Visitors

In addition to everything else going on this week, we have several groups of people from the good 'ol USA visiting us. My team leader has a group of people from his old church back in Virginia coming to Camden for a few days, and then some high-schoolers from our church in Philly are coming on Friday (I think...gotta confirm that, come to think of it). We'll be putting them to good use praying for Camden and hopefully they'll help us see our city in new ways.
I was reading a book called Urban Christian a few weeks ago. It's by a man who was a pastor in Chicago in the 1960s and 70s. All kinds of horrible stuff going on then - race riots, gang warfare, the failure of basic governmental services. He says that people who live in urban settings tend to build up psychological filters to keep themselves from being overwhelmed by all the audio/visual/relational stimulation that comes from city life. But this means that we can fail to see things about our city that are right in front of us. Groups like the ones visiting us bring fresh eyes and ears, unchecked by the filters we've built up. They have their own filters, no doubt, but those filters were designed for somewhere else, so they see things about Camden that we tend to miss.