Rant of the Exiles

Family. That's it. The Chinese immigrant church attempts to replicate the extended nuclear family of one's ancestry. It is the most redeeming aspect of the Chinese church in a nutshell.  It is best because of the unity, harmony, devotion, and respect inherent to the family unit. Nothing I have observed in mainstream evangelical culture rivals the Chinese church's ability to cultivate a family atmosphere. Chinese churches place tremendous value on unity, harmony, and conflict avoidance. There are five aspects to how a Chinese church builds a family: food, communal worship, caring, size, and resistance to change. As one woman put it, coming into a Chinese church/fellowship group has a "homey" feel - it's like returning home. The family that eats together stays together:  Like many immigrant churches, Chinese churches host lunch immediately after worship service and everyone dines together as a family. Food is pivotal in Chinese culture and a spec...

Dedicated to all the men who have shaped and formed me over the years Only steel forges steel in the smithy's store               Where bellows blow and fan                     The hammer strikes where iron burns bright give          Glory when man makes man               Father's bond with son is fire-forged not By blood but force and heat Discipline fans flame and wisdom's thunder Pounds sound in measured beat A boy may declare himself fully grown Thinks he's great, thinks he can Yet boy needs furnace to mold his heart since Only man can brand man  Shall a tender flower wield the hammer That batters steel to form? Can a willow withstand the withering heat Of the forge's scorching storm? A woman's birth pain ends but a man's true Labor is forging soul The contours, the ...

This  article  highlights some of the tension in reading too much Jesus into the bible. It's a struggle that every preacher and teacher should wrestle with.  In our preaching fellowship, we've been discussing how to discover Christ in the Old Testament while honoring the authorial intent of the human writer. How definitively can one say that any particular Old Testament passage points to Jesus? What kind of criteria can we use? On one hand, I can't overestimate the centrality of Christ as the overriding message of the scriptures. Though the bible is 80% law, the show piece of scripture is the grace of God revealed in Christ Jesus. On the road to Emmaus, the post-resurrection Jesus told his companions, "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled." In light of this statement and others, I view the Old Testament through the lens of the New...

Marc from the UK responds to my last post: I have to be honest, the "friend zone" concept that seems to be prevalent in today's culture (particularly American culture) is a little strange to me. Perhaps it's just a cultural thing.. But I don't find it useful to look at things in that way, this is why: I agree that believing you can win a girls' affection by being a good girlfriend is a myth, and I've often witnessed a "nice guy" who's chasing a girl that isn't into him, the more he does for her the more she loses respect for him. However, I believe that developing a friendship with someone you're interested in is a good thing. It seems that in US culture (I've never lived in the US but I went to an American school in Germany for a year) when a guy is interested, he'll often make his intention known straight away and ask the girl out on a "date". The issue I see with this is that often an individual will form ro...

Fake crying over fake friendship The friend zone refers to a person's unintended relationship status. It usually begins with a man who pursues a romantic relationship with a woman by building a friendship. His failure to do so is referred to as being friend-zoned.  Being friend-zoned implies the girl consciously chooses to plant her male girlfriend in a platonic hypostasis. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you're a guy, you chose it. If you're a Christian guy, you doubly chose it. Unintentionally or unconsciously, you made the decision to get locked up in friend prison. Here's why and some ways to break out:  1) You're a man and that means you're not a girlfriend:  Feminism minimizes the difference between men and women. Therefore, men can be friends with women the way women are friends with each other. And women can be friends with men the way men are friends with each other. Unfortunately, reality doesn't work that way. One or the ot...

I am. I have a lot of knowledge about the Holy Spirit. I have a biblical basis for understanding his unique role in the Trinity. I know he is present in my life and guarantees my eternal salvation. He is my counselor and he empowers all Christians.  And yet I am afraid to talk about the Holy Spirit explicitly in daily life. I'm scared of miracles - of supernatural manifestations of the divine. I don't have 100% certainty of when I'm walking with the Spirit. I'm suspicious of people who claim to regularly experience the Spirit's power in a tangible way and the way they talk about it. I'm uncomfortable when Christians say "I felt the Spirit leading me. . ." I've always seen this lead-in as impossible to argue with and a spiritualized excuse to justify an action.  And yet it's good to express confidence in one's faith. And Jesus does indeed promise the Spirit will guide us into truth. And there's so much biblical evidence for...

Lake Schmidell, Desolation Wilderness After attending the bar mitzvah of a friend of Caleb's earlier this year, I got excited about doing some kind of manhood ritual for him.  It was my first bar mitzvah and I was deeply moved by the experience. I identified two aspects of the Jewish coming of age ceremony where the adolescent male invests in the process. First, he must sing a large section of the Old Testament in Hebrew from memory. Second, he must perform a community service project and present a report during the ceremony. There was incredible symbolism throughout the worship service. Everything is sung in Hebrew and the rabbi did a great job explaining the meaning behind the objects. The Torah is held up and people touch it as it passes to demonstrate reverence and obedience. This ceremony represented the confluence of four distinct identities: spiritual, ethnic, family, and gender. The closet Protestant equivalent is baptism, if baptism were also ethnic and gender-orient...