Being Fully Present

We see clearly in Luke 22:24-30 that the disciples fully expected Jesus to become a military/political king who would take power in such a way that they would also have posts of power according to their perceived ‘greatness’, like ministers in a cabinet. Even after Jesus shared his last supper with them, talking about how he would not drink of the fruit of the vine again until the Kingdom of God comes and describing this cup as his blood poured out, they argued about who would be the greatest. In hindsight, we can mock the disciples, but we would probably be the same in their position. Even today we often miss the point that Jesus was explaining here that the Kingdom of God comes about through sacrifice and pouring oneself out for others.

But what most amazes me, is how Jesus could entrust his entire mission to these clueless disciples. Read the rest of this entry »

When I first was coming to Thailand, someone close to me said, “I really respect your desire to go and share the gospel. But I don’t understand why you want to focus on the poor.” I couldn’t believe he said that and my anger burned at him. How could someone separate the poor from the gospel? This person later questioned whether focusing on the poor was a waste of time, energy, and resources. Oh my anger burned. God’s special concern for the poor is clear throughout scripture. How did he not get it?

Sometimes recently though, and especially today, I can understand those questions and the pessimism behind it. I’ve lived and worked among the poor in Bangkok for nearly four years now and I would have to say that a lot of the reasons that the poor are poor and continue to be poor are the fault of the poor. And it does seem sometimes that working to achieve holistic development among the poor is a slippery slope battle (not a downhill one, but an uphill one). Read the rest of this entry »

For the past 3.5 years, I have been a squatter. I have lived in the Permsup community, a place of uncertain existence. Permsup has been home to about 500 people, the majority of whom have lived there 12-15 years or more. Some have lived there for 40 years. Ever since before I moved in, we were aware that a road project was scheduled to come straight through Permsup, evicting everyone. This pending eviction has hung over our heads like a cloud that destroys hope for the future and the freedom to plan.

It has affected me in very concrete ways. Because I never knew how long we would be here, I always felt hesitant to invest in my house and in long-term thinking programs of development. If I had known Permsup would still mostly be standing 3.5 years later, I would have made a lot of improvements to my house, both for my own living situation as well as to be a community resource center, perhaps with a computer lab for teaching skills to the neighbors and so on. In affect, the cloud of eviction forced me to live like a camper, wanting to live there among the people to identify with them and stand with them in solidarity and build relationships, but afraid to really move in and invest like this was truly my home. I was always afraid any investments made would be bulldozed away in short time.

And so it is for my neighbors as well. They live an uncertain existence, never feeling like this is truly their home, but cherishing the cheap housing it provides currently too much to plan for a better and more costly future. Without land rights, a community cannot develop. There is no foundation. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m actually in Manila right now. (I fly back to Bangkok tonight.) I was invited by the representative of one of the foundations I’m writing a grant with for the LadderWorks project to come and share about the LadderWorks vision with his pastors training seminar for sustainable transformational ministry here. Its been great to visit Manila for the first time. It feels like Los Angeles compared to Bangkok. Bangkok is maybe more like New York in comparison. Manila is so much quieter and less crowded, a drivable, relaxed city compared to Bangkok. And its really encouraging to see Filipino pastors get excited about the LadderWorks vision and start to think about how they might start something similar here in the Philippines.

While here, I’m also working on the official grant application for this foundation. At one point, it asks for a one page statement of faith. This was a good exercise for me to write out somewhat concisely, but in a stream of consciousness manner (just a set of “I believe….” statements really) what I believe. Its not exhaustive obviously, and its just a rough sketch. But with the amount of change that has occurred in my theology over the last couple years, its freeing to state out everything in one page as a confession of sorts. I thought I’d share it here as well.

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I believe in the Gospel that Jesus is Lord, that the Kingdom of God is at hand, that we are to repent and believe the good news, that the promises of new creation are real and true and for this world. I believe that Jesus is the Word, the Logos, the Way, the Truth, the Life. Read the rest of this entry »

When we talk about contextualization issues, I often find myself or others setting up the conversation at some point with something along the lines of, “How far can we go?”  Its true that it is a discernment process of what is good and redeeming and redeemable with a culture or a religious tradition that we can use directly or give new meaning to give glory to God and encourage people to remain within their culture and family while being followers of Jesus.  And of course, this process is primarily that of the indigenous believers interacting with the Holy Spirit.  Outsiders and missionaries like myself can never be the most effective at spearheading this process.  Though I find we often have to jumpstart it here to overcome centuries of mission work and Christianity in Thailand that set up stereotypes and ways of doing mission, evangelism , and church that are disinclined to contextualization.

