Category: Of Random Interest

Christianity, China, and College Students

I just read an interesting article

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about Christianity in China. The emphasis of the piece is on the dominance of Reformed theology in Chinese Christianity, but I was struck by the comments on the role of universities in the revival.

And in China, the place where Calvinism is spreading fastest is the elite universities, fuelled by prodigies of learning and translation. Wang Xiaochao, a philosopher at one of the Beijing universities, has translated the two major works of St Augustine, the Confessions and the City of God, into Chinese directly from Latin. Gradually all the major works of the first centuries of the Christian tradition are being translated directly from the original languages into Chinese.

All of this is happening outside the control of the official body which is supposed to monitor and supervise the churches in China. Instead, it is the philosophy departments at the universities, or the language departments and the departments of literature and western civilisation that are the channel.

“The [officially recognised] churches are not happy with universities, because it is not within their control. And their seminaries are not at the intellectual level of the universities,” says Dr Tan. “Chinese Christianity using Chinese to do Christian thinking has become a very interesting movement.”

And

If [May Tan] goes to preach at an official church, she says, “There will be perhaps 1000 people and 95% of them are over 65. So it’s a sunset church. But if I went to house church – there would be 1000 people; perhaps 20 of them in their 50s, and all the rest are youngsters. The older ones will all be professors at the universities. So these are the future of the churches. They have registered pastors, and no access to seminaries: But they have youth, and future, and money.”

And later on

“Very soon”, said Dr Tan, “Christians will become the majority of university students… that could happen.”

May it come to pass.matrix the divx download

College Ministry and Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha is unique among search engines. It doesn’t find websites — it finds facts.

And I just realized that it has unexpected utility for those of us who think about college ministry.

For example, you can compare UC Berkeley with UC Davis

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(or Harvard with CBC).

Or you can get a surprising amount of information on UC Berkeley.

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Cool Video From Joel 2/Acts 2

I just saw a cool video of Joel’s prophecy (the one quoted by Peter in Acts 2) made by The Work of the People. It’s definitely worth taking a minute and thirty-nine seconds to watch.

I just saw a cool video of Joel’s prophecy (the one quoted by Peter in Acts 2) made by The Work of the People

. It’s definitely worth taking a minute and thirty-nine seconds to watch.

Texts: Joel 2:28–32, Acts 2:16–21 zelnorm recall don t look now divx

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Dorothy Sayers on Work

Around 15 years ago, I heard Eric Treuil quote Dorothy Sayers to the effect that the carpenter from Nazareth never built any shoddy tables. It was fabulous. I’ve been thinking about that observation off and on ever since.

I recently stumbled upon it again, this time in its original form. It’s found in the essay “Why Work?” by Dorothy Sayers which appeared in her book Creed or Chaos

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Here’s one of my favorite passages:

over her dead body divx The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

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Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly – but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth. No piety in the worker will compensate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its own technique is a living lie.

…

[The Church] has lost all sense of the fact that the living and eternal truth is expressed in work only so far as that work is true in itself, to itself, to the standards of its own technique. She has forgotten that the secular vocation is sacred. Forgotten that a building must be good architecture before it can be a good church; that a painting must be well painted before it can be a good sacred picture; that work must be good work before it can call itself God’s work. purse brite

The whole essay is well worth reading and I commend it to you.

God's Grandeur: One Of My Favorite Poems

While preparing for this week’s sermon I was reminded of one of my all-time favorite poems. I won’t be able to use it in the message, so I thought I’d share it here as a bonus.

It’s God’s Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins

. You can find more of his poems at Bartleby

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THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.  
  It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;  
  It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil  
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?  
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
  And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;  
  And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil  
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.  
  
And for all this, nature is never spent;  
  There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went  
  Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—  
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent  
  World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Do you have a favorite poem?

My Redeemer Lives Considered From The Standpoint Of Grammar

WARNING: grammar geekiness ahead.

I hate songs with nonsensical lyrics, especially those that purport to be worship songs. The lyrics of a song matter far more to me than their accompanying music: I would forbid a song from being played in my ministry for having bad lyrics but never for having chords which I did not like.

And so I was especially pleased to make sense of some puzzling lyrics in My Redeemer Lives

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in church this morning.

The problematic stanza is

You lift my burdens
I’ll rise with You
I’m dancing on this mountain top
to see Your kingdom come

I was hung up on the word “to”, which I took to mean “I am dancing on this mountain top in order to bring about Your Kingdom’s arrival.” In another language this would be called a dative of purpose. This troubled me, because as Lindsey download the tragedy of macbeth online download drag me to hell dvd download the namesake online

said this morning, “There are few things less likely to bring about the kingdom than dancing on a mountain. How about feeding some homeless people or talking to someone about Jesus?”

But then I realized there were at least two other interpretations of the word “to”. It could be like a dative of instrument (“I am dancing on this mountain top because I get a good view from up here which enables me to behold Your kingdom as it spreads on earth”) or like an ablative of attendant circumstances (“To see your Kingdom come causes me to dance on this mountain top”).

I suspect it’s the latter.

So now I can sing that song.

For the 1% of you who have been similarly puzzled, you’re welcome.

For the 80% of you wondering if I made up the words dative and ablative, check out Wikipedia’s list of grammatical cases.

Create a Facebook Friend List for Chi Alpha

I just sent this email to the students in my ministry. If you find it helpful, feel free to adapt it for your own church/ministry.

Hope you’re doing well in the aftermath of finals.

Quick suggestion: take a bit of your free time over spring break to do a very simple task that will help strengthen our community.

If you use Facebook, make a friend list for Chi Alpha.

