This is the day. The 50th Anniversary of Malaysia marks the official launching of R.O.H, an effort recently inaugurated for the purpose of writing local theologies for the Malaysian context.

A MANIFESTO FOR A REVOLUTION OF HOPE (R.O.H)

Roh is a Malay word which means “spirit” and yet phonetically sounds like ruach, the Hebrew word for God’s Creative Spirit hovering over the world, and through the Incarnation is now in us, amongst us and through the Resurrection is all in all.

1. BACKGROUND
We live in a world that is being dominated by neo-liberal globalisation which has at the same time imperialised the rest of the world, including erasing national boundaries and local traditional cultures. Now, a timely moment has arisen (kairos) when the Kin-dom movement summons the emergence of a countercultural movement of believers in religion. This calls for Christian believers, especially intellectuals (in the sense of critical thinkers with professional and academic qualifications) to band together and think more concertedly within our Malaysian context so that we may imagine more globally while we act more locally. This comes in the light of the Asian understanding of knowledge and the local cultural wisdom of our people in Asia-Malaysia, not to mention the untold sufferings inflicted on the marginal communities in our midst (the many poor of the various religions and cultures).

To begin the ripple effect of a countercultural movement, a sizable group of Christian activists-strategists needs to come together on a platform that enables theological reflection (emergent contextual theologies). This is to encourage a critical interface between faith (religion) and society, fostering a rich interaction between theology and the social sciences with the clear goal of analysing pertinent issues affecting our nation/society. And thereafter, these thinkers need to articulate a theological response so that critical thinking Christians are guided (as a church emerging) in their lives. Such a theological response would have a societal impact on public policies, mindsets, worldviews and values of fellow Malaysians in their workplaces and neighbourhood.

Such critical analyses and theological responses must be “translatable” into effective and concrete efforts that command the attention of diverse stakeholders in our nation. “Stakeholders” here refers to the government with its multiple ministries and other agencies in civil society; so that together we move our nation forward in a manner that is Kin-dom-centred. This is aimed towards the greater good of all in Malaysia, especially the marginal communities.[1]

Such interdisciplinary, intercultural and inter-religious efforts can be seen as our cooperation with God in transforming our nation into the “playground” where Malaysia becomes a more harmonious society wherein all in Malaysia begin to live more and more as equal disciples and equal persons before God.

Ultimately, R.O.H’s hallmark is its sensitivity to the voice of the Spirit and its capacity to be the dynamism, the sap, the force within that sustains an emergent Malaysia. Out of R.O.H, there emerges too a host of theologies borne of a Gospel Faith that speaks together with the social sciences so that the Church emerging is seen and heard to be speaking into the joys and sorrows of fellow Malaysians and the wider society.

2. RESPONSE
a. Level-One Response (The Core Team)
The team devoted to this effort we call R.O.H comprises six people. Our primary goal in the configuration of this team is to reflect an adequate representation of both genders, both the Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions, and both the social-scientific and theological disciplines in interaction with each other. We have come to participate in this effort propelled by various collective motivations and reasons:

• Integrating local spiritualities into our understanding;
• Learning from people working with real socio-political issues to feed into theology;
• Finding like-minded people to write together and form theologies together (writing theology can be a lonely journey);
• Tying in faith and life together;
• Translating words into action on the ground, ensuring people at the grassroots level are defended;
• Western-driven theology that has caused us to think about the need for an Asian-driven theology, a local contextual theology;
• Disillusionment with Western-centric theology;
• Growth into self-identity;
• Creating a tradition for the future generations.

The R.O.H Team consists of the following personnel:

Tricia Yeoh Su-Wern
BBusComm Econometrics and Marketing (Monash, Malaysia);
MSc in Research Methods in Psychology (Warwick, UK).

Tricia is currently Senior Research Analyst at the Centre for Public Policy Studies, at which she engages in national socio-economic issues through research, analysis and fostering policy dialogue. This covers a wide range of issues, dealing for example, with inter-faith dialogue and economic policies. Her work involves interacting closely with the country's socio-political environment. She hopes to work constructively toward a matured and united Malaysia, and envisions faith and vocation as one, as we seek common goals and platforms in the long-term nation-building process.

Veronica Anne Retnam
BSc in Resource Economics (UPM, Malaysia);
MEd in Educational Psychology (Cardiff, Wales).

