Roger Smith
What's your thing?
Social Policy, Church Planting
Currently leading a church plant in Richmond. With four children and four grandchildren, he's a birdwatcher, Magistrate and Spurs supporter! Previously Head of Public Policy at CARE and Vice-Chair of the Centre for Bioethics & Public Policy.
Church: Richmond Borough Church
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Are you in the arena?
Roger Smith
Monday 26th July 2010
St Francis of Assisi is credited with famously saying -- "Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words" and also "It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching".
I am sure that we all know that the word "Gospel" itself simply means "good news" but that doesn't take us very much further. Do we equate "gospel" with the simple message of sin, the cross, repentance and faith, or is it much wider -- being good news as well as speaking good news?
I guess that we can sum this up by talking about incarnation of the Gospel or the Gospel personified.
As Henri Nouwen said when speaking about compassion—
“to not reach down from our high position to pull up those less fortunate but to go and make our home with them. For we have a God who did not pull us up but came and made His home with us.”
So, if we are to interact and ultimately change our communities for good, it is important that we must live and work in the community that we want to reach. This may seem a simplistic statement but it is ignored in so many instances. If we avoid these communities it gives out the message that they are too toxic for Christians to live in—too threatening to our lifestyle expectations for ourselves and our families.
It was Theodore Roosevelt who said—
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
In this seminar we look at some of the ways in which you can get into the “arena” of community and impact those around you with the Gospel…
(Originally recorded at at Everything Conference: Leeds 2010—Community seminar by Roger Smith).
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