Weekly staff meetings here at the church always begin with a time called Enrichment. Everyone takes turns leading, so each time we are enriched in different ways. It could be a selection of music by one person, a PowerPoint on some aspect of church life by another, and so on. This past Tuesday it was my turn to lead, and I reverted to my old ways when I was a seminary professor. I gave a pop quiz. It included questions from a book that a church member recommended a while back, Factfulness by Hans Rosling and colleagues.
The quiz included questions like:
“In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has…” and the choices were:
A. almost doubled
B. remained more or less the same
C. almost halved
Or “How many of the world’s 1-year-old children have been vaccinated against some disease?”
A. 20 percent
B. 50 percent
C. 80 percent
You get the idea. The answers are C for both of these questions. Incredible improvements are happening all around us.
Are you surprised? You’re not alone. According to the authors, chimps taking the test with random guesses would do better than most humans, even better than some global health experts. Rosling and his colleagues list ten reasons we skew toward what’s wrong with the world rather than what’s right. You can pick up the book yourself to see what they claim.
I thought about the book last Sunday when Carla mentioned another title, The Impossible Will Take a Little While by Paul Rogat Loeb. It’s an anthology of pieces by an impressive array of writers, but Loeb’s introduction tells you what to expect. Only two pages in, we read, “We live in a time fraught with bad news. More than one in five children in America lives in poverty.” And there’s climate change, political turmoil, and on the list goes.
So, which is it? Are things getting better or worse? A friend of mine likes to say the truth is usually somewhere in the middle. And I think he’s right. There are people everywhere working for justice, feeding the poor; and there are people everywhere running scams, committing fraud.
This week we are beginning a sermon series on the book of Jeremiah, a prophet in ancient Israel known mostly for his predictions of doom. But not entirely. Even amidst his oracles tackling some of Isael’s corrupt kings, he also offers tiny glimmers of hope. The writers in Loeb’s book do the same. Like the story Sister Rosalie Bertell shares about her mother who lived in Washington, D.C. and noticed that the buses didn’t always stop for black women standing on the corner who had worked all day cleaning the houses of white women. Every evening her mother stood with those women until the drivers got the point.
For the next few weeks, we’ll listen to Jeremiah and see if we get the point. Hope to see you Sunday.
Mike
Weekly staff meetings here at the church always begin with a time called Enrichment. Everyone takes turns leading, so each time we are enriched in different ways. It could be a selection of music by one person, a PowerPoint on some aspect of church life by another, and so on. This past Tuesday it was my turn to lead, and I reverted to my old ways when I was a seminary professor. I gave a pop quiz. It included questions from a book that a church member recommended a while back, Factfulness by Hans Rosling and colleagues.
The quiz included questions like:
“In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has…” and the choices were:
A. almost doubled
B. remained more or less the same
C. almost halved
Or “How many of the world’s 1-year-old children have been vaccinated against some disease?”
A. 20 percent
B. 50 percent
C. 80 percent
You get the idea. The answers are C for both of these questions. Incredible improvements are happening all around us.
Are you surprised? You’re not alone. According to the authors, chimps taking the test with random guesses would do better than most humans, even better than some global health experts. Rosling and his colleagues list ten reasons we skew toward what’s wrong with the world rather than what’s right. You can pick up the book yourself to see what they claim.
I thought about the book last Sunday when Carla mentioned another title, The Impossible Will Take a Little While by Paul Rogat Loeb. It’s an anthology of pieces by an impressive array of writers, but Loeb’s introduction tells you what to expect. Only two pages in, we read, “We live in a time fraught with bad news. More than one in five children in America lives in poverty.” And there’s climate change, political turmoil, and on the list goes.
So, which is it? Are things getting better or worse? A friend of mine likes to say the truth is usually somewhere in the middle. And I think he’s right. There are people everywhere working for justice, feeding the poor; and there are people everywhere running scams, committing fraud.
This week we are beginning a sermon series on the book of Jeremiah, a prophet in ancient Israel known mostly for his predictions of doom. But not entirely. Even amidst his oracles tackling some of Isael’s corrupt kings, he also offers tiny glimmers of hope. The writers in Loeb’s book do the same. Like the story Sister Rosalie Bertell shares about her mother who lived in Washington, D.C. and noticed that the buses didn’t always stop for black women standing on the corner who had worked all day cleaning the houses of white women. Every evening her mother stood with those women until the drivers got the point.
For the next few weeks, we’ll listen to Jeremiah and see if we get the point. Hope to see you Sunday.
Mike
