A Dinner Conversation

Yesterday I was blessed with the opportunity to spend a day learning from Dr. John Perkins, a guy who is kind of legendary in my line of work. I suppose I could write a lot about key points he made, and I may get to that content at some point. But what I want to write about now is how the things we learned played out in community with my friends.

Dr. Perkins said that we all need to have friendships deep enough to hear God's voice through them. We need people to uphold us. At dinner, I had the opportunity to hash out many of the things we had just learned with a group of some great friends. We talked about the church's role in reconciliation, the difficulties of minstering in complex urban contexts, and examining both top-down prescriptive ministry models and bottom-up grass roots ministry models.

At the end of our time together, I left that dinner feeling like it didn't really matter if I had managed to win debates or articulate every particular part of my position on the issues at hand. In fact, on my drive home plenty of new insights rushed into my head as if to say "Oh, I should have said that!" What really matters, though, is that I have friendships that are deep enough to hear God's voice through them. I learned a lot from my friends during the conversation. God is so good for calling me to a loving, respectful, and open Christian community at North Way. God is so good to have called me to an environment where I can openly discuss issues of God without being tortured or killed for speaking such things in public. I appreciate my friends, and I appreciate how richly God has blessed me.