week 10 – Reply to Barry Teshima’ blog

Barry, thank you for your comment and it would be a little helpful when you read mine on it. To help you to understand right now for the effort of the Asian immigrants to be “Americanized” is not easy or maybe impossible. The reason is because nationality is, from my experience as a Korean immigrant, heavily based on culture, which has got imbedded and formed us to be who we are. Even though we try to be Americanized, it is impossible to move until we can get rid of all the memories and ways of life that identified us with. Well, I guess that Filipino guys has to acknowledge that he is Filipino from the land of Philippines and living in America as an immigrant. I am basically saying that he does not necessarily has to be “Americanized.”

Week 9 Reply to Alex Lazo’s Weblog

I think that you are right that some American churches are trying to show off of their programs and activities. I want talk about a church that can be one of the competitive churches in Southern California. I visited Saddleback church (Rick Warren) and was so amazed at the decoration of the church building and the size of the programs. It was really spectacularly competitive with other churches. What really struck me though was the population of the church members. I heard that most of them were evangelized by this church. In a sense, I think this is good to be “seeker-sensitive,” but then the problem is that the new members do not seem to grow deeper into spirituality compared to other models such as Pentecostal or Charismatic because all of the setup is fixed for entertaining the seekers. I may be wrong at this view since I just visited only one time and heard about it from others. But I believe that there are pros and cons in this type of model.

Week 8 – Reply to Paul Kim’s Weblog

That’s right Paul Kim. I agree with you that they did not establish a egalitarian structure in their churches. However, the patriarchal church structure seems very necessary in order for them to understand the concept of God the father and His son. In their first attempt of understanding the trinity, I assumed that they might have had a hard time with grasping the meaning of “Father in heaven” Jesus often called God. This may have brought them to be more naturally patriarchal. As Jesus the son of God obeyed his father, the apostles of the church was to obey Jesus, and the congregation was in turn to obey the apostles. My thinking, however, is that today’s Western cultural shifts would not understand this system any more because of strong individualism coming along with autonomous idea.

Week 8 – Race Against Time: Racial Discourse and Irish History – Luke Gibbons – Castle

It is surprising to witness that the Irish native people were described as white chimpanzees in a British colonial literature. And because they were white it was more dreadful to the eyes of the British literature. What tells me from this is that the British colonialism had a sort of measure to classify any different peoples in “racial prejudice,” whether they were white or not.

week 7 – Response to Molly Amelia Krans

Yeah, I agree with your comments on Lambino. I also figure that the reason may come from the cultural differences. Any model of church I think should go along with their historical, anthropological background. As you said that is why we are not to judge other models or to be so confident for our own models. I have a question to you. What do you think about changing a model when the culture has been changed so much and our model seems too outdated? Can a church model be fluid in accordance with cultural shift?

week 6 – Reply to Toowhitt’s Weblog

Yes, I agree with your comment on this article. God’s intention throughout the bible history seems quite often different from what the biblical figures would plan or predict. How will it be more difficult for us to understand biblical passages when they are really attractive to be interpreted to resolve our oppression or social unfairness? However, I think it is also not safe to try to look at the biblical passage only in a broad angle, i.e. salvific idea to the entire human being, because God does not just care for the universe but also for a little cry of a baby on the earth. What I am trying to say is that it would be nice if we would attempt to find some sort of God’s characteristics in biblical narratives than investigate whether those stories match up with my situation or not.

Week 5 – Response to Terry Mak

You’re right Terry. If the kingdom has to be a consequence of the corrupted churches, it will be meaningless to distinguish the kingdom of God and the church. However, I guess fortunately I see them as different concept, though they interact very tightly with each other. What is wrong is not the kingdom of God and the church but the people who are contaminating those. Me too, I see a lot of politics and its corruptions. A lot of protestant churches nowadays are too much focusing on their gatherings and the status quo of the church power, trying to make it bigger rather than focusing on expanding the kingdom of God. They gather together just to “gather.” But I would say kingdom of God is more about spreading out throughout the world. I believe that the kingdom of God is outward-oriented while the church is inward-oriented, therefore, when we acknowledge their interaction and put them together, the church must be a gathering to spread out for the kingdom of God. What I’m basically saying is that I wish the church would know that they have to focus more on the kingdom of God with evangelistic mindset than on the “power generating.”