After the Eclipse

We took an evening flight from Geneva Airport on Wednesday evening a little after the eclipse. The plan was one full day in Rotterdam on Thursday, the ceremony on Friday at the Erasmus University AULA, and straight home after — everything compressed into roughly forty-eight hours.

The two-room apartment was small. All six of us in it, with not much space to move around. It reminded me a little of our time in Norway, another small apartment, except the kids were little then. They aren’t little now. Not anymore.

Here I am, with one wife and four children. Now, two are really grown up and mature. Two younger ones catching up fast too. I confess I have my nostalgic moments. But the days here in Rotterdam were about getting to know more about Elysia’s life the past three years.

“Her” Rotterdam

On Thursday she showed us her neighborhood. Where she goes for groceries. Her favorite bakery and bun shop. She told us about the places she hangs out.

I’d been here before, some time ago, with Gareth — we came to transport a table for her and a chair. I remember how hard it was to bring up the pieces of the table, as I remember it. It felt like a nice neighborhood then. This time, I noticed parts of it that were rather dodgy (especially the night before with the late-night bars), which made me wonder about the different people living in this old and yet new, progressive, open city — multi-ethnic, multicultural, which also felt rather young and vibrant. I could see the young working adults on their bicycles, some sipping coffee and enjoying their morning breakfast pastries.

Then later we met Elysia after a detour through The Depot of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen to the Erasmus University College building. Plenty of graduating students who collected their gowns and mortarboards. Some were posing for pictures with friends, others with parents and siblings just like us. Elysia showed us around the few floors of the building. We relaxed a bit. The kids started off playing pool. May Chin and Anja locked in a Foosball table game next. Ewan and I played table tennis, with me trying to show off some spins. As we were heading out, she showed me the library and the corner where she wrote her thesis. She’s no longer a student here, but she was showing us the spaces she had occupied.

The Desk

At the end of the tour, the support desk was sitting there quietly.

I walked past the counter. It was empty. No queue, no one there. The graduating students were sitting off to the side, some of them taking pictures in their gowns, getting ready for the next day.

Then a phone rang, and Elysia knew exactly what to do. She’d worked that desk for some time.

When I first saw it, I didn’t think about it much. I remembered she’d mentioned doing it and enjoyed her work there. I never knew it was special to her beyond my vague memory of it in our conversations.

The Dim Sum Dinner

We found a Chinese restaurant that evening. Over the meal, May Chin started with a question about what was most memorable for her. I jumped in and rephrased it a little and asked her how she had changed and how she had grown in the last few years.

She said (as far as I could remember her words), “I’ve grown to be more outgoing. I’ve become more social and meet people who are different. Because I’m living alone, I had to come out from my comfort zone.” She mentioned how when she was with us, her circle of friends had always been around ours, the parents’ context. But now she has come into her own, getting to know people and taking initiative to build relationships on her own independently. And that is no small thing at twenty-one.

Graduation Friday

Dressed up. Backpacks on, small luggage rolling behind us, and all of us walking up to the hall in sync. One holding on to the flowers.

There she was welcoming us. Hugs all around.

Then it was time to go into the hall. I looked for where to sit and chose the edge, as usual, along the aisle — somewhere I could film the procession, a space where I could take all the photos I wished without disturbing anyone, and somewhere I could get in and out easily. The others went for the better seats nearer to the middle for a clear view. I wanted that too, but I was also more interested in the overview, and later I explored different views from different sides of the hall.

Corners and edges are special places for me. I noticed it again at my daughter’s graduation: a seat where I could be still and have the freedom to explore, but mostly a seat from which I could take in the whole room — I could soak in the whole experience.

I like the flow of the ceremony. I loved the idea where the students’ names and degrees were presented with a photo of them as a child and as a student. I was intrigued by many of their long thesis titles. I was surprised by one very long name. I was curious about the favorite memories in one sentence or two. It brought so much humanness (with some humor) to what is a rather formal occasion.

When Elysia’s name came through the microphone, I was proud watching her walk up for her certificate. I got part of it on video and took some quick photos. I’m glad I did. This is a memory I want to hold. I want to keep it for her and our family too.

