What is the gospel?

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 »

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.

I’ve recently been refreshed in my vigor and boldness to pray for and pursue the comprehensive transformation of the city of Bangkok. This was the audacious desire that God placed on my heart back in the summer of 2002, my second summer participating in Intervarsity’s Global Urban Trek. As I look back on that summer, God did some amazing things in reworking our worldviews and giving several of us desires that are insane by human reckoning. Read the rest of this entry »

Wow. I can’t believe its 2007. I can’t believe I’ll be turning 27 later this year. Makes me feel old…

But looking back on 2006, I have to say it was the best year of my life. The primary reason I say that is because my understanding of what the Gospel is has been transformed. Starting in September 2005, I began a journey, kicked off by a mentor telling me how “Today is the best time ever to be a Christian” (I didn’t understand what the heck he meant at the time) and introducing me to several authors. This theological journey of sorts has continued to this day and continues into deeper and deeper waters. The worldview I now have is significantly different from what I had two years ago. I love Jesus so much more. I now understand his Kingdom to be so much more real and tangible and at hand. I have so much more hope for what God is doing on this earth. I am so much more excited to be part of his family, his Body. Read the rest of this entry »

There is life in the Kingdom of God. I am assured of that. But we don’t often choose it. I’ve felt something shift in me recently, especially since I read Brian McLaren’s latest book, “The Secret Message of Jesus”. Not that there’s a whole lot new in there that I haven’t read three and four times over from every Dallas Willard book I’ve read, but its starting to sink in. We have a choice. In every moment and situation. We can choose to live life the eternal kind of way, the Kingdom way that Jesus showed us, or we can choose the normal path of this world. Its basically a realization that we have true and utter freedom in each and every circumstance. There is no place where our responses and behaviors and thoughts and feelings are dictated by what happens to us or around us. We often make that excuse. But that’s just living as a slave to this world. Jesus has set us free. He has proclaimed, “The Kingdom of God is at hand!” Even, or especially, in difficult, trying situations, we can respond to people and things and situations in the Kingdom way rather than the way we feel we have to respond (for “fairness’ sake”, to “set things right”, because we’ve been hurt or made angry, feel we are wronged, etc.). We can seek to bless and build up others, even when we feel misunderstood or misjudged. Regardless of whatever “rights” we would have to validly respond otherwise, we have the freedom to forgoe the path where only greater frustration, stress, anxiety and anger lie. We have the freedom to simply seek to love and encourage and constructively build up others rather than responding in kind to any mistreatment. God doesn’t save us from our circumstances, he saves us in them, giving us an alternative path, the Way, the Kingdom. We need to believe in free will more and not less. Not everything that happens to us happens for a reason. But we can make reason out of each moment by how we respond in it. God has given us true freedom by offering the Kingdom, telling us that it is near, at hand. Let us walk in it. Oh blessed freedom! Praise you God for your gift. Keep us that we may walk in your light always!

I recently wrote a post on the power of an indestructable joy. That was mostly related in terms of encouraging hope where there is despair - particularly the kind of fatalistic despair common among my neighbors in Permsup. Since then though, I’ve been thinking about the relationship of joy to pain. There is pain in despair, sure, but its a pain where an indestructable joy, drunk with the reality of hope, is a truly compassionate thing. There are many situations, however, where such joy is not compassionate but seems almost insensitive. I’m talking of situations where people have received terrible things, and at no fault of their own. Friends suffering from random, debilitating diseases, kidnapped children in northern Uganda being forced into soldier service raping and pillaging as they have been raped and pillaged, etc. Where pain exists and exists in abundance, does joy even seem relevant? While the reality of hope is still a true thing there, what difference does it make? As Henri Nouwen has been teaching me, I think the thing there is just to suffer with people.

Now this makes sense of course, everybody knows that one of the best things you can do for people in pain is just to be with them. Just show them that you care. Don’t run away from the pain, or try to make it seem less than it is. But dwell in it with them.

