how funny is this? the ministers’ meeting i went to today is called “stevens point area ministers” or “SPAM.” yes, i throughly enjoyed spending my lunch hour with a group called “spam”. i went to the other area ministers’ group last week – sorry no cool name for that one but we did pray for an hour solid, which was great.
today “spam” sat through a presentation from justice works – an organization fighting for restorative justice. the presentation was from a portage county judge who said he had been on the bench in portage county for 30 years and now that he was seeing grandchildren of past defendants in court he wanted to do something to stop the cycle. it was excellent presentation and idea. so i’m going through mentor training in the near future to mentor someone who has gone through the criminal justice system as a defendant. i figured it was a great balancing act in case i do get to be a police chaplain.
i’ve been struck today by how often we (as in people in the world) divide situations into two extremes and decide that only one could be true. case in point – if you’re conservative you believe in law & order, while you believe in restorative justice if you’re liberal. why can’t both be true and both worked on? another case to consider – churches seem to either care about evangelism (i.e. telling people of the healing salvific power of CHRIST) or social justice (i.e. being instruments of CHRIST’s healing within society). seems to me that both are a part of the kingdom of JESUS. yet conservatives focus on evangelism almost exclusively and liberal churches focus on social justice. there are tons of other examples – environmentalist vs. capitalist, and others. why does this have to be an “either/or” type of thing?
i wonder if sometimes we (i mean this as “i”) do this because we (again i mean “i”) are too lazy to deal with both sides of the issue.
