March 11, 2025 • 38 mins
- Steven Felix-Jager's The Problem & Promise of Freedom: A Public Theology for the Church
- Amos Yong's Mission After Pentecost
- Amos Yong's Beyond the Impasse
- Amos Yong's Discerning the Spirit(s)
- Amos Yong's The Future of Evangelical Theology
- Amos Yong's The Missiological Spirit
- Amos Yong's Pneumatology and the Christian-Buddhist Dialogue
- Christopher Wright's The Mission of God
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Guys, we have a special announcement.
(00:02):
Yeah. Steven, your book is out.
Yes. A book that I've been working on for a long time.
Looking forward for a long time.
We actually have mentioned it like a million times in our podcast,
but it is finally out.
This is my first public theology.
Now, so brave.
The two of you guys who have followed my work,
you know that I do more of like the worship,
(00:22):
aesthetics and theology and stuff.
This is my first foray into public theology.
A lot of the topics we talk about in TikTok Theology are in it.
The book is called The Problem and Promise of Freedom.
It's available for purchase, Amazon, wherever you buy stuff.
It came out from Baker Academic.
I'm super excited about it.
Please go check it out.
(00:45):
Welcome to TikTok Theology,
a podcast that tackles the major trending topics on social media
that concern the Christian faith.
I'm Meagan.
And I'm Steven.
We know you can't form a theology in three minutes or less,
but those videos can identify current issues.
TikTok will give us the prompt and then we'll do a deep dive.
Thanks for joining us in this exploration.
(01:06):
Hey, team. Welcome back.
Today, we're going to be chit-chatting about global missions
without underlying bold italics, without colonization.
That's a tough one.
It is a tough one.
It's a tough conversation to have.
It's not really tough when you break down what we mean by that.
I'll tell you that much.
With our very, very, especially special guest
that we'll get into in a minute.
(01:26):
But I think especially with the age of social media,
the conversations, even about maybe things that have happened
in the past, have get brought up all the time.
And this is still a current issue, of course,
but for the last, you know, 500 years,
colonization has been a huge narrative.
I mean, so many people groups,
like places in Asia and Africa and Latin America,
(01:48):
have been colonized,
especially when it comes to the West
and what the Western civilizations have done, right?
And then often it's under the guise of Christianity.
Not always, but often.
Not always, but often and enough that it's...
Become a problem.
Become a problem, for sure.
And it's a conversation that comes up all the time.
Post-colonial studies are essentially,
(02:09):
it's a field that looks at that.
And like, what are the narratives
of not the dominant culture that colonized,
but what about the narratives of the people who were colonized?
Colonized, exactly.
And so it brings up discourse and stuff,
especially in theology and in politics and stuff like that, right?
Which we just got out of a very political season,
where how do we do missions?
How do we engage with the spirit of God?
(02:30):
How do we evangelize well
in a way that isn't colonization?
Right, because we were still commissioned.
Right, we're still called to go.
We're still called to the ends of the earth
and all of that, which we see in the Great Commission.
But how are we gonna do that in a way
that is actually empowering to indigenous cultures
and isn't now you have to look like me?
(02:50):
And that has been, I think, something that notoriously
Christians have not been very good at.
And I would argue still aren't super great at
in a lot of ways and has caused a lot of hurt.
A lot of people feel a lot of pain when it comes to Christians
because they've seen colonization at its worst.
Yeah, and sometimes they might not even know
that they're doing it.
They might not even know that they're not sharing the gospel,
(03:12):
but they're sharing a very particular Western gospel
or something, you know?
Right, it's so common.
And so we're gonna bring in a special guest
to really talk with us who this is his soapbox
and we love to get people on here
whose soapbox are the topics that we're discussing.
So Stephen, who are we having with us today?
We have the one and only Amos Yong.
Woohoo!
Now Amos Young is one of the greatest theologians
(03:34):
in the world in my humble opinion.
In our humble opinion at this moment in time.
He's definitely like a top three
on your list of Pentecostal theologians all the time.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
You know what I mean?
Like there's like the Jordan, LeBron, Kareem, Kobe kind of thing.
He's up there.
He's at minimum the Kobe.
He's excellent.
We've had him at LPU and speak before.
So he's a friend of ours, a friend of...
(03:55):
Somewhat of a mentor to me.
Now I never actually studied under him,
but I met him at conferences and talked to him.
And he was just so generous with his time,
taking his time out to just like offer me
a bunch of food for thought.
Even though I never actually had him as a professor,
I'm honored to call him, you know, a friend
and a mentor.
So just tell you a little bit about him.
(04:17):
He is a Malaysian-American Pentecostal theologian.
And he's a professor of theology and mission
at Fuller Theological Seminary.
He served as the Dean of the School of Theology
and School of Intercultural Studies,
but currently he is directing the D-Min
for Pentecostal and charismatic studies.
So he's awesome, has written so many books.
I mean, it's like, pfft, I don't even know,
(04:38):
like into fifties or something.
Love it.
Like it's an absurd amount.
It's an absurd amount.
Yeah, he's just a very prolific dude.
And this is so important to him
because he's written about missions.
He's written about the Holy Spirit
and the work all over the world that the Spirit does
and how we tap into that.
We recorded this interview a little while back
and I can't wait for you guys to hear it.
So check it out.
(04:59):
All right, let's welcome Amos Yong.
Welcome to the show.
You are such an important person in my life
as a academic mentor and it's just such an honor
to be able to have you here talking about
one of your main passions and that's missions.
Good to be here.
All right, so the first question that we have
is when we talk about global missions without colonization,
(05:21):
I'd love for you to just talk a little bit
about what the problem is,
why we're talking about this as something
that we need to do without colonization.
So in other words, is it possible for us
to spread the gospel globally without imposing
our Western cultural, economic, or political ideologies?
Yeah, well, thanks for the question.
Nothing like a red juicy one to get started, right?
(05:43):
Yeah.
Jump right into it.
Well, and certainly I think the question
of colonization itself is a complicated one.
In some respects, it describes a process
that extends the last 500 plus years
and that process itself is also multi-layered, multi-faceted.
(06:05):
There were lots of good things that happened
as a result of, let's say, European or Western journeys
to what we now call Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Assumptions that were made,
there were certainly also actions
that were taken by Europeans,
including those different kinds of Europeans
(06:26):
that participate in these journeys for different reasons,
including Christians, including missionaries
who went to the ends of the earth, so to speak, right?
Caring the answer to what they understood it.
Lots of complicated issues.
I think part of the big question is, in a sense,
not really can we do it without colonization
(06:47):
in the sense that as if it never happened,
but give everything that didn't happen,
all the good things and a lot of the not so good things
where Europeans undermine local cultures around the world
or where Europeans separated families
and took kids away and put them in boarding schools
(07:07):
and destroyed not only those cultural histories,
but the families, the languages, and so on and so forth.
So lots of very horrific things as well, right?
All of that happened.
And so part of the task before is, what does mission mean?
How do we engage in the mission of God
in ways that on the one hand, doesn't just dismiss,
(07:30):
well, those were in the past,
they no longer happen today,
but how do we take forth the good,
I mean, the mission is good news, the gospel,
then how do we really carry it forth
with that history behind us?
And in many respects, informing already who we are
and what we do, being alert to that,
being attentive to the results, the effects of history,
(07:56):
and yet not give up on God's mission, right?
I think those are the complicated questions of reformers.
It's when I necessarily cease to be evangelist,
but what does the good news mean in light of that history?
And how do we retell that in a new way
or new times, new audiences, so to speak,
(08:16):
and new dynamics in place,
but without just sort of ignoring
or putting everything under the carpet, so to speak.
Yeah, that's great.
That actually leads perfectly to my next question.
So in your work, you have spoken
about intercultural dialogue, really from the jump.
