Chan's Personal Blog

This entry is a continuation of where I left off last time in the article, "Live The Difference Conference - Pt 1". Just a quick intro for those who are just joining us. I went to the Live The Difference Conference last month which was hosted at Colwood Pentecostal Church. It was a conference geared towards Christian youth and young adults. The conference had a mix of general sessions / worship, and workshops throughout the weekend.

Anyways, in this installment, I'm going to talk about a workshop that I attended which was entitled, "The Volunteer Revolution" which was given by Bryn Huzzey. A few people from my youth group wanted to go to this one, but there was another workshop that was equally interesting, so if you missed it, here it is.

The Consumer Christian

The first thing that the speaker talked about was a class of Christians he identifies as the Consumer Christian. These are people who wander around churches with a consumer mentality, they're looking for a bargain. They hop from church to church seeking better services, better worship, and they're looking to be spiritually fed. When they feel like they're not being fed enough at a church, they leave and move on. The problem is that with this mentality, you'll feel less and less satisfied as you never take root in a church and grow. This mentality keeps people shallow as they're only interested in looking for good times. The instant a storm approaches at a church, they disappear.

I'll pause here to put in some remarks. One of the reasons why I think The Oasis (our youth group) is going to succeed is that it has a solid core group. This group of people has decided to stick around in the church all these years, even during the rough times. Let's just say the last five years at church has been rough, at one point the congregration size was down to 30 people a week because a lot of people were leaving. Anyways, the core group has survived the storm. My youth pastor has remarked a few times that he's heard some of our past personal experiences about the church, and he's shocked that some of us has stayed. In my optimistic opinion, the future can't be any worse than the past.

Anyways, back to the workshop, and about Consumer Christians. He went on to say that it's usually the Consumer Christians who complain about things in the church. His next statement was kind of profound, he said, "You've heard the phrase, if you didn't vote, you can't complain about the government. I'm telling you that you can't complain about the church if you're not building it." When you are helping build the church, then you are entitled to your opinion because you can affect change. When you're not building, you're merely a spectator that's heckling.

He then moved on to say that it was important for this generation not to follow the patterns of the Consumer Christian because we are the future church, we are the future leaders. Yet, it is very contradictory to society's selfish norms, as this society is very self-centered, very inwardly focused. A good way to counter this is to volunteer your gifts and plant yourself in the church and help build it up. He said the Great Commission wasn't restricted just to paid church staff members alone, a lot of it rests on volunteers.

Not In Full-Time Ministry != Bad

A misconception that he wanted to clear up is that you're not any less when you're not called into full-time ministry. God can make use of lay people as well.

This statement resonated with me. I remember a former youth pastor asking me to volunteer my entire summer to help him start up some program. I declined because I had summer school (not because I'm dumb, there's no such thing as summer vacation in my university program). Anyways, he put me though this guilt trip saying oh, you're not putting God first, or, oh you can take the summer off. This was not a realistic request, and I didn't feel drawn to that particular ministry that he was trying to start up. He even went as far as saying, oh you can't let your dad pressure you into going to school. That was a low blow. At this point, I lost all respect for him, but it really bugged me. I make my own decisions sir. Anyways, it was nice to hear that you don't have to be in full-time ministry and still be effective.

The speaker illustrated this point very well. He told a story about a man called William Wilberforce. He was a British member of parliament who became an evangelical Christian in 1784. He deeply desired to serve God, and considered becoming a full-time minister or something. However, he felt that God wanted to use him in politics.

William Wilberforce became deeply involved in social issues because of his moral convictions. In particular he felt that slavery in the British empire was wrong, and he pushed a bill to abolish slavery in 1791. The social reality at the time was that the British were getting rich off slaves, so it wasn't going to be abolished any time soon. The bill failed miserably. Year after year, Mr. Wilberforce pushed the bill, but it always failed. However, this sparked discussion within the public about the evils of slavery, and how it was unjust. William Wilberforce died in July 29, 1833, and he never saw his dream come true. However, the very next month after his death, the bill to abolish slavery finally passed in the house. Public opinion had finally changed. Instantly, 800,000 slaves were freed throughout the British empire. They now call William Wilberforce, "The Liberator."

This is an example where a layman, driven by his beliefs in God, ended a chapter of human injustice. Perhaps he wouldn't have been able to affect as many people if he decided to be a minister (a religious minister, not a political minister).

Anyways, it was an inspirational story, and it shows that not everyone has to be a priest to do good works for God. The speaker emphasised that there's a corner of the world where no one can reach except you.

Tonight we had a fairly unique Good Friday service at The Oasis. There were three parts of the service, the worship, the message, and the communion. The communion service was refreshingly different. It wasn't your standard corporate communion where everyone sits in their seats, and waits for the communion bread and juice to come by, and then everyone eats at the same time.

