Tonight was a great night! The Canuck's won, the Lion's won, and we had a house full of students from Vanguard College in Edmonton doing field work on urban missions.
Vanguard is my alma matter - only it was called NBC way back then. Times have changed - never got to go to exotic places like Vancouver when I was in college!
One of the cool things was that the team was led by Roger Graham who was a kid in our church in Whitecourt. It was really great to see where life has taken him and see him leading the team. It definitely makes you feel like some of those wild Friday night youth group meetings were worth it!
The Vanguard team had spent the morning in the downtown east-side, and then we walked them through our neighborhood before sitting down with them over mac and cheese and trying to explain what missions looks like in the affluent side of the second most densely populated inner city in North America. I think the contrast between what they had seen in the morning and where we lived was a shock. It's only 2 blocks, but it is a world away. Some expressed real anger over the obvious wealth of Yaletown and the whole Urban Fare scene when there is such desperate need just around the corner.
But they were still able to understand our mission. One of the many comments really spoke to me was the observation that when they were in the east-side, they never looked at the people on mission there and wondered why they were not doing something in Yaletown! So it wouldn't be fair to ask why people on mission to Yaletown are not fully engaged with the downtown east-side. The need for mission in Yaletown is just as real, just not as obvious.
Then we got into the whole living room church thing. What a provocative discussion that led to! WOW! Students have a lot of energy! I haven't been in that kind of dynamic, hyper dialogue for a long time! Mostly Paul and I had to answer the questions by saying "I don't know." I mean, what do we really know about perpetuating living room churches in the condo-jungle at this point? Come back in 5 years and we may have some more refined answers, or at least some experience to speak from. Right now we're just mainly talking about initial impressions and aspirations. But whatever we said, it sure stirred up some interesting dialogue.
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2 comments:
Hey dude. Got your comment about leadership training. In retrospect it probably was a dated choice of words. Building community and sharing ideas would have been a better choice.
Words can be so annoying. I knew exactly what you ment, but the connotation pulls things way out of whack. I love the connotation of "building community and sharing ideas". It's a great way to say it. I just don't want to get hung up in po-mo jargon that creates a whole new insider language.
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