Your first book, Descerning the Spirits,
was talking about that beyond the impasse,
(08:37):
you're really exploring how the Holy Spirit
might allow us to enter into dialogues
that we might not have been able to
if we really take a numerological approach.
But then one of your more recent books,
Mission After Pentecost, I feel like you did sort
of a labor for the academy in this.
You basically trace the spirit on mission
(08:58):
throughout the entire Bible.
Like so from Genesis to Revelation,
took thematically there.
But then really towards the end, like your conclusion,
you talked about what mission might look like
in our late modern world
and really kind of approached the idea
that something that me and Megan talk about all the time
of just having a good witness
(09:19):
and just a witness itself should generally be the focus.
So I wonder, can you explain for us
a little bit this concept of messio spiritus
that you talk about in that book
and how that might differ a little bit
from previous or older, mythological models?
Yeah, so coming from the Pentecostal church,
Pentecost tradition, tradition,
(09:41):
as a theologian, my journey into the theological academy
was sort of trying to follow up the question of,
here's how we experienced the Holy Spirit in my church,
in my grown up, in my denomination,
in our lives, including missionally,
how do we think through that theologically, right?
And so I wanna kind of take a two-step approach here
(10:02):
because I think you're right that
from the very beginning of my work going back now,
man, I'm old, it's almost something 30 years.
And but from the very beginning of my work,
it's not only been what you call the intercultural,
which is surely includes that,
but it's also been what I call the interreligious.
And at that time, 30 years ago,
I was really motivated by the question of kind of
(10:23):
discovering for the first time that
because of my East Asian or Chinese ancestral
and family background, we were first,
I was, I guess I would be the first full-genre
or second generation of Christians.
My parents were first generation converts from,
they were born in Malaysia, I was born in Malaysia,
they were born in Malaysia.
(10:45):
Chinese descent converts to Pentecostal Christianity
under missionaries from,
as someone's got missionaries from Northern California,
you know, came to Malaysia
and that's how my parents came to know Christ.
As first, my parents being first generation
at a hospital converts in this way,
we always looked at our Christian faith
(11:07):
as being the new direction of life,
having turned, repented from,
turned, converted away from what we were before
to word Christ.
And so all the things that we turned away from
was of that Chinese cultural heritage.
And so we never talked about that much.
I just assumed that we were Christians,
but when I was a grad student,
(11:27):
I began to learn that in our home,
we lived out Confucian filial piety.
In our home, my dad led us to,
he led us in a way that sought to avoid extremes
and I learned that was the Buddha's middle way.
In our home, I learned that my dad,
I learned from looking at my dad deal with the challenges
and problems of life.
(11:47):
How we always took the path of least resistance
and that's the Taoist Wu Wei,
sort of allowing,
watch how water flows down our creek
and adapts to the terrain, right?
And that's the Taoist Wu Wei.
We never used that language to talk about
who we were growing up,
but I began to discover that there were these East Asian
(12:10):
dimensions to who I was as an individual
and who our family was as East Asian immigrants
to North America and that made me very interested
about the religious other.
And so the intercultural other and the interreligious other
began, became important for me.
And I actually discovered their voice
by rethinking the Pentecost narrative.
(12:33):
So the day of Pentecost,
I think we all, most of us Pentecostals,
we go back to that narrative.
Yeah, definitely.
You know, it kind of is where our name comes from,
but Luke, the narrator of the book of Acts describes
how on the streets of Jerusalem
(12:54):
in that day, 2000 years ago,
there were people from every nation,
it always says Jews from every nation under heaven
that were gathered there.
So by that time, it was 600 years into what we now call
what even then was called the Jewish diaspora
where Jews were taken off to Syria,
they were taken off to Kaldia,
they were taken off to Babylon, 700, 600, 500 years before that,
(13:15):
they settled, they grew communities there.
Large parts of the Old Testament
are about prophetic messages in those contexts
in which then Jewish,
then second, third, fourth, fifth generation Jewish kids,
you know, grew up away from their homeland, right?
And so on the day of Pentecost,
all these Jews were kind of re-gathered back in Jerusalem
(13:37):
from every nation under heaven.
That's a little bit of a hyperbole, right?
But the point is that we have Jews
from all these cultural contexts.
And when the spirit was poured out
on the streets of Jerusalem,
as the disciples were there interacting with the crowd,
the crowd basically, again,
all these Jews from every nation under heaven said,
hey, we hear them speaking in our own languages.
(13:59):
And it runs off about 16 different either regions
of the world, of the known world,
or people groups that came from those regions.
And reflecting, they were saying,
we hear them in our own languages.
And at the end of that narrative,
(14:20):
the Lucas recording,
you know, what was happening,
he was saying that we hear them declare the wondrous works
of God in all of these different languages.
It was very, very confusing.
It describes the crowd as being bewildered and confused
and amazed and astonished.
And the question was,
(14:41):
we don't understand what's going on here.
Help us to understand all of this.
And, you know, in many ways,
I mean, that kind of reflects the way in which I think today
in our own, you know,
we all grew up in certain communal bubbles,
cultural bubbles or linguistic bubbles, you know?
And we only know what we know.
And as we grow older,
and now of course in the time of the internet,
(15:02):
I think it's interesting how in the information age,
you know, we have the streets of Jerusalem
are not just cobblestones,
but they're digitally mediated, right?
So we have the world now at our fingertips
or in our air phones or in our headsets.
And we can hear them or we can read
or we can learn about many different cultures
(15:23):
and languages and traditions of the world.
And what began to be really intriguing for me
was that the distinctiveness and the particularities
of what was represented in these languages,
which were connected to these people groups,
which were connected to these places,
which we go back to the Old Testament,
(15:44):
even back into the book of Genesis and the Creation narrative,
it describes the whole known world
coming from Ham Shem and Japheth.
It says that the descendants of Ham Shem and Japheth
went out and they spread out to different parts of the coast
and different parts of the world,
each in their own place,
and then developed their own nation and tribe,
(16:05):
and they developed their own languages.
And that's how the world came to be.
So different people groups in different places
speaking different languages.
And in that respect, I read the Pentecost narrative
as kind of a pulling forward of that fulfillment
of the initial covenant, the covenant Danoa, right?
To bless all people through that covenant.
(16:27):
And so that led me into, hey, I need to figure out,
like, how does this, you know,
what is this Chinese part of me in tail?
What is this Buddhist or, you know, as a Christian,
I never would have thought before to ask,
what is this Buddhist part of me in tail?
Or what is this Taoist part of me in tail?
Or what is this Confucian part of me in tail?
(16:48):
And how do I understand that Christianly?
How do I understand that theologically?
And how do I understand that faithfully?
And then we finally get all around to this now.
How do I understand all this as good news?
As part of the good news of the gospel.
So I've spent about 30 years still trying to put
the pieces of the puzzle together
and trying to connect the dots.
That's so good.
(17:09):
I love in this, like, kind of how you're reflecting
on these, like, concepts of, like, communities
and these people groups.
So in kind of light of that, how should, like,
what can the church today learn from the communal way
of life demonstrated by the early church
as it pertains to our Christian witness?
Yeah, well, I think we can learn a lot,
(17:29):
both on a positive and negative ledger.
Right, so let's hold on to the story a little bit.
You know, if you go back,
I mean, if you're familiar with it,
I think, you know, most of us Pentecostal,
we kind of, we kind of grew up kind of implicitly memorizing
the act story, right?
But if we go back and reread it more carefully,
we find that there were 3,000 that were then said,
you know, responded at the end of Peter's sermon and said,
(17:51):
oh, what do we need to do?
And Peter says, Luke records Peter saying,
you know, repaptize every one of you
in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness sins
and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
There's mass baptisms that day or over the next week
or whatever the case might be.
And then it says that all these diaspora Jews
that were gathered in Jerusalem began to gather together
(18:13):
in this new community.
