You leave your world of comfort for another world that you call your "missionfield". Even if it was for just a brief period of time, you virtually unpluck yourself from a familiar reality and transplant yourself in another reality that is absolutely alien to you.

It is initially rather exciting...new people, new air, new objects, new places...it is almost like a tour. But after a while, as familiarity grows, isolation begins to creep in. The "strange" people you interact with seem friendly, and yet you know that you have not been long enough with them to understand them or to know if they can be called "family".

And so you begin to think of the "family back home". And you visualise them amidst the momentum of their routines. And it suddenly dawns on you that they may not really remember you exist; at least it may appear that way...isolation does strange things to a person. Even through correspondence, they seem to be fulfilling an obligatory duty amidst the momentum of their lives.

A deep fear and insecurity begins to creep in as you experience that void of apparent non-existence. You want to tell the people back home what is happening to you, but they are busy. It's nobody's fault; they're just busy. The unapparent weaknesses of your life are abruptly magnified before you in your moment of solitude. Fear translates into panic.

In search on something real on which to cling, you look to God in despair. And he says "Yes, it's just you and me now. Now you know why I said 'Go'"? And you desperately realise that the closest reality that you can find within your secluded world is God himself.

We are looking at a fractured Body whose parts are disjointed, fragmented, injured, and do not function as a cohesive whole. I know you must have spent days and nights agonising over this reality. I know, because I have done the same myself. Yes, it truly hurts.

And yet, my friend, let us - you and me - not be quick to drop a sentence on the state of our fellow brethren. Let us not pronounce hopelessness or allow our anguish to be translated into despair. You see, these other friends of ours are just doing the best that they can in the best way they know how. They sincerely believe that this is how the Body of Christ should function. Maybe they do not know any better, for they have been taught by others who also sincerely believed the same to be true.

Let us embrace them. Let us surround them with a spirit of hope. Let us live our lives in a way that shows them what the way of Christ truly is, and inspire them to do the same. After all, we too are only able to do the best that we can in the best way we know how. Maybe this pain was just meant to make us better people after all. Maybe in weeping for the brokenness of the Body, we are also weeping for our own brokenness.

It is all right to cry for the injured Body, but let us journey on with hope as we cry. It is not in vain. For the Body will be made perfect at the appointed time. The Head will make sure of that. Meanwhile, let us resolve to walk faithfully in the way of Christ and do the best we can to inspire others to do the same.

Shall we?

The first category of weeping Christians may also be called "sulking Christians". They weep because the Church has hurt them so deeply. The Church has manipulated them. The Church has abused them. The Church has lied to them. The Church has cheated them. And they cannot get over it. And no matter how many local congregations they move to, there never seems to be one congregation that is able to help them to recover their place in the community anymore. Because they have been hurt too deeply, and they fear being hurt all over again. No, they cannot get over it...and it is unreasonable of anyone to expect them to get over it. Their favourite phrase is "But you don't understand..."

The second category of weeping Christians are those who weep over the imperfect state of the Church. They see a wounded people struggling helplessly to find healing. They cry over an injured Body that has somehow never been able to recover its strength to rise above the drowning currents of the world. They mourn over a people that has lost their sense of calling. Despite their tormenting pain for the Church, they foolishly refuse to define themselves apart from the Church. Some cry in repentance because they see themselves as contributive factors to the problem. They persist in weeping day and night, agonising over the pain of the Church, crying out, "Lord, heal my people". They are too busy weeping for the Church there is no time to weep for themselves.

Weeping Christians...both so similar, yet so different. Have you met any?

We can participate ardently in the perfect plan of God for his world. And yet, if we miss out on his foundational motivation of love in this invitation for our participation, we would have entirely misconstrued the heartbeat of God. We can be perfectly working out our entire lives in a thoroughly Christian-looking way; but if we at any moment dismiss the divine motivations for the perfection of our love in Christ, we have entirely ignored the dream of God for his people.

God is love. And if our God is love, we must be the embodiment of this love to the world. This is essentially what the entire foundation of the Christian faith is. In the traditional Christian disciplines of prayer, work and study, one must never forget that the underlying intentions of these disciplines is to provide space for a rhythmic expression of our love towards God.

