In This Month's Issue:
DAILY MISSIONS
Household head and the house girl in Tanzania
An interview: a father reflects on parenting
RESOURCES
Linking home and church in the Christian formation of children
A seminary workshop format in Member Mission resources
FOR MEDITATION
What answer to have given Steve Jobs at 13?
MM SHORTS
Lively church
“I hear you have a
lively church” – Do
you hear people
saying this about
your church? If not,
you may need more
talk about the issues
of daily life in
your church’s life.
5th graders use ads
to tell about God:
“God is like
General Electric . . .
God brings good
things to life”
– A Christian school
Keep Member Mission Around!
For Member Mission to last beyond 2013, it needs to be in the wills of its advocates. Click here for three ways to put a bequest in your will.
If all the pictures do not
show up, click here
to view this email on your browser.
April 2012
Member Mission Newsletter #103
New life!
(Click here for a printable version)
(Click here to view this email in your browser)
Two member mission hints
Commend the member mission approach as a needed next step in living your baptismal vows. Each of us needs more than the best of sermons and the best of ethical teaching. Each of us needs a way to reflect on the specific facts and the specific options for action in each area of daily life. That is where the worksheets come into their own (see Basic Tools 3b).
Candidates for baptism (on Whitsunday or Pentecost, especially) and confirmation have a right to discover the daily missions their commitment to the baptismal covenant asks for. Use the worksheets noted above for adults and youth. For age 10 and under and their sponsors (see Basic Tools 20).
Household head and the house girl in Tanzania
The working relationship between Joseph and his house girl had been strained for some time. Recently, Joseph received member mission training about how love and justice can be applied in daily life. The relationship with the house girl has been transformed. Joseph thanks God that his relationships with his house girl and other people have been repaired. He finds “he can no longer live as the way he used to live before Member Mission teachings!”
Contact: membermission@att.net
Helping tornado victims
A poor community in Alabama suffered one of a hundred tornados that crossed the state. In this small rural area 47 homes were completely destroyed. Cecil Williamson led two churches, one in nearby Demopolis and one in Birmingham to adopt six families in the hard-hit community. One home has been completely replaced and the family has moved in. By being prudent with the funds available through FEMA and insurance, they are living for the first time "debt free." With the gift of a reworked laptop, a daughter is working on her GED certificate. Cecil calls the six families monthly to be a friend. Sometimes, this will involve their needs; most often it is just to let them know her church is with them in the long haul, not just for the immediate needs. She definitely calls every time there is a storm warning, just to let them know she is praying with them.
Contact: membermission@aol.com
An interview: a father reflects on parenting
Abe and his wife have three children; a boy 8, a daughter 4 ½ , another daughter 2 ½.
What are one or two of the gifts and challenges that you find are yours as a father? And 
how do you see God helping you in parenting?
One is what I have learned about myself from having children. They have given me the gift of self-discovery. I can see my compassion in the older two already. Also, I have some of the same struggles they do. I have my ideas of how things should be and having to let go of them.
I can help them with their struggles because I have had the same struggles myself. As one who is only eight years into the parenting journey, I can see how things are going to continue to grow as they get older. I can see a struggle the older one is having as one that I have had. I ask myself how can I best equip him to handle and grow through it – knowing that it’s his own journey and, frankly, it’s me still on my own journey.
Further I see that some of the self-centeredness I might have fallen into as a young adult is completely obliterated as a parent. That’s a gift they have given me over and over again and, I suspect, will continue to give me over and over again. Sometimes it’s painful and sometimes it’s wonderful.
To be self-less is one of the challenges of being the parent of three kids. To be a parent is not a selfish act. You come up against wanting your own selfish needs to be addressed first It ebbs and flows but is an on-going challenge.
I need to see that I cannot control the struggles they will face. Also there are moments I suspect that I should have done something differently than what I did do. Accepting those realities is a time for me to tap into God or the Holy Spirit. I need to tap into a higher power to help me see that I am not always responsible for all of my son’s struggles and that he will have to grow through them on his own. That higher power can help me to pull away and to have a broader focus.
