Soundbites
Look around and enjoy The pursuit of more things — to the point of “gaining the world” — distracts one from contemplating or appreciating what one already has, and therefore guarantees that one lacks happiness. After all, what businessperson spends time contemplating his loyal and happy customers, appreciating the relationships of trust they share, expressed in an ongoing exchange of money for goods and services rendered? Doesn’t the average businessperson forget his current customers almost entirely, focusing instead on an abstraction like market share? (Many modern pastors, I have noticed, do the same, focusing on growth rates in attendance and giving and other abstractions, rather than on the faces and names
of real people they are serving). — Brian McLaren in Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope
God’s world More than anything else, the kingdom of God is about us “bearing fruit.” What is important is that we take the talents we have been given and do something with them. It is the doing something with our talents that constitutes our work, and it is our work that will help make the world more like the way God would have things. — Gregory Pierce in The Mass is Never Ended: Rediscovering Our Mission to Transform the World
Lucky us?
Ah-hah in Calcutta
Ours are the most fortunate generations that have ever lived. Ours might also be the most fortunate generations that ever will. We inhabit the brief historical interlude between ecological constraint and ecological catastrophe. — George Monbiot in Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning
Visiting Mother Teresa in her Calcutta home many years ago, I had an ah-hah moment: Looking around, I recognized that almost every poor person in that poverty-stricken city put food on the table through trade and commerce, not through employment, and not through aid. — Gerhard Pries, MEDA Investments director
More power to them I have a proposal to make: Every theological student preparing for pastoral ministry should spend a semester in the workplace listening and learning how to empower people for full-time service in the marketplace. Every pastor should spend one day a week with members of her church in the workplace setting, listening and praying. Every professor of theology in a seminary should spend two weeks each year in a professional office or a factory. Every theological faculty should include people who model full or part-time ministry in the world, since education is essentially an imitation process and students become “like” their teachers (Luke 6:40). Every local church that has members traveling to other countries for business should pray for them and “send them off” as missionaries in the same way we currently pray for short-term mission teams to Mexico. Every church should open its pulpit, at least occasionally, to thoughtful business people to speak God’s Word from the integrative perspective of being a business person, a school teacher, or a lawyer. — R. Paul Stevens in Doing God’s Business: Meaning and Motivation for the Marketplace
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The Marketplace May June 2008
