Stuff I'm working on
I'm working on a whole bunch of things, both for college and personal development. I'm currently thinking about:
- The concept of priesthood of all believers in the Japanese church
- "Jesus as the dutiful son: Confucian ideals in Asian Christology"
- The organisational culture of my mission field team
- How to change the organisational culture of my mission field team
- My personal leadership style and its influences
- The concept of global leadership, particularly in reference to Bernard Bass's theories and their application in Japan
- Personal, data and identity security for missionaries
- and of course, the big dissertation on leadership development training in Japanese house churches
That's before we get onto the computer stuff, of course.
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Organizational Culture
I wrote this about my mission field team, but I expect that it goes for every non-denominational mission agency ever:
It is a set of similar people going in different directions trying to behave like a set of different people going in a similar direction. Naturally this causes managerial tension.
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Times I'm ashamed to be a Christian, part whatever
When he got home his mother (my sister) and father were waiting inside for him. My sister wept as he came into the house and asked him "what did I do wrong?" Her husband told him that "he wasn't raised to be queer" and that he needed to be cured of his sin. They had already notified their church's pastor and youth pastor. The church told them to send him there for a conference immediately after he got home.
My nephew got into the car and decided he didn't need to be cured of anything. Instead, he decided he was headed to my house in Florida. He knew here that he would find love, compassion, and understanding. He knew if he went to the church he'd be ridiculed and told that he was defective and needed to be "cured". He told me a story of how a boy in his youth group committed suicide a few years ago and in his suicide note he admitted he was gay. He had been convinced that he didn't deserve to live since he couldn't be cured of homosexuality. (I know that sounds crazy, but some people actually think like that.) My nephew didn't want to be like that.
OK, I know it's America, and they do things differently there. But still: "he knew if he went to the church he'd be ridiculed and told that he was defective." That's what we look like to people, and probably for good reason.
I am ashamed.
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Cessationism: Why does anyone go out to bat for this madness?
As per usual: This is a blog post, in rant format, rather than an academic paper. Seems unnecessary I know, but sometimes that just needs pointing that out.
I'm doing a lot of study on Restorationism, apostolic movements, and the like, and occasionally coming across cessationist views. Cessationism is a rather hilarious theology which states that, essentially, when Jesus said he'd give us another Comforter who would be with us forever, he was actually taking about a book. The idea is that he gave the Holy Spirit to the church for a bit, and we used to have supernatural power and resources for an unspecified (but obviously very short) duration, and then God decided that was a bad idea. But that's OK, because we've got a book!
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Pete Ward on selling revival as worship
Revivalism was based on the ability to 'sell' evangelism. In the last twenty years, however, the market for this born-again product has declined in the United States and has all but collapsed in the United Kingdom. As evangelism as event and product has waned, it has been replaced by worship as the chief activity and emphasis for Evangelical Christians... Some of the faces have changed, and festivals such as Soul Survivor have burst onto the scene, but the culture of production has remained the same. The one key difference, however, is that now revivalism is selling worship and not evangelism, and intimacy rather than conversion.
- Pete Ward, "Selling Revival as Worship"
I see that in my own experience - churches which once focused on evangelistic initiatives are reinventing themselves as glorified record producers. Hillsongs has an awful lot to answer for.
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Errata, monologue and dialogue
I was thinking just yesterday about the whole topic of errata in publishing, and then one appeared in my email for me to deal with. There's a whole page of errata for my latest book, and occasionally I get emails from my publisher telling me about new problems that people have found in the book. Some of them aren't errors at all; some of them are minor typos and mistakes; some are suggested improvements, how I could have done things better; some of them are major problems, either where my understanding was wrong or where the topic that I was writing about has changed under me and what I've said no longer applies. But the point is that anyone can submit errors and suggestions, I can interact with them, and everyone can see the results.
It got me thinking that I'd like to see this extended to, say, Christian publishing as well as technical publishing. I realise this morning that I think I will see that, and it's part of a wider shift in culture.
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Model abuse
This degree I'm doing, and the previous degree I did, are in a subject called "missiology". The more missiology I do, the more I realise it's an almost impossible discipline to do well. The reason I say this is that missiology sells itself as an interdisciplinary subject - a combination of theological reflection and something else: sociology, anthropology, economics, history, anything. In my case, leadership and organisational theory.
But there's a problem with this: it means that to be a good missiologist, you need to be good at multiple disciplines. And the more advanced you get in an academic subject, and the more you specialise, the less likely you are to have the chops that are required. There really aren't that many people who are brilliant theologians and brilliant anthropologists, or brilliant theologians and brilliant sociologists, and so on. So most missiology is done by people who are pretty good at one and faking it at the other. And this leads to a problem I have begun to call "model abuse".
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Cheeses of Nazareth
Honest-to-goodness conversation with Hen last night:
Me: I found a bit where it talks about cheese in the Bible.
H: Where's that?
Me: In the story of David and Goliath, David brings ten cheeses to his brothers' unit.
H: There's another bit that talks about cheese.
Me: Where's that?
H: Right at the beginning.
Me: Huh?
H: In the Garden of Edam.
The Japanese church in the Second World War
Update: You should now be able to see it. Drupal is wonderful for integrating with lots of things (like Scribd) very easily, and awful for not having sensible default permissions for anything, or at least letting you know when the permissions are not what you might expect.
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