How Grieving Can Make Us Well
We all have losses that have shaped us, from losing something we loved to lacking something (or someone) we needed. Only by taking the time to witness, name, and hold our Grief, can we find the strength to release it to grow into something more.
Historical Reckoning and Asian American Political Theology
From a critical-historical point of view, then, it is not enough for the Asian American church to address the Western church’s historical lack of reckoning with its social sin of colonial complicity. To become the church as it is called to be, the Asian American church should also engage in a historical reckoning of its own complicitous legacies, such as authoritarian and neoliberal complicity. If the Asian American church honestly acknowledges that there is a historical and genealogical linkage between its original root in Asia and its present status in the US, it can begin to see more clearly what it should do to create and develop its distinctive political theology.
Book Review: The New Testament in Color
So then, can I, as an Asian American, trust Scripture? According to the wonderful contributors of The New Testament in Color, the answer to that question is “Yes!” Yet, not only I as an Asian American can trust Scripture, so too can African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, and others.
Advent Worship and Corporate Action: The Fourth Sunday of Advent
We celebrate this Advent, the birth of your son Jesus, and we also look forward to the 2nd Advent, the day when you will come again to make all things right, and to complete your Kingdom. Until then we ask for the strength of your Holy Spirit to help us to keep your commands, to live in truth, to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with you.
Advent Worship and Corporate Action: The Third Sunday of Advent
All of us are invited, even called, by God to make Jesus our hope. None of us are more worthy or less worthy to encounter God today. There’s no chart with God that puts some of us closer and some of us farther away. We’re all on the same ground. So, whoever you are, wherever you’ve been, welcome. God’s Spirit is here. Let’s meet him.
Advent Worship and Corporate Action: The second Sunday of Advent
Today is the second Sunday of the Christian season of Advent. Advent means “coming” or “arrival.” We celebrate two advents of Christ during this season – and, really, every day.
Advent Worship and Corporate Action: The First Sunday of Advent
We celebrate two advents of Christ during this season – and, really, every day. During Advent we look back at the first coming of Christ with so much thankfulness, and we look forward to the second coming of Christ with so much anticipation.
Advent Worship and Corporate Action: A Resource for Churches
This document contains four worship services for the four Sundays of Advent. It is our desire that you use their basic ideas as a skeleton, or just incorporate certain sections for your own churches’ worship.
The cost of sacrificial love in Asian American families: honoring parents while maintaining boundaries
A uniform approach to healthy family boundaries may not apply in our multicultural society, especially in families shaped by the immigrant experience.
Raising the Bar: Loving Disagreement Book Review
The faith that helped our parents and our families survive in this country can sometimes be at odds with the growing faith of the younger generation that looks around and is asking, “How can my faith impact the world around me?” It’s a complicated question.
Advent in the Midst of Suffering, Part II
This year, I will hope in the face of suffering and tragedy. Not because it’s easy, and not as a trite answer to make the darkness of suffering go away. But as a declaration that my Savior’s life from womb to tomb and beyond truly did conquer darkness.
Advent in the Midst of Suffering, Part I
At Advent, we ask, where is the light? What can the birth of a baby really do in this incredibly thick darkness? How do we hold on to the flickering light of Jesus’ birth without repeating rite sayings and spreading toxic positivity?
Freed from Fearful Timidity in Order to Flourish
Pastoring has been the soil on which I have met the Lord, over and over again. This calling invites me to be saturated in God’s presence and in God’s Word, year after year. It stirs up all of my insecurities and fears and my imposter syndrome, and those things become the ripe soil on which Jesus meets me, over and over again, to speak his words of love.
Why is Joining a Small Group So Hard?
If we need to build community, we must start being generous with our time. The best relationships grow when we give ourselves sufficient time for the conversation to flow and linger.
The Provision Of Rest
I had grown accustomed to spending my life in hyperdrive, running from one task to the next, so I could do more, be more, and make my family proud. Suddenly, I could do nothing.
Gifts of the Asian American Church
Perhaps we have been content to be spectators in our own homes, mimickers of our neighbors, and borrowers of their blessings. And I wonder: What would it take to make us care? If our resignation is learned behavior, a consequence of our unique structural disadvantages, how can we unlearn it and become brave?
We Are Not Immune: Lessons from a Mental Health Crisis
The compounded stress, physical strain, lack of self-monitoring, and dearth of healthy Christian friendships finally imploded on me. I could no longer sleep. Like a jammed switch continually set to “on,” my brain refused to shut down. For five months, it seemed all I could do was lie down at night and stare at the ceiling.
Beyond Essentialist Understandings of Asianness in Multicultural Liturgy
There is a place for multicultural celebrations that put Asian cultures on display; but, if we exclusively celebrate this form of liturgy, we run the risk of feeding into the stereotype that Asian Americans are forever foreigners.
Who is the Jesus of Advent?
The God of Advent is not a God of wealth, privilege, or status. The God of Advent is lowly–identifying with a forsaken place of our world.
Those Who Walk In Darkness
This holiday season, may we rest in the knowledge that the God we worship is not one who is intimidated by our suffering.