Why I Love Paris

Like Washington DC, Paris---the Capital City of France--was designed to intimidate foreign dignitaries.  I think Paris wins the competition.  I love DC, but it looks like it could have been built yesterday.  Paris, on the other hand, is filled with spectacular "intimidating" buildings and streets everywhere you look.  For instance, this first set of three pictures are taken from the same spot.  I was talking to Jamie on my phone and the Eiffel Tower was on my Left, the Grand Palace (with the giant green glass roof) was in front of me--the street flanked with Golden statues, and behind me was the enormous Invalides building where Napoleon is laid to rest in this--attached---dome Cathedral (below):

Notice how the statues on the street are so ornate, that if you get close to one of those tall pillars with the angels on top that even the minor figures in the middle of the columns have gold:  in this case, a Golden sword.

Or take this statue constructed on one of many of Paris' bridges.  You walk across the bridge, and this is what you see on the edge of the bridge facing out over the Seine.

Or the ornate statues on just one of Notre Dame's doors.

Or the variety of architecture on just one city block in the middle of the city.  It really puts every other city to shame.

Perhaps in 2011 or 2012, I would like to lead a group to Paris to visit the Church of God here.  I would also lead a tour of the city focused on the secularization of Europe.  We would visit key sights in Paris that would help Americans to grasp how and why Europe became so secularized and what this means for the future of Europe and for the United States.  Hopefully we can begin planning that relatively soon.

Not Your Ordinary City

It's a rainy, blustery, windy day here in Paris.  I arrived this morning after a super easy check in at the airport, a super quick flight (I slept the entire way), and a very fast trip to my regular pad in Paris.  I've been here in the Spring, Fall, and Summer, but never in the winter.  The leaves have fallen and it was quite chilly even though it said it was only about 50 degrees---it felt much colder than that.

I'm here to visit the Paris Church of God and to attend a three day event with another church.  A Muslim from Cote D'Ivoire is sharing with us about his conversion to Christianity and how Christianity is growing in the Islamic world.  His first lecture tonight was very interesting.  I could only understand about 5% of it, but it was still very good---what little I picked up.  I think he's filled with amazing stories.  I wish my French were better.  I'm determined to start practicing again.

It was nice to see some of the Paris friends again--especially the young people.  I have a good relationship with the folks here and I absolutely adore this city.  I never get tired of walking past the grandiose buildings that are literally everywhere. Pastor Michel and I had a late dinner at the restaurant of an Arabic Christian that he knows here in Paris.   It was literally one block from the Arc de Triumph.  So now I know a Christian guy who will give us a great meal by the Arc de Triumph.  I always enjoy my time with Pastor Michel and hearing about the realities of doing ministry in this heart of secularism.

Earlier in the day, while walking around near the Place de la Concorde, I found a great English bookstore thanks to google maps.  I've always had a hard time finding an English bookstore in this city (there are suprisingly few considering the large amount of English speakers that live here) and I was hunting for a copy of the new V.S. Naipaul book "the Masque of Africa."  I found it and I was thrilled to pick up a copy.  I may comment on it in future diary posts.

Tomorrow another session in the evening, and then some more Saturday before lunch with some of the CHOG friends.  I might write more later.  But just to give you an example of why I adore Paris-----take a look at that picture above.

It's just one of many squares (or plazas) in Paris.  And like I've said before, you can go down any street and see a stunning piece of architecture in this city (and don't forget all the great art work inside these buildings).

But just as an example.  I go to the bookstore on the metro (because it's raining hard) and I come out above ground and this is what I see (see picture above).  The Eiffel Tower in the background and the Obelisk at the Place de la Concord.  That Obelisk is 4,000 years old!  It was the Obelisk guarding the entrance to the Luxor Temple Complex in Upper Egypt and was built to honor Ramses the II----Marco and I just watched a recreation of that in the Ten Commandments a few days ago.  It was transported to Paris from Egypt back in the 1830's!  You know...before Abraham Lincoln was President.

So an AUTHENTIC 4,000 year old Egyptian Obelisk built for the most famous Pharaoh ever is just outside the subway entrance as I go up the steps.  THAT IS PARIS! And that is why I absolutely love this city.

One Nation Under a Patrick Groove...

Check me out.  You all know I like the Funk and Funk music is my thang....

Personalize funny videos and birthday eCards at JibJab!

Thanks to Byron and Jen for this!  This is actual footage of me on Soul Train in 1978 back when I knew how to dress.

