Revitalizing our Missions Program
A series exploring mission trends

Lighting Fires ...A Visit to the Adult Elective on Violence
By Jim Stark

To know where we are as a church, we need to know where our fires are. Who is deeply concerned about what?

Last month I said that the new trend in evangelism was that it should be "relational." Well, the Sunday School Adult Electives give us the opportunity to be relational within our church and share our heartfelt concerns with each other.

* We can discover our own fires and see who else has the same concern.

* We can explore how to best take that fire into the "local" community and be relational in doing so.

By being local in our actions we are moving with the new local trend for mission work. The needs are at our doorsteps. Since our problems are becoming more complex, we may have to coordinate several related fires at the same time. This is the message of the "holistic" trend. Good solutions to our problems are getting more complex, because behaviors are so interrelated. One fire feeds another. Linear or single patterns of action do not quench the center fire.

Another trend, "primary planning," reminds us that putting out our social fires is not a one shot project. It requires continual planning based on a sound Vision.

We need to strengthen our Adult Elective series in Sunday School to facilitate a continual dialogue on the fires of change in our hearts and plan what we can do about them.

Our current Adult Elective has been examining Violence in our society. It is complex and has many fires that keep it going.

On the first Sunday we showed that we tend to work on the symptoms of the problem, building more jails, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless. We still think that win/lose decisions solve our problems. However, we saw the true message contained in all violence. Force is the only tool we have historically used to change the status quo. It is quite evident that people still do not intentionally change themselves. Yet, the use of force to solve our problems is not working.

We need to pay more attention to the core mission of Jesus Christ and begin to transform our society by teaching ourselves and our children how to intentionally change.

On the second Sunday we saw the depth of the iceberg of violence. Criminal violence was only the tip. We have built a violent society in our institutions and our culture.

On the third Sunday we reviewed the presence of violence in our media. It is not new. A pattern of violence has been established throughout history in the ancient construction of male and female roles for essentially all cultures. These patriarchal societies taught men to be violent objects and taught women to be passive sex objects. Honor rewarded violence and shame punished its absence. Women were assigned the status of a piece of property. They could only shame men in their sexual relationships.

On the fourth Sunday we explored today's abuse of women by men. Experiencing shame still triggers violent behavior in men. The problem of violence is, indeed, historic and very complex. Its roots may be historical, but its elimination can be modern, if we begin to intentionally reconstruct those stereotyped roles for both men and women.

What can we at Central do to facilitate this change in violence? We can begin by intentionally changing ourselves — our personal attitudes about the use of force and the gender roles that we ought to have and allow. Protecting the abused is only a coping action. Building more prisons only increases the occurrence of violence at a later date. Let us begin with discussions on how to best change those historically set images for both men and women. Men should not be violent objects. Women should not be sex objects. What does the Bible say that we ought to be? We ultimately could light several fires of constructive change to the status quo at the same time. Treating the symptoms is not enough. It is a holding game plan. We need deeper preventative actions that will last.

If you have strong feelings about violence, please let me know!


Suggested Garden for 1998--Thinking about Spring?

First plant five rows of peas: Presence, promptness, preparation, perseverance, and purity.
Next plant three rows of squash: Squash gossip, squash criticism and squash indifference.
Then four rows of lettuce: Let us be faithful to duty, Let us be unselfish and loyal, Let us be true to our obligations, Let us love one another.

No garden is complete without turnips: Turn up for important meetings, Turn up with a smile, Turn up with new ideas, Turn up with determination to make everything count for something good and worthwhile.

Courtesy of Ralph W. Eggert


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A Visioning Process to carry Central Church into the next century is underway.

All are invited to a March 24th meeting at the church. For details, see page 2, the monthly Pastor's Pen column