Tag Archives: Teaching Report

The Good Samaritan Spring 2015 Mission Report: Part One

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Spring has come to an end in the year of our Lord 2015, albeit with a qualification. Here in SE Asia “spring” is summer the hottest time of the year. Here follows my “Spring” (summer) Mission Report. Over the next two weeks, five or six posting will complete this report. It includes capsules of some of my spring teaching lessons, my explorations with three other mission endeavors in Thailand, reports on my meetings with college/seminary leaders. Here follows the first installment of a volley of postings to occur over the next two weeks.

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Excerpts from Spring Teaching Lessons: Even though  most of the colleges and seminaries that I serve bring their academic year to a close in March I have continued to work close with ICF (International Christian Fellowship) in Udon Thani, Thailand teaching lessons. ICF is a church and school that serve Thai Christians who want to worship and learn in an English speaking setting, Falang (foreigners) from Australia, Europe and America as well as Laos students who come to Thailand for 6 to 8 weeks at a time to study. ICF gains its funding from many sources including A G churches in the USA.  Here follows terse excerpts from several of these lessons.

The Second Question: In the parable of the Samaritan (which we call the Good Samaritan) we hear the lawyer, a scholar of the law, the Torah, attempting to save face by asking a second question. The lawyer had already asked Jesus one question and from this inquiry he came out looking a little suspect in the eyes of the people standing by. This can be deduced from the fact that he ended up answering his own question. This showed he already knew the answer to the question he had asked. Wanting to save face the lawyer ventured a second question. It goes something like this. “okay Jesus if you affirm that loving one’s neighbor as oneself is the gateway into life eternal who is my neighbor?” Without knowing it this question revealed the root of the lawyers spiritual – ethical disease. He had boundaries and limits to his neighborliness. The lawyer’s problem was sort of like the blinders the Amish put on their horses so that they cannot see anything except what is straight in front of them. He could not envision an application of the love your neighbor ethic beyond the horizons of his own kind. His family and kin, his Judean neighbors that lived in his sector, his Jewish people and the Jewish nation were the horizon of his love your neighbor as yourself ethic. In Jesus’ response to this second question he told the Samaritan story and literally burst the seams of the lawyers constricted ethical circumference.

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After Jesus’ story neighbor ceased to be parochial. It referred to anybody in need. The horizon of the love ethic was released from the cramped little religious, ethnic, familial, national spaces and places it was habitually caught in. Jesus’ love your neighbor ethic cast a light on the future world, what it will look like and the way of life it will incarnate, namely a true brotherhood and sisterhood where all care for each other and where difference ceases to divide. At first glance Jesus shows up in this story as its teacher –  a storyteller calling us into a new kind of future. But reading this tale in light of the New Testament Gospel Jesus pedagogy is wrapped in a riddle. He shows up in the human drama clothed in the Samaritan’s garb and is discovered hoisting our half dead bodies onto his donkey and taking us to a place where our souls are safe with and in God.

When The View From Below Comes From Above

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Daniel Age Pastor

I have just returned from my 5th trip to China in the last five years. Here follows a few of my reflections one week after completing another teaching marathon providing a course in Christian Ethics in four seminaries in different provinces. In this visit I saw everything I saw before, only more!   China’s reconstruction of its society continues unabated. The countryside continues to be emptied at a stunning pace. While reputedly independent business has slowed marginally the State’s own investment in China’s economic boom has not slowed. The marvel of China’s transformation is the marvel of top down power and authority.

The State is very wealthy and powerful and it continues to build China at a pace that boggles the mind. High Speed rail continues to expand in leaps and bounds every year connecting more of its cities. For every one significant public works project currently in progress in America China probably has a few thousand projects under way. Over the last year I had read that China’s economy was slowing but one thing is everywhere evident, that part of the economy sustained by the Central Government’s industry and investment is not slowing. The breadth of the State’s construction activities is likely unrivaled in the history of governments. Literally everywhere one turns major public works projects, often gigantic in size, are occurring. Immense national greatness is about to be intentionally hall marked and the consequences dimly grasped.

Top down authority is showing its economic muscle in a grandiose remake of China. It’s a stunning display. Centralized power is over seeing an economic – cultural shift in its vision for China. It’s awesome, pervasive, and tremendously ‘successful’- effecting a sea change – the urbanization, capitalization and ‘factorization’ of a mere billion or so people!

The question that everyone in the West is debating is whether this top down power is really moderating and liberalizing. Hong Kong is an exception and the verdict on whether they will gain even the freedom they were promised is still out. In the main land the people seem most interested in making money and tasting the good life. It is true people are expressing their grievances more but little evidence exists that the Beijing governing elite are really having a rethink about their principle of top down power and the rights of the people and whether the people really want such an arrangement.

My impression is that many of the people in Mainland China seem to have formed a kind of cynical paternalism in their attitude toward the government although their love for and pride of China is strong. The governing elite on the other hand seem driven to over function and publically prove a kind of Aristotelian ethic of moral superiority to rule by their anti corruption, anti prostitution campaign within and against high ranking members in the party. The attitude of top down power seems characterized by over functioning while the attitude of the people seem to me one of under functioning – a kind of laissez –faire attitude toward their government except for a few ethnic separatists groups on the parimeter, a few intellectuals and poet types –and one other small group.

