Bit by Bit - Language Unlocks (Culture)

(Bit by Bit is a series that seeks to better understand timeless truth through gaming metaphors. The title refers to our progressive sanctification. And, you know, 1's and 0's)

Haven't done one of these in months, but I continue to be impressed with how gaming metaphors apply to unchanging truths and principles of life. Today's entry is related to my overseas work. It's not meant to discourage anyone who feels they can't learn languages well, but to encourage everyone to keep going.

The Struggle to Connect 

Language is one of the biggest barriers to ministry in East Asia. The difficulty of languages like Japanese, with three writing systems mixed together and complicated grammar, and Mandarin, with lots of similar-sounding words distinguished tonally and thousands of characters to memorize, is something most people are aware of.

When I say language is a huge barrier to ministry, I don't mean that one must be impressively fluent to do ministry over here. English teaching is always a way to help and meet people, and one can train many local pastors through a translator and accomplish important long-term kingdom work without spending years trying to get fluent in their language.

The problem, rather, is the relational issue: to connect with the average local person who does not speak your language, you need to speak their language well enough to do so, and while there are exceptions, most ministry that will not evaporate fairly quickly after you leave depends on that kind of connection. Without the language, you're also permanently separated from the culture; you can learn about it, but you'll always be missing a huge part of everything, a black box into which you rely on other people to look inside for you.

Language learning is tough, but that difficulty can be over-hyped too; there are some people who do struggle to learn any new language, but for most people with most languages it's a simple question of learning correctly (the right content studied in the right way) and investing enough time and effort to pound it into your brain until you make new neural pathways for it.

That means to learn a new language is to re-wire your own brain, so it only makes sense it would be a challenge. The attitude I condemn is neither the fear that one cannot do a good job in learning a new language due to its difficulty, nor the natural frustration that comes after much effort put into learning with seemingly little result; it's the attitude that says "language learning is hard, how little can I get by with and still serve?"

For me, as a Christian living overseas hoping to share my faith with as many people as possible in my community, language is a constantly present, relevant, and exhausting challenge. Most of my day-to-day communication here is done in Mandarin, and the more used to speaking it I become, the more obvious it becomes that it's not adequate. That doesn't mean I can't do what I do now with the language level I have now, it means I can see opportunities that lie beyond my reach because my language abilities aren't up to them yet. I want the language keys that open those doors.

There are discouraging days, where I feel like I should just give up and use English, and there are encouraging days where I can turn and see that, although the mountain ahead seems ever higher, I'm looking from a vantage point far above the plains below where I started.

But one of the most motivating things about the process of learning a new language, whether you've just started or over the long term, is that with every new useful phrase or word you learn, you are opening up new conversational or even social possibilities. This exciting process of slowly increasing your ability to function effectively in a new place and culture, at the same time greatly expanding your versatility and flexibility in ministry, is very similar to learning the rules and techniques of a new game.

Let's compare that process to an old classic:

Super Mario World

This is one of my favorite old games of all time. I think the designers hit a perfect balance of great art and level design; fresh and varying content and enemies so the levels don't get boring; memorable music themes, sound effects and cues; and secrets hidden everywhere. And yes, nostalgia may play a part; we did not have a SNES growing up, but I spent many hours playing it at friends' or cousins' houses.

One of my favorite parts of Super Mario World was how many secrets there were to unlock if you knew how. Whether flying above the screen in the Ghost House to unlock a secret level that gives you infinite lives (basically the secret to beating the game), or going to Star Road and finding all the different colored Yoshis, even the secret levels sometimes had their own secrets.

Secrets within secrets...

One of the more fun secrets to unlock in SMW are Switch Palaces. Everyone knows Mario games involve jumping under lots of blocks; Super Mario World introduced the innovation of several different colors of "exclamation point blocks" [ ! ], which must be "switched on" at the hidden switch palaces. (Only the first palace, Yellow, is in plain sight, the others must be found by discovering secrets in various levels) Until you find and activate the correspondingly-colored switch palace, these colored blocks are shown only as dotted outlines, showing where the blocks will be.

Early in the game, you had probably switched on the yellow blocks (further levels became fairly ridiculous if you didn't), but not yet the green, red, or blue ones, and every so often you saw a weird little area where you knew there was something going on, but only had the outlines of the potential colored blocks, so you wouldn't be able to reach the secret there without finding the switch palace of that color first.

Our family tradition was to run, jump, then switch directions exactly as he landed

Correct me if I am wrong, dear readers, but if memory serves, it is possible to finish the game with only the yellow blocks switched on. You don't need to unlock the secrets to finish it, you can make your way through and achieve the main goal of beating Bowser in his castle, which after everything it takes to get there is actually not terribly difficult.

However, that is not "really" beating the game. There is a way, by beating secret levels in the right way, to actually permanently change the in-game graphics from Spring/Summer to Autumn. The enemy designs change, the color palette changes, it's a victory which accomplishes much more than simply defeating the last boss and watching the credits.

Again, if memory serves, one cannot beat the final secret level and cause this change without the presence of the different colored blocks which you need to switch on at the hidden switch palaces. In other words, you can beat the final boss 100 times and the game won't change, but by switching on the missing blocks and unlocking the secret levels, you can affect the game itself.

Unlocking a Culture, Block by Block

Language is like that. Living in a new culture, in a new language environment, you start out with few things you can do. "Survival" language skills give you what is necessary to keep living there in the basic sense; you can get done the very basic things that must get done without finding someone that speaks your first language or someone to translate. You could continue in this way for a very long time, and many people do. 

But you won't even know what you don't know. You'll never have the conversations that could have opened up new doors, never get to know that local who can't speak English at all, but who is very influential in their own context, or can encourage you or be encouraged by you. You can set goals, ministry or otherwise, and reach them, and even "beat the game," by accomplishing everything you set out to do in a given time period.

What you set out to do might not be the best or most effective thing you could be doing, however. Missions is fraught with examples of people doing what they thought was a good idea and actually causing serious problems. But on a less extreme level, how many times have I read about and personally witnessed people who worked very hard, yet somehow found the long-term fruit from a given ministry was surprisingly absent?

That's not to denigrate their effort; God rewards our motive, not the outcome, which we are never totally in control of anyway. (sometimes not at all) But if your goal is to be as effective as you can, without enough language to get deeper into the culture, to understand the lives of the people you are ministering to, you won't know whether you're working in ways that make sense for the culture or not. I have been in the situation more than once of being present for someone ministering in English while listening to the attendees speaking Chinese, and realizing the attendees' assumption of what was happening and that of the person leading were wildly different.

I wonder how many times that has happened to me in the past, when I had no way of knowing.

Like the colored block outlines mentioned above, you might become aware that there are opportunities eluding you, but until you unlock the next level of your language abilities, you simply won't have access to them. That's not to say they're automatically open to you at that point. The secret levels are typically especially difficult or confusing, and have their own secrets. But knowing they exist gives you a whole new set of goals to strive for.

The Final Word

So if you are headed towards, or already work/minister in a multi-lingual context, my advice is this: To avoid burning out, make your default language goal whatever is enough to accomplish the goals you or your organization or ministry or team currently have--following our Super Mario World analogy, unlock those Yellow Blocks, then go ahead and set out to defeat your Bowser.

But set another goal too, which is that along the way you will keep trying to find those Switch Palaces and unlock new blocks to help you get into new areas. Then use the opportunities those new language abilities provide to go places and do things you couldn't before. Maybe the Star Road is where you'll find that breakthrough you've been praying for.

Stranger than Fiction: Strange Faith for a Strange Reality

Black Hole Sun: Life is Weird Sometimes

10 weeks ago, I was flying back to the US for a mission conference. I was exhausted before I left, but found myself unable to sleep more than a few minutes at a time on the 14-hour flight, and tried to pass the time with in-flight movies. The plane was a 787 "Dreamliner," impressively new with a well-designed interior and auto-dimming windows. Those windows turned into a problem when they didn't dim quite enough, and the sun just happened to rise directly outside my window. I was at first confused at the alien, blue sun which rose, until I realized the windows had auto-dimmed and the manual controls were disabled. The best I could do to avoid this piercing cyan orb, dimmer than it would have been but still painful to tired eyes, was to shift in my seat and pull my hat down low. I had already watched a couple of movies and nothing looked interesting, but an old classic-era movie about Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel caught my eye, partly because it starred both Rex Harrison and Charlton Heston. (Title: The Agony and the Ecstasy)

I don't remember if I watched Total Recall before or after that one.
Either way, Ginger Ale is the best choice on flights, always.

