Posted in missional on Aug 30th, 2010
Almost every Filipino I know is Catholic, this was once true for my Irish friends too. Almost every Korean American I know went to a Presbyterian or Methodist church as a child. And almost every older African American woman I know goes to church as well. What does this mean for us? It means it’s [...]
Posted in missional on Aug 30th, 2010
Studies have shown that people find it harder to believe someone when they are culturally different from you… So when someone from a foreign country who speaks and looks and sounds strange to you tells you something, it’s harder to believe even if everything they’re saying is true. I bring this up because if only [...]
Posted in missional on May 13th, 2010
Doing it differently – doing it for real – is going to require sacrifices. Anything extraordinary is going to require sacrifices. What’s a sacrifice? It’s anything beyond what you would normally do, and therefore it costs you… in effort, time, complexity, bandwidth, friends, enemies, emotional energy… If you want to do “what you would normally [...]
Posted in missional on Apr 29th, 2010
I don’t claim to be an expert on this. If anything, I’m the non-expert because I tend to have different tastes and viewpoints from people around me… So in a sense, I ought to be incapable of being relevant to most people, but I found a hack, a work-around. Deep withing the bowels of Scripture [...]
I know you’re supposed to hate paying taxes, but let’s try to think differently for a moment. I propose that in a perfect world, if humankind had never sinned – we’d still have taxes. Sure the tax system would be better, more equitable, more efficient, but we’d still pay taxes. Jesus was living under a [...]
Posted in missional on Apr 7th, 2010
The one thing we need more than money (especially when we’re poor), is the Gospel. Now many will disagree, but let me explain… I believe in the value of social services and hands-on ministry to people in need. But for the poor in a money driven society, I believe that the Gospel message is more [...]
Posted in life skills, missional on Feb 16th, 2010
If God has a ministry for you right now – some way in which you are uniquely placed or uniquely equipped to serve… then one reason you might not be able to figure out what it is, is because you’re confusing your ministry with your skill set… At some point in your life God’s ministry [...]
Posted in missional on Jan 21st, 2010
There’s no reason why you should watch this video of a puppy imitating a whistling sound -other than it freaking cute! What would happen to the the Church if people like you and me didn’t find the unique ministry that God has for us? (See a couple of posts back for what I mean by [...]
Posted in life skills, missional on Dec 15th, 2009
Or “why we don’t have a big flat screen TV…” Or live in a luxury building with doormen, or spend a lot on transportation or expensive vacations, etc… Not that there’s anything wrong with those things… But we can afford more of those things than we have – so we choose to do with less. [...]
Posted in life skills, missional, random thoughts on Aug 3rd, 2009
Maybe it’s because we live in a materialistic society, but we tend to think more about the things we really *want* and less about the things we really want to *do.* So you wouldn’t say it out loud but you probably have a pretty clear idea of what kind of car you want to drive, [...]
