In the past year (2024) I’ve slowly been writing some reflection on life and faith but I’ve kept it in a side document. Now that it’s the end of the year, I’m realizing that this endeavor will take longer to write than I thought so I’m gonna slowly release what I have so far as separate posts here, knowing that some chapters of this work are going to take longer than others. Putting it public helps me to be more open while committing to finishing it at some point in the future. Below I’m going to include the preface I wrote back in February 2024. It’s a time capsule of sorts, but I still think my reflections, even in the midst of my fresh wounds, still ring true today.
preface
I never imagined writing a book like this (or a book at all for that matter). I grew up in the church; was nurtured within it; flourished in it, even. I was in the youth group. I sang in the choir. I led small groups. I led worship. I studied the bible and was ordained as a minister of word and sacrament. I loved the church… and I still love the church. And I still believe that the church is called to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a city on a hill. But we are far from that today. The salt has lost its flavor; the light is covered and dimmed; and no one looks up to the city we’ve made.
We are supposed to proclaim “good news,” but is it… good? The world sees our message as anti-science, anti-gay, anti-fun, anti-everything. I’ve felt this dissonance since I was young but I was always offered this explanation: we’re in a culture war. And we soothe ourselves with Bible verses to affirm this defensive perspective; Jesus told us, “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.”1 The world hates us. Check! and go about our faithful day.
Somehow, I was able to live this out. I took every thought captive. I made a covenant with my eyes. I was always ready to give a reason. I wanted to live rightly, so I maintained a persistent awareness of the worldly values that challenged what I was taught to be right. Every challenge reinforced my resolve. I was good at this. But as I reflect on this today, I would not wish this way of life on anyone. It is a tiresome and anxiety-driven experience, not the abundant life that Jesus promised us. The world’s disgust cannot be our litmus test of faithfulness.
When I read the scriptures, I’m struck by the contrast of the people’s affection for Jesus. Multitudes came to him — climbed trees just to get a glimpse of him, snuck up behind him to graze his cloak, took apart a roof to get his attention. He was loved by the masses; everywhere he went they had issues with crowd control. The same was true of his followers in the book of Acts. The people adored the apostles and held them in “high esteem.”2 The apostles would be jailed by the authorities one day but were immediately welcomed in the public square on the next! The message that the apostles proclaimed was good in the ears of the people. Everyone who came to them found their needs fulfilled. They lived into Jesus’ call to demonstrate love, sharing all that they had with all who had need.3 The early church did not engender the hate of the world nor wear the world’s rejection as a badge of honor.
Why is the church so different today?
Now, I do not advocate for transplanting the church of Acts (or any church from any era) into the modern day. I am sure that even the early church had their own issues to deal with as they struggled to find their identity. Every church needs to find a way to express the faith in ways that are true and coherent to their context.4 But I’m finding that the modern church is often trying to restore and uphold a culture from a particular time and place that is no longer good in the present time and place. It has doubled down on what the world finds offensive under the guise of faithfulness, and has forsaken its call to express the love and grace of God in a way that the world will understand. The church has taken a particular culture and baptized it as “biblical,” deeming those who find issue with it as apostates and heretics. We are called to love, but the church has become preoccupied with power and influence. We are distracted by platforms and coalitions. We seek the opinion of distinguished teachers before we seek the LORD in prayer. We fail to realize that how these teachers have contextualized the faith may not be appropriate for our own neighborhoods. It was my practical engagement in the work of contextualization that eventually put me on the other end of my former denomination’s culture war and cast me off from my former church community.
It’s in this liminal space between faith communities that I now seek to articulate how I’ve come to understand Christian faith and practice. At the top of my concerns is my family — in particular my daughters; the only faith community they’ve ever known is the one we were painfully separated from. I want to pass on my faith to them, but what faith do I pass on? There’s much good that I cherish from my faith upbringing, but there’s also a lot that I would relegate to the past. To adapt a subtitle from another work with a similar aim, I want to pass on a faith that my children won’t have to heal from.
Maybe that’s impossible; every culture has blind spots. But I want to try. That’s what this book is: my attempt to communicate the heart of the Christian faith that is not bound by Christian tribalism and gatekeeping. I’m writing this primarily as a parent, not as a minister, though I’m sure aspects of my pastoral identity will bleed through. This will come as a series of personal addresses to my children, but perhaps others may find them helpful too.
I pray that the Spirit will guide me in this endeavor and I pray that the church will emerge from this darker period that it unknowingly finds herself. May we learn to love and model the heart of Jesus to the world.
Norman Yung
February 2024
- John 15:18-19 NIV ↩︎
- Acts 5:13 NRSVue. ↩︎
- That’s why accounts like Acts 2:42-47 and Acts 4:32-35 resonate so much with our hearts. There’s a longing for that kind of loving community in each of us; we all desire hearts that are full and at rest. My nod to Augustine here. ↩︎
- The way that a pietistic culture and society would formulate a systematized theology would likely have different emphases in comparison to the confessions of the western church (Westminster, Belgic, etc.). Conveying faith in language is already contextualization. ↩︎
faith worth passing on
This list below will auto-populate with posts/chapters in this series as I post them!