Rant of the Exiles

Mark 1:40-41 And a leper came to him, imploring him, and kneeling said to him, If you will, you can make me clean. 41 Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, I will; be clean. I sat in a McDonald’s hours before the governor of California announced a shelter-in-place directive for Santa Clara County residents. Social distancing was already in full effect - every other table had a sign “DO NOT SIT”. The McDonald’s near my home has two rooms - a main dining room where the counters and drink station are, and a side dining area where the restrooms are located. An older Asian woman sat fifteen feet away from me at a table. I heard her begin to cough. Once she started coughing, a person sitting in the room immediately got up and left. Another customer walked in and abruptly turned around.  If the devil wanted to devise a scheme to further create division and alienation, he would concoct a novel illness that would not kill the healthy but...

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...

Photo by  Tim Mossholder  on  Unsplash Once your children are old enough to get involved in activities, you will spend a lot of time driving them around. Even though Judy and I restrict the number of activities our kids are involved in, with four kids, it’s still a lot of driving. I’ve been told car rides are a great place for parents to bond with kids. They’re a captive audience and you can ask them any kind of question. I agree but it’s not easy. Here are some specific tips to help make conversation with your kids during car rides: 1. Think of specific questions, conversation topics, and games for longer drives: Most of making conversation is observing people and seeing what they do; I’ve had two separate sex talks with my boys in the car. During college, I remember my dad driving me somewhere and without transition, asked me a deeply personal question. I think we were talking about the weather and then he said “So do you masturbate?” That was so memorably awk...

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...

If atheism were a religion like Christianity, what would be its theological tenets?  My friend Eric suggested our poetry writing group and book club read How to Have Impossible Conversations by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay as a way to have meaningful conversations in a polarized and divided culture. Since Eric is an atheist, our group likes to be upfront about the religious content of a book recommendation. To my surprise before I started reading, Eric sent an email apologizing for the evangelistic nature of the book.  His email piqued my interest and I finished the book in a couple days. Reading Impossible Conversations through the lens of atheist evangelism was fascinating. This book offers helpful insights to anyone committed to promoting dialogue. And yet as I made my way through Impossible Conversations, I realized it was intended to help atheists convert believers, primarily Christians, to non-believers. Boghossian already wrote A Manual for Creating A...

I’m not sure if I’m on the #YangGang bandwagon yet but I’m certainly intrigued. Yang is funny and self-deprecating. His humor is evident throughout his book “The War on Normal People” with lines like “This was back when people dated in college” and his mom’s endorsement of universal basic income (UBI). My favorite chapter is the first, titled “My Journey”. I love how he tells his growing up story in a couple pages and I resonated with his stories of being bullied with ethnic slurs. I couldn’t relate to his entrepreneurial success but admired how he “had gone from being an underdog to one of the guys with the answers, from finding the most marginalized or excluded person in the room to finding the richest person and making him or her feel special” (pg. 9). I love how he visited various cities - Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh among many - and personally witnessed the hollowing out of the middle class. These rapidly increasing negative effects on America’s cities, Yang calls the G...