And they began to have,
share and have all things in common.
People that had need because they were visiting,
because they were traveling,
because they were, you know, whatever,
the community began to buy and sell
in order to support the community.
And, you know, as the days turned into weeks and into months,
(18:36):
people from the Judean countryside began to hear
about what was happening.
They began to come to the, come to the, to Jerusalem.
And the community grew from, it says 3,000, 4,000, 5,000.
So there was a lot of sharing involved
that, you know, created a new community of conversation.
(18:56):
Now, this community lasts as long as we might have hoped.
And about Acts chapter six, it says that,
well, before even Acts chapter six, you know,
there was all kinds of resistances
that the Jews were throwing up to what was happening.
So there was a lot of political blowback.
We might even say, you know, to the degree
(19:17):
in which the local economy was being impacted,
there's probably something going on there.
In fact, there was other things going on relative
to the economy in the sense that there's a story
for Ananias and Spira in which two individuals
wanted to make a contribution to the community,
but they, you know, weren't fully transparent
about what they brought.
(19:38):
And so there's some issues there that we can talk about
if we have some time later.
But again, then we might have to get to the sixth chapter.
It clearly states that the community,
there were two dominant language groups that were there.
Now, Acts two tells us that the crowd that was gathered
understood the languages that literally came
(20:00):
from across the Roman Empire.
And in that respect, again, you know,
most of my life has been spent theologizing
about the import of how the many tongues
of the peoples of the world all are essential
to the gospel, the good news.
And I want to come back to that in a moment.
But to the point about what we can learn
(20:20):
about the community, the two dominant languages
had to do with the fact that number one,
they were in Jerusalem, in Judea.
And the dominant local language in Judea and in Jerusalem
was Hebrew.
So you had the Hebrew-speaking community, or, you know,
and then the other dominant language
was the dominant language of at that time,
(20:43):
what was called the peace of Rome or the Roman Empire,
which was Greek.
So the diaspora Jews were probably 90% bilingual,
meaning, or maybe even trilingual.
But 90% bilingual in the sense that, you know,
they grew up speaking the local indigenous languages
and they grew up speaking the majority Roman language.
(21:05):
It'd be like, you know, Americans going
and growing up around the world,
they would probably speak English
as their dominant language,
but they might grow up speaking local languages
if they grew up in certain parts around the world.
So the Greek-speaking widows had to do then
with all of the what we would call diaspora communities.
(21:27):
There was at least the Greek language that unified them.
They may not have been able to understand the Phrygian
and the Egyptian and the Arabic and the Galatian
local languages, but they all spoke Greek.
Nevertheless, so you've got these two groups,
the Greek-speaking and the Hebrew-speaking groups.
And, you know, Acts 6 tells us that at some point
(21:48):
there were communicative challenges
across these cultural realities and linguistic realities.
Cultural realities probably having to do with customs,
language, cultural practices,
maybe some political and economic undertones
that complicated how, you know, groups gathered
from around the Mediterranean world
trying to forge a new community
(22:09):
and Jerusalem would have tried to make it.
And they tried to work through it
and tried to sort it all out.
And may have found a kind of a partial solution
with regard to appointing what they called
the time Hellenistic Jews
that kind of spoke the Greek language well
as leaders of the kind of the Hellenistic
or the diaspora community that was there.
But here's the point, right?
(22:30):
So intercultural encounter conversation
is never gonna be easy.
You know, cross-cultural encounter conversations
never gonna be easy.
Interreligious encounter conversations
never gonna be easy.
In fact, I mean, we're having this conversation here
almost in the middle of November on 2024
in which, you know, we've got a country in the United States
that's divided in terms of how we understand multiculturalism,
(22:54):
how we understand immigration,
how we understand hospitality to, you know,
people of other cultures and faiths
and religious in our country.
And so we can think of it,
I mean, there's long histories of all of this, you know,
in all parts of the world.
And there's no doubt some of that,
those dynamics go on.
So in my mind, I think that one of the major things
(23:17):
we can really learn from is the important,
but really the hard work of fostering space
for us to either learn other languages,
learn how to really interact with people
who not just speak other languages,
but come from these other linguistic, cultural,
(23:38):
and even religious backgrounds.
How do we foster a kind of communal space
or ecclesial space to begin with?
I mean, the church isn't necessarily all that good
at doing that for starters.
Like, yeah, in the public space, right?
But so ecclesially, at least from a Christian standpoint,
I would say, how do we foster a kind of ecclesial spaces
(24:02):
where what happened on the streets of Jerusalem
2000 years ago, people who were able to speak
in their own languages, or then people who were able
to hear the speech, the words of others
in these different strange, foreign, dissonant tongues?
How do we allow those kinds of spaces to grow
(24:25):
so that we can meet otherness in their otherness
rather than transform them into whatever we think we are,
or whatever we think we want them to become like us, right?
So that's, I think, the Pentecost principle,
the Pentecost narrative, and that's, I think,
the potency, but also the challenge of the Pentecost narrative.
Because the classical Pentecostal approaches,
(24:49):
I'll speak, you listen, you get transformed by my words,
and you become like me.
Right, yeah.
But actually, if you relax too,
that's not really what happened.
And there was first being arrested by the witness
or the testimony of the other
that really, I think, jumps out at me, right?
And if I'm not even arrested by the testimony of the other,
(25:12):
then I've already assumed that I know who they are.
But the Pentecost narrative invites me to be transformed
by what the other is bearing witness to.
Yeah.
That's good.
That's brilliant.
There's a level of mutuality there
that I think you're highlighting
that we don't tend to think about.
(25:33):
And so if we get to the actual question
of how do we not colonize is kind of given to this mutuality.
I did want to ask one thing.
We're recording this, as you mentioned,
in the middle of November,
but by the time it comes out in March,
I will have released a book called
The Problem and Promise of Freedom.
And I know you know I've been working on it,
and it's my public theology.
(25:54):
And there's a concept in it that I would love for you
to just kind of like, I guess, respond to.
Because I think it's congruent with what you're saying,
especially the political ramifications
and then tying it to Pentecost.
I was looking at a Luchen account in general,
and all of Jesus' statements of the Jubilee
that's repeated in Luke,
I made the argument that it's essentially paid off
(26:16):
in Pentecost, Acts 1 and 2.
And so what I was making the argument was that
the Jubilee for the Jews became a cosmic Jubilee
through Pentecost, that this equalling out,
the spirit poured out in all flesh,
and this general sense of justice
that would overflow on everybody
is essentially this universalizing
of this thing that God had planned.
(26:38):
Do you, well, one, do you think that's a,
do you agree with that idea?
But then secondly, do you see that as a possible framing
for how to engage the other all over the world?
What do you think of that?
Yeah, no, I'm eager to see that come out.
I think it's consistent with things I've written
relative to that idea in the past.
I'll say a couple more things.
(26:58):
Yes, there's a certain universalizing in Acts,
the ends of the earth, the ends of time,
you know, every nation under heaven.
And simultaneously with that,
I would also then want to say,
how does that invite us to live into all of the localities
or particularities?
You know, we don't just live universally, right?
We live in Southern California,
(27:20):
or we live in Timbuktu, you know, or whatever.
And every locality has its own opportunities and challenges
with regard to justice.
Let's say to take your Jubilee principle, right?
Every locality will be dealing with economic injustices
in different ways, right?
And so yes, there's a certain invitation
(27:42):
that Pentecost opens up to what I call, in fact,
in fact, I'm working on an article right now,
the last couple of days in which I'm thinking
about the promise of the Father, which is the spirit.
You know, Luke 24, Acts one and Acts two.
Jesus receives the promise of the Father
and then pours out that promise.
In that respect, I love the idea that the promise is,
(28:07):
in that respect, given that Pentecost paid on the one hand,
but it's still a promise in the sense
that every one of us are still going to be,
you know, experiencing or perpetuating economic
other injustices along the way of this book, right?
