Handpicked resources to help you grow in your faith. You can view the catalog online or get the app.
It also has helpful sections with gift suggestions for various price ranges and people.
by Matt Perman
Handpicked resources to help you grow in your faith. You can view the catalog online or get the app.
It also has helpful sections with gift suggestions for various price ranges and people.
by Matt Perman
Like Food for the Hungry, International Justice Mission also has a gift catalog, where you can give gifts to help free families from slavery, combat sex trafficking, empower local churches to seek justice, and more.
Beyond that, for today only (Giving Tuesday), any gift you purchase will be immediately doubled.
by Matt Perman
So today is Giving Tuesday, a much more important day than Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
One of the most fun and innovative ways to give is through a gift catalog.
This is what Food for the Hungry has been doing for a few years now, and it’s pretty cool. They have a catalog of items, except the items are not consumer goods that you buy for yourself or those on your Christmas lists. Rather, the catalog consists of items that you buy for the poor and which they can use to meet their needs and sustain themselves.
You can buy seed, cows, goats, wells, water purification facilities, and much more — all for the poor. This is pretty cool. It’s a whole other dimension than simply giving a gift of money, because you are able to purchase specific things that are needed.
Food for the Hungry’s efforts here represent a great way to bring innovation and creativity to the fight against global poverty. Their efforts show that innovation and creativity shouldn’t just apply to the for-profit sector — they are just as important in the cause of social good as well.
Their gift catalog is online and is well worth looking through. Plus, as I mentioned above, it’s a lot of fun!
by Matt Perman
That’s the subject of my post at The Gospel Project yesterday, Work and the Kingdom of God. I talk about avoiding the two errors of compartmentalization and spiritual weirdness, and how the biblical path is love at work (and what that means).
by Matt Perman
God does everything he does with excellence, and Jesus surely never engaged in shoddy work in his time of working as a carpenter before his public ministry. Therefore, we should not settle for shoddy work in our occupations, either.
Yet, because much Christian teaching on work is still thin and compartmentalized, this often happens. We need to correct this by affirming that we are not to compartmentalize our work and our faith, as though God’s call on us applies only in the area of church and our personal lives. Further, if we were able to recapture the compelling biblical vision of work in the church, it would do wonders for the effectiveness of our testimony to the gospel before the world.
I love how Dorothy Sayers makes these points in Why Work:
How can any one remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of life?
The church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays.
What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.
Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly — but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? [Great point! Shoddy and careless workmanship is an insult to God because it misrepresents his nature and pervasive concern for all areas of life.]
No crooked table-legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could any one believe that they were made by the same hand that made heaven and earth. No piety in the worker will compensate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its own technique is a living lie.
Yet in her own buildings, in her own ecclesiastical art and music, in her hymns and prayers, in her sermons and in her little books of devotion, the church will tolerate, or permit a pious intention to excuse, work so ugly, so pretentious, so tawdry and twaddling, so insincere and insipid, so bad as to shock and horrify any decent craftsman.
And why? Simply because she has lost all sense of the fact that the living and eternal truth is expressed in work only so far as the work is true in itself, to itself, to the standards of its own technique. She has forgotten that the secular vocation is sacred.
by Matt Perman
Dorothy Sayers, in Why Work:
The worst religious films I ever saw were produced by a company which chose its staff exclusively for their piety.
Bad photography, bad acting, and bad dialogue produced a result so grotesquely irreverent that the pictures could not have been shown in churches without bringing Christianity into contempt.
God is not served by technical incompetence.
by Matt Perman
Especially in a challenging economy, some people take the perspective that you should work whatever job you can, because the most important thing is to make money and earn a living from your work.
This perspective can sometimes sounds virtuous at first. And, of course, earning a living is indeed an important and essential component of work. If you can’t earn a living at your work, that turns it into an a-vocation, not a career.
However, there is actually something very un-Christian in that view of work. The problem is that it has turned making money into the chief and leading principle for our work. But that is not to be the case. Making money in your work is only one component among at least two others to which we are to give chief consideration in choosing a job.
That perspective of work outlined above subordinates the equal importance of finding work for which you are a good fit to the cause of financial gain. That is not right. It dehumanizes people and robs them of their ability to find real fulfillment in their work and, ultimately, make their greatest contribution.
The great Christian thinker Dorothy Sayers captures this perfectly in her short essay “Why Work”:
At present we have no clear grasp of the principle that every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature. The employer is obsessed by the notion that he must find cheap labour, and the worker by the notion that the best-paid job is the job for him.
