54 Quotes by Soong-Chan Rah

Seeing injustice in the city through an abstracted lens allows the individual to disassociate from the reality of injustice. Injustice can be objectified and depersonalized. Hunger, homelessness and racism are very real injustices, but they can be misunderstood when taken in an abstracted form. One of the most effective means of disengaging the church from the work of justice is making injustice a philosophical concept.

Lamentations reminds us that the proper response to tragedy and suffering is lament.

Our heroes should not be those who relish in masculine triumphalism but rather those whose hearts are tuned to the heart of God.

American Christians may be fearful of the dramatic changes that have already occurred in the world and in American Christianity. Could that fear be rooted in a loss of power as the demographics of world Christianity begin to favor non-Western nations? But these changes in Christianity may be exactly what God intended, requiring American Christians to relinquish a historical dominance and embrace a greater mutuality, equality and reciprocity in twenty-first-century world Christianity.

All worship is contextual, but there may be an underlying assumption of European American primacy in worship and the failure to recognize the captivity of the church to European American norms.

Shalom, therefore, does not eschew or diminish the role of the other or the reality of a suffering world. Instead, it embraces the suffering other as an instrumental aspect of well-being. Shalom requires lament.

The triumph-and-success orientation of our typical church member needed the corrective brought by stories of struggle and suffering. These.

What does it mean to be the church in the face of changing demographics and a changing culture? What is the church’s role in this changing landscape? Will we flee in fear from the cultural changes or will we engage the culture in a relevant but transformative way?

In another important area of church life, the worship life of the congregation, the Western priority of the individual determines the approach to worship over the biblical guidelines for worship. Worship in the white captivity of the church is oftentimes a collection of individuals who happen to be in the same room. Worship is just between the individual and God, and the church service exists to help facilitate that individual communion.