To Agape Fellowship

I wrote this letter on 12/30/2010. Now I send it to you through my new blog. I am a changed man. I use iPad and write blog. As you can tell, my life is pretty exciting. I will write something here and there, I need to write in order to survive. Check it out when you are too "excited" like me. 

A Letter of Thanksgiving

My Dear Friends,

Thanks for being there every Sunday to listen to God’s word through me even though my interpretation and understanding of His word may be inaccurate, and my own embodiment of His word has been filled with flaws. Over the years I wrote down every sermon. I printed out every sermon to practice at home even though I never used manuscripts when I preached. This is what I learned from my preaching courses at Gordon-Conwell. I believe it is a good practice and habit. When I look at a pile of sermon manuscripts on my bookselves, I see His grace. All these manuscripts remind me of most Saturdays in which I struggled and worried. In my worry and struggle, when I look back, I have a better understanding of 2 Cor. 12:9--"My gracious favor is all you need. My power works best in your weakness" (NLT).  

Over the years I have realized that people do not usually hear what I want them to hear. Sometimes I thought I prepared a good sermon and expected people to say something good about it. But people were usually silent and continued to live as if they never heard of it. God knows how many times I preached with inadequacy, and how much I disliked what I had to say on Sundays. When I preached with my inadequacy, you would say something good about what I said here and there. Besides that, what was beneficial to you was not what I wanted to stress on. That makes me humble and realize that the word of God is mediated through the work of the Holy Spirit who has absolute freedom to guide us into His truth in a mysterious way. The essence of the ministry of the Holy Spirit is self-effacing. The Spirit never claims that this is my ministry, for He always directs attention to Christ (Jn. 16:13-14): Christ is in the front; the Spirit, at the back. How many times I have violated this biblical principle!

But inadequacy is different from unpreparedness. The Holy Spirit works through the means, which is, my effort to prepare. To serve God without preparation is a great sin in God’s church.

Thanks for being there in Sunday school. I had no pressure to prepare and teach Sunday school. The only thing I regret is that I wish I wrote more over the years. I am amazed that I can write “that much”. To write is to think; to think is to write. And I like to think. I do not like to think about my own thoughts, for I do not want to repeat my own memory. Thus, I like to read. To read is to think about what others have to say. Writing helps me integrate my thoughts and think about my integration. I did not know that I can write something like this. I can say that in serving I discover God’s gift in me. When I decide to serve Him, He never ceases to amaze me. Thanks for being part of the process of my discovery.

Thanks for strong ties of relationship and friendship. I know that I can be personal. But I do not know that my personal relationship with you can become a mark of my pastoral style. I think I will approach people in various ministries in a similar way. A pastor can be a jerk if he/she relates to people only as a pastor. I wish that  the slogan “just as I am” is my pastoral attitude to approach and being approached by others, for God has saved me “just as I am”, not as a pastor. It is relational, not functional. Whenever a pastor-parish relationship becomes functional, it no longer works. My understanding of that is that grace seems to flow through relations, not functions.

In my last discipleship letter, I found out that I spelled the word “minister” incorrectly. I spelled “minster” instead. How could I spell this word, which defines who I am and what I do, incorrectly? I find it amusing and ironic because I made little mistakes like this till the last day of ministry. A minster is who I am; to minster is what I do. God seems to tell me that a minster will and should never be a professional.

“We pastors are being killed by the professionalizing of the pastoral ministry…Professionalism has nothing to do with the essence and heart of the Christian ministry. The more professional we long to be, the more spiritual death we will leave in our wake. For there is no professional childlikeness (Matt. 18:3); there is no professional tenderheartedness (Eph. 4:32); there is no professional panting after God (Ps. 42:1)” [John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2002), pp. 1-2.].

A minster is someone who answers God’s calling and shepherds His church with a limp. A minster is spiritual and stupid at the same time. What is a minster? A holy idiot. (cf. 1 Cor. 1:18-25)

Thanks for the video and all the sharing in it. I like it because you did not praise me. You just let me see myself through your words. In your words I see that I am in your lives. I am touched by that. As you know, it is hard to allow someone to enter into our lives these days. We rarely open our inner chambers for others. For me, that is meaningful. In the video, I see my future: you know how much I love my fat wife with a pair of hairy hands. You never know in the kingdom of God. His blessing can be turned into a curse. If my future will one day come true, I will pray to God: “You better kill me before I slaughter her.”