Going Home…

I just read a neat article: “Vietnam’s Diaspora Urged to Return Home”

I have been thinking about what it would take to change Vietnam and I am growing more and more convinced that Viet Kieu Christians (Vietnamese Diaspora Christians) need to start thinking long-term about how we can be a positive influence in the development of our mother country.

My mother church, the Vietnamese-speaking congregation, is always in a hoopla about how the younger generation does nothing for the Vietnamese people around the world – however I have yet to see them actually do anything for the Vietnamese IN Vietnam.

I’ve challenged a few people that if they are so persistent on serving only the Vietnamese community – they need to return to Vietnam and be a positive influence on the people there and society there.

Maybe it is about time that we as Vietnamese Diaspora Christians start this dialogue about returning home. It is no secret that Christians tend to be in the upper echelon of the financially wealthy in Western society – the numbers are there. If we can transfer our economic prowess and positive and ethical business practices in a society that does not have a clear idea of what business ethics really are – we CAN make an impact!

Maybe it is time to go home.

Incorporating Giving Into Your Corporation

I love business and commerce! It’s what I studied for my undergraduate degree and it’s in my blood and I love working with people to help them achieve their dreams.

I am also passionate about social justice. I absolutely love helping people because I know what it’s like to grow up or to live in a third world environment and I know what it is like to grow up in need.

God has given us so much in North America – we are an absolutely resource-blessed nation; because of that, I believe we are charged with the responsibility to bless others.

I want to challenge you business folks out there: Incorporate giving into your corporation!

What do I mean by this?

I know yearly, most federal governments provide tax credits for corporations that donate gifts and charity – but that is not what I am talking about. I am actually asking you to take a look at your company and ask yourself: can my company do something to help other people? Can I give back what I have gained financially?

• If you own a restaurant, can you provide cheap or free meals to the homeless?
• If you own a business, can you employ the homeless or working poor so that you can help them out of their situation?
• Do you encourage your employees to seek further education? Do you provide free education or free seminars for your employees?
• Does your company encourage your employees to go and help at the local homeless shelters?
• The list goes on and on and on…

For a more global approach: Do you give away free products to third world countries? (I am not talking about dumping products where they shouldn’t be going!)

TOMS Shoes is an amazing story of an entrepreneur who decided to create a business around the idea of social justice: for every pair of shoes sold by TOMS, a pair of shoes is donated to the poor in America or around the world. This is an entrepreneur who looked at a business model and said “I don’t have to make X amount of dollars – I can do this to help people!”

Some photographers that I follow on the blogosphere also do something similar by giving away their time and their talent to document what is going on around the world. Kenny Kim recently went with a team of photographers to Tanzania to document the relief and developmental work that Thirst Relief does in the area.

I recently challenged the students who are becoming engineers in my home church to use their studies for an eternal purpose. I challenged them to create bio-sand water filters that cost less than the current ones being made around the world. Currently it costs an average of $100 to make a bio-sand water filter… can we make them for $50? $40? $30?

Whatever you do for your work, ask yourself if you can incorporate giving into your corporation?

Disciplemakers

What is it to be a disciplemaker?

I was listening to a sermon and there was a video playing and one of the interviewees mentioned that we should be so in love with God that “helping people is not an option.” She said that we should be so in love with God that it’s not a choice for us to help people, that we should just go and sacrifice our time and our daily life so that we can invest in people.

Another interviewee in the video mentioned that they did social justice work at the local missions and that they went on missions trips as an entire family that he and his family served God as a family unit. He makes this statement:

Everything we do, we do as a family… I believe that because they [his children] have been raised this way that it’s just gonna be a part of their lives and it’s not even gonna be a choice for them. It’ll be “Listen it’s not even a choice, let’s go help others.”…

I was really moved by this statement because it reminded me again about the importance of discipleship and our responsibility to live our lives and lead in such a way to create disciples that glorify God.

I don’t think I’ve discussed this in a while but I want to bring it up again. I believe it is extremely important that those who are in roles of parents have a massive calling and a massive responsibility that God has laid on them: you folks have the responsibility to lead your children in such a way that they become disciples of God.

