Discipleship discipline

One of the things that I often wrestle with as a pastor and a Christian is the challenges of efficiency as opposed to faithfulness. Not that these are contradictory values-far from it, really. I think its important to be effective in the good work of God, with an emphasis on both effective and good. But I think there is always this wrestling that we do, because we don't necessarily know the real consequences of our actions.

This week, my sermon is on the choices we get to make as Jesus' disciples, and what those choices say about how we interact with the world, and how important ethical purity and concrete progress are for our lives.

This is a living conversation in the congregation-when we studied incarceration this last year, one of the challenges is having some sense of what might be wise public policy (particularly around issues of mental illness and drug addiction, both of which are exacerbated by the current prison system) but feeling fairly powerless to offer superior solutions, and/or shape public policy.

As a way of engaging this conversation, here is a wonderful video about ways that we can in fact use data to shape our discipleship, focusing our Christian energies on programs that actually work.

This talk focuses on how to actually help Sub-Saharan Africa, and it is worth a couple minutes of your time.