I knew she had done well in her studies. I remember how she slogged to get through her high school exams only to surprise even herself with her final grades! But seeing Bachelor of Sociology with the cum laude sticker on the screen was still an unforgettable moment for me.

I had read her whole thesis in draft months ago in Geneva. I’m a theologian, but I’m glad I had enough sociological academic muscles to understand and appreciate her work. She had put real effort into combining the academic theory and interviews that went into the thesis. She was reflective too in her analysis and insights — she wrote not only from her mind but also engaged it with her heart. I don’t recall either her mother or I being able to produce the kind of quality that I read in her thesis. Indeed, it’s a joy to witness our children surpass us.

The Favorite Memory

Then I read her favorite memory slowly again.

It was not about the thesis. It didn’t mention her intellectual journey. I was wondering whether she might have mentioned her classes or, like many others, their holiday trips with friends. A few even talk about getting drunk. None of that at all.

Her favorite memory:

Every passing smile and conversation at the support desk :)

She included a smiley. It was the same counter I had walked past the day before without thinking twice about it.

The sentence is so Elysia. It shows her values — what she says in public as a reflection of who she is anyway. I didn’t guess what she would state there. Yet, I wasn’t surprised. I confess there was a lump in my throat. I held back a bit. I’m glad I was sitting on the edge — just me taking it all in.

It’s Not About The Money, indeed.

Her thesis was titled It’s Not About The Money: A Systematic Typology of Social Entrepreneurs’ Sensemaking through Practices.

She argued it on paper but lived it at a desk in her own way. I’m glad to see those two things sit next to each other on a graduation slide.

All that achievement can’t be compared next to her favorite memory — smiles and people, conversations. And her quote reminded me that while she was smiling at the support desk, people were smiling back. I could picture how she must have shone to all those whom she had conversations with. That’s so Elysia.

We came out from the metro station, and my eldest, Gareth, took the lead toward the apartment that would be our home base in Dergano.

Dragging the luggage across the road at 34 to 36 degrees Celsius made the whole walk feel much further than it was. We passed a stall selling discounted shoes. I noticed Chinese words under the scaffolding of a building under reconstruction. We passed a bubble tea shop and some Asian shops. We weren’t lost exactly, but I kept wondering why the path to our apartment wasn’t simpler.

It felt rustic, not so developed, a little working class, and clearly not mono-ethnic. The Dergano wall art caught my attention, and along the road there was a lot of graffiti. I was wondering what kind of neighborhood we had stepped into.

Finally, one by one, we got there. Gareth managed the door. The Kit girls stepped in quietly. I forgot who turned on the air conditioning. Everyone was excited to see the place, especially the youngest, Anja, and the oldest — me. Nice beds! Cool kitchen! The apartment was full of little surprises with a no-go zone. But as far as the sofa was concerned, I was pleased to sleep on it. With my tired body, it took no effort to slip into dreamland.

That evening we returned to Milan city and took a curious walk along the canal, past people enjoying their drinks, before dinner in Chinatown — comforting for me, nothing too spectacular for the others.

A Proper Milan Day

The next day was a proper Milan City walk. The Milan Cathedral was inviting. I enjoyed climbing the stairs with the kids, huffing and puffing, and then the break at the top terrace with the city spread out around us and the crowds everywhere. What a view — both the architecture and across the city! Walking down was much easier, and cooling off inside the sanctuary was better still.

I spent a while there looking up at the stained glass, guessing with the kids which panel told which story. Adam and Eve in Genesis. Some that had to be Old Testament — the prophets, maybe. Then clearly the New Testament: the birth of Christ, all the way to the crucifixion. Panel after panel, a whole mosaic of stories when you stood underneath and looked up.

Then we split. The Kit girls sprang off. The two Kit boys drifted their own way. I was on my own for a little while.

I found a seat at the monument to Leonardo da Vinci, more intrigued by the four students standing around him than by Leonardo himself. I always thought of Leonardo as a solo individual genius. The presence of the students at this monument expanded my perspective towards an artistic community and legacy. It was hot, and I was glad to sit. Alone in the middle of a crowd, in good shade. Being on my own for a bit was actually good for me.

