ugly fire in a beautiful community... let's help them out

Though this is already posted on Lewis' blog, I thought I would let people know as well. Last week the Simple Way community, a beautiful group of people in Philadelphia, were faced with a terrible seven-alarm fire of a neighbouring warehouse that destroyed surrounding homes, the Simple Way's community center, and more. If you want to learn more about the fire and what happened, click here.

It broke my heart when I watched this video. You see and hear of lots of devastating fires, but this one really hit me. These wonderful people have set up an intentional community and are doing great things for those around them and for the greater Kingdom, and now most of it is destroyed. But there is hope. They have big dreams and it's exciting to see how this community is going to being growing. If you want to donate and help these guys out in some way you can do so through Tony Campolo's site. They need to rebuild their homes and lives now, so if we can partner with and support them, let's do it!

Trinity and Community

In continuing in on a discussion and journey of figuring out community, tonight we will look at the Trinity in relation to the community, unity, and diversity of humanity. Tonight in Systematic Theology class we are talking about the doctrine of the Trinity. In our discussion time we moved onto discuss the Trinity in relation to community, so here are some points that we discussed.

Points to ponder:

- both unity and diversity are healthy and necessary when it comes to community. although many fight about their differences, and bring a great divide between each other, if handled rightly and lovingly, diversity is a beautiful thing. we see this through the Trinity. the three in one. all have their unique roles within the God-head, but all are in perfect unity with one another. our differences bring us together. our diversity creates a beautiful community.

- we as humans need to live in and act as a community for so many reasons. life would be boring and dull if we were all the same, or if we just hung out with people that are like us. men, women, young, old, black, white, business minds, and artists need to be in community with one another. when we are with those unlike ourselves, we are put into a place where we are not necessarily comfortable. but this is a good thing. it challenges us to live life in ways that are out of our comfort zone. it stretches us to do new things that we might have not understood before or were scared of. diversity is a good thing. it is a Godly thing.

- just as the Trinity is one, we too need to become one. we need to learn to understand and practice unity of the body.

- look at the Acts church. everyone shared everything. its not a what's mine is yours, whats yours is mine mentality, but it is a 'it's all God's and we get to share in that' mentality. it's not a greedy way of life, but is an others focused way of life. putting the Lord and others before ourselves at all times.

- if we look at the Trinity, God gave up his Son. there is a sacrifice that was made. we too need to make sacrifices in our lives for the sake of community.

What I realized through this class discussion time:

- people are scared to even talk about community and unity. they don't want to touch the issue because they don't want to face what they don't want to do.

- they are so fixed on living as individuals, and don't even want to discuss possible ways out of this way of life. they don't want to live in the way that God originally intended it to be.

- someone even said that they don't feel comfortable talking about the issue of community and unity because that means that some serious change needs to take place. they don't want to face it.