The reality is that (in North America anyways) every person is responsible for their own faith, but it does not stop us as individuals to do our best to be a positive influence for the children that are in our lives. Do we live in such a way that these children can say: “I want to be like <insert name> because he/she is a disciple of God and glorify God in whatever they do!”

Do we live in such a way that we encourage children to love God so much that it’s not an option for them to help the poor and the oppressed? Do we live in such a way that inspires children to fall in love with God and to serve Him authentically and wholeheartedly?

Or do we choose to teach our children that it’s better to have a good education and to grow up and be safe and never to rock the boat and get a good career and make a lot of money so that you can buy a house and two cars and have 2.5 children? Do we choose to teach our children to choose a safe life devoid of the sacrifice and cost of following Jesus?

Or should you choose now to teach your children to be disciplemakers? So that they can join you on crazy missions trips and have a heart for the broken, the poor, the lost, the oppressed, the orphan, the widows and the imprisoned?

Children are our most important disciples – especially your own children!

Help Me Understand…??

I don’t get it. I don’t understand it.

What is “it”?

I don’t understand how a person who calls himself or herself a Christian does not resonate with the idea of helping other people?
I don’t understand how a person who calls himself or herself a follower of Jesus the Messiah (the Saviour, the One who Saves) cannot love the poor and oppressed?
I don’t understand how as children we grow up learning that money is a root of many evils and that it can impede on our spiritual lives and yet we spend the rest of our lives chasing it?

I don’t get it. I don’t understand it!

Aren’t we supposed to be holy and set apart? Aren’t we supposed to be the “light of the world”? Aren’t we supposed to be God’s hands and feet?

How is it then that so often we find it so shocking when we discover one of our coworkers or friends are “Christian”?
We often respond: “I didn’t know you were Christian!”
Could it be that we are so blended in with the world that it is almost impossible for us to figure out who is a Christian and who is not? We’ve lost this “otherness”!

I was reminded when reading another blog that “the stuff of earth” shouldn’t be the focus of our lives and it shouldn’t consume us – yet that is what we have allowed to happen.

This is a challenge to holiness – to “otherness”!

Concerts, Compassion and (un)Comfortability

I went to the Starfield concert yesterday with a bunch of my friends from my home church and it was such an encouragement and uplifting time of worship.

Last time that Starfield was here, they had David Nasser with them who shared the gospel with the audience. Yesterday night, Tim Neufeld (the lead vocalist and guitar player) took it upon himself to share the experiences that he and his younger brother had over the past year.

In August of 2009, the Neufeld brothers went with World Vision to Gweri, Uganda and were able to see first-hand, the start of social development in this new project region.

I can only imagine what the experience was like for them and it just amped me up for my trip to Tactic, Guatemala in May 2010 and then to VN in July-August 2010.

Tim Neufeld also spoke a bit on how comfortable Christians in North America are and that we take things for granted while there are people all over the world live a life less than normal. He provided a statistic: North Americans comprise of about 11% of the world’s population but we consume over 45% of the world’s resources!
I’m glad that I heard the message again yesterday night: we are taking life for granted and are living far too comfortable lives!

World Vision also was at the concert and the audience was given the opportunity to help and sponsor some children from Africa. Over 170 children were adopted yesterday night! Awesome stuff! A bunch of the guys and gals from my church also took the initiative and make their lives a little less comfortable and adopted children as well! I’m so happy that they did!

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To digress, the opening act, Article One, was AMAZING! Likened to a Canadian version of a more rockin’ Switchfoot, these four lads ROCKED the stage at First Alliance. They weren’t leading us in worship or anything of that sort, but it was awesome fun and entertainment as they prepped the crowd for a night of worship. The violinist was absolutely OUTSTANDING! I’ve seen him play on their music video “Without You”, and there is no way to compare these guys when they perform live.

Check out their single below and support the lads on ITunes and buy their album!

At What Cost?

The Good Samaritan is a wonderful parable that can relate to so many different things: helping people, humanitarianism, and social justice! But it is also a wonderful parable about incurring costs in our own lives.