Instead, there were four stations set up at the front of the church. At each station was a Bible opened to a certain passage of reading, and a few inspirational quotes. This I liked a lot as I like quotes very much (see bottom of this webpage if you want proof). In either case, an individual would travel individually from one station to the next (if it was free) until he finished all four. The first station was a station for reflection. It is essentially a place to make peace with God before you took communion. The second station was a reading of the last supper, and what the bread represented. At that station, there were actual loaves of bread which were different (usually we have these wafer things). After reading everything and praying, you ate the bread, and then moved on. The next station was a reading about what the wine represented. Again, after reading and praying, you drank the juice. The last station represented celebration. There you celebrate what Jesus had done for you. In addition, the station had a journal where you could write what God inspired you to write, or to say what God had done for you. In general, each station took about four or five minutes to complete.

The only bottleneck was at the last station with the journal. Some people decided to write novels, while others wrote one-liners. Maybe more journals for next time? Being a geek, maybe an electronic journal like this weblog would be kind of neat. It would allow for concurrency as multiple people could be writing at the same time. In addition, it would allow people to peruse the journal at a later date at a time of convenience. I for one have never actually read the contents of this journal before.

Anyways, communion worked really well. It felt like a mini-pilgrimage or something. I think changing the format of communion while preserving its meaning and content worked well. I have to admit growing up in church, some rituals are done so many times that they lose meaning over time because it becomes this automatic reflex, the mind is on auto-pilot during some of these. However, this format was nice as it felt a lot more intimate and interactive.

During this communion, I was able to participate without worrying about sound levels and what not, because we threw on a DVD of a worship concert featuring Delirious and Hillsong United. This was kind of nice, as the music team and company were able to enjoy this unique experience fully. Meanwhile, everyone else could enjoy the worship music while waiting for communion.

Quite a few people showed up for this event as well...

Yup, you guessed it, the horde was over again today..... grrrr.

In either case, I thought it was time for another article about church. Today's article is based on an awe inspiring prayer that I heard called The Patriot's Prayer. It is a prayer read by Nolan Clark who is a pastor that operates in B.C. Some of you may have heard him before, as he has come to Victoria before for a conference. The prayer is spoken with Braveheart style music in the background which makes it all that much more epic. The whole thing is produced by a web design studio called Red Ant Digital Creativity which is based in Kamloops. I wish I could produce multimedia like they do.

This prayer was inspiring to me because it is a fairly unique prayer. It is essentially a call to arms to Christians in this invisible spiritual war that we are engaged in. The style of this prayer seems to be inspired by Braveheart and The Patriot, both movies that I love dearly. The prayer draws parallels to war which is interesting to me because it is something that I study a lot about. Every generation has its great epic struggle. In either case, whenever I am down or stressed, I put this on to pick me back up.

Download available here. [MP3 File, 10 megs. Right click on link and go save target as.]

Here's a partial transcript of the patriot's prayer:


I think this prayer paints a very vivid picture of the conflict. One of the multimedia ideas I had for this was to accompany this prayer with movie clips from the Lord of the Rings. I can't help picturing a king rallying his soldiers on the even of battle, and at the end, ordering his calvary to charge. The Lord of the Rings definitely has some breathe taking footage of calvary charging against a superior force. This might be a nice multimedia presentation for youth group or something.

Anyways, hopefully someone out there finds this useful.

Tonight was a social night at The Oasis. The night was advertised as a food and movie night. I came early to setup the audio/visual gear for the movie (big screen... woot!). We then started setting up the couches and chairs anticipating an average number of people to show up.

While I was running around scavanging for RCA cables, a group of four new people showed up. Before the night began, all the couches were already occupied. Okay, time to haul in another couch, and more and more new faces were showing up.

Then the food convoy arrived. And the secret ingredient for tonight was (dramatic pause) PIZZA. It was a make your own pizza night. Kudos to Sarah the Hottie, and Bethany the Beauty (there, I said it, you happy now?) for getting that organized, and anyone else that helped you out. Good pizza.

More new people continued showing up.

The feature film of the night was Napoleon Dynamite. I knew it was a movie about some geeks in high school, but it wasn't what I expected. It was like a movie about nothing, yet it had its moments. The way that the director showed these random scenes of mundane events of the character's life kind of reminded me of Kill Bill in a way.

In either case, when the dust settled, I think there were about 30 people that showed up. More than a third of the people were new. That is quite the growth. This is great as I am awful at remembering new people's names. Hey......uhhh.......you, how's it going?

Anyways, something is happening. This may be the beginning of serious growth to the youth group. Numbers don't matter too much, but this does represent a milestone.