It Must Come to an End

Php2.12-13It must come to an end. If it doesn’t end, it won’t be healthy for any of us. That was the advice one of our pastors gave to a member of our cohort group as we concluded our nine-month “Emerging Journey” class. One of my new friends in this class was sad that the fellowship had to end. Nine months have flown by so quickly! As we finished our class last night, none of us wanted it to end. All night our pastor’s words bounced around in my head. He reminded us that it is unhealthy for a spiritual discipline or church program to go on and on without conclusion.

Continue reading →

Guidelines for Best Shepherding Practice

ShepherdLoveA friend asked me (paraphrasing his question), “How may UBF communicate the best practice of shepherding?” This is my short reply.

When “shepherding sheep,” the shepherd should repeatedly and primarily employ persuasion, reason and gentle appeals. The shepherd should never resort to coercion, intimidation, shame, threats, guilt-tripping, punishment, humiliation, retribution, silence treatment, etc. Why not? The sheep/junior will feel that they have no choice but to “just obey” their shepherd—or face consequences. This is spiritually abusive. It is control and manipulation. Primarily, it miscommunicates the gospel which gives freedom (2 Cor 3:17; Gal 5:1; Jn 8:32). Continue reading →

How Well Are You Discipling Others?

This is based on a fascinating 9 min video by Father Robert Barron about how he would teach his seminary students as the new President of Mundalein Seminary, which is one of the largest seminaries in the U.S. How would he communicate to his seminarians the principles of evangelizing our culture today? His 5 points below of excitement, knowledge, audience, culture, and TGIF certainly fully apply to all UBF leaders, preachers and Bible teachers who want to reach and touch others for Christ effectively in this generation.
Continue reading →

My Working Philosphy of Education

I have hardly begun my journey as an educator, which affords me the luxury of being totally idealistic. Though I have read and heard sad stories from America’s education history, I have yet to be tainted by the system myself (especially since I was home schooled for most of my education). I will take full advantage of that pure idealism in hopes that if I build it up as a fortress now it will stand firm in the face of opposition. On the other hand, I realize that my understanding of what I am about to write will probably change as I begin to teach. Though this paper is technically my “philosophy of education,” I would feel more comfortable calling it my “working philosophy of education.” I will share thoughts from Freire, Kumashiro and Jesus with some of my own ideas in between.

Chapter two from Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire was for me one of the most impactful works of literature I have read in the process of becoming a teacher. A lot of what he said deeply resonated with what is becoming my philosophy of education. He distinguished between the “banking method” of teaching (which is to simply deposit information into students) from “problem-posing” education where:

…the students–no longer docile listeners–are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher…The role of the problem-posing educator is to create, together with the students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of the doxa is superseded by true knowledge, at the level of the logos.

Continue reading →