Marketing consultants for the church?

Just as mom and pop hardware stores are being replaced by Lowes and Home Depot, so the little church on the corner is being inadvertently shut down by the market-researching mega church. Granted, this is no new phenomenon, but today NPR had an interesting segment on Marketplace Morning Report.

From a dear brother in Uganda

Here is an excerpt from an article by Rev. Henry Luke Orombi, the Archbishop of Uganda. Well worth a full read...

"For many of our tribes, revenge was esteemed as a virtue. If a family had been violated, the first instinct was to gather the clan, arm them, and seek revenge on the family and clan of the offender. In such realms, the Bible has had a profoundly transforming effect, given the teaching of Jesus on forgiveness. Traditional Ugandan society was driven by family loyalties, with little basis for loving those beyond your blood ties. The Bible brought the teaching of Jesus to love our neighbors and even our enemies. And, while there remain remnants of the old culture, the Bible has given us a moral and spiritual basis for transforming culture.

Traditional African objects of worship were limited to families and clans. This created a context in which no central beliefs could be held or shared beyond the ethnic setting. Yet ancestral spirits and such natural phenomena as earthquakes, lakes, and mountains could not satisfy the Africans’ quest for the living God. The Bible’s revelation of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit brought hope for deliverance from the fatalism that resulted from worshiping created things rather than the Creator and Redeemer.

The gospel of Jesus Christ as revealed to us through the Word of God enables warring tribes to begin to coexist and to embrace neighborliness. Indeed, the Word of God opened the way for the nation of Uganda to be forged. When evangelists from Buganda (in central Uganda) traveled to tribes in the east, west, and north, a new day dawned in our country. Instead of being armed with spears, they came armed only with the Word of God. Instead of a message of war and destruction, they delivered a message of Good News from the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ."

Full article.

Big man on campus now on the periphery needing humility

Christopher Wright has written a provocative little piece here on the massive shift of global Christianity over the past 100 years. One of his many challenges is for the Western church to simply recognize this and then go about the humbling work of relearning its missiology in a global context radically different than its grandparent's.