Growing up on old movies, I knew both of these men tended to play strong-willed protagonists, and thought perhaps the two of them theatrically butting heads would be entertaining in a way that yet another trope-filled recent Hollywood production would not be. The movie itself was quite unique, beginning with a long introduction about Michelangelo and his art (which brought back memories of Francis Schaeffer's old but legit video series – with his impressively non-ironic goatee and knickerbockers), before moving into the story of how a warrior pope got a capricious sculptor to spend years painting a ceiling on his back, and how the perfectionist artist convinced the tight-fisted pope to keep extending the project until he was finished.

It occurred to me what a weird, existential sort of moment this was—flying in thousands of feet over Alaska, awash in the weird, blue glow of an auto-dimmed sun, watching an old technicolor period film about Michelangelo and Pope Julius II starring the Professor from My Fair Lady and also Moses/the NRA guy, while eating Japanese snack mix.

Life is full of these weird, surreal moments, and they strengthen my faith.

They strengthen it because recognizing those weird moments is a defense against a subtle but strong temptation to doubt, which is that believing the Bible explicitly and worshiping the God it describes in 2016 can sometimes feel a little weird, a little unreal.

The Strangeness of Faith (Mirrors the Strangeness of Life)

Maybe you have never felt this particular temptation, but I often have. "This is the era of instantaneous global communication, of metamaterials, of Facebook, of satire-as-news and social upheaval. Isn't bowing over your Chinese dumplings to thank a 1^st Century Jewish Savior-King a little... weird?"

Let's be honest with ourselves, from the world's perspective, it's quaint at best. It doesn't always feel weird to us, of course: belief in God can feel entirely natural while we can see answers to prayer, the testimony of changed lives, those times we especially feel God's presence, etc. Rationally the evidence for God is there as well, both historically and logically. So it's right and good that our faith should seem as real and instinctive to us as it often does.

It's obvious, however, that there is much about believing the contents of a canon of books closed almost 2000 years ago and making life decisions based on the will of God, the Creator of our universe that we cannot ever directly observe, that will necessarily seem weird in a culture that calls movies that came out 10 years ago "old," and which struggles to explain even the obvious existence of the human soul or mind. To our modern, cynical world, sincere faith is weird.

But—real life is weird. Even if you've chosen to stay inside a zone of life that has become comfortable and familiar, there are those really bizarre moments where you just have to shake your head. For those of us who have left what was comfortable and familiar, those moments occur much more frequently.

So when your faith seems weird, remember that reality is weird too. In some ways, in this modern era where we live immersed in fiction—TV shows, movies, books, etc.--we come to expect reality, contrasted to all that fiction, shouldn't have that weird feeling. But that's a little misguided, because fiction is usually strange in a way that makes sense to people, a consistent weird, if you will, because it's coming from the minds of people. Most fiction is either seeking a balance of fictional but plausible events, or occurs in an alternate world where nothing has to conform to our perception of what normal is.

But reality is both real and yet also stranger than human-devised fiction. Things happen in real life that no one would find plausible in a novel or movie. One of those things is that, once, among a people who for hundreds of years had expected a Messiah from God, a man declared he was that Messiah, and furthermore the Son of God, and that the proof of this was that He would be killed, and then be raised back to life again. He was in fact executed by the colonial government, yet on the third day the tomb was empty and he was seen alive by hundreds of people, and those who knew him and wrote about it suggested that if you didn't believe them, you could ask any of those people. A very falsifiable claim, then, yet instead of being proved false, its proponents willingly went to their deaths for the sake of it, and the faith spread across the entire world. Clearly something happened which cannot be accounted for by the banal theories of skeptics, and for those of us who have experienced God in our lives, there is no reason to doubt the Biblical account, as we have encountered the One of whom it speaks.

Messy Reality vs. Fragile Atheism

So then, for believers in God, a weird world makes sense.
There are rules by which things are supposed to work, to be sure: the laws of physics are the equations that describe God's order. He called it good, and He doesn't randomly violate them. There are commonsense laws about our world as well. (I love the poem by Rudyard Kipling called "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" which cleverly illustrates how the basic principles of humanity, society, and life don't change, even when we manage to convince ourselves we've finally escaped them.)

But believers are free to acknowledge that, at times, weird things happen, which cannot be explained via the laws which explain how things operate by default, and we have an exception, what we call a supernatural event. If God is real, this makes perfect sense: that the One who set up the system and pronounced it good could still occasionally choose to make changes here or there as the situation requires, or in answer to the fervent requests of His people.

Materialists are forced to either explain away every single inexplicable event by natural means, or else shrug (Sometimes Christians forget.. under modernism you were forced to answer, but postmodernism lets you shrug. It's a nihilistic shrug, though). The only other way out is to deny the inexplicable thing happened at all, regardless of whatever evidence exists (as an atheist once said/unconciously admitted to me: Of course that couldn't be true. If it were, there would have to be a God) and at other times they simply come up with some other complicated explanation which they claim is much simpler or less crazy than "invoking a divine being" as the explanation (because they have already rejected that explanation for personal reasons) as if disbelief is the default normal (actually belief in God is by far the historical norm). It is as if color-blind people insisted color did not exist, and claimed any other explanation for people's claims of seeing color was preferable to the crazy, outmoded idea that things had a magical property they couldn't personally observe.

But preferring a very complicated explanation which does not involve God to one that does involve God is merely a sign that one has made up one's mind regardless of the evidence. If you don't want to believe in God, you'll find other explanations more appealing. If you already believe in God, whether weird things turn out to be less-common application of natural laws, or something more, it's equally reasonable in both cases.

In other words, Theists have much the less fragile position. Atheists tend to rebuff all challenges to their position with indignation and/or mockery, because without turning the burden of proof back on the other person, it becomes apparent just how narrow is the ledge to which they cling. (Polite atheists certainly do exist, but they typically will not debate the question either.)

Stranger than Fiction: The Implausibly Real God

In the end, a view of our world that excludes the strange and inexplicable is insufficiently broad to describe the real world. So when you are tempted to find the truths of scripture, the concept of God, or any aspects of our faith to be fundamentally strange (and if you haven't ever thought that, you might have a different problem...), don't feel bad about it, but recognize that it is because they are not plausible fiction, but part of messy reality. If the animals on an alphabet chart were hypothetical, I would consider U's unicorn to be quite plausible, but E's elephant to be a bizarre fantasy (Tusks coming out of its face on both sides of a skinny hose-like trunk and fan-like ears, all stuck on the front of a fat, bulky body? What was this artist smoking?). Yet the elephant is real and the unicorn is mythical. So there is no point in insisting that reality conform to what is theoretically plausible, in fact one of the marks of reality is that it never fits neatly into its own apparent cliches, and goes in directions we couldn't have expected if we were allowed to guess first.

We see this in our own walks of faith: Hypothetical faith is a nice pleasing continuity; real faith has odd corners and rough patches, even bits that seem missing. Fictional God is plausible: Allah—a simple, inexorable Unity, or the million specialized gods of Hinduism, one for everything. The Biblical God is not something we'd have ever imagined: One, but Triune; internally diverse in a way that defies human description, a Divine being who starts on the edge of what we can grasp conceptually and goes far past it. Prophets are more or less plausible—specially chosen people to communicate the ideas of Heaven to mortal men—but a suffering Messiah is so implausible that His own disciples didn't see Him happening under their own noses.

As C.S.Lewis has famously stated, a real God would be something we couldn't guess, versus something humans would come up with themselves. Reality is stranger and more wonderful than fiction, and that makes perfect sense in a Christian worldview (because reality is what the mind of God has come up with, whereas fiction is what the minds of humans come up with), unlike overly simplistic materialist explanations. Christianity is the one faith that can accommodate rigorous logic and inexplicable miracles, that doesn't only make claims to mysterious and inaccessible truth, but actually introduces concepts of reality that you can grasp at but not succeed in comprehending, that are grounded in the concrete and not merely mystical hand-waving, yet range far into the mystical realm in that they exceed our ability to comprehend and have no perfect analogues in the material world.

All this is exactly as it should be, and clashes with our expectations yet "rings true" with reality in exactly the way that real things do. So, rather than retreating to fictional conceptions that are less mentally tiring, that seem to make more sense precisely because they were conceived by humans for human consumption, let's continue to forge ahead into the weirdness of reality, and of our faith, and be comforted that the mutual correspondence between the two is simply more evidence that our faith is indeed real.

