maturing...

Met up with my cell leader not too long ago. Talked about my time in university. Has been a learning process. Continuing with growth.

Learning to be maturing in righteousness:
-> how to meld justice with love, and maturing in unity,

and then...
-> bringing people together for the purposes of Christ, whether directly or indirectly.

Courage, and conviction for both, and then humility for it all.

Thank You Father, for the community of people.

its been sometime

some people have been complaining that I haven't been blogging. Well...

I haven't been blogging much because I have been quite occupied with school work. I am still a bit too committed to my own school work, and I would take special semester because it would allow me to focus on school work, and hope to produce a good piece of work. Especially if its only on one module.

But that aside, serious things have happened or are happening. 

I want to thank God for resolving my LSM mini-crisis. I don't know what happened, but the thing is, I could have simply gone for a wednesday session if I had missed the tuesday one. But me being me, the obvious slips by me. And perhaps the prof did too, and so reproportioned my grades to distribute the 15% evenly. Phew. Amen!

There is a second crisis, but its more like a ticking time bomb, and it seems that the longer I wait, the bigger the explosion. There's a church retreat, but its in Indonesia, and I can't just slip out of Singapore. At some point in my life, I will have to tell them, and the more I delay, the bigger it'll be. Simply, Father, I ask for an answer. As to when I must tell them.

and the smallest thing, is academic. I'll be involved in hosting HCAP students, and its going to be a mess for me. 

Now, why am I still 'psycho-ing' people to join USP?!? haha. euphemism: evangelism.

Some exciting ideas, and the whole 'break' waiting for me. 

grace, and tonnes of it

i went to a prayer meeting and it was about grace.

How apt. As I'm writing this, my anger is subsiding, and I'm letting grace do its work. Here is the incident.

I put my clothes in a drying machine, and I left it there. I returned at the end of the cycle, and my clothes were replaced by someone else's. I guess what happened was, someone replaced my clothing with his/her...

I felt angry, and a many, many things were going through my mind about what to do. Should I dump it in the toilet, wet it? Should I throw them all away somewhere, as a lesson for the person not to mess around with other people's clothing? 

Well, it was so childish thinking about it, but I still did. Vengeance and pride can be very dangerous to handle. Oh well. In the end I just left them at the top of the machine, and after I was done, put them back in the dryer... 

Vengeance is the Lord's. I pray that the Lord have mercy on that person... 

And grace again.

This one is much more serious, and it concerns my relationship with an institution that I belong to, the church, namely, FCBC. First of all, FCBC is a wonderful church. Great people, great leadership, bold vision, with the guts, faith and love to do it. The problem might just be myself and my own perception. Here's how it goes, and it starts with who I think I am. I like books, I like apologetics, like philosophy, reasoning and arguing, in things intellect. I'm not exactly fun-fun, but I can be... But I know that what brings people to Christ is the relational and the emotional aspects of connecting to Jesus as saviour. I get that. And FCBC is really big on that, because as far as I know, bringing people to Christ really requires that relational/emotional stuff. Its just that... I've never been exactly big on that, meaning - I'm not exactly that socially/emotionally-adept, and the way I handle people is kinda different, meaning, I prefer small-groups, less than ten perhaps, and I want to focus on who these people are. And I want to talk, engage them, engage their ideas, because I think that a large part of Christianity is also knowing who God is, who Jesus is, and why they should be confident about their faith, in knowing what Christianity means, and how it faces up to challenges... 

I'm fearing that the nature of church hierarchy in FCBC - being essentially a vertical hierarchy with strict chain of commands - might make it difficult to respond to certain types of changes, especially tech-wise. Meaning, that since everything flows from the top, changes might not be reflected in time by the time it reaches the top from the ground. Besides, I am beginning to realise that some churches are not meant to be democratic, meaning, that there are some individuals who are thought to be... exceptional. While I do agree that some people are anointed and appointed by God for church leadership... hmm... this is an incomplete thought, but I think people can see where its going. A thought experiment would be: if a very high-up pastor does something ethically wrong but not criminally wrong, and if that person does not admit mistakes despite being wrong and even goes on to justify leadership through previous anointing, will there be means to... remove the person from authority? 

One of the things that I never really stopped wondering was whether Christianity supports authority or not... 

One of the threads here is that, when more people become more aware of the transformative power of infotech to change the modes of engagement, how will it change the way churches function? Open-sourced Sermons? Where believers flow from one congregation to another, depending on the sermons? Right now the network of churches is kinda disparate - meaning that every church does its own thing, oblivious, not really knowing what other churches are doing, because there is no need to. maybe with LoveSingapore, then more churches become involve with one another, and there is some communication, but still, for day-to-day stuff, churches are a social institution serving the spiritual needs of the community... I mean - thats a more technical perspective. Is it possible to conceive of a *super-church*, where there are no longer boundaries between different churches..... like a *hive* of some sort... specialisation into *workers* who do the work of evangelism and community outreach, *musicians* - worship specialists...

