Liberalism & Campus Ministry

Charles Krauthammer, a renowned doctor and sociologist commentator in Fox News, says that in the 60s there was a counterculture leftist plan to take over the academia of universities in America to reshape America’s worldview. And they did: they have taken over the colleges one after other surely by sending the best man and woman to do PhDs and eventually become professors in the universities, especially the ivy league who in turn produces the most professors for other universities. And these professors begin to publish their thesis, books, and worldview. A look at all the colleges in America today will see how students heavily towards one end, liberalism.

Today’s college students by a far majority lean towards progressive values, liberal worldviews, including Christians to a significant extent. They are the future Leaders of America and why is the church losing the grip/influence on the young people there’s only one way to stop this slide by bringing in the glorious gospel to campus for a rich life transformation & endowment of the “life of abundance” that Jesus promised.

Any wonder America’s leaning towards sexuality continuously like gay marriage, transgender as a seismic shift of America’s worldview stunning even the liberals by the success they have. It all started in the campus, and today Christians has a unique opportunity to penetrate university. Strictly speaking the gospel is neither left nor right, neither liberal nor conservative. Gospel cares for the poor & marginalized which sounds like the liberal left but also stands for morality like marriage between a man & a woman, sexual fidelity, honesty, integrity, faithfulness etc. All these virtues (except the sexuality stuff) are all applauded by the society at large, but the major difference between them is that the society at large fails at carrying out these virtues, because humanly it’s impossible because our human nature is fallen & bankrupt by default. (Ephesians 4: 18 They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts.)

Any effort to boost it up as we see that plentiful in schools and the rest, are all but temporary, not sustainable, because the real reason is that our hearts are darkened, and hardened. We do have virtuous human instincts, but that is not sustainable, and the world and surroundings corrupt us. That’s the bottom line. And for Christians, it’s a fact that we are in a spiritual warfare. The prince of darkness continues to devour anyone like a roaring lion. (1 Peter 5:8 Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour). So any effort to change a campus, change the society, a country is in vain without the supernatural message of the gospel where Jesus died on the cross and paid the price for us. He lived the perfect life we should, but could never have in a billion years. We are totally in need of the redemption of Christ who was offered up as an atonement and sacrifice for us all sinners.

Putting this into action, we must therefore put a major emphasis on college campus ministry, by being very intentional and encouraging our young people to get PhDs and enter the academia and begin to teach the cream of our young generation who will be the leaders of tomorrow. We have a catch up time to do.

My Berlin Experience & Reflection

In June 2017 my wife Doreen, my daughters Sarah Rebecca and I visited and joined the Hope Berlin/ Germany Festival conference in Berlin, Germany.

After being away from Hope International and North American conferences for years I certainly was looking forward to seeing and learning what’s driving the church plant of house churches in Germany. They have planted 400 “House Churches” all over Europe since they started like 17 years ago started and headed by Marcus Rose. This is a truly phenomenon breakthrough in post-Christian era Europe. He is an apostolic leader. I have known Marcus some 17 years ago but never met up ever since I myself was zealously planting churches in Kuching and Kota Kinabalu in Malaysia while he was starting in Berlin. It’s amazing and yes glory to God and how much He had used in anointing Marcus to have accomplished so much almost like Paul the Apostle, while I languished in America with a handful of core team. While over there in Berlin though, I have to say the theology taught by him and others are really not anything in particular that moved my heart greatly and there was nothing much impactful on theology. Most was really practically oriented teaching. But I would say that we were very blessed to see how the Germans, white Caucasians, so dedicated in serving the lord and I was most blessed by the passion of worship. This is quite an eye opener after being in America for 15 years, as I just don’t see that fervency among the westerners/whites serving the Lord in New York or anywhere else. I also had some good discussions with their apostolic leaders. Quite frankly I wouldn’t use this term so easily, but anyhow they’re good folks who really wanted to plant house churches. They are definitely good in evangelism and discipleship making, and live out what they have been taught in a simple way. Not much theological thinking but just doing it simply, quite a contrast to New York’s spiritual giants like Tim Keller.

