Month: October 2019

What Do We Do With All Them Pagan Holidays

On By missionmusingsIn Christian Ethics, ContextualizationLeave a comment

Image result for pumpkins halloween

Okay. I am here to help. Social media gets pretty confusing around Halloween time. People are, again, saying how evil it is for Christians to celebrate the day. In a few weeks more articles will come out talking about how Pagan Christmas is, and then three months later the same for Easter. No one complains about American Thanksgiving– a harvest festival much like those practiced by Pagan cultures around the world. If you don’t find that strange, consider that Halloween is lambasted annually for being related (a bit loosely) with Samhain, a Celtic harvest festival, after all. And no one seems to complain about the “Fourth of July” despite its use of fireworks— a pagan instrument used by cultures for centuries to scare away evil spirits. With all of these inconsistencies, I would like to offer a bit of help to know how best to deal with all of these different “pagan holidays.”

I would like to suggest a range of Christian responses or non-Christian responses to the issue of celebrations. <Note: for the last 15 years I have lived in the Philippines where Halloween is not celebrated much, being a distant second to Undas or All Souls Day. Therefore, I haven’t had involvement in Halloween in many many years. You can decide if that makes me a better or worse opinion.>

Possible Good Christian Responses.

#1.  Celebrate every day. All days are created by God so every day is holy and worthy of celebration.

#2.  Celebrate no days. Arguably this is just the same as the previous one. To celebrate each day means to treat each day as no more special than any other. So, in essence, one is celebrating or honoring no day as special. Since primitive Christianity gave us no days that MUST be honored above other days, celebrating no days is certainly a viable option.

#3.  Celebrate some days. This one probably needs to be sub-divided.

#3A.  Celebrate those days that have become considered to be “Christian Holidays.” As Christians we share a common heritage— a two thousand year heritage. When we celebrate Christmas, Easter, Palm Sunday, Lent, Pentecost, Epiphany, and many many other days in the liturgical calendar, we connect in some small way with our brothers and sisters in faith around the world and across time. That seems a good enough reason by itself to celebrate. I don’t feel like we have to triplecheck to make sure that no pagan, neo-pagan, or satanic group is trying to lay claim to the day. If Christians decided to view July 19 (to grab a day somewhat at random) as a new Christian holiday, I don’t think we have to be worried that some group has already messed it up.

#3B.  Celebrate those days that are culturally or civically significant that are not “anti-Christian.” We are part of a culture and a community that goes beyond the church. We are not only citizens of heaven, but citizens of nations, and products of history. Therefore, days that honor civil institutions, or historical events certainly can be celebrated. In fact, if Christians do not celebrate these, it could be argued that this makes Christianity alien to the culture and foreign to the nation in which it exists. Christianity is suppose to fulfill culture, or perhaps subvert it, but certainly not destroy it or ignore it.

#3C.  Celebrate those days that are one’s neighbors celebrate even if they are “non-Christian.” We know meat offered to Zeus is not tainted by Greek gods. We know that each day is created pure and good by God. We can redeem any symbol we wish, and we can avoid any symbol that we are uncomfortable with. If Christians were able to “Christianize” an instrument of torture, murder, and shame (the “cross”) we can certainly Christianize or redeem any symbol. The roots of symbols have no power any more than Zeus has power.

Possible Bad Christian Responses

  1.  Picking one of the options above and then telling every other Christian that it is the only moral choice. You can exercise your freedom in Christ or not, but it is not your place to tell everyone else what they can and cannot exercise.
  2. Listening to one-sided religious salespersons and taking what they say as the “gospel truth.” Most concerning to me are those who are taking the words of alleged Satanists as the truth when it comes to Halloween. Think about that statement– Why would we? In fact, we are missing the point. Those humorous quotes of Satanists expressing shock that Christians celebrate some aspects of Halloween are not understood for what they really are. They are attempts by a fringe group to appropriate a Druidic (non-Satanic) holiday and then push Christians away from celebrating All Saints Day, and All Hallows Eve. Of course, some Christians go the other way and assure us “It is all harmless” because… well, they did it as kids so it must be okay. I feel we can do better than this.

It seems like the articles that show up on social media right now embrace a certain ignorance and a touch of cowardice. I think we need brave scholars in Christianity, rather than ignorant cowards.

