Greetings People

        Apathy is a terrible mind set to develop!  A teenager who develops apathy stops caring about how they look, what they are doing in school and they stop caring about the consequence of their actions and about what will happen tomorrow.  Apathy can look very different in a young adult, who once had values and ideals and now simply goes with the flow.  They've given up on changing the world.  They no longer see that  they can make a difference.  The rest of us show our apathy by the fact that nothing touches us.  Natural disasters not my problem, the children who are dying of aids not my problem, the hungry not my problem.  Nothing gets through.

        People of the cross should be the least apathetic of all people yet we are now no different than the general population.  We stopped believing in the power of God working through one person.  Our only concern is the protection of our families and the assurance that we will have the best of everything.  The world can go to hell because it  is not our problem.  Global warming is not real. Until the recession hits our jobs who cares if the Big three car makers go out of business.

        Apathy is a terrible disease which comes into our lives very slowly, we hardly notice it creeping in.  Maybe that is why we need to guard our hearts and minds from this trick of the Satan that keeps us from being the servants of Christ.  The first step is to realize that we are apathetic, until we do we can't address the problem.

    Alan Hirsch in his book the Forgotten ways says that the "leaders role is to ensure that the system is directly facing up to the issues that confront it, issues that if left unattended will eventually destroy it."  I have never seen a person who is apathetic lead anything.  They might have the title but they are not the leader.

So here is the passion thought for the week again from Alan's book:

"On the whole churches seek to conserve the past, and particularly in  the historical denominations (Anglican and Presbyterian) their primary orientation is often backward to an idealized past rather than forward to a new vision of the future.  As such they are classic, often inflexible, institutions that enshrine an inherited tradition.  Hence, the historical churches are leading the decline of the church in the West."

Our passion has to be to move to the future where Jesus is working.  Our past informs our future but we don't get stuck there.

In Him
Don Berry-Graham
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"Start with the Church and the mission will probably get lost.  Start 
with mission and it is likely that the church will be found. "
-Graham Cray