Choice?: 26/03/2010
 
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One of the things I am involved in at our Church is a project called 'Martha's kitchen' which is set up to give a good meal and shelter (for an hour or so!) to people who are in need (homeless etc).

We get between 30 - 40 turning up week by week and have a right old mix of people from your traditional homeless sorts to younger people who have been thrown out of/or left home.

About 50% of the group are Eastern European as where we live we have serious numbers of people who work on the farms etc. We have taken the view that as 'we' opened the doors to everyoine in Europe, they have a right to be here and therefore if they are in need, they need support as anyone does. Much of the time work is there for these guys but as soon as demand drops so do thier jobs. Some are in really desperate situations...

When I was down at the project this Thursday, I eneded up packing stuff away at the end of the evening and as I did I had to go to different parts of our building. I observed the following groups:
  • a group of dancers practising for the Easter service
  • a group of 3 people gathered round a keyboard singing songs passionatly
  • a group of people praying for a guy in our Church who is dying of cancer
  • someone at a PC (researching for a sermon?)
  • a load of people in the 'worship club' (as I call it) practising for Sundays meeting
  • a house group that meets at the Church
My first imprerssion was that our church gets used so much now - almost 24/7. Most nights it's packed out like this with something going on.

My second thought was how interesting it is that diferent things ring different people's bells:

I have no doubt that I were to ask thew 'worshippers' what the most important thing is they would say 'worship', the prayers would say 'praying' the dancers would say 'dancing' and I, absolutely convinced by my interpretation of what God sees as essential for us to be involved with as Christians would be 'feeding the hungry'.

Despite my deeply held views (!), am I right that my are is more important? are we all right? is it each to his own? will I ever be as passionate about prayer/worship as I am working with the poor? should I be?

For me, I have pondered over recent months about what is priority - working on the basis that, with the precious time I have spare in a week, I can't do the lot and I came to the conclusion that my view is these things are important as I read the Bible and learn more about God. These are the things that it says (somewhere in scripture) are a 'test' of true religion (kingdom principles):
  • glorifying God/worship
  • prayer
  • witness
  • giving genrously
  • carring for widows and orphans
  • clothing the needy
  • feeding the homeless
  • visiting prisioners
Care to add any more? Let me know by commenting?

I then took these areas on a bit of paper and 'mappoed' what I was doing against these areas and found, to my surprise, I had stuff under most area. I was encouraged by this as the myth I ofetn live under (as I think many Christian do) is that we are 'not doing well enough' as Christians.

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