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Rotary Clubs, Church, Easter and Hope for the World

Posted on April 4, 2009 by Kurt in Hopes for the Church 2 Comments
Home» Hopes for the Church » Rotary Clubs, Church, Easter and Hope for the World

Hi all!

I have been away for sometime. Sorry about that!  I just finished my dissertation and sent it off to the Research Librarian at Fuller Theological Seminary for a final look over. I will be earning my PhD in Intercultural Studies from Fuller in June.  My dissertation concerns a missional imagining for denominational structures that are not hierarchical, but rather emerging from a missionally nurtured environment.  My dissertation is called: An Ecclesial Ecology for Denominational Futures: Nurturing Organic Structures for Missional Engagement. You will hear more about this in the future.

For now…I am back…here is a message I posted last Easter.  Happy Easter to all of you.

I am a proud member of a Rotary Club in my hometown.  I have been in Rotary for over ten years. I faithfully pay my dues, attend meetings, work on projects that better my community, traveled to Peru and Zambia working on projects to better those regions of the world.  I have met wonderful people through Rotary.  Some of my very best friends are in Rotary.

William Temple once said that the church is the only society that exists for the benefit of non-members.  Temple was wrong. Rotary is an amazing organization that though not perfect, exists for the sake of others. It does good work in local communities and around the world.  It is a leading force for a number of causes: stamping out polio around the world, helping people gain mobility through wheelchairs, fighting HIV/AIDS in sub-Sahara Africa, battling malaria, and creating sources for clean water.

Often I find that the church is an organization that, in spite of its language and mission statements, exists for itself.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer says the church is only the church when it exists for others.  In his day, and in our day, we know the church falls short of that description.

Easter is upon us.  Again we celebrate the amazing good news that Jesus Christ is risen.

Rotary is a fantastic organization, but it is not the church. The church is also called to make a difference in this world, to exist for others. The  church is radically different from Rotary because the church  is constituted by the Easter event. Because Jesus is risen, everything changes.  Paul reminds us that anyone who is in Christ is a new creation, the old is gone, the new has come (2 Corinthians 5:17)

This Easter event is to so captivate our hearts that we cannot keep silent! As great as my Rotary Club is, it cannot change hearts or transform societies.  The Easter message makes the most outrageous of claims:  the power of the risen Christ makes all things new.

This gives us great hope! This hope impacts the way we live and work today. Because of Jesus everything changes. We have a hope-filled mission. We do not sit back and wait for heaven, rather we engage in our world and become a sign and an agent of the good that God desires for his loved creation.

I will continue to be a proud Rotarian, but this always pales in the light of Easter. Christ is Risen!  He is Risen indeed. This is the hope of world, and the hope and joy for my life.

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  • JR Woodward

    Kurt,

    I’m looking forward to reading your dissertation.

    JR

  • Linda Ritterbush

    Kurt,

    Congrats on your Ph.D. (stands for Phinally Done, right?). Hope you get your dissertation out there in published or otherwise reachable form.

    Say, I see you are serving on homelessness issues in Simi. Isn’t there some new state legislation requiring cities to take more responsibility for homeless folks in their cities?

    As you may know, in TO all the overnight winter shelter-and-meals program is carried by a handful of local churches (ours among them), which has been a wonderful thing in many way. We have been looking forward, though, to the city of TO stepping up to the plate a bit more, which has been the kind of hope that is…uh..more the substance of things hoped for than anything else.

    So, I wonder how all that is going in Simi, and what good news you have about what your group is doing.

    Please forgive me if I have missed blogs you have done on this…I just popped in from a JR link. If you haven’t so far, would you blog a bit about engagement with homeless folks and issues?

    -Linda

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