June 2007

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 »