We pray because God so desires for us to live in close communion with him in this relationship of love. He longs to hear us express the desires of our hearts as we voluntarily share in his dreams as a response to his compelling love towards us.

We work because we are placed within the confines of space and time - a world that needs to witness the reality of God's love in their midst. The compelling love of Christ must move us to bring this love to every nation, tongue and tribe. The self-emptying love of Christ must cause us to empty ourselves for his sake, that the world will also be inspired to do likewise.

We study because we are in a constant journey of satisfying this insatiable desire to move deeper and deeper in this relationship of love with our Lord. And the way to move deeper is by learning as much as is possible that which he has revealed himself to be. Every enterprise of study must lead to a deeper love and a more resounding doxology of Christ.

Love has got everything to do with it.

But when one reaches beyond the confines of one's home and place of comfort, the enterprise of loving the world in the Spirit of Christ is rendered anything but involuntary. Henceforth, it becomes an act of the will, a firm choice from one's steadfast devotion to the person of Christ.

When one ventures beyond one's own boundaries of comfort to love the world in the Spirit of Christ, one's own gravest weaknesses are magnified and one's own vulnerabilities intensified. To love the world is also to embrace a posture of humility in that one allows the world to reveal the lesser state of one's being.

Loving the world in the Spirit of Christ can often also be a painfully lonely journey. Even when one loves out of the abundance of one's heart, the human person's emotional, intellectual, mental, and physical resources are limited. Together with the offering of one's self in loving the world is also the challenge to find one's unlimited source of love in the Spirit of Christ himself.

There were several anomalies in this system that are worth noting. I being Malaysian Chinese would be categorised as coloured. However, a Japanese would be considered "honorary white". An African American would also be considered "honorary white". Yes, what a load of junk.

If that was not ridiculous enough, this is another piece of the puzzle: it is said that the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa either established or upheld this system, citing that there was divine evidential support for it.

There is something within me that feels somewhat proud to be identified as a lesser person although this is no longer a reality in the New South Africa. I think of a God who embraces the lesser people of society and calls them his own. I think of a Christ who leaves his glory and is incarnated as a lesser man, and who suffers a manner of treatment fit only for lesser people.

So let me be the coloured person, lesser and deserving of no greatness.

I'm not even beginning to assume that I can remotely understand the pain that our coloured and black brethren went through during the apartheid era of South Africa. But I am proud of them. Very much so. They were more human than their oppressors. More human than me, perhaps.

It is nice to find opportunities to vegetate occasionally and free one's self from the routines of intellectual and emotional rigours. Today is such a day.

So the answer for me this morning was to join my friend in the yard in a self-indulging session of shooting tin cans with an air rifle. Sometimes a little boy's gotta do what a little boy's gotta do.

And yet, amidst that moment of letting loose, there is a deep sense of reality of the Kingdom of God in our midst...even while shooting tin cans. When we are conscious of the work of God in building his Kingdom, we are connected to that reality always. Or at least that's how it should be.

Mum, if you're reading this blog...I'm sorry I've been naughty!

It is strange how profoundly enlightening realisations unexpectedly emerge over conversations that take place over a meal. To begin with, all of us entered into the conversation with a deep, deep desire for them to know me, and vice versa, for me to know them. Beyond the casual superficialities, we were truly desiring to establish a friendship in a very real way.

And so the conversation went on. And in the midst of the conversation, they suddenly spoke into my life so powerfully without even realising that they were doing it. We were talking about our lives being the embodiment of Christ, when they said, "Yeah, we are the only bible some people are ever going to read". And these words immediately caused the sacramental and incarnational animal within me to leap. It was a breathtaking moment...literally, God was speaking.

It is strange how simple people understand such profound things, whilst the wise and learned people miss such non-negotiable truths about life and faith.

We are the only bible some people are ever going to read. Think about it.

A vision to impact the world or to bring change in the Church invokes a sense of excitement and purpose. But in the same breath, it could also constitute no less than a symptomatic expression of a preoccupation with self-significance. To carry a vision from God could, in the final analysis, after all just be another expression of human vanity. It is as if being the carrier of a divine vision places one on a higher plane of significance than that of the other insignificant mortals.

