Tuesday, 18 December 2007

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  Top 15 Confessions for the Asian American Christian (2007)*

  (*updating a previous post)

   

  • I confess that my faith has been reduced to going through the motions.  Go to church on Sunday.  Smile.  Lift hands.  Sing.  Smile.  Say goodbye.

  • I confess that I pray about five minutes a week.   

  • I confess that when I look at the kids in the youth group, at how emotionally they worship, at how emotionally they express their devotion to God, at how emotionally they seek God's will, I inwardly smile.  For I confess that I think them naive, idealistic, and that their religious enthusiasm is just a stage in life.  It'll pass. 

  • I confess that even though I say there is no higher calling than the pastorate/ministry vocation, I inwardly hope my children go to Yale Law School, and not Gordon-Conwell Seminary.  I will feel affirmed if they become doctors and lawyers; I will feel disappointment if they attend seminary. 

  • I confess that I do not like watching body worship.

  • I confess that I do like watching body worship. 

  • I confess that I look down on youth pastors.  I think of them as academic failures, people unable to get real jobs in the real world.  Mostly, I think of them as glorified baby-sitters.  They also make very easy targets, and I blame them for all the shortcomings of my children.  Somebody has to take the blame, and it sure ain't gonna be me.

  • I confess that I was inwardly shattered when word first came out that the Virginia Tech killer was Asian American; and that shame quickly turned to relief when it was disclosed that the killer was Korean American.

  • I confess I prefer to have a white pastor leading the ABC congregation.  Blond hair and blue eyes just looks more spiritual.  I confess that I find myself always sizing up an Asian American pastor, and feeling like he's never making the grade.  Feeling like he'd never succeed in the corporate/financial/legal/medical/real world. 

  • I confess that I find the typical AA yuppie Christian (in his 20s, single, career-minded and successful, materialistic) unbearable in his spiritual haughtiness.

  • I confess that the church is blind to the rampant sex that goes on under the mask of churchly decency and decorum.  It is the unacknowledged and unacknowledgeable swampland beneath the church brochure of tidy scenery.  Only a few are brave enough to confront and address it; the rest of us put on petty and hypocritical masks of naïve innocence.

  • I confess that while I am all for racial harmony (yay for the "multiethnic" church!), my child will marry an African American over my dead body.

  • I confess that I feel like a peon in the (white) working world.  And that's why I jockey for position in the Asian church, where it is an even playing field.  Where I can gain a modicum of power and (self-)respect.  I will give lip-service to the concept of servant-leadership, of course.

  • I confess that I do not like most Christians.  I find them boring, narrow-minded, petty, judgmental.  That if I crash-landed on a deserted island for a year, I’d prefer being with the cast of Lost than the members of my congregation.

  • I confess that I am a hypocrite.  I confess that I sometimes think this Christianity thing is all a sham, and I want to throw my arms up and just yell to hell with it all!

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

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