The purpose of rationale of this blog Existence and Faith is woven into the following introduction entitled “The Missionary Position”.

When I originally started this website in 2010 my purpose was stated by one phrase: An Online Magazine Featuring the Thought and Writing of Daniel Age.  Within a year my work and perspective changed. Beginning 2011 I commenced teaching courses for credit in fledgling Bible Colleges all over Asia. Through 2009 I have been focused on communicating my beliefs in thoughtful prose 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 mission to itself to achieve its own realisation sort of like the Deist view of God who once he created world went off and took a long nap and let whatever happen happen.

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 organise 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 beginning 2010 and reaching incarnation beginning early 2011.

By the Spring of 2012 I had completed 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 groomed for pioneer 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. And this “decided for it” means decided to teach it no matter the personal cost and risk. 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 fail 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, Paul Fiddes 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 a group’s interests and biases.

This does not require us to pretend to ignore the cannons of reason and evidence in our attempt to establish the truth ( truth with a small t). Indeed by the grace of God the interface of God’s word via the Spirit transcends us and it is for this transcendence we study and pray lest God’s word of truth become a wax nose. Nevertheless most often, if not always, we receive God’s truth in and through another who this truth via the Spirit has moved upon. And when this occurs not only the fire of conviction and truth are communicated but also a particular earthly human historical shape clings to this truth and is also passed on. God did not ordain his truth to be passed on to the common lot of humanity from an elite group who resemble the cast of the prototypical Greek thinker who, transcending time and place by pure thought, carves out truth for us extracted with precision from the pure timeless marble of heaven. We receive and give truth in the missionary position. And this missionary position is never free of our passion and the location in time and place from which we understand, speak and write it. God ordained it so. “Now we see heavens truth through a relatively dark translucent not transparent glass then face to face” (cf I Corinthians 13:9). It is me in this position, more or less, but I hope, more that you will encounter my thought and work in this blog.