Veronica started off with working with out-of-school youth and was then responsible for the formation of Catholic undergraduates in Malaysia. Then for nearly 18 years she was an economics lecturer at UiTM (previously Institut Technologi MARA). Her concerns are about reaching out effectively to poor communities and working with them in empowering partnerships. Her interest is also developmental psychology with a focus on research for policy change. She is currently starting off with training and development for low income communities through her own business enterprise.

Rachel Samuel
BSocSc in Development Studies (USM, Malaysia);
MSocSc in Development Studies (USM, Malaysia);
PhD candidate in Management (USM, Malaysia).

Rachel worked with the Consumers Association of Penang for three years on issues pertaining to the rural sector and health and safety issues. She took up the Bukit Merah people's case against the radioactive company and worked closely with them throughout the period of their legal struggle. She has also worked among drug dependents (women and HIV carriers) and been involved with the AIDS Hotline, the Community Clinic and the One Stop Crisis Centre. Rachel co-authored Women and Drugs, Domestic Violence in Penang, and Shame, Secrecy and Silence: A Study on Rape. She is currently involved with Women In Action in Melaka, Education and Research Association in Kuala Lumpur, the Melaka-Johor Office of Human Development, and the Counselling Ministry of the Melaka-Johor Diocese of the Roman Catholic Church.

Jojo M. Fung, SJ
MA in Theology (LST, Manila);
MA in Social Anthropology (London, UK);
STL (Berkeley);
Doctorate in Contextual Theology (CTU, Chicago).

The Reverend Father Jojo Fung is an ordained priest in the Society of Jesus, an order of the Roman Catholic Church. He is the Director of the Campus Ministry, the Orang Asli Ministry, and the Ministry of Eumenism and Interreligious Dialogue in the Diocese of Melaka-Johore. He is also the Coordinator of I.N.T.R.Asia and Co-editor of the Arrupe Papers. Father Jojo is a prolific writer on issues pertaining to the gospel as it relates to local contextual issues.

Sivin Kit
BTh (STM, Malaysia);
MTheo candidate (SEAGST).

The Reverend Sivin Kit is a minister of the Lutheran Church in Malaysia and Singapore (LCMS) and pastor of Bangsar Lutheran Church. Sivin is primarily concerned about ecclesiastical interactions with local social-political realities and desires to see the emergence of more contextual responses towards these realities. He brings with him a wealth of pastoral and missional perspectives in contribution to this conversation so as to ensure that our constructions are based on realistic observations.

Sherman Y.L. Kuek, OSL
BSc Management (Bradford, UK);
MDiv (Trinity, Singapore);
DTh candidate in Contextual Theology (Trinity, Singapore).

Sherman is an Adjunct Lecturer in Systematic and Contextual Theology at Seminari Theoloji Malaysia. His primary areas of interest are contextual theological methodologies and the recovery of the Great Tradition in the theological thought of the Christian community. It is therefore natural that Sherman also has a concern for ecumenics. He is presently completing his doctoral thesis on a theological critique of modernity in Asia.

The direction of the R.O.H. Team is guided by several individual Patrons who have kindly agreed to endorse our effort and be our guiding wisdom:

Revd Dr Hwa Yung
Bishop, Methodist Church of Malaysia

Among his various other involvements besides being Bishop of the Methodist Church in Malaysia, Bishop Hwa Yung is the Honorary Secretary of the Christian Federation of Malaysia (CFM) and the Chairman of the STM Council. On the international scene Bishop Hwa Yung is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies (OCMS), Oxford; the Vice-Chairman of the Asian Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization (ALCWE); a member of the Executive Committee of the World Methodist Council and an Executive Committee Member of the International Association of Mission Studies (IAMS).

Rt Revd Dr Paul Tan Chee Ing, SJ
Roman Catholic Bishop of Melaka-Johor
The Catholic Archdiocese of Kuala Lumpur

Besides having been the Bishop of the Melaka-Johor Diocese since May 2003, Bishop Paul is the Chairman of the Christian Federation of Malaysia (CFM) and the Vice-Chairman of the Malaysian Consultative Council of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Sikhism & Taoism (MCCBCHST).