An INTP on the Mission Field: Stuck in a Rut - Which Wheel needs a Branch?

Thanks for your Comments:

I have been encouraged by the positive comments some people have been leaving on earlier posts. It turns out there isn't much online for Christian INTPs. But yes, we do exist, and no, being creatures of logic doesn't mean we can't be believers in a God the worship of whom, given His existence, is not only logical, but the only sane course of action. Everything rides on the question of whether you first assume God, or first assume No-God; logic will take you in two different directions from that point, but to stick with the second assumption you must close your eyes to wider reality (general revelation), dismiss the faith of all believers throughout history along with the testimony of Christian scripture (special revelation), and reject any instances of God doing unusual things in your life to suggest His existence. Following up on any one of those would bring one to the point where logic suggested atheism was untenable, and one would either need to flee to the refuge of agnosticism or follow the journey of evidence and faith to its conclusion, as many atheists in history have in fact done. (C.S.Lewis being an obvious high profile example, but there are others)

Also, though some cast aspersion on the Myers-Briggs test for being "unscientific," etc, it has turned out to be a very helpful thing in the internet age, in that all of us people who are a certain way now have a name for ourselves and can find each other. Yes we all have our individual differences, but when someone is describing themselves in the context of being an INTP and you say to yourself, "Yes, exactly, so I'm not the only one!" then you know you have something of value in a categorization that allows that to happen. And I suspect it is not only INTPs who have that kind of experience.

1. Spinning our Wheels

Being both intuitive and logical types, INTPs are very capable of taking information from a wide variety of sources and suddenly arriving at valuable insights or conclusions on topics that may not be obviously related to the source material.

So, when confronted with a challenge in life, we tend to try to pull from our collection of data and observations and intuit a solution to it. Finding a creative solution which makes an apparently difficult problem simple is very fun, if nothing else, and feeling that every situation is both similar to others and unique in its own way, I tend to not want to apply a "standard" solution but either customize it to fit the particular context, or come up with an entirely new approach altogether. (This is somewhat useful on the mission field, since a lot of problems one encounters really are unique, or previous solutions are unusable because what worked in the past for a particular set of people in a particular context isn't a viable solution for here and now)

There are two weaknesses that arise from our intuitive problem-solving tendencies, however.

A. Being satisfied with a theoretical solution

The first is well known, and not limited only to INTPs; the idea that once a solution has been arrived at, the actual doing of it is left as an exercise for the interested student. You may have heard the joke about the three academics (usually a physicist, an engineer, and a mathematician) who, caught in a fire, all figure out how to escape, but one dies because having solved the problem of how to put out the fire he considers himself successful. Yet the fire still rages, despite a perfectly good solution now existing.

INTPs can fall into the same trap: I have on multiple occasions felt out of shape, and began googling exercise plans, seeking to get behind this or that plan and understand an "essential" workout might be in terms of an average human body, and thus arrive at the most efficient workout in terms of not needing to spend a lot of time on it but seeing adequate results (living in our heads, perhaps some of us begrudge our body the proper maintenance time it requires). But having done so, less than half of the time did I actually make an effort to put that basic, efficient exercise plan into action. The fact that I'd located and grasped the core physiological principles required for a brief and efficient workout seemed like winning half the battle, when it was really only a preparation for a battle I never ended up fighting.

The knowing of a thing is not the doing of it, and the essence of a workout is not understanding the essence of a workout, it's doing the workout, imperfectly and when you don't feel like it, over and over. (Something I'm terrible at, because I want to to do everything "in the flow" and workouts rarely start with that feeling and only sometimes end up achieving it)

Either way, whether the problem is academic, or concerns our work, our life, our interpersonal relationships, or all of the above, the result is that we remain where we are, and don't move forward.

B. Getting trapped in a vicious cycle

The other problem, and a nastier one, is when we are unable to quickly intuit a creative solution to a problem, and began to fixate on it. We assume there is some missing piece of information which, if put into the mix, would recalibrate everything and a solution would magically emerge as it so often does. And when that happens it's a beautiful feeling, but often it simply doesn't. (It especially doesn't when it's an interpersonal problem.)

Like a car with tires in the mud, in that situation throwing more mental resources at the problem, focusing more intensely on it, often only makes things worse. The problem begins to loom large in our psyche, and though some INTPs might do their best thinking under stress, I suspect for many of us this is not the case. For those of us prone to getting mentally flustered, the effort thrown at figuring out a problem might become more or less totally unproductive, just churning processor cycles, spinning our wheels fruitlessly.

We might try to thrust the problem aside, to think about other things, but it's there, like a dead mouse under a hard-to-move bookshelf, sending a vague odor that makes us feel guilty for not solving the issue but not guilty enough to start taking all the books out of the shelves just to get at the rodent corpse. And like a bad odor, the-problem-we-can't-figure-out will taint our mental life if we let it run unabated.

As before, we can pretend to ignore the problem while subconsciously continuing to be stressed about it, or we can obsess over it, but either way we are stuck.

2. Actually Pragmatic Lateral Thinking

Perhaps I am simply a wimpy example of an INTP, but sometimes in these situations I find myself wishing or hoping I might simply find a way around the problem. Being clever and creative, I am quite good at this, but in the end the one I'm outsmarting is myself. The problems that bring us INTPs up short and without solutions are precisely those kinds of problems that we have to figure out how to solve to continue achieving personal growth. And if our eternal side project is not personal growth but, somewhat relentlessly, the pursuit of the theory of everything and how its all related to itself, we will find that personal growth actually serves this objective as well. (We can perceive more standing on higher ground)

Wanting to get in better shape, I once agreed to a friendly bench-pressing competition with some coworkers, back when I was a programmer. I started out pretty weak, and never got to impressive weights, but was pleased after a while to be benching 110% of my bodyweight. At that point I hit a frustrating plateau, where more effort on the bench seemed not to translate into more results. After talking to more experienced lifters, I began to realize that, as someone who hadn't been doing this long, nor being particularly robust, I needed to strengthen my whole body before my bench started improving again. I'd maxed out my short-term capabilities, and needed to grow stronger overall before more effort in a particular exercise was going to be effective.

Very often, for INTPs (or anyone), we need to stop pushing forward obsessively and do some lateral thinking. Lateral thinking should be a strongpoint of INTPs, so it's a bit ironic that we rarely follow that logic when it comes to our own lives.

For a more specific example, in studying Chinese I was finding myself hitting a plateau, or even losing confidence with the level of Chinese I had already attained. I tried berating myself, tried concentrating harder, nothing helped significantly. But then I started taking vitamins due to other health issues, and suddenly the problem resolved itself, and I felt like I'd suddenly remembered to release the emergency brake. My mental cloudiness was seemingly the result of a nutrient deficiency. Thinking harder didn't help at all, but a little vitamin pill after lunch with some magnesium helped considerably.


[N.B. If you have the gift of a higher abstract level of self-awareness, as I suspect INTPs typically do, then you are already ahead of the game because you are capable of a high level of metamotivation; the ability to regulate and coordinate your behavior in support of long-term goals. There is no inherent conflict between this tendency and your walk with God, it simply means you have to submit yourself to God very intentionally to ensure you are not undermining your walk with God with self-serving goals. (Maslow was a smart man, but his theory is inherently flawed since he rejects the idea of a sin nature) High levels of self-actualization are something like a human version of sanctification, and thus while it is a good thing, it should never be confused with what only the Spirit can work in us, nor given de facto priority since it's something we can control. I'm seeing a lot of confusion of the two lately from the squishier side of evangelicalism, and it's as dangerous to those who are attracted to ideas like the power of positive thinking as it is annoying to those of us who find solace in Ecclesiastes.]

3. Don't just lower a Window; Get out, Look at the Car, and Figure out which Wheel needs a Branch thrown under it for Traction

So, INTP or not, if you find yourself in a wheels-spinning-in-the-mud situation, don't just keep mashing the accelerator. Even if you are blessed with a mental V10, no traction means you're not going anywhere. In the worst case, you'll just run out of gas or set your tires on fire. Now, it's pretty common to suggest "you just need to shift your focus," but I'm not just talking about taking a walk or doing something random to distract yourself. I don't know about you, but I can't fool myself with that kind of thing, I'll just obsess over my problems on my walk too, etc. Or if I successfully distract myself during the nice walk, the problems wait patiently until the evening grows late, to arrive just in time to induce insomnia.

