When is a pastor not a pastor?

My men's GROWth group met last night. (GROW stands for God's Word, Relationships, Outreach, and Worship/prayer). We also met last Tuesday night and spent part of our meeting standing outside waiting to see if there would be any nasty aftershocks following the earthquake. Ah, the joys of living in California! But I digress.

We got out almost an hour late, mostly because as we were sharing prayer requests I realized that there was something I needed to share, something that revealed to me that I'm not the all-together person that I sometimes feel I am or need to be because I'm a pastor.

At first I didn't tell my prayer request, not because I was too embarrassed (although that thought occurred to me later), but because I was in denial when I first asked "Does anyone have any prayer requests?" and then said something that was true but not very self-disclosing after which others gave their prayer requests. But something (probably the Holy Spirit) inside me told me, "What about the thing that was bothering you so much earlier today?" So I said, "I have another prayer request." As I told the story, I realized that I was revealing how neurotic I was because something that day had triggered feelings that I had been trying to suppress for years, and my feelings and obsessing that day showed how unsuccessful my attempts at repression had been.

The guys offered perspective and prayer. Most importantly, they walked with me: their responses assured me that they had had similar experiences and they shared the lessons they had learned. It was good to not be the expert, the pastor.

I know that I'm still in the process of being formed in Jesus' image (Rom. 8:29). And God is using these guys to do that work.

You're reading WHAT?!

OK, I'll confess: I'm reading the latest and last Harry Potter book and enjoying it. It's a little hard to get used to the grittiness of this book, because I'm used to the lighter, kid-friendly atmosphere of the previous books. The body count is appalling. But there is a kind of edge-of-your-seat excitement in the book, partly because of the fear of mortal danger. But enough of playing book critic.

The reason I hesitated to put this on my "what I'm reading" list is because there are so many in the Christian community who are up in arms about witchcraft as the subject of a book. (I would protest that the Harry Potter books aren't so much about witchcraft as they are about being an outsider in a society that prizes conformity. ) The same people might be a little put out that I've read "Pornified", but I could justify that as research for a sermon series and be let off the hook.

Am I a role model? Sure, and so is everyone. "Your life may be the only Gospel some people may ever read" as the saying goes. So should I avoid Harry Potter? Depends on what you think I'm a role model of (sorry for the terrible grammar but it gets the point across better). I don't want to be a role model of a narrow perspective of Christianity as promoted by a small group of powerful people. I want to be a role model of someone who is following Christ and engaged in my world so that I can know how to help others follow Christ in this world.

So I continue to be interested in a wide range of things, partly because I'm naturally curious and partly because I want to be as engaged as possible in this world that God loves and for which he gave his Son to redeem. I hope I'm a good role model of someone who is "in the world but not of it" (cf. John 15), rather than of someone who is "so heavenly minded he's of no earthly good."

Christ and culture

I finished reading Philip Jenkins’ “The Next Christendom”. The chapter on “Coming to terms” really interested me. Jenkins outlines how Christian beliefs have been modified or combined with indigenous religions in the places where Christianity is growing the fastest, i.e., in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

On the one hand, theologians in the West question if the result is truly Christianity. But Jenkins also discusses how Christianity was changed when it moved out of Palestine and co-opted religious practices of the Northern Europeans and British Isles.

Last Sunday we had a bunch of students from InterVarsity’s Stanford chapter visit as part of their “church tour”. In the Q&A afterward someone asked what it was like for someone who was not Asian American to participate in Grace Community. The question made me think about my own experience of Christianity, how my theology, my devotional life, my public worship, and even my music echoes so much of a voice that is mostly northern European.

Yesterday I went to lunch with several families from Grace Community. We were of Chinese and Korean backgrounds eating in a Japanese restaurant. There was that Asian American rhythm to our fellowship that made it easy for us to relate to each other so that conversation could flow easily.

In some ways I’m still coming to terms with being an Asian American Christian. At the same time, I’m sure that Christ is big enough to meet all of us on whatever terms are needed so that we can experience his grace.

more God sightings

Would Jesus go into a bar?

In the latest issue of the Covenant Companion (the Covenant's award-winning magazine) there are several articles of God sightings in places we might consider unusual: two articles were about finding God in bars, another about God's presence being felt at a funeral, and there was an article about how God is at work in the science of robotics. God was sighted by 2 pastors in bars (one pastor does sermon preparation there every Friday, maybe because he figures no one from the church will bother him there), by a friend at the funeral of a male prostitute and by the former director of the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute.

