Archives for category: ministry

As Much To Myself As To You

October 9, 2007 //

Jonah Matranga is one of my favorite artists. His music has been influential on a wide variety of bands. His work in Far showed that it wasn’t a contradiction to bring together heartfelt lyrics and face melting riffs. And before Chris Carrabba was stealing hearts and gracing magazine covers and the Plain White Ts were in heavy rotation on every tween in America’s playlist (you know, the Hey There, Delilah guys?), Jonah’s work as onelinedrawing brought being a singer/songrwriter back into style in indie and punk circles. He has even been featured on a couple of hip hop tracks by Fort Minor and Lupe Fiasco.

While I am a big fan of his music, I appreciate his honesty and humility as a human being. I saw him perform to an audience of about twenty or thirty people last week at the Casbah and he sang with the same sincerity and passion as he does to a packed house of hundreds. Afterward, he manned his own merch table and stayed late into the night to talk with everyone who came. I had emailed Jonah a couple of weeks ago with some questions about his show — and he surprised me with a phone call the day before the concert. Although I was trying hard to hide my enthusiasm and play it cool, Jonah was extremely normal — just a friend reaching out to another friend and connecting. After his performance, we talked a bit about family and he gave me a big hug as I left.

One of the most fun parts of Jonah’s live performance is his wealth of stories. With a big smile, he introduced his cover of the Jackson 5’s I Want You Back as being the roots of “emo” — not Rites of Spring or Fugazi. And before singing his song Tides, he described how a major corporation offered him essentially a hatchback full of cash to use this song in a commercial. In the end, he said, he turned them down — not out of some high and mighty, punk rock ethic — but simply because it didn’t sit right with him. These days, music is commercialized to the point of “indie” music being indistinguishable from mainstream radio in terms of usage in ads and sponsorships.

Jonah made a really good point during his show about the importance of honesty. Some bands “sell out” but experience a kind of cognitive dissonance about it, and so they try to rationalize or explain away what they’ve done. However, wouldn’t we all be better off with a little more honesty? If Apple wants to use your song in an iPod commercial or EA Sports in their next video game franchise — and the prospect of swimming in a vat of the gold dubloons these mega corporations are willing to pay is really attractive to your band — then just be honest about it. You don’t have to prove anything to anyone, you don’t have to score scene points with anyone — just do what you do with integrity and honesty.

I think this really hit me hard because I’ve been struggling with my current ministry context. Please don’t misunderstand: this is a good church , I love working with the students here, and our church’s leadership loves the Lord and His people. But I can’t help but feel that I’m not being completely honest to my calling — the thoughts about ecclesiology, mission, creativity, friendship and community that have been brewing inside me for quite some time now. I’m living in that tension, and trying to discern where this road might lead — with as much honesty and truth as I can muster.

I love this line from As Much To Myself As To You by onelinedrawing:

As much to myself as to you
As much a list of questions as
A list of what to do

Mystery, doubt, confusion. This is the mess that so many of us live in — I’m just hoping that it leads somewhere soon.

Categories church, communication, community, faith, indie, ministry, music

Reflections On The Gathering

September 28, 2007 //

DJ Chuang gave a really great presentation at “The Gathering” this past week at Evergreen Baptist Church in Rosemead. In his talk, Revitalizing Asian American Churches, DJ gave us the macro-picture of what’s happening with Asian American churches and he identified ways in which we might move forward in reaching the next generation.

DJ is a very refreshing and necessary voice — not only for the breadth of his research and the depth of his insight, but in his ability to bring people together. From my experience, Asian Americans spend way too much time trying to determine who is in or out based on our version of orthodoxy. In that paradigm, people spend more time straightening out the minutiae of their doctrine than in actually reaching people with the Gospel. Happily, the overall tone of this gathering was community-oriented and encouraging. In my prayer group, I was genuinely encouraged by the support of others who are a little bit further along in the journey of vocational ministry, including Sam Park over at Community Church on Holliston.