For this reason, it is crucial that God works on the life of the vision-carrier before he entrusts the vision into the hands of the carrier. So that it will transcend a mere gratification of the human hunger for significance and a self-defined purpose that is divinely affiliated. The heart of the vision-carrier needs to be pruned of all self-absorbtion, self-preoccupation, self-preservation, and self-defence. Then only can the sacredness of the divine vision remain untainted in the hands of its carrier. Otherwise, the integrity of the vision itself lies in question.

It is commonly said that one cannot carry a vision unless one was willing to die for it. Perhaps the scheme of God's purpose is such that one cannot carry a vision unless one was already dead to it. Then only can one be sure that the vision is the unreserved possession of God and not one's own to have and to hold. Then only will the sacredness of the vision remain untainted.

When is a man ready to carry a vision inspired of God? When he sees nothing else but the cross. When the cross is so meaningful that even the vision cannot match its significance. One should carry a divinely inspired vision only when the cross is the sole vision one can see.

He is.

And perhaps it is true that the task of creating impactful change is beyond us. And yet, for the follower of Christ, there must be an innate inclination within us to persist in dreaming God's dreams for the world. Not because we believe we can change the world, but because we believe in a God who has the power to redeem the world into perfection in his own appointed time. Whilst the task of creating impactful change may be infinitely beyond us, we are called to live out this eschatological vision by persisting in this dream.

To hold on to a dream of eschatological perfection and to uphold that dream in the best way we know how is by no means a reflection of a vain dreamer. Rather, it is an expression of faith in an unseen reality that has been promised by the God of redemption. We keep on dreaming not because we can change the world, but because we believe he can and will change the world as he has promised. Our dreams are not a reflection of our own power and capabilities, but rather, a reflection of the God we have embraced as our very own Saviour.

We must dare to dream and to live this dream. Not for ourselves or because we believe we can make it happen. Dream because we are called to witness in the here-and-now a future reality that has been promised.

Perhaps we have never understood. All he has asked is that we exist as his community, the embodiment of the Trinitarian love of God. We are called to love one another intimately, deeply, and relationally. Not casually, superficially and functionally. Love is an end in itself, because it reflects who God is. We have often expressed the language of hope in response to the despair of the world. We have often expressed the language of faith in response to our dreams for the future. But perhaps we have somehow lost the language of an authentically relational love.

Much of the love embodied in the life of the Church today is a functional love. Such a love does not exist as an end in itself; it is a love that is instrumentalised for another purpose. We express love because it gives rise to a climate of positivism in our communities. We demonstrate care when we need to see our community grow numerically. We love “in order to…”.

But God says to love one another because he is love. And it is in loving one another that all men will know that we are followers of Jesus Christ. It is not a functional love he desires. He does not even will that we love others just for the sake of bringing them into the Kingdom. He simply desires that we love because he is love.

And he desires that we love in deep sacrifice and vulnerability. It is a love that unreservedly offers our possessions for the wellbeing of one another. It is a love that offers one’s security, social status, and life for the welfare of the community. It is a love that propels the mighty man to undress and slip into the attire of a slave and to wash the feet of “the other”. And for as long as we are yet to understand what it means to love one another (whom we can see) in this manner, we lie to ourselves when we claim that we love God and devote ourselves unreservedly to him (whom we cannot see).

Forget evangelism. Forget social work. Forget growing the church. Forget the theological scholastics. Forget the exercising of the gifts. Forget the conferences and concerts. First, love; because God is love. Love the Lord your God with everything within you. And love your neighbour as yourself. Not for any reason other than that God is love. And the Christian journey is about spending our entire lives learning incrementally what this powerful truth must mean for us as followers of Jesus Christ.

Perhaps one day when we have truly understood what it means to love God simply for the sake of enjoying a relational love with him, then he will say "Go and do likewise". And then, we will truly understand what it means to be the Body of Christ in the world...the embodiment of God's love.

It is all about love. Will we ever understand?

I see a Church whose heartfelt worship praise and worship exalts God for who He truly is, and not simply for who she wants Him to be. Her worship of God is an end in itself and not for the purpose of asserting any form of earthly influence. Whilst exalting Christ with songs of faith and hope, she also reflects the pain suffered by her Lord for her redemption. She refuses to engage in any hollow triumphalism.