Only feebly, inadequately, and spasmodically do we ever attempt to tackle the problem from the other end, and inquire: What type of worker is suited to this type of work?
People engaged in education see clearly that this is the right end to start from; but they are frustrated by economic pressure, and by the failure of parents on the one hand and employers on the other to grasp the fundamental importance of this approach.
Steve Jobs often said “you need to love what you do.” I’ve seen some Christians stalk down about that, saying things like “well, I have to live in the real world — I can’t afford the luxury of seeking a job that I love.”
But without even knowing it, Steve Jobs was actually reflecting a very Christian view of work. And, as Jobs knew, this is actually the perspective that tends toward the greatest economic success in the long-run as well, for it is impossible to excel over the long-term at work that you don’t enjoy.
Finding work that you love is not a luxury. It is an implication following from the Christian view of work — namely, that work is not only about economic realities, but as Sayers also says, something that should be looked upon “as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God.” That reality needs to be upheld right along with the economic purpose of work. Anything else is a truncated view of work, and to say “but I need to live in the real world” is the easy way out and actually lazy.
To those who say “but what if sweeping floors is the only job you can get; shouldn’t you take it?” The answer is, first, the biggest problem with this question is that it seems to assume that there is no one out there who actually likes sweeping floors. But beyond that, most of the time people asking this question are settling too easily. If you are literally going to starve if you don’t sweep floors, then sweep floors. But don’t stop there. While sweeping floors, hold on to your aspirations to find the work that is a good fit for you, and keep looking for it.
Too often, people fall into the fallacy of using economic realities to bludgeon people into giving up their aspirations and dreams. Why do we have to settle so easily for the “either/or”? As in “either you are a dreamer who wants to find the work that fits yourself well, or you can live in the ‘real world’ and do work you hate but earn a living.”
I reject that dichotomy, as all Christians should. It is unloving, un-Christian, contrary to the nature of human beings in the image of God, contrary to the reality that work is intended by God to be more than economic, contrary to God’s very own purposes for our work and, ironically, in the long-run it is also contrary to the legitimate economic aspect of work.
by Matt Perman
Francis and Lisa Chan have a new book out, called You and Me Forever: Marriage in Light of Eternity.
Francis has summarized the main point well like this: “It’s easy for couples to get so wrapped up on things here, where they are not focused on the kingdom.” Lisa adds: “We need to remember that we are on a mission.” Marriage needs to be considered in light of eternity, and this means realizing that marriage is also about mission for the kingdom. This, in turn, also leads to the most fulfilling marriage.
You can learn more about the book at its website (which includes a very helpful short summary of the books vision by Francis and Lisa) and also see their humorous rap video for the book here:
by Matt Perman
This is a great article in the latest issue of Christianity Today on a new approach to helping lift Africa out of poverty through commerce.
My friend Paul Larsen, who is doing great work in this arena, is quoted several times in the article. (You can also check out the in-process website for the organization he is starting, called the 128 Foundation. Its mission is to drive social, economic, and spiritual progress in the developing world.)
Here’s the start of the article:
Three years from now, the largest port in all Africa is set to open its docks in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. But the hands that are building the $10 billion port are not Tanzanian; they are Chinese.
China has emerged as a powerhouse in the global market, and many expect it to surpass the United States as the world’s economic superpower in years to come. But the same growth that has improved the quality of life for millions of Chinese is arguably hampering it in Tanzania, Nigeria, Mozambique, and other African countries where China is buying land at astonishing rates. For example, in just two years (2011 to 2013), China’s investments in Tanzania grew from $700 million to $2.1 billion. “China is very keen on establishing brand-name equity or recognition among African consumers, because the African population is going to double by the middle of the century,” Howard French, author of China’s Second Continent, recently told NPR.
Critics of “land grabbing” say the widespread practice displaces local workers, provides fewer jobs, and extracts natural resources (oil, coal, gold) that skip local communities and go straight to international corporations. “Poor farmers and cattle herders across the world are being thrown off their land,” says investigative journalist Fred Pearce. “Land grabbing is having more of an impact on the lives of poor people than climate change.”
One for-profit corporation founded by Christians, however, sees growth potential in poor people themselves. Part of a relatively new investment category called “impact investing,” the company is tilling fertile ground in Tanzania, Mozambique, and Ukraine not only for economic growth but also for spiritual revival.
by Matt Perman
From Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just:
If you are a Christian, and you refrain from committing adultery or using profanity or missing church, but you don’t do the hard work of thinking through how to do justice in every area of life – you are failing to live justly and righteously.