Later we reunited over Jollibee, a Filipino fast food chain, and I was amazed how many Filipinos and many others were there. Packed, loud, and a good time with everyone mingled together, united by the slow wait for our fast-food orders.

The following day we caught the train out to Como. Beautiful lake, spectacular scenery, blazing hot sun, all with an occasional gentle breeze. Lovely lunch. But I think I enjoyed Milan more.

Faith Conversation Over Dinner

One of the things I enjoy most is the conversation over meals, and one evening in particular was worth remembering.

The questions sprung up about faith and prayer. One question came up on whether people who reject Jesus, or people from other religions, are praying to the same God.

I’m always interested in the questions people ask, and I wonder what happens if we come at them from a different angle. So I asked, how about thinking of it differently — whether the God we believe in listens to the prayers of everyone who reaches out, to whichever God they think they’re reaching.

I was sitting on the edge of the room. The mathematically minded son nudged back with more questions and links to ones and zeros. A social scientifically trained daughter came at it from other angles — and even cited the classic C.S. Lewis book The Great Divorce on hell. The artistically inclined daughter listened. The experienced mom chipped in here and there with wisdom. A family conversation about faith with food in the middle — food for the body and food for thought.

What Kind of Neighborhood is Dergano?

Milan and Como were both magnets for tourists. Dergano, where we had our home base, was something else. It was where regular people lived.

Walking those streets, I wondered whether this was a place with more migrants. The people I saw looked like newer Italians — many of them not European by appearance. What is clear is that European cities are no longer limited to one color. Even within one country, Rome had the ancient flavor and didn’t feel so mosaic, people-wise, but Milan is contemporary Italy that’s more diverse and colorful.

Later I found out more. Once upon a time this was a working-class area for the original inhabitants. It still is not poshly decorated by the rich and famous. But the working-class industrial neighborhood is now an urban area that’s largely immigrant and diverse. I had assumed, from the bubble tea shop and the Chinese signage, reinforced by the fact that the majority of kids were playing basketball, that this was mostly a Chinese neighborhood. It isn’t. In several neighborhoods, the Egyptian community has the strongest presence.

Once I knew that, I started paying attention differently. Someone cycled past me speaking Arabic. Another person walked by on the phone, also in Arabic. Yes, there were Chinese faces, but I had been reading the whole neighborhood off the shops I happened to notice first.

In the cooler part of the evening, people gathered at the basketball court with family and friends, a buzz I could hear from a distance without catching any of the words. Watching them brought back my own childhood in the United Kingdom.

If Dergano reminded me of anywhere, it was Leicester, where I lived as a boy. The old Leicester I remember was where many of us from Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Malaysia lived alongside the Indians and the locals.

But of course, we were very much local too — at least rooted in the neighborhood.

I didn’t think of it while I was there. Walking those streets, I was too absorbed in what was in front of me. It’s only now, sitting back in Geneva, that Dergano has brought back Leicester — my childhood there and the times I’ve returned since as an adult. In Leicester, I recall being inside the neighborhood. In Dergano I was merely passing through it as a visitor.

That answered the question I’d been carrying since the first walk, past the wall art and all that graffiti, wondering what kind of neighborhood we’d stepped into.

Bubble Tea and A Restful Home

One more moment, on the last day.

We stopped for bubble tea on the way back, and I could speak Mandarin with the shop owner. She thought we were from Singapore. Apparently not many Malaysians pass through Dergano. Maybe it was because we look Chinese but speak English to each other. She recommended something that’s a specialty and came back with a cute doggie-decorated cup.

In a world with so much emphasis on one ethnicity, it’s good to be reminded that even in Italy there’s a growing mixture. It’s like the bubble tea — the sugar, the milk, the tea, and the ice, all of it together, cooling off a oven-like afternoon and an overheated body. In a time when temperatures are up, all this diversity comes as a gift that cools things down.

We kept the cup in the fridge afterward. It was worth preserving — watching the mixture and the sugar float and settle inside, waiting to be enjoyed again. Such simple pleasure.