I see a Church that abolishes her own altar and brings her people out into the world as invitational altars that influence others to live in the way of Christ. They do not go out as the "sinless among the sinners", but rather, as redeemed sinners who have embraced the grace of God and are learning to work out their salvation. In that way, they share in the real struggles of other fellow human persons.

Yes, the Church that I see is so dependent on the Holy Spirit because many will try to stop it and stand against it, and at times even seem to prevail; a Church whose people are unified, praying and full of God's Spirit.

The Church that I see has a message so clear that lives are changed incrementally and potentials are fulfilled by being laid at the altar of God's missional purpose for the world through the power of His Word (which is understood by way of careful exegetical study); a message embodied in the very lives of her people so they can go and live amongst those who possess no television screens.

I see a Church so compassionate that people are drawn from impossible situations into a loving and friendly circle of hope, where answers are sought together (because there is often no short-cut answers to issues in life unless one preferred to be simplistic about things) and acceptance is offered.

I see a people so Kingdom-minded that they will count whatever the cost and pay whatever the price to be God's instruments of revival in the land. And that revival may not necessarily be expressed in a certain preconceived way, for she submits unreservedly to the sovereign authority of God in every expression of revival from one culture to another.

The Church that I see is a Church so committed to raising and empowering a leadership generation who will understand that its task is not so much of reaping the harvest merely as a shallow numerical goal, but rather, reaping the harvest by simply being Christ to the world (even if it may mean a longer journey towards the reaping). It is a Church so enlightened by the understanding that the task of evangelisation is a part of her own discipleship journey rather than an imperialistic attempt at gospelising the world with her body of beliefs without first allowing them to witness the person of Christ in her life.

I see a Church whose head is Jesus, whose help is the Holy Spirit and whose focus is the Great Commission. And yet, she herself is so much a part of this Great Commission in that whilst she disciples the world, she herself is being discipled through that experience itself. It is a Church that understands that the task of the Great Commission is not simply about world evangelisation. She is not a naive Church.

YES, THE CHURCH THAT I SEE COULD WELL BE OUR CHURCH - THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST.

Sherman Kuek,
Member of the Body of Christ

[A personal adaptation from "The Church that I See"]

But for us who stand on this side, we know that the life of a hero is shallow. The reality is that we are feeble. We cannot save the world. All we have are noble intentions and broken dreams to share. But yet, we still share God's dreams for the world and for the lives of those we love. We share God's dreams by loving the world authentically and vulnerably. And yet we do not love in a spirit of triumphalism. We love in a spirit of brokenness and humility. We love by sharing in the brokenness of the world. We love by offering ourselves to and sharing ourselves with the world, in weakness and humility.

Perhaps when the world sees that a fellow sufferer has come to terms with his mortality from finding a sustaining grace and an abiding love in the way of the cross, they will do likewise.

We need more broken friends. Heroes let us down.

And yet, there are some others - perhaps extremely few, but nevertheless existent - who seem to be almost too willing to abandon everything to follow Christ. Initially, it is thrilling to see one such extraordinary zeal for self-abandonment...until you eventually realise that there never was a sense of self in that person in the first place.

The call to self-denial presupposes that there ever was a sense of self. Where there is no sense of self, there is no "self" to deny or to offer to the Lord. It is dangerous when a person says "I'll just follow anything Jesus says; after all I've had nothing left to lose from the start anyway". That is different from saying "I have lost everything I have had to lose for Christ, and therefore have now nothing left to lose". The former person never offered anything. He has no cross to carry.

God welcomes everyone; even the one who has lost his sense of self or the one who never had it in the first place. But he also requires that the person embrace a restorative search for his identity. It is in understanding who we are that we can thereafter know what we are offering to God. It is in finding our identities that we thereafter are confronted by the reality that our self-worth is never worthy enough for God. Then we can offer these selves to God and have our identities redefined by the person of Christ.

Following Christ is not about having no sense of the self. It is about having Christ to work through our sense of self so that it becomes aligned with Christ's own sense of self. Following Christ comes at a cost, and it costs us ourselves. Those who never had a sense of self must allow Christ to help them find themselves, and then later on be confronted with a choice to embrace a denial of this self and abandonment into God's hands. Only then has something truly been offered to God - the self.

