Global Learning Community--Day 3

Had a great day yesterday. The meeting facility is great. We have found a schedule that seems to work for all of us. We start with breakfast at 9am with our first session at 10am. Yesterday we started with a 20 minute clip from Discovery Channel's "We Built This City" and looked at the city of London. One author writes this of cities:
“Two central themes have informed this history of cities. First is the universality of the urban experience, despite vast differences in race, climate, and location. This was true even before instant communication, global networks, and ease of transportation made the commonality among cites ever more obvious. As the French historian Fernand Brauden once noted, ‘A town is always a town, wherever it is located, in time as well as space.’”[1]

“This leads to a keen generalization about what characterizes successful cities. Since the earliest origins, urban areas have performed three separate critical functions—the creation of sacred space, the provision of basic security, and the host for a commercial market. Cities have possessed these characteristics to greater or lesser degrees. Generally speaking, a glaring weakness in these three aspects of urbanity has undermined life and led to their eventual decline.”[2]

“Cities can thrive only by occupying a sacred place that both orders and inspires the complex natures of gathered masses of people. For five thousand years or more, the human attachment to cities has served as the primary forum for political and material progress. It is in the city, this ancient confluence of the sacred, safe, and busy, where humanity’s future will be shaped for centuries to come.”[3]

After debriefing on the London film we read and discussed an article by Tim Keller on the City and then had lunch. We had a brief session after lunch and then participants were free until dinner...and what a dinner it was--bacon wrapped filets, baked potatoes, shrimp. It was Babette's Feast.

We finished last night watching a movie called, "To End All Wars" directed by David Cunningham. David is Loren Cunningham's son. Loren Cunningham is the founder / president of YWAM. It was a powerful movie. After the movie was over we all just sat there impacted by the power of the gospel that was portrayed in the movie. Afterwards we reflected on what we saw and heard. Because the movie is set in a Japanese POW camp in Thailand and we good several Asians present the reflection was powerful.
[1] Kotkin, Joel, The City: a Global History, Modern Library, New York. (2005) preface
[2] Kotkin, p. xvi
[3] Kotkin. P. 160Rich Lotterhos has been fixing some incredible meals.