Featuring some of the members of the 20-30s small group at the River. 

I went to the Highway Community a few weeks ago because it's nearby.  Tara Leigh Cobble, a Christian Folk Rock / Acoustic / Pop Artist, was a guest leading worship.  She was selling CDs afterwards and I got lured over (even though the message was about money.  and quite a good message, too.).  She had a bunch of cards with pictures of kids laying out, and it turned out to be kids looking for sponsors through this organization she is promoting: Gospel for Asia: Bridge of Hope.

I spoke with her about the organization a little to see how it's different from Compassion International.  She's really passionate for the cause.  It's pretty cool because 100% of the money goes to missions.  No administration or fundraising.  And with all that I've been learning in my Perspectives class, I'm beginning to understand why it's important to reach all the unreached people groups.  

As I looked through the stack of kids for the cutest little girl, she exclaimed to me "Don't worry! I have more kids in my trunk!"

Hehe.

On God's Passion

An excerpt from John Piper's "Let the Nations be Glad" is in our textbook and this one part struck me where Piper wrote:

"Missions flows from the fullness of God's passion for God and it aims at the participation of the nations in the very passion that he has for himself."

Huh? It sounds so... self-centered. I get that worship is what fuels missions, I get that. The verses that are cited make sense (John 15:11 says "I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete"; John 17:13 says "I am coming to you now, but I say these things while I am still in the world, so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them"). It makes sense that the God desires us to experience His joy. But this idea of God's passion for himself just sounds so strange. Maybe it's because I only read an excerpt from Piper's book and I'm not getting the full context. I suppose God is God after all, so... Anyway.

On the Gospel of the Kingdom

What intrigued me about Lesson 3 is this passage from Matthew 24:14:

"This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come."

God gives us this mission with a motive. The end won't come until the gospel is preached to all nations. So interesting.

On Intercessory Prayer

"Prayer: Rebelling Against the Status Quo" by David Wells really had me floored (you can read it here). The whole idea of prayer is something that's always boggled my mind. Part of me just always figures God's will will be done so then what's the point? .

He writes:

"What, then, is the nature of petitionary prayer? lt is, in essence, rebellion—rebellion against the world in its fallenness, the absolute and undying refusal to accept as normal what is pervasively abnormal. It is, in this its negative aspect, the refusal of every agenda, every scheme, every interpretation that is at odds with the norm as originally established by God. As such, it is itself an expression of the unbridgeable chasm that separates Good from Evil, the declaration that Evil is not a variation on Good but its antithesis. Or, to put it the other way around, to come to an acceptance of life “as it is,” to accept it on its own terms—which means acknowledging the inevitability of the way it works—is to surrender a Christian view of God."

Gee, I might as well just copy and paste the whole article in here. There is not much I can comment on, I just thought I'd paste in the little snippets from my readings that intrigue me.

The Perspectives class takes me back, way back, to my teenage churchgoing years. And not because of the content of the course. Which was great yesterday. But I'll write about that later.

The class is inside a Chinese church. I feel like I haven't been inside a physical church building in years (besides for weddings), let alone a Chinese church building. For some reason, I feel like Chinese churches have a different feel to them. Maybe it's the fluorescent lighting or the big banners on the walls in Chinese and English. Or the folding tables and chairs. Perhaps all churches are really like this but I'm really only familiar with the Chinese ones.

The people in the class are mostly Chinese, and some of them speak in Cantonese with each other. It's weird hearing older women referred to as "auntie" again. I feel like I haven't been around my parents friends and their kids very much anymore, so it's not often I hear other people use that to address people.

Class opens up with a few worship songs to get our hearts in the right places and focused on God. The lyrics to the songs are projected on the screen using an overhead projector (in case you've forgotten, it's a big box with a lamp inside used to project light onto a screen) and transparencies (thin film with writing on it that is projected by the overhead projector). What was once so common seems to have nearly disappeared, at least in this Silicon Valley area. I remember using them all throughout school until college. And then they sort of just slowly disappeared and then all the LCD projectors just took over one day. But to be standing there, looking at transparencies projected on the screen, singing praise songs that I haven't heard since youth group or the beginning of college, is just so... nostalgic. I kind of miss it. In fact, in a way I prefer it. Because there are no distracting images of hands or candles or children behind the lyrics. Or worse, moving images that make you feel like you're traveling through space. Those make me feel queasy. I know they are intended to be some sort of visiual stimulation to aid worship, but honestly, they just make me want to throw up. It's probably just me.

Anyway, this Chinese church setting catapulted me back in time to going to fellowship when I was a kid: the Alpha and Omega junior high group and the "Genesis" high school group. So many memories of "growing up" in the San Jose Alliance church. It reminds me of an innocent age where following God really wasn't that hard. The familiarity of this setting made me reflect back on my whole churchgoing experience as a teenager.

The talk given by yesterday's speaker at church (Nikki Toyama) and at the luncheon afterwards was about gender, culture, and faith. It made me think a lot about my own identity as a female Chinese American Christian. Where a lot of "me" comes from is from church, from being female, from being Chinese. My expectations of church all stem from my experience of church when I was younger (as I'm sure it is for anyone from any culture). That experience is subconsciously sort of my baseline every time I go to a new church. I had never given much thought to the intersection between culture and spirituality before, except for observing that a lot of Chinese and Christian ideals line up well, making it easy to become Christian without too radical of a lifestyle change (at least on the outside). Berkeley is full of a lot of people like me: Asian American Christians. This seemed surprising to me when I was a student there because of the liberal culture. But it's really not surprising because hello, aren't we all supposed to be overachievers that strive to get into the best public school? I feel a lot of times like I'm in this box. I am lumped in with this group of people. And so much of me wants to fight it, to be different. To not be like that stereotypical Asian American Christian. I don't even know what defines this box exactly, or why or how I fight it. Or why it even matters. But I bet this feeling is not unique to me or my culture.

My thoughts seem to not flow together now because it is late. I really want to read Nikki Toyama's book, "More than Serving Tea."