[aron]

One final thought (I hope) on the subject. After a while, I imagine my readers get bored & I try to shut it down. But usually I like to write because I simply enjoy writing, and also because sometimes I think there are things that need to be said, or in this case written.

So I wanted to add a perhaps necessary or useful thought, regarding my previous post of "acting on the margin", or "going on". I think the Bible calls it "continuing steadfastly" (Acts 2:42). Like, "blessed is he whom, when the Master returns, he finds him so doing" (Matt 24:26, Luke 12:43). I remember a local church song, probably composed after some "rebellion", in which we all sang, "Go on, go on/Go on in the Lord/Be strenghened, go on in the Lord".

Well, I argue that this "going on" is about people, specifically your neighbor. How you treat the person next to you is how you treat God, and how you treat others is how God will treat you. And while it's to some degree measured by what we might call "the body of work", i.e. the totality of your actions, it's more importantly determined by how you are treating people right now, at this moment. This determines whether you are, in fact, "going forward" or "going backward". You are either moving toward or away from the proverbial "finish line" or "promised rest" or what-have-you depending on your relations with others.

And I also argue that this got subverted in the LSM churches. Instead of your neighbor, your orientation point, or measuring stick, on becoming an "overcomer" in the LSM teaching and practice was your relationship with "the ministry", or "the church", or "the body". Your neighbor be damned. And with that I vehemently disagree.

This is why to me the "full-timers" and "serving ones" and "campus laborers" are today's equivalent of the medieval RCC monks and nuns. They think that if they simply do enough good stuff to build up the system, the scales will tip in their favor, and they'll have a reward. But one telling part for me is that the LSM system of teachings and practices ignore the poor; even though that suffering one may be their "neighbor", the poor can't be used to "build the system", so they are ignored, sometimes even avoided. Another telling example is that if your LSM-system neighbor runs afoul of the system, like they witness "Noah getting drunk in his tent", you have to jettison your neighbor, not the system. That is what I meant by "your neighbor be damned" -- after the obligatory lip service, when push comes to shove it's about your relationship with the system.