This group is the ‘Underground’ or ‘House Church’ movement. This movement was born sixty-six years ago because enough Christians did not take well to the then new Communist government’s attempts to control the church, a policy and practice that remain in place to this day. The birth of the underground church occurred because some Christians refused to submit to the top down impress and control on the church. The new communist government wanted to domesticate and socially quarantine the Christian church’s cultural impact and potential political threat by virtue of its independence and feared interaction with the ‘imperialist’ West. And this going underground was not merely about freedom from a Western viewpoint. The underground church went underground because of obedience not modern freedom sensibilities. It is true this movement is just a tempest in a teacup but one must beware of despising the day of small things. The Kingdom of God in this world almost always lives in the shadows of small insignificant things.

During my working visit this year I learned a little more about this movement. The underground or house church movement remains vital and growing. Country/rural congregations have lost members over the last ten years because of the shift to a factory industrial economy based in the cities but city congregations are growing. There are five streams or developments in the movement numbering several million. But these exist, for the most part, in strings of house congregations with pastors who are under pastors. In most settings one cannot go to any publically recognizable place and see this church and find out where it is at and who is in charge. Indeed it is underground and disparate, loosely but in fact really connected in one of these five streams.

In many locations women provide the leadership needed and their number far exceed men. One pastor’s class I taught for a week in the mountains was composed of approximately 25 women and 3 men. The ladies were a force to be reckoned with. They were wives, mothers as well as the main leaders of the church. One pastor may in fact shepherd 10 or 20 house church congregations. In one seminary/college I served in a major city the principle in his forties introduced me to their founder – a woman around eighty years of age. She gave me a lusty smile her countenance bearing the impress of an undefeated warrior.

In a very few locales congregations have emerged above ground and come to tacit working arrangements with the government and with the official government registered ‘Three Self Churches’ without becoming registered. But my experience now 5 years in the making, confirmed by new conversations, argues that the popular narrative of growing tolerance by the government is not consistent and nor reliable. Because of economic development assumptions are made about the liberalization of Chinese society. But just about the time a person makes this conclusion some one in the top down power chain becomes anxious or randy and a new series of intrusions occur. Even so in many locales especially in the far north persecution of underground church leaders has moderated little over the years. The Communist Party still possesses a vision, albeit a changing vision, of what does and does not contribute to Chinese culture and an inbred fear of groups assembling and indoctrinating independent of government control. In the West we make a distinction between the civil and the sacred, the religious and the secular. But my sense is that the Communist party does not get this distinction and for one reason – they had too much ‘religion’ in their political platform from the get go.

To state the matter directly, along with the explicit paternalism, there is still some ‘religion’ in the State’s communism – Marxism was always a secular variant of the Kingdom of God. Beyond order and justice, the rightful vocation of all governments, the communist government remains committed designers and mangers in their socio –culture project even though this task has become more complex as China modernizes, as socio-economic mobility occurs among its people and as it is more exposed and responsible to international values and critique.

This year in a province once thought to have gained considerable religious tolerance and which enjoyed in many instances ‘above ground’ normality churches were forced back to a more subtle covert posture because local authorities returned to their policy of repression. One church costing millions of RMB thought to have established itself above ground was bull dozed to the ground. Top down power is by nature unpredictable, fickle and unsafe. Seasoned leaders in this Underground/House Church movement know this. Even so their caution is not to be interpreted as fear. While few openly defy the government I have not talked to anyone who obey demands to cease and desist. They just go down and come up somewhere else most often within the space of 24 hours. One group upon being instructed to disband and join a near by government registered church simple reset their meeting times at hours apparently too early for the authorities.

In some locales authorities have been at times tolerant and the believers have built churches or rented facilities then intolerance revives and these are closed or destroyed.

In Beijing a different sort of group of non – government church has emerged and become bold. They bought their own building and commenced to meet publically. But within a short time their pastor was arrested and jailed then released and the building chained and it remains chained. Now for three years they meet year around in the park in the open air. On any given Sunday up to 2000 members gather but their pastor is often arrested on Friday and released on Monday.

This year in all but one of the house church seminaries I taught in I was required to go into the school facility under cover and remain inside for the entire week – no leaving the premises. These schools exist with as little a social footprint in their environs as possible and their facilities are almost always not recognizable from the outside and the students living inside leave the premises very seldom, which means for most students once every four months. Most schools offers a diploma, a bachelors and masters as well as a program for practicing pastors needing formal education. All degrees ultimately come from an established accredited Asian theological school outside China and most of the teachers come in as missionaries with their own support.

When the View From Below Comes From Above

In a future posting I will develop one of my ethics lectures that I taught this year. The lecture I will post provides the theological and ethical rationale for a segment of the church in China breaking away and going underground and staying underground (more or less for nearly seven decades). My lecture (given at three of the four seminaries, to be posted in the near future) returns to Karl Barth, Martin Niemoller, and the Barman Declaration by the Confessing Church in the 1930’s. In crafting this Declaration Barth whetted his sword razor sharp in order to expose the Nazi’s ‘trespass’. Hitler and his Nazis required official control of the Church in Germany and wanted to domesticate it and organize it around their top down cultural National Socialism project. In a word (here paraphrased) Barth and the Confessing Church said in effect “the church does not belong to you or to us that you may require it and we may give it over to you. Obedience to a higher claim on us the church obligates us to decline your demand and name it for what it is. You have trespassed the propriety of your rightful reach over society – the church belongs to Christ. It exists for his mission and purpose alone and no others and he alone is its head and sole authority and as Lord over the church he is alive through the Spirit, the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.” (The Barman Declaration was a declaration not written in the first person nor composed as a letter to Hitler but indeed sent to and read by him.)

