We Live in an Age of Miracles

You may have seen this on “Glee” (I hadn’t). It’s real.

Genesis 1:28

We have it covered. And by “we” I mean “you”.

Incidentally, on the day this picture was taken, Betsy Ryan (R) (by which I mean, that’s her on the right, I have no idea how she votes, though she might be on the right there too) – as I was saying, the day this picture was taken, Betsy Ryan ran 18 miles.

True story.

A Service Idea for Us

I like the idea of making regular service a routine part of life at the church. Here are several thoughts that I remember hearing voiced during our last several classes:

• we want to do something at South Street, but we don’t know what
• poverty is much worse in other countries than in Orlando
• giving does a lot for the giver
• an important part of service is forming relationships
• an important aspect of the things that are routine in the church now (ie soccer) is that they provide an opportunity to foster relationships
• relationships grow out of time together and shared experiences
• you want our class to do anything, you have to provide child care (well, for the rest of you people anyway; me, I walk the earth, like Caine from “Kung Fu”)

Something that occurs to me is that it might be possible to take something like the Stop Hunger service project some of us have signed up for on the Saturday of Service Weekend and make it a standing event, every Saturday morning, come when you can. It sounds like that project is going to involve a lot of fairly mindless grunt work and will be a good atmosphere for people to talk. So maybe we could hold the project at South Street, and ask for community help. I don’t know what else we can do for folks downtown, but I do know they would benefit from the chance to do some work for people worse off than we (Winter Parkers and South Streeters) are.

I think that would provide one pretty good answer to the question “what are you Winter Park people doing down here?” Well, we’re here to prepare aid packages to send to a church we’re working with in Africa, and we could really use some help. Could you South Streeters give us a hand? We can provide some child care, your older kids could help out as ours will, and we can all work on something together. While we’re doing that, we’ll get to know one another better.

It’s not the kind of work that would require training or even a regular commitment of time from any one individual save the child care providers. Just show up when you can, do some work, and get to know other people of good will who are doing the same thing. Sporadic attendance + talking: a Cornerstone dream project! What do you think?

Africans Are Like Us

…so why shouldn’t they escape poverty the way America did? The link is to a four year old editorial by econ prof William Easterly that I just came across during our last book study, and it has quite a different perspective from Richard Stearns. A taste:

The real Africa also has seen cellphone and Internet use double every year for the last seven years. Foreign private capital inflows into Africa hit $38 billion in 2006 — more than foreign aid.
…

In truth, Africans are and will be escaping poverty the same way everybody else did: through the efforts of resourceful entrepreneurs, democratic reformers and ordinary citizens at home, not through PR extravaganzas of ill-informed outsiders.

The real Africa needs increased trade from the West more than it needs more aid handouts. A respected Ugandan journalist, Andrew Mwenda, made this point at a recent African conference despite the fact that the world’s most famous celebrity activist — Bono — was attempting to shout him down. Mwenda was suffering from too much reality for Bono’s taste: “What man or nation has ever become rich by holding out a begging bowl?” asked Mwenda.

Another proponent of this viewpoint is Dambisa Moyo, a Zambia-born, Oxford-educated economist who in fact goes further to say that aid is harmful. She’s the author of Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa. That’s her in the video (the black woman, not the white guy).

I was interested to see that she has also spoken well of Kiva.

Poverty, Money, and Love

We’ve heard – and I’ve felt – concerns about being able to afford giving enough to make any real difference. To help counter that, here’s an inspirational short presentation on microlending. Microlenders enable entrepreneurship in the developing world by providing impossibly small loans – tens of dollars – to people who lack the collateral to do business with their local banks for even that much money. It’s an idea that was pioneered in the 70s by Mohamed Yunus, an economist from Bangladesh (and Vanderbilt alum) who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work. He founded the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh with a loan from a government bank in 1976; as of July 2007, the bank has issued US$6.38 billion to 7.4 million borrowers.

That’s not him in the video.

That’s a young woman named Jessica Jackley, a graduate of the first place I went to college, and one of the founders of kiva.org. As you’ve figured out by now if you hadn’t heard about it before, Kiva is a microlending organization; they use the internet to connect borrowers and lenders of tiny sums of money. Well, one at a time they’re tiny; since its founding in 2005, Kiva has distributed $203 million from over 900,000 lenders to fund nearly 275,000 loans.

Here she is explaining what inspired her.

It’s Time

I have had many conversations about the impact of the study on The Hole In Out Gospel and most have ended with concern. “The study is great” I hear, but they continue “I am afraid this will be another of those studies we do for a month and then don’t see any changes in our lives.” Let us start now. This Sunday Richard Breslford will be joining us to discuss his experiences on Mission trips, building wells and providing water to people that lack the resources to do this on their own.

It is time for Cornerstone to make some decisions for our contribution. Do we want to start with a local one time project? Do we want to undertake a concern that does not provide immediate results but instead captures our hearts for a period of time? Do you have a specific passion that we can commit to?

Let’s use the comments to begin discussion and aim for a decision by April 24th.

Questions to help us narrow down our focus:

• Here or abroad?
• Contribute to an existing ministry or begin anew?
• Is there a financial goal?
• Children or adults or both?

“Hole in our Gospel” study week 5

We had a great class this week. The topic this week was “the church omission”. We learned that on average the American Christian community tithes about 2 percent and the church invests about 2 percent in missions/service projects. That leaves a gap about $168 billion dollars. We learned that we spend about $705 billion dollars on entertainment and recreation in America.

Think about the impact that we (Christians) can have if we focus our monies towards service or serving others. Our church is above average in this area. We support an African church, we reached out to help South Street church, and we have a very active mission area.

This conversation quickly turned into what and more importantly how can we help and fit service within our very busy schedules. As a group we discussed changing the importance or priority of service in our lives. By doing this, maybe we find time within our schedules.

As part of this study, there our personal activities that you can do. They are found on www.sixweekquest.com.

See you next week for our last class and special guest speaker.

Brian