Revd Dr Simon Chan
Ernest Lau Professor of Systematic Theology,
Trinity Theological College Singapore

Dr Simon Chan is a renowned Asian theologian. He is the author of Liturgical Theology; Spiritual Theology: A Systematic Study of the Christian Life; Man and Sin; and Pentecostal Theology and the Christian Spiritual Tradition. He is also an ordained minister of the Assemblies of God in Singapore.

b. Level-Two Response (Friends)
The effort also seeks to be a platform for the coming together of other like-minded Christians in Malaysia to share in the dream together. It will simultaneously create a voice for other scattered Christians who in their individual capacities have begun to, or desire to, make a change in Malaysian society. This is akin to causing minute but significant ripples.

Therefore, the next layer of involvement in this R.O.H effort consists of others who may be equally interested in this initiative and committed to its cause. We seek to draw upon their experiences and resources, and will endeavour to receive their contributions seriously, through personal conversations, writings, and organised gatherings. Where appropriate, their concerns will find their way into our constructive efforts.

3. OUR COMMITMENTS
a. Our Commitment to the Neighbourology Principle
The neighbourology principle expresses the deepest motivation for our contextual engagements with the local contexts. It is important to begin with how we see people in our nation firstly as neighbours, and what this involves. Authentic love for the neighbour involves a “kin-dom” mentality (based on an idea of “kinship”, which is very consistent with the Asian paradigm of societal life).

Two crucial features of the neighbourology principle are:

• that we must ensure our ultimate goal is for the long term. Critiques although necessary will be driven purely for the sake of achieving desirable results for the nation in the long run. Loving the country necessitates honest criticism at times. And we critique the country because we believe she is worth critiquing.

  
  

• the objective of building bridges. This involves healing wounds between different races, religions and any other factors that have since divided the Malaysian society.
  

b. Our Linguistic Commitment to the Target Audience
While we intend for our audience to be largely urban and educated in nature, this necessitates an inclusivity of experiences from the bottom up, including the marginalised and grassroot communities. Formal English will be used but care will be given to ensure it is not necessarily academic or technical to ensure laymen comprehension.

Because the Malaysian church has a long way to be exposed to such local contextual theologies, we will be targeting the church primarily and only at a later stage speak to society at large. In other words, our primary concern relates to what it means to be “the church in the world”.

In regard to our use of language for the communication of our theological constructions, we will make it a point to employ the language of social scientists and other relevant disciplines in the midst of our theological articulations. This is to ensure that our articulations are not found dislocated from a proactive interaction with the language of other disciplines. Yet, our articulations should also reflect the language of the intended audience as afore described. Whilst social-scientific and theological jargon may be an inevitable, the employment of such jargon has to be unpacked and written in a manner understood by our readers.

c. Our Commitment to Holistic Reflections
We are not in favour of our articulations constituting knee-jerk reactions towards unexpected occurrences in the life of the nation. Much of the Christian community’s statements and positions on socio-political issues in Malaysia is reactionary in nature. These statements and positions are issued only upon an urgent need to do so, and are seldom undertaken with sufficient theological reflection given to the purpose. It is hoped that we will provide holistic reflections upon local Malaysian issues, as opposed to the mere knee-jerk reactions in response to perceived external threats.

d. Our Commitment to Basic Governing Principles
There are generally five key principles that the group considers essential in governing our local theological constructions:

• Socio-Political Context. This will include crucial issues which will be identified in our subsequent meetings to develop a proper contextual framework for our theological reflections. It is important that this framework must include a concern for marginal communities.

  
  

• Social-Scientific Disciplines. Our theologies will be dislocated from reality if we do not seriously engage the findings and analyses of the social-scientific disciplines in our society. The role of the social-scientific thinkers in our team is therefore crucial.

  
  

• Local Cultural Wisdom. The cultural paradigmatic realities of the society in which our theology is entrenched must be accounted for in our theological constructions. This is also known as the principle of inculturation, wherein local epistemologies are taken seriously.

  
  

• Christian Tradition. The approach we are taking herein is an ecumenical one. Our joint concern is for the wellbeing of our neighbours, our nation, and not the disagreement on our respective distinctives. In fact, in deep appreciation of how our distinctive traditions may contribute positively to this conversation, we take the guiding voice of the Great Tradition as a non-negotiable in our constructions.

  
  

• The Gospel. This principle is not necessarily separate from the fourth, but accentuates a point of importance. Our theology must come to terms with the heart of the gospel, which essentially speaks of the ultimate and full establishment of God’s reign in the world.
  

e. Our Commitment to Various Levels of Socio-political Involvement
There are three possible levels of socio-political involvement by the Christian community: i) writing, ii) helping immediate needs (e.g., helping the poor and alleviating immediate suffering), and iii) effecting structural change. Historically, Christians in the Protestant Malaysian Church have been active within the first layer but little else has been done in either of the other two. It is noted that the situation is not very far different for the Roman Catholic Church in Malaysia.

