Church 3rd Anniversary Celebration

Our church here will celebrate its 3rd Anniversary on March 11. We’ll be very busy again working on the program and church decorations. 8 people will be baptized as part of the celebration.

Our digicam is broken We found it out when I was about to take pictures of our church visitors one Sunday that it was broken from an impact. Why it did break remain a mystery for us. Anyway, don’t expect pictures post for a while until God touches people to gift us with one. We hope that we will have our new camera before March 11.

Narlin is got sick two weeks ago. But she is now well and continue holding free English classes in the community and working at the Day Care Center.

Deitrich Boenhoffer and cheap grace

I first read The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer when I was a young new Christian. The book in paperback edition looked like a novel and that was perhaps attracted my attention and picked it up lying around our church’s library. But I admit, I never understood the book then and I’m trying to recall what this great theologian wrote in that book. I really didn’t have a chance to get back to Bonhoeffer. But here and then, I’ll find Boenhoffer’s life and thinking to be a real challenge to theology students like me. This is a man who not just thought out his theology but live it out and actually died for it.

Richard G with other theology bloggers has a blog dedicated to the work of this great theologian. I started reading it, I was hoping I could also contribute but my knowledge about this great theologian is awfully lacking. Right now, I’m content just to read and learn.

Bonhoeffer’s attacked cheap grace being marketed by evangelical churches which I think is prevailing in modern or postmodern Christianity. Under the cover of the reformation’s principle of justification by faith alone, he charged that Christians have been relieved of the obligations of discipleship.

Cheap grace means grace as doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian “conception” of God… The Church which holds the correct doctrine of grace has, it is supposed, ipso facto a part in that grace. In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin.

Boenhoffer contrast cheap grace with “costly grace”. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives man the only true life.

I always hear this idiomatic expression from the English speaking people and I don’t know exactly what it means. “Put your money where your mouth is.” But I guess, Bonhoeffer surely did that.

Mission Partners

My friend Steve Hayes over at his blog Notes From the Underground writes a very insightful post about mission partnership and I think this is true. I know that Western missionaries are doing their best not to force their culture to the host country where they are serving. But I am witnessing it happening all the time.

But what is really mission partnership? A more verbose expression but nonetheless clearer phrase: Mutual responsibility and interdependence in the Body of Christ. Steve quotes his friend John Davies clearly give us a good description of what it is all about.

Missionary work is essentially two-way; Christ said, `Whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them’ (Matthew 7:12). If we took this seriously, we should probably have to pack in half the missionary work of the Church that we are used to, if it meant that blacks would start teaching whites , and doing good to them, and expecting them to be grateful. Our mission is not, in a one-way traffic, to extol the greatness of our religion: it is to hear and know the living God – and just as between God and man, so also between Christian and non-Christian, all real living is meeting. If this is not our way, we misrepresent the God who has sent us out, whose very nature as trinity is one of reciprocal relations.