To offer a non-existent self to God would be a most selfish thing to do. In saying "Lord, here's nothing for you", one is hoping that God will be willing to accept nothing and give everything in return. Whilst God in his loving grace may undertake even such self-motivated transactions, it is not a choice that honours God. We cannot offer to God something which we do not have.

The first of the three thoughts is that theology is the sole right of the Christian community. It is a language that belongs to the Church, for it is within her that the Spirit of God dwells and guides her in the articulation of her understanding of God's revelation. This of course does and should not lead to the obstinate arrogance of holding that there is nothing anyone else beyond the Christian community has to say about God that is worth a listen. It is certainly the prerogative of any "friend" to acquire a knowledge of this language bequeathed by God to his people. And yet, there abides a special transaction between God and his community of believers in which the community is granted sole right to determine the validity of such theological propositions emanating from without that community.

The second of the three thoughts is that theology should be held by the Christian community as her "language of examination". Whilst we are called to be in consistent interaction with all dimensions of life - both the sciences and the arts - the philosophical and ethical premises undergirding these arenas have to be examined by the Christian community - and thereafter affirmed or rejected - based on her language of revelation. Of course, the imposition of this guiding rule may invite critique, rejection, and even ridicule. But isn't it true that all arenas of study possess their own unique languages owned, employed and defended by the particular communities? And aren't these languages often employed for the purpose of examining the literary expressions of propositions emerging from other communities? Hence, theology as the particular language of the Christian community.

The final of the three thoughts is that theology needs to be recovered as an integral dimension of Christian spirituality. It is not uncommon for the average churchgoer to assume theology to be the sole task of professional theologians. It is not only an unfortunate assumption, but more than that, a reality that speaks of an impending disaster in the spirituality of the Church. St Bonaventure's words ring true: "Theology is the path to holiness". It is in the process of living together and being confronted by the person of God as a community, and then articulating this collective experience of the divine in our midst, that increasingly builds and further inforces our consciousness of the sacred and the divine. The theology articulated by the community forms the very community itself and leads her increasingly into Christlikeness.

Some of you have told me that you miss some of the Latin I vainly inject into my blog entries sometimes. Okay then, here's one for you:

Revera linguam latinam vix cognovi: "I don't really know all that much Latin".

Forgive me, Father. My love is shallow, self-motivated, and carnal. If the innate human inclination is to love what is beautiful and what is better, then I stand in full acknowledgement that my sense of aesthetics and that which constitutes beauty is depraved. Deep within, I know you are the embodiment of beauty par excellence and that you deserve nothing less than the highest measure of loving devotion I can afford. But my sense of beauty is tainted...it is married to a confusing myriad of contradictions and a shameless blend of lust, self-ambition, and temporal gratification. The perverted distortions of my perceptive senses often hide the power of your beauty from me.

Your love compels me to exist in the tension between forcing myself to dutifully reciprocate and to lovingly reciprocate out of the depths of my heart. Each instance of my inability to express the latter love - the true and divinely appointed love - causes me to agonise over my incapacity. Perhaps this explains the occasional secret wish within me that you wouldn't love me so much.

And yet with each confession of guilt and inability, I find you confronting me with grace. It is a grace that lovingly accepts the best of my worst and embraces me in my entire imperfection. It is a grace that offers a love as compelling and intense as a divine Lover could afford.

But it is also this grace that consistently haunts me in grave reminder that I am yet to love you as I should. Why you would choose to love me so, I will never understand. But I know that it is more a reflection of the worthy Lover than the one unworthily loved.

Perhaps in consistently offering this love to my neighbours to the best of my ability and witnesing their inability to reciprocate (in the same way that I am unable to reciprocate your love), I am beginning to experience a glimpse of how my state of existence must hurt you. And perhaps this will provoke within me a genuine desire to love you from the heart. And I truly do want to.

Change my heart, Lord, won't you please?

You have tried to show me and my people many times in many ways that love is the essence of life. And all too often, we have sorely missed the point. We have come to love one another only as a Christian duty and not because we truly loved. We have often learned to appreciate one another only functionally, and we cringe at the idea of loving one another deeply and relationally in a way that may not yield the most effective returns to our preoccupation with efficiency.

