Article
Back in March, I read a fantastic little article in the Huffington Post entitled: What if the Kids Don’t Want Our Church? In short, it’s a look at how people in the previous generation collected and cared for things like fine china and hoped one day to pass these things down to their children. Today, however, these same people are discovering that this latest generation has no attachment to things like that. What the previous generation thought they were handing down for generations to enjoy will most likely be sold in a garage sale, if they are lucky enough to find an owner at all. The article begs the question, is the kind of church we’ve built just another unwanted knick-knack, and if so, what should we do?
Find it @ huffingtonpost.com
Charity
Operation Smile is an organization that aids children with a cleft lip and/or cleft pallet (which affects one in every 700 children born today). The company works primarily in the two-thirds world. Since its inception, the organization has performed over 200,000 free surgeries and worked with three million more. It is a wonderful organization that makes a huge difference in saving the lives of infants, many of whom could die of malnutrition without the proper care.
Find it @ operationsmile.org.
Video
TED Talks are a worldwide group of conferences and speeches organized by the non-profit group, Sapling Foundation. The goal is to share knowledge. There are all kinds of interesting speakers like biotechnology engineer and physicist Robert Fischell, who speaks about his new implantable defibrillator, and Sugata Mitra who’s Hole in the Wall experiment with children and computers inspired the film Slumdog Millionaire. But my favourite so far is Dan Pallotta’s, “The way we think about charity is dead wrong.” Basically, he says that everything we think about non-profit organizations, advertising and “overhead” is undermining programs that we love, stopping them from flourishing and pushing the most talented leaders away from them and out into the private sector instead.
Prophet
Pat Robertson, the televangelist and chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Network, has always been a little divisive. He is a multi-millionaire author, past presidential candidate and marijuana legalization advocate. He said 9/11 was the ACLU’s fault; Hurricane Katrina came as God’s punishment on abortionists and that Haiti got hit with an earthquake because its government had a pact with the Devil. He even claimed the end of the world would come in 1982. Recently he was trying to sell his own brand of protein health bars and promised his audience that he could leg press 2,000 pounds (700 pounds more than the world record). So … he’s not exactly right all the time. But this time, during the 2012 presidential election, the Lord told him what was going to happen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtWdXq1z1NU
