But, for my 10th and final post, the topic that used to be the bread and butter for comments/eProps/etc., relationships!  Then again, I’m taking flip side view of that and that is, the non-relationship: being single.  And, the post may end up being very analytical and scientific, so, perhaps not that interesting.  And, xanga and blogs are not what they used to be, so again, perhaps no views.  But in any case….

I was trying to think of a few titles for this post.  Something that would grab the eye and still convey what I was trying to write about.  Higmeista came up with: chaste and the church.  Great title, but not quite what I was trying to go for.  Also thought about, flirt and the fellowship hall, but again, might hit the wrong idea.  In any case, on to the post.

I was trying to think about why there are such a large number of singles in the church today and why that number seems to be growing.  I was thinking about it in terms of grid and group (see this post for a primer) and was thinking we are unaware of the rules for relating with one another (grid).  We are afraid of the consequences of it not working out (group).

I believe this happens because when we’re growing up in our context, we are aware of the rules.  But when we are placed in this new church context, one that we have not grown up in and with other people, all we are aware of is the ambiguous, unspoken rule of “don’t be shady.”  Most people play it safe in consideration of the group and interpret it as “never interact” but if we never interact, nothing will ever happen.

The solution to this is (as with the fellowship hall post) we can either educate the people involved in how to relate with each other (make the grid level aware) or provide the structure for interaction (supply the grid).  Simple short term structures may prove to be fruitful, for example, a speed dating event or something along those lines if we can get past the stigma (make that interaction acceptable in the grid level).  Education of the rules for interaction would best be done with indirect communication and would be difficult but better in the long term…OR, I could try to spell them out for you right here:

[to be continued]

Regarding individualism, we have turned God into something small that fits inside our own personal world.  While it is true that God is close and personal, He is also the God that transcends our own lives and is larger than the whole universe.  Rah says, “Even small group ministry, which is supposed to be the primary expression of community life…often yields a narcissistic, indivdualistic focus.  Small groups become a place of support and counsel rather than a place where Scripture challenges teh participants towards kingdom living” (p. 37).

Consumerism, closely related to individualism, also creeps into our mentality towards church.  When choosing a church, the word “shopping” is used, and individuals will entertain the idea of leaving a church if it is not meeting his or her personal and indiviudal needs.  “We’re purchasing a product rather than committing to the body of Christ” (p. 47).

I think I largely agree with his ideas, even if he writes them from a seemingly angry perspective.  But there is insight and perspective to be gained from his writing.  He also notes how in trying to cater to the individualism and consumerism, pastors may cater their message to what will meet the needs of some individuals but that is not what the purpose of delivering the Word should be.  It should be what God needs to say to the whole community, not what individuals need to hear.

However, a lot of my writing has been about how we can better meet the people in our community by meeting the people in the culture they are most familiar with.  The idea is to remove cultural barriers to worship and let the Gospel be its own tripping stone rather than culture itself.  But in trying to cater to the cultural needs of individuals, am I feeding the consumerism and individualism that is talked of here?

The tension is this: on the one hand, you want people to worship God as freely as possible, not to be hindered by cultural forms or being distracted by anything else.  On the other hand, you do not want to cater to people’s tastes and give them what their itching ears want to hear.  How is this tension resolved?

I have not had time to flesh out my thoughts regarding this but perhaps your thoughts will help me shape my own.  Would love to hear what your thoughts are.

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?

 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/

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?

50s/60s TV Dads

Examples: Leave it to Beaver, The Brady Bunch

The Typical Scenario: The typical 50s/60s tv dad was wise beyond measure.  The typical plot of a show, the kids are trying to outwit and outsmart someone, but the dad is always one step ahead of them.  The final minutes of the show are typically the father talking with the kids and teaching them a valuable lesson.

How It Might Have Affected Culture and Society:  I think for the most part, no one questioned their father.  Their authority over the household was absolute.  TV reinforced the idea that if we tried to do something we were not suppsoed to, Father would know and we would get in trouble, so we tended to trust what our Fathers said for the most part, submitted to his authority.

80s/90s TV Dads

Examples: Full House, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Who’s the Boss

The Typical Scneario: The typical 80s/90s TV dad was smart, but was always getting outsmarted by his kids.  Typically, one of the kids in the show would basically do whatever they wanted, the parent would get angry or do something “wrong”, and the final minutes of the show were usually the parent apologizing to the kids for what they had done.  Sometimes both would be at fault, and there’d be a dual apology, but there are also many an episode where it is just the parent aplogizing to the kids.