By the way, this is what my hair looks like at this moment.  And it looks GOOD!

Home is Where the Heart is

Marco and I are so glad Jamie's home.  We missed her a lot.  I told her that this place we live in becomes a house when she is gone.  When she's here, it's a home.

Aside from starving to death and having my cooking rejected by my own son, it was an okay week.  Marcorefused to eat my food.  I heated chicken nuggets in the oven (it took all of my concentration) and he said, "No way if this is your first time. I'll take a peanut butter and jelly sandwich."

Well, I got the cooking bug.  I now know how to make tea and put something in the oven.  It's possible I may try heating up a frozen pizza in the next month---ON MY OWN!

We did have a great time with Uncle Dave----that would be missionary to Bulgaria Dave Simpson.  I'm looking forward to going there to see the work that they do sometime in the Spring if all works out.  It is a tough, tough country to operate in, but they do it with such enthusiasm, grace, and fun.  All of us on the 3W crew are huge admirers of the Simpsons who bring a wonderful spirit to this very awesome crew here in Europe/ME.

Jamie for her part had a great time with the 3W gals.  They worked very long, hard hours organizing a conference, but they had a wonderful time together.  Everyone brings their own special gifts and there's just a great deal of team unity on our 3W crew.  Frankly, this is unusual, and it's something that has to be protected.  Which we do.  Expectations of unity are high--and they have to be.

Well, tomorrow I'm off to Paris for 4 days.  I'll be visiting with the church in Paris, attending a seminar they are putting on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and then speaking on Sunday before taking my low-cost carrier back to Berlin.  Yes, it does mean saying goodbye to Jamie again.  I don't like that, but at least I know we are all eating, sleeping, and bathing regularly which is more than I can say for those times when I am running the house.  On Monday night, we seriously considered eating road kill.

The real reason I'm glad Jamie is home is not because of her cooking, but because she is my best friend, the person that fascinates me the most in the whole world, and I LOVE spending time with her.  I still like dating her.  I still can't wait to see her after all of these years.  It actually gets more that way each year!

Thank you ladies of the Three Worlds team.  You ladies are awesome and make us proud!

Jamie, welcome home!

Women of Three Worlds Back from Turkey

The gals from the 3W Crew are back.  They were in Turkey helping to organize a conference.  Here they are in front of the famous Blue Mosque. 

Another view of the Blue Mosque.

A view from the inside.

A Turkish market, I guess.

Photos courtesy of K. Goldman---although used without permission.  Sorry Kara!

The King and I

Marco and I have a special guest in our home:  Dave Simpson--missionary to Bulgaria.  Dave's here because we are starving to death.  Both Marco and I are down to 98 pounds with Jamie being gone.  The weird thing is that Marco only weighed 54 pounds when she left.  Oh well...anyway.

It's been fun to have Dave here in Berlin and us guys of the Three-World crew had a good time last night hanging out while our wives are in Istanbul, Turkey.

Marco and I are watching Cecil B DeMille's "The 10 Commandments" again.  I love that movie and wrote about it last year or so, when we were watching it.  Marco recently asked me who the two best villains in movie history are.  For me they are:

1) Darth Vader

2) Yul Brynner in the Ten Commandments (as Pharaoh).

In both cases, when they are on the screen, you can't take your eyes off of them.  They exude evil and charisma.

Yul Brynner was a super interesting guy.  He was from Vladivostok, Russia in Sakhalin---the very Eastern tip of Siberia.  He had Mongol heritage, gypsy (Romani), Russian, and Jewish heritage.  He grew up in Vladivostok, Harbin, China, and Paris where he did propaganda on the radio against the Nazi's during World War II.  He became famous for his portrayal of the King in the King and I.  He also was a renown photographer, an author--and a handsome devil with a cool, deep voice.  He also won an academy award and a few Tony's.  And as if that was not enough, he was also an accomplished musician and sang Russian Gypsy music from Russia's Far East.  He died in 1985 of cancer.  Check this out.  A taste of the sound of the Russian Far East:

Remembering Cindy

We received word today from our friend Alan in Taiwan that his wife Cindy Lwo died of cancer this morning at 4:20 am Taipei time.  Cindy had been struggling against cancer for the past couple of years and put up a valient battle.  Cindy was a collegue and a great friend.  She was also a great mother and a wonderful support to her husband Alan as we joined together to try to do work in East Asia.  She was very committed in her support to Alan and was even willing to uproot her life in these coming years to do ministry on a larger scale with her husband.  But then she got sick. The last time I was in Tapei, I visited their home.  Cindy was in between battles of chemotherapy and we were hoping that the worst had passed.  As I visited with them I started to feel nauseous for some reason and I felt really nauseous.  Even though she was the one that was really sick and week, Cindy had me lie down and gave me an interesting Chinese massage with hot glasses.  It took the sickness away immediately.  After that, I started calling her "Taipei Mother."  That is my final memory of her.  She was just so sweet.  And so ready to sacrifice.  

