplies to missionaries serving in remote locations to flying injured or sick children to Guatemala City for urgent medical care.

Right now they're back in the states trying to raise enough support to return to Guatemala for two years. They've raised enough to cover their basic expenses (which doesn't take much down there) but still need to raise about $40,000 to cover the operational costs of flying the plane 50 hours a month.

If you're feeling generous (and/or a prompting by the Holy Spirit), take a minute and donate to their cause. You'll be glad you did.

Change faith versus politics standoff, says Christian think tank

We don't have a "state religion" like they do in England, but many of the issues that led to a new book Faith and Politics After Christendom would seem to apply to the American church as well. Published by the British think-tank Ekklesia, it lays out some provocative ideas worth contemplating....

The history and ideology of Christendom, which has parallels in other religious traditions, has led to the utterly false assumption that the only options in the relationship between faith and politics are between the kind of religion that tries to dominate others, or the virtual expulsion of religion from public life and its reduction to a ‘private’ sphere.”

Neither of these approaches, often advanced by religionists and secularists respectively, is either credible or desirable, argues Ekklesia.

In Faith and Politics After Christendom, Jonathan Bartley says that if it wants to follow the subversive way of Jesus (who rejected violence, broke religious taboos, by-passed political authority, and was ultimately killed by the powers-that-be) the church should stop trying to grasp political privilege for itself.

Instead, it should recognise itself to be a creative minority, operating from the margins, with an imaginative agenda for change which it should seek to ‘get on the agenda’ by example, by witness and by cooperation with others – as in the global anti-poverty movement.

Although here in America we might quibble about resigning ourselves to a "minority" position, however creative, its well worth considering the virtue of behaving as if one were a minority voice. After all, the humility that the Creator Himself demonstrated when he walked the earth is to be our standard. Regardless of whether we are a minority or majority, we are to not to use the tools typically employed by the majorities in the world.