Who would have imagined we’d start on the first evening with Chinatown food and end on the last evening with Taiwanese-inspired bubble tea, with a string of experiences in between? And for three nights, a simple Dergano turned into a restful home.

My old sermon recordings were all buried on a hard disk at Bangsar Lutheran Church (BLC). It was always at the back of my mind to revisit them. Thanks to Chee Kah, who retrieved them and sent me the link, I could download my sermons from 2015 to 2019. I didn’t re-listen to the recordings in full. I heard bits and pieces and spent an afternoon using Superwhisper and Claude to transcribe them into text, with subheadings and paragraphs. I wasn’t so interested in hearing myself again (that would have been too much 😏); I can wait for another time. Instead, I focused on having just the content in written form so I could come back to it with fresh eyes.

Each sermon was deeply local and embedded in the Malaysian context while somehow still connected to the wider world. They were heavy listening for a Sunday 10AM morning service: a strong dose of theological reflection and biblical exegesis stacked together in a way that demanded a lot of a congregation. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people didn’t fully follow. But each sermon had the same twofold aim underneath it: something for my members so that the church could keep our focus on reaching and serving non-members. The outside world was always the horizon informing the sermon and the sermon pointing back out toward it.

Covering three or four sermons would have been too much. So I will stick with one in this post.

Then: Ten Years Ago in Malaysia

I preached the sermon “Your Kingdom Come” on Bangsar Lutheran Church’s 16th anniversary, 27 August 2016.

Founding pastors rarely get to return and serve again. But I had this privilege. The anniversary let me revisit how far we’d come — this time not as the full-time pastor I’d been before, but as a returnee pastor now teaching full-time at the seminary and leading a center for religion and society, with a role that reached well beyond BLC. But BLC was always home. It still is the garden where everything that flourishes now first grew.

I highlighted two themes after sixteen years:

One is: for some of us as Christians, to find our voice again — to be Christian in a way that honors God without being burdened or weighed down.

Over these sixteen years, I’ve had to learn to be a Christian afresh, in a way that let me find my voice. I think many of us, through our own journeys, found our voices too — found we could still walk with Jesus in the midst of our struggles, our pains, our doubts, our questions. That translated not just into our personal Christian lives, but into what it means to be a church, to be Christians in Malaysia.

Three books shaped me in those early years — A New Kind of Christian, Proper Confidence, and Missional Church, to name a few, and much more, each in different ways giving me language not just for my own struggles but for going beyond myself, with others, and into society. Too much of the Christianity in the air back then, and maybe still now, was heavy laden. Finding our voice again meant being free, gracious, and open to creativity — recovering, ironically, the root of what the gospel actually is: a message that liberates us.

The next part of the sermon deepened the theme:

Finding our voice is one part. The other is embodying an alternative vision — because the kingdom of God is also a kind of vision, a set of values, a utopia if you like — something of the future we hope to see and realize here, in some way.

When STM students visited us — someone actually saw this in a photo — one former STM student, who years ago visited us during the renovations at Luther Centre, told me he’d forgotten most of what I’d preached that day (very comforting for pastors), but remembered one thing: that we — the church, not me — opened his eyes as a seminarian to see that the church does not exist for its members. Hold on — it exists for its non-members.

Reading that again now, ten years later, feels like a paradox. So much of what I actually did as a pastor, in the eleven years before I left for my PhD in 2011, was aimed first at the seekers, the burnt out, the questioning — people who then became members. Membership mattered, of course, for belonging and commitment and for the shared journey we have all embarked on. Grace was high on our agenda too, and not cheap grace, the kind that skips the cost — a grace that freed us, healed us, energized us, and always pointed back outward in the end. I recall the four movements in the weekly worship bulletin were Upward, Inward, Forward, and Outward. So, all these movements were non-negotiable.

Two more excerpts capture the second theme further:

Of course we enjoy God’s grace, but BLC has tried for years not to over-program, not to pile on activities just so we can be proud of an annual report. Instead, we pray that everything we do helps us be catalysts of spiritual and social change reflecting this kingdom, making this prayer real.

If finding our voice means anything, part of embodying this vision is that we’re here to support whatever God is doing through each of you in your callings outside the church.

