'social action' Tagged Posts
The Role Of The Local Church Within Deprived Communities (1)
Note: This is an updated version of a previous post. In his book, Generous Justice, Tim Keller states: “All I know is, if I don’t care about the poor, if my church doesn’t care about the poor, that’s evil.” Jesse Johnson, writing an article for The Cripplegate Blog, has a somewhat different…
Why Should We Bother With The Idle & The Ungrateful?
Shouldn’t we focus our attentions on those who ‘deserve’ our kindness in housing schemes? There are so many people in our world who are in a terrible condition through no fault of their own. Yet on our housing schemes there are 100’s who will not work. They choose to live…
The Generosity Experiment
This is fascinating if we think about it from a Christian perspective. [vimeo http://vimeo.com/29140232]
How do we help a generation damned by a lack of any work ethic?
Those of you who know me personally or have followed this blog for any length of time will know that I read a lot of books. A while back I read a book entitled, ‘Toxic Charity:How the Church Hurts Those They Help (and How to Reverse It)’. I will enclose a short review here, although…
When Helping Hurts
This is an extremely provocative book and I absolutely loved it. Although written for a North American cultural mindset, it is certainly applicable across much of Europe. The byline is, ‘How to alleviate poverty without hurting the poor..and yourself’. We live in a culture where the concept of a ‘missions trip’ is now almost the ‘done…
How far should we go in living for Jesus?
What do we do with the words of the Lord Jesus Christ in Matthew 10:39: Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it. The context is sending out the 12 to proclaim the ‘kingdom of heaven’ (v7). They were sent out as ‘sheep amongst wolves’ (v16) but were encouraged to stay firm in Jesus and to…
Christian Youth Work : Developing Healthy Partnerships
One of the things that we notice about the young people in Niddrie is that many of them like bikes, both the pedal kind, and the motor kind. So bikes present us with a great opportunity for contact with many young people and also with other organisations working in the area. As a church, we want to…
Should the church help young people into work?
If any professional ever had a claim to the title ‘Jack of all trades’, it would surely be the church Youth Worker. What other profession can boast such diversity in roles as: counsellor, entertainer, artist, cleaner, cinematographer, people manager, taxi driver, web developer, teacher, caretaker,…
Niddrie Pastor lifted by the police…
by Mike Stark True story!! OK, so this isn’t exactly new news, but it is very funny none the less and well worth a read – click on the photo to see an enlarged copy. This is from Scotland’s Daily Record newspaper on 3rd September 2007, describing a memorable incident that happened shortly after Mez took up his new post as pastor of Niddrie Community Church. He…
On being a school chaplain
It’s been nearly 3 years since I first got into the local high school. Since those early days, my job as Niddrie Community Church’s youth worker has involved an increasing amount of time and energy spent there. Last month, I was invited to consider becoming the school’s chaplain, an official position within the school community that would give Ellis and…
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