10th march 2007 busy saturday

watched pursuit of happyness with yang en and co. haha. was nice. but the company was a little boring. there's really little point in me tagging along with yang en, eating lunch and all. then i went to bugis to buy a little pencil, a glorified sketch pencil. and then met weiyang and jay.

the main point of the day was that i realised the main difference between fcbc and ncc. fcbc emphasizes on discipleship, people ministering to people in love and spirit. ncc emphasizes 'the finished work of Jesus on the cross' and how every individual can claim it. as for chc, i'll try to learn when i attend their services.

other churches of course, have different emphasis. faith aog is a small church, in asking believers to go on the mission, whether home or overseas. thats all i know. when i've time, i'll really go to many other churches and get a feel of the different things that happen.

then there was the part about mental shallowness, and christian's words come to my memory. how today's songs are so shallow, so devoid of nuances, just vulgar direct coarse trash like direct from mtv (sometimes it feels like this way). i wonder if any of the churches will occassionally, every now and then, do simple hymns. like society's popular culture is based on low cultural denominators, so i guess, the things that come out become like so, simple direct, easy to understand. or people don't bother to understand further. so church, winning people, have to find the cultural denominators in dealing with the people, and ends up using the same low cultural denominators... and... are the culture of churches becoming this way?

and this just came into my thots. long time ago, churches used to be bastion of knowledge, works of philosophy, learning, even research - gregor mendel was a monk. but that was then secular authority took charge of learning and made it religion-neutral, in the light of nasty brutal religious wars that consumed entire kingdom's treasuries. but anyway, churches were epitomes of cultural development - michaelangelo's sistine chapel, the monastic orders... and today? churches become repositories of moral values, guardians of a vault that musn't be corrupted. and in the midst of their duty, these guardians attempt to extend the reach of their duty. guardians who are becoming paranoid that their vault might become breached, extends their arms but neglects their original aim... in a secular society, churches can only extend their cultural arms so far beofre being lost in the cacophony of voices of the coarse. the church as to be both, in reaching out to those in ordinary society, yet elevate itself beyond the vulgar and the coarse in normal society. as always its a delicate battle.

arh well. just funny stuff. anyway, when does devotion become hysteria? and weiyang tells me when people don't know what they do... and the third reich comes to my mind, how hitler seduced the minds of an entire people.

a small atoll of rationality in the vast ocean of poverty of thought.