The Match Factory | Jan-Mar, 2009

Ideas for selected
Match Factory dates
over the next three months
by Lucy AitkenRead
W

elcome to another installment of ideas to help you engage with some of the international commemorative dates in the first quarter of the new year. This is just a few highlights taken from the complete 2009 Match Factory calendar that can be found here.

January 20 | World Religion Day
Making headlines in the UK recently was the atheist bus campaign. In response to the seeming abundance of religious messages of hell and damnation, atheists across the country raised 50,000 GBP to place banners on seven London buses with the message  There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

It is all too often that religion is associated with personal strife, violence and war rather than freedom, joy and social cohesion. In a New Kind of Christian Brian McLaren has one of his characters discuss the origins of the word religion, “The old Latin roots of the word simply mean ‘reconnecting,’ you know - broken ligaments being reconnected and defragmented. That sounds like exactly what we need, don’t you think? We’re ‘deligamented’, disconnected, fragmented people who need to be ‘religamented’, reconnected, put back together with God, with one another, reintegrated with ourselves, reconnected to the world we are a part of.”

World Religion Day provides an opportunity to reveal all the potential religion has to offer our broken and disconnected world and to allow positive rather than negative associations to be formed.

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Deeper shade of grey | what’s next?

When the song of the angels is silent
When the star in the sky is gone
When the kings and princes are home
When the shepherds are again tending their sheep
When the manger is darkened and still

The work of Christmas begins…

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Something new is in the air

Sneak peek at the new site

For the past six months we’ve been working on a complete redesign of theRubicon. We will be relaunching the site as a portal to serve a global readership. To that end we’ve gathered together features that will make the new site even more compelling and useful. Since we started the redevelopment we’ve tested various web platforms, wrestled with visual elements and overall design, pushed dozens of plug-ins to their limits and have slowly moved towards a finished product.

Of course nothing in the web world is ever “complete” since growth and change - both organic and ordained - is the essence of the internet. But we’re very close to unwrapping theRubicon 3.0. Sometime in the next two weeks we hope to splash across another brook by relaunching this site for the third time in less than three years. Watch for it in early 2009.

In the meantime, we welcome media of all sorts - articles, photographs, art, video and audio -  that fit with our publishing mandate. If you have something you’d like to submit, please contact us.

We also need to grow the team that helps run theRubicon. If you have any of the following skills and can offer a little or a lot of time to this rapidly growing site, we’d like to hear from you:

• editing
• scheduling
• project management
• photo research & management
• WordPress posting

We’re excited about what lies ahead; let’s travel through the new year together.

theRubicon team

ThinkAloud | accountability

God knows what’s going on

I’m sure it is obvious to all of us that there are many uncertainties in life. Yet this common knowledge does not make the truth any less urgent. Those things that we view as most secure and stable can and often do vanish overnight. Apart from those factors that contribute to the quality of life, there is the uncertainty of life itself. While each of us feels we will live forever, we know this is not so. All around us are monuments to those who thought they were immortal.

Despite this potentially unsettling situation there are certainties we can be sure of. As Christians we rest in the knowledge that the Lord is in control of all things. This is His world, and He has not abandoned it. He is approachable. He is loving and caring. He is forgiving and He has standards that He expects us to live by. These standards are not impossible, except for the person who insists on “doing his/her own thing” and ignoring God’s guidance. This guidance is clearly revealed in the Bible through the Holy Spirit.

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The break continues

theRubicon continues to take a few days off to celebrate the wonder and mystery of the incarnation. We’ll be back soon.

He pitched his tent among us

I

n that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; for see — I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,

‘Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favours!’

Best wishes for a season of celebration
theRubicon team

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From Russia with blogs | Christmas

Joyous holiday, celebration or supermarket?

It is nearly Christmas.  People in St. Petersburg [Russia] can be seen practicing their various traditions and customs.  Western and Orthodox beliefs stand equal during this season; people celebrate Christmas on December 25th as well as January 7th. As a result, everything blends into a long holiday season filled with Christmas trees, oranges, champagne and dinners.

According to the Orthodox calendar Christmas happens to fall after New Year’s, on January 7th.  Under the rule of the Soviet Union, all Christmas celebrations were grouped together with New Year’s celebrations.  Instead of an angel, a Kremlin star was placed on the tree.  For a long time, Christmas was sustained only in private, family celebrations.  I remember Christmas celebrations at my grandmother’s house, but I do not recall hearing anyone speaking of Christ during that time.  This day was meant for going to other people’s houses to celebrate by exchanging gifts.

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The Three Wise Men

A Christmas Meditation by Geoff Ryan

Not a festive season goes by that I don’t think about that evening twenty-six years ago. Not to mention the two other guys I spent it with. Christmas Eve 1982. The memory flares briefly every year, like the embers of a dying fire caught by a passing breeze. Three lives that converged for a few hours one night.

It was Floyd’s idea. He was the main man, after all. A well known person in this particular part of town. A smart guy who had gone to college, who read the financial section of the paper and who always spoke quietly and politely. He also dealt drugs to all and sundry. The sort of very unofficial community leader of dubious reputation and motive that this part of the city regularly produces through a process of natural selection.

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JustThinking | prostitution 3

Gunilla rocks | Danielle Strickland

Gunilla Ekberg the Swedish social reformer who introduced brand new legislation into the country that has upheld the rights of women and virtually eliminated the need for prostitution suggests that two things are necessary to change nations.  Nation changers pay attention:

1. Imagine a better world. You can’t do what you can’t imagine. Every good athlete knows this. Apparently every good social reformer does as well. Mohammad Yunis, founder of Grameen Bank and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner echoes the sentiment in his acceptance speech.

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Institutionalization

by David Witthoff

One of the growing concerns in the western Salvation Army seems to be institutionalization. I’ve seen a lot people become very concerned with the future of the Army and the direction that we are headed in - or perhaps, from their perspective, the lack of direction. It occurs to me, though, that the identity crisis we are experiencing is only a symptom of institutionalization, which is what so many today are fighting against.

But here’s the kicker: our task at this time is not to fight institutionalization in our Army, but to figure out how we will institutionalize, because it is inevitable.

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