And part of the Christian, part of Christian discipleship,
(28:29):
Christian faith, Christian mission is,
how do we live further into the promise of the spirit?
How do we live further into the justice of the economy,
the justice of identity, the justice of the polis,
as opposed to perpetuating the injustices
of all of these that we inevitably do
(28:49):
if we just simply live in the flesh, right?
And so it's both universal, but it's particular.
And it's both given and paid for and done
in Christ and in Pentecost on the one hand, but yet,
but it's the invitation to mission to live even more fully
into the promise of justice
(29:12):
that is still woefully absent in much of our lives,
much of our world even today.
Yeah, and even just Shalom.
And I know you mentioned that in your book
and I make a huge deal about that.
It's just kind of like a telos, an ultimate goal,
which, you know, it goes before even justice.
(29:32):
Like justice is like, should be a ground floor for us,
just like that we're treated fairly.
If you think about this kind of,
like I guess the liberal concept of justice,
like a Rawlsian concept of justice,
like it should be a ground floor.
But what we should be is embracing each other
to use both terms and having this engraced kind of living
that's really rooted in Shalom.
Awesome. Yeah, that's so good.
We have one more question for you.
(29:54):
I think Megan has for you.
This has been just such a, not just fruitful,
you're being brief in the way you're talking about it,
but like, man, we could talk about this forever.
You know, like it's such a pertinent content.
So I really appreciate what you're saying here.
But Megan, why don't you go ahead and take it home for us?
Yeah, as we kind of, as we do for every single one of these
(30:15):
episodes, as we try and give like a practical charge,
because sometimes theology can feel very cerebral
and very up here.
And I think that there's something really special
about grounding what we talk about
into different applicable things,
whether we're just attending church or leading churches
or something that feels very ministerial.
So kind of to wrap it up, like, do you have practical advice
(30:37):
for Christians who are considering foreign missions?
Whether it's short term, long term,
like how can we actually be a witness in foreign missions,
wherever that is from wherever we are,
that's actually effective and isn't just continuing this,
like, oh, and then we go for two weeks
and we help nothing and we do nothing.
And how can we actually be a witness in these spaces?
(30:59):
So, you know, I appreciate giving the opportunity
for me to speak into this, even from the standpoint
of my own life, you know, I've only come
to this more concrete positionality
in a roundabout way after over the last 30 years.
So let me give you the upshot of it
and then I want to backtrack and why it's so important.
(31:22):
Absolutely.
The upshot of it is I would say take time to learn
at least one or more other languages.
But wherever you feel that, you know,
you might have a heart to,
because you have more specifically about missions abroad,
right?
Yeah, correct.
Southern in the US, right?
We might say something that, well,
we can use Google translate, yes, but,
(31:43):
but again, knowing the language is not just
about communicating, but it's about understanding.
Remember, if you don't understand the otherness
first and foremost, then you can't be transformed
by the otherness first and foremost,
and you will continue to colonize in your missiology
and your practical practices, right?
But if you learn the otherness of the other first and foremost,
(32:06):
and I come now to say that because that might have seen
so obvious from an Axe II standpoint,
but myself, because we, my parents were first generation
converse to Christianity, even though I was born in Malaysia,
because of our newfound Christian commitments
(32:27):
and our commitments to even ministry,
like my parents were pastors before I was even born, right?
My parents learned how to speak English
through the missionaries and because
of the British colonization,
and they only taught my brothers and I English
in our own growing up.
So I spoke Cantonese with my grandparents,
but after we moved to the US,
(32:48):
I didn't have access to my grandparents anymore,
so I really didn't have the opportunity
to keep developing my Chinese language.
When I was, let's see, I was now 35,
when I was 35, I took two years of Chinese.
I also had a lot of administrative responsibilities
at the other institution I was at at the time,
(33:09):
and the reason why I took that,
because I really felt like I wanted to pick up
that language at that point in time.
But trying to learn Chinese at almost 40 or so,
it's really, really hard.
And so unfortunately, I really still can't speak Chinese
today, I picked up some Spanish in high school
that helped me with my, I got married to my college sweetheart
(33:32):
who is a Mexican-American, so I earned a lot of
taco points, brownie points with my loss of time.
Sure.
So I can kind of hold a low conversation,
a kind of a minor conversation in Spanish,
but I can't really write, I can't write academically,
(33:53):
and I can't, at one point I might've been able to preach
a really bad sermon in Spanish.
That's what I'm talking about.
But I wish I knew more languages, first of all.
And because I feel now, now I would say that, again,
I was motivated more with my Spanish
for what I could do with it,
(34:14):
what I could, as an agent, enact on it.
But the Chinese bit, and since then,
has been driven by, if I understood more languages,
by the way, I had to study French and German for my PhD,
but those are faster languages with all of the baggage
of colonialism and so on.
So my point was that, I think now I would say,
(34:38):
what languages do is it opens up to other worlds.
It opens up to other ways of understanding ourselves,
ways of organizing ourselves, ways of envisioning,
imagining the possibilities of life.
Sure, it opens up the communication.
And then I think it also opens up the possibility
(34:59):
that we would be more embracing of the witness
and the testimonies that others bear,
the uniqueness of their own life journeys
and life journey, right?
And that, at the end of the day,
I think is what a decolonized mission is.
It's the capacity for every one of us to bear witness
(35:20):
out of the uniqueness and the particularity
of our own locations and journeys and sojourns.
And do that in this, as you mentioned, Steve,
this mutual or dialogical manner with others, right?
So that it's not me that bears the responsibility
to bear the good news,
(35:41):
but it's the cumulative voice of the people of God
and actually of those that they encounter, right?
That the wondrous need, the works of God
are declared out of what was happening
on the streets of Jerusalem.
And those were not limited to only apostles
doing the speaking, but also others doing the hearing
(36:02):
and interpreting and translating.
So, Lord's gonna raise up interpreters and translators
and multilingualists.
And out of that, we get decolonial mission
in the next generation.
So good.
I think an image that I just got is,
mission in this age, and you can see what you think
about this, but it's kind of like, you know,
(36:23):
how philosophy, Socrates would talk about it
as the pursuit of wisdom, looking at in light of your work,
that we're pursuing the spirit's work in the world together,
that we are with not just us,
but also the people that we're encountering.
We're trying to see and sense and know the spirit
in this world and what the spirit is doing.
Would you say that's a decent categorization?
(36:44):
Yeah, I'll tell you man, that.
All right, cool.
Well, hey, thank you so much for this.
I think it was just brilliant and very interesting.
The language piece is such a practical
and just such a good piece of advice that you have.
I speak about 1.3 languages.
So, yeah, the same way, just kind of that biracial,
born in Germany and everything.
You really don't know people and what they're saying
(37:06):
and doing if you don't have that deeper sense
of communication that's available to us
by just knowing the language.
Well, anyways, thank you so much for blessing us
with this time and we'll see you around.
Take care.
That was so good.
This is one of those conversations
that we have to be so strong and brave
and not keep going with,
because we could talk about this for hours on end,
(37:28):
tell you what.
So, it was such a blessing to have Amos on the podcast.
Oh, do you think that's like framing missions
as we are pursuing the spirit's work together?
Man, that's a different.
Oh, yeah, the division is the enemy's primary tool,
I feel like in the church to divide us.
And so, when we talk about pursuing unity in the spirit
(37:51):
to everything that we do,
especially when it comes to missions
and evangelizing and stuff,
like I feel like that would really solve
a large majority of our problems.
So good, so good.
All right, friends, just a reminder,
we will link in the show notes
where you can get Stephen's book,
brand new book on the Marquis,
and then we'll also have a lot of great resources
that Amos has, books Amos has written.
