Vision

The last two weeks at church, we’ve been blessed by having messages from visiting speakers on missions.

The first week it was Urie Sharp. He spoke about the church in China, persecution and some of the wonderful things that are happening over there through the work of various missions. Because it is a closed country, I won’t go into detail here on a public blog. His detailed stories and descriptions were at times heart warming, at times heart wrenching. His message caused all of us, I hope, to have more of a heart for the church in China and the vast needs of Christians there. The only question that remains what am I going to do, what action will it bring on my part? Prayer is a start for sure. Maybe more, who knows?

This past week we were blessed by the visit of John and Laura Smucker who are on furlough from serving in Minsk Mazowiecki, Poland. The mission they are working under is Anabaptist International Ministries. John spoke during our morning service about being called by God. During the afternoon time, they gave a slideshow, sang some hymns as a family and showed some of the “artifacts” from that distant land. One of the most prominent blocks to the spread of the gospel, as John shared, is the entrenchment of the Roman Catholic Church and all its associated rites and rituals in peoples lives. It is part of the culture, gives people their “identity” as it were, and the cost of leaving is high. Let’s remember to pray for the church there in Poland and the families there as they are a light for the Lord in their corner of the globe.

Twenty years ago, the average American would sit down to a cup of coffee in the morning and read their favorite newspaper such as the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times or perhaps a local newspaper.  If you wanted to find out how your out of state relatives were doing, you’d sit down and write them a personal letter.  If you wanted to keep up on your favorite organization such as various Christian missions or other charitable groups, you’d subscribe to their ink on paper newsletter.

Today, all of this is changing, thanks to blogging, and the entire, difficult-to-define set of technologies dubbed “Web 2.0″.  Now you can visit the various blogs being published by the Wall Street Journal, your local paper, your distant relatives, and the various organizations that pique your interest.  But, the time required to “serf” the web (mis-spelling intentional) to all those individual websites is prohibitive.

Enter Google Reader, a web-based blog and RSS feed reader.  If you have a gmail account, you just sign in and add the rss feeds from all your favorite blogs and news sources such as http://joshchamp.wordpress.com/feed  You can even add it to your personalized homepage along with your email at www.google.com/ig.  This allows you to quickly glance at your newest emails and all the updates to your favorite blogs on one page.  I use it personally and have found it very intuitive and easy to use.

Of course, if you don’t use Gmail, there are other feed readers, also known as feed aggregators, that do the same thing:

• Blog Lines
• News Gator
• Rocket RSS

So how do you read the news?  Feel free to comment.