Go ahead and keep your 10%!

Cory Harrison adds-up how tithing really works

M

y wife and I administer a corps in a fairly affluent community in the United States. We have soldiers at our corps, including ourselves, who “bring home” a fairly significant amount of money compared to about 95% of those we live life with as part of our ministry.

Like most churches, we have financial commitments, budgets to meet and expenses to pay out, a café that runs six days a week - and we have just agreed to provide three meals a day to all who live in our neighborhood. We estimate that we will see over 500 a day for those meals alone. We have just hired a full-time staff member to focus completely on evangelism, outreach and a crazy Salvation Army World Services goal.

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Tags: food, tithe

Taking out the trash

We are not judged solely on our belief says Jonathan Taube

“Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; but the worries of life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desire for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful.” - Mark 4:18-19

Recently, I was really struck by this passage as I was reading my Bible. It is from the parable of the sower, which is well known one, often used in sermons and devotionals. I guess what really stood out to me from Mark’s account is how specifically Jesus addresses wealth and the desire for material gain as being a main component of the “worries of life”, which lead to being unfruitful.

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Universal God

God speaks in many languages | Anya Kotrikadze

W

hen the 2008 Olympic games were held in Beijing, China, the majority of fans and sport lovers observed the event on their televisions. Televised sporting events usually require some sort of commentary in order to explain to the viewers exactly what is going on. Since the Olympics are international, it was vital that the commentary not only be in Chinese. As viewers, we knew that those commentaries would be translated to Russian, Moldavian, Ukranian, Georgian and dozens of other languages.

It is very important that any information we receive be in our native language. This makes understanding and perceiving new data in detail much easier. If you have recently purchased any sort of a household appliance or electronic item, then you must have noticed the vast variety of languages that the instructions are available in. Sometimes it may take several minutes just to find the desired language.

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Blotted out

Will the church ever come together, asks Jonathan Gainey?

In a town where I have lived, there was once a restaurant that was closed by its owner. That’s no big deal, except for the fact that it was at a time when certain people could not eat in that restaurant because of their skin tone. The owner closed the restaurant rather than be forced to serve all customers. That happened many decades ago — but sadly, the sin of hatred still lingers in many towns and cities all over the world.

When I moved to Germany in 1990, the wall which separated East Germany from West Germany had recently been knocked down. What an amazing time that was. But soon after the liberation of the East Germans, I heard West Germans calling them, in German, “East-landers.” The particular German whom I was speaking with explained that this was a derogatory term, used for those East Germans who were getting too many benefits from the West German government.

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Tags: reconciliation

The All New, and Improved…

… Post Global Economic Collapse, 100% Value Match Factory

Welcome to the first post of the new-for-2009 Match Factory.  In the joyful confidence that less and less of you are content simply dreaming of a more just and peaceful world we have been quietly expanding the Match Factory.

You may notice a few changes.

This year we will be dedicating a lot more space towards the climate change conversation.  This is because:

• It is a matter of social justice. Climate change impacts the worlds poorest and most vulnerable first and worst. If we care about inequality and injustice we must care about climate change.
• Time is short. We only have a limited amount of time to get off the collision course we are on and to show global leaders that the December 09 UN meeting at Copenhagen must produce a global green deal that works for the world’s poorest.
• The time is now. At the end of last year Ed Miliband, the UK’s Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change called for a mass moblisation on climate change similar to Make Poverty History. We all need to be part of a movement that makes a global green deal not just politically viable but politically necessary.

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All for one or one for all: gender inclusive language

… in non-essentials, liberty says JoAnn Shade

It happened again recently in church. The scripture was read: “In him (Jesus) was life, and that life was the light of men” (Jn 1:4). “He [John] came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe” (Jn 1:7). Powerful statements of life and grace, absolutely, but there I was, wondering why it only used the word “men”. Somehow, as I write these words, it seems like a minor point in the midst of those amazing words in John 1, but I found myself feeling excluded from that wonderful passage by that gender-exclusive word.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve had this reaction. Jotted with frustration in my ever-present notebook was this thought, as we had just sung Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus: if the song proclaims “ye that are men now serve him,” does that let me off the hook? Or does it keep me from ministering in ways that I know I am called to minister?

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