(38:12):
So, head on down there to get your hands
on some really, really good theology books
for the next couple, six months of your life
that you can really crack into and start reading.
Yeah, all right, well, as always,
this was brought to you by the School of Theology and Ministry
at Life Pacific University.
So we'll see you guys next time.
See ya.
Guys, we have a special announcement.
(00:02):
Yeah. Steven, your book is out.
Yes. A book that I've been working on for a long time.
Looking forward for a long time.
We actually have mentioned it like a million times in our podcast,
but it is finally out.
This is my first public theology.
Now, so brave.
The two of you guys who have followed my work,
you know that I do more of like the worship,
(00:22):
aesthetics and theology and stuff.
This is my first foray into public theology.
A lot of the topics we talk about in TikTok Theology are in it.
The book is called The Problem and Promise of Freedom.
It's available for purchase, Amazon, wherever you buy stuff.
It came out from Baker Academic.
I'm super excited about it.
Please go check it out.
(00:45):
Welcome to TikTok Theology,
a podcast that tackles the major trending topics on social media
that concern the Christian faith.
I'm Meagan.
And I'm Steven.
We know you can't form a theology in three minutes or less,
but those videos can identify current issues.
TikTok will give us the prompt and then we'll do a deep dive.
Thanks for joining us in this exploration.
(01:06):
Hey, team. Welcome back.
Today, we're going to be chit-chatting about global missions
without underlying bold italics, without colonization.
That's a tough one.
It is a tough one.
It's a tough conversation to have.
It's not really tough when you break down what we mean by that.
I'll tell you that much.
With our very, very, especially special guest
that we'll get into in a minute.
(01:26):
But I think especially with the age of social media,
the conversations, even about maybe things that have happened
in the past, have get brought up all the time.
And this is still a current issue, of course,
but for the last, you know, 500 years,
colonization has been a huge narrative.
I mean, so many people groups,
like places in Asia and Africa and Latin America,
(01:48):
have been colonized,
especially when it comes to the West
and what the Western civilizations have done, right?
And then often it's under the guise of Christianity.
Not always, but often.
Not always, but often and enough that it's...
Become a problem.
Become a problem, for sure.
And it's a conversation that comes up all the time.
Post-colonial studies are essentially,
(02:09):
it's a field that looks at that.
And like, what are the narratives
of not the dominant culture that colonized,
but what about the narratives of the people who were colonized?
Colonized, exactly.
And so it brings up discourse and stuff,
especially in theology and in politics and stuff like that, right?
Which we just got out of a very political season,
where how do we do missions?
How do we engage with the spirit of God?
(02:30):
How do we evangelize well
in a way that isn't colonization?
Right, because we were still commissioned.
Right, we're still called to go.
We're still called to the ends of the earth
and all of that, which we see in the Great Commission.
But how are we gonna do that in a way
that is actually empowering to indigenous cultures
and isn't now you have to look like me?
(02:50):
And that has been, I think, something that notoriously
Christians have not been very good at.
And I would argue still aren't super great at
in a lot of ways and has caused a lot of hurt.
A lot of people feel a lot of pain when it comes to Christians
because they've seen colonization at its worst.
Yeah, and sometimes they might not even know
that they're doing it.
They might not even know that they're not sharing the gospel,
(03:12):
but they're sharing a very particular Western gospel
or something, you know?
Right, it's so common.
And so we're gonna bring in a special guest
to really talk with us who this is his soapbox
and we love to get people on here
whose soapbox are the topics that we're discussing.
So Stephen, who are we having with us today?
We have the one and only Amos Yong.
Woohoo!
Now Amos Young is one of the greatest theologians
(03:34):
in the world in my humble opinion.
In our humble opinion at this moment in time.
He's definitely like a top three
on your list of Pentecostal theologians all the time.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
You know what I mean?
Like there's like the Jordan, LeBron, Kareem, Kobe kind of thing.
He's up there.
He's at minimum the Kobe.
He's excellent.
We've had him at LPU and speak before.
So he's a friend of ours, a friend of...
(03:55):
Somewhat of a mentor to me.
Now I never actually studied under him,
but I met him at conferences and talked to him.
And he was just so generous with his time,
taking his time out to just like offer me
a bunch of food for thought.
Even though I never actually had him as a professor,
I'm honored to call him, you know, a friend
and a mentor.
So just tell you a little bit about him.
(04:17):
He is a Malaysian-American Pentecostal theologian.
And he's a professor of theology and mission
at Fuller Theological Seminary.
He served as the Dean of the School of Theology
and School of Intercultural Studies,
but currently he is directing the D-Min
for Pentecostal and charismatic studies.
So he's awesome, has written so many books.
I mean, it's like, pfft, I don't even know,
(04:38):
like into fifties or something.
Love it.
Like it's an absurd amount.
It's an absurd amount.
Yeah, he's just a very prolific dude.
And this is so important to him
because he's written about missions.
He's written about the Holy Spirit
and the work all over the world that the Spirit does
and how we tap into that.
We recorded this interview a little while back
and I can't wait for you guys to hear it.
So check it out.
(04:59):
All right, let's welcome Amos Yong.
Welcome to the show.
You are such an important person in my life
as a academic mentor and it's just such an honor
to be able to have you here talking about
one of your main passions and that's missions.
Good to be here.
All right, so the first question that we have
is when we talk about global missions without colonization,
(05:21):
I'd love for you to just talk a little bit
about what the problem is,
why we're talking about this as something
that we need to do without colonization.
So in other words, is it possible for us
to spread the gospel globally without imposing
our Western cultural, economic, or political ideologies?
Yeah, well, thanks for the question.
Nothing like a red juicy one to get started, right?
(05:43):
Yeah.
Jump right into it.
Well, and certainly I think the question
of colonization itself is a complicated one.
In some respects, it describes a process
that extends the last 500 plus years
and that process itself is also multi-layered, multi-faceted.
(06:05):
There were lots of good things that happened
as a result of, let's say, European or Western journeys
to what we now call Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Assumptions that were made,
there were certainly also actions
that were taken by Europeans,
including those different kinds of Europeans
(06:26):
that participate in these journeys for different reasons,
including Christians, including missionaries
who went to the ends of the earth, so to speak, right?
Caring the answer to what they understood it.
Lots of complicated issues.
I think part of the big question is, in a sense,
not really can we do it without colonization
(06:47):
in the sense that as if it never happened,
but give everything that didn't happen,
all the good things and a lot of the not so good things
where Europeans undermine local cultures around the world
or where Europeans separated families
and took kids away and put them in boarding schools
(07:07):
and destroyed not only those cultural histories,
but the families, the languages, and so on and so forth.
So lots of very horrific things as well, right?
All of that happened.
And so part of the task before is, what does mission mean?
How do we engage in the mission of God
in ways that on the one hand, doesn't just dismiss,
(07:30):
well, those were in the past,
they no longer happen today,
but how do we take forth the good,
I mean, the mission is good news, the gospel,
then how do we really carry it forth
with that history behind us?
And in many respects, informing already who we are
and what we do, being alert to that,
being attentive to the results, the effects of history,
(07:56):
and yet not give up on God's mission, right?
I think those are the complicated questions of reformers.
It's when I necessarily cease to be evangelist,
but what does the good news mean in light of that history?
And how do we retell that in a new way
or new times, new audiences, so to speak,
(08:16):
and new dynamics in place,
but without just sort of ignoring
or putting everything under the carpet, so to speak.
Yeah, that's great.
That actually leads perfectly to my next question.
So in your work, you have spoken
about intercultural dialogue, really from the jump.
Your first book, Descerning the Spirits,
was talking about that beyond the impasse,
(08:37):
you're really exploring how the Holy Spirit
might allow us to enter into dialogues
that we might not have been able to
if we really take a numerological approach.
But then one of your more recent books,
Mission After Pentecost, I feel like you did sort
of a labor for the academy in this.