That was BLC — a local community without a big staff, not that we could have afforded one. It was my home twice over: first as founding pastor, until 2011, when most of the experimentation happened; then as a kind of second-chance returnee pastor, more like one of the members, with another job serving elsewhere. I was at the seminary; they were in banks, universities, companies, NGOs, and some were at home. At least in terms of time and energy, I felt like one of them. Maybe that’s why rereading these words moves me to revisit voice and embodiment afresh.

Now: Finding My Voice Again

It’s 2026. Finding my own voice and finding it together with others while embodying something beyond ourselves — that’s still precious to me. Two scenes carry it: one from June (my most intense work season) and one a small surprise from last week (on my first vacation day).

The council committee meeting room. This June’s Lutheran World Federation (LWF) Council meeting was my third since taking the role. In 2023, it was intense: on-the-job training as interim Director for Theology, Mission and Justice. But this time, having served as Director since 2024, I felt less occupied with the mechanics of the job and more able to find my voice in it, support the committee chair, and help the department find its own.

I never liked theater-style seating, so I made sure we sat at tables arranged in a rectangle, facing each other. Two bishops, a president, a young leader, a woman leader, and an adviser on one side; related-organization partners and staff filling the rest. Nothing like BLC, and yet the spirit in the room was familiar — the encouragement, the willingness to talk plainly, as well as more face-to-face encounters and engagement. One of the partners named it directly: these were constructive conversations, not another round of the same old complaints, but a real question of how to move forward. My colleagues spoke in their own voices, and we heard each other. It mirrored something of BLC’s spirit from ten years back, in a room that would otherwise be unrecognizable to the person who preached that anniversary sermon. The foundation for it, I think, was already there in the writing of the director’s report, especially with the theological framing as a significant part of it — the first time I felt we were finding our voice together, not just as a department, but as a whole collective of partners and member churches.

The question about the men’s pre-meetings and more. A colleague messaged me on Teams last week, asking how I’d been running the men’s pre-meetings — the gatherings that eventually became what I wrote in Men in Pink, Not Men in Black. It wasn’t something I expected anyone outside my own head to be tracking.

Numerous conversations outside the rooms in different spaces have been happening with member church leaders and partners these past six months, and especially the last three: conversation after conversation that hasn’t fixed everything or resolved every limitation but has given me real confidence that we are on the right track and we are actually focused on finding our voice and embodying a shared vision. I am seeing things starting to connect better. During BLC’s time, we were trying to be a church that exists for its non-members. Now, as a department, I keep reminding my colleagues we don’t exist for ourselves either — everything we do exists beyond ourselves. Finding that voice, and embodying that vision, is still what all of this is actually about.

Moving Beyond: Courage, Confidence, and Commitment

I’m impressed by the 2016 Sivin 🤓. Revisiting his sermon now brings back memories and lessons. He had more courage than I remember having. If courage is what got him there, what I have now feels closer to confidence — trusting what’s already been tested, rather than trying harder to prove something new. We need both courage and confidence.

By 2036, I hope all that I’ve mentioned above will have converged into something less about me and more about us. Not just for my own well-being, but also for what we can contribute to the wider global Lutheran communion — and the people it serves — so we can all carry forward together. For that, we need to throw in a large dose of commitment.

The final stop for me was Saint Christopher’s Church. A beautiful church in Commugny. Gareth, Ewan, and I went in and sat down quietly, just to let our legs rest after more than 12 kilometers of walking. I was quite exhausted. My right leg was aching — I don’t think I’d sprained anything, but I haven’t walked that far in a long time. I realized later that the present building from the 18th century sits on a 6th-century precursor church on a former Roman villa site.

In the morning when we started in Nyon, the weather was perfect. I liked the cool and refreshing air after the morning drizzle. It was pleasant to walk together on part of Via Jacobi (which is Switzerland’s section of the Camino de Santiago — the Way of St. James). Apparently, the section we walked through overlaps with the Via Jacobi Stage 19 (if we include Nyon, that's part of Stage 18). For Ewan, my second son, it’s closer to the end of his planned pilgrimage than the beginning, where he already pressed through the harder parts. It was nice to slip in closer to the end and join him there.

