Monday Conversations: Chicago & Violence, the church & the LGBT community

My Monday was rather interesting, if I do say so myself. 

In the morning I joined in with some other New Life pastors to attend a press conference with the Chicago Clergy Coalition. The violence in Chicago has been beyond epidemic. The press conference was to announce the coalition's call for a weekend of peace in the city of Chicago. The tribune did a nice job reporting on the event; you can read their article HERE.

One pastor who spoke at the event made the comment, "12 people are killed and almost 60 wounded in Colorado and it is called a tragedy. In Chicago that is called Saturday night." It was really amazing to see so many church leaders from varying faith backgrounds in one place to stand before God for the city of Chicago.

Check out the Chicago Clergy Coalition's website for information on upcoming events that are planned in regards to addressing the violence in Chicago: www.chicagoclergycoalition.org

I left the press conference to head to Moody to be interviewed along with my friend Christopher Yuan on Moody Radio. We were on the Midday Connection program to talk about how the church can interact with the LGBT community. It was my first time doing something like this so I really had no idea how it would go, but it seemed like things went well.

You can listen to the interview by CLICKING HERE.

There were a lot of good comments/questions that came up on Midday's Facebook page(some not so good). My plan is to go through and write up a blog post this week responding to as many of them as I can.

Two issues close to my heart in one day. Not a bad way to start the week.

Praying for peace in Chicago - in more areas than one.

Assisted Observation

In my Hermeneutics class at Moody yesterday we began talking about OBSERVATIONS when it comes to Bible study.  This was my lead in video:

"It doesn't say...anything!"

In my Studying & Teaching the Bible class this morning we were talking about Lesson Aims: which in a nutshell are focused, measurable goals you have for your lesson that are focused on the student and their life change. Basically, what do you want to accomplish in this teaching? An example of a lesson aim: "The students will discover why staying up really late at night is bad for their health by going over statistics and research of sleep patterns & health issues." That just came off the top of my head - probably a Freudian slip that I need to sleep more.

Part way through we began going over examples of "bad aims" and why they were bad. The first was "I want to be a blessing to my class." Everyone got the glaring things: not measurable, focused on the teacher, too vague, etc. During a moment of quiet while they were pondering more critiques, Ben responded, rather matter-of-fact, "It doesn't say anything! I mean, that sounds good but what are you saying? It could be anything!"

It was a pretty funny moment the way he said it, but I also thought that it was so good, simple & brilliant. "I want to be a blessing." Sounds so good, so right - but am I really saying anything at all? Is it possible to use a lot of "church-talk" that sounds really good and sounds like we have it all together in our head and heart - but we really don't? Can we be talking a lot without really saying anything?

Obviously we need to be a blessing to people - but...what does that mean?

So...what does it?