The Fellowship Hall

 

How do you feel about the fellowship hall?  Do you enjoy the time after service in the large room with the drinks and snacks as time to catch up with others, meet new people, and partake in some fellowship as the name might suggest?  Or do you have feelings of nervousness, dread, and fear?  If it is the former, Praise God!  You’re making the fellowship hall what it is in theory meant to do.  But if it is the latter, you are not alone.  I’ve had a number of conversations about the fellowship hall and many people are intimidated by it.

I don’t think people were intimidated when we were a smaller church in a smaller building.  Maybe it’s something about the large ceiling space and warehouse-y feel?  But then again, people were intimidated by it at the old, warmer feeling building.  So, I don’t think it’s the space.  Maybe it’s the number of people there now?  We feel guilty that we may not know everyone with the large number of people?  Perhaps.  Please, voice your feelings about the fellowship hall (anonymously on seminarythoughts.wordpress.com if you like) and let me know how you feel about it and why.

My theory is that we dislike the fellowship hall because it is does not meet us in the type of culture we are accustomed to.  Let me explain.

As I’ve talked about on other occassions, there are 2 dimensions to culture: grid and group.  Briefly, group is the amount of importance the group as a whole plays to the individuals and grid is the amount of structure in relating with others there may be.  When people are afraid of the fellowship hall because they might offend someone for not remembering their name, being afraid of offending is high group, remembering the name is part of grid.  When people are afraid to meet new people because they don’t know what to say, that is a fear based in not understanding the structure in relating with others and that is an indicator of high grid.  Generally speaking, North American culture is low group, low grid: every individual can do whatever they like and say whatever they want and no one will take offense because everyone understands it is the right of the individual for personal expression.  Generally speaking, Korean culture is high group, high grid: people worry if they are to address using the honorifics, use korean “noona/unni” and “hyung/oppa”, say the right words, do the right things(use 2 hands when receiving or giving something, etc.).  All those unspoken, unwritten rules are high grid, and the worry of offending someone is high group.

Our church is predominantly Korean-American which means we’re somewhere in-between these two seemingly opposing cultures.  But, I think the Korean in us kicks in when we go to the fellowship hall.  Our fears of offending others take over, and we tend to do what we are familiar with and what won’t offend.  The fellowship hall structure as we are familiar with it is a very low group, low grid structure.  You go into a big room and talk with whoever you like and do whatever you want.  The high group high grid person in us gets uncomfortable with that.

How then, can we make the time are more genuine time of fellowship?  Remove the cultural barriers that are making it ineffective.  Contextualize it, as it were.  I suggest we make our fellowship time a bit more structured.  Raise our grid level a bit.  We can either do this by teaching our people how to interact with others (explicitly or implicitly…implicit communication works best in high group high grid cultures) or by providing a structure to make the rules more explicit.  In the short term, providing a structure (for example, games, tables, seating, etc.) can be effective, but I believe would be too hard to maintain in the long term.  The flip side is difficult because we are so subcnsciously inculturated in our culture that it’s hard to teach what everyone “should” already know.

How do you feel about the fellowship hall, and what would it look like to you to share in genuine fellowship after service?

Does God Prefer the Poor?

It’s a question I never thought about until class the other day.  It seems like such an obvious question and I wondered why I never asked it earlier.  On the one hand, it goes against our sense of justice to believe that God would have a preference for certain people but on the other, there is no getting around that Jesus went out of His way for the poor, sick, and oppressed.

 I believe John Piper does an excellent job for the case for God’s impartiality here.  The greatest element for this case is Romans 2:11, “For there is no partiality with God.”  But, is the answer that simple?  If you’ve read any of my recent entries, you’ll know, it never is.

So this question arises from an emerging theology in South America, namely, Liberation Theology.  One of the major premises of liberation theology is that God prefers the poor, oppressed, widowed, etc. over the entitled, rich, elite, etc.  There’s certainly scriptural evidence to support this:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed
-Luke 4:18

 On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
-Mark 2:17

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.  For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
-Matthew 25:31-46

We can also see it in his selection of Israel as a chosen people.  Yes, Israel was chosen to be a blessing to other nations, but they were still chosen out of many other nations.  Could it not be argued that even the doctrine of predestination has an idea of preference in it?  Also in the book of Romans, cross referencing Exodus, Paul writes:

Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden.
-Romans 9:18

My friend posits that it only appears this way because the poor, oppressed, etc. are more receptive to God.  But if it were just an appearance, what of the verses quoted above that show he was sent to the poor, he has mercy on who he wants, etc.

It’s a conundrum for me.  I don’t think it can be answered by an “and/both” since being impartial would, by definition mean, that God can not be partial.  What are your thoughts on this seeming paradox?

Ultimately, our theology on preference is not what matters though.  What matters is that we, like Jesus, reach out to the poor, oppressed, widowed, prisoned, overlooked, downtrodden, hurting peoples.  As Jesus said before the parable of the wedding banquet:

“But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”
-Luke 13-14

Start by checking out:
http://www.onedayswages.org/

Is the Gospel Good News to You?

Let me begin by defining “Gospel.”  Simply put, gospel means, “good news.”  In this very broad definition, is the good news simply that Christ came to earth a man, died, and rose again?  Is the good news limited to just 4 books of the Bible?

I would like to propose that the whole of the Bible is good news.  Certainly, the 4 gospels share the good news of Christ’s life but could we not argue that Romans equally shares the good news of eternal life?  Does not even Genesis show God’s redemptive purpose from the begining of time and thus is good news for us?

I would even say that Acts is good news for us in that it shows us a church community that while not perfect is living out church life in community.  It is good news that a church persecuter like Saul can be redeemed to be the greatest evangelist the world may have ever known.

It is good news that even in the exile, God is sovereign.  It is good news that in the Psalms, we can bring our frustrations, joys, and everything else to God in song.  It is good news that we can live out our faith practically, as in the book of James.

I believe that the whole of the Bible is good news.  And this good news may take the form of proclamation of God’s goodness in Christ, or it may take the form of how to live faith in a faithless world.  Good news may even come in the form of rebuke as long as it leads to repentence and proclamation of Christ or the changing and living out of faith.

I think thought, in our Western ability to compartmentalize and dissect we have tried to boil down the Gospel to just one small thing but the good news is so much more than a mental ascertation.  In other parts of the world, the gospel is much more practical than theological.  It is much more about how to live than it is how to think.  It is about right action, not necessarily right belief.

Yet, we do not live in other parts of the world.  We live in the Western world.  How then does the gospel look, sound, feel to you?