When I originally started this website in 2010 my one phrase explanation of my purpose was An Online Magazine Featuring the Thought and Writing of Daniel Age.  I am here and now changing that purpose dramatically.  Up to now I have been focused on communicating my thoughts and insights for the benefit of any reader who came along the cyber highway and discovered me.  Focusing on thought I gave little thought to mission!  Making thought the engine I wanted mission to naturally come along behind clarifying and fulfilling itself. I left it to itself to achieve its own realization. The transformation of my Blog/Magazine Existence and Faith that you are reading here puts my new mission teaching venture in Asia front and center and in that context provides select pieces of my current insights taken from my teaching excursions. Christian truth and Christian mission, thought and action, the ideal and the ‘deal’ cohere and when separated tend to lose their integrity. From here on you will get the former in the posture of the latter.

A month or so before my 20th high school reunion a classmate chosen to organize the event solicited a recent photo from each person. Instead of sending a sitting or standing portrait I passed along a picture taken of me cultivating my strawberry beds. The shot depicted me glancing up while throwing my pick head into a bed of horse manure, soil and straw. My classmates saw me in action and this is what I wanted. And here in this blog/online magazine this is the portrayal I now want to give and the posture I now want to write from and work in. Behind my new romance with mission there is a little epiphany which occurred this last fall – winter 2011 &12.

This Spring 2012 I returned from five teaching hitches in Asia, one in India, one along the Thai – Myanmar border and three serving China’s under ground house church movement [Beijing, Hangzhou and Shanghai].  In my encounter with students preparing for ministry working and studying toward their Master’s of Divinity degree or Bachelor degree I learned that mission was the primary horizon of their future vision of ministry.  Few if any planned on graduating then going to a church and becoming a pastor. They were in seminary and college to equip themselves to become leaders and venture forth to do mission work. Jesus’ “go out ” (Matthew 28) was the posture of ministry preparation. This included studying the Christian Scripture and theology but within a framework of becoming leaders – action; most often bold daring mission action that possessed very little existing organizational or structural support.

Last summer some one asked me why I was going way off to Asia to teach in some of the poorest seminaries and Bible colleges. I quipped half factiously but half seriously “I am going in hopes of saving my ministry lest I burn out after 25 years”.  We know everything we know by relief – by contrast. And contrast is a gift we get by getting out of our comfort zone! The Christian mission and message is rapidly moving forward in the East, especially the new China and it is being driven by different kinds of engines than those in the west. In a later article I will elaborate on this further but here my point is to draw attention to the new impetus that informs this website and my ministry. China does not get the Western model of apologetic Christianity where the arguments and proofs of its truthfulness and relevance are coolly presented for the reader to coolly and cognitively decide for or against. Truth is being taught, learned, passed on from inside another person who has herself or himself decided for it, believed in it, sacrificed for it, decided to teach it no matter the cost. Understanding for them means not only standing under but taking what you stand under to others. It might be said one does not touch Christian truth from the outside as scripted book idea but inside another who has digested and been nourished by this truth more or less, in one way or another.  Most often we get truth if it is truth we are getting like the baby Robin gets the worm from the bill of the mother already half digested by her.

I think Asia and especially the under ground church in China knows this in a way many in the West fails to comprehend. The historical road that the west has traveled on to reach today’s city called ‘Modernity’ was reason, rationalism, empiricism, romanticism, economic and social liberalism and of course Christianity in the west was thereby extruded into these shapes. The new Christian impetus in the east, especially that coming into play in China’s house church movement, I sense is not and need not be overly encumbered by the late western Christianity formation.

This realization pushed me further in the direction I am taking both in this blog and my ministry. It is not my recent Christian thoughts and insights that I want to communicate perse but these as much as possible within the setting of my current mission work and engagement in the East. This is now the present frame of my website. It is no more an “online magazine” but a mission blog enlisted to report on my teaching engagements and experiences while also providing the reader with a few choice reflections and insights taken from what that I have imparted to or learned from my students; selections that I hope will be of some spiritual benefit.

I end with an antidote taken from my own history. Many years ago I sat in the office of an Oxford professor to explore the possibility of writing a dissertation in hopes of building my understanding of the relation of church to the modern world and being awarded a Ph D. After sorting out my research topic the professor retorted “this sounds more like a mission than a research project”. Later when I was accepted into the University of St Andrews  in Scotland to do my work I told this story to my supervisor Dr George Hall who burst out laughing and then quipped “every doctoral thesis is a missionary project”. We are in this world for something and whether we are subtly aligned with academic protocols or whether we proceed apart from these scholastic cannons, inevitably we are about the business of composing our witnesses to establish our passion and release it into the public square.  This tallies well with one of Post Modernism’s central insights – all ‘truth’ more or less bares the impress of a historical social struggle to script reality in a form that is friendly to a person or group’s interests and biases. This does not require us to pretend to ignore the divine antecedents of truth but it does mean we most often encounter this truth from another and share it with another in the missionary position. It is in this position you will meet pieces of my thought and work week by week in this blog.