Gearing up for next week

We have a pretty active weekend/next week, with 2 people arriving on Friday, 5 interns arriving on Saturday (plus maybe 4 more) and 9 sports ministry people on Sunday. We'll be meeting with the host families today to make sure they know what to do with their visitors. The language barrier/bridge is always fun.

We remind them to provide purified water to drink and brush teeth, towels for bathing, what sort of foods our U.S. visitors can handle for breakfast, what our daily schedule generally is, etc...

The logistics are rather daughting regarding housing and meals for 16 people doing 4 major activities every day (2, 2-hour sports clubs and 2, 2-hour ESL classes).

Check the McManus blog, http://abcdmcmanus.blogspot.com/ for more details on what the Summer Inters are up to...sounds fun!

Quote of the day:
This separation of value from fact is reflected in the separation of private from public life that is one of the characteristics of our culture. And, as I shall argue, the response of the Christian churches—or at least of the Protestant churches—to the challenge of the Enlightenment was to accept the dichotomy and withdraw into the private sector…. By doing so, it has secured for itself a continuing place, at the cost of surrendering the crucial field. As an option for the private field, as the protagonist for certain values, Christianity can enjoy considerable success. Churches can grow. People can be encouraged, as the posters in General Eisenhower’s day used to put it, to “join the church of your choice.” All this can happen. And yet the claim, the awesome and winsome claim of Jesus Christ to be alone the Lord of all the world, the light that alone shows the whole of reality as it really is, the life that alone endures forever—this claim is effectively silenced. It remains, for our culture, just one of the varieties of religious experience.

Foolishness to the Greeks, by Lesslie Newbigin, p. 19, commenting on the Protestant church’s reaction to the Enlightenment, and the current cultural and religious pluralism.