  1. Go to http://www.facebook.com/friends/?ref=tn
  2. Click the blue “Make A New List” button on the left side of the screen and call the new list “Chi Alpha”.
  3. On the next screen, add everyone in Chi Alpha. Use the phone list as a guide (I’ve enclosed the list of names below — just cut and paste them one at a time into the “add to list” box).
  4. Now every time you log in, you’ve got a simple way to quickly check in with our community. There will be a “Chi Alpha” link on the left sidebar of the main Facebook page that will show you the most recent status updates/shared links/whatever from the people in our group.
  5. Now add two or three people you are sharing your faith with to the list. Whenever you see their status updates pop up on the XA list you just made, remember to pray for them and invite them to join us the next time you see them.

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It’s hardly going to revolutionize your life, but if all or even a lot of us do it then it will make our community that much tighter. Facebook is a great tool for enhancing real life friendships — maximize it for the Kingdom!

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College Ministry and Global Transformation

One of my favorite subjects to talk about is the strategic nature of campus ministry. As I was reading the most recent issue of Books & Culture scar divx

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, one passage from a book review popped out at me:

I saw a striking pattern in these books [Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in the Global South: Africa children shouldn t play with dead things download /Latin America/Asia] that the editors and authors did not mention: a distinct source for much of the more principled evangelical social and political engagement across the regions. Repeatedly, the leaders of parachurch ministries and reform-minded NGOs that worked on behalf of the poor and the vulnerable, who spoke up for human rights and electoral reform and against corruption and autocratic rule came from two sources: student Christian movements and the worldwide network of evangelical leaders affiliated with the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization. Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship joined the People Power movement in the Philippines, while Campus Crusade played a central role in the formation of the Citizens Committee for Economic Justice in South Korea. Likewise in South Africa, it was the members of Youth Alive, the evangelical student fellowship started in Soweto by Caesar Molebatsi, who drove the Concerned Evangelicals movement to resist apartheid in the 1980s. The Latin American Theological Fraternity, an evangelical network with strong ties to both the Lausanne Committee and the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, figures prominently in pro-democratic evangelical work across Latin America.

INFEMIT [the International Fellowship of Evangelical Mission Theologians] itself is a product of this network, which might help explain these authors’ interest in highlighting this strain of evangelical social thought and action. But it is indeed significant. Little could the Anglo-American founders of the Lausanne and campus ministry movements have imagined that their emphasis on thoughtful Bible study and a “whole gospel for the whole world” would help animate democratic movements around the globe.

source: “Now What? Revivalist Christianity and Global South Politics” by Joel Carpenter. Books & Culture March/April 2009, page 36.

If you want to change a culture, change its campuses. They are the steering wheels of society.

How To Listen To A Bad Sermon

Listening to a bad sermon is like eating crab legs. It’s a lot more trouble than it should be, but you can still get a lot of meat if you are diligent.

So how do you do it?

Here are some tips that I sometimes find helpful, in order of preference. I don’t want to make you too excited: nothing is going to make a bad sermon good. But these might help mitigate your suffering.

  1. Be merciful. Preaching consistently good sermons is a lot harder than it seems. Think about your worst day on the job and how you would like your coworkers and customers to respond with compassion and understanding. Now extend that same compassion to the preacher.
  2. Overlook the stupid stuff. Every once in a while even solid and reliable preachers will say something that’s completely ridiculous — usually when they venture outside their area of expertise. This is particularly true when preachers begin using stories to illustrate a point they are trying to make. It can really throw you for a loop. Tune it out the same way you tune out that one cousin at family reunions. Even your favorite book has some boring passages, but you judge the book on its highlights. Judge sermons likewise.
  3. Be randomly inspired. I learned this from Dary Northrop in a seminar: you should bring a notebook to sermons not because of how insightful and magnificent the preacher is going to be, but because the Holy Spirit will spark new and amazing insights in you which are only tangentially related to what is in the speaker’s notes. Few sermons are so bad that there is no goodness in them — even a three-year-old will say something profound and/or hilarious if you listen to them long enough. So wait for a clever turn of phrase, an obscure or unexpected Bible reference, or a fact that you were hitherto unaware of and begin writing furiously. Doodle as well. Repeat as necessary.
  4. Pretend it’s opposites day. don t look now free download

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    had a tradition in his Chi Alpha ministry. Once a year he would preach opposite: “Why You Should Not Pray”, “Why God Is Untrustworthy”, etc. He did it deadpan (well — as deadpan as Harlow ever gets). The first time he did it he was worried his students wouldn’t catch on that he was merely exaggerating and then repeating their own doubts back to them in order to demonstrate how ridiculous their doubts were, but it was a huge success. Even the guests got it. It became an institution. Ever since he told me that story, I gamely pretend that a really bad sermon is merely the results of “opposites day”.

  5. Improve the sermon.

    This is risky because it can lead to pride and also can be disruptive if people around you notice what you’re doing, but there are times when it’s your only possible psychological defense. There are two fundamental kinds of badness. There’s bad delivery. That’s the best kind. The preacher has good things to say, but the inability to say them well. The whole sermon can be spent fruitfully paraphrasing and improving the solid content of the sermon. For example, you might reorder and reword the outline for greater impact or logical flow. There’s bad content. The preacher is distorting the text or not thinking things through. That’s harder, but can be even more diverting. You can compose your own outline from scratch on the same passage or topic that the preacher is endeavoring to address. One or two of my best sermons has come about this way.

Finally, my apologies to those who have had to endure a stinker from me. I know it has happened before and have no doubt it will happen again. It’s my job to be the best speaker I can be and it is your job to be the best listener that you can be. I’ll do my job whether or not you do yours, but if we work together this whole thing will go much more smoothly.

And a note to my pastor — relax, this was not inspired by your sermon this week. You didn’t even preach. We watched a movie, remember? 🙂