Mostard Seed vs McWorld...

... reinventing life and faith for the future.
I was waiting for an oportunity to import this book from Amazon and to lower my Wish List until a friend telling me that this book were already available in Brazil with another title :"The Hidden Side of Globalization", I would never know about it with this very oportunistic title!
I have finished and apreciated it a lot! From a Greenpeace guy and an executive, I am closer to an executive, but this is not to say I am closed to social ideas, I just get discomfort when comes more social minded guys and try to blame you of having what you have and ebarass the church as evebody were obligated to donate, I rather trust discipleship and the work of Holy Spirit to move hearts and souls to see their goods as blessings to be given to people who need. I think this books helps church very much for this kind of work.
I liked very much the aplication of futurology to church, as business does. It is really a pity churches do not worth this kind of work and feel comfortable to answer questions made yesterday, but make nothing to prepare to answer questions to be made tomorrow. Tom Sine made himself very clear, a summary of his concern in this book is that Globalization process is absorving more and more of medium class money and time through his appeal to consumerism. The bad consequence of this is that church will be more needed, but will have less grasp as long as medium class will have less time and money to dispose to Kingdom.
I remember when I was taking discipleship class and simple life class was the harder of all the course. But here is a great answer, we can live with much less than we live now and we can serve God on what we have, this is the core of stwardship.
I thought this reading very important which can generate a very good discussion, mainly to the US people, from whom Tom Sine tooks a lot of examples and applications.
Their examples are very good and so creative, I thought courious the new kind of monastic community purposed.
Linked to this theme, I remember a very nice documentary called "Surplus - terrorized into being costumers" shocking and interesting, it said a similar message that consumerism is taking people to nowere and to sadness, but his answer to this was far from satisfying, it is reflected by the violence at G8, IMF etc. Mostard Seed remains a so better answer.