Take the Challenge!

Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

My first blog entry...a quote from one of my favorite authors about what it is we're trying to accomplish with "church".

My thanks to Scott Sager for recommending Elizabeth O'Connor's book Call to Commitment, from which this quote is taken.

"If we are to accept the challenge of the crisis of our times, we, as Christians, must know that the world's deepest need is for saints. These are people who can give themselves in ways which seem fanatical to those who live by the usual ethical and moral norms. These are people who live normally by the second mile. It is not sporadic with them. They have thrown the familiar "duty" maps away. They are utter fools for Christ's sake. They are always finding some little cruel cross to climb up on. They stay there and suffer even when the people deride them and mock them, and thereby they stay closer to Him who stayed on his cross until he died. Now, if Christ be not God, they are utter fools, but if Christ be God, then they are the only sane people in the midst of the insane."
"These people are a people who will throw themeselves into the breach between the peace and healing of God and the loneliness, anguish, and terror of the world's lost. They stand as a bridge between man and God, willing, even eager, to become ground grain, broken bread, crushed grapes, poured-out wine. They are willing to be fed upon by the earth's hungry until those hungry ones can feed directly upon Jesus. The world has always needed such people, and it has survived because, here and there, there have been a few such people. But the point now is that the world is not likely longer to survive unless there are many such people - unless you become such a person and unless I become such a person."