In the past year I’ve had the opportunity to interact with numerous churches who are in the pastoral search process, from lead positions to associate positions to planting positions. I was amazed at how many churches / search committees / people just did not have their stuff together when it came to hiring. Now I’m not giving up on the Church, so pls, no rants in the comments section against organized / institutional religion. But I am convinced that so few people know how to do the search process right that there needs to be some kind of help, particularly at the denominational level, to do this better. In the meantime, numerous pastoral candidates, whether green or experienced get shellacked in the process. No one deserves to get beaten up even before they start the ministerial race, and this post over at Eugene Cho’s blog powerfully communicates this. So I’m listing below the Do’s and the Don’ts in the pastoral hiring process gleaned from my own experience in the matter. Read more…
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Found an interesting read on what this author believes is needed more of today: Needed: More Monocultural Ministries | Christianity Today and a response from Mark DeYmaz over @ OutofUr: Mono-Ethnic Ministries and Multi-Ethnic Churches (Part 1) | Out of Ur. If you ask me the discussion is too polarized. A dichotomy is set too strongly by both sides, I believe, and might benefit from a historical perspective (that I’m not prepared to offer). In other words, in the earlier days of immigration to North America, how did the church fare being ethnically-contained, or otherwise, (e.g., Irish Catholics, Swedish Free, Russian / Greek Orthodox, Korean Presbyterians, etc.). My 0.02 over at OutofUr:
From an asian-am perspective we need both; monoethnic churches that carry heritage, multiethnic churches that carry mission. Now if only we can get monoethnic churches to start planting multiethnic ones…
Conceivable?
I posted this almost a year ago and am re-posting it in light of the loss of Clark Pinnock. Yes, a loss. While I can’t stand on the same ground as his Open Theism, I’ve found in him (and great stories about him – read below) a pious, humble expression of the faith. Orthodox or not, the impression I have is the man walked humbly with his God. So here’s the re-post. Read more…
Recently I was asked this by a good friend.
So as I plow my way through Regent’s summer Hebrew intensive (affectionately coined “suicide Hebrew” by students) I reflect on this question again. And my answer is still unwaveringly – yes. With all the gravitas I can inflect through a blog post – yes. Can you hear it in my voice? So what’s so important that someone would subject themselves to the torture of pronominal suffixes and third declension nouns when we have just fine English translations? And what about the postmodern context? Does that change anything (I really think not but adding the word “postmodern” tends to make everything sexy, like black-rimmed glasses and facial stubble)? I think John Piper is dead-on on this one: Read more…
Thank God for Regent College’s contemplative chapels:
Almighty God,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
to me the least of saints
to me allow that I may keep even the smallest door,
the farthest, darkest, coldest door,
the door that is least used, the stiffest door.
If only it be in Your house, O God,
that I can see Your glory even afar,
and hear Your voice,
and know that I am with You, O God.
Attributed to Columba of Iona
I’ve been receiving a load of visits searching for the above phrase or some variation so I wanted to do due process and redirect where there is information. I don’t know pastor / prof Gary Parrett personally but thru extension. He has directly influenced many people close to me and is particularly influential and a huge blessing on the Korean (American) community, particularly second-gen. In short he sounds to be better (unconscious still), although the accident was horrific and his injuries are still extensive and serious. Thank God he is alive, although unfortunately the same cannot be said about his traveling partner Kenny Ye. Ken was a fellow Covenant pastor as I understand. Maranatha.
http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/garyparrett
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2010/07/03/general-as-skorea-bus-crash_7741850.html?boxes=Homepagebusinessnews
So the Avatar movie hit the big screen and I had the chance to watch it. The whole hoopla over the “racebending” of the characters can be tracked over at angryasianman – virtually every other post. I think the critique is legit – and I’ll take it from a religious P.O.V (being a blog on race, place AND faith). One thing is for sure; this may be the most ethnically diverse movie ever made – as M. Night alludes – if all we are considering are extras. As far as the primary casting is concerned – the protagonists and the heros / heroines of the story – it’s old hat. Last Samurai kind of stuff. And from a religious angle, the continued co-opting of foreign religions – a kind of cultural imperialism – is something that has irked me about Western revisions of Eastern religions for a long time. As if the latest reincarnation of an ancient Eastern religion were anything but. In my travels nearby Tibet I’ve listened with fascination to the lore of reincarnations of “the Chosen One.” But the ongoing question around here is why messiah-figures so often have to be depicted as white. I’m not just on to Hollywood casting. I don’t care, they can cast whoever they want. They have no prerogative to diversify and it only becomes an exercise in political correctness anyway. The question is, why we as a society continually hunger for saviors of a lighter hue.
If you ask me, the Airbender should have looked something more like this: Read more…
At the outset I can already tell: this is a good book. There are some reservations I have however, as I go into it: clericalism is not always such a bad thing, and I am a bit wary when it comes to institutional destabilizing books – they tend to carry a bit heavy on the polemical side. Furthermore, I am also cautious around the strong emphasis on the revolutionary spirit of the Protestant Reformation at the expense of the merits of Catholic and Eastern theologies. Indeed, this appears to be the operating presumption as reflected in the section titles: “The Church in the New Reformation, The Pastor in the New Reformation, Leadership in the New Reformation.” Also, the use of “institution” in the pejorative sense pervades: “The Institutional Entrapment of the Church” (62), “Unveiling Our Institutional Mind-Set” (78), “Shifting from Institution to Organism” (94). I appreciate the latter distinction of Organism over Institution yet find myself still wary at the pervasive denigration of institution. Read more…
My trip out east was accompanied with the National – not their latest, but their signature, “Boxer.” It was the sound for my drive through the Turnpike, through NYC, on the LIE, even through the suburbs of VA. “Showered and blue-blazin” I ferried from sight to site wearing a black suit in 95 degree weather. It was home for this Brooklyn-based band and it sounded like home to me. Everything they spoke about – building Fake Empires yet staying true, having a cause to fight for to begin with, feeling clean in a big city, getting Mistaken for Strangers by your own friends: Read more…
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Just arrived last night from an epic tw0-week trip to New York, New Jersey, and Northern Virginia. In 95 degree heat and humidity. With two small children in diapers, one with a fever. With a rickety car with leaking AC. In a black suit. And the last leg from Sea-Tac airport to Bellingham (2 hrs) finally took its toll on me; I pulled over in Seattle’s Wallingford district and hurled out the side of the car. It was epic, in a non-Leopold Bloomian way. But I must extend a gracious THANK YOU to my new-found friends in the East: Thank You. And there are other insights. I’ve spent the last few weeks envisioning what a “missional Korean-American church” might look like and Read more…
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