 This must be so difficult for the whole family.  She was a beautiful woman. 

We won't forget her and all that she did for the Kingdom.  Our thoughts and prayers are with her family.

Non-Western Christianity (One of the Three Worlds)

Nobel-prize winning write V.S. Naipaul is directing his considerable writing talents to a subject I am very interested in as well, African Spirituality.  The spectacular growth of Non-Western Christianity is what Philip Jenkins has called "The Next Christendom" or the most important moment in religious history since the Protestant Reformation.  The bulk of this growth is occurring in places like China, India, Brazil, and Sub-Saharan Africa.  Sub-Saharan Africa is now estimated to have 390 million Christians.  How African Christianity is processed and transported oversees will have a big impact on the world.  Naipaul's new book The Masque of African Belief promises to be an excellent examination of the subject.

Christianity in Africa is often inner-mixed with local religious beliefs and practices.  This is called syncretism.  To some extend, syncretism occurs in any culture.  It can eventually get institutionalized and we don't even recognize it anymore.  Culture inevitable affects Christianity and this seemed to be fine with Jesus and the Bible which continually sees culture absorbed, but the ultimate meanings changed after it encounters the Christian message.

African Christianity is often used as an example of overly-sycretistic Christianity because it is true that many African Christians still practice folk religion--and perhaps even trust it more than the Bible at times.  Yet, on the other hand, African Christianity is much more likely to take the Gospel stories of miracles as literal and possible even in today's world---and lo and behold, more miracles due tend to occur in these settings where people value the supernatural.

In much of the world, the supernatural and the material world do not live in hostility.  Whether it's secularized Europeans planning vacation pilgrimages to Poland, Portugal, or France to see the Virgin, Japanese construction companies paying tribute to a Shinto Shrine before a new modern railway is built, or an African witch-doctor making appointments using their cell phone, the world is still remarkably spiritual in most places.

The difference, however, is to the degree which the spiritual affects daily life.  Naipaul's journey is into 21st Century Africa where the spiritual is very much everywhere.

From the Book Review:

There is a great thudding taboo in any discussion of Africa. Western journalists and aid workers see it everywhere, yet it is nowhere in our coverage back home. We don't want to talk about it. We don't know how to. We smother it in silence, even though it is one of the most vivid and vibrant and violent parts of African life. We are afraid—of being misunderstood, or of sounding like our own ugliest ancestors. The suppressed topic? The African belief in spirits and spells and ancestors and black magic.

Political-correctness, which is often the death of any good scholarship and analysis has prevented a lot of examination of this subject.  One of the reasons I have valued V.S. Naipaul is for his willingness to ignore political-correctness and show the grime and grit beneath cultures.

The review continues:

In most indigenous African religions, "God" is pretty much inaccessible to humans. But they believe every human is surrounded by a swirl of spirits—of the dead, of the living who can temporarily leave their bodies, of nature—that are constantly at work. Many of these spirits will take on physical representations at key moments, from trees to carved idols to animals. They can protect and heal, or they can smite and curse. Life is a constant exhausting process of wooing the spirits and warding them off. They can be communicated with directly, but it is easier to talk through the local soothsayers and witch doctors. Africans who describe themselves as Muslims and Christians will often retain these traditional beliefs not far beneath the surface.

These beliefs—like all religions—can bring both sweet, illusory comfort and intense terror. One typical story Naipaul stumbles across captures both. In a corner of Uganda, a young woman explains to Naipaul: "My grandmother produced twins who died. They had to be buried in a special way, in hollow pots, and a shed had to be built over the grave, to protect and shade them. Every year my grandmother went there to tend the shed, feed the grave, and sing and dance there. When she became a Pentecostal, she had to stop that, as it is not allowed. She had to remove the shed, and she was so afraid that the twins would come and kill her and her living children."

And this gets to the heart of the issue, which is that the deep respect for the supernatural that Africans possess is something that secularied Westerners should probably respect more.  At the very least, Western Christians---who often use the language of spirituality constantly--but in the final analysis spend little time or energy devoted to it in any real risk-taking way--could learn a lot from African Christians and their confidence in a God that acts not only in history, but in our present age.

