The reflecting theologian

As a result of what my lecturer mentioned last week about him going to an overseas church which has been previously split apart by a scandal to preach to them about faith, I began reading up on a church split that I have heard about some years back. The incident was not that high profile internationally and therefore it was not being widely reported in international Christian news site. Moreover, despite the apparent success of the church internationally, the church remained isolated for most part of its history from other churches. Nevertheless, the church was considered one of the most successful churches in its own home country and had been pretty controversial in terms of its practices.  The summary of the whole incident stemmed from accountability. This is one concept that most people do not like to hear but unfortunately, it remains so important in our Christian life, especially when we are dealing with money in church and human lives in our koinonia. In the church, financ...

It has been a long time since I posted anything here. The frequency is getting lower but things have been getting busier over at my side. Work wise, there had been a lot of happenings there and that contributed a bit. Study wise, I have to work on my assignments every week and that leaves very little time already. On top of that, I need to work on a few bible studies that I will be teaching over the course of August to October. Nevertheless, I am just sharing a snippet of my view on a recent hot topic that has been spreading like wild fire - the issue of the NIV translation. In some sense, the issue is not new, and in fact, I had discussed this with an ex-colleague before over some very heated discussion. The key problem with this partly lies with the "King James Only" movement, which states that the KJV is the only English translation worth trusting, for many various reasons. For some who are unaware, the Bible-Presbysterian church is one tradition that apparently embraces...

I personally like this song by Matt Redman, "10000 Reasons" and I think it helps to remind us of the reasons why we should bless the Lord. Here's my 10,000 reasons to bless the Lord for your reference: My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ My salvation in Christ I think you get the idea. The po...

I had a conversation with a friend over the weekend, and we were talking about serving in ushering, or more particularly, leaving ushering as a ministry. On reflection of the conversation, I realised that at least in my own church, we have a tendency to use certain language that betrays how we think of the different ministries. Here's a replicate paraphrase of what roughly transpired during the conversation: A: I heard that you left ushering  Me: Yeah, there were certain circumstances. I was asked to leave so that I can focus on other ministries.  A: Yeah, me too. I left sometime back. They asked me, "so when am I going to move on" and I think I got the signal... Then I realised that we inevitably use words and phrases like "move on" and "advance" and "other ministries" to describe our experience on leaving ushering. Other languages which we used to use back in my younger days are "I will start off with ushering and see where God...

The stuff that I want to say in this post is partly sparked by this post: https://pastorpeterko.wordpress.com/2012/11/10/why-i-wont-date-you-an-imaginary-letter-to-a-non-christian/. I thought, as I reflect upon some relationship lessons that I have been through over the past two years, it may be good to list it out somehow. As some of you may notice, some of these points are probably reflected somewhere else in this blog. 1. You simply have to discriminate One of the pet peeves when people of different faiths get together is that you shouldn't be exclusive in your dating and narrow your choices so much to only those in your faith. I must say that this is really a convenient excuse for people to get together, as the argument self-destruct upon closer scrutiny. Unless you are effectively a bisexual who have no preference, you already excluded half the world's population the moment you set out to look for a relationship/life partner. A man will naturally look for another woman...

As students in Singapore, we are familiar with this thing called the "10-year series" which is really a series of past-year examination papers from the GCE O and A'level. The assumption is that the questions do not vary too much and hence it is possible to practice from these past papers and gain a familiarity of the kind of questions that will come out in our final papers. In a society that focuses much on grades (where a bad result in PSLE condemns you to a hell that even the Devil shutters), the mastery of the 10-years series means a difference between a fail (which is B) and a pass (which is A+++, in order to get distinction, one must obtain 200% of the score as a sign of one's godlikeness in the GCE). I am of course exaggerating here. But this is to spring off to another issue that I am concerned about. For many years in my walk in the church, I have heard the same 10-year series label being applied to Christian answers to difficult situations. This refers to s...

While I was walking to office this morning, I was reminded of a story that was written by G.K Chesterton, which I mentioned in this blog some time back. This is the story in full, as told in his book "Orthodoxy": “I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas. I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes of philosophical illustration. There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you...