 

 

Empowering Leadership over Empowered Leadership

On By missionmusingsIn Missions as VocationLeave a comment

Years ago I went to a conference on Multi-site churches. Most of those who had mega-multisite churches were Independents— not part of a denomination. But one of the main speakers did have a very large church that was multi-site and was part of a denomination. During the Q&A time, an acquaintance of mine and from my denomination, asked this pastor a very relevant question. It was, “As a megachurch leader but also a member of a denomination, what would you like for your denomination leadership do to help you be more effective in your doing your ministry?” Since the acquaintance of mine was in denominational leadership, it seemed an especially relevant question.

The megachurch pastor said at first, “Stay out of our way.” But then he laughed and said he should give a better answer than that. He then said, to the effect,

The difficulty that denominations have is that they are led by pastors. It makes sense that the leaders of groups of churches should have previously been leaders of churches. But there is a problem with this. You see, pastors are “vision-people.” That is, they embrace the role of guiding the church in the way it should go. They gain a vision of where the church should go and then try to instill that same vision in the membership of the church. That is fine, but when they move into denominational leadership, this tendency doesn’t go away. They still seek to be the visionary people. Now, however, they start to see the various churches in their denomination as the tools to carry out their vision.

But this is the problem, because churches already have visionary leaders and have their own vision which is appropriate to their own “Church-DNA” and setting. What is needed is denominational structures and leaders who do not see individual churches as the tools to carry out their own denominational vision. Rather they need denominational leadership that identify and affirm the visions of individual churches and embrace the idea that the denominational structures and leadership are tasked to help empower individual churches to execute their own visions.

At the time I thought that was a pretty insightful image… and I still do. I also think it is somewhat unrealistic. If the ministry as a vocation promotes visionary people (we tend to think the religious leaders SHOULD be visionary)… and ministry has a hierachical structure, it is hard to imagine a system that promotes vision up to a certain level, and then supports empowerers above that level. It is like expecting politicians to actually be “servants of the people” when the finances and process of move to higher levels politically require being a servant to political and financial allies.

But imagine for a moment if a system could be developed in missions that follows the ideas of the quote above.

Imagine a mission agency that seeks to support the vision of missionaries within their organization rather than seeing them as pawns to be mobilized for their own vision?

Again, these may be a bit unrealistic. However, I think that at least there is a possibility of some modest changes that can be done so that hierarchies can empower rather than disempower and embrace vision from others rather than crush it.

  • Set up a structure that embraces training, and supporting the troops on the ground to carry out their task. Reject a military war model of a group of generals far removed from the front lines moving around troops.
  • Seek top-level leaders whose vision is more about empowering others rather than being empowered by others.
  • Seek to establish patterns that affirm empowering leadership at the lower levels so that at the higher levels the pattern and process doesn’t have to change.

On this last point— Imagine a missionary who seeks to work with local leaders by empowering them to do what God has called them to do.  This would be quite different than the more common method of a missionary coming in with a clear vision of what he or she wants to do and seeks to find local allies who can be brought in to serve the missionary’s vision.  Imagine a church pastor who sees himself as one who as an empowering leader seeing the church as a priesthood of believers, and works with the church rather than rules over the church.

Who knows…. it just might work.

Update to Theo-Storying

On By missionmusingsIn storiesLeave a comment

I finally got around to revising Theo-Storying: Reflections on God, Narrative and Culture. I expanded one chapter, and added an entirely new chapter. The new chapter is on the use of stories for theological reflection. I alsotheostorying fixed a number of little errors from the earlier edition. Curiously, I was able to keep it the same number of pages because I adjusted the formatting slightly. This allowed me to keep the same cover. I don’t know why… but I like the cover.

For some reason I had a bit more trouble with Amazon this go-around. For the E-book version, it wasn’t accepting my .doc file. I ended up sending my .pdf file. Amazon Kindle doesn’t really recommend using .pdf because the results apparently can be a bit “wonky.” However, I saw no more “wonkiness” with this version than the normal e-book result. But hopefully later we can solve that problem. With the paperback version, it was different. Everything went in smoothly, but then Amazon said I need to verify that I hold the copyright. I don’t think I gave them any reason to doubt that, so not sure the problem. Then I found that the Edit button is disabled… so I can’t (yet) fix things. However, when I went onto Amazon, it looks like the new version of my book is there. So not sure what is going on… but it seems like it doesn’t really matter to the end user— just me.

In some ways, Theo-Storying is my favorite book. That is because it is the only book that I wrote because I wanted to write it. This is not strictly true. It is the only book that I wrote because I wanted to THAT I FINISHED. Other books I finished I wrote because of it being my dissertation, or because my wife or I are teaching a course and we wanted a book for students here in Asia that covers the topics in a way that is appropriate for the trainees.

 

How to Keep Them Talking???