Not unlike the Confessing Church in 1930’S Germany the underground church in China is indeed a free church movement in its radical obedience to Christ’s sole Lordship over the Church. It was born over against the centralized government’s attempt to control Christ’s church and it continues vigilant in this posture.

While the historical situation is entirely different between Germany and China the issue of propriety and domain as regards the church remains the same. There is clarity, timeless clarity, in the Barman Declaration especially regarding the church’s relation to any egregious behavior of the state whenever and wherever that occurs.

Christmas /Advent Mission Appeal

By the time this academic year concludes, the Lord willing and if the creek doesn’t rise, I will have completed my goal of serving between 8 and 10 schools. My vice has been that while I have succeeded in getting into these schools and teaching for credit college and masters level courses I have not succeeded in raising sufficient support to balance even my expenses. If you are looking for a micro mission project to support please consider this one.

May you claim the Peace that Christ came to give; the peace that gives favor with God and serenity in the soul.

 

* Some of you who read the title of this article will recognize the phrase “ the view from below”. It comes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer description of his experience as a prisoner. Here it is obviously infused with a different meaning

Dr. Daniel Age in China: A Show and Tell Report

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On November 1st Dr. Dan landed in Shanghai for a four week, four seminary teaching marathon. Here follows his personal account in a show and tell report – enjoy!

( The captions precede the pictures)

The students in the picture below are all church pastors working to earn their degrees. Unfortunately this shot only shows about two thirds of the class. There were about 25 ladies and three men in the class. The women were a force to be reckoned with. They are mothers, wives and the main stay of leadership in the church. Leaving their homes and families they came from quite a distance to learn for a week at a time. They were serious students and took meticulous notes often stopping me to get everything down on paper and demanding clarification. When they prayed during their worship time and at the beginning and ending of a class day the earth would shake because whilst one woman prayed at every phrase the entire group would resound “Amen”. It was awesome. It felt sort of like warriors ready to charge an enemy. I was suffering from the cold but it did not phase them. We would do class close to seven hours each day and then I would retire and take a foot bath out of a wooden basin. But I would give them assignments for each evening, which they would work on into the evening returning to their same seats till nearly ten P M.  This means in the cold they inhabited their seats over ten to twelve hours. Often bodily noises would be heard rising from among the group. I said to myself these women are the real deal. If one wants a yardstick to measure commitment look no further.

These are underground church pastors

 

This school shown below is my favorite school. They took very good care of me –  washing my clothes and walking me to town and buying me fruit and whatever I needed. It was the only school where they were free to move about in their community. Each day at the end of the day we have an open forum for any question or comment. The ladies who on the whole excelled above the young men when given a chance to ask questions often focused on marriage whilst the young men wanted to stump me by asking me to interpret the most esoteric discombobulated texts in the Bible and there are more than a few. Gathered together there was no verse in the Bible they did could not find its whereabouts within 90 seconds (no WIFI needed). Even so like almost all the students I taught they struggled with my conceptual approach to teaching and learning. They wanted a more mathematical hard information approach. I wanted them to grasp a theological insight and apply it on their own to a new frontier of life and thought. They would rather undergo a root canal than follow this approach.

This school shown in a previous pic is my favorite school

This is another school sandwiched in huge city in an area where a mix of industries coexist with low income housing. I call this the “Jack Hammer Factory School.” The school founders bought the facility from a company who moved their operation leaving the huge factory vacant. It sort reminds me of the catacombs because there are so many rooms and niches in the building and the presence of a school inside the old factory is obscure.

This year about 80 students live and study in 4 month stretches most not leaving the premises during this term time. This is a master’s level class. The picture was shot from the rear because no frontal/facial view was not permitted. I have taught here three times. Maybe this school had the most mature and promising students at the Masters level.

This school sandwiched in huge city in an area where a mix of industries coexist with low income housing. The school founders bought the facility from a company who moved their operation leaving the huge factory vacant. Maybe this school had the most mature and promising students at the Masters level.

This is the entire student body of the seminary and Bible college located in one of China’s huge cities. All students no matter their level took my ethics course. The young man to my left I made the class Sergeant at Arms because he had a voice so powerful the window pains would rattle when he raised it.  I decided half way through the class to baptize him with an official role – calling the class to session and announcing break time. This is my fourth year teaching here.

This is the entire student body

The young man in the picture below is my interpreter hired for the week he traveled by train 35 hours to reach the school in this mountainous region. He was a fine interpreter. Freshly married 4 weeks previous he pined for his wife and often received and sent texts. But he was fully present and deeply intrigued by my ethics course thesis. I realized early on I had the wrong idea about translation. I didn’t need to teach the whole class, but rather just teach him and he would teach the pastors. So while teaching publically and privately I expended all my energy helping him grasp the idea and if and when he got it my job was over. He would take it from there. The gap between Mandarin and English is that great! The glow in the corner is an electric heater. It was cold. But the power in the region went off often.

