What percentage are you?

In case you missed the whole Occupy Movement, in a nutshell it was raising up the economic disparity in America. The chasm is great between the have and the have nots. As such, here is a little tool to help you see perhaps where you might fall into the income percentage in your area of the United States.

I am not sure if you are supposed to do your before tax income (I think that is the intention of this tool), but you can do your post tax income if you would like.

According to this my household is in the top 40% in my area. It makes me wonder if my socio-economic level pushes me farther away from the needs of people in other income brackets? It makes me wonder if I am in fact richer than I think I am.

Is the UMC heading the way of No Child Left Behind?

The Associated Press had this little article the other day which made me think of the UMC's latest push to move toward greater concern about 'metrics'.

Nation wide the UMC is requiring a number of different metrics to be counted and logged into a network online.  Basic stuff really.  The UMC is saying that it is important to assess where each church is and by counting these different metrics (people in worship, dollars given away, baptisms, etc.) we can begin to set goals for each local church.  These goals will be able to help churches who might be "failing".

Ten years ago the USA adopted the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act which sounds rather similar to what the UMC currently saying.  NCLB has been exposed for radically falling short of its intended goals (irony if I have ever heard of it).  Students are falling behind in math and science and funding is being cut in all areas that are not test related.  Teachers are expected to focus on the numbers of the test and students become stats on a spreadsheet.

If the UMC is really embracing the almighty metrics, then might we be wise enough to know that just because people are in worship they are not being spiritually formed.  Just because the books might not show service hours does not mean people are not serving their neighbor.  Even if people do not know the micro stories of the Bible does not mean the macro narrative is not guiding their lives.

If you are in the UMC I encourage you to read this short article and heed the warnings that we can learn from the failings of the NCLB act.

How Many Slaves Work for You?

This is another little survey to discover a bit more about the human slavery issue around the world.  We might think that since slavery is illegal in the US then Americans must be "slavery free."

Take this little survey (it is easy to do but you can take a long time on this if you want to get more specific/accurate).

My first run at this test shared that I had 25 slaves working for me.  :(

As soon as I saw that I instantly thought, "Now wait just a minute.  I should go back and modify some of my responses and try to rationalize away some things.  For instance this does not take into account that I am actually answering for a family of three people. So I should/could split this number into three and that is much more accurate..."

This sort of rationalizing when on and on in my mind for a while until I realized just how crazy it is to think that I would feel better to have 8 slaves than 25 slaves.

One slave is one slave too many.