On the Anniversary

Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

Prayer of the Week

Grant us, O Lord, to trust in you with all our hearts; for, as you always resist the proud who confide in their own strength, so you never forsake those who make their boast of your mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Prayer for the Week

Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things: Graft in my heart the love of your Name; increase in me true religion; nourish me with all goodness; and bring forth in me the fruit of good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen

The Church will be led by China

China's place in the Christian movement has not been the propagation of Christendom and Western hegemony, as nearly everyone now agrees - in reality, Christendom has long been a historical anachronism. As Huo Shui, a former government political analyst observes, the Christian idea of love has introduced a new value system in China, including the idea of repentance "which is lacking in Chinese culture." He writes of a moral revolution in the New China where the "Christian faith became more indigenous . . . you can no longer say that Christianity is a foreign religion. The Churches are led by Chinese. You see Chinese Bibles. You hear Chinese worship songs. You experience a Chinese style of worship. The church looks and feels Chinese . . . Christianity has finally take root in Shenzhou - in China, the land of God." All this suggests that a China strengthened by its own resources and renewed in its own identity would be a China well endowed to assume a leadership role in the scheme of post-Western Christian developments.

- Lamin Sanneh, Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity (bold mine)

Prayer for Mission

For Mission

Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace: So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you; for the honor of your Name. Amen.

From the daily office of The Book of Common Prayer, 1979.
dailyoffice.org

Identity, club-culture, and the Gospel

"As identities can be picked up from a variety of media sources, the construction of 'who we are' arises increasingly from how we imagine ourselves, rather than from where we live."

- Ian Condry, "Japanese Hip-Hop and the Globalization of Popular Culture" in Urban Life: Readings in the Anthropology of the City, 384.

And, at the same time, as Condry points out, there are places where imagined identity "shows up" and is developed. Condry borrows from the Japanese term genba, used in the hip-hop world to denote the hip-hop clubs as the "actual scene" where hip-hop happens. The word genba is used "in the hip-hop world . . . to contrast the intense energy of the club scene with the more sterile and suspect marketplace" (italics mine, Condry, 386). Condry uses the term genba to describe how within globalization there are global cultural forms that, instead of imposing a cultural imperialism of homogeneity, tend to get interpreted and shaped according to local culture so that there is heterogeneous multiplication of global cultural forms. The diversity and characteristic Japanese-ness of Japanese Hip-Hop is a prime example, and the clubs - the genba - is where it happens.

Condry (after spending over 18 months attending over 100 club events around Tokyo all held between the hours of 1 a.m. and 5 a.m.), describes how even though club culture is extraordinary and exotic it still is "embedded in Japan's political-economic structures, characteristic social relations, and the contemporary range of cultural forms. . . It is largely predictable what kind of pleasures can be expected, and also the generally unpleasant consequences for work or school after a night without sleep" (Condry, 380). This tension is most clearly seen when the clubbers board the first trains at 5 a.m. to return home as the businessmen and women get off the first trains to go to work. Even the train schedule dictates the socializing patterns of the club culture.

It's no wonder that the church has struggled to grow in Japan. When the leading edge of cultural change is centered in smoke-filled clubs between the hours of 1 a.m. and 5 a.m., a Sunday morning worship service that has more in common with a "sterile and suspect marketplace" rather than a place of intense energy and life such as the clubs will by default not capture the imagination of the kinds of people that shape culture in the clubs. Are there any Christians that are part of this club culture? Does anyone know? I sure hope so, because the energy of the club is only a shadow of what could it could be, and what it could lead to, when transformed by the Gospel.

Prayer for the Week

Almighty God, you have given your only Son to be for us a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life: Give us grace to receive thankfully the fruits of this redeeming work, and to follow daily in the blessed steps of his most holy life; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Urban Theology Overview (FTS_MN520)

Today I began my first of two one-week intensives, Encountering the City: Introduction to Urban Mission with Professor Jude Tiersma Watson. In this class we will learn the basic framework and skills to "exegete" the city and the people that live there, which essentially means that we will observe and interact with the different facets of the city in order to better understand who and what the city is. The end goal is that we would know how to "learn" a city and its people, so that we can more effectively join God in bringing his kingdom to bear on the city.