I just came from visiting two new parents in the hospital and had the privilege of seeing their newborn and praying with all three of them. I suppose we would consider that a typical place for God to show up: in the midst of the wonder of his creation of new life. But as I was talking to the (exhausted) new mom, we joked about my earring and how I was crossing some stereotypical boundaries for pastors. We agreed that Jesus would have no trouble going into a bar because that's where people go to look for support and respite. Often what they find in the bar (and in the church) are stereotypes they feel they need to maintain and so they keep things bottled up inside. But Jesus would have had no trouble challenging the stereotypes so that he could bring hope and healing wherever it's needed.

So maybe we need to start looking for God in unusual places. And maybe he's waiting to go to those places with us.

speaking of sex...

I've been pleasantly surprised by the reaction to my preaching on the topic of sex. I've finished 3 of the series of 8 sermons. I've gotten both verbal and email responses saying that people have appreciated my broaching the topic.

This is a hard topic to preach. It's not that I don't have anything to say, it's that there are so many ideas in my head from all my reading it can be hard to figure out how to present the info in a way that's interesting and helpful while being thoroughly biblical. Oddly, one of the hardest things to do is to use the Bible as more than a proof-text. We talked about this in the "Serving the Bread of Life" class (on preaching), that the temptation is to put one's own story into whatever text you're studying rather than letting the Bible speak for itself and help to order all the stuff that's in one's own head/life.

Sorry if I lost some of you with that last sentence. My point is: pray for me because I want this to be a series that is both biblical and relevant. I don't want to wag fingers or give legalistic advice. I want the proclamation of the Word to be a way for God to work in all of our lives, i.e., top be a means of grace. So thanks for your prayers and encouragement. Now back to studying for this Sunday...

God's business God's way

I had breakfast with Dave Evans on Thursday. Man, my head was swimming with all the ideas he was throwing at me! Not only does he talk a blue streak, but there's a lot of good ideas in that blue streak. The big idea was that God is present in everything and everywhere and our job is to see him and cooperate with what he is doing. Jesus said this in John 5, that he only did what he saw the Father doing. And that's the secret of being a "contemplative in action" (Ignatius of Loyola's phrase, founder of the Jesuits).

So the question is: why do we act in most of our planning meetings as though God isn't present? And I'm talking about church meetings, too. We may start and end with a prayer, but we don't think that God is much concerned with the way that we do business or how we conduct ourselves. Surely he just wants us to get the work done. Isn't efficiency and productiveness the name of the game? Or is it?

What would our meetings be like if we really believed that God was present in our meetings, that he was at work in each of us, and in our group that's meeting? That he might be more interested in making us more Christ-like than in creating a list of action items? That the more Christ-like we are (both as individuals and as a group), the more likely we'll be able to figure out exactly what we're supposed to be doing? And the greater the likelihood that we'll be able to do it?

Asian spirituality

I attended a bi-monthly meeting of Asian American pastors last Thursday (the South Bay chapter of the Asian American Bay Area Fellowship). It's always encouraging to get together with other pastors, especially if we're being honest about our struggles and not just tooting our own horns about how well our churches are doing.

When we first started AABA Fellowship 15 years ago, it was virtually all Chinese American pastors. Last Thursday, of the 7 who made it to the meeting, 3 were Korean, 3 were Chinese and 1 was Japanese. And the Koreans were definitely the most vocal. (One of the Chinese and the Japanese were really late, anyway.) The Korean church in America seems to be growing steadily and I know several Chinese churches that have hired Korean pastors to work with their youth or English-speaking congregations because there's a lack of Chinese seminary graduates and pastors.

What makes the Koreans so fervent in Christian spirituality? One answer would be the relatively recent history of Korean immigration to the US relative to Chinese immigration (the 80s were the heyday of Korean immigration). Korean cultural identity is related to Christian piety because of the strength of the Christian Church in Korea. And recent immigrants always hang on tightly to any expression of cultural identity as a way of keeping a sense of identity in a new land. Another would be the emphasis on fervency especially in prayer. That fervency is a legacy of shamanistic Korean religion that was co-opted by Korean Christianity.

I don't have a final answer on this. But it's a question that greatly interests me as I look for ways to reach out to the very complex group that is "Asian American". I'd like to know more about Japanese and Vietnamese and Filipino and Hmong spirituality, Christian and otherwise. I'm not looking for excuses for how hard it is to reach Asian Americans with the gospel, but for ways to express the gospel message in culturally relevant ways and then allow for a deeply authentic love for God and the world that God loves.