DJ shared some great insights about what existing churches can do to support the next generation of believers:

Encourage creativity
Raise up young leaders
Support church planting through prayer, people and funds

In particular, the idea of raising up young leaders spoke deeply to me. As someone who pastors students, I battle the Asian perfectionist tendency inside of me all the time when it comes to raising up next gen leaders. It’s hard to give people room to grow, to try new things out, to fail. There is often little room in Asian American families and churches for an actual learning curve — it’s often either be perfect or don’t even bother trying. Many Asian American pastors are perfectionists and micro-managers; not the best combination for raising up young leaders.

I have encountered way too many pastor-types who are maybe five or six years further along this path who refuse to mentor younger leaders because they themselves never received the mentoring they sought from first-gen pastors. I don’t want to operate from this kind of hurt. I don’t want to perpetuate this self-defeating cycle. I want to be someone who can help raise up next gen leaders. I might not have much to share, but maybe I can contribute to others so that they don’t have to reinvent the wheel every single week.

I also see how important it is for me to seek out the wisdom of those further along the path. I’m not talking about a formal mentoring relationship with a set schedule (who has time in their schedules for that kind of model these days, anyways?) but conversations, dialogue and lots of listening. I have been privileged to be in contact with many wise thinkers and leaders recently, and I am just trying to absorb all the wisdom I can.

Here’s to more gatherings like this one!

Tags first generation

Categories asian american, church, community, emerging church, faith, hope, ministry, postmodern, second-generation

The Never Ending Story

September 27, 2007 //

This morning, I stopped by a Christian bookstore to pick up some resources for our youth ministry. I was deeply disappointed to discover an old edition of Skits That Teach still on the shelves — the one that opens with a mocking, racist portrayal of a “Chinese food deliveryman.” Although it might feel like a long time ago, this whole commotion took place earlier this year. I have asked this particular bookstore to remove this edition on at least three occasions. This morning I sent both an email and a letter to their corporate office. Hopefully, this issue can be resolved quickly and simply. After all, the publishers, Youth Specialties, took extraordinary and decisive action to make this right. It seems like a very small step for this store to replace the old version with the updated one.

As draining and frustrating as this issue has been, I know that it it is only a very small component of the greater picture of racial justice in our country. It was only fifty years ago that nine African American students required the protection of the 101st Airborne simply to attend classes as schools became racially integrated. How could a society be so sick that a group of high school students required Presidential protection?

And yet, this is not a story that happened and we moved on from it. It continues to happen today. As Juan Williams writes in The Legacy of Little Rock, for Time Magazine:

American schools are still nearly as segregated as they were 50 years ago. Almost three-quarters of African-American students are currently in schools that are more than 50% black and Latino, while the average white student goes to a school that is 80% white, according to a 2001 study by the National Center for Education Statistics.

However, what might be more disturbing than this continued segregation is the underlying attitude that Williams identifies in the current state of our approach to education, race and civil rights:

…even as we celebrate what happened 50 years ago in the glory days of the civil rights movement, the political will to integrate schools in this country is long gone. So, too, is the desire to fix every economic inequity before delivering quality education to all children.

It is so easy to lose heart, to grow apathetic, to feel like things will never change. Maybe it’s because we think we’re beyond all of this “race talk.” After all, we don’t see hooded Klansmen murdering people or the police turning firehoses and attack dogs on peaceful protesters, right? Then again, the Jena 6 situation might suggest that we haven’t come as far as we’d like to think.

And yet, in the midst of this confusing mess, we cling to the promise of our God who makes all things new. I must believe that God wants to create His perfect shalom out of all our hatred, violence and nonsense.

Categories asian american, church, communication, controversy, frustration, ministry, race, reconciliation

The Boyfriend’s Back (And You’re Gonna Be In Trouble)

September 20, 2007 //

Although I am inclined to listen in on conversations about worship and music anyways, lately I have noticed quite a few people weighing in on this issue. There seems to be a growing dissatisfaction with the state of modern worship music. In particular, many have taken the infamous Jesus Is My Boyfriend genre to task. John Stackhouse, a professor from Regent College in Vancouver, Canada, weighs in decisively in his post Jesus, I’m NOT in Love with You. Albert Hsu, author of The Suburban Christian, shares his insights in Pitfalls of Romanticizing Worship.

