Connect the Grass-Roots to the Big Picture

We need grass-roots activism. It gets things done, it helps people in practical ways and in so doing makes a worthwhile point. Yes grass-roots activism is good.

We also need an enduring sense of the big picture, the overall direction, where it is all headed. This provides the underlying energy, the thrust, the drive that the grass-roots activism surely needs as its fuel.

The trick is to connect the two: grow the grass towards the light! Without that big picture vision the activism may win some victories, but down the line will be stunted and will not grow further.

I recently read how Martin Luther King did this connecting so well. Rolling up his sleeves he joined and led grass-roots actions that made very real difference on the ground. But he did it with a keen sense of Kingdom vision that he preached seamlessly with his rallying calls for action.

We are activists, with un-tiring energy, because of who we are in Christ - a Kingdom people attracted to Jesus and His Kingdom. So eager are we for this Kingdom that we will join Him in seeing it happen in our lives and neighbourhoods right now.

Soon Jesus will return in all His Kingdom glory, yes very soon. With it His ultimate perfection will land, making good every promise and finishing the transformation of every thing that delights to wait for it. Our grass-roots activism right now lights the very landing lights for this wonderful occasion.

Overcome Evil with Good

We live in a risk averse culture. So much so, that even Christians in their faith tend towards risk averse decisions, which potentially could curtail what would otherwise be good outreach.

The risk calculation is a complex one with many inputs and variables. A good question to ask is 'are we doing something that is basically good, simply blessing people'? If the answer is 'yes', with no strings attached, that ought to be good enough to trump a number of other factors.

The problem is that there is alot of bad out there. People and the general cultural perception may have been stung in the past by bad people doing bad things. This leads to restriction going forward: it can both make people averse to receiving that which is good, and also make us averse to trying to offer that which is good. The restrictions (explicit or implicit) factor into the soup of our risk calculation ... but sadly it means we might calculate and come to the wrong conclusion on a proposed activity.

The reaction to evil is to not be overcome by it, nor to simply bound it by living with restriction upon restriction. The answer is to overcome evil with good (Romans 12:2). Dispensing that good will mean taking a risk ... a risk in the face of both past evil and present evil. But if you are basically dispensing good, it will be a risk ultimately worth taking.