Rant of the Exiles

Initial logo courtesy of Bach Nguyen I had hoped to announce the name of the church plant during service this Sunday at Garden City. That won’t happen so this is a virtual announcement.  We are Quicksilver Church. In 1989, my parents bought a home near New Almaden , in the one of the most southern reaches of San Jose. I never understood why it was called “New” because the area felt decidedly old, run-down, and rural. The original Almaden is a town and municipality in Spain, about 200 miles south of Madrid. The mercury deposits of Almaden, Spain account for the largest quantity of liquid mercury metal produced in the world.  New Almaden, on the other hand, is aptly named for the location of the oldest and most productive mercury mine in the United States. Mercury, also known as quicksilver, was mined extensively during the California Gold Rush beginning in 1848. Mercury is used to recover tiny pieces of gold mixed in soil and sediments. Mercury and gold settle t...

Photo by  Michelle Jimenez  on  Unsplash Exactly nine years ago, my boss, friend, and mentor, Justin Buzzard, began planting Garden City Church and posted Top 10 Reasons NOT to Join a Church Plant . I thought it might be fun to share my own top 10 list. Like the church plant itself, which will be a Garden City daughter church, my top 10 list replicates much of the thinking in Justin’s list and extends it to the church plant’s unique context.  Do not join a church plant if . . . 1. Your personal dream for the church plant supersedes your love for other believers. “Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Life Together . This applies to every church, in its infancy or otherwise, and yet church plants are tempted by the idealism of its members, and th...

James Taylor, the great grandson of Hudson Taylor, the famed missionary to China who founded the China Inland Mission (now OMF) once said: “It is a tragedy so many foreign Chinese have left the evangelization of China up to the non-Chinese.” James spoke those words over twenty-five years ago during a Chinese church retreat when I was a senior in high school. His calling out of the Chinese diaspora vis-a-vis white missionaries challenged and haunted me. This challenge was the impetus behind my plans to join Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ) staff to do a one-year mission trip to China. But I didn’t go. Rather, I accepted an invitation from my hometown pastor, Tom Chow, to return to San Jose and reach my American-born Chinese peers. After nine years of working as a project manager and volunteering with the youth group and young adult ministry, I joined the staff of my home church, Chinese Church in Christ - South Valley (South Valley) in 2006. In the summer of 2007, South Valley...

I recently taught my kids about the power of compounding . It’s a finance term that refers to the exponential growth of an investment. You invest a small sum of money which earns an annual return that is re-invested and over time, accumulates into a large sum. Compounding has a  snowball effect . The chart above demonstrates how saving the exact amount but starting ten years earlier can make a huge difference. Emily contributes 33% more than Dave but ends up with twice as much wealth because of the additional time her money has spent compounding. Finance bloggers extend the principle of compounding to other areas of life . One example is mountain biking . They write about how a skill can be broken down into various incremental steps or sub-skills. Working on one sub-skill at a time generates a compounding effect. I have been playing basketball for over thirty years. My body has deteriorated in the past decade but I’ve continued to work on my skill set. In my teens, I played as o...

An awkward Asian American intellectual reflects on being a missionary exile in East Oakland Russell Jeung’s new book is called At Home in Exile: Finding Jesus among My Ancestors & Refugee Neighbors . An alternate title could have been "Nerdy Asianz in the Hood". Make no mistake about it - Russell Jeung is a nerd. He absolutely fits the model minority stereotype. How to tell? Exhibit A: When you graduate from world-renown Lowell High School in San Francisco, get a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Stanford University, and then later obtain a PhD from UC Berkeley. Check those boxes for Jeung. He now works as a sociology professor at San Francisco State University. I met Jeung for the first time at his book launch. Exhibit B: When you are decidedly unimposing physically. Jeung doesn’t wear glasses but his look fits the nerd mold. He is rail thin and doesn’t appear to do any strength training. His body language is awkward and although a fluid public speaker...

I've been loving Malcolm Gladwell's new podcast, Revisionist History. A recent episode is called Generous Orthodoxy ; it tells the story of a 98-year old Mennonite pastor named Chester Wenger who loses his pastoral credentials for performing the wedding ceremony of his gay son. This podcast attempts to reconcile the tension between relationship (generosity) and moral principles (orthodoxy). Without a doubt, he falls on the generosity side of the question. His appeal to orthodoxy consists of personal sacrifice and respect for the institution.  There's a lot to disagree with: 1) Gladwell does not espouse conservative Christian beliefs: One of my friends couldn't finish the podcast because of Gladwell's "smarmy and superior tone". It's also immediately apparent, especially if you've listened to his previous podcasts, that Gladwell is politically progressive. In one of that three-part series, he attacks Stanford, Bowdoin, and other elite colleg...

Over at our South Africa ministry trip blog