Author: Glen

The Church Changes The World

The church too often gets a negative rep on the college campus. Consider this: “Would anyone notice if our church closed down tomorrow?” a preacher asked his congregation. Harvard University researcher Robert D. Putnam says yes, Christianity and other religions do make a difference in American society. (source)

Some highlights:
* half of all personal philanthropy is religious in character, and half of all volunteering occurs in a religious context.
* Churchgoers are substantially more likely to be involved in secular organizations and to have deeper informal social connections.
* In one survey it was membership in religious groups that was most closely associated with other forms of civic involvement, like voting, jury service, community projects, talking with neighbors, and giving to charity.

Food for thought…

Over 20 Students At Our House For Thanksgiving!

Forget stuffing the turkey–we stuffed our apartment this Thanksgiving!

The nearly 30 people we had in our house for Thanksgiving!Forget stuffing the turkey–we stuffed our apartment this Thanksgiving! Not only did Glen’s brother and Paula’s college roommate travel down from Washington state, but we were able to host over 20 Stanford students in our home for lunch on turkey day (nearly 30 total people)!

Let me tell you–that’s an awful lot of people to cram into one apartment!

In case you’re wondering why they didn’t head home to visit their families, all the students were international students (mostly from Singapore). Traveling internationally and getting jet lagged is a big hassle (and pretty expensive) for such a short break from school.

For many of them, this was their first real celebration of Thanksgiving. Think about it–how many other countries celebrate the pilgrims’ survival? To my knowledge, only Canada…Students eating Thanksgiving meal

Several of our guests were already following Christ, but many have yet to experience God’s transforming love. The Kingdom of God flows through relationships, and so please pray that God would use our hospitality as a catalyst for spiritual growth in these students’ lives.

Cooking for so many people was a huge task, as was seating them. Thanks to Greg, Rachel, and Ailin for helping to prepare the food, and many thanks to Southbay Christian Center and Three Cities Assembly for loaning us chairs and tables, and a heap of thanks to Pastor Mike Brown of International Assembly of God (as well as his worship leader Paul) and Josh Wong and Ming Fai Wong for helping to cart the chairs and tables to our place. We couldn’t have done it without you!

UPDATE: our Photo Gallery has been updated with pictures from the Thanksgiving feast!

Please Pray for Paula Marks

please pray for Paula Marks–she’s in a coma

I just received this email: “Last evening, Paula Marks, wife of Bob Marks [Bob is on the Chi Alpha national leadership team], had a brain aneurysm burst. She is currently in a coma in neuro intensive care unit and is unresponsive. Please keep Paula and the family in your prayers, they need a miracle.”

Please pray for Paula and Bob. They’re both wonderful people (although I’d ask you to pray for them even if they were scoundrels). FYI: Bob is on Chi Alpha’s national leadership team and is a veteran missionary to France.

UPDATE: On 12/4 in the morning I received this email:
“Many of you are emailing me wanting a latest update on my mom.

She is very ill and the doctor told us, that he is NOT seeing significant improvements.

We are told that less than 1% survive this kind of aneurysm.…

That does not mean that our faith is gone! Unless God interferes she will pass on so we continue to pray for a divine miracle.

Please pray with us for this miracle because I do know that God does perform miracles.

Several of you want to know what to pray for specifically so here it is:

The doctor wants to see if her lift 2 fingers on command and then he will recognize that she is not neurologically impaired.

That is what I am praying for. I told her that last night and reminded her that her strength is in the LORD. PSALM 121 is what we have taped in her room…we are also reminding her that it is “Not by might, nor by power but by His spirit, says the Lord.” Thank you for praying for her! ”

UPDATE: on 12/4 in the afternoon I received this message:
We just got a call from the hospital…when the doctor asked Paula to raise
her two fingers- she did.

Praise God for his answer to prayer! The family is very encouraged, but
Paula still needs our prayers for continued healing.

Just a Quick Update

Just an update on what’s been going on in our weekend ministry…

On a personal note, the last few weeks have been a great exposure to the diversity of the Assemblies of God here in Nor Cal.

Two Sundays ago I had the opportunity to talk to people about our ministry at Family Community Church in San Jose. FCC is a very contemporary church reaching young adults and professionals by the droves. They’ve added over 700 in weekly attendance over the last two months.

That afternoon, I was invited to preach in a Fijian church (First Fijian Assembly of God) that meets here in Palo Alto. It was great–they’re a wonderful church! We were especially honored by their gifts of Fijian leis to us. Interestingly enough, they make leis out of dyed tree bark in Fiji. Very nice.

Last Sunday I was able to share at Oriential Christian Center (a Chinese church) that meets down in San Jose. It was the first time I’ve ever preached with an interpreter. I kind of like it!

And to show you how connected the Body of Christ is, one of the people I talked to at FCC gave my website to a friend of his who works at Stanford. He contacted me and we had lunch yesterday. While talking, he mentioned that he had a Fijian friend he was trying to minister to, and I was able to connect him with the Fijian church I preached at!

How wild… God has got a way of hooking things up. He’s definitely got a systems perspective!

By the way, we’ve been experiencing great favor in our attempts to schedule services and connect with pastors. Right now we’re preaching in a different church every week through March, and we’ve got tons of 1–1 meetings planned.

As a result, we’re already at the 70% mark of our mandated monthly support! It looks like we’ll be able to go full-time on campus sometime this academic year. Yippee!

Also, it looks like we’re going to have around 30 people crammed into our apartment for a Thanksgiving lunch tomorrow–almost all of them Stanford students!

