This blog is going to serve many purposes. First, it is a response to a class assignment. I am currently taking a class entitled Wealth and Poverty in the New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary. One of our assignments offers us the opportunity to interact with our community in an effort to serve and/or inform them about issues of faith and service. We are to amalgamate our cerebral classroom experiences with human interaction regarding issues of wealth and poverty in our consumeristic era. This blog will serve as a platform for dialogue regarding such issues. Please feel free to comment liberally in an effort to keep the conversation alive and moving forward.Second, I hope to offer you resources. There are so many opportunities to give and places to serve locally, nationally, and internationally. I hope to call your attention to various avenues of service that you may have not known about previously.
Third, (and consider this a warning) I will rant. For those of you that know me well, here I will vent, implore, seek council, and describe various encounters I have with anything that is pertinent to the overall discussion of this blog. I will not filter my emotional or intellectual responses to what I am learning in class and how that relates to what we see on the streets.Fourth, we will together engage Scripture as we seek to better understand what it meant to be poor in the ancient world, as well as Jesus' concern for the poor and the wealthy. How does this concern affect us and our interactions with the poor today? This blog element will be at times pedagogical, while at others, more devotional and inquisitive.
5 comments:
I can't wait to hear your ranting and raving. I also look forward to reading your unfiltered emotional and intellectual responses to what you're learning.
Looking forward to it!!
"amalgamate cerebral experiences" First, you can't talk to the poor like this. My thinking today is that I want to be the worker that is found feeding the servants "at the proper time." (Matt 24) I don't know if the servants are necessarily poor, but I think it means we're supposed to feeding someone something and it should be out of our "personal" wealth that God has put in our hearts.
Chances are that most of us reading this are "personally wealthy," literally and metaphorically, but more than that, whether are hearts are in it or not, we need to be serving the poor because Jesus told us to do so.
I'm thinking you should have taken on a more challenging topic...why invest your time in something where the answers are so easy...right???
I'll be following to see what folks have to say and if I feel I ever have anything of consequence or intelligence to add to the dialogue, I'll chime in.
Proud of you for being willing to wrestle with this question that is so complicated.
p.s. be sure your rantings are directed at Rob and not me.
This is a great springboard for dialogue, Lauren. These are issues that are not often brought up in the realms of polite, politically-correct conversation, particularly among people in the church.
I'm looking forward to reading more of your posts as you continue!
Oh, and thanks also for the Beliefnet quiz info - I now know that I am a 100% Orthodox Quaker.
Post a Comment