Posts Tagged ‘conversation’
Convos at Urbana 09 in St. Louis
This week I’m in St. Louis for a large students mission convention called Urbana 09, click on this twubs to follow twitter conversations in real-time.
I’ll be hangin’ out at the Pan Asian North American Student Lounge, located at The Holiday Inn Select St Louis Downtown in between sessions.
Follow @urbana09 for official announcements. Follow me @djchuang247 for live tweets. The official hashtag to use is #urbana09 according to the twubs.
[update] here are 4 videos I’ve posted via YouTube from #urbana09:
Impact matters more than intention
Wow. These blog post comment threads at here and here about unintentional racial stereotypes is blowing up. Big. Time. [cf. summary]
I think that discussing highly-emotionally charged issues in an asynchronous public forum like the online blogosphere is mostly ineffective. One party describes the pain of the impact from the (alleged) offense, while the other party tries to describe the original intent, all sincere and good. To quote Sam Chand, “The difference between reality and expectation is conflict.” Both sides have unmet expectations. Both sides have different perceptions of reality. Conflict ensues. It’s more than misunderstanding.
I’ll confess that I’m rather new to the impact of public communications by influential leaders. I prefer a world of open book open source unfiltered communications, and am learning to filter and edit based on readers’ response. But realizing that words mean things, and sometimes words can be mean things to the listener even though the speaker didn’t intend it.
I’d be curious how other influential Asian American leaders like Eugene Cho, Dave Gibbons, Charles Lee, Ken Fong, would respond. My guess is that a direct conversation between Mike Foster and Soong-Chan Rah, in a safe private environment, will bring faster resolution than any further color commentary.
[update 11/4] Mike Foster and Jud Wilhite have issued a public statement that “some of our earlier messages … were mixed in with some defensiveness on our part. … we deeply regret anything we did to offend our Christian brothers and sisters in the Asian and Asian-American communities. … that is why are we reaching out this afternoon to hear the concerns and the best way to move forward together in a positive way that corrects past mistakes, respects individual viewpoints and, importantly, advances the ministry for everyone.”
philosophy and religion have a place
Small talk is not my forte’. I can talk about weather or sports for maybe 30 seconds tops. Those are the conventionally safe topics. Work usually comes up early in the conversation, as in “what do you do?” People too quickly associate one’s identity with their work / profession / career.
There are some topics not good for small talk: “… it is not safe to discuss subjects that society deems controversial such as religion or politics.” Yet, politics get lots of air time, even though it’s controversial. Lots of mainstream media and social media time at that.
One British etiquette website describes what’s safe and not safe for small talk conversations:
Which topics are safe for small talk? …
- The weather, eg “It’s a lovely day today, isn’t it?”
- Sport, eg “Have you been watching Wimbledon?”
- Hobbies, eg “What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?”
- Work, eg “What sort of work do you do?”… Which topics are best avoided for small talk? …
- Money, eg “How much do you earn?”
- Politics, eg “Who did you vote for at the last election?”
- Religion, eg “Do you believe in God?”
Yawn.
What about philosophy and religion? Now these two topics make for much more INTERESTING conversations!
why talking about sex is so hard
In this video conversation with Becky Knight, a sexologist and sex educator in the Charlotte, North Carolina area, we breach an often uncomfortable topic, “Why talking about sex is so hard?” Her website is www.livingsexuality.com and she twitters at twitter.com/livingsexuality
There you have it. Sounded to me like just do it, and start the conversation. No magical how-to. How have you talked about this subject with your peers? Your children?
debrief on the Fuller conversations
I got an invite from Daniel Lee [facebook profile], a Th.M. student at Fuller Theological Seminary, who is coordinating a newly-formed group on campus called Asian American Theological Fellowship. Last night was quite the privilege for me to share a presentation titled “Reaching the next generation of Asian Americans”.
More than a handful of my long-distance compadres asked about my thoughts and feelings about last night’s engagement. Here they are, in 3 parts: the presentation, the group, and the potential.
The presentation. This presentation consisted of 59 PowerPoint slides. If I ran thru them Lessig style, no big deal, but I dwelled on many of them, skipped a few, and lost track of time. Meaning, I think I went long– I did go longer than I had planned to. As I debrief here, it dawned on me that since I first built this presentation in September 2007, I’ve added on more slides to cover frequently asked questions. Now after (maybe) 5 iterations, I’ve only added more and more slides — didn’t remove any. No wonder I went long! If I were to take Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule of Powerpoint, get it down to 10 slides, I maybe could summarize it as:
- The opportunity is huge and urgent to reach more Asian Americans. The population will double in less than 50 years.
- Churches naturally have a life cycle like any organization. From time to time, church must adapt to cultural changes to revitalize, or else.
- Ethnic Asian churches have adapted to several models of multi-generational multi-lingual churches to accommodate both Asian-language speakers and English speakers.
- We’ve got so much more to offer. On the whole, in comparison to other racial groupings, Asian Americans are the most educated and have highest earnings. These resources have yet to be fully activated for Kingdom purposes.
- Healthy churches grow AND reproduce.
- In the past 10 years, there’s been an exponential growth of new churches effectively reaching next generation Asian Americans.
- New churches doing church a new way are found all over the United States. It’s not just a “West coast” phenomena.
- We still need more new English-speaking Asian-led churches to reach the next generation, and the unchurched majority.
- Ask not how can we keep “them” in church. Ask how can we reach more people for Jesus.
- It takes all kinds of churches to reach all kinds of people.