θαυμάζω

My first year of doing ministry apprenticeship in Australia consisted of a lot of following Euge around and listening to him teach here and there. One Saturday he picked me up from home and told me that we were going to go down to Stanwell Tops where he would be teaching a seminar on something something (it was a while ago and I can’t remember). He said on the way down we’ll swing by the Maccas and grab some dinner.  Something that people in Australia often get wrong about the U.S. is that we don’t like nicknames as much as you guys do. The truth is, we are just as lazy as you are and we also feel the need to shorten everything in order to try to save time and mouth energy. The only thing is, we’re not as good at it. And so our nickname for McDonalds was another three-syllable term, “Mickey D’s”. Net time and effort saved: Zero.  And so because of that, I had never heard of this Maccas before. I was so excited. I had only been living in Sydney for a few weeks and I was still t...

About ten years ago I went to Bali to attend the CCCOWE conference, a summit on evangelism and church missions for the Chinese diaspora. It was awesome. I got to try Kopi Luwak coffee (it tasted exactly like any other coffee). I heard Christopher Wright give the keynote talks. I read both The Mission Of God (well, more like skimmed and cherry-picked passages) and The Mission Of God’s People , and they’ve deeply shaped my missiology and ecclesiology. And I met the Reverend J. Hudson Taylor. The fifth. James Hudson Taylor V (apparently nicknamed JT) was the great, great grandson of the legendary Hudson Taylor, British missionary to China and founder of China Inland Mission, which is today called OMF International . For almost two hundred years, the Taylor family has been serving the Chinese people through an unbroken line of descendents, each of whom bore the name of their patriarch. The Taylor I met and briefly chatted with served as the main interpreter at the conference and it woul...