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

The Big Story (In Small Pieces)

October 8, 2007 //

I had the chance to meet up with James Choung last week. My wife teases me about having “internet friends” (a phrase which could easily come across the wrong way if taken out of context!). While I am very glad for the camaraderie and kinship I find in the blogosphere, it is still nice to meet people face to face. James introduced me a great local coffee shop and we sat down and talked, laughed and shared for awhile. Because James is the San Diego staff director for InterVarsity, I picked his brain and learned quite a bit regarding the spiritual vibe and general scene of our local college campuses.

If you haven’t already seen it, I highly recommend this video clip James put together about “The Big Story” of the Gospel. A very creative and thought-provoking picture of what it means to follow Christ:

I am thankful for this reminder that the Gospel is a much bigger narrative than just my story. I love the paradox at work here, though: when I remove myself from the center of the story and gain some much-needed perspective, I experience a deeper intimacy with God. The mighty, providential God of all time, history and creation wants small, messed-up me to be a part of His story of reconciliation, redemption and rescue. It’s almost too much to wrap my head around.

Thankfully, I don’t need to see the entire metanarrative at once (not that I could, even if I wanted to); sometimes, sitting down with new friends and sharing our stories allows me, in small pieces, to plug into the overarching narrative of the big story.

Speaking of stories, James has written a book, True Story: A Christianity Worth Believing In which will be released through InterVarsity Press next year. I’ll definitely pick up a copy when it hits the bookstores, and I encourage you to do the same!

Categories college, communication, community

Remedy Drops, Asians Rejoice!

October 3, 2007 //

A note of disclosure: I am a big fan of David Crowder’s work. My wife and I once took a couple of college students and drove two and half hours from northern Jersey into the wilderness of Long Island to attend one of his concerts. Like many others, I was thoroughly impressed with their last release A Collision — for its epic scope, indie rock ramblings (and extra long titles!) and for the circumstances under which the album was released (the album as a response to death, just as the band lost their close friend and pastor Kyle Lake).

The highly anticipated follow-up to A Collision (if we skip over B Collision, the ’06 EP of B-sides and other miscellany), Remedy, was released on September 25th. Though I understand the sentiment behind CCM Patrol’s review of Remedy — and I definitely appreciate their honesty (and, often, bluntness) in reviewing much of the music that is released in the Christian market — I was certainly not disappointed with this album.

Reviews are highly subjective. In fact, part of the fun of reading reviews is vehemently disagreeing with them (and later grumbling about what a bunch of cultural Philistines those reviewers are). As Marko wrote in his review of Remedy, when I listen to this album, I picture myself singing this in company of those who love the King (to borrow a Crowder phrase). One of my most powerful times of worship in the context of singing along with other people happened several years back at one of the Thirsty conferences. DC*B was leading their version of Thank You for Hearing Me, and right at the moment in which the distorted guitar kicks in (if you’ve heard the song, you’ll know what I’m talking about), thousands of earnest worshipers lifted their hands in unison. So, you will not read an impartial, detached, “pure” review of the album from me — it is virtually impossible for me to separate the experience of listening to the album from the experience of being there.

One interesting phenomenon surrounding DC*B is their popularity among Asian American youth — Korean American kids, in particular. As Andrew Beaujon writes in his book Body Piercing Saved My Life (which I also recommend), “…for some reason its members don’t fully understand, the David Crowder Band is huge among Korean Americans. They were due to play a large Korean church in New York City a few nights later and had recently played for a mostly Korean crowd of eleven thousand in Los Angeles.”

I actually had a short email correspondence with Crowder, which included a brief discussion of their popularity with Asian American kids. DC*B puts on a high energy show with lots of goofy fun. I was at their concert in LA that Body Piercing mentions, and one of the highlights of the evening was when Crowder broke out his shiny red keytar and challenged the crowd to make a louder noise than the Neil Diamond concert in town. You have to love a worship leader than gets all up in Neil Diamond’s grill. In all seriousness, though, I believe it is precisely this goofiness, freedom and spontaneity that appeals to Asian American youth. At home, for so many Asian American teens, their value is in direct proportion to their performance. There is very little room to make mistakes — after all, Johnny Kim down the street plays first-chair violin, is president of his youth group, and won a governor’s award for academic excellence — and he does everything his mother tells him to do, and he’s waltzing into Harvard a year early… on a full scholarship, no doubt.

So, when Crowder urges these kids to whistle along and get a little undignified as they connect with our God who loves them just as they are, something deep within them responds. Remedy therefore is an appropriate metaphor for our community as well — despite the veneer of perfection and achievement, we are an awful mess on the inside. For too many of us, the internal pressure builds up until it explodes in rage, binge drinking, or worse. What a sight it is when captives are genuinely freed in the presence of the King!

Remedy is definitely simpler in approach than A Collision — no rock operas or postmodern parenthetical asides on this album. However, Crowder continues to write simple lyrics that are deceptive in their depth. Take this beautiful line from their reworking of O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing, “There are so few words that never grow old… Jesus.” Or these words, from the title track:

Oh, I can’t comprehend / I can’t take it all in

Never understand / Such perfect love come

For the broken and beat / For the wounded and weak

Oh, come fall at His feet / He’s the remedy

Plus, how can you deny a worship album that features a track with the Nuge himself melting faces with his song-length solo in the background?

