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Andrew spaceOn life and ministry in Chinese churches! 2009/11/7 The Glory of God - a Bible study series Over the last week we've been looking at the centrality of the glory of God - and we've been tracing through how this gives shape to a whole range of different areas of Christian life. See parts one, two and three of the table.And the importance of the glory of God is one of those things that people will gladly affirm at an intellectual level ("oh yes, of course we should do all things for the glory of God"). Organisations may also affirm this in their vision / mission statements ("this church exists to blah blah blah ... for the glory of God"). However there is a huge difference between such affirmations - and hearts that see, and love, and are jealous for, the glory of God. How do we get people to that point? I think it is by showing people something of the glory of God - and praying that they might see it and love it. It is, in the end, God who reveals his glory to people, shining the knowledge of his glory into our hearts. And they see his glory primarily in the face of Christ. Paul says, For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. And so here is a link to a seven-week topical Bible study series I wrote for MSG (My Small Group) over the last few months. What these studies try to do is show something of the importance of God's glory to himself, its centrality to everything God has been doing, and the loveliness and terror of God's glory. These are topical Bible studies, and generally they aim at breadth and depth by firstly doing a quick overview of a range of Bible passages, before drilling down into one passage. Towards the end of each study discussion questions allow people can explore the implications of what they've seen. But most importantly, the studies have a front and a back - the back being a table that builds from week to week, helping the group trace out the implications of the glory of God for the Christian life. There are seven studies:
If I had more time, I would have written more... there are definitely other areas worth exploring. But as they stand, I hope you find these studies as life changing as we found it! [ PS: last day at ND today... ] 2009/11/6 Two visions of the Christian life - part 3 This is part three of a series - see the first two parts here and here.
Some of you might think that 'reformed theology' is as far away from a vibrant spiritual life as you can get. Because for many people 'reformed theology' does conjure up images of serious, unsmiling people with thick books of dusty theology under their arms. It makes us think of tiresome people endlessly discussing about predestination... not very attractive! One of the major ways that reformed theology has been misunderstood is that people think it is primarily about predestination and TULIP. But that's actually wrong: reformed theology has always been about the glory of God first and foremost - and God's sovereignty in salvation was only ever a stepping stone towards the end point - of the glory of God.
In fact I have even come across books about reformed theology written by major scholars where they talk a lot about predestination - but who don't mention the glory of God at all! In contrast, here is what AN Martin writes about Calvinism:
The so-called Five Points of Calvinism are cast in a negative form and can in some ways be misleading. Nonetheless we cannot change the course of history, and so the Five Points have come down to us and we must learn to live with them. Take the last four points - unconditional election, particular redemption, the efficacious call of God and the persevering work of God in all whom he has called and joined to his Son: What is the focal point in all of these? The ultimate focal point, of course, is the display of the glory of God's grace, as we read in Ephesians 1; but as the immediate focal point, how is that glory displayed? By what means? By the taking of totally depraved creatures and making them wholly men and women in whom the very likeness of God's Son can be seen. You might be surprised, but John Calvin himself affirms the centrality of the glory of God in all his thinking and practice:
Assuredly, the thing at which I chiefly aimed, and for which I most diligently laboured, was, that the glory of thy goodness and justice, after dispersing the mists by which it was formerly obscured, might shine forth conspicuous, that the virtue and blessings of thy Christ (all glosses being wiped away) might be fully displayed. For I thought it impious to leave in obscurity things which we were born to ponder and meditate. For all its bad press, reformed theology is actually all about being captivated by the glory of God! And the centrality of this in the life of the Christian is not merely a meaningless theological affirmation - from these tables you can see that it comes out in intensely practical ways.