When I asked why he decided to do this trip last week, he told me he wanted to get out of his comfort zone. Many pilgrims walk this route for reasons that are spiritual, cultural, and sometimes deeply personal too. I sensed that it was deeply personal for him. My aim during this Sunday walk with him wasn’t really to get out of my own comfort zone. It was just to spend some time with him and experience a little of his adventure. I walked for very human reasons: A father walking with his son. Gareth, the firstborn, joined too, which was a pleasant bonus.

Ewan told us the days before had been hard, especially walking alone. Indeed, walking alone was the main program for him. But the Kit girls, my wife May Chin, and the sisters Elysia and Anja had met up with him on another day and walked part of it with him too, so he wasn’t alone the whole way. And this time it was the Kit boys’ turn to join the walking party. Extra bonding is a bonus blessing too.

During our first 15 minutes, Gareth discovered he wore the wrong shoes — no padding — and the discomfort affected him. At one point they swapped shoes, Gareth walking in his brother’s shoes for a stretch, then switching back. Mostly they cheered each other on and made fun of each other in equal measure, which for them might be the same thing. I enjoyed trailing behind a little bit and observing them spar with each other.

Along the way, Ewan told us about how he had met mostly older fellow travelers. One man used to work in foreign affairs, and some of the stories had their own dangers in them, almost like a spy movie. But it was good that he could talk with a few older ladies from other parts of the world doing this path as part of something bigger in their own lives. One woman had taken years to complete it — started long before and was only now finishing this round. That’s quite remarkable. I listened with curiosity and amazement at what Ewan kept discovering along the way.

There are people who walk this way as a way of disconnecting from their world, walking the paths of the ancients, meeting fellow companions along the way, and sharing experiences to enrich one another. For me it was smaller than that: I was merely stepping into a stage in the middle of the longer path, joining Ewan’s walk for a moment. Nothing too spectacular. I just wanted to walk with my son.

We were keeping a pace, one spot to the next. Nice houses through the village areas and small townships, then suddenly a stretch of forest, bridges, and a train going past somewhere off to the side. A fair number of joggers, all looking healthier than I felt. I was just glad to have made the whole journey.

During our time in St. Christopher’s Church, all three of us were aching (okay, I didn’t complain, but my legs were really sore). No one was in the worship sanctuary but the three of us. God was there too in that space. I found a smaller corner and prayed there for five minutes. Not deeply. But a short prayer — for me, for the boys, for the family, and for the world.

Ewan stamped his paper, and I felt a real sense of accomplishment in that moment — more his and a bit of mine too. He had been walking with a stick by that point. Aching, I think, but always pressing on. I hugged him outside the church, and then he and Gareth carried on to finish the path heading all the way to Versoix, and maybe, just maybe, all the way back to Geneva.

I watched the two of them nudge each other forward down the road, which was a joy to see, and then I detoured alone to the Coppet train station to catch my ride home. My older legs had enough for the day. But I still felt a bit of accomplishment underneath it.

Ewan had the beginning and the end. A fixed goal, and he was focused on it. I have appreciated that he’s always determined to complete what he has set out to do with excellence (that’s just him!). Gareth and I came in and walked part of it with him with a more relaxed, leisurely attitude. At the end, seeing the two brothers finish it together was a real joy — and it was a lovely surprise, by the time they got home that night before dinner, to their mother’s surprise too. A proper shout of celebration from all of us when they walked in.

My vacation was supposed to start with a retreat so I would have a chance to sit down to review and renew my life. Time to slow down and go back through the months and see what I have accomplished and learned along the way. Instead, the renewal began with getting my legs moving. I don’t think I would have done it on my own; so often in my life the real motivation is doing something together with someone else, and this time it was walking with Ewan, getting a small taste of what he was experiencing.

What does renewal mean for me these days? It is my theme word of the year. I get the sense that it’s not necessarily fitting what I originally had in mind, which often is more routine and planned. Time to try something ‘new’ that’s ‘renewing.’

Walking through Stage 19 reminded me of the people I’ve walked with over the years; there are very few whose whole road I’ve seen in total. Mostly just one slice, one stage, a few parts, and some significant moment. Whatever shapes and sizes of these shared memories we have had — they have been renewing.

