[Sorry this is so after-the-fact, but I continued having wi-fi issues and was not able to post closer to unfolding of events. My apologies also for the rough nature of the presentation of comments. I will not have time this week to put them in a better format and wanted to get them out there as I took them in the meetings]
Day 2 at New Baptist Covenant Celebration
Highlights of what I heard:
Tony Campolo
He focused in on “Which Jesus should we preach?”
He began with a quote from George Bernard Shaw quote about
making God in our own image—returning the favor. He said that the Jesus I hear more often is a
WASP American. The Jesus of Scripture is
different.
He addressed the issue of our younger generations and the
temptations of materialism; that we must challenge them vocationally—to live
radical lives, not conforming to values of our culture. He shared about the new program at Eastern to
start micro businesses in third-world countries. His challenge is for students to live radical
lives. “To be a follower of Jesus is to
question every expenditure of your life.” Other comments along this line: If all
we are worried about is how we are going to maintain the institutions, then we
aren’t going to be the church Christ envisioned. Christ incarnated in his followers; same
Spirit in Christ Jesus in our mortal bodies. Are you ready to surrender to Christ, to challenge the church to be what
it is and ought to be? We have to
challenge young people, not because we made it too hard, but because we made it
too easy. There is a craving to do
something heroic and we are letting them down.
He then turned his challenge on the church, asking “Does the
Jesus of Scripture legitimize the building of an institution? We need a sacrificial church, which
recruits people to go into the world to save it from poverty and sin; that
lives out the call that the Kingdom is at hand.”
Older people didn’t escape his focus either. What else do you have to do? He challenged
them to quit chasing a golf ball and to get into the world and get busy with
Kingdom work.
He concluded by saying that we must also give the message of
salvation, not just the physical needs. “Preach a Christ that delivers the poor and provides eternal salvation.”
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Another speaker I heard was Marian Wright Edelman
Her opening questions was, “What about the Children?”
Bonhoeffer’s test of how civilized a society is by how it
treats its children. We are flunking
his test based on the stats.
Our low rates in US as an industrialized nation—20th,
21st, last
There is a cradle to prison pipeline crisis in
America
—due to unlevel playing
field from birth
86% black, 83% of latino, 83% of white cannot read at grade
level—not being able to read is social death in a world of globalization; will
require adults in every sector; church ought to be the locomotive not the
caboose in speaking up for the children in our nation.
Provide positive alternatives for children. Our gathering here is not about us, but about
others; we can dismantle this pipeline; we know how:
- Confront
and end our adult hypocrisy. “We
are what’s wrong with our children.” We must break the silence. Our children will continue to seek our
attention in negative ways until we give them positive ways. They need our integrity. - The
church needs to regain its prophetic voice. Justice is what we are called to
provide. Its not right that
children die of a tooth abssess in a nation like ours; Katrina children
still out there with post-traumatic stress disorder. We don’t have a money problem in this
nation, but a priorities problem. We need to hear MLK’s warning that a nation that spends more money
on military defense than on children is approaching spiritual death. 7 months of last year’s budget could lift
every child out of poverty. Eisenhower
said that with every bullet made is a reminder of every child that is not
fed. We need to move from
celebrating and enshrining him as the dreamer and hear him as the
disturber of unjust peace. MLK’s words about keeping moving—“If you can’t
drive, walk, etc.”
Wondering Thoughts 