Day three Down.  

Heard last night was a bit hard on the kids and Brianna O. who was watching them.  Supposedly Aiden continues to ask "Is Daddy at church?"  

Today we spent the majority of the day discussing cultural analysis and it does not look pretty.  One assignment was to go downtown and observe.  Once observations were made we were invited to consider the ways that our culture adjusts or affects our faith.  Starbucks the coffee shop showed us a society that loves lots of choices, and wants the perfect cup of coffee.  How does our desire for choices and high quality goods influence our hopes for a service on sunday morning.  

People came in one by one and bought coffee - all a part of something that is drinking coffee, but they did not talk to one another, brush shoulders, or even say hello.  Do we want to come to church for our dose of Jesus with the hopes of not having to be bothered by relationships? These are some of the questions we asked.  

Another interesting question was this - "How much should our culture inform or form the way that we share the message of Christ?"  

As is the norm -  there is not time or space to consider all of the questions we wrestled with, but those are a few.   

Our day ended as we began to consider our research paper - Due in November.  We are encouraged to begin thinking about the FINAL paper as we write the smaller ones so that we may be able to use research from the smaller ones to help write the big one - 100-200 pages i think.  Well right now I am leaning toward writing a paper on the ways that Christian Spiritual practice can be used to develop leadership skills and attributes.  So paper - small paper number one is going to focus on using scripture to develop leadership reflection for our church board.  They don't even know of the plan yet.  I will write more about this later.  

For now - Know that Zion and my family are in my thoughts.

Blessings