For my own spiritual journey this year, I’ve been reading the scriptures backward this year, end to beginning. I’ve reached Luke now, moving toward John. What strikes me is how much of this is via media: going in between, in the middle, starting not at the beginning and not at the end, but at one point, one stage, while everything around it is already moving. I step into different streams, different places, different moments and occupy a small part of them. That was the image I came back with.

Even my work has been following this pattern. At least, I’m noticing it more these days. Stepping into part of the history of one of our member churches, part of a space that’s already been in motion long before I arrived — the privilege of serving people in the middle of their own stage and hoping to add something to it.

The first draft of this post was recorded during a walk around my neighborhood. Forty minutes, no music, just me and the voice memo and whatever was around me. A lady was ahead of me on the phone while walking a dog. A father was cycling past with two children — one on the seat, one in the trailer behind. While walking and whispering, I welcomed a breeze on my face even though I was already soaking with a bit of sweat. I passed by free books left out in the open on the way almost reaching home — I was curious about the things people had left behind that I might have picked up if something had caught my eye (for the record: I didn’t bring any books home).

This was an ordinary walk around my own neighborhood, nothing like my Sunday walk with my sons. But it’s where this got written (or verbalized) — legs moving, hands moving, the words coming out before I’d fully thought them through. I might keep this going if possible just to see what’s the unique experience that comes out of this approach. Writing not at the corner wherever I’m seated, but talking (more like whispering) while walking.

I used to call this an inventory. That word sounded like it came from a warehouse. Gathering. I like that better. There’s still time to change these things, so I changed it.

Sparks kept popping in my brain in the different rooms, and only settled once I found a corner. Thinking on the edge. Or the silent kind of thought that happens when no one is looking.

I enjoyed this season of writing during Ordinary Time. It’s different. Perhaps not so spiritual-sounding but no less human.

Let the Six-Word Memoirs do their work. Sit back and enjoy. I did.

Skimmers welcome too. Like the Chinese saying, 蜻蜓点水 (qīng tíng diǎn shuǐ) meaning the dragonfly touches the water.

Others plunge deeper. Some subscribe. Some just follow out of curiosity.

Thanks for reading till the end — at least this one.

I was expecting fewer crowds, since it was meant to be the last day of the AI for Good Summit, and I was hyped up to watch The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist after scanning through the schedule. It caught my attention, with a panel discussion afterward featuring some of the people involved. I told the family I was excited about this one, and with my happy summer soundtrack on, off I went on Bus 23.

I posted on the family WhatsApp group:

I’m going for this. The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. ByE!

When I arrived at Palexpo, it was empty. Really quiet. Nobody there. On Monday, I’d sat in a room full of ministers and a Nobel laureate for the UN’s Global Dialogue on AI Governance. Now the signboards were still up. A welcome message was still there with no one left to welcome anyone, arrows pointing toward lines where no one was lining up, and an advertisement for the AI for Good Summit that had already ended. I stood there for a moment wondering what had happened.

Getting It Wrong

I checked my phone properly this time for the schedule and the dates and realized where I’d gone wrong. I’d been so focused on the documentary itself that I never confirmed when it was actually screening. I’d simply assumed Saturday, because in my mind, Saturday was the last day of the summit. It wasn’t. The screening and discussion had been on Friday, the actual last day. Silly me for not to take note this was Saturday. I had come dressed smart casual and ready to engage, and the hall had nothing left to give me. I should have known better. In Switzerland, almost nothing official happens on a Saturday.

I texted the family on WhatsApp that, actually, I got it all wrong.

Haha it was yesterday!!! Well, no one here. I’m coming back to vacuum the apartment. I should have thought in Swiss — who works on Saturday? The Malaysian in me is hard to eliminate.

It was an odd feeling, watching a few people walk past me on the way to the bus stop, none of them knowing what had or hadn’t just happened to me. I rode back on Bus 23 for about twenty minutes, toward the corner of my room. Disappointed, but not devastated. It’s okay. The morning’s plan hadn’t worked, but I still wanted to see it and found a way to watch it myself, alone, later that afternoon.

