It has been absolutely encouraging for the past two weeks to attend UofT's summer Campus for Christ weekly meetings and just see the crazy growth that has occured over the two years I was gone. Amazing.
I think they have more frosh than the total members of when I was there two years ago. I even think they have more people in positions of leadership than the total members of when I was there two years ago. Rewind back to 5 years ago, when there were only 10 steady, consistent members. I would have never guessed this exponential growth 5 years ago when I first started to attend.
I thank God for the good leadership that he's provided at Campus for Christ. I truly believe that Campus for Christ is one of the few good role models of "Christian campus groups" we have today. In my severely biased opinion, they have no serious/big flaws, although they are not perfect since it is a group composed of humans. However, this group not only talks in comfortably insulated bubbles with tags and titles outside of it that say their mission is the Great Commission. They walk the Great Commission too. They actually get out and do stuff, and they also have a strategic plan on doing so. Praise God for Campus for Christ, I'm so thankful that God used Campus for Christ to mold me into the person I am now.
Some of the key ways I have been shaped by C4C has been:
1. To be proactive and be a change-agent. Not to wait for my Christian leaders to tell me to do something before I go and do it. While I shouldn't disrespect and be unsubmissive to authority, I shouldn't wait for them to tell me to do something before I start doing it. I need to take the initiative not only inspite leaders not telling me to do anything, but especially when I'm in a situation where leaders don't tell the people they're leading to do something.
2. To be teachable and not be afraid to fail and admit failure
3. Selection. To weed out people who really don't care about the Great Commission. (I'm not talking about kicking them out of the church, but not to invest the valuable and limited time that God has given me into people who don't even care about God's stuff [the GC])
4. Spiritual multiplication. Why spiritual multiplication is more biblical, effective in the long-term, and more strategic than spiritual addition. Great concepts in the book "The master plan of evangelism" by Robert Coleman
Thanks God, for Campus for Christ
***
A theme that God has been reminding me of lately is just the importance of balance in order to have a vibrant, vivacious, overall healthy relationship with Him
In highschool and university, I bounced back in forth through seasons of emphasizing loving God with all my "mind" and loving God with all my "heart" (or at least what I understood about loving God with my "heart", for I am realizing that our modern understanding of "heart" in our culture is pretty different from what the Biblical writers meant). Sometimes, I was overbalancced in one area so when I realized the need to fill the other area, the pendulum swung pretty hard towards the other extreme and I neglected the other. Then I tried to learn a balance in proportion of the two.
However, in the past two years in East Asia, I have learned so much about the biases of "Western Christian thinking" that I was completely oblivious to all the previous years of my life! Not only were there cultural blindspots that I discovered that us Westerners have, but these blindspots affected my relationship with God!
Before, I only thought that there were 2 mediums of how I were to build my relationship with God. If it were not with the intellectual pursuit of the knowledge of God, then it was through the strong affective/emotional experiences accessed through the worship of God through the "heart". I was completely oblivious to experiencing God deeply through my will (decision making/motives), my physical body, and also my intuitive experiential knowledge of the mysterious spiritual realm, the latter of which I am becoming really interested in in this phase of my life.
I realized that this bias (of only emphasizing or validating experiencing God through the mind or the "heart") comes from a very limited view of the Christian walk that has only started about a few centuries ago (through the influence of some historical periods such as the Enlightenment, as well as the Reformation). This had led most of us western Christians to only validate, or at most take serious notice of experiencing God through intellectually driven stuff like Wayne Grudem or emotionally laden stuff Max Lucado, or a mix of both cateogiries that land on different locations of the same contiuum of both mind and heart.
And this framework of "mind or heart", I realized recently, is very culturally relative. I am not talking about the existence of the "mind" or "heart" that is relative, but the exclusive notice of the two, while neglecting other fundamental faculties of the self (will, physical body, spiritual intuition), is completely characteristic of modern western Christianity within the confines of western countries for just about a few centuries.
I have started to dabble into earlier Christians (who weren't affected by the Enlightenment or the Reformation), and noticed that their paradigm is pretty different from us. If one reads the writings, or even quotes from the desert fathers, the medieval mystics, the catholic monasteries, the eastern orthodox masters, it is so different from John Piper, Johnathan Edwards, and John MacCarthur (I'm not hating on these guys, I'm sure they are God-loving, Bible-believing followers of Christ). This discovery of different tools to spiritually "feast" upon God was almost as dramatic as my discovery that in the middle-east and some Muslim countries, they eat all their food (including rice with other dishes) with their hands, and that utensils are as rare as typewriters these days.
I have to be careful now. Now that I am on a journey to supplement these different faculties of my being in experiencing God (will, body, spiritual intuition), that I do not repeat the mistakes of history by swinging the pendulum too hard to the other side and completely neglect intellectual theological knowledge (which I previously liked and still do), as well as "hillsong happy clappy" experiences of the heart. But to put them in a bigger unified/holistic context of the overall human self.
I think experiencing the reality of God through additional God-given faculties is just like experiencing physical reality through one of the additional five senses of one only previously had two of them. Imagine someone who only had the 2 senses of smell and taste, but didn't have hearing, seeing, or feeling all their life. Then one day, they start to hear, see, and physically feel. That person feels more alive to physical reality. Something has happened to me similarly in the realm of walking with God.
I must be careful to maintain the balance though.
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