Yesterday was a great day at annual conference. Both of our guest speakers for this year addressed us. The first was Rev. Rudy Rasmus of St. Johns church in Houston TX. I won't recount his whole story here except to tell you that he took a nine-member urban church and grew it to a membership of nine thousand, one third of which are homeless or formerly homeless. He grew it by creating a place where people are loved and they are in service. It is a church of getting things done. Bishop William H. Willimon comes from the North Alabama conference, a place where he readily admits much of the populace is still racist. He is one of the authors of the “Disciple” bible study series, so he seems like an old friend. He comfortably conveys stories of pastoring, preaching and challenges from his many years in the ministry. I would strongly encourage you to visit their respective web sites to learn more about them.
On the surface these men could not appear to be more different. But in the most important ways they are of one mind. The both believe in loving first. They both believe that we learn and live most like Christ when our faith takes action. They both have such a love for God's people, that they were willing to bring the gospel to this tiny peninsula in northern Ohio.
We needed to hear their message. We needed the encouragement, the reassurance, and the challenge. Although many great things are going on in the name of Christ in our conference, we still have a long way to grow. Our Annual Conference is still too white, too rich, and too old to properly represent the actual membership of West Ohio. And I count myself as part of the problem. We must be ever vigilant to keep working towards a church in which everyone truly feels not just welcome, but accepted and loved radically and unconditionally.
I truly believe that Christ and his church is the only hope for the world. I do not put my faith in human creations, for people (including myself) always disappoint. I do not put my faith in the rule of law created by our governments, because morality cannot be legislated. The only place I can put my faith is in the redeeming power of Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour. Only through his crazy, irrational love for the world and the people in it can we expect to affect real and lasting change. Evil will always defeat the plodding strategies of a bloated government or bureaucracy. But when God's people simply go out and DO, evil cannot keep pace. Love unencumbered moves at a pace that cannot be matched by forces seen or unseen. When we strip away the committees, and the laws, and the rules, and the regulations, love moves at a speed that can only be measured in changed lives. Like the wind, you can only see love because of the obsolete traditions it has blown over as it passed through. Like the wind, you can only see love because of the way lives have turned like leaves on a tree to reveal a side that was previously unseen. Like the wind, you can only see love because where love has been, things are no longer the same. Lives are changed, communities are transformed, relationships are restored, and the faces of the people are turned toward the sky, waiting for that next wind that will carry them to further heights in directions they cannot predict and do not expect.
My boss's boss posted on this cool new thing today; it's called "Wordle". It is a tool that creates a word cloud from any text that you input. The sizes of words are based on the frequency in which they occur in the text. It is really interesting to play around with different groups of words and see how they turn out. Here I took the words from our home page. I can't put my finger on it, but there is something I really like about this! It is like a quick intuitive way of turning words into pictures. If you click on the image to the left you can see the larger version.