The idea of House church is somewhat similar to the Missional community group started by Church Plant in Belgium under the Redeemer City to City. In a hard gospel ground this seems to be working. No Sunday premise needed, no headache and renting, no money problem.

They evangelize wherever they go with a heart’s intention to bring blessings to them, not just to evangelize or proselytize them per se. Like my Malaysian German friend, Kajin Teo (also an apostolic leader there) shared, it’s not about bringing people to church, it’s about meeting their needs. Like Jesus’ way of evangelism is always about meeting the needs of the people, crowd around him. He healed them of all kinds of diseases, and cast out demons regularly. So we should also meet the needs of our friends, neighbors, and contacts. And interestingly, the way they do it is by listening to the Holy Spirit saying to them. Like asking the Lord who to talk to, and what to talk about. And when they have touched a number of people, they follow them up regularly, and it will come to a point its just more convenient to gather them to gather and teach them the word of God and also fellowshipping together. There you are, they just started a house church of 3 or 4 people. They then shepherd the leaders weekly through Skype and exhort them to walk in the Lord, obeying the scriptures etc. I also spoke with Ps Denis Lu of Hope Kuching, a sizable great church in my hometown of Kuching where I have preached a few times every time we visit our parents/family in Kuching. We love visiting Hope Kuching & the fellowship of the saints there and the hospitality of Ps Denis & Hai Eng. He also commented that if he were to start all over again, he definitely would consider this house churchmovement. First you raise a lot of preachers, leaders overnight, second, you would save a lot of money by running a 500 people or more church.

Question is: How do you quality control of all these small mushrooming house churches? Answer is they, the senior pastor skype with each of them at different authority levels and share God’s word, mentor them, etc…real personal level on a weekly basis. Then all the house churches combine and meet for celebration once a month or a quarter.

I will continue to pray and adopt all that I had observed in Berlin where applicable here in New York and continue to do expositional preaching that changes the hearts of listeners in New York and build a gospel centered movement. In God we trust. Thank you Lord for the opportunity to visit and learn in the Hope Germany Camp!

The fact is that’s what happened in the Torah/OT. It’s the whole bunch of men hungrily pounding and demanding Lot to release the 2 visitors for them to have sex. Gen: 19:4 Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom—both young and old—surrounded the house. 5 They called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.”–the rest is history. The 2 men who were angels saved Lot and struck those lustful men blind and later rained down fire and destroyed the whole Sodom.–That’s the revealed words/facts as recorded in the bible and Torah. Hypothetically, if the 2 visitors were women, and the bunch of wild men coming to rape them, I would have said their depravity is reaching the heavens. Same thing, no exception. Now:The Nestorianism is beyond the acceptable confines/boundary of any evangelical bible believing Christians. To call into question the deity of Christ, is completely preaching a different gospel from what Paul preached and has to be totally rejected . Galatians 1:6 “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— 7 which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. 8 But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse! 9 As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse!” The Nicene creed and Apostles creed are explained and expounded solidly from the revealed word of God in scriptures. It’s NOT an add on. One cannot expound on what thats NOT revealed. We have to be careful as what we teach as we would bear responsibility in the coming of Christ in the end time.

Paul praised and thanked God for the stamina, endurance of the Thessalonian church in facing persecutions and trials in 2 Thessalonians 1. One word I do want to bring up to us : When we are trying hard to press on in our lives for a calling, for a vision, for a dream, or facing trials/persecutions, remember that if we are walking with the Lord, it’s the grace of God that’s working in us. It can’t be just us dreaming and have a self centered ambition pressing on, be cause that will be of the flesh, and that will be religion, which will get you no where and wear you out. But when you understand and acknowledge that it’s the grace of God working powerfully behind us, suddenly all dams breaks loose. It’s a powerful theological position that we, all Christians, must take, as this is God centered, Christ centered. Grace oriented.

How do we frame our prayers?—Prayer/Faithfulness

2 Thessalonians 1: 2 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 3 We ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing.