Even in love, we have sought to be efficient. Wasting time with one another has become but a waste of time. Each moment spent together has become an enterprise of equipping one another for the purpose of furthering our already humungus corporation. We manipulate others into thinking that we truly care. The reality is that we demonstrate love only as an avenue for the attainment of a desired means; to motivate them to love us back so they are compelled to fulfill our ambitions. The perceptive ones see through our motivations and are repelled at our lack of sincerity.

For once, I desire to learn to love like you. I want to love out of the nature of your being in me; to love simply because I want to love, not because I must love. To waste time with others simply because they are worth my time. To love them simply because they are who they are. To be Christ to them simply because I share your dreams for their lives. Not because I want them to become contributive members of my church community. Not because they have something that I want. I want to love them simply because my God is love.

If love is the essence of life, then teach me how to love...so that I may live.

This had never happened to me in years. Until I discovered (or should I say "recovered") what it means to live in the community of saints who together share the dreams of God for one another. And since then, such God-moments have become so much a part of my daily life. These are moments of epiphany; moments when I am so thoroughly aware of my place within God's scheme of things in his Kingdom.

For this to happen, we need to begin living invitational lives that welcome such depth of transactions between ourselves and other fellow persons. We need to forget about our need to present a false image of ourselves so as to invoke a sense of respectability. We come as we truly are, and we share of ourselves freely with those who would not despise even the lesser things in our lives.

Looking back at the Lord's Supper in our communities, I am reminded that it is the broken Christ who calls us to gather at the table and to partake of his brokenness and in one another's brokenness. We come as lesser people, so that the fullness of Christ can be realised in and through us. When broken people come together to partake in one another's brokenness, there is power. Because the reality of the broken Christ becomes embodied in the community, and the world witnesses an invitation to partake of his grace along with his people.

I believe in the communion of saints.

In my interactions with Christians and non-Christians alike, I keep finding myself having to grapple with this question: Do I or do I not believe in truth propositions? It is a preposterous question by all proportions, I know. How can I, as a believer and follower of Jesus Christ , not believe in truth propositions?

Still, I insist that this question in itself is vitally necessary. But it is not my belief in truth propositions that is in question here, but rather, the principles that guide my expression of these truth propositions. I repeat...it is not my belief in truth propositions that is in question here, but rather, the principles that guide my expression of these truth propositions. Truth propositions in themselves are desirable; but it is frequently the handler of these propositions that render the propositions themselves unnecessarily repelling. After all, if Marshall McLuhan is right that "the medium is the message", then one should ensure that the manner of presenting truth propositions is befitting of the very propositions we seek to present.

And in my estimation, it is crucial that the following considerations be factored into one's attempts at responsibly handling truth propositions:

1. In my fixation on asserting truth claims about God, we may misrepresent him, who truly desires to be known as a person more than as a concept. Perhaps the issue is more about the sequence of introduction more than it is about whether I believe in truth propositions. Maybe truth propositions are meant to be discovered as a part of one's journey of following Christ rather than asserted as a way to make people decide to follow Christ. The latter approach often demeans the hearer in a very profound way. It is unfortunate that many non-Christians reject the message because of the approach, rather than because of the essense of the message itself.

In introducing Christ to others, I would rather introduce Christ as the God-man who penetrated the history of mankind and showed the world how to live in the way of Christ. It is the virtues of the person of Christ, introduced and expressed through my life, that would even present a compelling attractive power to others. And for those who hear and respond to the call to follow the way of Christ, the subsequent desire to understand the claims of this Christ about himself and about us naturally follows.

2. My claims about him are neither complete nor perfect. All too many times, the gospel has been presented by well-meaning Christians as if we know better than anyone else because the truth has been revealed to us (whereas the rest of the world is all but godly). This is unfortunate, because we have a lot to learn from the religious Buddhist monk and the religious Muslim dakwah about the way of Christ. Yes, we do. Please understand this: God, in his sovereign grace, has lovingly scattered glimpses of truth beyond our propositional categories that may lead others to Christ.