There are two types of people here: those that avoid costs and those that will incur them.

It’s a simple enough of a story for us to follow: the Priest and the Levite, two types of people who profess to be holy and godly people – yet they avoid the beaten up man who was left on the side of the road. It is a Samaritan who is passing by who stops, treats the man’s wounds, takes him on his own donkey and lodges him at an inn and pays for the man’s stay and any upfront costs and promises to pay even more if there are further costs for the injured man’s treatment.

There are a whole lot of lessons that we can learn from this parable. Jesus’ particular lesson to the Teacher of the Law whom He was speaking to was this: your neighbour is someone beyond your race, ethnicity, culture and religion.
The Jewish people of the time did not associate with Samaritans – they were a mixed people who were seen as unclean and unholy because of their Hebrew-Canaanite heritage.

I’m not going to focus on the ethnic and religious aspects of the parable, but I would like us to look at the lesson Jesus teaches us about incurring a cost in our life.

Book Review: “Crazy Love”

I’m not normally about the newest or biggest things in Christian culture, I’m not about trends or fads, and so when my little sister told me that I need to read this book, I was very skeptical.

About two months ago, I got around to finally sitting down and taking a gander through this book and I was overwhelmed by what author Francis Chan described about this amazing God that we worship and serve.

Francis doesn’t mince his words, all the while avoiding guilting his readers or condemning them, but as North Americans, we have royally messed up our conception and worship of God. We have no clue.

This book is a challenging read, not in the style or language of the writing, but in the concepts and challenges that it presents. It asks the hard questions and challenges Christians to move out of our comfort zones and our lukewarm faith.

One of the things that has changed my life over the last two months has been Francis’ wonderful understanding of the Trinity and how our relationship with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit will change our lives. He challenges us that we need to balance our intimacy and reverence with and for God in order to have a holistic understanding of God. This understanding then changes us because we realize, “Wow! This is the God that I worship? Man… I’ve got to do something, I have to respond, I have to transform my life!”

I hope that is the same response that you have once you’ve read this book as well.

We are also doing the “Crazy Love” DVD Group Lessons series for our young adults group at my home church. Most of the young adults had previously never heard of this book or have never read it and so, as we are going through this series they are finding it incredibly challenging to deal with the discussions that are taking place.

Sometimes we’re so caught up in our own problems that we don’t realize the need to open up our hearts to God, that we refuse to truly experience the love that He lavishes on us and so we do not understand this love, we do not know what to do with it.

I highly recommend this book and suggest you get a copy and read it – because after reading it, you will view your scripture reading, your prayer life, and your worship life in a totally different manner.

An East Asian Conception of Monotheism

I believe that East Asians are inherently monotheistic although they operate within a pluralistic realm of religion.

I actually it is easier for East Asians to become followers of Christ than it is for a Westerner; my reasoning behind this is two-fold:

1. East Asians do not operate under a Greek philosophic thought process.
2. East Asians are readily spiritual.

East Asians (Chinese, Koreans, Japanese and Vietnamese) have an advantage in regards to reaching a monotheistic paradigm compared to Westerners because we do not operate under a Greek philosophic thought process. The Greek philosophic rational method has left Western thought paralysed dealing with the question of “Is there a God?” while the East Asian has no conception of causality or the scientific/rational method. For the East Asian, the question is not “Is there a God?” but rather the question is “Who is God?” and “Who is THE God?”.

Coming from a Confucian background, East Asians already presuppose that there is a God, a Creator or a Heavenly Ruler – however for East Asians, God is Deistic – He does not interfere in the work of humanity.

East Asians are spiritual people. Whether they are superstitious or religious, East Asians are predisposed to being spiritual. Again a lot of this comes from the Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist backgrounds of many East Asians.

However, for the Chinese, during the earliest recorded dynasty, the Shang Dynasty, archaeologists have discovered a very rich cultic practice that the common people and the royal family participated in. For the people of the Shang Dynasty, they worshipped Shang-ti (上帝 the Heavenly Lord or the Ultimate Lord) – a Creator being who resided in the heavens. However, the people also worshipped their ancestors who they believed interceded on behalf of them to Shang-ti.

