Asking the Right Questions

Last evening Dick Alexander and I drove from Cincinnati to Nashville to attend the annual Q Conference. It began this morning and continues through Friday noon. Dick has attended several years; this is my first time to come.
The program consists mainly of a string of presenters from a wide range of disciplines, each of them offering insight, exhortation, research, or advice on how Christians can advance the common good. Gabe Lyons, Q founder, offered four questions we should be asking about the world and considering
as we hear the presentations:
1) What is wrong? (Stop and confront it.)
2) What's confused? (Clarify it and compel to action.)
3) What is good? (Celebrate and cultivate it.)
4) What is missing? (Create solutions and catalyze wider action.)
I have pages and pages of notes, and I took a bunch of photos. Below I'll publish a few of the photos, with quotes below each. But this only scratches the surface of all the input swimming around in my head and begging for further thought (and action!)

Donna Freitas, college professor and researcher into the hookup culture on college campuses, author of Sex and the Soul and The End of Sex:
Young adults believe they are supposed to be casual abou sex in college. . . . Students often believe hookups are their only option. I see a lot of stress and sadness. . . . 43% of them are profoundly unhappy with the hookup culture.

Brian Fikkert, author of When Helping Hurts:

Economists think of human flourishing, i.e., success, as consuming more and more things. And since consumption is limited by income, we need greater income. And economists aren't the only ones who believe this. This has been the world's general approach. Such methods, at their worst, create dependencies as we hurl resources at poor people. At their best, we make them just like us. . . . And yet as our prosperity has increased in America, the incidence of mental illness and suicide has multiplied. This is because of sin. Sin is a human flourishing problem. Material poverty is rooted in this central problem: Our relationship with God, self, others, and the rest of creation is broken. Poverty is in the broken systems that broken people have created. We eed to repent of material definitions of success and our faith in technology. The goal isn't to transform Bahgladesh into the United States, but to transform both into the New Jerusalem.

Russell Moore, Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission:

For many years there has been an understanding that Christianity is a normal and expected way of life to be a normal member of US society.

That is changing, and I think that is good news.

One of the most dangerous things we, as the church, can do is to try to normalize Christianity. Christian standards are not made up by men, and this approach doesn't work. Christian standard have always been a scandal.

Seeing ourselves as a minority is to see that we’re living in a time that is not yet the kingdom of God. We speak a word that is prophetic and that is seen as something strange.

As we work for human flourishing, we communicate and articulate the gospel itself.

 We speak with conviction and with kindness, because we realize that the thing that transforms ultimately is not a list of ideas, but hearing a Galilean voice.

We say what Jesus said, but we say it as Jesus spoke: “Come unto me all ye who are heavy laden and I will give you rest.”

Gary Haugen, International Justice Mission:

2.5 billion people in the developing world today have no access to law enforcement. 

There are more slaves in the world today than in any time in history.