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Site last updated 6/5/08

Get Ready for Reunion!!! July 12-18, 2008

Just want to see what has changed? Check out the Additions page.

We have a new Seventy in our Mission Center. ...................Visit the Las Cruces photo album.

Who do you Follow?

I recently saw a documentary on the scientific community and the commitment within that community to ignore and reject Intelligent Design. One person interviewed in the documentary was very vocal about rejecting God. His view was simple, that if he couldn't understand an event or process, if he couldn't then control that process, it simply didn't exist, it was not even considered that there might be a being or an intelligence higher than humanity. He did acknowledge one possible exception, that there might be a race of people somewhere in the universe that has evolved ahead of us, but they are not here and therefore irrelevant. He was committed to the idea that humanity (and by projection, he himself) is the most advanced being and is accountable to no one.

That mindset has become prevalent today, even if not consciously thought out like this man had done. We like to see ourselves as at the top of the heap, masters of our own destiny, having to answer to no one. Even religious people, ones who believe in God and assume they follow Jesus, have been infected by this mindset. Read the church growth books, or most theology books, or the congregational health books, and if you look closely you will find an assumption present. This assumption is that, "I have the answers, if you just do what I tell you, you will prosper just like I have." We work hard, we do our research, and we assume that our plan must be God's plan and that God should bless it.

We make these assumptions even as the church (the Christian church at large, including but not limited to Community of Christ) is shrinking in numbers and shrinking financially. Why, we wonder, is God not blessing us with the growth and vitality that our plans surely merit?

Perhaps the answer is one that is hard for us to really get into the core of our beings. Maybe the answer is that we can't save ourselves, and that being called to be a prophetic people really means to let God give the answers and the direction. Perhaps our catch phrase should be what John Wight recently said in a Seventy Newsletter, "Lord, help us to follow what you are already blessing."

Bruce Darrington
Rio Grande Mission President

Check out the new page and the Newsletter too!

Photo Albums!