Oh shucks. I am becoming incoherent. Better stop now.. the point is, there is a dissatisfaction about being in FCBC that I haven't found a way to resolve. But if I truly grasp that: it was never about me, or how I feel, but about how God wants to do something through me - reach out to people and do some other stuff - then it ought to have settled things right? I do *get it* but some other thing feels not quite right... Lotsa scary thoughts, but just stopping now to do some other work...

Grace.

at home...

I interrupted the monotony of write-eat-pray-run-sleep (i don't run that often, I confess) of my holidays in order to go for a church retreat. it was there that i found myself confronting some ideas. 

1. i have legacy issues with past figures of authority.

2. i still think about church and social activism.

1. is certainly a personal issue which i need to handle with church leaders and so is OB for the blog, while 2. is something that I would think about here.

I think about the clique of people that I know of - the people who go do social activism, and are really hardcore about it. And I began to notice a pattern, that these people are either non-Christian, or they come from more traditional churches for whom outreach is still a rather *simple* thing of being there in a community. 

I guess being in FCBC, one of the package that comes along with it is a very extensive network of leaders with which to work with to reach out to do evangelical events in a rather organised manner. Part of it, I guess involves this rather complicated word called 'discipleship', which in *simple* terms, means to make someone to be more like Christ, and in more practical terms, to mean, building upon love and faith with God. And with that kind of agenda, there isn't a lot of space left to do *other* stuff, namely, other kinds of social engagement, especially in more activist terms. 

Now let me clarify, FCBC runs Touch Community Services, which basically does welfare services for the community, reaching out to the poor, and needy of the community. And it does splendid work. I believe that Singapore is enriched with the existence of TCS, and many people have benefitted from being recipients of the good work that TCS does.

BUT when it comes to things like... civil rights, the environment, the church is silent. Not just FCBC but also for many churches as well. Yet, these churches routinely pray for events in the world, such as political and civil crises in other nations and natural disasters. I'm like, WTH!!!

I understand that the churches would be concerned about events that affect the lives of their people, hence they pray for events such as the current financial crisis, where people lose their jobs and such. And for natural disasters of massive scales, they pray, like the 2004 tsunami. And they might pray for countries in the region or in Asia, because they might be have a presence there, in their members doing mission work, perhaps. But I'm just simply pissed, that they seemingly turn a blind eye to things in the world - and make broad generalisations about how these events seem to indicate the Second Coming. 

Well, church leaders ought to know very well that people have been saying the Second Coming is coming through the centuries since Jesus died. 

I respect these comments, but at the back of my mind, I go... 'err.....' 

I know the church ought to be rightly concerned with these things about the crisis and mission works, and the countries in Asia and others, but... HELLO!!! WE ARE INCREASING CO2 LEVELS LIKE NEVER BEFORE! HEY! THOUSANDS ARE STILL STARVING IN AFRICA!! HEY, THERE ARE CULTURE CONFLICTS IN SINGAPORE!!!!

Is belief in church-state separation something to confess about? I don't know. Was George Bush a good president? He might've been a strong christian, but maybe he didn't do such a good job. Should I care if Obama is a strong christian? erm... well, if he is, great, if not, well, i pray God will bless him in his presidency. Should I care if the European leaders are atheist or agnostic? Well, too bad they aren't believers, but I pray for open hearts! How should I respond about the political situation in Singapore? Well, I pray that PAP not make Singapore TOTALLY TOTALITARIAN. hmm...

hmm... hmm... 

I guess I blow the liberal/conservative divisions out of the water. I don't bloody care. All I want is to lead a God-fearing life and to apply the knowledge that I have for His glory. 

But back to my point. I realise that for many of the non-believers (of christianity, at least), their social activism, in effect, becomes a church, that secularism and humanism becomes their religion for them. Which is why they have all the time they have to do these wonderful things. I look at my own life, and...well, I love writing and ideas too much I guess. Its a matter of time-share and mind-share, to make the choices that I'm making now, to choose one thing necessarily at the expense of the other... This isn't really a complaint, but I'm wondering, I guess many people in FCBC have had to make concessions of one kind or another in order to do the things in FCBC and not other things that they might want to do, such as maybe, for my case, social causes and such. 

On the other hand, social activism is essentially social transformation, which is just another word for many individual salvation... a society is transformed when the people themselves are transformed, which is just another way of saying... God is there. But then... well.. i guess its just one of those things to struggle with... 

sigh. why does life tie itself up in knots...