I think God has spoken to me about some things relating to my passions outside of church as well as in. And I want to say some of them out-loud, so I 1) don’t forget them, or forget that I said them 2) try to hide away from the tasks needed to start things going because they will be hard and 3) Schmelzer suggested speaking your dreams and goals out loud in a sermon so that you have to think about them and grow your faith after you get all the funny looks from people who think you are crazy.
I have a dream that some day children in land-locked desert countries will be able to afford to import food, not because they have sold off their few precious natural resources, and not because they finally figured out that when you have an over-abundance of sand you should make glass (j/k), but because they have begun to sell information and ideas like a commodity on a global market.
I have a goal to help my local community by finding a way to effectively train children and adults (especially children…since other people in our church have dreams of staring after-school programs) on fundamentals of what a computer is, and how to use it to be part of a global community, and not just look at stupid cartoons and porn (although…who doesn’t like a good stupid cartoon?).
I am going to make a comitment to helping religious organizations and non-profit organizations dedicated to social justice (not helping animals, or restore buildings, but the ones that help people) improve their utilization of the technology available to them. Also, I want the Church to understand that it represents massive buying power, which is what drives our economy, and drives what goods and services are available in our economy. If we demand standards-friendly, open-source, non-price-gouged, computing resources, we can get it, and help swing the market so that it proliferates into coporate and private-secular homes in the US. This drives up adoption of the practices world-wide, which improves the availability of those resources to developing nations.
Well, anyway, that is what I’ve been thinking about for the last couple of months. I would love to openly debate how much of an idealist I am, and every other aspect of what you agree or disagree with me about in this area, but, I would ask you to wait. I have a proposal that I wrote for our church (and my wife edited to make it readable for normal people) and I sent it to Jeff to look at, and I want to wait until after we have talked about it to discuss any of this stuff in depth publicaly, because some of my ideas may change after I hear his feedback.
So, in the meantime, and before you ask me too many questions on these topics check out this paper. (the last 11 pages are just references, and the print is huge, so don’t be alarmed by its size)
http://matheteuo.org/downloads/Penguin-in-the-Pew.pdf
It isn’t a great paper, but it covers a lot of issues I want to eventually address and debate on my blog.
Jeff, that is the paper I said I was going to ask you to read…hopefully posting it here will save me an email.
Thanks for reading my rambling dreams, I’ll return in a few weeks with more on this topic.