A quotation from Archbishop Oscar Romero aptly sums up what I would feel is on God’s heart at present, out of which a lot of my life motivation comes:

“This is the mission entrusted to the church, a hard mission: To uproot sins from history, to uproot. sins from the political order, to uproot sins from the economy, to uproot sins wherever they are. What a hard task! It has to meet conflicts amid so much selfishness, so much pride, so much vanity, so many who have enthroned the reign of sin among us. The church must suffer for speaking the truth, for pointing out sin, for uprooting sin. No one wants to have a sore spot touched, and therefore a society with so many sores twitches when someone has the courage to touch it and say: “You have to treat that. You have to get rid of that. Believe in Christ. Be converted.””

I’m not a trained theologian - my background is in what became known in the UK as the “new church”, “charismatic”, “house church” movement - I’m an insolvency practitioner by trade, working with people in serious financial difficulties, and I started seeking out a distinctive Christian response to the debt issue some years ago - in and out of Deut 15 etc - realised that there is a slavery in debt and focussed on a potential parallel to Moses’ approach to pharoah - I’m still having to let that simmer.

Out of that I started to look at money / mammon as an issue, starting at Gen 1, where I was also forced to look at sabbath, which blew my mind, and after further wandering through the Pentateuch, also at tithing and the feasts of Israel. I’m finding that these are all bound together in the area of personal and corporate lifestyle. At present I find myself out on my own in my local church in my understanding of these things.

My personal journey is currently one in which, as an individual who has been very “mindy” and “boxed up”, I’m fighting to recover my ability to feel emotion - at the same time what’s opening up for me is the recognition of an overwhelming need for God’s people to both know and express God’s grief for the mess that the church has made, including our part in the mess of society at large, and also to find practical ways to repent of what we’ve done.

Maybe my debt work will give me a context for that - but I’m after more of God’s heart whichever way.

I’m here to learn.