Pacific Islands University
Our stay in Guam was about getting to know Pacific Islands University.
We were deeply impressed with Pacific Islands University (PIU) and its people. It’s the only Bible college and seminary of its kind in all of Micronesia. PIU is strategically placed for advancing the gospel among the 2,000 islands of Micronesia. President of PIU, Dr. David Owen, and the PIU faculty are doing strategic, important work.
Read more about PIU. Consider financially supporting PIU. Consider taking a semester, a year, or the rest of your life to live in Guam and serve PIU as a professor, administrator, librarian, mentor, etc.
Below are photos of PIU students who cut down some coconuts for us to eat on campus.
Guam
Last week was full of unexpected difficulty. Now, as promised, I will blog a bit about Guam and the Philippines.
After a 10 hour flight to Tokyo, we boarded a 3 hour flight from Tokyo to Guam. Japanese vacationers filled the plane. We soon learned that Guam is Japan’s Hawaii, Guam is where many Japanese go to spend a week vacationing under the sun and in the water.
We began our time in Guam in the water. I took the picture above at a secluded beach where our host took us snorkeling. After hiking 1-2 miles down the coastline we had the ocean to ourselves, it was just the four of us snorkeling in the Philippine Sea.
During the hike we learned more about Guam.
Guam is a territory of the United States. Though just 30 miles long and 4 miles wide, Guam is the largest island in Micronesia. Guam’s present population of about 180,000 is expected to double over the next 5 years because of the American military buildup.
Guam holds a strategic, prominent position in Micronesia, making the work of Pacific Islands University incredibly significant…
Philippines Preaching Conference
On Saturday I travel to the Philippines for a week, along with fellow pastors/close friends Mark Mitchell and Rob Hall. There we will put on a preaching conference for 100+ Filipino pastors. My component of the conference includes lecturing on Gospel-Centered Preaching and Preaching the Parables. On the way there we will spend a day in Guam visiting with friends at Pacific Islands University and Seminary.
This is going to be a great trip. I can’t wait. I love serving at a church that cares about preaching, training pastors to preach, foreign missions, and sending its pastors on adventures such as this. I love that our church here in the Bay Area is full of Filipinos who love the gospel and want to see it advance in their home country.
I’d like to ask all of you to pray for this trip.
- Pray that God would use our teaching to equip and inspire the pastors we will be training, most of whom have never received any preaching instruction before.
- Pray that God would teach us much through the friendships we form with the Filipino pastors and our stay in their culture.
- Pray for the Philippines, that the gospel would advance and local churches would thrive in this country of 7,107 islands and 92 million people (the world’s 12 most populous country).
- Pray for our wives and kids while we’re away.
- Pray for our safety, sleep, and stomachs.
- Pray that we’d have a lot of fun.
Thank you for your prayer.
I’ve decided to fully unplug during this trip: no computer, phone, email, etc. So, unless I pre-write some posts to appear while I’m away, I will not be blogging next week.
Socrates in the City
The latest issue of World has a great article, Mission to Metropolis, profiling the work Eric Metaxas is doing in New York City with Socrates in the City–a ministry that’s bringing the gospel to NYC’s cultural elites. Particularly helpful is Metaxas’ articulation of how William Wilberforce and friends have inspired his vision of gospel ministry.
Taking Your Theology to Another Level
I find time and time again that talking to non-Christians forces me to take my theology to another level. “I pray,” says Paul to Philemon, “that you may be active in sharing your faith, so that you will have a full understanding of every good thing we have in Christ” (v. 6). Unbelievers are not satisfied with the pat answers and unexplained terminology that Christians all too readily accept.
…Communicating the gospel cross-culturally and across subcultures causes us to reflect on how much of our Christian practice arises from the gospel and how much from our own culture. Mission is the opportunity to rethink which elements of what we believe do belong to the gospel and which in fact belong to our culture.
Richard Florida, Who’s Your City?
I found Richard Florida’s new book, Who’s Your City?, a fascinating, thought-provoking read. I have my questions about aspects of Florida’s research, but his thesis is compelling. The book is built around three key ideas:
1. Despite all the hype over globalization and the ‘flat world,’ place is actually more important to the global economy than ever before.
2. Places are growing more diverse and specialized–from their economic makeup and job market to the quality of life they provide and the kinds of people that live in them.
3. We live in a highly mobile society, giving most of us more say over where we live.
Florida argues that though people have historically given a great deal of thought to life’s who and what questions (who should I marry? what should I do with my life?) and largely ignored the where question (where should Iive?), today’s economy is making the where question more important than ever before. Indeed, “For the first time ever, a huge number of us have the freedom and economic means to choose our place.”
Building off his earlier work (ie., The Rise of the Creative Class), Florida makes the case that today’s economy is driven by three key factors: talent, innovation, and creativity–factors that “are not distributed evenly across the global economy.”
These factors are clustering together in urban areas (today, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas), or in what Florida calls mega-regions:
Cities have always been the natural economic units of the world. But over the past several decades, what we once thought of as cities, with central cores surrounded by rural villages and later by suburbs, have grown into mega-regions composed of two or more city-regions, such as the Boston-New York-Washington corridor. Mega-regions are more than just a bigger version of a city. In the way that a city is composed of separate neighborhoods, and like a metropolitan region is a new, natural economic unit that results from city-regions growing upward, becoming denser, and growing outward and into one another.
