Bono addresses crowd, Michael W. Smith covers U2 at Christian Music Festival

[drummerboy]

This is a reposting of a story from Everything You Know is Wrong........


Yesterday I was at the Creation festival, a massive Christian Music Festival in central PA. (approx 80,000 people in attendance) The fest runs for like 4 days, but yesterday's main event was a Michael W. Smith concert. Normally I'm not a big MWS fan ( a bit on the esay listening side for me) but he was doing a set of all worship-oriented music that was really, really cool. So, he starts talking about how as Christians, we need to be overflowing with love and pouring our lives into other people, and this leads to a stroy about meeting Bono at this year's Grammy awards. He said that the two of them talked at length about Africa and Debt Relief, and what role christians should be playing. He said that their conversation reaffirmed a lot of things that he had always thought about Bono's faith, and that he felt that God was truly stirring in Him and was going to be doing some amazing things through him. He then said that he had a message from Bono that he'd like to share with us, and up on the huge jumbotrons they showed a video which Bono had shot for the crowd from London, talking about our responsibility as Christians to love our African neighbors as ourselves, and encouraged us to contact our representatives to ask them to support debt relief. The video ended, and MWS then encouraged the crowd to pray for Bono and his efforts as well as for the African people, then said that he felt it would be appropriate to play one of Bono's songs, so he led the crowd in "40" as one of his closing numbers. A very, very cool night that I'll not soon forget......

- andy

btw - I highly recommend cheching out creation if you live anywhere on the east coast - they have it the last weekend in June every year. www.creationfest.com

 

[adamswildhoney]

Thanxs for the info!

 

[sulawesigirl4]

Thanks for reposting this here. I'll say what I said in EYKIW...I am of the opinion that the church has been woefully negligent in carrying out the many exhortations all through the Bible as regards the poor and downtrodden.

Perhaps one thing to discuss is "in what ways can churches involve themselves to greater effect?"

Something that has been on my mind is the attitude that I confront (and even have entertained in my more conservative days) within the church is an unwillingness to acknowledge the scourge of AIDS. I get the impression that there is still an impression amongst many believers that it's sad, but that since it's generally sexually transmitted, the people who get it are "paying for their sins." Thus a reluctance to really rally behind AIDS help. Am I way off base here, or perhaps just surrounded by more conservative Christians than anyone else? I guess I bring it up to get some feedback on what you all think of both that viewpoint and what you feel the appropriate reaction is.

Anyways, look forward to talking about this with you all.

 

[drummerboy]

Thanks for reposting this here. I'll say what I said in EYKIW...I am of the opinion that the church has been woefully negligent in carrying out the many exhortations all through the Bible as regards the poor and downtrodden.

In his video address one of the statements that Bono made which I thought was staggering was that there are over 2400 scripture references which deal with the poor.

- andy

 

[mebythesea]

Thanks for a wonderful story!

As for how churches dealing with the AIDS issue, I don't spend much time with conservative Christians so I haven't really heard that viewpoint voiced (tho I'm sorry to say it doesn't surprise me much.)

The churches where I have the most experience rotate AIDS healing services, have AIDS awareness events, organize AIDS pledge walks, and so on. Our cathedral even has a permanent banner displayed to keep people aware of its AIDS ministry.

And we had a huge outdoor rally/communion service in 2000 for debt forgiveness, with speakers from Africa.

 

[follower]

Again, nice story drummerboy.