What've you been up to lately?

The past two weeks have been tough in many ways, a violent attack of the flu meant I was sleeping at least 12 hours a day, rapidly falling behind on my assignments and locked away from the world in 'self-quarantine'.

While I was in recovery, I had opportunity to do a bit of 'light' reading, and for me, the raw fire of early Salvationist writings was just the thing I needed to keep my fighting spirit alive whist in a germ-induced haze. Summing up my feeling at that time was this quote:

"Nothing demoralizes salvation soldiers more than inactivity."

- William Booth

I was physically inactive at the time, but have recently felt missionally inactive because of the constraints of college and my increasing hunger to be doing the work of Christ. Putting my personal feelings aside, I think of how many soldiers today seem to be demoralized (have you noticed an 'air of discontent', holy or otherwise, which pervades the air around many soldiers?). Is it as William Booth said, that inactivity is the root of a demoralized fighting force? I believe that if we only engaged our soldiers in vital Christ-centered mission, we would hear much more rejoicing and less 'muttering' amongst the ranks. As a friend said recently, "every person can do ministry, if they can do something, they can do ministry... even baking scones or moving tables".

Let's ask ourselves - What is it I am doing? What action does God require?

if in leadership, what is it we are asking our soldiers to do for Christ?

Let's not be an Army that used to be a movement, let us share a Holy Spirit-inspired vision that will inspire our soldiers and our Army, to move today.

"Where there is no vision, the people perish" (Prov 29:18a), lets not allow people to perish for our lack of vision, or lack of action!

Church x 5

I went to 5 services last Sunday... FIVE!

That's pretty extreme, even for a Cadet, but you know what? I didn't get bored, didn't get sick of hearing about God, meeting with His people or getting into worship!

But really, what's the point of all this church stuff? As much as I love it all, sometimes I wonder at how much time we actually spend on preparing a service. Whether its worth the effort if our focus is on the wrong things. Could we we better use our time in the community? reaching new people for Christ? Or do we just need a renewed idea of what 'church' is really about?

I haven't formulated any real answers for myself as to what church should look like (believers meeting together) or how I should go about enabling worship. But I find myself very uncomfortable with anything that smacks of 'performance'... instead, yearning for the 'authentic' when meeting with other Christians in church settings.

Of the five services I went to, I still found myself drawn to the younger, informalish, "authenticity-chasing"-type service, where people don't take themselves too seriously, but seriously worship the Lord and seriously seek to make their faith real in the everday.

But.... praise the Lord for variety in the Body of Christ!!!!