According to Florida, the world economy takes shape around a couple dozen mega-regions. The core of the American economy is “made up of roughly a dozen mega-regions…,” most notably the Bos-Wash, Nor-Cal, and So-Cal mega-regions.
Florida argues that the clustering of certain types of jobs and certain types of people in various mega-regions is creating more clearly defined personalities for cities, hence the title of the book.
Five broad personality types are, according to Florida’s research, beginning to typify various mega-regions:
It’s these creative clustering, economic, personality factors of mega-regions/cities that Florida presents as rationale for taking a second look at the where question.
Selfishly, I was pleased to see that the San Francisco Bay Area ranked at the top of most every one of Florida’s rankings (most innovative region, best city for various life-stages, etc.).
- Sadly, as Florida briefly notes in his book, the economic factors at work in America’s mega-regions are increasing the gap between the very rich and the very poor.
- Strategically, I think Florida’s research is helpful to the Christian community, especially to church planters and church planting organizations wanting to plant churches in regions where the gospel can be leveraged for catalytic impact.
For more information about Richard Florida and his book, go to Who’s Your City? To check out Richard Florida’s interesting blog, go here. And, if you’re thinking about moving, you’d benefit from consulting Florida’s “Best Cities” chart:
Some Numbers
Some numbers
Current world population: 6.7 billion
World Christian population: 2.2 billion
World population increase per day: 219,000
Net Christian converts per day: 79,000
Fastest-growing Christian population: China with 16,500 per day
Christian martyrs in 2007: 175,000 (or 480 per day)
Christian martyrs in 1970: 377,000 (1,033 per day)
As reported by the International Bulletin of Missionary Research and digested by religion scholar Martin Marty
(HT: World Magazine)
The Gospel in Everyday Conversations
My latest article, The Gospel in Everyday Conversations, has been posted on the New Attitude website. I hope you benefit from reading it.
1 Great Way to Love Your Neighbors & Build Community in Your Neighborhood (Even if You Live in A Cocoon)
Yup, that’s the floor plan to our condo. Now when you come over you’ll feel really at home.
If I could show you a full schematic of the Brittan Heights development here in San Carlos, you’d see both that this is a great place to live and, that like most condominium developments, this is an easy place to “cocoon.” For most people, condo living is cocoon living–after work you crawl into your condo cocoon where you relax away your evening in complete isolation from the neighbors cocooning next to you, above you, and below you.
Throughout our 1 1/2 years of condo living here, my wife and I have been thinking hard about how to better get to know, love, and build community with our neighbors in a neighborhood without front yards, porches, sidewalks, or natural meeting areas. Last year my wife came up with a brilliant idea: throw a party for our neighbors.
Last year’s party went off swimmingly. Neighbors who’ve lived/cocooned here for 15+ years conversed with each other for the first time and commented on how this was the very first get together our little neighborhood had ever had.
Tonight we’re hosting the “2nd Annual Wine & Cheese Block Party” for the 12 condos in our unit. Tons of people are coming. We’re really looking forward to it. You might want to consider doing something like this for your neighbors/neighborhood. To get you started, below is the invitation we sent to our neighbors (minus true addresses):
The 2nd Annual Wine & Cheese Block Party
for the residents of Brittan Heights 777 & 778Date: Friday, February 1
Time: 6-8 pm
Place: The Buzzard Home
777 John Doe Drive, #7Who: Residents of 777 & 778
(Feel free to bring a guest.)RSVP: tbuzzard@yahoo.com
What to bring:
Your favorite cheese or a bottle of wine to share.
If you can’t bring anything, no problem! Just bring yourself.
The Gospel is Advancing in Cambodia
Last night at 20s we hosted three special guests from Cambodia: Paul, Bonseum, and Som Oll. For the past 17 years Paul Nuth (far left) has been leading a church planting movement in Cambodia that has been aggressively advancing the gospel and changing the Buddhist landscape of Cambodia.
Last night Paul shared with us his riveting story of how he came to Christ, how he escaped the Killing Fields, and how the gospel has been advancing in Cambodia over the last two decades. When Cambodia re-opened its borders in the early 80’s after the fall of Communism and Paul first returned to his country, there were roughly 50 underground Christians in Cambodia. Today, Paul has overseen the planting of over 1,100 Cambodian churches. Our twenties crowd was deeply moved by Paul’s story of conversion, suffering, and God’s providence and his report on the progress of the gospel in Cambodia.
Paul’s ministry thrills me. Our church has found great joy in supporting Paul’s ministry. In July of 2006 I spent two weeks in Cambodia, helping put on a preaching conference/workshop for Paul’s team of church planters. And it looks as though this spring Mark Mitchell and I are likely to return to Cambodia and put on another expository preaching conference for Paul’s team.
Last year I wrote a series of posts about my time in Cambodia. You might enjoy reading some of those posts. You might enjoy beginning here, with a pictorial account of the Cambodian Genocide Museum which is located on site of what once was the main torture/killing camp in Cambodia.
And, if you haven’t seen it already, the movie The Killing Fields is a must see for understanding what happened in Cambodia.