While Stackhouse’s post is a bit of a polemic (more on that at the end), both he and Hsu point to the underlying problem of emphasizing the individual over the community in expressing our worship and love for God. Stackhouse shares this insight:

But the New Testament never calls Christians Jesus’ fiancées or his brides. Instead, it is the Church collectively, and only the Church as a whole, that relates to Jesus this way–just as individual Israelites did not relate to Yhwh as so many spouses, but only the nation of Israel as nation was his beloved bride

However, it was Albert’s post that spoke most powerfully to me. His nuanced historical perspective on individualism and romanticism, along with his biblical insight, provided quite a bit about which to think. In many ways, individualism/romanticism is the cultural air we breathe. We are born into it, and sometimes it takes a voice calling out in the wilderness to wake us up. As Hsu writes:

Culturally, I think that when we Christianize romantic motifs in our worship, we often merely substitute one idolatry for another, rather than challenging the very validity of romantic love as a controlling narrative in our culture.

To borrow a phrase from Brian McLaren, we must stop and consider what story we find ourselves in. This is an essential question: What narrative controls us? Is it the story that says even if you were the only person on earth, Jesus still would have died for you? While I think I understand the heart of this well-worn story, it is firmly rooted in the individualism and romanticism that Albert describes in his post. And, if Jesus pretty much exists for my personal happiness, what are the consequences for our worship together? From my experience, this ends up being a room full of people (whether it is ten or ten thousand) who are singing the same song but, despite being completely lost in love with Jesus, are completely disconnected from one another. They are physically together but miles apart in their hearts.

Or, do we understand the story and reign of God as being much, much larger than the scope of our individual lives?

* * * * *

In his criticism of the “love song to Jesus” genre, Prof. Stackhouse says, “it gives me the homoerotic creeps to declare that I am ‘in love with’ another man.” At first glance, this seems to be an honest expression of his discomfort with these kinds of lyrical expressions of love and adoration to Christ. However, what he writes immediately afterwards gave me pause, “And I don’t apologize for saying so.”

As Jamie Arpin-Ricci observes, this second sentence “seems to suggest to me that he considered how some might take this comment, but still felt it appropriate to say it.” Honest expression is one thing, but it should not be considered burdensome, especially for someone of Stackhouse’s erudition, to find a better way to express this feeling. It saddens me that so many in the Christian community have trouble distinguishing between being “real” and being rude.

Perhaps it is that rebellion within us that cannot stand it when someone shows us where we have gone astray. Instead of humbly acknowledging our mistakes, we launch into defense mode — justifying and responding with our own counteroffensive, “Well, I’m insulted that you’re insulted by my words.”

All too often I see people, especially when confronted with their own racist or prejudicial attitudes or actions, respond with a self-righteous, “Well, should I have to think of what everyone will think every time I say something?” Of course, it is unreasonable for us to expect people to consider the feelings and experiences of every other human being on the planet — but there is something to be said for a general sense of empathy and understanding, especially coming from followers of Christ. And often, this line of reasoning is used as a cover for laziness — it’s easier to fall back on the broken default setting than to actually change the way we speak, think or interact with others.

Categories church, controversy, ministry, music, worship

What A (Joyful) Racket!

September 12, 2007 //

Vincent Moon has created a series of brilliant short films called The Take-Away Shows. Moon has filmed artists such as Beirut, Menomena and Tapes’n Tapes performing their songs in surprising locations — perhaps walking down the street or playing in a basement stockroom. From the Take-Away Show site:

You meet a band. You take them outside, in the streets, and ask them to play there, shoot the movie in one unique shot, whatever happens. Those are the Take-Away Shows, the weekly video podcast from French weblog La Blogotheque.

