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Yesterday I stumbled upon a magnificently-written article analyzing why American evangelical Christians have largely decided to go to bed with Donald Trump, a man whose life is so obviously contrary to the high biblical standards of Christian living. And then last night I couldn’t sleep. I woke up this morning after a fitful night, realizing that everything that I had been feeling about American Christianity towards the Trump campaign just lined up with my own experience of growing up in church in NYC. Since the 1980s, with the founding of the Moral Majority, politically engaged evangelicals have tried to impose their moral outlook on the country through political means. But many evangelicals tried to keep to themselves, walling themselves off from secular culture. All the while, the tectonic plates of culture shifted beneath their feet. When the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015, that set off alarm bells inside a community that had tried its hardest to sing praise hy...

The other day, I was surfing on facebook, when I saw that one of my friends put up a facebook status defending the Christian position on same-sex marriage. I can't remember how it goes, but the long and short of it was: "Calling same-sex marriage the fight for 'marriage equality' rigs the debate from the start. It positions you on the side of what's simply 'good' and 'fair', and uses semantics to antagonize anyone who opposes your position."  As a Christian in Christian ministry, I completely agree with that assessment. After all, who wants to be against equality?? What it says is that if you're not on the side of same-sex marriage, then you have the right to shape marriage your way and deny other people the right to have marriage their way, and by logical extension, it means you're a hypocrite. When you think about it, one can say that this is an argument crafted not on logic, but on careful use and exploitation of terminology. T...

Through a combination of the Election season and my unshakable impulse to check Facebook every time I lose focus on what I'm doing right now, I have learned so much more about the political leanings of my friends that I care to find out. I've discovered that I have at least one Christian friend in every major political category: Apathetic (gotta start with that one, right?), moderate, left-leaning, right-leaning, God is going to abandon America if Obama doesn't win, and God is going to straight up Sodom-and-Gomorrah everything from sea to shining sea if Romney doesn't win. I fall into one of the categories that I listed above, but what bothers me most during politics time is not how other people can be a Christian and have a different political view, but how exclusively and explicitly some Christians have connected their religious hopes with their political alignment.  This blog has written about how our politics have revealed that our eschatological hope isn't u...

In my three years of doing ministry in Sydney, I've written and preached about fifteen to twenty sermons, which means that I'm still a very, very young and inexperienced preacher. And in my endeavor to become a a better preacher, I've noticed that whenever I go back to read one of my sermons, if it's older than six months, I end up hating it and wondering how anyone could have ever let me read THAT on the pulpit. You might have experienced this same phenomenon, especially if you keep a journal. Have you ever gone back to read something you wrote a long time ago and start feeling the flush of embarrassment, like "How could I have thought or written those things?" It's a sign that you are growing as a person and maturing in thought and intellect. In the case of my past sermons, it's a sign that I've growing and maturing as a preacher. Now don't get me wrong; as far as I know I haven't ever preached heresy or mis-exegeted the Bible, or at ...

This was a book I read with my pastor, Owen, last year while I was doing ministry apprenticeship. It's one of my favorite books on not just ministry, but Christian relationships in general. I highly recommend it to all Christians.   “ As we listen to eternity, we realize that the kingdom is about God radically changing people, but not in the self-absorbed sense our culture assumes. Christ came to break our allegiance to such an atrophied agenda and call us to the one goal worth living for. His kingdom is about the display of his glory and people who are holy. This is the change he came, lived, died, and rose to produce.” (5)        Paul Tripp's book, Instruments In The Hands Of The Redeemer , reads, more than anything else, like a chameleon. Different people with different life situations will pick up this book and read it as exactly what they needed to hear. A pastor will read it as a guide for doing biblically faithful pastoral counseling. A married cou...

          A couple of weeks ago, I turned up at church wearing the new outfit that I had purchased back in New York last December. Blue dress shirt with a Navy Tommy Hilfiger top, DKNY jeans, and a pair of Polo Ralph Lauren boots. That was the first time in a long, long, long, long time that I can remember being complimented for my clothing. No fewer than three people responded with some variation of "Dan! Nice shoes!" when I said hi to them, and Roy Wu actually saw me from across the whole hall and came over just to comment on my attire. It felt nice. It made me smile. It confirmed that I like it when I wear nice clothing and people notice.           Truth be told, I didn't acquire a single article of clothing that I was wearing that day on my own. My fiancee Jo picked out the shirt and jumper, I was assisted with the jeans, and my friend Phil Thai practically had to hold a gun to my head to make me buy those nice brown shoes. "But, wh...

       I really like words. I like phrases, I like wordplay, and I like finding out the origin of certain words and phrases. Well earlier this week, I found out where the term “falling from grace” comes from.        Nowadays, the definition of “falling from grace” is to fall from a position of high esteem. We often talk about celebrities who fall from grace when news of something bad they've done hits the presses. But it doesn't have to be celebrities. You can “fall from a friend's good graces" if you do something bad like betray him or deny him, or put up embarrassing pictures of him onto facebook. In my mind, the term “falling from grace” invokes this picture of walking on some tightrope way high up in the air. Every careful step you take is another chance you might slip up and come crashing down. The way that we use the term today, you have to work so hard not to fall from grace. You have to be good all the time, look good all the time, ne...