Manchester’s Drug problem

Many of you know that Manchester has a serious drug problem. The link below will take you to an excerpt at unionleader.com of a  press conference with the police chief the day after Easter that reinforces that. The hotbed of drug activity is a handful of blocks north of our church facility, east of Maple around Manchester street.

http://www.unionleader.com/uploads/media-items/audio/090414Mara.mp3

Let’s plead with God to expose the elements of evil in our city and pray for the conversion of users, dealers and those in between so that the drug market falls apart due to lack of demand. Transformation must include this element of life in the city.

“Pray for those in authority over you…”

sdg

Andy Crouch in byFaith

Andy Crouch from Christianity Today did an interview with byFaith magazine about his book Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. (I’d post a link but the electronic version isn’t up yet.) He wrote it out of a concern that Christians were attempting to change culture in deficient ways. One was politically, wherein the Christian right attempted to gain power to affect policy changes that reflected Christian values and ended up being changed themselves by that power. He says, “I actually think that having a grand cultural strategy is a dangerous thing…any grand strategy for cultural change that’s accompanied by a plan to find and control the levers of power–whether it’s the film industry or in Washington or even the local school board–underestimates the way power changes people.”

Another concern he expressed was that Christian energy in the arts has been used up in the “Christian subculture,” creating music that imitated “secular” music and served Christians as a market niche rather than art that served humanity for God’s glory. He refers to Christians today who are influencing culture (Alison Krauss, bluegrass singer and Andrew Stanton, creator of the film WALL-E, among others) but not getting noticed in “Christian media” because they don’t “quack like the Christian subcultural duck”.

Crouch’s call to genuine God-glorifying art as a reflecting of our being God’s image in this world is much needed. Ironically, it’s possible that the church would have more influence in the world if it stopped trying to influence the world so much. In other words, if we would simply live out our faith in our disciplines rather than trying to “get noticed” as some bloc of cultural power, we would be saltier and have more effect.

sdg

What a game!!

My gracious sister Dawn took me and a friend (ended up being my brother in law, John) to a Boston Celtics game last night for my birthday, which is actually today (yes, I’m only partially a fool). It was against the Charlotte Bobcats, which are not supposed to be one of the elite teams in the NBA but they beat the LA Lakers the night before.

The game was back and forth all night, with the Celtics struggling defensively throughout without their best player, Kevin Garnett. Ray Allen, one of their stars who was having an off night, hit a three pointer to tie the game at the end of the first overtime. He then airballed a  3 with a minute left in the second overtime and then hit one with 2.1 seconds left to give them the win. WOW!

Our seats happened to be near where the Celtics players headed back to the locker room, and I saw Paul Pierce high fiving some fans as he walked out. Suddenly his white elbow band, which he always shoots into the crowd, came sailing through the air and landed on the seat in front of me. Now, how to get this on ebay…

After the game Dawn arranged for the three of us to participate in a shootaround on the court with about 50 other people. I got to make a layup on the garden parquet (of course, I missed a jumpshot beforehand).

Great birthday–thanks a million, Sis!

sdg

Blogging again

I dropped off the blogging trail while we were upfitting our new facility, and in addition we had some technical difficulties with our blog site. I believe we are now online again, so “welcome back!”

sdg (soli deo gloria, for those who forgot)

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