In contrast, other theologies may promise much and have a strong and exciting focus on being serious about doing God's things - but they draw people's attention away from the glory of God to their obedience - and over time they wear people down. The focus of today's table shifts to theology - and as you read across the rows, you'll probably start to pick up how much of our theology - and even our favourite gospel outlines! are not actually centred on the glory of God... And that's because I think that many people who claim to be reformed, are "but halfly reformed." They may be reformed - but only in their doctrine. In terms of their heart, and their ministry practice, they betray how their Christianity has really centred on humans all along. Oh of course, they are committed to God! But they have not seen, nor are they captivated by, nor are they filled with love and jealousy for ... the glory of God.
For more on reformed theology, read talk #1 from SCCCA's SALT retreat earlier this year!
[ PS: stay tuned: the next post will feature a Bible study series on the Glory of God that you can try out... ] 2009/11/5 Two visions of the Christian life - part 2 Last time we looked at the first part of the table outlining two vastly different visions of the Christian life (see previous post).
For many Christians, the battle they are fighting is between selfishness on the one hand, and Christianity on the other.
And in the face of worldly selfishness that elevates my own desires and my own interests, it's probably natural that Christianity is cast in terms of its antithesis: suppression ofmy own desires, and in its place doing God's things.
 And I think, for some Christians, this is how we end up with a Christianity driven by duty and obedience. Instead of selfishly doing our own thing, we should dutifully submit ourselves to doing the things God wants us to do. Because after all, God is God, right? we should let him call the shots, right?
The problem is that this puts the focus on outward obedience and conformance - and not on the inner affections of the heart. Yes, we may be performing the actions of church attendance and prayer - but our hearts may actually be very far away from God. We may have the outward form of Christianity, and even be 'into ministry'! But the inner reality of what we truly love - and fear - is not centred on the glory of God.
 For those of us from Confucian backgrounds however, there is something else... Our culture also strongly predisposes us towards a Christianity of duty and obedience in a way that is unknown to those from Western cultures. I've written more on that here!
In the Gospels, there was in fact a group of people who excelled at outward obedience. They were faultless in their conformance. However when Jesus came across them, this is what he says to them:
7 You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: Here is more of that table. As before, read down one column, and then the down the other. And as you do so, ask yourself: what is the focus of this vision of the Christian life?
[ PS: stay tuned for more of the table... ] 2009/11/4 Two visions of the Christian life - part 1 I think there is something seriously wrong with a lot of our Christianity. And this is even true of many evangelicals...Over the last short while I've been working on a table and sharing it with some of our leaders at ND, and our Bible study group too. One column is entitled, "Christianity of duty and obedience", while the other is entitled, "Christianity captivated by the glory of God." And what I've done is I've created rows of all different aspects of the Christian life - how we pray, how we think of evangelism, how we conceive of Christian growth - and mapped what it would look like under both of these visions of the Christian life.
While the left-hand column has the form of Christianity, you can probably start to see that the right hand column actually makes absolute sense of that form of Christianity. Under this vision of the Christian life, it makes sense of why Christians are to do the things we do. It gives the practice the meaning and life and colour it was always meant to have!
There are more rows to the table ... stay tuned (but you can read more from talk #2 at SCCCA's SALT retreat earlier this year - download the PDF here).