Instead, think laterally with regards to your own life, and be prepared to make changes. If you find yourself unable to rise to a particular challenge, your problem may not be a lack of mental effort or ability. Take a look at your current condition of life instead. One or more of your wheels aren't getting traction, which means your mind is stuck in a rut too, until everything gets moving again.

Emotional and mental and physical health are all tied together, and spiritual health affects all of these as well. Whether you are a dichotomist (body, soul) or trichotomist (body, soul, spirit) or octochotomist (who knows), humans were created with a body and meant to have one. Our existence after death as spirits awaiting final judgement and the new beginning of all things (whether in glory or in shame, with God or having rejected Him and existing in isolation from Him, which truly is hell), is actually an artificial and temporary state of affairs. In the new earth we will have bodies, just as Christ did. So while quotes like "You don't have a soul, you are a soul; you have a body." which C.S.Lewis never said, are popular, in one sense they are not biblical, or at least they are too short-sighted. You will only temporarily not have a body; the eternal plan is that you will have a glorious one.

We are designed to function as a unified whole. So for INTPs, who tend to ponder and throw their mental circuitry at every problem, when we get stuck in a rut, or up against problems we can't think our way out of, the problem might not lie in a failure of thinking at all. Look for weaknesses in other wheels. Where is the slippage occurring? Get some traction there, and you may find everything else begins to move forward.

Chinese Compliments: Peeling the Cultural Onion

"A Culture is like an Onion!"

The First Layer: Appreciation ("Your Chinese is so good!")

As I continue to live and serve in Taiwan, certain parts of Taiwanese culture I learned at the beginning reveal themselves to be more complicated than they first appeared.

Years ago, during my previous stay in Taiwan, I felt like Taiwanese people were very generous with compliments. People often commented at how I was good at using chopsticks, how my Chinese was impressive, etc. I felt it was just a way to be polite, especially to a guest in their country.

Another missionary commented once that if your Chinese gets really good, you stop getting compliments. His theory was that people stopped thinking of you as struggling to speak the language and needing encouragement, and simply focused on communicating with you, or even that if your Chinese was really good, they would start comparing you to themselves or other native speakers and not feel excessive praise was warranted.

The Second Layer: Realization ("Oh, it's Just Saving Face")

He may have been right, but I think there is something else in play as well. As I think back on the times I've been complimented, sticking to the examples of using chopsticks and speaking Chinese, there are usually two special situations where someone will most frequently offer a compliment (obviously in many parts of the world if you do something well someone might notice and compliment you on it; I am speaking of situations where cultural factors are more obviously at play):

1) You are a foreign stranger
Compared against the average stereotype of a Westerner, any 'waiguoren' in Taiwan who can use chopsticks without dropping things all the time, and speak even a few intelligible sentences in Mandarin, is already ahead of the curve. The bar is typically very low for anyone who "looks like a foreigner" (ethnically non-Asian based on appearance), so you get a free chance to fly high over it and impress someone the first time you meet them. After that they know you, and will probably tone down the compliments as they now expect it from you.

2) You fumbled
As Westerners the first example makes sense. Meeting someone at your work for the first time and witnessing they're fluent in Mongolian or skilled at origami, a compliment might come reflexively. It might not be so special in Mongolia, or Japan, but outside of those countries, and if they aren't from there, it's the kind of accomplishment that naturally garners some praise.

But in this second example of when people compliment you in Taiwan we encounter some significant cultural differences. For me, it began with noticing a funny discrepancy in the times I got compliments, in that often I felt like it came not at a time when I felt particularly fluent in Mandarin or adept at chopsticks, but when I was struggling. I might almost drop a piece of food, or barely manage to get my brain and mouth in sync to get all the right words out to express myself, and it's right then that someone smiles and compliments me on how good my chopstick skills are, or how good I am at speaking Chinese.

It confused me until I remembered the idea of "saving face" in Chinese culture. A lot of politeness that adults show to each other in Taiwan revolves around helping each other to "save face." It's an inheritance from the honor/shame aspect of Chinese culture which is still strongly influential in Taiwan. Saving face can either be positive (something done or said to "give face" to someone, honoring them), or negative (avoiding words or actions that would cause someone to lose face, or incur public dishonor).

Sometimes that looks like what we're familiar with in the West, trying to help someone get through an awkward moment gracefully to spare them embarrassment, or complimenting them in front of others to build them up, but sometimes it can happen in ways that are surprising, or sometimes even irritating, if one doesn't take the extra mental step of remembering what's going on behind the scenes.

[The Books aren't Always Right: While studying up on Chinese culture before coming to Taiwan, I read in a culture book on the topic of saving face that it was normal for people to not react when something was dropped and broken, and not come to help someone pick up what they dropped, in an effort to save them face and pretend they hadn't done anything potentially embarrassing. I can say from experience that neither of these scenarios are so extreme in Taiwan: a number of people will turn around to look if a dish is dropped loudly in a restaurant (but some will smile reflexively, to cover the embarrassment), and someone will often run to help a person who has dropped things, the one being helped typically thanking them profusely. I don't know if the mainland is different, or if that describes Chinese culture decades ago, but rubberneckers are alive and well in any part of the world I've visited thus far...]

So in the case of compliments, then, they are often not compliments per se, but a polite way to get past the awkwardness of a mistake or struggle in performance.

The Third Layer: Understanding ("I Guess that Actually Makes Sense")

Having realized this, I was tempted to be vaguely resentful: so in the end people were not "really" complimenting me, in fact they were doing something nearly the opposite--acknowledging that I'd messed up. From a Western perspective, it's less like an acknowledgement of merit, and more like whipping out febreeze and spraying it around in the awkward silence after someone has a bout of flatulence: in a sense it magnifies exactly the embarrassment the gesture was meant to cover/relieve.

In Chinese culture, however, there is a tacit collective understanding that mistakes or failings which everyone is willing to overlook or graciously cover for are like the tree that falls in the woods with no one around to hear it. No ears, no sound-no acknowledgement, no shame. Everyone covers for each other, if you have a good relationship with them, and the problems don't exist. (Which is one way that sometimes in East Asian cultures small problems can become enormous issues, but that's a topic for a different post)

A similar situation arises with making cultural mistakes, something I blogged about previously. While I typically want to be told when I commit a cultural faux pas, so that I can avoid making the same mistake next time, my friends might try to help me save face by not saying anything. We therefore have a somewhat humorous impasse: to me, being a good friend is telling me what everyone else already knows so I don't keep acting improperly and being the only one who doesn't know it, and to them, being a good friend means pretending I didn't do anything wrong so that it's not awkward. (Friends who understand you are trying to be a student of the culture and are good at explaining those things are very valuable)

This also explains the observation at the beginning, that as one's Chinese improves, the number of compliments you receive for it diminishes. You don't need as many compliments, because you are making fewer mistakes! Like so many things, it only seems counterintuitive until you understand the reasons behind it.

The Fourth Layer: Responding in Kind ("Do Unto Others...")

In the end, when one begins to become more familiar with the reasons behind the way people act, there is always a choice to be made. You can judge the cultural habit, and decide whether you approve or disapprove of it, or you can judge the motive behind it. In this case, trying to help you save face is definitely a friendly action. It's following the Golden Rule; what they would want you to do for them, they are doing for you. And that's the most you can ask of anyone.

So, one reaches a deeper layer of the cultural onion: learning to understand why people do what they do, and appreciating the good motives behind the action. Then instead of confusion, stress, or resentment, there is gratitude. That is also a necessary step to reaching the next layer down: learning how to help others save face, but doing so in a way that not only corresponds to the culture, but to the often counter-cultural teachings of Christ.

Think about the excruciating extent to which Jesus, as an honored teacher, let alone the Son of God, willingly lost face, allowing Himself to be publicly humiliated and dishonored as far as humanly possible, out of His love for us. 

As He taught us, we must often, rather than saving face, turn the other cheek.

"My Power is made Perfect in Weakness": Christian Antifragility

Dear Readers: I hope you all had a joyful Christmas. (I recognize it has not exactly been a peaceful holiday for many of you, with the crazy weather across the United States).

The New Year now approaches, promising to be even more complicated and chaotic than last year as tense and unstable situations around the world are further destabilized. Plus elections. It is well for followers of Jesus that our hope is not in this world, else it would be a bad time for hope.

(And to top it all off, next year will begin the Chinese Year of the Red Fire Monkey. As a believer I place zero faith in astrology of any kind, but I had a laugh at how humorously ominous that sounds...)

