What brings you joy?

Anything… be it simple, silly, or profound.

Do tell.

I’m headed out the door now for our quarterly staff prayer retreat. My colleagues from around the country in our regional offices (CA, WA, MN, TX, TN, OR) have flown-in to join the DC HQ staff for a day of reflecting on the spiritual grace of “rest” and to have times of individual and community prayer. These days of retreat are such a pure gift. I’d so appreciate your prayers for us, that we may come unhindered and undistracted to meet with our loving and holy God today.

And - a HUGE thank-you to all of you who left comments and wrote me emails in response to this post from earlier in the week - so very helpful! I look forward to picking up on this conversation Monday as your insights and a couple books I’ve been reading lately have been illuminating.

Have you ever wondered about or struggled with the relationship between forgiveness/grace/redemption and the necessity of holding perpetrators accountable for their crimes through restraint (prison) and accountability (just punishment)?

What are the sticking points for you? What is hard about this topic? What scriptures do you use to guide your thinking about issues of civil law and grace?

If you have even 1 minute to send me a thought, here’s my personal email: . Or else, leave a comment for others to interact with.
Much appreciated! 

Today Laurel Henshaw (welcome back from SE Asia, Laurel!) and I are taking a day off-site, away from in-office meetings in order to do some long-range planning and vision development for the Institute.  Some topics include:

- laying the agenda and drafting the content for our annual 3-day Institute Retreat with Gary Haugen and the Senior Fellows next month
- laying strategies and project plans for 2009 (including the upcoming Global Prayer Gathering in March)
- drafting a timeline for the development of the Institute’s international school program
- continued drafting of a working 10-year vision for the IJM Institute in correlation with IJM as a whole

What questions do you have about the Institute and where it is headed?
What suggestions do you have for us as the Institute grows and develops?

Andy Crouch just wrapped his speaking here at Catalyst on the mainstage. Here are a few key take-aways from his message on “creating culture”—as you read, consider how you can apply these principles to the need for creating justice for the oppressed.

What cultural good is God calling you to create - and who will be in your circle of 3?

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- Every cultural good begins with 3 people. Occasionally 2, never 1. Google began with 2 guys - when they added a third to their creating circle, that was when the idea began to move and explode.
- The circle of three can’t do it by themselves, however. The circle of three needs to grow to 12.
- The circle of 12 - these 12 bring a depth to the work that wasn’t there before.
- Eventually a wider circle forms - reaching critical mass at about 120. The circle of 120 spread the new cultural good into the worldin ways that the 12 alone never could.

The amazing good news - all of us have a “three.”
Everyone in this room could be part of that little circle of three than creates something new in the world that no other group of people could create.
There is something that you and your little circle could create that, if you don’t create it, no one else ever will.

[For more explanation of the 3-12-120 principle, definitely check-out Andy’s book.]

What do you make of Andy’s claims? What unique cultural goods do you sense God prompting you to bring to the work of seeking justice for the oppressed? What risk might God be asking you to take?

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Part 2 of my conversation with Andy Crouch last week. Here Andy addresses his claim that “we can’t change the world.” My question to him - where’s the hope in that? How do we then move forward to bring true transformation?

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BETHANY: Throughout all different sectors of society today we hear much talk about “changing the world.” What are we to make of this? How do you think we are to go about changing the world?

ANDY: Whenever you make culture, if by the grace of God you’re successful, it leads to transformation and change in the world.  That being said, I think that we get carried away sometimes… There are hundreds of books with the subtitle: “How such-and-such changed the world.” But it’s much harder in the midst of history or culture [as opposed to looking in retrospect] to be at all sure that what you do is going to have a transformative effect. If you’re in it, if you’re in the cultural project, to strategically bring a change, and that’s your goal, I think you run the risk basically of pride and of overreaching, of trying to strategize your way into enough cultural power to achieve your goal. The problem is that no one [person] has enough cultural power to achieve the kind of change they want to happen in the world, and so we can easily burn out on ‘changing the world.’

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Here are just a few more answers to some of the questions we received after Gary’s message at the Leadership Summit.  Feel free to submit others as comments and we’ll be sure to respond over the next several days.

Q: How do you fight social injustice w/o law experience?

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Friday we posted a sampling of the questions that have been flowing-in by text message and email to the Leadership Summit staff following Gary Haugen’s message.  As promised, we’ll be rolling out answers to these questions over the next few days.  To begin:

Q: Does Gary Haugen’s organization, IJM, have short term “field” opportunities – or is the level of specialization too high?

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