My question though, is how do we mesh joy with pain? Doesn’t joy and hope have anything to say unto pain? We are people of eternal hope - and we are also called to suffer with people. It’s generally assumed that joy and pain are mutually exclusive. If we have joy, we can’t be experiencing pain; if we are in pain, we can’t be experiencing joy. But is this true? It would seem to me that the entire Christian enterprise rises and falls on whether this assumption is false or not. Because in Christ, there is most certainly hope and therefore joy. But we cannot be followers of Christ unless we endeavor to suffer with those in pain. If we run away from pain, we are not followers of Christ, for Christ left all the glory of heaven to dwell among us and suffer with us. It must be true, therefore, that joy and pain can simultaneously coexist. Read the rest of this entry »

God is just rocking my evangelistic world. How have we gotten things so off for so long? I think most people who are anxious about evangelism are so because they’ve never been equipped with a way to share the gospel that really makes it great news. In the past, I think I was resigned to the reality that though I knew the gospel was so much more than the bridge diagram, I would just have to be patient and hope people saw the real mmmph of the gospel in the way I lived and in deeper conversations we’d get into. I had no way to summarize the gospel that included God’s designs on healing this whole world (with us as a key part in that plan) rather than just an individualistic ticket into heaven, sin exchange summary.

The idea that we don’t have to first convince people that they are sinners, but rather just establish together that we live in one messed up world (a much easier thing) is so freeing. And that the key hook isn’t just a ticket into heaven, but a role in a worldwide revolution to heal this messed-up world, that’s so much easier to sell. What have we been doing all this time starting off the “good news” with a message of condemnation (”you are a sinner”)? That’s not good news, its bad news! (And its not news, deep down, most people know they’re sinners anyway.) But the message that God is about fixing this broken world and that he wants our company in fixing it, and thinks we can be of use to him in fixing it - that’s good news. Read the rest of this entry »

Some of my immediate neighbors in the Permsup community are the drug dealing ring here. A number of these young men and a couple women hang out in front of the community every day and night. In my first year here, I used to hang out with them a fair amount, especially this one kid Gaeng. But in the last few months, it has been a rare occasion that I’ve stopped and chatted with this group. This has been somewhat intentional, in order to focus my energies on the family oriented group that includes Ratchai, Komsorn, YaiGao, etc. in which we already have well-established relationships and significant inroads for ministry. But I think its been partly in avoidance also. This group can be much crasser and the sobriety quotient is much lower. Its just less comfortable to hang out with this crew.

But a couple weeks ago, with my good friend James visiting, they called us over, and we stayed longer than I normally would. And…I felt so comfortable with them. Its funny, like you have to get over that activation energy, and then bam! it flows. Once past that first facade, I felt there was a definite spirit of openness and seeking among these young men. (I think I used to write them off as too drunk to remember anything I would say to them.) There’s about 4 or 5 core men that are always there that I’m familiar with (Bperk, Bpet, Joe, Lek), but then there’s others who are transient in and out. The second time we hung out with them a couple days later, it was actually one of the new guys, Black, who asked me right away, “So, Dave, I’ve been wondering, why is it that you, a foreigner, live in the slum of all places?” A perfect entry to share the gospel! These are the moments I live for. And I feel much more confident now than I did a year ago in terms of sharing the holistic missional wholeness of the gospel and contextualize it as going beyond Buddhism rather than in direct conflict with it. I feel armed now! I can articulate why the gospel is such good news. Read the rest of this entry »

More thoughts on the strong man passage in Mark: At the end of the section, there’s that much-worried-over issue of the unforgiveness to the one who blasphemes the Holy Spirit. I’ve heard numerous theories in my life on what this means and how we don’t need to worry about it and so on. But they all seem to be a bit of spiritual/mental gymnastics for a clear statement. Perhaps what I’m going to say here is a little bit of gymnastics as well, but it makes sense to me. My two main influences in this study are Dallas Willard and William Barclay. In Barclay’s commentary, he explains how at the time of Jesus, folks didn’t have the same understanding of the Holy Spirit that we do today. So to blaspheme the Holy Spirit didn’t mean so much as to speak bad of the third person of the trinity, but rather to confuse the will and purposes of God, as well as his actions, as those of Satan. It is to see things opposite from reality. Read the rest of this entry »