[ PS: which column represents that kind of reasons you would give for reading the Bible? for prayer? for giving? ] 2009/10/27 Pornography - and what people search for on Google This Sunday night I'm doing a talk on pornography at the evening fellowship at ND. In preparation I've been looking around for some stats on pornography - and quite a lot of the stats available are somewhat old. However one way to get up-to-date data on people's interest in pornography (say) is to check how often it's searched for through Google. And Google Insights allows you to see what people are searching for over the past several years... Just type in the search terms you're interested in, and you get a graph showing you the relative ranking of those search terms over time! Unfortunately Windows Live Spaces won't let me embed the chart. So instead here is a screen grab of the graph where I'm tracking searches for 'sex', 'porn', 'Jesus' and 'Olympics' over the 2004-2009 period (click on the images for a larger version).  You can also isolate a particular country or even state - here for instance are the searches for those terms from Australia. Clearly Australians have an inordinate interest in sports!  Potentially a useful tool if you're looking for a quick graphic to introduce a topic! [ PS: any other search terms you can think of comparing? ] 2009/10/18 SALT 2009 retreat talks online! Back in August I spoke at SCCCA's SALT retreat up in Katoomba. This was a leader's retreat for Asian churches in Sydney, and I was asked to speak about reformed theology. And that's what I did - however I reckon it would have surprised a lot of people who thought they know what reformed theology is about...Many people think that reformed theology (or Calvinism) is all about predestination, the sovereignty of God in salvation, and TULIP. But at the retreat we saw that that's not really true - the heart of reformed theology is actually the glory of God! And these things are merely stepping stones towards the glory of God. In the first talk we look at this, and consider why it is that people focus so much on predestination, and why it's such a big deal that we are on about the glory of God!
In the second talk we move on to look at two broad kinds of Christianity - firstly a Christianity of duty and obedience. We contrasted this with a Christianity that is captivated by the glory of God, and saw what a massive difference this makes to the Christian life. We also saw how our Chinese background predisposes us in a big way towards a Chrsitianity of duty and obedience!
Then in the third talk we move on to talk about what all this means for ministry. We look at the content of our preaching and teaching - but also look at how being captivated by the glory of God completely transforms how we even go about doing ministry!
Unfortunately not all the talks were recorded. However you can get them as a PDF file from the SCCCA website at this page - click the blue arrow to begin the download! You may also need the outlines to make sense of the second talk - the PDF of the booklet can be found here.
[ PS: no updates for a while? I've been busy doing assignments and readings for an MA subject on Calvin at Moore College! ] 2009/10/8 Where do we need to plant Chinese churches? Where in Sydney do we need to plant Chinese churches? Which areas have lots of Chinese people - but are very thin on Chinese churches?In the past there was this map created with Google Maps, showing the 100+ Chinese churches in Sydney. That was made by Ernest Chiang (who is doing a church plant in Mortdale with CECA). And remember, that map used a very broad classification of Chinese churches. The different coloured pins, by the way, are meant to represent different areas. And we've also seen this map (to the right), which shows you the Chinese population density in different areas of Sydney. But wouldn't it be good if you could put the two together, to see where we need to plant? What I've done today is just that. I've overlaid them, with a bit of resizing and stretching and transparency... and that gets us the following map.  The usefulness of a map like this is probably immediately obvious for planning your future church plant. You can easily see areas of significant Chinese population density, yet with few Chinese churches (use the small hotmap above to identify significant areas). Here are some of those areas:
Be aware that some of the churches on this map are struggling, or are only focussing on one language or demographic, or have somewhat dodgy theology... And that some brand-new churches have been planted since Ernest made that map! [ PS: where would you plant a Chinese church? ] 2009/10/6 Chinese in Catholic (and other) schools in SydneyFrom graphs like this in previous posts, it's pretty clear that the primary school and high school age group is very significant for the future of ABC ministries. Well, what kind of educational institutions are ABCs in? How many of them are in Catholic (and other) schools? First off, here is a graph showing you where the Chinese and ABCs are in terms of educational institutions in Sydney. Note that the red bars (All students) maps to the scale on the right hand side. The green and blue bars (Chinese and ABCs) maps to the scale on the left hand side. I've put them on the same graph so you can see the relative proportions.  In case you want it, here is a table with that data.
