dream job for a new season
Today I started my new job with Leadership Network (LN)! I’d first heard about them back in 1998 when I was pastoring, on staff at a church plant, and my senior pastor had received LN newsletters. I was transfixed by their desire to serve churches with innovations and strategies. Now I’m getting to work alongside; so excited! My role with LN (described by csmonitor.com as a church consultant group) will be to help with their digital initiatives, which is to say, using the internet and the web more effectively (probably firstly) to distribute content about church innovations and (perhaps later) to use the web itself for innovations of Kingdom impact. I’ll get to do researching, strategizing, facilitating, internet stuff, and work with a virtual remote team of great people. I’d write more, but this was only my first day. I’ll be in Dallas later this week, and most of next week, and will hit the ground running with learning the ropes and hopefully do something that’d be public-facing before you know it! Stay tuned..
Asian American Emergents skypecast this Sunday
Spread the word about the Asian American Emergents skypecast [NOTE: sorry, messed it all up; please skype me to join!] coming this Sunday 10/29 at 9:00pm Eastern + 6:00pm Pacific. Note that this Sunday is the first day of Daylight Savings Time in the US. We should be talking about planting emerging/emergent churches for Asian Americans with our special guest Bruce Reyes-Chow, making his first appearance on the skypecast that he originally dreamed up.
Had an incredible time here in Oregon; flying back East to Washington DC on a red-eye. Tell you more next week.
[update 10/29/06] We used an alternative way to do our event tonight, b/c I messed up the Skypecast setup and we also had other technical difficulties too, so we did it via a Skype conference call: Skypecasts allow up to 100 participants, but Skype conference calls only allow up to a maximum of 5. So, sorry Eddie for not being able to include you on time, this go around 
On the call, we (Bruce Reyes-Chow, Sivin Kit, myself, plus 21-year-old Eugene from Vancouver listened in.) did dialogue around the issues of planting emerging churches to reach a new generation of Asian Americans. Bruce (who is Chinese/Filipino) started with a discusses the story of how Mission Bay Community Church started with PCUSA support; it now has a multiethnic diversity of about 40% Asian-American, 40% White, 20% other (African American/Multi-Racial). We explored the intersection of Emergent and Asians, talked about technical difficulties, and ended with advise about church planting.
We did manage to record the last 25 minutes of the conference call: listen in or download the MP3 audio + add your comment below to join the conversation.
[mp3]http://djchuang.podomatic.com/enclosure/2006-10-29T19_47_19-08_00.mp3[/mp3]
gleaning wisdom in Grants Pass
I’m out here for a week in the sticks of Southern Oregon, in a town called Grants Pass. This place is among the great outdoors of the Pacific Northwest, and supposedly one of the fastest growing retirement communities in the country.
I’m really glad to sit under the sagely teachings of a master facilitator to learn his process for strategic operating planning. It’s a different spin on strategic planning, and in many ways more wholistic than what little I know of other systems and carries with it a simple elegance. But more than that, to glean from his wisdom. I have always gravitated towards wisdom, even though I haven’t figured out what to do with it, but usually can’t remember the stories that make truths come alive. So I’m recognizing the value of stories, and I’ve gotta figure out a way to remember them so I can retell them.
And hearing life wisdoms this time around, I’m finding motivation to get past my psychological self-defeating mechanisms, and I think by the end of the week, I’ll turn the corner from being a lifelong resistor of personal ambition, personal success, personal gain, personal performance, and personal accomplishment. Yes, I know there’s a lot behind those personal words, but that’s what has been a part of my personal story.
why I stopped pastoring
Even though I was blogging when I stopped pastoring, I had not gone on record to explore and unpack why I quit that high calling. The year I stopped was a dark year, a lot of my life didn’t make sense during that transition. I’m asked that question often enough, so now that I’ve been a regular citizen as long as I’ve been clergy, I’m starting to gain perspective on what all of that was about.
Oh, I wish I could be a pastor! I spent a decade of my life trying, dedicating myself to serious studies at a seminary, praying and doing spiritual disciplines, even working as a pastor for over 5 years. I believed I was called to go to seminary– a Bible verse urged me on: for the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. I started by faith, and I continued by faith, but blind faith could only last so long.
Read more
Exit Wounds: The Flight of Asian American Faith
Peter Ong’s article title Exit Wounds was posted on AsianAvenue.com; the teaser describes it briefly:
A walk along boulevards in any major American metropolitan city, one will find that the church as the cultural center for Asian American ethnic communities. According to a 2000 Pilot National Asian American Political survey, Christians make up the largest Asian American religious group at 46 percent. But despite the common faith there is an undercurrent of conflict between first and second generation Asians.
You can read the article online, but you have to register for a free account to add comments there.