The young man in the picture

I went from the city to the country, actually the mountains to a middle province. When I arrived at the ‘school’ which was a two story house with many rooms I was sure at last I would be allowed to walk about outside because their neighbors were few and the location a sparsely populated mountain valley. But I was confined to the indoors lest neighbors caught sight and the gossip chain stirred unwanted attention. These are pastors walking to catch their ride after a week away from their homes and congregations to do my ethics course.

i went from the city to the country

Located in another massive city finding this school would be like finding a needle in a industrial hay stack. Picking me up at a hotel they drove me to the parameter of the city into a maze of heavy industrial operations and then when we arrived at their building they threw a coat over my head and hustled me to the third floor where I lived and lectured for a week. All the students inhabited the second floor. The living was a notch above camping maybe but they were spirited, dancing and singing during break time.  My interpreter hired for the occasion was first rate. There were about 25 students in all. The founder was a woman approaching eighty years.

Located in another massive city

Among Hmong – For Two Weeks: Teaching Mission Report For September 2014.

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On Tuesday September 2nd located in ICF, Udon Thani, Thailand 45 minutes south of the Laos –Thai border crossing at Nong Khai I commenced a two-week course on ethics.

After a bit of a shake up in Laos I had only seven students in total, four earning their BA. Most students were Hmong from hill tribes in Laos and all relatively new Christians seeking to prepare themselves for ministry. The subject I agreed to teach was on ministerial ethics. Since there are no separate ethics for any particular class of people, and because all are called to minster, I set about to apply the ethical insights I developed in my new book, “Suffering the Tension Between the Seen and the Unseen” to ministry. In total our discussion ran about 45 hours. During this time the students, using our very capable interpreter and the principle/founder of the school, Ben McClure, expressed themselves ensuring that communication was occurring. Their input and responses kept the class interesting but no time more than on the last day.

September 2014 Teaching Report

On the last day I asked the students to present their papers. Part of the assignment was to share some of their pre Christian religious experiences and reflect on them in light of the insights taught in the course. The Hmong people have practiced Spirit Worship for centuries, maybe millennia. All my Hmong students shared personal experiences about their involvement in these practices having participated in them growing up in their families and tribes before they became Christian. For this reason they resonated with one discussion more than others. In order to appreciate the students’ responses I indulge the reader in the lesson in question that I opened up during one of our classes. Understanding this lesson a little will help one appreciate the students’ response and the story retold below on the last day.

In my book I have a chapter entitled “Don’t Get Your Exercise Jumping to Conclusions.” In this chapter I show that from times eternal humans encountering events remarkably good or bad tended to jump to far-flung spiritual conclusions. For instance, Hitler having escaped an attempt on his life by underground conspirators, because a thick wooden table shielded the explosion of a bomb placed under a desk near him concluded that his survival proved God’s favor rested on his work. My argument is that faith imposes a form of blindness on us — we cannot look at events on earth (the things that are seen) and correlate them correctly and directly to the movements of the unseen God in heaven. Time to time life as we experience it directly and immediately ‘heats up’ and when this occurs we are more often then not, seduced into jumping to false conclusions.

‘Sight’ without faith, (faith that anchors one in the ‘hiddeness’ and mystery of God) tempts antimony. The physical is thought to mirror the metaphysical. True faith interferes with this ‘spiritual’ correlation. Faith respects God’s ‘hiddeness’ in the earthly sensual, physical realm not only in terms of the invisibility of God’s eternal being but God’s day-by-day activity, God’s doing. Later with faith glasses we can see a little and at least say that what has happened was made purposeful by God (Romans 8:24) but up close in the moment we surely cannot say for sure what is happening and where or how God is in what is happening. Faith means to respect the ‘hiddeness’ of God. If we don’t live by faith we trespass and get our exercise jumping to conclusions. Here the street value of faith, on account of the fact that it grounds us spiritually to a greater unseen reality and the spiritual truth of that reality, is that it prevents us from being sucked into and under our immediate experience. It gives us a measure of distance from the charm and terror of our experience.

The Apostles and Prophets via word and Spirit reveal the reality of God, the relation God has to us and the kind of life God is backing and promising. And precisely because this revelation is different than that which direct immediate experience suggests is true we can cool and minimize the impact direct experience has on us when it ‘heats up.’ Experience without faith renders us fully exposed to the emotional, psychological and ‘spiritual’ impact of the phenomena we are confronted with. Experience with faith intact downsizes and qualifies this impact and anchors the soul in something greater.

This lesson intersects with the students’ stories on the last day. At class time each Hmong student told a spirit worship story. I chose to include this one. My youngest student, 18 years old, told us about what happened when his brother died. Immediately his father offered a chicken on the family alter replete with chanting in a non-literate ‘language’ to appease angry spirits. Unsure whether this would suffice his parents went to the Hmong shaman. Because their religion teaches that death always comes in twos they wanted to be sure their sacrifice would avail. Confident that the spirits had turned against the family the shaman made his judgment. The premature death of their young son revealed that the spirit’s displeasure with their family was very great. The antidote he concluded must be commensurate with the gravity and severity of the spirit’s anger – the sacrifice of a cow! The sacrifice of a cow would likely protect them and appease the spirits’ anger.