You basically trace the spirit on mission
(08:58):
throughout the entire Bible.
Like so from Genesis to Revelation,
took thematically there.
But then really towards the end, like your conclusion,
you talked about what mission might look like
in our late modern world
and really kind of approached the idea
that something that me and Megan talk about all the time
of just having a good witness
(09:19):
and just a witness itself should generally be the focus.
So I wonder, can you explain for us
a little bit this concept of messio spiritus
that you talk about in that book
and how that might differ a little bit
from previous or older, mythological models?
Yeah, so coming from the Pentecostal church,
Pentecost tradition, tradition,
(09:41):
as a theologian, my journey into the theological academy
was sort of trying to follow up the question of,
here's how we experienced the Holy Spirit in my church,
in my grown up, in my denomination,
in our lives, including missionally,
how do we think through that theologically, right?
And so I wanna kind of take a two-step approach here
(10:02):
because I think you're right that
from the very beginning of my work going back now,
man, I'm old, it's almost something 30 years.
And but from the very beginning of my work,
it's not only been what you call the intercultural,
which is surely includes that,
but it's also been what I call the interreligious.
And at that time, 30 years ago,
I was really motivated by the question of kind of
(10:23):
discovering for the first time that
because of my East Asian or Chinese ancestral
and family background, we were first,
I was, I guess I would be the first full-genre
or second generation of Christians.
My parents were first generation converts from,
they were born in Malaysia, I was born in Malaysia,
they were born in Malaysia.
(10:45):
Chinese descent converts to Pentecostal Christianity
under missionaries from,
as someone's got missionaries from Northern California,
you know, came to Malaysia
and that's how my parents came to know Christ.
As first, my parents being first generation
at a hospital converts in this way,
we always looked at our Christian faith
(11:07):
as being the new direction of life,
having turned, repented from,
turned, converted away from what we were before
to word Christ.
And so all the things that we turned away from
was of that Chinese cultural heritage.
And so we never talked about that much.
I just assumed that we were Christians,
but when I was a grad student,
(11:27):
I began to learn that in our home,
we lived out Confucian filial piety.
In our home, my dad led us to,
he led us in a way that sought to avoid extremes
and I learned that was the Buddha's middle way.
In our home, I learned that my dad,
I learned from looking at my dad deal with the challenges
and problems of life.
(11:47):
How we always took the path of least resistance
and that's the Taoist Wu Wei,
sort of allowing,
watch how water flows down our creek
and adapts to the terrain, right?
And that's the Taoist Wu Wei.
We never used that language to talk about
who we were growing up,
but I began to discover that there were these East Asian
(12:10):
dimensions to who I was as an individual
and who our family was as East Asian immigrants
to North America and that made me very interested
about the religious other.
And so the intercultural other and the interreligious other
began, became important for me.
And I actually discovered their voice
by rethinking the Pentecost narrative.
(12:33):
So the day of Pentecost,
I think we all, most of us Pentecostals,
we go back to that narrative.
Yeah, definitely.
You know, it kind of is where our name comes from,
but Luke, the narrator of the book of Acts describes
how on the streets of Jerusalem
(12:54):
in that day, 2000 years ago,
there were people from every nation,
it always says Jews from every nation under heaven
that were gathered there.
So by that time, it was 600 years into what we now call
what even then was called the Jewish diaspora
where Jews were taken off to Syria,
they were taken off to Kaldia,
they were taken off to Babylon, 700, 600, 500 years before that,
(13:15):
they settled, they grew communities there.
Large parts of the Old Testament
are about prophetic messages in those contexts
in which then Jewish,
then second, third, fourth, fifth generation Jewish kids,
you know, grew up away from their homeland, right?
And so on the day of Pentecost,
all these Jews were kind of re-gathered back in Jerusalem
(13:37):
from every nation under heaven.
That's a little bit of a hyperbole, right?
But the point is that we have Jews
from all these cultural contexts.
And when the spirit was poured out
on the streets of Jerusalem,
as the disciples were there interacting with the crowd,
the crowd basically, again,
all these Jews from every nation under heaven said,
hey, we hear them speaking in our own languages.
(13:59):
And it runs off about 16 different either regions
of the world, of the known world,
or people groups that came from those regions.
And reflecting, they were saying,
we hear them in our own languages.
And at the end of that narrative,
(14:20):
the Lucas recording,
you know, what was happening,
he was saying that we hear them declare the wondrous works
of God in all of these different languages.
It was very, very confusing.
It describes the crowd as being bewildered and confused
and amazed and astonished.
And the question was,
(14:41):
we don't understand what's going on here.
Help us to understand all of this.
And, you know, in many ways,
I mean, that kind of reflects the way in which I think today
in our own, you know,
we all grew up in certain communal bubbles,
cultural bubbles or linguistic bubbles, you know?
And we only know what we know.
And as we grow older,
and now of course in the time of the internet,
(15:02):
I think it's interesting how in the information age,
you know, we have the streets of Jerusalem
are not just cobblestones,
but they're digitally mediated, right?
So we have the world now at our fingertips
or in our air phones or in our headsets.
And we can hear them or we can read
or we can learn about many different cultures
(15:23):
and languages and traditions of the world.
And what began to be really intriguing for me
was that the distinctiveness and the particularities
of what was represented in these languages,
which were connected to these people groups,
which were connected to these places,
which we go back to the Old Testament,
(15:44):
even back into the book of Genesis and the Creation narrative,
it describes the whole known world
coming from Ham Shem and Japheth.
It says that the descendants of Ham Shem and Japheth
went out and they spread out to different parts of the coast
and different parts of the world,
each in their own place,
and then developed their own nation and tribe,
(16:05):
and they developed their own languages.
And that's how the world came to be.
So different people groups in different places
speaking different languages.
And in that respect, I read the Pentecost narrative
as kind of a pulling forward of that fulfillment
of the initial covenant, the covenant Danoa, right?
To bless all people through that covenant.
(16:27):
And so that led me into, hey, I need to figure out,
like, how does this, you know,
what is this Chinese part of me in tail?
What is this Buddhist or, you know, as a Christian,
I never would have thought before to ask,
what is this Buddhist part of me in tail?
Or what is this Taoist part of me in tail?
Or what is this Confucian part of me in tail?
(16:48):
And how do I understand that Christianly?
How do I understand that theologically?
And how do I understand that faithfully?
And then we finally get all around to this now.
How do I understand all this as good news?
As part of the good news of the gospel.
So I've spent about 30 years still trying to put
the pieces of the puzzle together
and trying to connect the dots.
That's so good.
(17:09):
I love in this, like, kind of how you're reflecting
on these, like, concepts of, like, communities
and these people groups.
So in kind of light of that, how should, like,
what can the church today learn from the communal way
of life demonstrated by the early church
as it pertains to our Christian witness?
Yeah, well, I think we can learn a lot,
(17:29):
both on a positive and negative ledger.
Right, so let's hold on to the story a little bit.
You know, if you go back,
I mean, if you're familiar with it,
I think, you know, most of us Pentecostal,
we kind of, we kind of grew up kind of implicitly memorizing
the act story, right?
But if we go back and reread it more carefully,
we find that there were 3,000 that were then said,
you know, responded at the end of Peter's sermon and said,
(17:51):
oh, what do we need to do?
And Peter says, Luke records Peter saying,
you know, repaptize every one of you
in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness sins
and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
There's mass baptisms that day or over the next week
or whatever the case might be.
And then it says that all these diaspora Jews
that were gathered in Jerusalem began to gather together
(18:13):
in this new community.
And they began to have,
share and have all things in common.
People that had need because they were visiting,
because they were traveling,
because they were, you know, whatever,
the community began to buy and sell
in order to support the community.
And, you know, as the days turned into weeks and into months,
(18:36):
people from the Judean countryside began to hear
about what was happening.
