Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Jon Acuff: Game Changer



Jon Acuff runs and writes a popular blog: stuffchristianslike.net. If you don't know about it, I'm surprised, and you should read it. He's hilarious, insightful, aspires to be Don Miller and makes people like me aspire to be Jon Acuff.

Yesterday he did something pretty amazing. He posted early Tuesday morning about wanting to raise $30,000 through his blog to build a kindergarten in Vietnam.

He set a deadline of December 31, 2009. So a little under 2 months. Pretty tight schedule.

The entire $30,000 was raised within 18 hours.

18 freaking hours.

You can follow the short 'journey' here (though I'm willing to bet the bar will be re-raised to $60k...and it should):

Beginning
Middle
End


Obviously this isn't something 'Jon Acuff' did (that's right, he's in quotes). This is something that God put on his heart, and then used him as a tool to raise this money through the community that has formed on his blog.

Hundreds of people donated money to someone they've probably never met, to help kids that they will probably never meet, because they love God and felt a desire to express that love through a tangible way to people who needed it.

And it took roughly 1.2 seconds for Jon to see what was happening and shove all of the kudos away from himself and directly onto Jesus for what was going down.

People love to argue and fight about social media, blogs, twitter, facebook, church online, etc about whether or not you can have authentic community through these mediums. This is a huge hot button topic in the church.

Events like this one that happened yesterday are game changing and eye opening.