another excerpt from Erwin McManus ‘an unSTOPPABLE force’ – just buy it already!

‘And though i’m advocating our need to become a movement, I would like to encourage you to give up on keeping up.’

then a little later:

‘The first-century church didn’t keep up with its time, didn’t spend its energy keeping up with its time. The first-century church changed time. It rewrote history. It radically impacted culture. The church was the forerunner, not the runner up. And out of the church’s influence came the greatest art, the greatest music, and the greatest thinkers. Out of the church’s influence were born the cultures from which came Voltaire, Nietzsche, Einstein, Newton and Hawking, not to mention Jefferson, Franklin and Edison. The Michaelangelos and the da Vinci’s came right out of a context that Christ had radically shaped. I am not saying that they were all followers of Jesus Christ, but I am saying that they were all indebted to Him.”

and i just think this is solidly the key – the church should be setting the pace – one area where this is blatantly true to me and where God is calling me to be a voice is that of relationships – for too long the church has done relationships pretty much like the world has done relationships and hence we sit with the situation where the rate of divorce within the church is pretty much the same as the rate of divorce outside of the church. This is an absolute tragedy and the solution lies some part in us saying ‘waitasec, if we continue to do the things we’ve always done we will continue to see the results we’ve been seeing’ and start setting the trends and role modelling patterns of successful relationships [which are not easy – they require work and commitment and time and energy, but when you are married to the right person as i am then all of that is more than worth it and i deeply desire to serve my wife and love her and help her to be all she can be and to absolutely dominate in life] and becoming the benchmark, rather than sitting on the bench.

there must be more than this…