Doesn't start until February, actually

As an INTP, ideas are my currency, and the ever-present task in the back of my mind is to keep figuring out how our world works in all its complexity. A few years ago I was exposed to the idea of "antifragility," explained below, and found it to be a very important new property to look for in any human endeavor (including those of the Church). As we seem to be entering a time in which circumstances grow eerily similar to those that preceded the World Wars of the previous century, we can take heart knowing that the Church which has endured every hardship and trial of history will emerge from whatever societal chaos may come, because she is built on a foundation which cannot be shaken by the world.

The Idea: Antifragility

The concept as currently articulated is the brainchild of Nassim Taleb, a Lebanese-American thinker/author/risk analyst, who has written important work on the impact of "flukes" or "random catastrophes" called Black Swans, with the implication that it's foolish to regard them as unavoidable events, but that they should be expected to come eventually, and can even be profited from accordingly.

This initial work was followed by more research and contemplation of the subject, which he developed further conceptually and for which he eventually coined the term antifragility. The idea is usually explained in a threefold manner:

1. Fragility: We know what fragile means: that something which is fragile must be handled with care, that it cannot receive shocks or stress without sustaining damage or even being destroyed. Fine glassware is fragile, as an obvious example.

2. Resilience: Normally one would say that the opposite of fragility is resilience, or toughness: the ability to handle shocks and stress and not take much damage, or at least to recover quickly. A rubber sole is resilient, a piece of oak is resilient, etc.

3. Antifragility: Taleb's innovative idea is that resilience is not really the opposite of fragility. The true opposite of fragility would not be something which is more able to endure shocks or stress, but which would grow stronger due to them. With no good word to describe this property, Taleb made up a word: Antifragility. If you remember basic Greek mythology, there was a beast called a Hydra, which for every head cut off would grow multiple heads in its place. "Stress," in this case physical damage, was actually helpful to it. Another example would be the bones of a child: if they break, a properly healed bone is actually stronger at the previous breaking point than it was before the fracture.

The three-fold analogy of fragility, resilience, and antifragility is explained in a good summary article on the Art of Manliness. If this blog post interests you in the subject, that's a great place to start.

For now, suffice to say that while resiliency becomes very desirable when facing a time of rapid changes and above average stress, antifragility is the secret to those groups which don't merely weather the storms, but somehow seem to profit from them and come out stronger.

We see examples of this in the news today:

Muslim terror groups are often quite antifragile. The more Western military might tries to pulverize them, the more they melt away into the populace, recruiting more people to their cause due to collateral damage. Soon new cells pop up where none were before. It's the hydra all over again.

The stock market, on the other hand, is fragile. 2008 demonstrated what can happen when an entire economic system becomes fragile and is hit by a shock, in that case the housing lending bubble popping. The US economy is also fragile with regards to oil; any significant jump in the oil price and the whole taut system quivers anxiously.

This explains why somehow the mighty Western powers have found themselves unable to defeat a radical Islamic foe that is positively dwarfed in terms of military power and not really liked by anyone: The West is fragile with regards to dependence on oil, and antifragile radical groups are destabilizing the region where the oil is. We can't ignore them, then, for pragmatic if not moral reasons, but our previous strategies only seem to have made matters worse. Part of the reason we haven't defeated them is not because they are tougher than us, but because they are antifragile. While individual terrorists and radical muslim cells can be killed quickly, on the whole this strengthens their movement.

Fragility and Antifragility cannot be confused with weakness and strength either. Before the War in Iraq, Saddam's dictatorship was much stronger than the subversive elements in his territory, but it was also more fragile than they; once our both stronger and more resilient military wiped Saddam's forces off the map, the regime went down easily. The antifragile radical movements which took advantage of the chaos are not so easily dealt with, however, and will require different strategies.

Antifragility is often found in conjunction with small size, redundancy, decentralization, a willingness to take small risks if the chance of reward is good, and a focus on increasing one's available options.

With all this in mind, antifragility sounds like a great thing to pursue in one's personal life. But can it be related at all to our faith? Should a Christian even try to use this kind of "success" strategy? Let's take a look.

A Case for Christian Antifragility

1. Is it ungodly to strive for something like antifragility?

When talking about making our ministries or churches more robust, the first instinct is that this is of course a good thing. Then, sometimes, a "spiritual" objection arises: shouldn't we be focusing not on our own strength, but on dependency on God? "When we are weak, He is strong," after all.

My answer to this is that "when we are weak, He is strong" is not a command but an observation. Paul makes it in Second Corinthians after "boasting" of his qualifications and his suffering for God in 2 Cor 11 and 12. He then mentions his "thorn in the flesh," an enigmatic term which commentators have enjoyed guessing about for centuries, as a reminder from God that His grace is sufficient, for His power is made perfect in weakness. Paul says, with much grounds for boasting of his "street cred" as a gospel worker, that "to keep me from becoming conceited" (ESV; NET has "so that I would not become arrogant) he was given this thorn in the flesh to remind him of his own weakness. His boasting of his own weakness is therefore both a willing submission to God's reminder and a joyful proclamation of the strength of Christ, of whom Paul lives to preach.

And that is generally my response to this kind of objection. We don't need to strive to be weak, because like Paul, whatever we think we may have to boast about, we are already weak. God's power is made perfect in us when we recognize that weakness, when the illusion of our own tiny ability is seen for what it is, and we humbly rely on strength from God. A crumb on the lens of a telescope can obscure stars larger than our sun. It doesn't mean the crumb might not be big compared to other crumbs, but our perspective tempts us to compare it to the star, which is more ridiculous than we can comprehend.

2. Honoring God in our Ministries

All that is to say, any kind of argument that trying to make our churches and ministries stronger is inherently an attempt to take glory from God and give it to men, or to exalt ourselves and our strength against God's, is simply wrong. Those things might happen if we go about it the wrong way, or with the wrong motives, but it's not wrong to do the best job we can, in fact it's sinful not to attempt to. We are not to strive for weak ministries, but good and effective ones. Our weakness is something to bring before God as an obvious condition, not a property with which we ought to seek to imbue our efforts.

So if we are loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, we will not be ambivalent about setting up our ministries to function as well as we can, from the human standpoint, while praying always for the work of the Holy Spirit to accomplish the work in people's hearts that we cannot.

3. The Church is already Antifragile

And if we believe we have a responsibility to strengthen our churches and ministries, then, we should take note that God has already established the Church as an Antifragile institution.

In the early days of the faith, once Christianity was no longer viewed as an odd flavor of Judaism but a new, non-sanctioned faith that was rapidly spreading among the Roman populace, Roman emperors undertook campaigns to discourage or eliminate the growing Church.

From a human standpoint, the "stress" on the Church was very great; multitudes lost their property and were imprisoned, and many lost their lives as well.

(Note: I have not linked to the Wikipedia article on Roman Persecutions, as it seems mainly concerned that we understand the Christians were making an overly big deal about it and the Romans were just trying to keep order.. In general I suggest being cautious of Wikipedia these days; many of the editors who oversee page content are self-proclaimed activists who push the pages in the direction of their own views)

However, we have a saying, "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." (Tertullian)
The result of all those persecutions is that the Church grew very rapidly, both as the plight of believers drew attention and sympathy to their faith, and as they were often driven from one area to another, spreading the gospel to new areas it would have reached more slowly otherwise.

A similar thing happened in China during the closed years of the Cultural Revolution; when Christians came in from outside later, fearing the Church had been reduced or eliminated entirely, they found it had instead grown greatly during the difficult years.

To say, then, that the Church is antifragile, is not to deny that it was God's power that expanded and protected Her; antifragility is not a cause but a property, and the Church by its nature possesses this property, due to exactly what we discussed above: God's power is made perfect in weakness. This means the more desperate of circumstances we are reduced to, as a church, as the Church, or as individuals, the more we may see God do.

Therefore we see that "God's power is made perfect in weakness" is actually a bold revelation of startling truth. We thought the equation was:

"Do your best, and God will do the rest": 

But what Paul reveals is that in reality we have this:

"My power is made perfect in weakness": 

As you may remember from math class, as the denominator goes to zero, the value of the fraction goes to infinity. As our strength fails, there is no limit to what God can do.
This is not merely antifragility, but ultimate, supernatural antifragility.

Satan is very strong, but he is merely resilient. By the gift of "weakness," together with His power, God has made the Church so that the gates of hell truly may never prevail against it, by its very nature. This is why prosperity and ease are the most effective tools in the arsenal against the Church. Suffering and hardship actually make the Church stronger; of social influence, political power, and comfortable circumstances weaken it by hampering and slowing its development.