They began to come to the, come to the, to Jerusalem.
And the community grew from, it says 3,000, 4,000, 5,000.
So there was a lot of sharing involved
that, you know, created a new community of conversation.
(18:56):
Now, this community lasts as long as we might have hoped.
And about Acts chapter six, it says that,
well, before even Acts chapter six, you know,
there was all kinds of resistances
that the Jews were throwing up to what was happening.
So there was a lot of political blowback.
We might even say, you know, to the degree
(19:17):
in which the local economy was being impacted,
there's probably something going on there.
In fact, there was other things going on relative
to the economy in the sense that there's a story
for Ananias and Spira in which two individuals
wanted to make a contribution to the community,
but they, you know, weren't fully transparent
about what they brought.
(19:38):
And so there's some issues there that we can talk about
if we have some time later.
But again, then we might have to get to the sixth chapter.
It clearly states that the community,
there were two dominant language groups that were there.
Now, Acts two tells us that the crowd that was gathered
understood the languages that literally came
(20:00):
from across the Roman Empire.
And in that respect, again, you know,
most of my life has been spent theologizing
about the import of how the many tongues
of the peoples of the world all are essential
to the gospel, the good news.
And I want to come back to that in a moment.
But to the point about what we can learn
(20:20):
about the community, the two dominant languages
had to do with the fact that number one,
they were in Jerusalem, in Judea.
And the dominant local language in Judea and in Jerusalem
was Hebrew.
So you had the Hebrew-speaking community, or, you know,
and then the other dominant language
was the dominant language of at that time,
(20:43):
what was called the peace of Rome or the Roman Empire,
which was Greek.
So the diaspora Jews were probably 90% bilingual,
meaning, or maybe even trilingual.
But 90% bilingual in the sense that, you know,
they grew up speaking the local indigenous languages
and they grew up speaking the majority Roman language.
(21:05):
It'd be like, you know, Americans going
and growing up around the world,
they would probably speak English
as their dominant language,
but they might grow up speaking local languages
if they grew up in certain parts around the world.
So the Greek-speaking widows had to do then
with all of the what we would call diaspora communities.
(21:27):
There was at least the Greek language that unified them.
They may not have been able to understand the Phrygian
and the Egyptian and the Arabic and the Galatian
local languages, but they all spoke Greek.
Nevertheless, so you've got these two groups,
the Greek-speaking and the Hebrew-speaking groups.
And, you know, Acts 6 tells us that at some point
(21:48):
there were communicative challenges
across these cultural realities and linguistic realities.
Cultural realities probably having to do with customs,
language, cultural practices,
maybe some political and economic undertones
that complicated how, you know, groups gathered
from around the Mediterranean world
trying to forge a new community
(22:09):
and Jerusalem would have tried to make it.
And they tried to work through it
and tried to sort it all out.
And may have found a kind of a partial solution
with regard to appointing what they called
the time Hellenistic Jews
that kind of spoke the Greek language well
as leaders of the kind of the Hellenistic
or the diaspora community that was there.
But here's the point, right?
(22:30):
So intercultural encounter conversation
is never gonna be easy.
You know, cross-cultural encounter conversations
never gonna be easy.
Interreligious encounter conversations
never gonna be easy.
In fact, I mean, we're having this conversation here
almost in the middle of November on 2024
in which, you know, we've got a country in the United States
that's divided in terms of how we understand multiculturalism,
(22:54):
how we understand immigration,
how we understand hospitality to, you know,
people of other cultures and faiths
and religious in our country.
And so we can think of it,
I mean, there's long histories of all of this, you know,
in all parts of the world.
And there's no doubt some of that,
those dynamics go on.
So in my mind, I think that one of the major things
(23:17):
we can really learn from is the important,
but really the hard work of fostering space
for us to either learn other languages,
learn how to really interact with people
who not just speak other languages,
but come from these other linguistic, cultural,
(23:38):
and even religious backgrounds.
How do we foster a kind of communal space
or ecclesial space to begin with?
I mean, the church isn't necessarily all that good
at doing that for starters.
Like, yeah, in the public space, right?
But so ecclesially, at least from a Christian standpoint,
I would say, how do we foster a kind of ecclesial spaces
(24:02):
where what happened on the streets of Jerusalem
2000 years ago, people who were able to speak
in their own languages, or then people who were able
to hear the speech, the words of others
in these different strange, foreign, dissonant tongues?
How do we allow those kinds of spaces to grow
(24:25):
so that we can meet otherness in their otherness
rather than transform them into whatever we think we are,
or whatever we think we want them to become like us, right?
So that's, I think, the Pentecost principle,
the Pentecost narrative, and that's, I think,
the potency, but also the challenge of the Pentecost narrative.
Because the classical Pentecostal approaches,
(24:49):
I'll speak, you listen, you get transformed by my words,
and you become like me.
Right, yeah.
But actually, if you relax too,
that's not really what happened.
And there was first being arrested by the witness
or the testimony of the other
that really, I think, jumps out at me, right?
And if I'm not even arrested by the testimony of the other,
(25:12):
then I've already assumed that I know who they are.
But the Pentecost narrative invites me to be transformed
by what the other is bearing witness to.
Yeah.
That's good.
That's brilliant.
There's a level of mutuality there
that I think you're highlighting
that we don't tend to think about.
(25:33):
And so if we get to the actual question
of how do we not colonize is kind of given to this mutuality.
I did want to ask one thing.
We're recording this, as you mentioned,
in the middle of November,
but by the time it comes out in March,
I will have released a book called
The Problem and Promise of Freedom.
And I know you know I've been working on it,
and it's my public theology.
(25:54):
And there's a concept in it that I would love for you
to just kind of like, I guess, respond to.
Because I think it's congruent with what you're saying,
especially the political ramifications
and then tying it to Pentecost.
I was looking at a Luchen account in general,
and all of Jesus' statements of the Jubilee
that's repeated in Luke,
I made the argument that it's essentially paid off
(26:16):
in Pentecost, Acts 1 and 2.
And so what I was making the argument was that
the Jubilee for the Jews became a cosmic Jubilee
through Pentecost, that this equalling out,
the spirit poured out in all flesh,
and this general sense of justice
that would overflow on everybody
is essentially this universalizing
of this thing that God had planned.
(26:38):
Do you, well, one, do you think that's a,
do you agree with that idea?
But then secondly, do you see that as a possible framing
for how to engage the other all over the world?
What do you think of that?
Yeah, no, I'm eager to see that come out.
I think it's consistent with things I've written
relative to that idea in the past.
I'll say a couple more things.
(26:58):
Yes, there's a certain universalizing in Acts,
the ends of the earth, the ends of time,
you know, every nation under heaven.
And simultaneously with that,
I would also then want to say,
how does that invite us to live into all of the localities
or particularities?
You know, we don't just live universally, right?
We live in Southern California,
(27:20):
or we live in Timbuktu, you know, or whatever.
And every locality has its own opportunities and challenges
with regard to justice.
Let's say to take your Jubilee principle, right?
Every locality will be dealing with economic injustices
in different ways, right?
And so yes, there's a certain invitation
(27:42):
that Pentecost opens up to what I call, in fact,
in fact, I'm working on an article right now,
the last couple of days in which I'm thinking
about the promise of the Father, which is the spirit.
You know, Luke 24, Acts one and Acts two.
Jesus receives the promise of the Father
and then pours out that promise.
In that respect, I love the idea that the promise is,
(28:07):
in that respect, given that Pentecost paid on the one hand,
but it's still a promise in the sense
that every one of us are still going to be,
you know, experiencing or perpetuating economic
other injustices along the way of this book, right?
And part of the Christian, part of Christian discipleship,
(28:29):
Christian faith, Christian mission is,
how do we live further into the promise of the spirit?