The objectives and strategies of R.O.H. will be in attempting to achieve all layers of socio-political involvement. This however is an incremental and dynamic cultivation and change, as the process is subject to growth and alterations in time.

f. Our Commitment to the Dissemination of Our Ideas
We are committed to the dissemination of our social scientific analyses together with the accompanying theological constructions in various forms of publications. This may involve web publications, books and monographs, journal articles, and sporadic articles in newsletter.

In time to come, there is also a great possibility that we may organise events involving relatively small clusters of young thinkers who share in our concerns and who would be keen to participate in conversations pertaining to these concerns.

The R.O.H. Team
31 August 2007
Malaysia’s 50th Anniversary

Endnotes
[1] These marginal communities include the poor, the Orang Asli, women, persons with disabilities, plantation and factory workers, migrants and refugees, and children at risk, among others.

Log onto the R.O.H Malaysia Blog. Click here.

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This is you, one birthday ago.

What has changed in the past year? Some things. A couple more strands of white hair, maybe. Two growing kids who're bigger now than they've ever been. A vocation that keeps you busier than you ever can be.

But some things never change. You'll always been the person who sat by my side as I stared death in the face. You'll always be the one who gave me strength to choose life when I could have chosen otherwise.

Some things will keep changing, but some things never will. My life story can never be told without yours... this can never change.

Happy birthday, jie.

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Your deepest problem is no different from humankind’s most fundamental problem. You need to be loved, accepted, wanted, and to know that the world is different because you exist.

This problem has manifested itself in thousands of different ways in human history. Human persons, in longing to know that their presence makes a difference, strive to validate their existence in various ways.

Whilst you may think that your particular manifestation of the human problem is perhaps more excruciating than that of others, it might be more beneficial to see yourself as an incarnation of humanity’s most fundamental need.

Then you can also move on to be moulded into an incarnation of the solution to that need.

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You have been deeply damaged through the years by the mystery of suffering.

Sometimes the damage becomes so confrontational that you agonise over the overwhelming gulf between who you really think you are and who you really want to be.

The truth is, who you think you are is vastly different from who you really are. But to know who you really are, you must look beyond yourself towards the defining source, who is also the source of all light. If you keep looking at yourself, you lose your bearings and see only grim darkness.

You are not in darkness. If you were truly in darkness, you would not know light. The very desire within you to walk in the light, to live in the light, to love in the light, points to your having been touched by light in your life. You have tasted light, and that is why you desire light.

Don’t you see, everything you need you already have? You have it more than most others. You are loved. Whilst you may spend your days trying to convince yourself of this reality, others are busy loving you in no superficial measure. Long not for a gift you already have.

Be inspired by love, that you may inspire love. Because you are the beloved.

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...mankind is weak and frail when pain confronts them. It doesn't matter whether our little finger is cut, or we have to endure the agony of an aggressive cancer, we will always dislike pain.

Pain therefore reminds us that our lives are frail and much of it is beyond our control.

From an essay written by a student of mine

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Eternal Father,

Remind my heart. Remind my heart that in my moments of grief I may not forget the gifts which you have given me.

May I not, in sadness and sorrow, see only darkness. Grant me the grace to see light and hope coming to me in the form of love.

Most deeply, remind my heart that you are love; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, united in the bond of eternal love.

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“...every time there are losses there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper.”

A quote from Henri Nouwen

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What you see above is a silhoutte... a reflection of things to come.

It's something Malaysia has needed, and which some Malaysians have been waiting for. For years.

The mystery will be revealed in its fullness this coming National Day (31 August).

Watch out.

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I spoke at a Methodist Church yesterday, and this was how I was introduced by the local pastor to the congregation:

"Our preacher today is a very young man. He has kindly consented to speak at our service this morning. He has been teaching us a course on Authentic Spirituality in the past several weeks. We find his teaching... err... weird.

Let's welcome Mr Sherman Kuek!"

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A man and his dog were walking along a road. The man was enjoying the scenery,
when it suddenly occurred to him that he was dead. He remembered dying, and
that the dog walking beside him had been dead for years. He wondered where the
road was leading them.