From the stats on religion in a previous post, a number of people have asked about how many ABCs are actually in Catholic schools. This table tells you the answer: 2,075 are in Catholic primary schools, and 1,781 are in Catholic high schools. While the number of ABCs in Catholic schools is proportionally much less than the population as a whole, it's actually about right for the percentage of ABCs that are Catholics. You might have thought that there would be proportionally more ABCs going into Uni / tertiary education than the general population. So why does the blue bar look so low? That's because the age profile for ABCs is not flat - but heavily weighted towards primary and high schoolers (see this graph). It's not that there are less ABCs doing tertiary education - but there are much more school aged ABCs coming up through the education pipeline! Notice also the big green spike of Chinese people in Uni / Tertiary education - that's because of overseas students! Here is a map of Chinese kids (not necessarily ABCs) in Catholic infant and primary schools.  And here is a map of Chinese kids in Catholic secondary schools.  Here is a table with that information on Catholic primary and secondary schools. Note that these are kids of Chinese ancestry, not just ABCs.
[ PS: for more on Catholic ABCs see this post... ] 2009/10/1 Chinese transitoriness in Sydney (part 3): more on North and South In a previous post we raised the theory of Chinese people moving from the South of the city, to the North. What I've done here is divided up Sydney into North and South. In the graph below there is a list of Statistical Local Areas (SLAs) - and I have grouped the SLAs from 'Botany Bay' to 'Blacktown - South West' as being the South, and the SLAs from 'Hunter's Hill' to 'Wyong - South and West' as being the North. Admittedly this is not a perfect division (eg. this puts 'Penrith' and 'Blue Mountains' in the South), but it'll do as a rough guide. This bar graph then shows you the movements into each of these SLAs, divided up into whether they are coming from SLAs in the South (red) or the North (blue).  This is helpful in showing you whether the people moving into a certain SLA have mostly been from the South, or the North. But what is happening across Sydney as a whole? Is there a big movement from South to North, as they theory suggests? For this next graph I've tallied up all the movements of Chinese from the North and South, and whether they have gone to the North or South. This graph shows you the overall pattern of movements into and out of these two areas.  Here is a table summarising this movement data for the Chinese in Sydney.
What we see is that, on the whole, people from both North and South tend to stay in their area (10,325 Chinese who moved from the North stayed in the North, and 39,237 Chinese who moved from the South stayed in the South). In addition, the South saw more Chinese people moving about than the North (a total of 13,554 moving from the North, compared to a total of 46,012 moving from the South). However the picture is also skewed because the South also includes disproportionally more SLAs than the North. But what about across-the-harbour movements? When we look at people crossing over to different areas, there are less Chinese people moving from the North to the South (3,229) than there are Chinese people moving from the South to the North (6,775). In fact over this 2001-06 period there was a net movement of 3,546 Chinese people from the South to the North. So the theory is true - on the whole, Chinese people are moving from South to North. But this movement is not very large: 3,546 only represents about 7.7% of the total house movements in the South... [ PS: how many people in your church have moved across to the other side of Sydney over the past 5 years? how many have moved in? ] 2009/9/29 Life stage of Sydney ABCs - in bar graphs In a previous post I published a table of Australian Born Chinese (ABCs) in Sydney by life stage and area - as well as a series of maps. However maybe a better way to see that data is to have it in a stacked bar graph. Here it is:  I find this a better way to identify significant areas of ABC high schoolers (say), than with a hot map. I think it's also easier to see how your area stacks up against others in Sydney this way. This second graph here is that same data, but now in a 100% stacked bar graph. This is useful for showing you the relative proportions. Note that right at the bottom of this graph is also a 'Total' bar, that shows you the average across Sydney as a whole - use that to compare your area against the whole of Sydney.  This is not as useful as the previous graph - but in a few instances it can quickly alert you to the fact that your area has a disproportionate number of ABC young workers (eg. Sydney East) - or children (eg. the Parramatta area) - compared to other areas in Sydney. [ PS: notice how prominent the reds and greens are in both graphs - a sign of how many young children there are in the ABC category... ] |
My take on Chinese churches!
Encouragement for those who serve!
Posts on the parent-child relationship for Chinese people!
Posts on going into full time ministry!
Bible studies I've written, that you can download and try out with your group! PDF format.
Recommended reading that doesn't fit elsewhere!
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