On By missionmusingsIn dialogueLeave a comment

I was looking at a blog of one of my favorite Asian theologians. His blog is on Patheos. Patheos appears to be a webspace that allows bloggers (especially theological or religious) to reside. I am not sure if they allow the bloggers to be monetized, but there are an awful lot of advertisements. Much of the advertisers are really, Really, REALLY SKETCHY. Personally, I am not interested in clicking on an advert to get a prophecy from my personal angel. If my personal angel wants to tell me something, he/she can email or PM me like the rest.

One advertisement caught my eye, however. It said.

How to shut up an atheist in 15 seconds flat.

Click Here to Find Out How

A strange whim came over me and I clicked on it (something I never ever ever do).  It said,

Atheists silenced by “Adam Gene” discovery.

A new blessing for every Christian American.

It started to try to open up a video for me to watch… but I dumped out before that happened. I wasn’t convinced I was interested. First of all, it is apparently for Christian Americans and most of the people I minister with and to are Christian Asians. Second, if this “Adam Gene” is such a wonderful thing (“a new blessing”) shouldn’t it be a new blessing for atheists? Do Christian Americans really need a new blessing? Let’s not get greedy…

Not having watched the video, I have to guess what is being said. I guess they are saying that there is something that someone labeled the “Adam Gene” in the human genome whose character is so self-evidently inexplicable from an non-theistic evolutionary perspective that a committed atheist will be completely dumbfounded and have no retort to this. And this discovery can be explained adequately in 15 seconds or less. Without knowing what this new blessing is (which I guess must actually be an “old blessing” since it is given the moniker “Adam”), I still have my doubts. Worldviews are generally quite resilient to opposing views, and evidence is rarely as “In Your Face!!” as proponents think it is.

For me, however, I am thinking more about an advert for Patheos that would be a bit different. It could be something like this:

Atheists

I feel like this would be much more valuable and interesting. I feel it sounds clickbait-y enough. Adding “in 15 seconds flat” is overkill, and I think disingenuous as well. When a person clicks on it, they are taken to a list. Perhaps the list could look something like this:

  1. Let them know that you are genuinely interested in what they believe.
  2. Listen actively and intently to what they say, seeking to not only understand what they believe but also why they believe it. (Talk less, listen more.)
  3. Demonstrate to them that you genuinely care about them as fellow human beings; and see each as an individual person, not a label or category.
  4. Make it clear that the care you demonstrate to them is not contingent on them coming around to your way of thinking.
  5. Invite them to share their faith journey to atheism. Seek to understand and empathize as much as possible with the feelings involved in that process.
  6. Dispel the stereotype that you as a theist believe that they, as atheists, must be bad people.
  7. Agree with them in areas that you can honestly agree, Don’t pretend certainty on things that you can’t be certain about.
  8. If asked to share what you believe, do so with humility, gentleness, and respect.

I would like to think that following such a list would be a blessing to Christians (American or otherwise) and Atheists alike.

Quite an improvement in my view.

Quitting as Lack of Faith or Act of Faith?

On By missionmusingsIn Commentary, Missions as Vocation, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Going into Missions is often thought of as an act of letting go. One lets go of one’s former job, one’s home culture, and often many friends and even family.

One might think that means that missionaries

walking away

are good at letting go, but that is often not the case. In fact, the letting go in the past may make one less prone to do it in the field. One of the main challenges is letting go of ministries or projects. There can be a number of reasons. This is not an exhaustive (or exhausting) list.

  1. Fear of Change. We are creatures of inertia or homeostasis. It takes energy to change, to learn, to grow. If we have been doing something, we are likely to try to keep it going (1st order change) rather than stop and do something different (2nd order change).
  2. Comfort. Not unrelated to the first one, but now expressed in a more positive way. We get good at something and it feels like we have found our niche or our calling. It feels right to stay where we are and it feels wrong to cut ties… break relationships… end what has been so much of our present. Innovation and new challenges seem wrong, because we have gotten good at thinking “inside the box,” and hanging out in our “comfort zone.”
  3. Sense of Ownership or Privilege. We identify our ministry work with ourselves rather than with God, or with locals. The ministry feels like “ours” and not “theirs.” We sympathize with the writer of Ecclesiastes whose complaint was of how the rewards of one’s hard labor eventually go to those who did not work for it or earn it.
  4. Hubris. It is tempting to think that a ministry cannot survive without us. To let go can feel like dooming a ministry to collapse. Unfortunately, that attitude can actually create this reality. Thinking one is indispensible can lead a missionary not to train up others to take his/her place.
  5. Unable to Recognize the Times. I Chronicles 10:32 speaks “Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do,…” Missionaries don’t always recognize when times have changed and situations changed. A need may disappear. A missionary may have transitioned from pioneer, to parent, to partner, to participant, and can (and should) move along. Many projects come to their natural end of life, but instead of being celebrated as a completed task, are put on life-support and maintained in a state of ineffectiveness.
  6. Fear that it Suggests a Lack of Faith. When is giving up on a project a sign of lack of faith, and when is it an act of faith? This takes a great deal of discernment, because leaving can be a calculated plan to follow God’s calling, or a running away from difficult tasks and choices. Retreat can be an act of cowardice or a an act of sound strategy. Leaving too soon is bad, but so is leaving too late. For some people it is a lack of faith because they believe the calling of God is static (“God has called you to this place for this ministry… until death”) rather than dynamic (“Calling is following God wherever He leads”).