Categories asian american, church, hooray!, music, reviews, second-generation, worship, youth ministry

How We Can Be Changed

October 1, 2007 //

The publishing world has been swamped by “I deviated from the majority culture in a specific way for a year” books over the last several years. Books such as Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and My Secret Life on the McJob chronicle the downward mobility of its authors and they lessons they learned as part of the minimum-wage work force in America. Other recent year-long life experiment titles include A Year Without “Made in China” and Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally.

However, this recent release by AJ Jacobs, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, stood out to me because of the implications it might have for those who follow Christ. You might recognize Jacobs as the author of 2004’s The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World. As an aside, I love these extraordinarily long book titles. Credit (blame?) perhaps Dave Eggers and his book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. From a friend’s blog, I have determined that I will either release an art-damaged indie orchestral single or postmodern semi-biography titled FINAL NOTICE: The Earth will fall into Null space. Does publishing that to my blog copyright this phrase?

On his site, Jacobs gives a little bit of background on why he wrote his latest book:

Why? Well, I grew up in a very secular home (I’m officially Jewish but I’m Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant). I’d always assumed religion would just wither away and we’d live in a neo-Enlightenment world. I was, of course, spectacularly wrong. So was I missing something essential to being a human? Or was half the world deluded?

I might read this book based simply on the parenthetical aside, “I’m Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant.” Delightful! A couple of pages from the author’s website stood out to me: You too can live biblically and How to be good, in particular. Now, while I understand that there is more than a good measure of smirky, tongue in cheekiness going on here, I also believe there are some pretty significant insights as well.

The Bible? I Don’t Get It

Many people, followers of Christ included, find the Bible to be inscrutable, archaic or irrelevant — or some combination of these things. In his quest to follow all of the “rules” in the Bible, Jacobs stopped shaving his beard. Never mind that he ended up looking a bit like Sam Beam of Iron & Wine or endured an endless stream of ZZ Top jokes — this particular experiment in rule keeping reveals our confusion about following the Scriptures. If the Bible really is “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth” (ugh), then why don’t more Christians follow these obscure rules? A bit more on this at the end…

Sabbath Surprise

It surprised Jacobs, though, how beneficial some of this obedience ended up being..In his list of the “Most Unexpectedly Wise and Life-Enhancing Rules”, Jacobs writes the following about keeping the Sabbath:

As a workaholic (I check my emails in the middle of movies), I learned the beauty of an enforced pause in the week. No cell phones, no messages, no thinking about deadlines. It was a bizarre and glorious feeling. As one famous rabbi called it, the sabbath is a “sanctuary in time.”

For those of us who want to follow Christ, there is something so powerful in these words. Although our words say, “Jesus loves you just as you are,” the unspoken addendum to this phrase is often, “…if you accomplish a bunch of stuff for Him.” The Sabbath not only refuels us, but reminds us that we are not in charge. A few Sabbath-related titles: Mudhouse Sabbath, Sacred Rhythms, and Keeping the Sabbath Wholly.

Everything Else Is Commentary

Now, back to the idea of picking and choosing which biblical commands we will or will not obey. In the end, this is an issue of hermeneutics — the lens through which we interpret and understand Scripture. Some well-intentioned folks will say things like, “I don’t interpret the Bible; I just read what it says.” Well, unless they are reading in the original Hebrew and Greek, they are interpreting it — actually, even if they were reading from the original manuscripts, the simple fact that the words are being processed in their minds means they are interpreting it. As Rob Bell writes in Velvet Elvis, “God has spoken, and everything else is commentary.” In other words, no one has a purely objective, agenda-free comprehension of the Bible. So, then, the issue becomes how we will interpret the Bible.

Regarding obscure Old Testament commands (the non-shaving of beards, no cheeseburgers, etc.), I have heard people try to brush them aside with, “Jesus died for us so we live under a new covenant. All that stuff is in the past — those rules no longer apply.” Unfortunately for them, the ten commandments are also in the Old Testament along with the commandment Jesus calls the greatest for His followers, so this approach would be a bit more than throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Inside-Out, Upside-Down

There is also the interesting question of how changing our outward behavior will change our inner attitudes (and vice versa). Sometimes, all we can do is obey even though our hearts are not in it — and, mysteriously, God changes our hearts through that. Because we cannot separate our bodies, hearts, minds and souls, it makes sense that the dynamics of transformation include all of these aspects of ourselves. Certainly, God cares about our hearts and wants us to be changed from the inside-out, but we cannot use that as an excuse for inaction — waiting and waiting for our hearts to be perfectly Christ-like before altering our lifestyles.

I can only commend that Christ Himself would be the lens through which we will understand and live out the Bible. Many theologians, authors and denominational perspectives are helpful and necessary. We should seek the wisdom and guidance of others. But all of that is meaningless without a genuine desire to follow Christ and to live as He wants.

Categories asian american, books, church, communication, emerging church, faith, health

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