Linking home and church in the Christian formation of children – See “Family affair” by Rich Melheim in The Christian Century for February 22, 2012. Rich Melheim was pastor of several Lutheran churches in Minnesota before starting Faith Inkubators, which produces materials designed to make the home the primary incubator of faith. He has written and produced books, songs and plays for children and youth, and he is a frequent consultant and speaker on faith formation and family ministries. In 2009, he launched FAITH 5, an effort to get parents involved in their own kids' faith life every night. He asks parents and kids to commit themselves to five minutes a night of simple faith encounters. Families are asked to drop what they're doing as soon as the first kid is ready for bed and walk through these five steps:
1) share your highs and lows of the day;
2) read a verse of scripture from Sunday's preaching or teaching text;
3) talk about how the highs and lows of the day relate to the scripture (is God actually saying something to you?);
4) pray for one another's highs and lows; and
5) bless one another before turning out the lights on the day.
http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2012-02/family-affair?print
A seminary workshop format in Member Mission resources was used effectively for Prof. Hughes’ class at the School of Theology at Sewanee, March 3-4, 2012, Friday night and Saturday. The workshop provided practice in use of the basic resources (ways to find your daily missions, your gifts for mission, and finding a teammate) of the Member Mission Network; discussion of their use in various church settings; and included a pre-workshop field assignment that prepared participants for the kind of experience offered by the workshop. For your seminary or for further information, membermission@aol.com or contact Wayne Schwab, 802-482-7743.
FOR MEDITATION – What answer to have given Steve Jobs at 13?
Even though they were not fervent about their faith, [Steve] Jobs's parents wanted him to have a religious upbringing, so they took him to the Lutheran church most Sundays. That came to an end when he was thirteen. In July 1968 Life magazine published a shocking cover showing a pair of starving children in Biafra. Jobs took it to Sunday school and confronted the church's pastor. "If I raise my finger, will God know which one I'm going to raise even before I do it?"
The pastor answered, "Yes, God knows everything."
Jobs then pulled out the Life cover and asked, "Well, does God know about this and what's going to happen to those children?"
"Steve, I know you don't understand, but yes, God knows about that."
Jobs announced that he didn't want to have anything to do with worshiping such a God, and he never went back to church. He did, however, spend years studying and trying to practice the tenets of Zen Buddhism.
Meditate on what you would have said if you had been the pastor.
[From Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Simon & Schuster, 2011, pp. 14-15]
For more in preparation for Pentecost baptisms, see Basic Tools 20 on the web site for
preparation from a member mission perspective. It makes the most of time with parents and godparents of children being baptized. Use the worksheets with adults – Activity 1 and any mission field they want to choose. [For your reference: http://www.membermission.org/New‑Website‑Files/basic‑tools‑20.html]
For the day of Pentecost, if you teach or preach, present Baptism as joining Jesus' mission; we are called to move beyond coming to church for personal support to being agents of Jesus’ mission to make each area of our daily lives more loving and more just. Whenever you teach about baptism, talk about member mission as "Living out your Baptism in your Daily Life."
Pentecost season and the summer could be just the time for a pilot group using the workbook, Living the Gospel; see pp. 11‑12 of the workbook [order Living the Gospel by clicking here] for ideas for doing it in 5, 8, or 12 sessions.
* * *
For Sundays during Eastertide,
work with your preachers to include
one illustration from daily life in each sermon.* * *
Tell us about your work with member mission at info@membermission.org or phone 802-482-7743 (to fax, phone first). You continue on this list because of past interest and / or work together with the Member Mission resources. If you missed or lost any past newsletters, you will find them on the website under Newsletter > Archive.
To be dropped from the list tell us at membermission@aol.org.* * *
God is most interested in how we live from Monday to Saturday.
Sunday – all of church life – helps us to do it better.