On the other hand, my own feeling is that a lot of African Christianity is held hostage to a world that resembles Zoroastrianism (a battle between good and evil with humans as simply the pawns) and not the victorious, empowered, spirituality that Jesus preached.  This bent toward superstition and tradition is very common of cultures accepting Christianity for the first time (Actually, Christianity has been in Africa longer than it has in Europe--but I mean Sub-Saharan Christianity as it has grown since the 1930's).  Inevitably, a lot of syncretism does occur in the first generations.  You even see this in the New Testament and St. Paul has to call out churches that are still clinging to their old pagan ways.

In the end, Christian orthodoxy emerges through the interpretation of scripture and prophetic voices.  Notice how in the critics story about Africa a woman superstition is challenged by Pentecostals.  Pentecostals, of course, are on the far extreme of belief in spiritual manifestations by Western standards.  Yet in Africa, they are the corrective, moderate force.  This is why I believe it is not such a terrible thing that Pentecostalism is the primary growth vehicle for Christianity in Africa.  In the long run, this is probably the natural corrective.  Movements and denominations that are not Pentecostal, will not see the same level of growth.  Yet they are important as well.

Jamie "Sophia"

Photo: Icon in the Hagia Sophia Istanbul

As part of our duties as Regional Coordinators for Europe and the Middle East, we will be traveling a lot throughout the region.  Usually, it will be me traveling alone.  I have upcoming trips to France, Northern England, and Scotland for instance.  Sometimes we will travel as a family as we did last week when we went to Egypt.  We will attend the England CHOG quarterly meeting in London as a family in November.  But every once in a while Jamie will go without either of us. This week, Jamie goes to Turkey to help organize a conference in Istanbul.   That means Marco and I will be left at home ALONE!!!!!

What this means is that Marco and I will have to fend for ourselves.  Who will make us dinner?  Who will pack the school lunch?  Who will make sure that we get dressed?  Who will make sure that we bathe semi-regularly?  What will we eat?  Did I mention there's nobody here to cook for us?

Of course, this is not the first time Marco and I have been left alone.  Yes, it's true we both lost about 10 pounds the last time Jamie left.  And yes it's true that when we had our boys weekend last summer in Cincinnati, we forgot to eat.  But I think we should be okay. Well, not really.  We'll be counting the days until she comes back.  She's the glue that keeps it all together all the time.

Actually, there's more to the story.

The gals of 3W will be joining Jamie on the trip and they will be busy helping the Women's conference there.

Meanwhile, we will be getting a guest this week.  David Simpson, missionary to Bulgaria will be moving in with Marco and I.  And David can cook!!!!   So perhaps we will not starve to death.  In fact, between Kelley, Aaron, David, Marco, and I, we may have some pretty wild guy times this week sans frau (to mix my European languages).

Marco and I appreciate all that Jamie does for us--and yes, we tell her often.  Marco says, "We're dumb and dumber."  And guess who is "dumber?"  Yup, that would be me.  I'm wondering how many things I will get wrong this week.  Hopefully no major screw ups involving school schedules, homework, or anything else.  Jamie's got all the sophia (that means "wisdom"), but hopefully she'll be busy visiting the sights of one of the world's most beautiful cities---despite the unseemly headlines in today's news.  The American response to bombings is complete and utter panic.  The European response is:  "Well, that's unlikely to happen again for a while and there's nothing I can do about it anyway." I think we tend to fall in the latter category as far as our mindset goes.

I myself can't wait to visit Istanbul someday soon.  But I'll be real happy when Jamie is back because we will both miss her a lot.  And not just because we are starving to death.

The Fall

Fall is my favorite time of year.  But for the past 10 years, I haven't experienced an Autumn.  In Hong Kong , the tropical climate means that there really is no fall and there are no leaves changing.  Not since I lived in Connecticut have I been able to enjoy the leaves changing color.

A few weeks ago, Marco, Jamie and I were walking down the streets of our Berlin neighborhood.  We were stepping on leaves and feeling them under our feet--slippery against the wet pavement.  The colors were amazing and the cool brisk air blowing the leaves down gave us a foreign feeling.  Marco had never seen leaves fall and change colors.  He was amazed.  So were we.

It really is nothing short of miraculous to see this kind of beauty in nature.  It's something I appreciate more as I get older and as I see it all again through the eyes of a child.  How do we ever get numb to these things?