James Choung's Blog
October 8, 2014
Beyond Awkward
My friend and colleague, Beau Crosetto, just came out with a book this week! It is an excellent book on evangelism and specifically helping those of us that feel awkward about the idea of sharing our faith. Hence the title, Beyond Awkward: When Talking About Jesus is Outside Your Comfort Zone.
If you buy Beyond Awkward this week, Beau is offering 4 FREE resources.
A new Ebook: Breakthrough Evangelism
Seminar Notes: Beyond Awkward Spiritual Conversations Training
Evangelistic Bible study leader notes on Acts 8
Case Study: A man’s transformation from jaded to bold in evangelism
Buy the book and get the bonuses here:
Also, check out a post he wrote on the tensions we face in evangelism – to be awkwardly silent, or awkwardly zealous. He wants to help us avoid the extremes and move beyond the awkward into authentic witness of Jesus.
May 27, 2014
Big Story App: Tutorial
For now, it’s at Vimeo, but will later be included into the free app in a future update. I hope it’s helpful!
April 1, 2014
Discipling Skeptics and Seekers
Beau Crosetto — fellow InterVarsity staffworker, fellow church planter, and blogger at Release the APE — and I wrote a free eBook on evangelism for the Exponential network. It was Beau’s initial idea, and he persuaded me to join the project. And over the past couple of months, we worked on this together for many, many hours. A couple of times, we completely overhauled the book’s structure so that it would be something useful and helpful in your hands.
We really believe, as we write, that “evangelism is the discipleship of skeptics and seekers,” and that if we’re serious about discipleship, we also need to be serious about being humble, faithful and winsome witnesses of the hope that we have. Here’s the blurb from the exponential website:
In this new FREE eBook, the authors help leaders understand two things: 1) Why every believer needs to be doing evangelism and leading people to faith: and 2) How you can create a culture of witness in your church or faith community. For too long we were pressuring people, and now we have become passive in evangelism. Crosetto and Choung say the time is now to seek a third and better way!
Let us know if the resource is helpful! And you find 14 other free eBooks from Exponential as well!
January 17, 2014
Designed to share
January 15, 2014
Life after death
Here’s another video created by the good folks at Explore God that I found online. This is from that same one-hour interview they did.
January 13, 2014
Just get out of the way
This article is repost from one I had written for Wheaton’s Evangelism Blog called Evangel-vision published on January 9, 2014.
A month ago, I was with all of the InterVarsity staff from the great states of Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska, training them on how to lead Spirit-led conversion movements over three days. Ambitious, eh?
I don’t know if I covered all of the bases, but I’m excited about the role of listening prayer with people who have yet to follow Jesus. I have a hunch that God speaks to all people, not just to people who put the label “Christian” on their lives.
When I bought my green Honda Civic fifteen years ago, I started to notice all of the other Civics on the road. It’s like my eyes were opened to them, once I started noticing. In the same way, when I started looking for the role of listening prayer in a person’s coming to faith, I started seeing it everywhere. After making calls to faith and following up to hear someone’s story, it seemed that an experience with God was instrumental in their making a decision to trust Jesus with their lives.
That makes sense, doesn’t it?
In the age of modernity, truth — particularly propositional truth — had authority. But in postmodernity, experience carries the day.
So I started experimenting with teaching people to hear God’s voice and then inviting them to listen — regardless of their faith background — and to see if He says anything at all. Then, I’ll invite someone to follow Jesus afterward, and if they’ve heard from God, they’ll often give their lives to him.
I trained on that, sharing some of my stories.
Let me share an exciting outcome. A staff worker from Iowa, Rachel, went back to her campus the day after that conference ended. She was talking with a student, Chelsea. With the training in mind, she felt led to give some impromptu teaching on hearing God’s voice. They did some listening prayer, and Chelsea heard the phrase: “feeling like I don’t measure up.” She then looked up and said, “That’s exactly what I feel! I feel so guilty acting like a Christian when I have so many questions and doubts and know I am just acting. I have been looking at all these other religions lately and don’t know what to believe.”
So Rachel invited her to do listening prayer again to see if some of those doubts could be addressed, and they were. Then Rachel asked, “What would it look like to start something new with Jesus today? Would you be willing to follow him even if all your answers aren’t answered right away?”
And Chelsea said, “Yes!”
Sometimes I wonder if there are times we just need to get out of the way, and let God speak directly to people who don’t yet know him. In my experience, one word from God is worth a thousand sermons.
January 3, 2014
Do women have an elevated standing in the Christian community?
This post was written for Release the APE a month ago, and it was the #3 post of the year. If you’re interested, you can see what the top five were for 2013 here.
A few weekends ago, I spoke at a conference titled “Renewing Gender Relations.” It was an honor to be speaking alongside other plenary speakers such as Dr. Mimi Haddad, the president of Christians for Biblical Equality, and Rev. Dr. Grace May, president of Women of Wonder.
I spoke on the synergy of men and women in partnership, and was led to offer a history lesson.
My main question came from the subtitle of Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity: how does the obscure, marginal Jesus movement become the dominant religious force in the Western world?
In his book, he takes a sociologist’s lens on Christian history, and says that without mass conversions or events, Christianity could achieve 5 to 7.5 million adherents by 300 AD just by having 40% growth each decade through relational evangelism.