Missionaries pre-field, however, like Perspectives students, often are taught about contextualization as a spectrum or a scale (like the C-1 through C-6 scale for example) where the implicit or explicit message is, “Go far enough to win people, but don’t go too far to where you’re entering into syncretism.”  I think this way of putting syncretism at the far end of the contextualization scale is a misunderstanding of what syncretism is.  Syncretism and contextualization are two different issues entirely, on two different planes.  Or rather, the phenomena of syncretism is the lack of effective contextualization in animistic contexts.  I think rather that we must ask, “How far must we go in contextualizing to ensure against syncretism?”  In fact, the process of contextualization is one in which we take captive every thought and make it obedient to the Messiah, just as Paul instructed. Read the rest of this entry »

Some rough thoughts on contextualization:

What follows is, with a few edits, my thoughts on contextualization of the gospel for Thai Buddhists that I wrote up for one of our Servant Partners trainers who was preparing a teaching on contextualization for the Servant Parnters’ interns in Los Angeles. (April 2007). More polished articles will be forthcoming and posted under my “Writing” page.

The key to my contextualization is that Logos=Tamma. Tamma is widely translated “Dharma” in English, though it is important to note that Theravada (Thailand, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Laos, Burma), Mahayana (China, Korea, Vietnam), Zen (Japan), and Tibetan Buddhisms are more different from each other than Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox or (I think) Sunni and Shiite Islam, and so popular books in the west that emphasize Zen and Tibetan forms might describe things quite different from what I am referring to. The idea of Tamma is the force behind the universe, the right order of things, the path of righteousness, Truth, Wisdom, etc. When I look up Logos in the Greek lexicon on my computer Bible program, the definition is eerily similar. Tamma is the root word behind nature (tammachat), righteousness (kuamchobtaam), normal (tammada), religious truth (kristtaam or puttaam for Christian and Buddhist respectively), scripture (prakristtaamkampi or praputtaamkampi), the community of saints (tammikachon), etc. John makes the leap in John 1 to say that, “In the beginning was the Tamma, and the Tamma was with God, and the Tamma was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made…..The Tamma became flesh and made his dwelling among us…” Read the rest of this entry »

God, I cry out to you on behalf of the city of Bangkok

I ask you for its redemption

Would you change this city, from top to bottom, from inside out

Bring about a new creation, a new beauty, the vision of the new Jerusalem

I believe this city is not forsaken, but is a city sought out Read the rest of this entry »

I realize now that we (or at least I) cannot pray with perseverance for specific niches of the Kingdom of God in a place without also praying for the larger picture and maintaining connection with it.  As I’ll describe in a future post, I believe that’s because, as Paul teaches, the church is founded on the ministry of the apostles and the prophets, not simply the evangelists and the teachers, as we can often think.

Through the encouragement of a dear friend, I’ve been reminded recently of this vision from five years ago of praying for the entire city of Bangkok to be comprehensively transformed.  I’m back again to crying out to God for the salvation and redemption of every inch of Bangkok, even as it drains me of all energy in the process.  I invite you to join with me in praying for this city.  Its like climbing a mountain, taking everything out of you.  But yet so rewarding also as when you come to beautiful vistas and understand God’s heart for a place and are infected with the knowledge of his character and faith in what he’s going to bring about.

Again, I invite you to join with me in praying for this city.  Let’s pray for the knowledge of God’s goodness to spread to every corner and nook and cranny of this city….

I found a leaf

He said this tree is for the healing of the nations

I saw this leaf said, “Thailand”

“Can I take this?” I asked

“Run,” he responded

So how did all of those prayers end up? What fruit do we now see in Bangkok? Well, I can praise God that instead of just one ministry in the red-light districts, I now know of at least 5 very active ministries. I can praise God that in addition to the two lines of the skytrain that existed back in ‘02, Bangkok now has a subway line and vigorous construction on one new skytrain line and an extension of one of the existing lines. Before the coup last year, there were plans to build 4 or 5 new subway lines that would serve a large part of the city, quite similar to my original prayers. Now, those plans seem to be on hold until a new government is elected at year’s end, but the city government has placed posters all over the city promising that the skytrain and subway is coming, just be patient. In our network, we have 4 house churches in slums that did not exist before. By next January, there could be 8 Servant Partners staff pioneering in slums here, compared to zero back in ‘02. There is also several staff from Australia’s Urban Neighbors of Hope ministering in the Klong Toey slum, Bangkok’s largest slum. The Bangkok Vineyard partnered with some missionaries from Hong Kong to begin ministry in that slum as well.  There’s a couple YWAMmers focusing on slums. A small established Thai-led ministry focusing on slum outreach is still continuing as it was 5 years ago. One of the senior pastors of one of Bangkok’s largest churches repented three years ago of listening to the missionaries who told him to focus on church growth and ignore serving the poor. He committed his church to learning about ministry in the slums and has since started a number of cell groups in slums.  The two Christian microenterprise development programs that were just starting back in 2002 (including ours), are still going and have helped hundreds of people from tens of slum communities start small businesses and avoid the usurious loan sharks.

The city is not yet transformed, but God is at work.  There is change.  His people are waking up.  Things are happening.