Barrie residents, we've got a good mayor.  Christians, we need to feel blessed.  Here's why.

A few night ago, Mayor Jeff Lehman held an evening called Focus on Faith, to discuss matters related to faith in the community.  Faith leaders across the city were invited and about 30-people showed up, many of them pastors.  I was honoured to be one of the invited.

Mayor Lehman started off by speaking for about 20 minutes, then sat down on the hot seat and invited questions.  There are a number of amazing things about what happened that night.  I'll list a few.

1) Most obvious is the fact that the mayor initiated this night.  In a day and age when faith is being pushed out of every aspect of our lives, where science is 'truth' and people of faith are actually disillusioned (according to the world), the fact that we have a mayor that requested to meet with the faith community is something that must be recognized.

2) Equally impressive in my books is the fact that the Mayor went ahead with the meeting, despite coming up against some opposition.  Some thought the meeting wasn't a good idea.  Pushing the separation of church and state (which I am undecided on to be honest, but that's a discussion for another time), they lobbied the mayor not to have the meeting.  He had it anyway.

3) Not many people would put themselves on the hot seat and welcome questions - and possibly criticism.  The evening was tame and all were well behaved of course, and it was mostly informational - asking what the city was doing about affordable housing, or parking, or churches in industrial lands, etc...  There were not many difficult questions, but the mayor did not shy away from any of them, and was willing to answer anything anyone threw his way.

4) Mayor Lehman started the hot seat session by asking, "What are your churches saying to you?  What is your congregation saying?  What do they want from the city?"  The mayor WANTS to hear from us!

I bring it back to this key point - in this day and age when faith is considered non-essential and even silly, a mayor that wants to hear from (and work with) the faith community is worth more than its weight in gold.

I only had one issue with the whole evening, and it was a big one - that it took us over an hour to ask the question, "Mayor, how can we, the churches, serve the city?"