Recently I was struck by what Don Carson wrote about how we pray are very different from how Paul prayed. Paul prayed in a phenomenal class A prayer if we call our prayers as Class C. Let me explain. Our general prayers consist of about 10% thanksgiving and worship to God, and the rest about 90% of the time will be requests, petitions (generally). Whilst the book of Psalms is the most intimate, personal prayers one can ever pray, and I love psalms way of prayers which I follow almost daily, but there is another stark different way of prayer by the apostle Paul as in 1 Thessalonians 1 and other books by him. It’s amazing to see how intense is prayers is and the second thing is how much he longs for a passionate for the church he planted. Almost his entire prayers are thanking God for his grace that is powerfully working in the people’s’ lives, and that he is always praying and thanking God for their faith in God growing and their endurance in facing persecutions and trials. There is no mention of prayers like how we would normally pray-O God protect them from persecutions, and stop the evils. But Paul is focusing of the inner growth of the folks as their endurance grows. In fact, the word “faith” in 1 Thess 1 in Greek means fidelity. Fidelity or faithfulness to God. In other words, Paul is more interested that we grow in our faithfulness to God and actually praise God because of persecutions; he sees tremendous substance of growth in the people’s’ lives. 2 Thess 1:⁴ Therefore we ourselves boast about you in the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith in all your persecutions and in the afflictions that you are enduring.

Then the source of power for being able to endure is very important. If we just try harder on our own strength in God, I mean, even in God, because it’s very subtle, we would feel deflated and discouraged after a period of time. Because that’s religion. Not the gospel where the grace of God is working in enormous stride in us. It’s all Him. Paul said-Grace & peace from God to you… it’s the grace of God that works mightily in us that our faith is growing.

I got inspired continually in the last 2 weeks one after the other about the power of charismatic power & fire, and also the depth & profundity of Reformed teaching & thinking. If I have to choose one of the two, I would have to choose reformed thinking & teaching. That stimulates my mind & captures my imaginations. However, I don’t have to do that. I can have both.

Why Charismatics and Calvinists Need Each Other

This article brilliantly lays down the reasons why we need to combine both. Example: the fastest growing churches in the world is pentecostals/charismatics!

But let’s not fool ourselves—the Reformed movement pales in size to the Modern Pentecostal/charismatic Movement (hereafter, MPCM). MPCM is the fastest-growing religious movement in the history of the human race. In 1900, there were statistically a meaningless number of such Christians. Presently, the number sits around 700 million (see Allan Anderson’s “Global Pentecostalism,” a paper presented at the Wheaton Theology Conference on April 3, 2015), or 1 out of every 3 believers. Just to put it into perspective, that’s more than the total number of Buddhists (around 500 million), Jews (around 14 million), and all folk religions (around 400 million) in the world. MPCM isn’t going away. Quite the opposite. –Adam Mabry

This explains why we need the pentecost power.

Why reformed teaching? There is just too much to say. The teachings on gospel centered way of teaching & preaching by Tim Keller has impacted me greatly. The notion that gospel is only the ABC of Christianity is completely wrong. Its the A-Z of Christianity. He has written and spoken many with great intellectual conviction, and I will just glean what it impacted me so much. First and foremost, for a guy like me from the charismatic background, this is completely new to me. I absolutely loved the teaching of absolute dependence ion God and we are so depraved that we can’t even lift our finger to rescue ourselves. This has shifted my mindset so much to God, rather than a mix bag of me & God. I have now come to understand much better the meaning of surrender to God. I mean, there is no surrender if you have to push your will power to surrender. There is none. Why? Because there is nothing in us that we have that we own or possess. There is nothing we achieve that count towards us. Its all God. The grace of God. The absolute mercy of God. Its been said unless you see the darkness of your soul, you can never see the glory of the ALmighty God. There has to be a contrast. Thats why Paul can say I consider as rubbish that I have achieved compared to the knowledge of Christ! Wow! And how? I struggled with that verse for a long time. It’s because he sees the depravity of his soul, his doings, his achievement, that he sees such a contrast that he was absolutely and utterly transformed. It was such a radical transformation that he went from a persecutor of the gospel to be the apostle of the gospel and suffered tremendously and endured for the gospel. Now do we need to be in such drastic contrast? Each of us has different pathways and callings from God. But the principle of contrast needs to be evident & strong.