After a while, they came to a high, white stone wall along one side of the road. It looked like fine marble. At the top of a long hill, it was broken by a tall arch that glowed in the sunlight. When he was standing before it he saw a magnificent gate in the arch that looked like mother-of-pearl, and the street that led to the gate looked like pure gold. He and the dog walked toward the gate, and as he got closer, he saw a man at a desk to one side.

When he was close enough, he called out, "Excuse me, where are we?"
"This is Heaven, sir," the man answered. "Wow! Would you happen to have some water?" the man asked. "Of course, sir. Come right in, and I'll have some ice water brought right up." The man gestured, and the gate began to open.

"Can my friend," the traveller asked while gesturing toward his dog, "come in too?" "I'm sorry sir, but we don't accept pets." The man thought for a moment and then turned back toward the road and continued the way he had been going with his dog.

After another long walk, and at the top of another long hill, he came to a dirt road leading through a farm gate that looked as if it had never been closed. There was no fence. As he approached the gate, he saw a man inside, leaning against a tree and reading a book.

"Excuse me!" he called to the man. "Do you have any water?" "Yeah, sure, there's a pump over there, come on in." "How about my friend here?" the traveller gestured to the dog. “There should be a bowl by the pump." They went through the gate, and sure enough, there was an old-fashioned hand pump with a bowl beside it.

The traveller filled the water bowl and took a long drink himself, and then he gave some to the dog. When they were full, he and the dog walked back toward the man who was standing by the tree. "What do you call this place?" the traveller asked. "This is Heaven," he answered. "Well, that's confusing," the traveller said. “The man down the road said that was Heaven, too."

"Oh, you mean the place with the gold street and pearly gates? Nope. That’s Hell disguised as Heaven." "Doesn't it make you mad for them to use your name like that?" "No, we're just happy that they screen out the folks who would leave their best friends behind.

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She was affectionately known by her church congregation as Pastor Sun. She was the Deputy Senior Pastor and was in charge of the worship ministry in the church, whilst her husband (Kong Hee) is still the Senior Pastor today.

After sometime, she went into the secular entertainment industry to be a positive influence in the world beyond the church.

This is her now, being that "positive influence" she wanted to be:

In trying very hard to not judge, the question keeps emerging still: who has evangelised who?

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I've always wondered how it'd feel like when I arrived at the tail end of my doctoral writing.

After five years, I'm now working on my final 5,000 words to make up 100,000. Final chapter.

So this is how it feels like. Hmm...

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So here we are, standing at the crossroads, having to decide how we desire to move on as a part of the very fractured Body of Christ.

Surely, what I have shared in response to these questions threatens the status quo of church life. It brings much inconvenience, for it obligates us to deconstruct much of things we have taken for granted for decade upon decade.

Amidst the imperfection of my articulations, whether these words are merely received as the troublesome voice of dissent emanating from a disgruntled Christian or as a prophetic voice in the wilderness depends largely on the spirit of the hearer.

From where I stand, it is my conviction that church life, along with our idea of spirituality, need to be radically deconstructed and reconstructed; not so much that we will be relevant to the times, but that we will be relevant to the coming of the Kingdom.

Too much of our idea of spirituality and the Christian life has been focused on living our lives in the present; this leads us to settle with contentment for sub-standard expressions of who we are as Christians. Perhaps it is time to live a future-oriented (eschatological) life.

But yes, it is just too troublesome. Looking too much like Christ may just get you expelled from the church… it has happened before.

But throughout the ages, we see that the Spirit of God keeps raising people who're foolish enough to think that living the eschatological life is a possibility in the present moment. Every time the church is too fixated on her temporal existence, the Spirit raises from within her a number of people who refuse to resign themselves to this senseless preoccupation with temporality.

Posted by SK at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

What do you think would be the greatest challenge to integrate spiritual formation into the life of the church?

The greatest challenge would probably be to convince many pastors and church leaders that what they are doing in/for the church now is not spiritual formation. It is just doing, not so much a cultivation of being.

The only people who can effectively bring about some kind of deep change in the way church life takes place now are the pastors and leaders, but they are also the people who are the most difficult to convince in this respect. Many have been so used to a specific idea of what constitutes "formation", they find it hard to see a different perspective.

In other words, most pastors and church leaders actually think they are already doing it. And the idea of re-examining their present paradigm of formation makes them rather resistant.

