Thursday, January 12, 2012
Count the Cost
First of all, I apologize in advance for the sharp transitions and loose train of logic. Follow me...never mind that, follow Jesus.
Here's a small poem that I wrote under the inspiration of the 'Cost of Discipleship' Sermon by Mark Driscoll. If you haven't watched the sermon, look it up on youtube or on his mars hill website. It is nothing less than good logic. Here's my poetic summary of it:
Here's a small poem that I wrote under the inspiration of the 'Cost of Discipleship' Sermon by Mark Driscoll. If you haven't watched the sermon, look it up on youtube or on his mars hill website. It is nothing less than good logic. Here's my poetic summary of it:
Perilous path but no fear when it is all about dying,
Many may search for driftwood, not even trying, attack
Light the boat on fire, no turning back-
wards kingdom turned upside down,
Growth or decay.
Consume or contribute.
Do NOT quit.
Count the cost, go for broke, act not like a hypocrite,
The war is not won though the victor is decided.
Our wills become one through the grace of God inside me.
How do you expect to be the foot soldier if you can’t read
the footnotes?
Living in the one grand story, the one that You wrote.
While we are on the subject, something that has been great recently has been a (quote unquote) book club that one of my housemates and I started. We are reading 'The Cost of Discipleship' by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. So we have periodically met to discuss chapters and our reactions and applications of the text. Now, one thing that we have learned indirectly through the experience is the value in becoming a "regular" somewhere. We initially went to the local Boyle Heights coffee shop called 'Primera Taza' (spanish for first cup) and got into some good conversations with the owner while drinking coffee and discussing the book there. We discussed with him the unfortunate situation that confronts a lot of non-profit businesses which is the need to evaluate their effectiveness and results based on quantifiable data. That leads me to question:
How do you quantify relationships?
If non-profits like YoungLife and Boyle Heights native: Homeboy Industries value relationships as a desired outcome, then what statistical data can you use to get donors and other stakeholders in the organization to believe in what they do?
Tragedy.
Furthermore, relationships take time. I recently heard that a well respected prof at Biola does not do marriage counseling with couples until they have known each other for two years and two months. That, based on research, is the amount of time it takes to gets to know someone well, or at least in his opinion, well enough for the couple to consider marriage. Point being: relationships take time and patience is not merely waiting.
I mean the Paul writes:
What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building.
(1 Corinthians 3:5-9 ESV)
Sometimes I wish I could add to that: Paul planted, Apollos watered, Ryan added the miracle grow, and voila, God made it grow...instantly! Wouldn't that be nice, but that would be my terms, not God's. Still, I have no answer about how to measure results and effectiveness aside from quantity of people served. Ideas?
But anyhow, I mentioned YoungLife for a reason. Our house is hoping to start a YoungLife club for the high school students in Boyle Heights. The analogy that is given to explain what YoungLife does is, it is like an ambulance, whereas the church is like the hospital. You can't have one without the other. There are students who would walk on coals before they would step foot in a church, and those are the students we are hoping to reach. If I was to paraphrase John 1:14 it would be something like, "And the Word became flesh and blood and moved into the barrio, full of compassion and truth." That is our vision. The tutoring that we have already done has been some contact work in building relationships with the students. Contact work is over half the battle.
Bringing it back from a long chain of tangents, I was saying that we started a book club. And I met a dude the other day who is an intern for the Union Rescue Mission in Skid Row. So already what you know about him is that he spends a lot of time with the homeless. He has similar musical tastes as myself and he loves to read. So naturally I invited him to be a part of our book club and he eagerly accepted the invitation and joined us tonight in discussing the book. We were all reading from free books, so only the books are cheap, not the grace (that's a joke...Bonhoeffer writes a lot about the difference between costly grace and cheap grace). He had a lot to contribute to the discussion and then came to our house afterward because in Skid Row one spends a lot of time with people in the 50+ range and he wanted to fellowship with friends of a similar age (us). But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
(Luke 10:29 ESV)
You are the neighbor.
While we are on the subject, something that has been great recently has been a (quote unquote) book club that one of my housemates and I started. We are reading 'The Cost of Discipleship' by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. So we have periodically met to discuss chapters and our reactions and applications of the text. Now, one thing that we have learned indirectly through the experience is the value in becoming a "regular" somewhere. We initially went to the local Boyle Heights coffee shop called 'Primera Taza' (spanish for first cup) and got into some good conversations with the owner while drinking coffee and discussing the book there. We discussed with him the unfortunate situation that confronts a lot of non-profit businesses which is the need to evaluate their effectiveness and results based on quantifiable data. That leads me to question:
How do you quantify relationships?
If non-profits like YoungLife and Boyle Heights native: Homeboy Industries value relationships as a desired outcome, then what statistical data can you use to get donors and other stakeholders in the organization to believe in what they do?
Tragedy.
Furthermore, relationships take time. I recently heard that a well respected prof at Biola does not do marriage counseling with couples until they have known each other for two years and two months. That, based on research, is the amount of time it takes to gets to know someone well, or at least in his opinion, well enough for the couple to consider marriage. Point being: relationships take time and patience is not merely waiting.
I mean the Paul writes:
What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building.
(1 Corinthians 3:5-9 ESV)
Sometimes I wish I could add to that: Paul planted, Apollos watered, Ryan added the miracle grow, and voila, God made it grow...instantly! Wouldn't that be nice, but that would be my terms, not God's. Still, I have no answer about how to measure results and effectiveness aside from quantity of people served. Ideas?
But anyhow, I mentioned YoungLife for a reason. Our house is hoping to start a YoungLife club for the high school students in Boyle Heights. The analogy that is given to explain what YoungLife does is, it is like an ambulance, whereas the church is like the hospital. You can't have one without the other. There are students who would walk on coals before they would step foot in a church, and those are the students we are hoping to reach. If I was to paraphrase John 1:14 it would be something like, "And the Word became flesh and blood and moved into the barrio, full of compassion and truth." That is our vision. The tutoring that we have already done has been some contact work in building relationships with the students. Contact work is over half the battle.
Bringing it back from a long chain of tangents, I was saying that we started a book club. And I met a dude the other day who is an intern for the Union Rescue Mission in Skid Row. So already what you know about him is that he spends a lot of time with the homeless. He has similar musical tastes as myself and he loves to read. So naturally I invited him to be a part of our book club and he eagerly accepted the invitation and joined us tonight in discussing the book. We were all reading from free books, so only the books are cheap, not the grace (that's a joke...Bonhoeffer writes a lot about the difference between costly grace and cheap grace). He had a lot to contribute to the discussion and then came to our house afterward because in Skid Row one spends a lot of time with people in the 50+ range and he wanted to fellowship with friends of a similar age (us). But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
(Luke 10:29 ESV)
You are the neighbor.
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