The divisions among us

I spoke of the heaviness of the blog reading I was doing yesterday... here are a few examples that still have me a bit depressed and perplexed about the state of Christianity:

From A Religious Liberal Blog:
"I was struck by my conversation with a Southern Baptist campus minister. He informed me that he could never work with the local UCC Disciples campus ministry because of our open stance to gay and lesbians. "

From Chuck Currie:
This discussion of efforts to take advantage of the tsunami by turning it into an opportunity to evangelize.

And this nonsense about wasting time creating divisions instead of doing God's work.

From Fr. Jake Stops the World:
This discussion of the Episcopal Church (USA)'s discussion of homosexuality.

From The Faithful Skeptic:

We currently have five volunteer chaplains who are all non-denominational, conservative, evangelical Christians. Our chaplains have engaged in some of the following behaviors:

• refusing to cooperate with an effort to bring on Jewish or Muslim clergy so we can be responsive to all members of our community,
• engaging in discriminatory behavior towards the one female chaplain in the program (e.g. refusing to schedule her for shifts)
• refusing to honor requests for assistance from clergy of specific denominations

Couple these discussions with all of the sad news from Iraq and the region affected by the tsunami, and well, things have been cheerier in Godblog-dom, eh?

I suppose that the reality is that there are legions of ordinary, everyday laity who are simply trudging ahead with their lives, many doing great things in the name of Christ.

Here's a challenge... maybe we should attempt to gather a bit of news about the joys and accomplishments of Christians for a bit of a reprieve? There must be lots of great news to share about the courage of tsunami victims, the willingness of others to help (both in terms of donations and donating their time/efforts)...

Mark