Regular readers of this blog are well aware of my affiliation with George Fox Evangelical Seminary, and the new Doctor of Ministry in Global Missional Leadership, which will launch on September 1. It will feature challenging content from our lead mentor, Dr. Jason Clark, who is a passionate learner, as well as a highly skilled practitioner. When the students meet up for face to face learning intensives (about once per year), it’ll be in really great, dynamic locations – London and Nuremburg for the first round; Nairobi, Kenya for the second; and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for the third. Guest lecturers from each of these locations will participate, which will give the students some amazing opportunities to learn from diverse theological, cultural, and experiential perspectives. The rest of the work the students do will be in online environments. I’ve had an opportunity to meet several members of our first cohort of students [...]

Once again, apologies are in order for some quiet days on the blog.  Internet connectivity has been spotty at best since I left Malaysia.  I will try hard over the next few days to catch up. While I only spent five or six days in Kuala Lumpur, they were pretty efficient in terms of the number experiences I had and the number things I was able to see.  I must say that this efficiency was due mostly to my most excellent host, Sivin Kit, and the schedule he put together for me.  Here’s a quick run-down of my time: -       Late evening arrival on New Year’s Eve.  It was late, but not so late  that I wasn’t able to have dinner with my Sivin, get checked into my guest lodging, and see three different fireworks displays from my window at the strike of midnight. –  Walked the streets of KL [...]

The day I arrived in Kuala Lumpur was a significant day for Christians there.  Not because it was the 7th day of Christmas, but because of a High Court ruling.  First, a little background.  Malaysia is officially a Muslim country.  There is a wide diversity of people groups, and along with that, an acknowledgment that there will be a variety of other faith practices, but the default is Islam. The court case, in some ways, goes back to 17th century, when a Dutch-Malay dictionary was created.  When it came to translating the word “God,” they used the word most familiar to the local people – Allah.  This word has been in fairly common use ever since – in Bible translations, as well as other books and training materials.  The specific case in question had to do with a Catholic newspaper’s use of the word Allah, which some people took issue [...]

I started this blog – in it’s humble, stripped down, blogspot format – a few months shy of eight years ago.  At that time, the blogging pond was pretty small.  I jumped in because I was interested in engaging conversation that would end up developing into what some refer to as the emerging church.  Back then, I knew nobody in person who was wandering the crazy pathways I was, so I went to this new online community.  Frankly, there weren’t really that many people that were even blogging about issues of postmodernity, deconstruction, and approaching the gospel and the Church from a non/post-Christendom perspective.  So, the few blogs that were out there tended to link to each other quite a lot, so the blogrolls I’d see typically had the same core of names and pages on them. One of those names I used to see on blogrolls (and still do) [...]