Then, with each chapter, he unpacks a counter-intuitive reason why the Christian faith was growing. Christianity reached the middle and upper classes, and not just the poor. Their mission to Jewish people was rather successful, instead of unsuccessful. Christians offered basic care to the sick during plagues when their own pagan relatives left them for dead, increasing the chance of survival nine-fold instead of just relying on miracles. Christians were concentrated in urban areas where they could welcome the steady inflow from surrounding areas, and they could minister to the urban chaos and grind, due to the strength of their community. And during persecution, the way martyrs would face their death greatly impressed the Greco-Roman world.
But there was one more factor: women had an elevated standing within the Christian community.
“Christianity was unusually appealing,” writes Rodney Stark, “because within Christian subculture women enjoyed far higher status than did women in the Greco-Roman world at large.”
His reasons from a sociological perspective are interesting. In a Greco-Roman world where men vastly outnumbered the women, the women outnumbered the men in Christian circles. They were usually the primary converts, who would later lead their husbands to faith. And the Christian faith gave them incredible advantages: in a world where men were expected to be promiscuous, Christianity demanded fidelity for both men and women. In that way, women enjoyed higher security and equality in their marriages. In a time when women were often given over in marriage by age 12, Christian women married later and had more choice. And where the Greco-Roman world didn’t want many children, Christians were encouraged to be fruitful and multiply, and with their prohibitions against infanticide (which often targeted girls) and abortion, more female babies were allowed to live.
But in all of this, women were also leaders of the church. Many women were martyred, and those who were killed for their faith often held positions of authority in the church. At the Council of Chalcedon in 451, they specified that deaconesses needed to be single and over 40. The very fact that they had qualifications for deaconesses must mean that, obviously, they existed.
“Nevertheless,” writes Stark, “there is a virtual consensus among historians of the early church as well as biblical scholars that women held positions of honor and authority within early Christianity.”
It seemed that Christian women enjoyed far more privileges and status than other women in the Greco-Roman world, which leads to a question:
Do Christian women today enjoy more privilege and status than women outside of our communities?
For if the answer isn’t in the positive, I wonder what that means for the health of the church. Because when women did, it helped a marginal sect become the dominant religious force in the Western world.
My question is: what happens when they don’t?
January 1, 2014
The difference between science and religion
I realize that this blog needs a little lovin’, a little TLC these days. One resolution I won’t make is to write more here. I couldn’t bear to see another resolution broken.
But what’s keeping me posting are the videos that Explore God keeps producing, and I’m floored by what they can pull together from an unscripted, hour-long interview. Here’s something they put together from thoughts I had on science and religion, and I hope you find it helpful.
October 21, 2013
Why does God allow pain and suffering?
They explore questions like: How do we even know there is a God? Or, how do you talk to God? Or, why do we need community? In this video, we cover the question: why does God allow pain and suffering? And I was spliced in near the end of the video.
I really liked how it came out: tasteful, thoughtful, and hopefully pointing beyond just ourselves, but to a greater reality all around us.
July 23, 2013
A stupid prayer
This article is cross-posted at releasetheape.com on July 18, 2013.
I prayed a stupid prayer a year ago.
As I was looking for a new role in campus ministry, I asked for something that would require me to exercise my faith muscles. And when we were starting our church, I asked God to build something that wouldn’t be credited to the talents of the people in the room. I wanted God to do something that could only be explained by his presence with us, that would be impossible to do without God.
That’s what I prayed.
And praying that, back then, was exciting. For the APE’s out there, when God calls you to something crazy — and I did say when — it’s absolutely electrifying. The thrill of the dream fills our lungs, and makes us want to shout. The risk of the adventure starts getting our blood pumping. We lose sleep with giddiness, because we’re in love with the possibilities. It’s fun — really fun — at the start.
And that’s what it felt like to me when it was all about the dream. Planting a church. Taking a new national role with a campus ministry. It was all exciting. New. Dreamy.
Now, a year later, he’s answering that prayer. And I wonder why I prayed it.
Everything feels impossible. Truly. I have no idea how I’m going to juggle the possibility of adding a third child, the start of a new national role, and still lead this church plant. All of these things hum with a vibrant energy that just wants to grow — and keep growing — and seeks to be released.
And yet, I find myself trying to manage it all, to keep them small and manageable. Some would say that’s wisdom. I can tell you that, for me, it’s laced with fear.
So yes, in a way, it was a stupid prayer to pray. Unwise, even.
Now, there’s certainly more risk involved. And uncertainty dominates: I really have no idea how this is going to unfold. I’ve had times when I’ve questioned my call.
Still, I’m glad I prayed that prayer. Ironically, it’s causing me to pray more. I have no idea where I’m going, but I desire His presence that much more. Because everything will fall completely, irrevocably flat without his help and leading.
Even more, I’m leaning more heavily on my friends and partners, to help me through it. And through this conference I’m attending — through the community of faith — my calls have only been confirmed more strongly through specific, prophetic words. Now I have God-stories. And my faith muscle is definitely being worked. It’s aching, but hopefully, growing.
And in the end, I now have more faith that the rest of the prayer will be answered — that God would build something that could only be explained because He was with us.