Daniel Age September 2014 Teaching Report

The trouble with this prescription was that the family was not well enough off to sacrifice a cow. Offering a cow would ruin them financially. For this reason they turned to a friend who suggested another possible solution – go to a Christian minister in a near by village and seek help. Under financial duress they opened their mind to things they were heretofore closed. After hearing out the matter the pastor assured the parents that there was no link between the death of their son and malicious spirit activity. Essentially the pastor said “don’t get your exercise jumping to conclusions” illness and death are related to real life and health not spirits. Not convinced the parents brushed aside the pastor’s attempt to disentangle spirit activity with illness and pressed the pastor for protection from another death strike on their family. This is what he wanted and expected.

Because the belief that physical life is the playground of fickle spirits is so deep in the Hmong’s psyche he did not expend too much energy trying to convince them otherwise. He pointed them to the unseen God who was greater than all spiritual and earthly powers and introduced this God as benign, just, good, merciful and loving. This unseen God, alone above all and before all was their refuge. Worship and trust this God and your life will abide under his care.

This helped a little. The pastor was mixing spirit with truth, truth with and into the spiritual realm and engendering faith. He was painting and coloring the spiritual realm in such a way that it ultimately took on a new shape in their minds and they imagined things differently. The truth of the existence of one God, good, faithful, merciful and caring whose power was greater than all earthly and spiritual powers began to disenchant their minds and lower their anxiety.

This coloring of the Unseen metaphysical /spiritual realm differently indeed helped, but only when the pastor broke out of the language of pure metaphysics and began to tell them this worldly Gospel story about how an anointed one came from God, sent from God (i.e. messiah) to earth and triumphed over evil and death did the fear of spirits begin to loosen their grip on them. The Gospel’s flesh and blood history, portrayed in a drama of defeat and triumph on earth where a real person, in real time and events, occurred in a real place provided the crucial stepping stone out of the spirit world morass they were caught in. The ‘physicality’, simplicity of the story transpiring in real time, combined with its spiritual interpretation broke the charm of the seamless erratic spirit world they were caught in. No cow was sacrificed and in time they became Christian and with them their entire family became Christian. Conversions from spirit worship to Christ among the Hmong people are rarely individual. The whole family transitions together under the leadership of the father.

Daniel Age September 2014

The unseen of the spiritual shaped and informed by the gospel and the nebulous unseen of the world of spirit worship competed for their minds but the power of the former compelled faith and freedom while the power the latter, real or imagined, seduced them, making them fearful. Using the help of the other Hmong students and their stories I have taken the freedom to shape the pastor’s way of leading the parents to faith. The irony is that we are not really that different. A faith that is able to resist the seduction of awesome phenomena needs the word of the Gospel of Christ. In this world, this world reality, a victory has occurred. The gospel of Christ alone gives faith in the unseen teeth!

My next stop is Phenom Penh. In an up coming post I will share the details this project.

Walking on Water With Peter– Everyday!

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August 2014 Teaching Mission Report.

The last week of August I returned from the US to Asia and made my way to Udon Thani in northeastern Thailand where on Sunday August 31st I preached at the ICF (International Christian Fellowship). I chose for my text Matthew’s account of Peter walking on water.  My message circled around a theological and ‘homiletical’ involvement with the text. Here follows a digest.

Sooner or later you and I find our self at a juncture in life’s journey where the firm foundation under our feet disappears and Jesus’ call to Peter to get out of the boat and journey across the water to him transitions us from a voyeur amused by a tale from the comfort of our arm-chair to a soul at the crossroads called to surrender his anxious grip on fixity.

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Suddenly the love of another under one’s life may pass away or fail, the material means that sustains and protects us erodes threatening to thrust us into the vicious grip of want. Our vitality and health may slowly or rather quickly falter when an accident happens, disease or the downside of aging makes an unwanted call. And when any or all of these or other mishaps come knocking just as surely toxic anxiety, cynicism, bitterness, forcefulness, anger and despair come knocking at the door of the soul. At such times the good word of the gospel calls us to keep on keeping on and trust the invisible foundations under us more than ever. Happening upon any of these eventualities we must, as Paul writes, “look not on the things that are seen but on the things that are unseen.”

When the visible and tangible foundations that have been holding us up and taking care of our shalom fail all the more we must retreat to the invisible foundations and weather the storm. Then more than ever we must, as it were, abandon the boat and walk on water with Peter. When all that we see, touch and feel under our lives – socially, materially or physically – slips and slides and reveals its fragility and we begin to sink into anxiety or despair Scripture reminds, “underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deuteronomy 33:27).

The invisible God in Christ reveals Himself to be the invisible foundations of our life. The love that steadies and grounds us is ultimately invisible, the visible material pinions of our lives are ultimately connected to an invisible Provider and sustainer. Behind, before and independent from all the forms, orders and relations that steady and support us, as good and proper as they are, an invisible foundation abides that the eyes of faith alone are able to see looking past the weather of our lives fair or foul.

