Speaker 1 - Gerry

I have three pages of notes on Gerry. As you can probably guess, that is mostly due to the fact that he was the first speaker and not much else. Before I start it is interesting to note that on the first page at the bottom someone has written:

Joshua,
thank you
Josh, you have a very nice
note book.

Now my first guess was that Albanian boy I saved from a dragon finally found me because the printing is so messy and obviously came from a disfigered hand but it might also be that the writing chooses to be anonymous so I will pursue it no more...unless you have information on who I should be saying you're welcome to.

I digress, Gerry talked about communicating the gospel in terms of people's specific cultures. He gave us a three step system:
Know unchanging word, know changing world
Know the changing people and their changing world
Take unchanging word to the changing people living a changing world

Something that I have thought about to a fair extent is this whole question of being able to relate to people. One of the most amazing things about Jesus, if you think that he was just a human being, is how amazing he is at being exactly what a specific person needs at a specific time. To the lady at the well, he saw through her and brought truth into her life. For Peter, he had to call him the devil yet my guess is that it was the best good for Peter at the time. Peter seems like the type where you needed to just set them straight every once in a while. To Zacchaeus, Jesus was friendly and inviting and my guess is that if Jesus would have had a place, they would have eaten there instead.

Jesus' ability to be anything to anyone is quite spectacular to me. I'm not sure if this is what Gerry meant by his sessions but it is the thoughts that came up for me. How am I living my life to be more like Jesus in this way? How am I trying to understand and relate to those who think and live and feel differently than I do?

Finally, there are two quotes that came up during the sessions. I don't remember who either of the authors were.

God has called us to live a daring and impossible kind of life which necessitates faith in the kind of God who does the impossible.

Don't go to church, be the church.