Thus, it would be good for us to season our approach towards other religious people will a lot of grace. After all, wasn't it through grace alone that the person and truth of Christ has been revealed to us? Wasn't it by grace alone that our hearts were inclined to hear the laws of God and to live in the way of Christ? Grace and love...these are what win the hearts of people to the Lord. Similarly, truth propositions are meant to be embodied in grace and love, not in assertive statements that express less respect for other people than they deserve.

I guess this would be my rule of thumb in terms of my facilitation of truth propositions: When it comes to Christians, I will present truth propositions...and I will keep on presenting them whilst also emphasising the more relational way of Christ. When it comes to non-Christians, I will live it...and then say it later when asked.

Various solutions have been explored in the past. Firstly, parachurch agencies were established to revive the missional understanding of the faith. But before long, these agencies themselves institutionalised and became another "kingdom" within the larger Ecclesiastical Kingdom. And unfortunately, these institutionalised agencies are frequently engaged with the institutionalised churches in a politics of suspicion. Furthermore, they are so far removed from the institutionalised churches that some of their members hardly have an ecclesiastical life at all. Secondly, some fragments of the community broke away from the institutionalised churches to develop missional communities of their own. This approach failed to acknowledge that the social dynamics of human beings typically necessitates institutionalisation for the creation of a certain sense of order in the regulation of their relationships. Before long, they themselves began to institutionalise as independent non-denominational churches. Very often (although not always), such independent institutions are engaged in even more vehement internal institutional struggles than the long-standing denominational churches. Thirdly, institutionalised churches themselves began to establish cellgroups with the hope that this would be a mechanism to revive the organic facet of the Church. But because this mechanism was fully within the authority of the institution itself, it soon constituted another piece of machinery for the production of barcode Christians.

Thereafter, I advanced the idea that we must be willing to look beyond our Protestant legacy in order to discern an appropriate mechanism to revive the organic dimension of churchlife. And looking at the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox streams of the Great Tradition, we almost immediately see the absence of something fundamental in Protestant history: monastic orders. And these orders were the very things that provided for the organic dimension of churchlife. It is not that these orders existed devoid of structure, but rather, that these orders had the missional purpose of God as their sole reason for existence. They embraced a lifestyle and the accompanying spiritual disciplines that gave rise to the fulfillment of this missional purpose.

Hence, the Protestant Church can recover our organic life as a Christian community through the establishment of monastic-type communities within our institutions. We must recover anew what it means for us to function in an invitational way as organic monastic communities, and for our people to embrace the vows of missional chastity, missional poverty, and missional obedience. To honour these vows in their richness and depth, the people in our communities need to explore two dimension of the Christian faith:

To know more of God:
This is about learning the relational dimension of the faith. It entails an incremental understanding of what it means to live in the Way of Christ.

- The Way of Simplicity
- The Way of Sacrifice
- The Way of Suffering
- The Way of Solidarity (Part I and Part II)
- The Way of Solitude

- The Way of Self-Denial
- The Way of Servitude
- The Way of Sacrament
- The Way of Subservience
- The Way of Subversion
- The Way of Study

To know more about God:
This is about learning the propositional dimension of the faith. It entails an incremental understanding of what what the community of believers has been saying about the faith since its inception centuries upon centuries ago.

- About the Language of the Church (Theological Prolegomena)
- About the Father (Theology Proper)
- About the Son (Christology)
- About the Holy Spirit (Pneumatology)
- About the Church (Ecclesiology)
- About Salvation (Soteriology)
- About Mankind (Christian Anthropology)
- About the Last Things (Eschatology)

The Way of Christ, which represents the more relational dimension of the Christian faith, complements the missing facet of Western Theology. Western Theology is undoubtedly useful and has brought the Christian community a long way. However, it also lacks the invitational expression of Christ's life. In this regard, Asian spirituality presents a rich legacy and prospect of complementing this weakness in Western Theology. It is with this understanding in mind that I have explored what it means to live in the Way of Christ.

The Christian journey of discipleship must find its rootedness in both dimensions of the faith - relationally and propositionally. The task of Christian discipleship is to illuminate for the followers of Christ what it means to live out the three vows of missional chastity, missional poverty, and missional obedience through a depth of praxis in both these relational and propositional facets of the Christian faith.