How do we live further into the justice of the economy,
the justice of identity, the justice of the polis,
as opposed to perpetuating the injustices
of all of these that we inevitably do
(28:49):
if we just simply live in the flesh, right?
And so it's both universal, but it's particular.
And it's both given and paid for and done
in Christ and in Pentecost on the one hand, but yet,
but it's the invitation to mission to live even more fully
into the promise of justice
(29:12):
that is still woefully absent in much of our lives,
much of our world even today.
Yeah, and even just Shalom.
And I know you mentioned that in your book
and I make a huge deal about that.
It's just kind of like a telos, an ultimate goal,
which, you know, it goes before even justice.
(29:32):
Like justice is like, should be a ground floor for us,
just like that we're treated fairly.
If you think about this kind of,
like I guess the liberal concept of justice,
like a Rawlsian concept of justice,
like it should be a ground floor.
But what we should be is embracing each other
to use both terms and having this engraced kind of living
that's really rooted in Shalom.
Awesome. Yeah, that's so good.
We have one more question for you.
(29:54):
I think Megan has for you.
This has been just such a, not just fruitful,
you're being brief in the way you're talking about it,
but like, man, we could talk about this forever.
You know, like it's such a pertinent content.
So I really appreciate what you're saying here.
But Megan, why don't you go ahead and take it home for us?
Yeah, as we kind of, as we do for every single one of these
(30:15):
episodes, as we try and give like a practical charge,
because sometimes theology can feel very cerebral
and very up here.
And I think that there's something really special
about grounding what we talk about
into different applicable things,
whether we're just attending church or leading churches
or something that feels very ministerial.
So kind of to wrap it up, like, do you have practical advice
(30:37):
for Christians who are considering foreign missions?
Whether it's short term, long term,
like how can we actually be a witness in foreign missions,
wherever that is from wherever we are,
that's actually effective and isn't just continuing this,
like, oh, and then we go for two weeks
and we help nothing and we do nothing.
And how can we actually be a witness in these spaces?
(30:59):
So, you know, I appreciate giving the opportunity
for me to speak into this, even from the standpoint
of my own life, you know, I've only come
to this more concrete positionality
in a roundabout way after over the last 30 years.
So let me give you the upshot of it
and then I want to backtrack and why it's so important.
(31:22):
Absolutely.
The upshot of it is I would say take time to learn
at least one or more other languages.
But wherever you feel that, you know,
you might have a heart to,
because you have more specifically about missions abroad,
right?
Yeah, correct.
Southern in the US, right?
We might say something that, well,
we can use Google translate, yes, but,
(31:43):
but again, knowing the language is not just
about communicating, but it's about understanding.
Remember, if you don't understand the otherness
first and foremost, then you can't be transformed
by the otherness first and foremost,
and you will continue to colonize in your missiology
and your practical practices, right?
But if you learn the otherness of the other first and foremost,
(32:06):
and I come now to say that because that might have seen
so obvious from an Axe II standpoint,
but myself, because we, my parents were first generation
converse to Christianity, even though I was born in Malaysia,
because of our newfound Christian commitments
(32:27):
and our commitments to even ministry,
like my parents were pastors before I was even born, right?
My parents learned how to speak English
through the missionaries and because
of the British colonization,
and they only taught my brothers and I English
in our own growing up.
So I spoke Cantonese with my grandparents,
but after we moved to the US,
(32:48):
I didn't have access to my grandparents anymore,
so I really didn't have the opportunity
to keep developing my Chinese language.
When I was, let's see, I was now 35,
when I was 35, I took two years of Chinese.
I also had a lot of administrative responsibilities
at the other institution I was at at the time,
(33:09):
and the reason why I took that,
because I really felt like I wanted to pick up
that language at that point in time.
But trying to learn Chinese at almost 40 or so,
it's really, really hard.
And so unfortunately, I really still can't speak Chinese
today, I picked up some Spanish in high school
that helped me with my, I got married to my college sweetheart
(33:32):
who is a Mexican-American, so I earned a lot of
taco points, brownie points with my loss of time.
Sure.
So I can kind of hold a low conversation,
a kind of a minor conversation in Spanish,
but I can't really write, I can't write academically,
(33:53):
and I can't, at one point I might've been able to preach
a really bad sermon in Spanish.
That's what I'm talking about.
But I wish I knew more languages, first of all.
And because I feel now, now I would say that, again,
I was motivated more with my Spanish
for what I could do with it,
(34:14):
what I could, as an agent, enact on it.
But the Chinese bit, and since then,
has been driven by, if I understood more languages,
by the way, I had to study French and German for my PhD,
but those are faster languages with all of the baggage
of colonialism and so on.
So my point was that, I think now I would say,
(34:38):
what languages do is it opens up to other worlds.
It opens up to other ways of understanding ourselves,
ways of organizing ourselves, ways of envisioning,
imagining the possibilities of life.
Sure, it opens up the communication.
And then I think it also opens up the possibility
(34:59):
that we would be more embracing of the witness
and the testimonies that others bear,
the uniqueness of their own life journeys
and life journey, right?
And that, at the end of the day,
I think is what a decolonized mission is.
It's the capacity for every one of us to bear witness
(35:20):
out of the uniqueness and the particularity
of our own locations and journeys and sojourns.
And do that in this, as you mentioned, Steve,
this mutual or dialogical manner with others, right?
So that it's not me that bears the responsibility
to bear the good news,
(35:41):
but it's the cumulative voice of the people of God
and actually of those that they encounter, right?
That the wondrous need, the works of God
are declared out of what was happening
on the streets of Jerusalem.
And those were not limited to only apostles
doing the speaking, but also others doing the hearing
(36:02):
and interpreting and translating.
So, Lord's gonna raise up interpreters and translators
and multilingualists.
And out of that, we get decolonial mission
in the next generation.
So good.
I think an image that I just got is,
mission in this age, and you can see what you think
about this, but it's kind of like, you know,
(36:23):
how philosophy, Socrates would talk about it
as the pursuit of wisdom, looking at in light of your work,
that we're pursuing the spirit's work in the world together,
that we are with not just us,
but also the people that we're encountering.
We're trying to see and sense and know the spirit
in this world and what the spirit is doing.
Would you say that's a decent categorization?
(36:44):
Yeah, I'll tell you man, that.
All right, cool.
Well, hey, thank you so much for this.
I think it was just brilliant and very interesting.
The language piece is such a practical
and just such a good piece of advice that you have.
I speak about 1.3 languages.
So, yeah, the same way, just kind of that biracial,
born in Germany and everything.
You really don't know people and what they're saying
(37:06):
and doing if you don't have that deeper sense
of communication that's available to us
by just knowing the language.
Well, anyways, thank you so much for blessing us
with this time and we'll see you around.
Take care.
That was so good.
This is one of those conversations
that we have to be so strong and brave
and not keep going with,
because we could talk about this for hours on end,
(37:28):
tell you what.
So, it was such a blessing to have Amos on the podcast.
Oh, do you think that's like framing missions
as we are pursuing the spirit's work together?
Man, that's a different.
Oh, yeah, the division is the enemy's primary tool,
I feel like in the church to divide us.
And so, when we talk about pursuing unity in the spirit
(37:51):
to everything that we do,
especially when it comes to missions
and evangelizing and stuff,
like I feel like that would really solve
a large majority of our problems.
So good, so good.
All right, friends, just a reminder,
we will link in the show notes
where you can get Stephen's book,
brand new book on the Marquis,
and then we'll also have a lot of great resources
that Amos has, books Amos has written.
(38:12):
So, head on down there to get your hands
on some really, really good theology books
for the next couple, six months of your life
that you can really crack into and start reading.
Yeah, all right, well, as always,
this was brought to you by the School of Theology and Ministry
at Life Pacific University.
So we'll see you guys next time.
See ya.
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