Advent Worship and Corporate Action: The Fourth Sunday of Advent
We celebrate this Advent, the birth of your son Jesus, and we also look forward to the 2nd Advent, the day when you will come again to make all things right, and to complete your Kingdom. Until then we ask for the strength of your Holy Spirit to help us to keep your commands, to live in truth, to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with you.
Advent Worship and Corporate Action: The Third Sunday of Advent
All of us are invited, even called, by God to make Jesus our hope. None of us are more worthy or less worthy to encounter God today. There’s no chart with God that puts some of us closer and some of us farther away. We’re all on the same ground. So, whoever you are, wherever you’ve been, welcome. God’s Spirit is here. Let’s meet him.
Advent Worship and Corporate Action: The second Sunday of Advent
Today is the second Sunday of the Christian season of Advent. Advent means “coming” or “arrival.” We celebrate two advents of Christ during this season – and, really, every day.
Advent Worship and Corporate Action: The First Sunday of Advent
We celebrate two advents of Christ during this season – and, really, every day. During Advent we look back at the first coming of Christ with so much thankfulness, and we look forward to the second coming of Christ with so much anticipation.
Advent Worship and Corporate Action: A Resource for Churches
This document contains four worship services for the four Sundays of Advent. It is our desire that you use their basic ideas as a skeleton, or just incorporate certain sections for your own churches’ worship.
The cost of sacrificial love in Asian American families: honoring parents while maintaining boundaries
A uniform approach to healthy family boundaries may not apply in our multicultural society, especially in families shaped by the immigrant experience.
Raising the Bar: Loving Disagreement Book Review
The faith that helped our parents and our families survive in this country can sometimes be at odds with the growing faith of the younger generation that looks around and is asking, “How can my faith impact the world around me?” It’s a complicated question.
Advent in the Midst of Suffering, Part II
This year, I will hope in the face of suffering and tragedy. Not because it’s easy, and not as a trite answer to make the darkness of suffering go away. But as a declaration that my Savior’s life from womb to tomb and beyond truly did conquer darkness.
Advent in the Midst of Suffering, Part I
At Advent, we ask, where is the light? What can the birth of a baby really do in this incredibly thick darkness? How do we hold on to the flickering light of Jesus’ birth without repeating rite sayings and spreading toxic positivity?
Freed from Fearful Timidity in Order to Flourish
Pastoring has been the soil on which I have met the Lord, over and over again. This calling invites me to be saturated in God’s presence and in God’s Word, year after year. It stirs up all of my insecurities and fears and my imposter syndrome, and those things become the ripe soil on which Jesus meets me, over and over again, to speak his words of love.
Why is Joining a Small Group So Hard?
If we need to build community, we must start being generous with our time. The best relationships grow when we give ourselves sufficient time for the conversation to flow and linger.
The Provision Of Rest
I had grown accustomed to spending my life in hyperdrive, running from one task to the next, so I could do more, be more, and make my family proud. Suddenly, I could do nothing.
Gifts of the Asian American Church
Perhaps we have been content to be spectators in our own homes, mimickers of our neighbors, and borrowers of their blessings. And I wonder: What would it take to make us care? If our resignation is learned behavior, a consequence of our unique structural disadvantages, how can we unlearn it and become brave?
We Are Not Immune: Lessons from a Mental Health Crisis
The compounded stress, physical strain, lack of self-monitoring, and dearth of healthy Christian friendships finally imploded on me. I could no longer sleep. Like a jammed switch continually set to “on,” my brain refused to shut down. For five months, it seemed all I could do was lie down at night and stare at the ceiling.
Beyond Essentialist Understandings of Asianness in Multicultural Liturgy
There is a place for multicultural celebrations that put Asian cultures on display; but, if we exclusively celebrate this form of liturgy, we run the risk of feeding into the stereotype that Asian Americans are forever foreigners.
Who is the Jesus of Advent?
The God of Advent is not a God of wealth, privilege, or status. The God of Advent is lowly–identifying with a forsaken place of our world.
Those Who Walk In Darkness
This holiday season, may we rest in the knowledge that the God we worship is not one who is intimidated by our suffering.
Inhabiting the Hole of Advent: Transfiguring Asian American Futures
What if the problem is not our perceived foreignness at all, but our perpetual propensity to play the game? Maybe the way out of this perception is not ultimate economic empowerment, but a transfigured desire that perpetuates the possibility inherent in the empty space of Advent.
'Mixed Blessing' - One and a Half Years Later
God has plans for us…plans that are sometimes very different from our own goals and strategies.
Opening Our Hearts to Lament
Whenever a racial tragedy happens in our country or around the world for that matter, our posture of heart as a family is to first respond with lament. My family laments every time a life is lost because every person’s life has value and meaning.