Secondly, the idea of Christ centeredness on the cross. I have never seen the comparison of all the verses and tie them to the cross in preaching until I meet Tim Keller. Jonathan Edwards always describes the beauty of the Lord and how he was radically impacted by it. You see these guys use the sufferings of Christ on the cross as the beauty of redemption and fulfilment of the absolute beauty of where the grace of God meets the wrath of God! It absolutely makes sense. Wow! I have never seen it that way. Its amazing. How can a righteous wrathful vengeful God exist with the side of him as tender, loving, caring, forgiving? It is all made possible when the cross of Jesus absorbed all the wrath of God, for God to forgive us, and love us and even adopt us as his adopted children! That’s amazing. Miracle! Have I heard this kind of teaching in pentecostal circles? No. Do I like it? I love it! It melts my heart. Makes my christianity so much more organic and not mechanical, vision driven leadership kind of thing.

I will expound more next time….:)

Stay & abide in the vine. Jesus is the vine.

p/s I used to chase after the vision. Now I chase after my Lord Jesus Christ! 🙂 Yay!

Reading Tim Keller’s article, something resonated in my soul:

1. Pentecostalism/Charismatics  I believe that charismatic combined with reformed theology teaching is going to be the torch-bearer of the revival in America as well going forward just like the worldwide body in Asia, Latin America, Africa with pentecostalism. Its most multi-ethnic group, multiracial, fastest growing block of christianity. (Isn’t that’s what we are all talking about especially in NYC about diversity, and the rest?)  However, it needed a little more than just that as there is a lot of bad theology and prosperity doctrines all wound up in pentecostals or charismatics, unfortunately.  In America, we definitely need a more orthodoxy to anchor in with the power of the Holy Spirit. Some glaring examples: Like In America we talk so much about diversity, in Asia/S America/Africa, they just do it and it happens. Any wonder in the day of the Pentecost, God revealed the multi language, multi ethnic/culture church!! The first church in human history was revealed on the day of Pentecost in the book of Acts, with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit to the birth of the first church. That’s not a coincidence, that’s the providence of God. It sends a signal on how the Lord wants the end time church to look like. It must not be void of power & miracles. The problem with great teachings of America shaping the culture, intellectuals, still come short of the vital real renewal/revival that we all long for. Like Keller said correctly, our country is in a crisis, political, family, academics, liberals have swept across the nation. 

There is a sweep of pentecostal revival. In America, a combination of reformed teaching with the power of charismatic demonstration of the gifts of the Spirit is going to resonate across America. Praying we will arise. 

2) Student movement

Tim Keller said “If you’re on a college campus, you’re on the culture’s cutting edge. [The campus] is our best leadership development pipeline. By exposing people to the cutting edge of culture where they have to deal with the modern mindset, where they have to deal with non-Christians — that is the best way to develop pastors and lay leaders”

I have been raising students from campuses and eventually becoming pastors and leaders of the church. I strongly echo that, and that’s why we will reach out to campuses passionately. Starting to meet at W72 st, Upper west side. Welcoming all Columbia students!

Keller and Duncan: A More Relevant PCA?

my little children, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you! Galatians 4:19

We often pray that a person’s behavior and attitude will change and God will touch him or her. A better prayer will be to pray for Christ  being formed in the person.
Why? Because this is the presence of God in the person’s life not by some will power of the individual that brings change. But you actually have the person of Christ in you! That’s a huge difference! It’s much more personal and intimate. It is much more encompassing.
Remember your will power doesn’t change you. What changes you in Christ in you!

Notice that the word used here is Christ is ‘formed’ in you. It’s a formation process. It’s only possible if Christ is in you. Only God can do that. Pray!

Example: would you like to have a map guiding you or a life person leading you?
Ask for the person of Christ! He is the Son of God our savior and redeemer who loves us and died for us. He is our shepherd. I shall not lack.
I love Christ. I can’t love laws. I can’t love vision. Without Christ, I am doomed. My life is in Christ. Christ is in me. Christ is everything. Bible says, it’s no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me, and the life I now live I live by faith in Christ  who loved me and gave himself for me.