Matt shares the treatment plan and prayer requests here.
Author: Jonathan Dodson
Partner/Members Material
Some churches emphasize parntership/membership in the New Year, so I thought I would update on our material for our Partners on Mission class. The material previously listed under Tools for Missional Church is outdated, so I’ve updated that link. All material is under a Creative Commons License, which means use it, adapt it, but give credit. Merry Christmas!
ACL Partners Class Teaching Notes
U2, Creativity, & Christmas
It might come as a surprise that Rolling Stone has named No Line on the Horizon as Best Album of the Year, with Moment of Surrender as Best Song (which is a pretty amazing song: read about its development here). This album certainly marks a new expression of creativity for U2, and they still don’t think they have made their best album yet (good news for Joshua Tree lovers?) In a recent interview, the Edge was asked about the band’s belief that their best music as still to come. His response lends wisdom for creativity:
We all genuinely believe it. It’s not arrogance. It’s because we are still hungry. There’s no reason why we can’t do this. You think about other art forms and artists – filmmakers, painters, sculptors. It doesn’t follow that your best work is done in your late twenties, early thirties, and then it’s downhill. Unfortunately, that’s the way rock & roll has panned out. But we don’t buy that. Our only limitation is our ability to apply ourselves, to be hard-minded on our work. We push and push until we get to those special pieces of music, those lyrics. And it doesn’t arrive on call. You can’t turn it on. It needs time spent and time spent in the right frame of mind.
While I’m on the topic of U2, you might consider this powerful quote as a means of grace to stir your Christmas affections. Don’t just read it; meditate on it. Merry Christmas!
The idea that God, if there is a force of Logic and Love in the universe, that it would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain itself and describe itself by becoming a child born in straw poverty, in shit and straw…a child… I just thought: “Wow!” Just the poetry … Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable. There it was. I was sitting there, and it’s not that it hadn’t struck me before, but tears came streaming down my face, and I saw the genius of this, utter genius of picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this
And here’s a bonus, the new song “Winter” off the Brothers soundtrack. Moving.