I do not have a strong background in Korean or Japanese history, however Vietnamese people have also a tradition of worshiping the Sky (Thiên or Ông Trời) and also ancestral worship.

Monotheism is not a concept that is foreign to East Asians, the most difficult part for a Christian when sharing God with an East Asian, is that the East Asian needs to understand why God is important and who is this God.
East Asians are deistic – we are pragmatic in nature and culture and because of that, too often the concept of a personal God is very foreign to us; I believe East Asians are the perfect example of people who believe there is a God but He should stay in Heaven.

In our next entry we will discuss reconciling the idea of a personal God in an East Asian context.

The Cost of Worship

The last entry, I had mentioned that God demands of us a faith that costs us our lives.

How often do we think about the cost of worship? I want us to focus on a passage of Scripture from the Old Testament in 2 Sam 24:18-25.

The background of the story is that David sinned against God by enacting a census to count his army, God strikes the people with a disease as a punishment for three days and seventy thousand people died.
God relented and demanded that David setup an altar to God on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.
Araunah offered to give the threshing floor to King David and in his humbleness and wisdom, David replies:

“No, I insist on paying you for it. I will not sacrifice to the LORD my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing.”

Do we come to worship God without incurring any cost?
What does it mean for us to incur a cost when we worship or serve God?

For some of our brothers and sisters, being Christian alone will cost them their lives. For some of our African brothers and sisters, they walk for three hours one way in order to meet up with their church community and worship God for five hours at a time due to the incredible distance between their homes and their place of worship.

I think too often we view God too lightly, we don’t realize His transcendency – His GREATNESS.
Over the last two months, I have come to experience God’s greatness in so many ways and it has often left me trembling on my knees.

“Who am I that You, O Lord, should take mercy and give me such grace?”

It is in those moments that we understand that we cannot come to worship believing that God owes us anything but it is that we should lay down our lives before Him and bear the cost of being His followers.

Counting the Cost

There are three types of things that I don’t think Christians should be, and they all start with “C” for the sake of making it easier to remember.

Christians should not be:

1. Comfortable
2. Complacent
3. Cost-Conscious

I’ve written about not being comfortable or complacent before but this new “cost-conscious” aspect just popped up yesterday while I was discussing social justice with my friend H. She had mentioned a story about a friend of hers who said that he refuses to go on a missions trip to a third world country because he knows he will be changed and be forced to give up his (lavish) lifestyle in order to meet the needs of the poor.

Talk about being cost-conscious!

Today at church we watched a video sermon from The Meeting House with Pastor Bruxy Cavey and he also mentioned this cost-consciousness that Christians should not have.

Jesus had already “laid the chips on the table” and said this:

²⁶“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple. ²⁷And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26-27)

We know what the cost of following Jesus is – it’s our lives. The decision to follow Jesus does not mean that easy roads and blue skies are ahead of us – our life can be demanded of us, whether it is through trials and hardships or persecution and martyrdom.

Yet so many Christians, when confronted with the issues of changing their lifestyles from being one of comfortability to cruciformity (living your life in light of the cross), they refuse to take the chance to let God truly take them on a wild ride in life and start counting what choosing a cruciform life could cost them.

We should not be in a position where we are counting the costs to us – we shouldn’t really even be living lavishly comfortable lives. The $300 pair of jeans you just bought could’ve fed, clothed and sent a child to school for a whole year; the $60 sushi dinner could’ve bought a goat for a rural village in Africa or Asia. I’m not saying that you can’t treat yourself to things now and then, but if the choice is between giving up your life to God and helping others and living an uncomfortable life versus living for yourself, many Christians will opt not to take the costlier route.

What it comes down to is this: you’ve already given up your life to this God who is amazingly crazy and He is offering you a ticket on the greatest adventure of your life; yet all He’s asking is for you to stop counting the costs that you might incur along the way and just start on this journey with Him!