Whilst acknowledging that they have done the best they could under the paradigm in which they have been raised in the church/ministry, we need to find ways of modeling something different for them that they might realise that many of us might have missed the point of what it means to be the church.

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If there are no boundaries and limitations, what would you most like to see happen or emerge or take place in the area of spiritual formation?

Firstly, I would most like to see the abolishment of spiritual formation as a distinct aspect of theological training at the seminary.

I would like to see an integration of the formation process through which a minister-in-formation undergoes. I don’t think the way in which spiritual formation is emphasised in the seminary today does justice to the concept of spiritual formation itself.

I think it is very unfortunate that in the scheme of things at the moment, there are the biblical scholars, the theologians, the historians, and the spirituality gurus. As a result, we even have spiritual formation gurus who are unable to impart their ideas of spiritual formation with strong theological undergirdings, because they themselves studied spiritual formation apart and distinct from theology.

If formation is to be seen as holistic, then its embodiment has to be holistic. All of our lives - our studies, our prayer, our worship, our communion, our relationships, our vocations - are various dimensions of a holistic spiritual formation.

Surely, every seminary would laud my lament and claim to have the kind of holistic emphasis I am speaking of here. But yet, at the end of each semester, it is the academic result slip that speaks the loudest of the seminary’s preoccupation and priority.

Secondly, I would like to see a deliberate effort to shift our paradigm of spiritual formation at the level of the local church.

We need to see, in a very real and concrete way, the role of the church as the depository of the mysteries of God. These mysteries of God propel every individual within the church in his/her journey of growing “into Christ”, and the individual therefore cannot exist apart from the church and must keep existing as a part of this Body into which he/she has been baptised.

In other words, the church must start taking up its role as the centre of spiritual formation for every believer by forming the personhood of every Christian within it, not just organising activities and inviting people to participate.

Together with that, each individual must also be taught to cultivate an awareness that he/she is also a part of the mysteries of God within the church. Each individual in the community is a very crucial part of the spiritual formation of other individuals in the church, for he/she is an agent of grace within the scheme of the Kingdom.

This is why believers have to share together in a common life, for in so doing, they are embracing one another as divine mysteries of God and mutual agents of grace for one another’s journey “into Christ”.

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What would you consider to be the greatest gap in terms of spiritual formation for your church?

For your pastors? For church leaders? For youths?

This will be mostly a reiteration of something I have shared earlier.

I consider the greatest gap in terms of spiritual formation for my church to be our understanding of what it means to be the church and what it means to be followers of Jesus in the world.

Most, if not all, of the Christians in my local church see the church as a place to express their spirituality and a place to express their devotion towards God. In other words, every good Christian goes to church, attends the services, the cell groups, the bible studies, and the family camps. The even better Christians attend prayer meetings and the extra conferences and seminars organised by the church.

Beyond that, there is little or no understanding of how the church has been given the mysteries of God that she may cause each individual to further grow “into Christ”.

There is little or no understanding of what it means to be the people of God beyond all our programmes and activities; we attend these things because we genuinely want to be “good Christians”, not because we see how they help us grow “into Christ” (nor do these things necessarily help us attain that goal, in the first place!) But we just keep cooperating anyway, because “good Christians” do not question.

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As a pastor, teacher, counselor, etc, what is your vision for the Malaysian church?

My vision for the Malaysian church is to be mature enough to see beyond the matrix in which she is stuck at the moment. She is paralysed by a colonial past and cannot seem to get over the colonial form of Christianity she has inherited.

I feel that the Malaysian church should be mature enough in her faith journey to start questioning many presuppositions previously taken to be a priori. Much of what the Malaysian church believes and practises is utterly disconnected from the local cultural wisdom of the Malaysian society. She is very much an alien in her own nation.

Even today, at the 50th celebration of our nationhood, the Malaysian church is still being imperialised by the Western culture, both high and low cultures. It may not be so much the fault of the West as it is our own, for we are often drowned in our own insecurity.

For example, two national bodies responsible for bringing together a significant segment of the Malaysian churches recently implemented a programme transplanted from a Western evangelistic association. Many of these methods transplanted from the West, although not wrong in themselves, are often utterly insensitive to local worldviews and cultures.

