Week 10 – Monday

I can’t believe it’s the last week of class already! Today’s class really hit me AFTER class when Dr. Bolger revealed to me that the church is not necessarily refering to the church service of the congregation but rather the community. I am not sure how to go about my paper anymore, but I’m sure that God will reveal His direction for me, because He is so faithful.

Week 9 – Response to Andy O’s Blog on Bourke’s “Reading a Woman’s Death”

I do agree that mission trips–especially short-term–must be very careful of who they send and how they interact with the people in affirming or condemning the culture. I do, however, think that the missionary has a very difficult line to walk on when the culture from which they are learning has practices that mar the people’s identity or that are truly demonic. Bridget Cleary’s death, brought about by the superstitions of the fairy legend making her husband believe she would come back again, was not healthy and needed to be addressed. I do not think those exploiting the situation responded correctly nor do I commend them. How would you recommend addressing that type of situation if you were a missionary on the field?   

“Concert and Salsa Dancing” Birthday Party

Almost finals week… crazy, huh? Well, after turning in your last paper, everyone in the Church and Mission class (invited your friends) is invited to come to my birthday party, next Friday, December 7th. We will meet at Cristian Cazacu’s Romanian Concert in Travis Auditorium, which starts at 7:30PM. After the concert, we will move to a free salsa dancing club in the area. I’ll give more information on that later this week to those who ask me or are my friends on Facebook. It will be a great night of good, clean fun… for those of you worried about freaky dancing, don’t be! I’ve been told the people at this club respect their dancing partners  Yaya! 

Week 9 – Two Models for the Future Church – Fuellenbach

I was excited in reading Fuellenbach’s assessment of the “two models for the future church”–one of heirarchical structure, the other of decentralized charismatic structure–and how the two models must work together. As 70% of all Roman Catholics are in the 2/3rds World, the Holy Spirit is evidently moving within the BECs (Basic Ecclesial Communities) of the 2/3rds World. I especially appreciate “[t]he basic images it uses [for the] people of God (all are equal), body of Christ (living organism), and Creation of the Holy Spirit (charismatic entity)” (Fuellenbach, 169). My image of the Church is a combination of both models, which will be good when I go onto the mission field and will be hopefully better able to relate to the Church of that culture than if I were to only accept the West’s heirarchical model of the church. 

Week 9 – Tyranny, Boundary, and Might: Colonial Mimicry in Mark’s Gospel – Tat-siong Benny Liew

 Liew states, “Despite Mark’s declaration of an apocalypse, what we have in the Gospel are recurring themes of “empire” such as tyranny, boundary, and might” (Castle, 216). Liew points out that Jesus being reinstated as God’s only Son further perpetuated the colonial heirarchical structure within the Church, such as Liew’s upbringing in colonial Hong Kong. He also reiterates Mark’s reinforcement of the “insider-outsider” binarism through “[p]resenting an all-authoritative Jesus who will eventually annihilate all opponents and all other authorities [...in other words] ’serve-or-be-destroyed’ (Castle, 214).

Week 9 – Mark and Empire – Stephen D. Moore

I was appalled by this reading of Mark, not so much because of the possibility of Mark being written as a counter-empirical Gospel but rather because Moore built his whole argument of this article on this theory that Mark and Mark’s Jesus were all about the physical “empire” rather than spiritual Kingdom. By focusing so much on the “empire” and physical realm, Moore tended to cheapen the spiritual aspects of the Daniel, Revelation, Mark, and John. Is my conception of Moore’s presentation of Mark due to my enculturation within the evangelical Church in America or something else? I am not sure.  

Week 9 – Reading a Woman’s Death – Angela Bourke

I was amazed at the many possibilities of how many ways the death of Bridget Cleary could be read from different people’s standpoints: taken away by fairies (as is oral legend), realistically tortured brutally by her husband and neighbors before being burned to death (either out of “her expected reappearance” [Castle, 453] or out of sheer, provoked violence), husband or neighbor invoked, etc. These different viewpoints make me wonder how much we are affected by the superstitions of our culture and by beliefs of our faith. Michael, according to Bourke, had faith through the fairy legends of his culture that his wife would come back to life after he killed her. What parts of our culture do we need to call into question?   

Week 9 – Out of the Center: The Literatures of Australia and New Zealand – Ralph J. Crane

“In Australia and New Zealand white writers have begun to write back to the center in an attempt to exorcise some of the Eurocentrism that has fashioned so much of the literature of the dominant culture in the two countries. In turning away from the center white writers in Australia and Pakeha writers in New Zealand are beginning instead to redefine themselves in relation to the indigenous cultures of their countries” (Castle, 397). People all around the world–including Caucasians–should follow this example of realizing the true value of “indigenous” cultures and embrace their history rather than try to conform to our Euro-/ethnocentric modern worldview. I, as a white American, had never realized just how much of a Euro-/ethnocentric modern worldview I had until I began studying at Fuller this quarter–thanks to Dr. Ryan Bolger, Dr. Bryant Myers, and Dr. Roberta King.