Thursday, November 12, 2009

Report Back to Me

Sometimes it is the little things...

If your kids are like mine and you have a number of things you would like them to do, it is most beneficial to tell them one at a time. And if your kids are like mine and they sense that you might have more than that first thing you tell them to do, they are really good at disappearing after that first thing. Granted that could just be my imagination, but it probably isn't. I could make lists and sometimes do especially for the day to day things, but nothing works better than the spoken word.

Thus the institution of "Report Back to Me." It works like this. When given an instruction or a school assignment you must always, and I mean always report back to the instructor(usually known as "Mom" who wishes she were still "Mommy" but that is another post). If I only have the one task for them to do then I let them know from the get-go that it is the only thing I need them to do. This saves us a lot of time doing what I call "the regathering of the peoples" and saves on the frustration of the peoples starting something new and fun and exciting only to be told they need to put their clothes away. "Report Back to Me" gets us through the school/chore part of our day at a better pace and gets things done a bit more effeciently making all the peoples including mom a lot happier!

What is a Missional Church?

From a paper by Tim Keller, he lists five elements of a missional church.

1. Discourse in the vernacular.
2. Enter and re-tell the culture's stories with the gospel.
3. Theologically train lay people for public life and vocation.
4. Create Christian community that is counter-cultural and counter-intuitive.
5. Practice Christian unity as much as possible on the local level.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Found on my pillow

written by Lizzy but as you can see from Creed. ;-)


Cost vs. Coverage

Though I usually try and stay out of political commentary, this bit of analysis by Fareed Zakaria in the latest Newsweek struck me as a concise summary (so it doesn't address every point) of the health care debate.

There are two great health-care crises in America-one involving coverage and the other cost. The Obama plan appears to tackle the first but not the second. This is bad economics but also bad politics: the crisis of cost affects about 85 percent of Americans, while the crisis of coverage affects about 15 percent. Obama's message to the country appears to be "We have a dysfunctional health-care system with out-of-control costs, and let's add 45 million people to it."