From an introductory article by our professor:

• In 1900 only 10% of the world's population lived in cities, now 50% of the world's population live in cities, and in 20-30 years it will be 70% with most of the growth in Africa and Asia.
• Latin America is already 80% urbanized.
• Within in the U.S., poverty is now expanding to the suburbs as the affluent "gentry" are returning to the city center.
• Because of the rapid change of cities globally, "much of what we have learned about life in cities, and the theology of cities, may not be relevant for the cities of the future."
• "Urban is both a place and a process. Urbanization is the process of growth within the city. Urbanism is the cultural impact of urbanization."
• The terms "urban ministry" and "inner-city" have been used not so much to designate a location but a certain group of people, the poor and at-risk. With the expansion of poverty to the suburbs, will our language change to match reality?
• Anti-urbanism is deep within the fabric of our nation, especially in our majority culture, and especially in the church. The American Dream is not an urban dream. "The greatest barriers to urban mission are not within the city but wihin the church."
• There is a need for further development of urban theology that focuses on praxis, narrative communication of theology, issues of justice, power, exclusion, racial reconciliation, and how the city is interconnected with suburban and rural areas.
  

Throughout this class I will be especially interested in how to apply city research methods to the university campus and surrounding community as well as looking at how universities are interconnected with the city. This should prove fruitful for campus ministry, especially in urban-based, heavily commuter campuses.

Reflections on... Free Churches (FTS_MC500)

For our last class we took up the topic of the ecclesiological grouping known as the Free Churches, which includes everything from Baptist to Assembly of God, from Nazarene to Quaker. For the sake of ease of discussion, we covered the beginning of the Free Church from at the time of the Reformation, the Anabaptists. Their movement was referred to as the Radical Reformation, because not only did they take up the reforms of Luther and Calvin, but they also went even further to deconstruct the entire structure of the church as it existed. Whereas the Reformation continued to maintain the symbiotic partnership between church and state and the expression of the church as one visible institution, the Radical Reformation broke ties with both the government structures and the visible institution of the church. This movement began with a Bible study led by Ulrich Zwingli, from which many left to form independant communities of re-baptized adults. Zwingli, one of the leading Reformers, distanced himself from these Anabaptists ("ana" meaning "again"). Charactersitc of the Anabaptist and most Free Church movements is, of course, adult baptism, an emphasis on holiness, a central focus on the Scriptures, an understanding of the church as against the world, a more thorough emphasis on the priesthood of all believers, and an understanding of sacraments as merely symbols.

We finished the discussion on Free Churches with a brief overview of the modern global Pentecostal movement. Most Pentecostals would trace their roots to the Azusa street revival of 1906 in Los Angeles, and since then, according to Dr. Bolger, the Pentecostal movement has become the fastest growing social movement anywhere in the world and at any time of history. Pentecostalism is more appropriately described as a movement, since there are many different denominations within Pentecostalism, not to mention all the independant churches scattered throughout the world. The two striking characteristics of the early Pentecostal movement were, of course, the phenomena of speaking in tongues, but also, and perhaps more significantly, the radical racial and gender diversity within the same movement. From the very beginning the poor and rich, men and women, and people from all ethnicities and nationalities were in together in fellowship, in leadership even. According to Dr. Bolger, one could sum up the basic Gospel message of the Pentecostals as: Jesus is your savior, he will baptize you in the Spirit, God heals, and Jesus is coming again. With this basic foundation, Pentecostalism has swept the globe and become the second largest Christian movement next to Roman Catholicism.

This ends my reflection on lectures from my class, Church in Mission. This next week I will be starting a class called, Encountering the City. I plan on blogging through the daily lectures there as well. I hope it proves helpful for all of us!