The presence of this invisible foundation is often made imaginatively clear through the Spirit when at kairos moments we need it the most. When fortune presents itself and life appears steady, secure and intrinsically good on its own accord the Spirit against the flesh, points us beyond the present but soon fading jubilee to an invisible security that abides under us on account of costly grace. Or the scene changes and life presents itself as intrinsically bad and insecure and fickle. At such times life ‘heats up’ and attempts to seduce us into thinking and feeling that “what we see is what we get,” that what we see, touch and feel is the be all and end all. Learning to follow after the invisible security presented in the Gospel i.e. learning to walk on water we refuse to give too much dignity to abundance or scarcity, trouble or triumph, success or failure, want or wealth, the presence or absence of the love of another or even our righteous life or lack thereof. Faith sees something invisible that trumps the visible.

Eventually walking along on this invisible foundation of life, love and righteousness under us we come to a place in the journey of life similar to that which Dietrich Bonhoeffer came to, although hopefully absent the malice that pursued him. Upon facing his imminent demise he stepped to the gallows and for the last time ‘walked on water’ firmly confessing, “this for me the end is the beginning of Life.” “Ah to die well is an exquisite but rare victory.” ( Author Unknown)

This message seemed to be received fairly well and was welcomed by ICF’s pastor Ben McClure who back in July wrote me in New York and asked me to preach on this theme hoping members would be attracted to audit the class I would commence teaching two days later on September 2nd.

Dr Dan’s Teaching Mission Update: China – Fall 2013

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Dr Dan’s Teaching Mission Update: China Fall 2013

There are over 100 underground seminaries currently flourishing in China. A few operate out in the open in the south but most carry on in the shadows. To date over the last three years I have a served a little less than ten. There are Government approved and co-opted churches in which the government has ultimate restrictive control and say and then there are the underground churches. The former derive their permission to exist from the state and the latter from God. The former I call churches organized around top down power and the latter underground church is organized around bottom up power. The mere fact of the relocation of power in the underground movement accounts for a good deal of the new energy that is released.

I am writing this having just returned from China to Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand where I will attempt some R&R and do the final editing for the long over do book “Existence and Faith: The Doing and Undoing of Religion in America”. Circumstances beyond my control have delayed the final editing until now. Here follows a brief report of the five legs of my mission teach in China then out to Malaysia and back in again. Of the five stops three were especially skittish about pictures and any precise blogging that would draw attention to their location and identity. In many places the situation appears to be loosening and it is but then just about when one thinks that calm has at long last arrived here to stay the corpse of old zealots suddenly starts kicking and flagellating.

I will avoid a chronological order and share bits and pieces freely of this six-week run. The visa process is sometimes daunting and from my standpoint inflicts unnecessary burdens. In order to fulfill my assignments I had to go in and come out and then return  – always as a tourist.

At least one school I worked in has achieved a working sharing relationship with an approved government church and enjoys greater freedom. I have included with their permission a number of pictures from my time with them. There are cities in the south of China from Shanghai to Hangzhou where little government resistance occurs. My impression is that schools from the North and West have migrated to these cities and set up shop but remain very careful perhaps far beyond any caution due. Within 10 years the situation will be radically different, the Chinese are can do people extremely aggressive and undaunted at this time in history. Traveling to many Asian countries I feel this distinction sharply. The day when Mainland Chinese underground churches will educate their own teachers cannot be far away. Several of my students are going abroad for M Div’s. One leader told me within ten years itinerant teachers from the west and other Asian countries will not be needed.

In Beijing I asked one leader what the key to his success in planting and building churches was from a human standpoint and he simply said the government loosened the chokehold on us just a little and we immediately exploited this slight easement. He has been working for thirty years building underground churches and his story is amazing. It is being written up for me and will be posted soon.

I taught again in Beijing, stayed in a modest hotel and walked to the ‘school’ located in business high-rise office building. Here I met up fifteen older students working on their master degree. The course was Christian Ethics. The challenge during this week was translation. The translator that was originally planned fell through the last minute so two young guys were immediately drafted. English to Mandarin takes an experienced translator to pull off, these guys were not trained and still in the early stages of learning English. Many things could not be translated so I invented stories and suborned them into my service like mules enlisted to carry one’s luggage. I would spin a story and then show where the idea was in the story. Straight concept was way out of reach. But it was the heart these two guys nicknamed King David and Joseph the favored son. While one translated the other manned the computer word search back up post. The second day Joseph said he was whipped his brain had never worked so hard – and he looked haggard. I was like Pharaoh’s taskmaster lashing them to deliver the goods. But they had heart – and prayed, really embracing the challenge with spirit and this proved the tipping point I am sure. Spirit and grace salvaged the week and in fact this is true. And on the last day the students demanded that I share something from my own story in life and ministry so I told a few personal stories with no agenda whatsoever. So grateful were they to see my ‘in the trenches real person identity trying to work out my calling juggling the fatherhood duties of not so distant bygone days that they secretly pulled their RMB’s and gifted me a small send-off – a brisk and sweet embrace of their kindness and gratitude to me for my sojourn to their school.