Antifragility for the Believer, Ministry, or Church

A. Church

So if the Church (the Body of Christ as a whole) is already antifragile, how about a church? How about your own local church?

Sadly, though the Church only grows stronger through persecution, individual churches may split over any number of issues, mostly strong personalities coming into conflict. This kind of "church multiplication" is not antifragile, it merely takes something fragile and breaks it into two fragile pieces.

A strong and healthy church, however, which reproduces itself, could be antifragile. A church of healthy and developing small groups of whatever form is already very resilient, and is probably antifragile. Any harm befalling the church, be it financial, loss of important people, etc., can not only be made up for by everyone coming together, but it is an opportunity for training and discipleship to be put into action. Someone may need to step into the old role.

A church seeking to be antifragile will have redundancy as well; a church with a human bottleneck (one or more indispensable people) is quite common, and may be quite efficient, but it's very fragile. Should that one or those key personnel be removed, the church might be in serious trouble. Rather than praying for God not to ever let that person be unable to perform in that role, then if they are unable to, putting it down to God's mysterious will that the church suffer all these problems (this is what the Muslims do with "Inshallah"... it's not at all a proper application of the doctrine of God's sovereignty), a church seeking to become less fragile will have that person train others to do what they do.
(That feeling of being indispensable is both pleasant and addicting for very many people, but it's not helpful to the survival of the church. It must be laid at the cross along with everything else)

So, two tips for an antifragile church:
1. Healthy, "real" small groups, with the goal of each being capable of functioning as a microchurch if necessary
2. Anyone with an important role in the church has trained at least one person to do what they do (it doesn't have to be perfect, or even well, they just need to be able to do it) Note that this includes the senior pastor. Most churches' weakest point is the senior pastor, because he's irreplaceable. Some churches never recover from the loss of an especially beloved or capable senior pastor.

B. Ministry

Many ministries are fairly fragile just by their nature, and will dissolve naturally if there is too much disruption. This is not necessarily a bad thing; a ministry should arise from the gifts and calling of individual believers joining together, and there will always be other opportunities to pursue for the Kingdom. But there are certain ministries, say a church plant, where it is highly desirable that the ministry should continue long term, or at least survive until the primary objective has been accomplished.

So one hopes that a long-term ministry would at least be resilient. But it would be even better if it could be antifragile. What if a church plant, upon encountering difficulties, did not fail but spawned off a second, successful ministry? What if the end result was that three cell churches were planted instead of one?

Pursuing antifragility gets trickier for a ministry, but it can be done. The easiest path is to first identify what would cause a ministry to fail if it were absent. This is not always obvious, but once identified, either the crucial elements are replaceable, or they are not. Often, in smaller ministries, they simply aren't. If you have one Evangelist, they can show you how they do what they do, and everyone can practice it, but they can't give you that spiritual gift. In that situation, we are simply back to our weakness and God's strength, and trusting that if He wills the ministry to continue, He will not let that crucial element be removed, or He will give others the ability to carry on that important part of the ministry.

On the other hand, sometimes redundancy is possible. If the ministry depends on one guy who knows how to set up sound equipment, he should teach someone else how to do it. That's an easy step.

Another important part of antifragility is to keep things from expanding out of control. If your ministry is trying to do three fairly different things, perhaps one should be spun off, with your blessing, into its own ministry. If there are people in common, they may be able to invite others to participate in the ministry and it will be a training opportunity.
The attitude is not consolidation, but multiplication.

Three tips for an antifragile ministry:
1. Be aware of what is absolutely crucial for the ministry to continue and make sure that stays in focus
2. Redundancy wherever possible
3. Keep things focused. Preference is on multiplication versus consolidation

C. Personal

This is the one most people talk about, so I'll talk about it the least. However I rarely see it coming from the perspective of one's walk with God, so there are some worthwhile issues to raise.

Once one is aware of the concept, the Bible is actually full of references to antifragility. Grape vines bear more fruit when they are pruned heavily. Jesus says that a seed cannot grow unless it dies (to being a seed), but once grown it can produce many seeds. Romans 5 speaks of the importance of suffering, which produces endurance, endurance character, and character hope. Thus suffering, something we typically try to avoid, produces the hope we are looking for. Avoiding the suffering may, surprisingly, be the reason you feel hopeless.

Therefore an attitude of embracing productive suffering, submitting willingly to the stress that causes an antifragile thing to become stronger, can produce a vital change in one's walk with God. If upon encountering difficulties, rather than asking the very natural questions that spring to mind: "Why is this happening to me? What sin is this punishment for? Does God really love me?" we can try changing the question to: "What is God teaching me through this?" In what way is this making me a better person and more effective servant for the Kingdom?" No one signs up for gym classes and then asks the instructor why he's making you suffer. The difference for Christians is that sometimes we don't realize we signed up to be made into the image of Christ.

If we recognize that letting God walk us through a series of ever-increasing challenges is precisely the process of spiritual growth He intends for us, we might even be willing to voluntarily leave our comfort zones, to ask God to lead us to tasks too big for us to handle as we are now. If comfort is our goal, we cannot grow to be more like Christ; we must embrace a certain level of discomfort in order to develop. I think that's what Paul was getting at with some of his athlete analogies: If we approach the spiritual life like an athlete approaches a marathon, the Christian life suddenly starts to make a lot of sense.

"God doesn't call us to be comfortable. He calls us to trust Him so completely that we are unafraid to put ourselves in situations where we will be in trouble if He doesn't come through." - Francis Chan

One could explore antifragility in the Christian life from innumerable other ways. (redundancy in one's personal walk, so that small things don't disrupt it; how we think of risk as believers; keeping our lives simple and flexible to serve God...) We'll save those for a future post. For now, check out the link near the top for the explanation of antifragility (actually here it is again), or find Taleb's book on Amazon if you want the full blown, way-too-much-information version.

"God isn't Fixing This"

Does God Care? 

After yet another grievous shooting, the NY Daily News is releasing a controversial cover, proclaiming in plus-sized font "God isn't fixing this." Clearly this is meant as a rebuke to those who claim "their prayers are with the victims" yet don't do the things the NY Daily News feels they should in order to reduce gun crime. I'm not interested in the politics here, let alone the grandstanding. "He who sits in the heaven laughs," not at the plight of humanity, but at those who would mock Him or set themselves against His authority. More interesting is that scripture clearly both states that the wicked will receive what they deserve, and has the Psalmist crying out asking God why that doesn't seem to be happening.

For the issue at hand, it suffices to say that as Christians we know men are sinful by nature, and are not corrupted by the tools around them. Perhaps we should investigate the breakdown of the family, the increasingly nihilistic worldview poured into the minds of our children, and a society become so antagonistic to human nature that mass percentages of people feel it necessary to be on antidepressants, before we start blaming tubes of metal for magically corrupting humans that secular society supposes are inherently neutral or even inherently good.

But what I'm interested in here is their intentionally provocative claim. Is God really doing nothing? Is He indifferent to humans killing each other, or is He powerless to interfere in our free will? This is often posed as an unanswerable question (Does God lack the will to stop evil, in which case He is not good, or the ability to stop it, in which case He is not great), but actually there is a perfectly good answer, that can be expressed in various ways.

So then, if God does care, and He is powerful enough to act, then...

Why God Doesn't Stop Evil or Fix the World (My personal analogy)

Ancient Chinese weaponry: one iron and two bronze swords

A Bit about Bronze

In Taipei, there is a fascinating museum of Chinese antiquities. Called the "National Palace Museum," some of China's great cultural treasures are stored there, brought by the nationalists both to hang on to them and ostensibly to keep them from being destroyed by the communists, for whom desecrating symbols of class oppression was a popular pastime and sometimes required symbolic act of allegiance.

In this museum you can see everything from very ancient jade wheels to the gold and pearl finial topping an Emperor's crown, to a piece of stone shaped exactly like a piece of pork and the most famous of all, the jade cabbage. (The food culture here goes back a very long way)

Another thing you can see are ancient bronze weaponry: swords, spear points, etc.

Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. A game-changing discovery of antiquity, it afforded its users an advantage over those using merely copper weapons, and remained popular even well after iron weapons were developed.

Among the various reasons that iron weapons -initially inferior to their well-developed bronze counterparts- superseded them, was due to cost issues. Once iron-working was developed, the abundant iron ore meant iron weapons were cheaper than bronze, which required the importation of tin.