And yet, such national ecclesiastical bodies are not yet mature enough to examine such programmes critically and theologically. For any national ecclesiastical body to seemingly assume that an evangelistic effort can be transplanted universally (what more from the West to Asia) without a sense of cultural sensitivity speaks of an insensitivity of the church towards her own nation. More fundamentally, it speaks of a lack of theological understanding on the part of the ecclesiastical leaders of what it means to be the church of Jesus Christ in Malaysia.

Ecclesiastically, I am merely an active member of the local church holding no position on the organisational hierarchy. But my vision for the Malaysian church is simply that she matures and develops a strong ecclesiology (a strong understanding of what it means that she is the church in Malaysia).

Posted by SK at 12:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

What are the three greatest needs of your church? How relevant is spiritual formation in addressing these needs?

In my observation, the three greatest needs of my church are as follows:

i) cultivating followers of Jesus who understand the message of the Kingdom and who are adamantly desiring to embody that message in their lives;

ii) cultivating a theological understanding of the church as a “Kingdomic community” and actively attempting to express this idea of community in concrete ways; and

iii) cultivating leaders who see themselves as more than administrators, organisers and decision-makers; who see themselves as spiritual guides of the community.

I do not think there is any form of concrete theological reflection or a deliberate consciousness for an undertaking of any sort of spiritual formation at this point of its life journey.

Like most other Protestant churches I observe, my church is most of the time majoring on how to do church rather than seeking to understand how to be church. No doubt, it is one of the best of the Protestant churches I have ever been a part of (I mean this sincerely); but there is still much for us to learn in terms of understanding that our task is more of cultivating Christians who will be rather than Christians who will merely do. But for that to happen, we need a strong theology of the church.

In other words, I am saying that the spiritual formation of my local church is not effective in addressing the said needs. In fact, the notion of spiritual formation might not even be a part of the consciousness of the local church. It often seems like we do what we do because “these are things every good church must do”.

If we had a proper theological understanding of the nature of the church, a new consciousness would emerge, shifting our preoccupation from what we need to do to who we need to be; or in fact, who we already are.

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If you had a free hand to run a church with no boundaries, how would spiritual formation look like at its best integrated form?

If I had a free hand to run a church with no boundaries, spiritual formation would take place in small communities of believers. However, I must quality this with my strong reservation regarding the contemporary cell group movement which tends to mechanise church life and regulate communal involvement for the express purpose of numerical growth in the church - this goes entirely against my most basic idea for the being of the church itself.

I like the name given by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Kuala Lumpur to these small communities – basic ecclesial communities (BEC), although I do not know enough about this structure to discern if it is entirely coherent with my idea of spiritual formation.

In my understanding, each small community should have a spiritual formator within it to regulate the common life of the said community. This spiritual formator has to be someone wise in understanding life and faith, not necessarily someone who has had formal credentials or theological degrees, but someone who possesses deep spiritual wisdom. He/She becomes the guide for every life within the said small community.

The believers within each community, with the guidance of this spiritual formator, share in a common life. They spend time with one another daily, redefine the boundaries of their families and their private space, share a common commitment to Kingdom life, and together seek to deepen their understanding and praxis of the perichoretic life of the Triune God with one another.

Within these communities, each individual embraces the values of simplicity, obedience and purity. As communities of faith, they together share in the values of relationality, mutuality, grace, offering, and missionality. All these values are tied in with the principle of sacramentality and are to be defined theologically. Whilst these values may sound abstract, the outworking of these values must be concretely observable in the common life of each community.

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What is your favourite quote that best describes your idea of spiritual formation? (continued)

b. The Martial Arts Apprentice
One day, a young man who desired to learn a supreme form of martial arts heard there was a martial arts master in a high mountain. He made his way there to beg to be an apprentice, that he too might one day become a martial arts maestro.

As he approached the martial arts master, he was already feeling rather downhearted because the master did not seem very keen in teaching him the art. But it did seem that the master was keen on trying him out first, so the master said, “All right, you begin by mopping the floor using two pieces of cloth. You squat down and use both your hands to mop the floor. Make sure you’re done by the end of the day.” So the young man thinks to himself, “I didn’t come here for this. But I think he’s testing me, so I’ll just do it, and then tomorrow he’ll accept me as his apprentice.” So he completes his task for the day.

To his horror, early the next morning, the master tells him, “Do again what you did yesterday”! He begins to get furious, but tells him he has to persevere if he wants to gain the trust of the master. But as time goes by, this task of mopping the floor drags on for two weeks, then three weeks, then up to months! And worse still, at a later stage, while the disciple was mopping the floor, the master would just walk by and give him a kick in his stomach. At times, he would use a stick to hit the disciple’s back. And he would fall over with such great pain. Even at night while the disciple was sleeping, the master would just sneak into the room and kick him hard. Ouch!