If you are looking for easy answers, you will find none here. Listening to God and to wise mentors and peers are important, but these will remove all doubt. It is somehow right that MINISTRY rhymes with MYSTERY. There is, and should always be, a certain amount of uncertainty. Ultimately, our decisions must be Acts of Faith.

Writing Status

On By missionmusingsIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I have been writing more lately and so thought I would update my status on books that are and books that will probably never be.  For the books that are you can click on my Amazon page…. HERE.  With the exception of my medical missions, my books are not formally edited so they are what I (or in two cases what my wife and I) thought were worth saying.

Dynamics in Pastoral Counseling and Training

  • Subject:  Pastoral Counseling and Pastoral Theology
  • Target Reader:  CPE Trainee, or Bible School student
  • Status:  Just published September 2019
  • Comment:  Co-authored with my wife, who is a CPE Supervisor.  A follow-on to “The Art of Pastoral Care.” Takes an Integrationist or Christian Counseling perspective to the relationship between theology and psychology.

Dialogue in Diversity:  Christians in Conversation with a Multifaith World

  • Subject:  Interreligious Dialogue
  • Target Reader:  Missions student
  • Status:  Published January 2019.  About to go through minor revisions in preparation for a new missions class
  • Comment:  Takes a perspective of Dialogue more focused on Clarification and breaking down barriers to conversation between adherents of different faiths, rather than an apologetic or a “common ground” approach.

The Art of Pastoral Care

  • Subject:  Pastoral Care & Counseling
  • Target Reader:  Bible School student, CPE trainee, or Churchmembers seeking competency in lay-pastoral care.
  • Status:  Published December 2017.  Revisions are not scheduled at this time.
  • Comment:  Co-authored with my wife who is a CPE supervisor.  This is actually our most popular book.

Ministry in Diversity:  Applied Cultural Anthropology in a Multicultural World

  • Subject:  Cultural or Missions Anthropology
  • Target Reader:  Bible School or Missions School student
  • Status:  Latest edition December 2017. Collecting minor corrections to be incorporated sometime in 2020.
  • Comment:  My second most popular book.  A pretty accessible entry-point to the subject.

Theo-Storying:  Reflections on God, Narrative, and Culture

  • Subject:  Theological Reflection and Storying
  • Target Reader:  Those who like to use stories to hear, reflect, and theologize.
  • Status:  Latest Edition June 2015.  Undergoing a modest revision with at least one more chapter.
  • Comment:  I think this is my personal favorite work since I wrote it because I love the topic (as opposed to writing it for courses I am teaching).  Enjoying updating it at the moment.

Principles and Practices for Healthy Medical Missions:  Seeking the Church’s Role for Effective Community Outreach in the Philippines and Beyond

  • Subject:  Christian Medical Missions
  • Target Reader:  People, churches, and agencies involved in Christian medical missions. (Focus is on the Philippines)
  • Status:  Latest Edition February 2015.  No updates planned.
  • Comment:  This is the condensed book form of my doctoral dissertation.

Books that I started but will probably never finish

  • Book on Missions Theology.  This is probably the most viable book of the ones I started but did not finish. Took a lot of stuff from that book and put it into my other books that I did complete.
  • Book on Holistic Ministry.  A lot of good stuff in it… but also a lot of stuff that did not stand up well upon rereading later. Again, took the best stuff and incorporated in other books, or in class lesson plans.
  • Autobiographical Book on Missions. Wrote this pretty early… only 4 years into missions. Maybe something to do— EVENTUALLY. However, will wait until I am older (or maybe won’t do it). I have read a number of autobiographical works of missionaries. Some are great. Some are… meh.