This clip of the Arcade Fire gang crowding into an elevator to play Neon Bible — playing the snare drum by tearing pages from a magazine and the bass drum by pounding the walls — and then performing Wake Up in the middle of the audience is breathtaking. Moon doesn’t edit out the band laughing or tuning, or even the occasional musical misstep; the result is a vibe that is immediate, real and filled with joy. As Arcade Fire performs from the middle of the audience, you can almost see waves sweeping over the crowd as they become part of the band.

Many people have shared their insights into the problem of the “worship industry” recently. To highlight a few:

David Gate’s post called Translate His Wonders rails against “McWorship”
David Park over at Next Gener.Asian Church in Coming Back To A Heart Of Worship speaks against soulless “worship karaoke”
Brett McCracken in The Tragedy of (Most) Modern Worship Music articulates his issues with the state of modern worship music in the church today

I am all for excellence in worship. Half-hearted, out of tune, I just picked these songs five minutes ago worship sets hardly bring glory to God. However, too often that drive for excellence results in slick, overproduced songs that are indistinguishable from the latest hits by Chris Daughtry or Kelly Clarkson (actually, I wouldn’t mind a worship “hit” that is as catchy as “Since U Been Gone”) — songs that hit all the right notes, but lack soul.

I realize that my particular musical aesthetic skews toward jangly indie collectives like Arcade Fire, Architecture in Helsinki and Broken Social Scene (or Los Campesinos! who are new to me), but it might breathe some much-needed life into our worship if we made a little bit more of a racket. In this Take-Away Show of Architecture in Helsinki performing Heart It Races, the band recruits a small backing choir of fans, which turns into a conga line, which becomes an impromptu invitation into a private party:

Architecture in Helsinki thought about everything : the choir, the bass drum and portable amplifiers. Alas, during the procession that starts shortly after, the amps die. So, with an extension cord, we borrow power from the locals, overlooking from their 2nd floor windows. Electricity from a kitchen !

Cameron Bird, shiny-eyed, asks me whether he can go up in one of the apartments, as he would like to sing from the window. Kelly goes in yet another flat and shows off the ice tea her hostess gave her. In our flat, dinner is cooking in a huge pan, the kids swarm towards the window in excitement, the mom goes about her business in the back of the place, and Cameron sings along with the small crowd down in the street. He winks laughingly at Kelly, he’s having so much fun. Behind us, the kids look impressed. We brought the Take Away Show to their home, in between the living room and the kitchen, we got in the place just by asking politely, we are an accident to this family. Just as Take Away Shows are an accident to the artists we follow. As soon as the song ends, everybody goes back down. The little girls put on their shoes, they run down the stairs before us.

Meanwhile, in the street, the little choir turned into a troop. The line is already long in front of the Flèche d’Or. Architecture in Helsinki, not even all there yet, have everybody form a “congo line”. Then that’s how it goes : something’s going on at the front, in the middle, in the back, everybody moves forward. Vincent Moon bumps into the percussionnist, goes again, wants to be everywhere at once, doesn’t have time, bumps into me. In the street, a blind man wiggles to the sound of the band passing by. Since the beginning, everybody is really out of tune. Cameron sings so loud, the mic is out… We go inside the Flèche d’Or, not open yet, a private cocktail is going on. The people follow us, twenty, thirty people, invited without a word. It was good, it was fun, it was about an invitation, returned almost immediately.

Sure, it’s kind of rough around the edges, but what a joyful noise! Wouldn’t it make God’s praise glorious if we replaced some of the sheen with more joy? What if we took Moon’s words from an interview with Spin, “I don’t want to see a band on the stage; I want to be on the same level” and realized that we are the band — all of us? Of course, someone has to play the instruments, but we’re all participants. I long for the day when we can “open up the doors and let the music play” and our worship becomes contagious, creating community and opens doors so that we can celebrate together.

Well, here’s one thing we can all agree on: Sufjan Stevens needs to perform from rooftops more often.

Categories church, community, emerging church, hooray!, indie, ministry, music, worship