Rant of the Exiles

I love short-term mission trips. Its exciting to go to another country or region and experience a world radically different from what I'm used to. The team bonding is tremendous and I grow so much as a result. And yet it never ceases to amaze me how we as Christians overestimate the positive impact we have on the target community. We are delusional about the benefits we bring. We think we're making a tremendous difference for the kingdom because we spend two weeks building a house for a family whom we can barely communicate with.  Darren Carlson does a fantastic job describing some of the problems of short-term missions trips here . He talks about how sometimes Christians are not only not helpful but actually do harm to the target community. Here's my favorite paragraph: Imagine a team from France calls your church and says they want to visit. They want to put on VBS  (which you have done for years), but the material is in French. They have heard about how the U.S. ch...

I went to a 3-day home schooling conference this week with Judy. Out of the 80+ moms who attended, I was one of three men (all dads) who participated in all the sessions. In one training class, our instructor kept referring to us as "ladies". Despite the gender inequity (which I was prepared for), I heard all kinds of creative ideas about how to bring up my children in the training and instruction of the Lord. That phrasing comes from Ephesians 6:4 and is a direct admonition to fathers, not mothers. From a biblical perspective, a child's education is the ultimate responsibility of dads. We may (and I do) delegate much of this responsibility to our wives but that doesn't excuse us from final accountability on how our kids turn out. Based on some comments I overheard from moms, I would say the majority of dads are disengaged from their children's education. This is not surprising.  Most fathers never get a chance to practice fatherhood before they become one. ...

Being an alpha male and being a good listener appear to be opposing ideals. But being a good listener requires a game principle called outcome independence. Here's a good primer on outcome independence from a Christian perspective (specifically for pastors!) and one decidedly not , but with gospel implications. Outcome independence means you stay focused on an important goal or process despite resistance. The Old Testament prophets including Jeremiah and Isaiah were HIGHLY outcome independent. They proclaimed judgment and repentance regardless of Israel's response. This principle will help a guy in every type of interpersonal relationship - as a father to his kids, as a husband to his wife/significant other, and as a man to his coworkers and peers. It is worth mentioning here that Asian American men in particular (and I'm preaching to myself here) would benefit greatly from learning outcome independence. Negative example: A couple days ago, I commented to Judy that she h...

I've been sabbatical since the end of May. With Sundays free, Judy and I took the opportunity to visit two churches this past weekend -  Westgate and Southbay . We went to Westgate's Saturday evening 6:40 pm service and Southbay's 10:20 am service. Both churches have exploded numerically in the past couple years. According to my friend's husband who is an elder at Westgate, they grew from 700 to 2000+ Sunday attendees since moving into their new worship center. Southbay's story is even more dramatic - I don't know the numbers but the church is barely four years old and to have four services in a large space is quite impressive. Clarity of values: Having read Simple Church , I understand intellectually the importance of making a church's mission and vision clear. But these churches are putting it into practice. Westgate is very intentional about publicizing their six40 discipleship process and various global/local compassion ministries. Southbay walks pe...

Another thing I talked about at the fatherhood workshop was Bowen family systems therapy and how well it captures the typical Chinese family dynamic. The essence of Bowen theory is that the family is a unit, not just a collection of individuals. That means when one person changes, the dynamic of the rest of the family changes along with it. This understanding of the family fits well with the communal nature of Chinese culture.  One of the eight main concepts of Bowen theory is  triangles . According to Bowen, a triangle is more stable than a dyad. But the problem in a triangle is that there's always someone left out. Let's take a married couple without kids (a dyad). They might look like this below. (These pictures are really crappy. I wish I was more tech-savvy)   In the picture above, you have marital bliss without children. There is intimacy in the relationship. But once you add a child to the family, the system changes. That's what we see in stage 1 below. ...

I led a fatherhood workshop for a group of men this past Saturday. One of the things I talked about was how the typical Chinese family crushes childrens' initiative. Initiative is recognizing a need and responding to it without being asked. Most kids (and adults) don't take initiative because we grew up in a family environment where we were criticized or shamed when we did something beyond what we were asked to do, including even good and helpful things. "I know you were trying to help but how could you wash my red sweater with the whites? Don't ever do laundry without my permission again!" Initiative is foundational to leadership and manhood. A leader recognizes a problem and acts decisively, independently, and if needed, preemptively. But in Chinese culture, the combination of a controlling mother and a passive father results in children being punished for taking any kind of initiative.  Kids learn at an early age that initiative is a bad thing. I ...

This post is dedicated to Fred Gilham whose paper inspired this idea. When you look at a painting, it can take a moment to determine its centerpiece. In this 1851 work by Emmanuel Leutze, it’s pretty clear. The centerpiece is not the boat or the river of ice. It’s not the men rowing or the guy holding the flag. It’s not the guy holding his hat or the guy steering the boat. It’s the man standing in the center, rising up higher and straighter than anyone else. George Washington. He is the center of the picture. He makes up only a small portion of the surface area of the painting. But the picture would not be meaningful without him. He’s the one who made the decision to cross the Delaware River in the middle of the night in order to surprise the Hessian army (artistic license made it a daytime crossing). He’s the one who led his exhausted troops through the freezing cold on that Christmas evening in 1776. The credit for victory in the Battle of Trenton goes to him. All the elements of...