The Faith of a Scientist

From an interview at Christianity Today: John Polkinghorne worked for years as a theoretical elementary particle physicist and then a mathematical physics professor at Cambridge University before resigning to train for ministry in the Church of England. Earlier this year, he was awarded the 2002 Templeton Prize for progress in religion…

Polkinghorne on whether science and faith are compatible: “I’ve never felt an either/or situation that I had to choose either my science or my religious belief. Of course, there are puzzles about how the two relate to each other, and I tried to think about those during my science days. And, of course, I’ve thought a great deal more about them since then.

“I try to hold the two together as far as I can myself. I want to be, so to speak two-eyed: looking through my science eye and my religious eye at the same time. I’m glad that I’m both a physicist and a priest and, though I’m puzzled by how those aspects of me fit together, I want to hold them in dialogue with each other.” (read the whole thing)

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery…

It’s fun to have an influence!

This is so cool! I waxed nostaligic last week, and so I visited my old church’s website to see how things were going. While there I happened to glance at their ‘What We Believe’ page, and I noticed that it looked very familiar.

You see, when I began talking to Stanford students about Chi Alpha many were curious about our beliefs. I quickly realized that I needed a more student-friendly way of explaining our beliefs than the formal Assemblies of God statement of faith. So I thought about it and decided to revise and expand the one that we used to use back at SMS Chi Alpha.

In any event, I wound up writing a concise statement of faith for Chi Alpha @ Stanford. Lo and behold, it’s identical to the one on my old church’s website! I emailed Cal (my old pastor), and he said that he saw it and liked it so much that he decided to adopt it. Furthermore, he’s shared it with two other churches (Timbercreek and Timberline) that are considering adopting (or adapting it).

Since one of the things I get most excited about is sharing resources that help other people be more effective, I’m pretty happy about it! I’ve wanted to be a mean meme machine for the Kingdom…

Minor Site Redesign

a quick update on the site’s organizational scheme

I’ve done some tweaking of the site. Basically, I’ve changed the layout of the front page slightly, and I’ve updated the way I categorize information on the site to reflect a refinement in my thinking.

For several months now I’ve been explaining to people that there are three key ways they can be a part of missions (aside from becoming a vocational missionary), and I’m redesigning the site so that information is categorized accordingly. Most of my entries fall into one of four categories:

1. Intercession: Praying for Missions
My basic thrust in this section of the site is to encourage people to pray for us, and especially to pray what I consider to be the core biblical prayer for missionaries.

2. Investment: Giving to Missions
This section of the site invites people to partner with us financially, which is actually given more prominence in the Bible than is praying for missionaries. Many of the entries revolve around anwering people’s questions about giving to missions.

3. Involvement: Working for Missions
In addition to praying and giving, people without a call to full-time missionary work can frequently do things to help out. Within the Assemblies of God, this includes working with such missionary auxilliary ministries as Light for the Lost, Speed the Light, Boys and Girls Missionary Crusade, and the Women’s Ministries Missionary Boutique. This is a new section of the site, as I really didn’t have anything up about this prior to yesterday when I posted practical ways people can help.

4. Information: Learning about Missions
Finally, I added one category for entries that were relevant, but just didn’t seem to fit the above classification.

I haven’t completely finished revamping things yet, as I’m still thinking about how to handle the remaining categories and whether or not I should launch a personal blog (wherein I actually express opinions) in a subdirectory of this site. I express more of my personal interests and observations over at http://www.xastanford.org/, but there’s a lot of stuff I haven’t put there because that blog, like this one, is a blog with a purpose.

To give credit where credit is due, I got the categories from First Assembly of God in Des Moines, Iowa. I don’t know if it’s original to them or not.

How To Volunteer

practical things you can do to help us in our ministry

Paula and I have been thinking lately about how people can become involved with our ministry at Stanford beyond praying

and giving. Here’s an ever-evolving list of things you can do to help out:

  • Come and prayerwalk the campus. Not familiar with prayerwalking? Learn more about it!
  • Serve as a mentor for a Stanford student. We’re especially eager to find Stanford alumni willing to develop a purposeful relationship with a student.
  • Act as a host family for a student. Let them come do laundry at your house, feed them home cooked meals every once in a while, and take them shopping once a month or so.
  • Do their homework for them (just kidding).
  • Provide rides to church.
  • Come utilize a ministry gift at our weekly worship service (Wednesday nights at 8pm). We’ve already got a worship leader and a speaker, but tell us what you’re interested in and we’ll see.
  • Volunteer your expertise with creating compelling dual-encoded HTML/AOL/text emails.
  • Volunteer your web expertise and help us make our sites (xastanford.org and glenandpaula.com) better.
  • Help us fold and stamp our print newsletters once a month. We send out about 500, and our fingers sure get sore!
  • Send Glen useful links, articles, and book recommendations to assist in his sermon preparation.
  • Introduce us to Stanford alumni that you know (especially Christian ones).
  • If you feel called, pursue appointment as a Campus Missionary Aide through Chi Alpha Campus Ministries and work with us part-time on campus.

If you’re interested in any of these opportunities, let us know. We’ll interview you and talk to you about expectations (both our expectations of you and your expectations of us).

How To Pray For Us

Pray that God would give us opportunities and the ability to take advantage of them.

If you ever don’t know what to pray for us, pray for us like the early church prayed for the apostle Paul:

“Be sure to pray that God will make a way for us to spread his message and explain the mystery about Christ… Please pray that I will make the message as clear as possible.” Colossians 4.3–4, CEV

In other words, pray these two things:
1) That God will create opportunities for us to tell Stanford students about God’s love for them.
2) That God will enable us to take advantage of those opportunities to communicate the gospel clearly and credibly.

And as always, you can look at our list of prayer requests.