But the all-encompassing item for me is loving one another as Jesus has loved us. It is my opinion of all the commandments Jesus and the apostles gave us the commandment to love one another is the one the church has great difficulty keeping or a great unwillingness to keep. I am beginning to think we are more unwilling than unable.

It may be unfashionable (and to some anathema) to talk about keeping commandments because we think Jesus didn’t give commandments. Too bad, He did. Somehow I can’t seem to find a healthy, redemptive, restorative alternative to loving God and loving others.

Thanks Dan. Blessings.

If you hang here long enough, you’ll see that this is one of my pet issues. In my line of work as a freelance writer, I’m technically unemployed if I don’t have a solid set of clients and jobs always in the queue. So I depend very much on the network of people I know and their networks. So yes, this issue means a great deal to me.

As to “throwing the unemployed under the bus,” it’s bad enough to be treated like cattle by modern business when trying to secure a job, but it’s even worse when your supposed safety net of people looks the other way and whistles idly. Been through that too many times, too.

We pride ourselves on our individualism and free market society and those have a tendency to replace compassion in the economy of the American church. Don’t get me wrong, I like free markets economically speaking. But unemployment brings suffering and we seem to collectively have an aversion to pain or suffering of any kind and we tend to throw the unemployed under the bus or keep them at arms length or push them on the mercy of the free market. These things are a far cry from the compassion and hospitality Jesus models and COMMANDS us to exercise.

The church that is properly influenced and appropriately responsive to the needs of the unemployed and the compassion of Christ will band together and help and obey the command to love one another as Jesus has loved us.

Good #10.

Perhaps the blogs function as a whole to be a correcting force. I’m not positive that institutions will teach any of this unless there’s some clamoring for it from the little people. That’s how life works, it seems.

So if enough of us little people start changing our own lives to reflect these correcting truths, it will filter up. I know that I’ve tried from the top down and that simply doesn’t work.

The problem is that the “visionaries” we have at the top are either not very visionary or they’ve petrified over the years through constantly fighting against the system (so that in the end they become the system they once fought). I find most Christian leaders today are products of the system, so changing the system only hurts them in the long run. Call it “biting the hand that feeds.” They don’t want to bite that hand.

Again, that’s why change has to come from the bottom up. Once the leaders at the top notice the sea change coming, they either have to go with the flow or be swept away. Most will go with the flow.

Obviously, that can work either positively or negatively. Just witness all the bad changes that have come in the Church in the last century. We just have to be sure that as a grassroots movement we stay true to the Lord and not to liberal (or even conservative) ideas that have no root in Him.