Master Class - Beijing

This time, as always, it was a steady culinary struggle. Chinese eat many things at one meal. One meal where I went out with the surrounding pastors to a restaurant I counted 37 dishes on the table that turned in the middle. I am gastrointestinally challenged and did not look forward to school mealtime. Often I thought how to come up with a good excuse to legitimize my absence at the table, perhaps resort to the tried and true method – cut my toe off or run into a building face first. In spite of gastrointestinal disturbances by the grace of God I kept one foot out of the net and kept laying up new bounty on my ‘new’ ethics insights and also on my ride through Galatians. In Paul’s faith – sight polarity [2 Corithians5:7]  there is an ethical well of pure water so deep and fresh as to be inexhaustible.  In my course through Galatians I paid attention, to D G Dunn, Wright and Sanders gathering many insights [‘The New Perspective] but then went on to show that their Covenantal Nomism paradigm disintegrates under post exilic Hasidim separatism which infected 1st Century Judaism with legalism coming through  the back door. After working through this book time and again I have never understood Paul so well. Even now Paul, who is the radical thinker and theologian Apostle, is domesticated by the church. In order to unhook Christianity from the train called Judaism and set it free to go into the Gentile world unencumbered by food laws, Sabbath days and holy rituals like circumcision and the other 600 plus laws he reshaped the people of God identity and the ethics that would carry it. Thanks to Paul the Christian way is ‘extra nomos’ – outside law. These insights and ‘new’ ideas I will put in my theological discussion column in this blog in 2 weeks.

After my first August run in China I went to Penang, Malaysia to meet the president of MBTS and speak to the student body and take a three-hour lecture with the D Ministry students on the foundation of Christian Ethics. The president Dr John Ong is a prince of a man and able leader of this school. I am honored to have bumped into him and liaise with MBTS to help out in their China seminary education mission. Beyond their service to Malaysia, China is their main mission field and they are coordinating teachers for underground seminaries all over China ranging from 40 students to a hundred or more.

The last school I served in southern China, ‘Union’ (September 18 to 27) had 46 students terrible as an army with banners. Before class started they sang and then prayed and when the appointed student prays he or she pauses between complete phrases at which moment the entire class provides a resounding a refrain – “amen”. It stirs the blood to say the least.  I found the students spirited, full of questions and so full of youth’s verve trying their best to calibrate their devotion with what is true in the Christian faith.  I am sure I fielded over 150 questions during this one week, eight hour a day course on Galatians.

Many students come to Union from far away some from the Mongolian border. In the middle of the week the president took me out to dinner in the mountains with my translators to a restaurant that dates back to the old way of raising one’s own food, cooking in a kitchen that dates back to the 1800’s with a little ditch outside the kitchen where live fish await their destiny so that from swimming to eating is a matter of a few minutes.

At dinner I learned about the president’s history. During the Cultural Revolution they confiscated all Bible’s all around China also in the city I was teaching in threatening imprisonment and hard labor for those who did not surrender them. He told me how his mother salvaged the only Bible in the area wrapping it in plastic and hiding it between a rock crevice under the stone bridge in her neighborhood much later when the heat resided she recovered it and it survives to this day. And true to her devotion her son now the president and founder of Union became an evangelist and traveled China for years building little clandestine house churches eventually ending up in prison. Such is the salt behind this school’s beginning by this family.

At Union one girl sat on the front row 20 years old with the maturity far exceeding her years.  She had a natural way of keeping everything real and the questions she asked revealed her mind. With dead seriousness wrapping her question in a beguiling smile, as if it was a bit humorous and serious at the same time, she asked me why unlike her classmates the Christian message didn’t wind her up with zeal and feeling, surely there was something fundamentally wrong with her she implored. I told her to sit easy with feelings and flux of zeal and devotion and close to the teaching that made sense and spoke to her. She said “I think what you teach makes sense to me”. She was one of three out of the entire class who spoke English. She traveled 40 hrs by train from a city in the northwest close to Russia.

I went again to the motorcycle prison seminary. This is the name that I penned on it because when one goes into this school (once a motorcycle factory) there is no coming out until you served your time. This year about 70 students attend and live there male and female. The school is as obvious as a bird’s nest in a thicket. You can be looking right at it and never see a school. Once inside walks outside are prohibited. Inside an intense routine of worship, study, classes, and (in keeping with their habit) fast eating occurs like clockwork. Romances are not allowed. But who is surprised when 10 minutes after graduation ‘friends’ transmute into bride and groom and start ringing the wedding bells.

In my upcoming blog posting I will share a few thoughts and stories from the other seminaries that I taught at in China during this August – September 2013 run. Attached are a few Union pictures and a few others from 2 other schools plus a couple shots from my street walks. With these there are a couple shots from my visit to MBTS.

I must confess I am spent totally. Lecturing all day every day including morning and evening refocusing the lectures ends up a 12 hr day. I emptied the bucket again and again until there was not a drop.  Chiang Mai is my appointed R&R town in northern Thailand. Here I will spend a couple weeks making the final, long over do, changes on my book before submitting it to MBTS then return to teach at a new Karen seminary along the Thai Burma border [Masters students only

God Bless you

Daniel

Don’t miss more photos from the road posted in the following China Photo Essay Post. 