How It Might Have Affected Culture and Society: We began to question everything.  No longer was the Dad all knowing.  He made mistakes too!  He was no longer the super-hero solve everything, but did the best he could with what he knew and made mistakes once in a while.  This empowered kids to question what their Dads told them.  It lead to the mentality that I can do whatever I want, try anything I want, and the consequences won’t be bad.  In fact, it might not even be my fault!  Perhaps a sense of pride and entitlement creeps into society as a result.

TV Dads today

Examples: Family Guy, The Simpsons

The Typical Scenario: Today’s TV dads have been reduced to being completely incompetent.  It’s actually amazing to see the change happen in Homer Simpson from season to season.  In the first season, he was just a regular dad trying to help his family as best he could.  The second season, he became a less competent dad, but still had some level of intelligence.  Today, Homer is a walking catch phrase with no apparent ability to think and is a slave to his passions (perhaps due to the crayon in his brain…I suspect placed there sometime in the second season).

How It Might Have Affected Culture and Society: Fathers are no longer responsible for their actions.  They are no longer viewed as the wise, all knowing, sources and bastions of knowledge they once were, and not even as people who may have some experience and advice, but now are just seen as nuisances and non-understanding people.  The ideas that began in the previous era become engrained and furthered.  A sense of entitlement is instilled in us and we have a right to everything.  Nothing is privlege anymore.  We think we can do whatever we want without any consequence (good or bad).

This post became much more serious than I had originally planned…but do you think art reflects life, or life reflects art?  Are the tv shows a sign of the times, or the impetus for those changes in time?

This morning, I woke up about 15 minutes late.  Not the worst start to the day, but not the best.  This resulted in me getting out the door a little late but should still be able to catch the 9:00 bus.

Except that I drive to my bus stop, and this morning, for whatever reason, all roads leading to my bus stop were under construction.  There were so many backed up cars on the main roads and detours down side roads, that I ended up having to backtrack a bit and then move forward again.  This pushed my target bus to 9:15, the “late bus.”

The walk to the bus stop from where I park took a little longer than I expected, which resulted in my missing the 9:15…leaving me to wait for the 9:30 bus, the “REALLY late bus.”  This would get me into port authority by 9:50 if all goes smoothly (but that rarely happens) so, expecting to get into port authority by 10:00.

Naturally, there is traffic in the tunnel which delays the bus as well, bringing my final arrival time to port authority to 10:15.  Tack on the 15 minute walk to the office, and I get in at 10:30.  An hour later than I normally shoot for.

How does this relate to the body of Christ?  Well, as I was enjoying my calf burning speed walk to my office, I was thinking about how one part of my commute made the rest of my commute suffer.  And in general, when one part of the commute is bad, we tend to focus on all the other things that go wrong with the commute.  As a flip side to this, there’s also the tendency for when a commute goes well, that it seems like every other part of the commute goes well too.

But, it brought to mind the idea that we don’t suffer with the rest of our body (or our commute, depending on your analogy of choice) enough (or at all?).  Neither do we rejoice with the rest of our commute-nity often enough (rejoicing weekly sounds good to me =))

I could go one of 3 routes with the rest of this post:

1.  Expound on the idea of suffering and how we can appropriately suffer together in community rather than trying to go it alone.

2.  A reminder that Thanksgiving is around the corner, and to appropriately rejoice and suffer together.

3.  Note that the passage in Corinthians is talking about the sharing of gifts to build up the community and that if gifts are missing, the body is crippled.  If a gift blesses the body, it is built up (body-building, you could say).  And thus, build up the body (physically and spiritually =P) by sharing your gift of cooking for a pot-luck dinner.

Dinner sounds good right about now =)

In light of the prayer meeting tonight, I was looking for an old post of mine. It was a sort of call to prayer then, and I link it here as a call to pray again:

http://dmachine.xanga.com/214495725/item/

reading over this entry again, I’m amazed that I still have the same issues. I still do not pray big prayers. I still “pray as I ought, not as I am.” My supplication still dominates my prayer time. And I still lack prayer requests to ask for because my own prayer life is lacking prayer.