Eventually, the disciple realises he has to watch out and avoid kicks and beatings from the master. So as he mops the floor, and even as he sleeps at night, he finds himself being very alert so that when the master comes, he can avoid those kicks and beatings.

One day, he loses his patience at the master’s abuse. And tells the master, “Okay, enough is enough! When are you going to teach me some real martial arts?” The master replies, “You’ve been learning every day since the day you came. And everything I have to impart, you already know. You now know the secret of this art – it’s alertness, and you’ve mastered it. Now you can go.”

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What is your favourite quote that best describes your idea of spiritual formation?

I do not have a favourite quote, but I do have two favourite stories I use to describe my idea of spiritual formation. These are not original stories, but are nevertheless reflective of certain fundamental dimensions of spiritual formation.

Also, these stories are true of how learning actually used to take place in pre-industrialised societies and reflect a missing dimension of our Christian heritage that we have lost in discipleship and formation.

a. The Violin Maker
Stradivarius was a legendary violin maker from Italy in the 18th century. He made violins like no other man in existence. His violins produced sounds which flickered, constantly trembled, and moved like candlelight. There are about 600 Stradivarius violins in the world today, and one can fetch a price of as high as a USD 200,000. And despite the way in which technology has grown by leaps and bounds, nobody has truly figured out what makes Stradivarius violins sound the way they do.

How did a master violin maker like Stradivarius or any other violin maker teach an apprentice to make violins? Did he conduct classes twice a week for two hours each session? Or did he offer a certificate programme for this? It’s simple. He would bring the apprentice to live with him, day and night watching him make violins.

Apparently, a great violin that produces the best music can only be made from certain kinds of wood. These woods are from trees that have survived a cold season at a certain time period. So the master violin maker would take the apprentice up to the mountains of Switzerland to find wood there. The master violin maker would test the wood by touching, feeling and smelling the wood, to judge whether the wood would be suitable for the construction of a good violin. His apprentice would just be following him and observing him for many years. One day, on one such trip, the master violin maker would pass the wood, piece by piece, to the apprentice to ask the apprentice to gauge if it was good or bad wood. The apprentice would begin by guessing wrongly, for he does not truly know what constitutes a piece of good or bad wood – and neither does the master have the words to describe the criteria!

But the apprentice just keeps imitating the master’s actions – touching, feeling and smelling the wood. Some years later, he’s able to do what his master does, and he knows what is good wood and what is bad wood – without necessarily having the words to describe the criteria! But he has mastered the art by slowly imitating the master and is able to eventually construct high quality violins instinctively, which even highly technologised machines cannot do.

Editor's Note: The second story will be posted up in the next post.

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What is your favorite book/s that best describes your idea of spiritual formation?

My answer to this question will not sound very characteristic of me, but my favourite book which I think best describes my idea of spiritual formation is the bible, especially the Gospels, and then the book of Acts.

It is in the Gospels that we see (in “real time”) how spiritual formation takes place through the sharing of the common life between Jesus and his disciples. It is also in the Gospels that we see the idea of the perichoretic life being best reflected through the life of Jesus and his companions. Jesus lived as a parable before his companions, being the perfect model of the perichoretic life, that they might imitate him in all dimensions of their lives.

In the book of Acts, we see how the followers of Jesus continued the legacy he had left behind for them. They kept on sharing in the common life and learning what it meant to live a life based on the perichoretic nature of God. We see how they met daily in the homes and how they shared everything they had with one another, no one claiming their possessions to be their own. They were doing the dance of life together. Christ was no longer present, but yet, still present in a very real way through his Spirit in their midst.

It seems to me that spiritual formation is often discussed as a very abstract concept. At best, it is cultivated through a series of “programmes” and “disciplines” seminary students or church members are put through. At worst, it is imposed as a set of legalistic requirements which has to be met in order to graduate from seminary.

But scripture imparts the idea of spiritual formation in a very different way. It imparts the ideal through the narration of a beautiful story and the passing down of a legacy from one generation to another. From the Gospels and the book of Acts, we can see that spiritual formation is about helping people to find their places in the Story of God, and in the process of finding their places, coming to understand who they are themselves.

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