 

The housechurch movement: China

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All but 3 pictured here are young housechurch pastors. Each has started his or her own congregation. This is how Christianity is spreading in China. No traditional denominational structures exist within the housechurch movement. Churches spawn churches. Pastors simply emerge from a cell group and commence to build their own congregations loosely connected to their alliances. The movement is like a dragon with many little heads, which in turn generate more little heads. There’s no place to go to or person to contact who is crucial or pivotal to the movement. If authorities get nervous and arrest a leader the consequences are minimal. Layers of distinction create an antidote to the effectiveness of government intrusion. Uniformity and conformity are not valued but networking is. And while education is valued it is not in order to meet leadership requirements only to build up and strengthen a Pastor/ missionary’s gifts for her work. All the student/pastors here are earning a masters degree awarded by an established, accredited seminary in Malaysia. My surprise with this group was the degree to which their questions were practical. Their interest in and capability for theological thought was very low while issues dealing with church order and government were their focus. It seemed a great burden for them to wrestle with ideas and follow ideas to connect the dots. Late into the course two university students came to listen in. They were bilingual [Mandarin and English] . My work on the “Transformation of Morality by Luther and Paul especially went over well with these two. They begged me to stay in China and continue taking teaching appointments but I refused. My health required a break and the harsh cold in Beijing was no place to get my zip back.

Different than any other place in China: Wenzhou

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This is a school that’s taken sanctuary under the wing of a church that operates out in the open in Wenzhou, China. The pastor of the church acts as the principal. The students you see– mostly undergraduate students, with six Masters students– compose the entire student body. Wenzhou is different than any other place in China. It is called the Jerusalem of China. Liberties and religious freedom for Christians exist here but Beijing refuses to interfere. They like what is going on in Wenzhou economically. Somewhere along the way, Beijing lost the battle to control culture here.  In their minds (Beijing’s communist leaders) traditional Chinese culture excludes China becoming Christian but in some places, especially Wenzhou they lost their culture battle and surrendered. There are flourishing churches all over Wenzhou and some of these harbor schools for students that have come from other provinces in China where such endeavors are forbidden. This class especially endeared themselves to me. I came down with a virus of some kind and it was working havoc with me – chills, fever and a chest inflammation. I worked through it but on the 4thday of lecturing it became apparent to them I was struggling. They asked me to stop the class and began to sing and pray for me. It was so powerful. Listening to these 40 students sing felt like Joshua’s trumpets that brought the walls of Jericho down. Later they kept telling me how cold it was in Beijing and how I needed to get a real coat. On the last day behind my back they took up an offering and went out and bought me a very warm coat. I went off to Beijing with a “warm baby” an electric hot water bottle, polar bear bedroom slippers and a very warm coat. Later in Beijing they texted me and told me they had a prayer session for me and that I should be getting better within the hour! They also assured me I was their favorite teacher and waited for me to return.

The fullness of the ‘empty’ and the emptiness of the ‘full’: Thai-Burma border

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At the Mae La Refugee Camp there is a thatch dorm for handicapped Karen men who suffered land mine accidents and violence at the hands of the Myanmar military. I was invited to visit these men. On my arrival they rallied and sang to us wanting to give something to us. After their music, wanting to give something to them, I talked about faith, hope and love in the midst of the brokenness of life then we prayed with them and visited each one. One member in our group who had come to visit the camp that day, a writer from Sweden, an unbeliever, was greatly moved – on account of their courage and serenity; and the thoughts of faith hope and love in the depths, when life appears beyond redemption. He had come to Thailand for fun but decided for a day off to visit this camp. I ate lunch with him after our meeting it was clear he was stirred and shaken. The fullness of the ‘empty’ and the emptiness of the ‘full’ had wedged itself into his mind.

For the Karen not only is hope needed but the transformation of hope: Thai-Burma border

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These are seniors at KKBBS College at the Karen Mae La refugee camp 67 Kilo from Mae Sot, Thailand. I was their teacher for 2 weeks. I’ll remember this class for their questions.  For instance, they wanted to know the right relationship of Christians and the church, to political power.  A large percentage of the Karen people are Christians so much so Christian and their ethno-cultural identity have merged. The political fortunes in Burma/Myanmar are shifting and they are keen to know if and how as Christians they can move the process along in their direction.  The Karen groups that were run over and fled are now, more than in times past, flirting with hopes of a return to their homeland. In the not-so-recent past the Karen carried on guerilla warfare in defense of their towns and villages, which had been overrun by the military. I urged them to play with new images of their future in the emerging Burma, less separated as before whilst no less distinct, or true to their values, customs and culture. I quoted Chalcedon “union without fusion distinction without separation”. It maybe that for the Karen people not only is hope needed but the transformation of hope  – a new solidarity with distinction, distinction with solidarity. The old hope – the return of highly separated almost parallel peoples within the new Burma may be dated. Hope, like all prayer, rarely if ever returns to us from our God-sent petition in kind. Do we receive our answers in the same form we send them to Him? More often than not, Life teaches us otherwise. These are seniors and they were feeling the weight of their impending futures, soon they will graduate and then what, where, how? At the close of my two weeks with them they took over the class and ask me to sit.  They proceeded to have one of their musicians play the guitar and sing to me while they filed by one by one and shined on me blessing me and thanking me.