But, I have failed in asking for the first thing I asked for in the post: for the Lord to help us to pray. So, I ask the Lord again, 4 years later, to help us to pray.

if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land. Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place.I have chosen and consecrated this temple so that my Name may be there forever. My eyes and my heart will always be there.
-2 Chronicles 7:14-16

I’m excited for the prayer meeting tonight. I’m excited to see what God does with a people coming together to seek His face, turn from wicked ways, and pray. And I pray the Lord help us to keep praying.

We are a commuting culture.  The very nature of a suburb is rooted in commuting.  A suburb is “sub-urban” so that you can work in the city (the urban) and yet return to home which is close enough to commute but without the negatives of the urban.

We commute not only to our jobs, but to our churches as well.  Our church has often been called a “commuter church.”  I’ve heard that when plotting out our church’s location compared to the location that our congregation lives, there is a doughnut effect: the church is the whole in the doughnut while the congregation lives relatively equidistant away.

But what does being a commuter church mean in terms of identifying the community we are a part of?  In Biblical times, identifying your community was easy.  Your community was the neighborhood you were a part of.  You couldn’t really get that far and commuting was achievable by foot for most.  But with the advances in transportation and ease of travel, commuting blurs the lines of community.  Is my community where I live?  Where I work?  Where most of my friends are?  Where my church is?

I’ll begin exploring this topic with a word study (courtesy of Pastor David Choi.  Thanks so much!)  He notes:

“Com” is a latin root meaning together or with.

commute is a combination of com (together) and mute (from mutare, as in mutate, or change).  So the idea behind commute was originally to (ex)change a series of payments into one.  We get a similar sense when a sentence is commuted (lessened, or exchanged).

Community, according to my dictionary comes from the same root as “common” so that gives you a good sense of the word.  Common in the sense of having things in common (as opposed to its other use, common).

From these etymologies, we can see that the prefix “com” is common across them.  I speculate (and this is pure speculation) that the origin of commute also had to do with the idea of travelling (or making the exchange) together.  As mentioned in the word study, a series of payments into one (extending that idea further), a bunch of people getting a ticket together to pay for a nicer ride together (a train for example).

In this way, the words commute and community are related to each other by the idea of “together” being the prefix root.  But the title of this blog has 3 words that begin with “com”.  It turns out that the prefix for compartmentalize is actually an intensifier rather than the idea of “together”.  and partmentalize comes from “partis” which (of course) comes from part.  Now, where am I going with these 3 words.

A friend speculated that commuting leads to a kind of compartmentalization of lives.  We compartmentalize our work life from our personal life.  The commute separates (geographically and by time) different areas of our lives.  The distance and time slice we spend at work naturally separates it from the people we would see in our personal life.

Does this same idea apply to commuting to church?  Do we naturally segment off our spiritual life from our personal life because of geographic distance and time?  Does the commute to church make Sunday from a specific hour to a specific hour in a specific location naturaly compartmentalize that area of life from the rest of our lives?

And what of the third word: community?  With our life neatly compartmentalized into various sections, what is our primary identification of community?  Is it the workplace where we spend the majority of our time?  Is it the place where we live?  While discussing the idea of community and commute, I came to the following conclusion.  The community I most primarily identify myself with is my church community.  Not it’s geographic community location, but “the church” as in the body of people that make up the church.

Every compartmentalized area of my life intersects with this community.  While at work, I will meet people from that community for lunch, on occassion, after work for dinner as well.  When at home, I meet people from that community that are geographically closer to hang out.  And of course, on weekends, I spend most of my time with people from that community.  But most of all, that is the community I feel most “at home” at.

This conversation arose as a dilemma to the question, “to which community does the commuter church minister to?”  Is it the responsibility of the individuals to minister to their “home” communities?  Or the community the church is geographically located in?  I came to the conclusion that since I primarily identify myself with the church community, whatever community the church reaches out to is the one we, as a community, would minister to.

But, we have notoriously struggled with the idea of “community outreach.”  Maybe it’s because of the inability to define which community we want to minister to, or the distance required for parts of the church regardless of which community we did end up serving.  The earlier mentioned friend suggested that the reason we’re good at missions but struggle with community outreach is because missions is a kind of commute.  We commute to this distant area, serve, and return to our homes when we’re done.  It’s nice, tidy, and compartmentalized.  Serving in community is a bit messier, because when you go home…it’s still your community.

