Thursday, July 30, 2009

Vinoth Ramachandra

Vinoth Ramachandra is an IFES worker in Asia. He came to speak at SMBC last year and we all read this excellent paper of his before he came. I think that "integrity" would capture what he's about. One of his big things is that in the West we don't read the Bible with integrity, but from a rich, Western perspective - so we overlook the myriad places where justice and looking after the poor is commanded. People reading the Bible who live in places where there is great poverty and violence do not overlook these things - so we need to listen to them to remove our blind spots.

He also said that the way we live and think lacks integrity because of its inconsistency. We spend the bulk of our lives expecting that our families will be physically well cared for, have a good education etc and working for these things, but the moment someone talks about providing the same things for people in poor countries we throw our hands up and say it's the social gospel.

He also said that our Christian lives lack integrity in that we only do Christian stuff on Sundays and fail to consider how our faith should change the rest of our life. One of Vinoth's ministries is to mentor secular workers and to get them together in support groups to discuss how they can live as a Christian in their working lives.

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