Why couldn't you just get tin from used bronze weapons? Because it doesn't work that way. To separate metals once they have been alloyed is an expensive and complicated process, and at least to my knowledge there was no way to do this on a large scale (possibly at all).

Even today, with complicated procedures that can do it, it's obvious that to remove the tin from a bronze weapon destroys the weapon for all practical purposes.

Alloyed with Sin

This world was made good. Humans, in choosing to sin and step outside of God's will for them, not only destroyed their own spiritual life, but wrecked up the world too, meant as a beautiful home for people living in harmony with God and each other. Sin is not evil varnish, it is a flaw that goes to the core of people and the world. To remove it, you cannot strip it off, you cannot cut it off like a frostbitten finger; to get rid of the sin, the thing once pure and now an alloy of itself and sin must be unmade.

This is true of both of us and the world. To be made new, as Christ makes all things new, we must first be Unmade. Dying that we shall live; baptism is the earthly acting out of this truth, but then for the rest of our lives we must be melted down, put into the fiery furnace so that God may skim off the dross, and coming out each time more pure. This is sanctification.

While Christians are typically aware of this, I find that many are unaware that the world is in an analogous situation. We aren't fallen people in an unfallen world, we brought the world down with us. It too must be unmade and cleansed from the corruption of sin, but that will be the end.

"Fixing" the alloy of sin. True gold fears no fire; don't be dross.

One Day

When tin is removed from the bronze sword, the sword is no more. When sin is removed from this world, the world will be no more. Suffering and injustice will be judged and come to an end, but so will everything else.

I think what people are really asking is more like: "Why doesn't God take all the bad parts out of the world and leave the good parts?" That question is easy:
1) He made the world without any bad parts, but free will meant we could screw that up, and we did
2) Outside of Christ, you are a bad part that would be taken out.
3) He's giving everyone a chance to choose His side before he does exactly what you are suggesting

The fiery end that Peter speaks of (2 Peter 3) will happen, and a new heaven and new earth will be made including all that was pure from the last one. There's a reason that day is spoken of both with hope and with respectful fear; when it happens, it is final. The beginning spoken of in Genesis has its ending in Revelation, and what happens after that is part of the next book.  Hope your name is in it, or rejoice if you know it is.

Until then, as Peter speaks of in that same passages, that God is delaying in destroying the world to burn the sin out is a mercy to those who still have a chance to choose Him, and neither weakness nor toleration of sin on His part. If the end came now, there would be no more suffering, but no longer any opportunity to repent while there is still time.

So we pray: Come Lord Jesus. But increasingly I find myself saying "but not just yet"--I have too many friends who may yet choose God before the end, and I still hope to see it. Ending the suffering in the world today means denying them of that chance, forever.

Get Moving I - Holding the Line vs. Advancing the Kingdom

"Hold the Line" or "Advance the Kingdom"?

How do we in the Church balance a responsibility to "hold the line"--for doctrinal purity within churches, for resisting the decay in the culture outside of them, etc.-- with the responsibility of following the Great Commission? The first implies a defensive, static position, while the second is outwardly focused and concerned with advancing the spiritual kingdom of God on earth.

It would seem the two are in conflict, and while the idea of "missional"churches, and the ramifications of it, solves some of the problems, in this post I want to suggest a lot could be improved by simply changing the way Christians think about the problem, with a little help from an analysis of tactics strategy then offer a few steps to getting back into the battle where it's actually being fought.
First, a look at some the related issues:

1. Conservatism

The first issue I want to address is Conservatism. Most people identify this with political conservatism, but the cultural phenomenon of conservatism in America is broader than politics. I strongly believe one problem in the American evangelical church (and perhaps others) is that of conservatism, again not politically but as an approach to life and ministry and "being the Church."

A reckless and overly aggressive attitude Church-wide would of course be a problem, but as per Screwtape and the people wielding fire extinguishers in a flood, it does not seem to be the special problem of our time to be primarily guarded against. On the contrary, there seems to be a default tendency to avoid action because of uncertainty, lack of clear direction, and the desire to avoid potentially costly failures. This kind of reflexive conservatism, a fear of moving lest we move wrong, actually hinders the Church's work a great deal. If "don't rock the boat," "be careful," "don't make people uncomfortable," "don't go overboard," "we'll think about it (please go away)," is the default attitude in those churches which most revere and promote careful attention to scriptural truth, it's no wonder that around the world it is not conservative and evangelical but charismatic churches which are seeing most of the rapid growth.

In the US, in this new era which began roughly with 9/11, the cultural situation looks different for millennials. They are not fighting to conserve, but either to carve out stable lives in an increasingly unstable culture, if they're self-motivated, or simply remain in their current situation, if they're not. The system of comparative stability inherited by previous generations has finally begun to break down, and so conservatism is less appropriate than building anew, something which is more suited to weather the dark times that seem to be coming and the instability that is already becoming normal.

So my contention with regard to conservatism and the Church is that we may have found ourselves in the position of making great efforts to keep alive a beloved, mighty oak whose roots are all but dead, but which is still covered in acorns each year. I believe we should be less concerned with keeping the old tree going another year than with planting those acorns as fast as we can. Take pride, if you must, not in the grand old oak, but in fields of new saplings. Some won't grow into strong, healthy trees, but many will.
Now is not exactly the time to be conservative, then; we need to be active, intentional, and busily preparing for the future more than regretting what we've lost or fearing change we can't stop anyway.

2. Zeal vs. Fear

That brings us to the second issue. Continuing the oak tree analogy, despite the need for a new forest, there are those who for various reasons are very ambivalent about the work of planting new trees to begin with. In the parable of the wheat and the tares, instead of accepting the regretful loss of a few healthy wheat sprouts as an acceptable exchange for getting rid of those invasive weeds, his landowner commands that they be allowed to grow up together. The point is not a flawless field, the point is the wheat. I believe we may be in a situation where in many conservative evangelical churches today people are perplexed with a small and shrinking harvest but nevertheless point with pride to our immaculate church fields, where all our time and effort has gone into making sure all the weeds are eradicated before any new seed is put out. (On the other hand, many churches avoid even mentioning what happens to weeds at the harvest, for fear any of them might take offense)

Planting more churches, spreading the gospel actively (while none of these things are illegal yet)... all these things engage us in the harvest work we are called to as a Church. It may even be that we should be giving thanks for this season; not as a fearful time of corrosion of the Church's cultural influence, but as a time when overgrown fields everywhere are waiting to be planted and harvested, and we can simply rise up and do so. (That especially while we can see to the East, smoke rising off burning fields.)

So we should plant with zeal while we can, advancing into new fields and not spending all our energy in "holding the line" against the influence of weeds from the next field over. Maybe one field even gets slightly overrun and in need of serious attention, but in the mean time we have planted four new ones, and can now return and attend to it. If Paul had spent his whole life in Antioch to make sure that church stayed perfect, we wouldn't have a global Church today; our times are more like Acts than we know.

3. There are Two Lines

It's clear, then, that we can neither be apathetic about holding the line of truth with regards to what is taught and preached in our churches, nor lax in our efforts to advance the kingdom by planting more churches and taking the gospel into our communities. Both things must be attended to, and how can we do that, with churches full of "attendees" plus a small core of already over-worked volunteers?
It may be that in this decade, we need to overthrow the 80-20 (or even 90-10) rule; if the church is to survive, thrive and do the work it's called to do, it cannot be primarily composed of Christians who consider showing up regularly on Sunday mornings to be the majority of their Christian duty.
Even a shift to a third of church-goers deciding they weren't content to simply sit and listen, but demanded to be involved in taking what they learned and putting it into practice, and teaching others to do the same, would mean a massive increase in manpower and what the Church was capable of.

This dance of holding the line and advancing the kingdom is not a zero-sum game, however. More of one does not automatically mean less of the other. That is because, in reality, they are of course two different lines.

Think of a war: there is a line of battle, perhaps several, and a line further back which denotes secured territory. The line that protects doctrinal purity, that ensures our foundation remains biblical truth--that line must be held. But the line that expands out into a fallen world in need of light--that line must advance.

To win battles, both things must be happening at the same time. You must take ground, hold it, and keep it secure. You cannot take new ground by holding the line, and you cannot keep it secure by moving your troops away somewhere else.

Aha, you may say, but then they do detract from each other, because you need troops to do either the one or the other. In a physical battle that's true. In a church, it is to be hoped that some of the same people capable of recognizing and defending against false teaching are also capable of taking the gospel out into new territory. In fact, being good in one area hopefully implies one is skilled in the other as well. In a healthy church, there will be priority given to having these experienced warriors training others to walk in the same way.

