We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded by your direct support for ReKnew and our vision. Please consider supporting this project.

Beautiful Ruins
If you want to read something today that is beautiful and challenging and unsettling, read this.
D. L. Mayfield moved a couple of years ago with her husband and daughter from Portland to a diverse immigrant community in Minneapolis. They live a life of solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed. If you’re curious how they ended up living this life, the post above in A Deeper Story will give you a pretty good feel for it.
Here’s a snippet of that piece:
Relocate everything, redistribute your life. Move away from safety and security. Go the opposite direction as the American Dream, and see if you don’t breath a sigh of freedom as you go. Move in and sit down and don’t get up for a good long while. Listen for as long as you can stand it, and when you burst at the seams with all you are learning and all you want to share, listen harder. Be confused, be scared, be naive, be hopeful. Start out lonely, and float into the land of the overwhelmed. It is your turn to feel like the stranger, and soon it will be your turn to experience the hospitality.
If something feels easy, it is because it is. If something feels hard, it is because it is. If going and doing a project or a trip or a social media campaign is quick and fast and requires little of you except for the requisite epiphanies, then it is too easy. It does not speak to the lions waiting to devour us all, it does not bind us to living breathing people. Go, go and see the world, but come back as a sister or brother, a friend and equal. We are all part prophet, all part narcissist. We are all trying to save the world through scarves, a little bit of hope and beauty that we can take with us into this lonely world.
Category: General
Tags: Beauty, D.L. Mayfield, Kingdom Living, Listening, Missions, Solidarity with the Poor, Upside-Down Kingdom
Related Reading

Be the Change Now
Ghandi once said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” It’s a profoundly Kingdom teaching. It seems to me, however, that few people adopt Ghandi’s philosophy. It’s far easier to focus our attention on how others should change. It’s far easier to spend our energy assigning blame for the problems of society…

Cheap Grace and Consumer Christianity
The “cheap grace” Gospel sells well in America. We live in a culture of consumerism that conditions us to habitually look for “the best deal.” We’re more or less trained from birth to live in the question; “How can we get the most for the least?” We think this way about our houses, cars, clothes,…

You’re Not a Pacifist Are You?
Jayel Aheram via Compfight Brian Zahnd wrote a great piece the other day on this topic. He contends that when he is asked this question, it often has the same flavor of the question, “You’re not a pornographer are you?” Why is this question so contentious among believers? Brian has some interesting ideas about it.…

Hearing and Responding to God: Part 4
Are you inadvertently appealing to magic when you listen for God’s voice? Greg continues his series on hearing and responding to God by pointing out the difference between communion with God and Christian magic. You can view the previous videos here and here and here.

Sermon: The Salt and Light Revolution
What does it mean to be the salt and light? In Greg’s sermon last weekend, he explores how followers of Jesus can step out of the crowd in ways that bring these good things to the world around us. Visit the Woodland Hills website for this week’s sermon resources.

Everybody’s Got a Prequel
My wife and I, along with some friends, recently attended the Broadway Play Wicked. Without giving too much away, I’ll tell you the play attempts to answer the question: What could have possibly made the “Wicked Witch of the West” so [apparently] evil (as presented in the original Wizard of Oz)? After all, normal young…