In This Month's Issue:
DAILY MISSIONS
Pick-up basketball - a leisure mission
Aging, levels of care, and spiritual growth
RESOURCES
Taking the Plunge: Baptism and Parenting
FOR MEDITATION
MM SHORTS
Howard Zinn on people power:
“If democracy were to be given any meaning, if it were to go beyond the limits of capitalism and nationalism, this would not come, if history were any guide, from the top. It would come from citizen’s movements, educating, organizing, agitating, striking, boycotting, demonstrating, threatening those in power with disruption of the stability they needed.”
From children’s Letters to God :
“Dear God, Who draws the lines around the countries. Nan”
Seven mission fields?!
Home, work, community, wider world issues, leisure, spiritual health, and my part in my church’s life! Yipes!
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YouTube: Have You Seen?
Gloria Helps a South African Province
Keep Member Mission Around!
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June 2010
Member Mission Newsletter #83
Early Pentecost – being open to the Spirit
(Click here for a printable version)
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For your prayers:
In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, June 14-19, Gloria Young and Christopher Jones from the USA and Dundas Gamama and Ibrahim Sabuni of Tanzania convene a Member Mission workshop with:
four days of leadership training in English for 15 group leaders;
two days of training in Swahili for 84 local clergy and layleaders;
supported by resources translated into Swahili by Narcis Sebikwekwe.
[To contribute financially, send your tax-deductible gifts to:
Member Mission Network, Inc.,
10 Jubert Lane, Plattsburgh, NY, 12901-6442.]
Pick-up basketball – a leisure mission
In college in his early twenties, Chris likes to call up friends to meet at a basketball court. He played on his high school team and with a CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) team. “It’s a place to make new friends and to hang out doing something we all love,”
How is God at work here?
“It gives me a way to relieve stress. Basketball helps me to channel my frustrations into doing well in the sport. I get to enjoy something I love and appreciate what God has given me.”
How does God help you to play?
“God has given me the ability to enjoy the sport. He has given me a good body to use which is fun. He encourages me to press my hardest and persevere through any challenges I may have. My mentality on the court transfers to everyday life. I press my hardest without ever giving up and trying the hardest in everything I do.”
Aging, levels of care, and spiritual growth
Ellen is a doctor working for Hospice. As she goes about her work, how much care to give is a frequent question. She finds herself counseling the ill and their loved ones on how much care to request. She seeks to align the kind of care with their goals and values. Sometimes she finds herself called to offer a reality test for the plans being considered.
As a government funded agency, Hospice is not church affiliated. Consequently, Ellen hopes to put her religious reflections into a separate paper for use in churches. Some of its elements would include being explicit about the religious base of the values being used; about how faith might guide the choice of the level of treatment; and, in general, how to understand where the patient is in life’s journey.
Taking the Plunge: Baptism and Parenting by Anne E. Kitch, Morehouse Publishing (2006) —for use with parents bringing a child for baptism. The second section, chapters 7-12, discusses living out the five baptismal commitments in the context of everyday family living. Click here to read reviews and order online.
“A Bill Moyers Essay,” his last program on April 30, 2010 included these lines describing his populist viewpoint throughout the series. He defines populism as a bottom up movement of the people to make their views known and to achieve their goals of greater justice for all. He says, “The marriage of money and politics has produced an America of gross inequality at the top and low social mobility at the bottom, with little but anxiety and dread in between, as middle class Americans feel the ground falling out from under their feet. According to a study from the Pew Research Center last month, nine out of ten Americans give our national economy a negative rating. Eight out of ten report difficulty finding jobs in their communities, and seven out of ten say they experienced job-related or financial problems over the past year. So it is that like those populists of that earlier era [1890s], millions of Americans have awakened to a sobering reality: they live in a plutocracy, where they are disposable. Then, the remedy was a popular insurgency that ignited the spark of democracy. Now we have come to another parting of the ways, and once again the fate and character of our nation are up for grabs.”
Click the image below to watch the video or read the full transcript.
FOR MEDITATION
A world safe for diversity
“Let us not be blind to our differences – but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. And we are all mortal.”
— John F. Kennedy in a speech the year following the Cuban Missile Crisis, Profiles In Courage, Perennial Classics (1955)
YouTube Brings You Members on Mission
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Tell us about your work with member mission at info@membermission.org or phone / fax 518-561-1184. You continue on this list because of past interest and / or work together with the Member Mission vision. If you missed or lost any past newsletters, you will find them on the website under Newsletter > Archive.
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God is most interested in how we live from Monday to Saturday.
Sunday – all of church life – helps us to do it better.