Hold here or advance?

4. "The Line" vs. "Maneuver Warfare"

I think there's a better picture we can use, however, for this ongoing battle. While within the church there is absolutely a doctrinal line which cannot be compromised, perhaps in terms of engaging our culture, advancing the kingdom into our communities, the appropriate image should not be "a line" at all.

In World War I, the infamous "trenches" were lines held against the enemy, with a no man's land in between into which few could venture and return alive. Early artillery pounded, machine guns rattled, and soldiers fought to hold positions and keep from being overrun, with such horrific casualties and suffering that it shook Europe to its philosophical core.

When we talk about "culture wars," we could extend the analogy to these front lines. (I believe I've actually heard the phrase "on the front lines of the culture wars" used more than once) A lot of American Christians seem to have internalized this idea. If you understand this, it makes more sense why seemingly innocuous things like coffee cups and chicken sandwiches can become massively controversial: small things in and of themselves, they represent a feint or real thrust across the (constantly narrowing) no man's land of cultural neutrality. If not rebuffed, perhaps ground will be lost, and lost ground means a new foothold for the enemy.

A "holding the line" mentality means Christians have 1) blurred the kingdom of God and the cultural footprint of the Church (not the same thing), and 2) tacitly admitted than cultural conditions are too scary, and they are not really thinking of making progress anymore. Enemy trenches in what was, until fairly recently, neutral territory (things like "the Arts," and "the Sciences") and historically constructed largely by the Church itself, are ground so long not occupied that they have become unfamiliar anyway, and possibly dubious. (Maybe that's not ground we even want to hold. We can build our own little versions of them, over here on our side.)

But let's fast-forward to World War II now. The Germans have developed a new theory of tactics, called maneuver warfare. While the initially powerful French army, still thinking in terms of "lines," has spent vast amounts of resources and effort constructing the impressive Maginot Line, the Germans have decided that lines need not be overrun by force, when they can simply be evaded and attacked from an angle of their choosing. You may remember the history: the Germans simply used their tanks to drive around the Maginot Line and through Belgium. France fell within two months.

I have often seen the technological aspect emphasized here (the innovation of armored tanks changing warfare) but in this case the much more important thing is the core idea: "Your lines will not determine where the battle happens; we will determine that."

A Tiger Tank in occupied France.

There is a two-fold lesson here for the Church:

1. Culturally, there is no "line" to hold.
There may once have been; no longer. Forget it. Regardless of what you believe about America being founded as a Christian nation or as a secular nation with Christian influence, right now in 2015, America is "The World" (As in, "The Devil, the Flesh, and...") and we need to stop talking about "taking 'our' culture back."
Like Germany vs. France, the Enemy has not countered the influence of Christianity in the culture by drawing up an entrenched line of battle against it, he's simply driven all over the place and taken over. He owns the battleground, and already does in this world by default, until Christ's spiritual victory is made terrestrially manifest.
(That is what the Church in Europe attempted to do prematurely, by flawed, time-and-culture-bound human effort, therefore creating a "Christendom" at once as glorious as cathedrals and as miserable as serfs. God's eternal version improves on the cathedrals yet elevates His serfs above the angels. Wait for it. Trust me, you don't want a theocracy before the actual Second Coming)

Think of the times recently when the church finds itself in conflict with mainstream culture over an issue, doesn't it usually seem to be behind the times, caught off guard and trying to catch up? That's not because Christians are stupid and backward (of course some people are, inside and outside the Church, but that's always been true), and not because the gospel is irrelevant to today's culture, but because the enemy has been picking the battles, having them occur at the time and place of his choosing. It may also be due to the fact that as the culture increasingly rejected Christian values, the church increasingly retreated from culture as well, losing a sense of what the big issues are outside its protective cloister walls while we argued about worship music styles within.

2. If we sit behind a line of our own imagining, we do so merely to the Church's detriment.
Since the enemy has not confined himself to any sort of line, if we are still thinking in those terms, we are merely restricting our own actions to a failing and outdated conceptualization. Meanwhile, as mentioned above, there are acres and acres of fields, formerly full of wheat, now lying overgrown and dormant, on the other side of that line. We can either languish behind a shrinking area of cultural influence, observing which denominations and cultural institutions seem to still fall on our side, and which have "gone over" to the enemy's side, or we can discard that outdated concept and start thinking of all spirit-filled, scripture-honoring churches as individual outposts in the midst of a dark and darkening culture. The light there, if it is there, will shine more and more brightly as the storm gathers. Our goal is not to control, but illuminate; therefore it should be getting easier, not harder. As the culture increasingly teaches people we are wrong and dangerous, if we are following Christ, we will appear increasingly right and whole. People will be drawn to the Truth even having been taught to shun it.

5. A Path Out of the Trenches

So then, if we want to break out of the trenches in this so-called culture war, both because the important battles are being fought elsewhere now, and also because that's not really the battle the Church is called to fight, what do we do?

Reading this, ideas may already be occurring to you. Not radical ways to reinvent the Church, which seldom take hold widely. But simple things every Christian can begin changing in the way they look at the world, that will help them begin impacting people for Christ in their own context.

Here, I will just list a few steps to get you going.
(Points if you already recognize the reference...)

Step 1. Observe
As I have explained, some churches are still sitting behind the line of a battle which has moved elsewhere. If you're still down there, you need to get out of the trenches and find out where people are right now. Some Christians have non-churched friends and know how they think differently about life and what they do with their time, and are evangelizing over the long term by bringing scriptural truth into their lives and being good witnesses. A lot of Christians spend all their extra time on Church activities and with other Christians, however, and don't have a clear idea about what goes on in the wider culture. They've grown up in an alternate, parallel culture behind the lines. They may not know what unchurched people do, or how they think, and their attempts to reach them may be based on godly intentions but also a fair amount of ignorance.
While I never unspecifically recommend giving up ministry obligations, I can state without equivocation that if you actually don't have any friends outside of church, you are not being obedient to God in this area and need to fix that. God did not give you His love and truth for you to keep them to yourself and among those who already know Him; the Great Commission is quite clear that He intends us to let the entire world know about His offer of reconciliation, love, and life.

So try going to popular places and seeing how the majority of people in your neighborhood, community, or city spend their time. Have conversations with strangers. Do a little research about your area's demographics and neighborhoods. Equip yourself with some knowledge of what things are like in the environment in which God has placed you.

Step 2. Orient
Not a reference to the Far East where I live, but of orienting yourself. In this step, taking what you found in step 1, you combine your observations with what you already know. Pray thoughtfully about how God would have you, and if appropriate, your family too, engage the people around you for His kingdom. What are your talents and your background? Is God giving you a burden for a need that exists in your community? You don't have to strike off on your own with no experience (I don't actually recommend that), so what ministries may already exist that you can join to get more experience in that area?

Step 3. Decide
Make a decision. You may want to ask wise and experienced people you know for advice, ask friends and family to pray for you, etc. What is God leading you to do? Are you already involved in ministry and have no more time? Maybe you are called to stay there. Maybe God is calling you to ask about starting something new at your church, or maybe there's something another church is doing that's in line with what you feel drawn towards, and it's a change for you to introduce a link of cooperation between two churches. You may decide to get more training in a certain area. You may even decide to do nothing for now, and repeat steps 1 and 2.

Step 4. Act
Now the decision has been made, and it's time to get moving. You may be starting something new and need to begin gathering resources and volunteers, or be joining something already in progress. It may be a slow gradual beginning, or you may be off to a running start in a ministry with which you're already familiar. What you do is up to you and God, but I will say this: If it's successful, watch out. Progress in ministry and advancing God's kingdom puts a target on your back. Don't let fear slow you down, but be alert and pray. Old temptations may return, or new ones may arise. People who previously seemed friendly may suddenly seem like they are putting obstacles in your way, or even jealous of your progress. On the other hand, other people will almost certainly appear as unexpected help and blessings.
When something great happens, write it down. (I'm guilty of not doing this enough) When difficult times come later, you can remind yourself of what God has done.

"Going over the top"... out of the trenches and into combat

That's all I've got for now. I'm tired of the nit-picking debates on who exactly said what appropriately and non-offensively, tired of the gloom-and-doom talk of our declining culture; it's time we stopped focusing on what we can't change and begin focusing on what we definitely can, in whatever context God has placed us.