Too Busy For Discipleship

I live in Halifax, Nova Scotia Canada. Right now we are dealing with an issue the news here has deemed #scandalpalooza on twitter. The long and short of it has to to with the Mayor trying to run concerts off of the city coffers. A few months ago the concert promotion group, 'Power Promotions' went bankrupt, taking with it some 400k in loans from the city. The city council was shocked. The public was shocked. The media was shocked. And now we are trying to figure out what happened.

As I was listening to the news I heard an interesting commentary. They were comparing the goals of the city council verses the goals of a private concert promoter. The city wants to create lots of excitement and make people happy to live in Halifax. The business' goal on the other hand is to make money, the method to do so just happens to be the concert. The commentator's point was that these goals are not exclusive of each other, but that it was better to private business to run concerts because they will figure out how to do so without losing money.

This conversation quickly lead me to think about the church.

Let's Talk About Sex

I have only been a pastor now for a few years. However before that I was just a regular person. Some of my friends from the time I was just a regular person (eg those from Jr, High, High School and my Undergrad) every now and then surface via Facebook or some other medium to ask a question. Sometimes it is theological, sometimes practical, sometimes it is about Jesus and sometimes just general religious wondering.

The question below came the other day from a teacher friend of mine who is now living in Calgary. The following blog was my attempt to answer her.

A Tame Spiritual World

The other day I had a conversation that made me a little uneasy. We were talking about ghosts, demons and devils. In of itself that is not unusual. If one spends anytime in the gospels they inviability need to talk about demons and the devil. Jesus simply spends to much time dealing with them to ignore them completely.

But that was not the kind of conversation I was having. Instead we were talking about this individuals supposed real experience with a demonic attack. This person while living and working in Canada now, originally comes from India. Which holds to a pattern I have gotten used to. I only tend to have this kind of conversation with people if that are not from the so called Western World.

It seems that for the most part here in the West we like our spiritual world nice and tame.