And thus my theory.  I believe that whatever community the church would minister to, because of our primary identification with the church community, our people would want to be a part of.  We have struggled in the past because most of our community outreach has been the impetus of individuals.  Perhaps, an effective community outreach would be undertaken if it was the undertaking of “the church”, the community of people that belong to this community.  But what does this look like?  It would still be tied to individuals at some level.  Just exploring out loud.  I have no answers, just thoughts.  What does it look like to you?

the role of ritual for a community is typically to bring a person or people from one phase of life into another. the community is typically involved so that everyone is made aware of the roles/status of the person/people going through the phases. usually, there’s a phase where they’re sort of stuck between phases, called the liminal phase. let’s take a look at marriage as an example.

you start off as a single person. the change is going from a single person to a married couple. the deaprture from the first status into the liminal phase is the engagement period. you’re not quite single anymore, but you’re not quite married. you’re between phases. the symbol of this liminal phase is the engagement ring. that usually occurs with a small ritual/ceremony with only the closest of relatives (or sometimes just the couple itself) to signify the entry into the liminal phase. after the engagement period, the couple has a large wedding celebration in which the whole community is invited to go through the status transition together. since everyone is there, the transition is known by all and everyone is aware of everyone’s new status. the couple is married and has completed the transition from singleness to married.

another example for most cultures (not in the united states) is going from youth to adult. most high group, high grid cultures have some sort of ritual in acknowledging young boys into becoming men. an example of this is the jewish celebration of bar mitzvah. a korean example may be the period where young men go to the army (although…i can’t think of any specific rituals involved with that occurring).

in any case, i’m not sure how we as korean-americans respond to ritual. are we like koreans and have a procilivity towards it, or are we like americans and have an inherent distrust in them?

rituals are an effective means of communication for high group high grid people because they provide a lot of meaning, reinforce traitional values, and communicate those values and meanings to future generations. but two things can also happen to a ritual.

a ritual can lose its effectiveness when the ritual becomes about the ritual rather than what it symbolizes. in this case, it becomes a sort of magic. the outcome is the reason why the ritual is done in certain ways and not what the symbolism behind it is. this is where most superstition arises from. an example of this occuring is like when a ball player always ties his shoes in a specific way. ritual for outcome without purpose.

another way ritual can lose its meaning is when the things involved in the ritual have lost their meaning. the ritual then becomes powerless and rote. the ritual’s purpose is lost. i think much of ritual has gone this route in american culture. i will speculate a little here now.

the only rituals that we hold to today that i can think of are marriage and communion. as i’ve already priefly discussed the marriage ritual, let’s examine the communion ritual. communion had a lot of meaning for early christians as bread and wine were essential to life. it can be argued that fermented drink was safer to drink than most water while bread was the staple food of most. the connection to bread being body and wine being blood would be an easy one to make due to this (probably subconscious) connection with life and also the elements’ consistency and color. today, however, bread is more of a free thing placed before a meal. i would argue rice is more of a staple (for korean-americans at least) than bread is. and wine is more of an excess/luxury than something that is consumed on a daily basis for life.

i would argue that perhaps communion could be better served using meat and water. meat has become a staple in the typical american diet. its connection (probably subconscious) to life is clear and a clearer more powerful connection to “the body” can be made. it may even be too intense for some to imagine meat as “the body that was broken.” think about how that can powerfully communicate.

additionally, water has become viewed as being pure, and essential to daily life. we as an american culture pay a premium for bottled water but do so on a regular basis as an indicator to how we value it. water has the additional imagery of purity and can serve as a reminder of Christ’s crucifixion where blood and water poured out. He is also the living water. grape juice is a kids’ drink and wine is even sometimes viewed as a vice. these communicate the wrong idea in the ritual. but water is more closely tied to what we are trying to communicate through the ritual of communion in my opinion.

now, some may be thinking, “doesn’t communion HAVE to be with bread and wine?” it can be argued for certain. but, picture going into a foreign land, where bread is viewed as “the foreigner’s” food. wine is viewed as inherently evil. and now you are telling everyone that this MUST be done for fellowship and communion…you are essentially communicating that they must deny who they are and what they believe to be accepted into community and, even more inaccurately, to be in fellowship with God. you are communicating (probably subconsciously) that the people must become foreigners that indulge in drink to become Christian. this is clearly communicating the wrong message.