Watching Alone

In some ways, watching it alone was better. I could let my own reactions surface without being part of a shared audience experience. No popcorn for me — potato chips, peanuts, and a drink. It was a solitary watch rather than a shared one, with no one to turn to afterward and talk it through. But I’ve savored solitude before, and it was a blessing spiritually then too. This was a different kind of watching and waiting, thinking and reflecting, yet equally enriching, if not more. Alone in my room, but with more room, ironically, for whatever the documentary might have to say. I was open to that.

The documentary itself is told from a deeply personal angle, showing one man’s reckoning with what AI means for his own life and his own child. For me, nothing about the rapid development of artificial intelligence can honestly be grasped from an individual point of view alone. I’ve circled this same tension before, from a more productivity-minded, personal-practice angle. I’m fully aware of the pull between AI as a personal engagement and AI as something that needs public deliberation and decisions about its effects on society. The film knows this too; it starts with the personal, but the public dimensions were never absent or invisible.

The film’s directors, Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell, did a good job weaving Daniel’s personal story into a larger concern around artificial intelligence. I liked how Daniel’s hand-drawn artwork, kept in notebooks through the process, was worked into the finished film alongside all its more polished effects. There’s a rawness to that filming approach, combining the analog thread well with the digital.

The Wife’s Line

No spoiler alert, but the exchanges between Daniel and his wife were some of the most interesting material in the film, bringing together two people circling the same questions from different angles. One moment moved me more than I expected: Daniel, as a new father, connects his earlier AI anxiety to his newborn child. His wife pushed back, insisting that his search for answers couldn’t stay confined to a warm kumbaya moment. I agree. We need the personally affected moment. But there’s more: there’s always more that reaches beyond us.

I got teary-eyed. I tend to when fatherhood comes up on screen. I’ve been soft on the inside since Gareth, my first, was born more than twenty years ago. Something about watching another father, especially a first-time parent, stirs up what’s in my chest. This is when being alone in a room is better than sitting and sobbing next to strangers in an audience.

What stayed with me longer than the tears was what his wife said about agency. I have often benefited from a comment from a corrective voice that made me stop and think harder about my next move, especially what we can do and what we should do. It’s less about which side we land on personally or publicly, whether it’s dystopian or utopian. I don’t think I land fully on either one. It’s about focusing on us as people who can still act, who can still make a difference, even in a small way.

I already live inside one small, deliberate answer to some of the anxiety this whole film is built on. As an early adopter, I’m cautious without being paralyzed by fear — I don’t mind experimenting with new ways of working and thinking. I’ve written about it before: the practice of working alongside AI in my own writing without handing it the pen, without surrendering human judgment. I’m still not willing to let Claude Cowork click send on my behalf.

Daniel’s journey through his learning and his interviews — with apocalyptic-minded guests on one side, optimistic tech evangelists on the other — was entertaining, alarming, informative, and insightful all at the same time. Where he ultimately points to is a place of hope over fear and intentional change that leads toward transformation, not despair. At least, that’s what I was looking for, sitting at the corner of my room, watching the story unfold without a perfect resolution.

Where We Meet, and Where We Diverge

The empty hall was already telling me something before I had language for it. The film's title carries inside it the Greek root of 'apocalypse': unveiling, uncovering, and making the invisible visible. I was glad the Saturday turned out to open a space for its own kind of unveiling to see what I might have missed. The Book of Revelation is sometimes titled, in other translations, simply The Apocalypse. Daniel Roher ends up drawing on a word one of his interviewees offers him: apocaloptimist.

I’ve been working on and deepening my own words for a while now: Hopetimist, Imperfectionist, and lately, Transformationist. So I spent some time with his use of apocaloptimist, asking where we converge and where we part ways.

What’s clear to me is this: we don’t need to be fully dystopian or fully utopian. Many voices in the film tend toward one or the other. It isn’t about landing on some so-called balanced middle either. However we get there, I find that we arrive on the same shared ground. We converge on hope and the capacity to act constructively, albeit from different starting points. Daniel gets there as a young father, watching his newborn and wondering what kind of world is being handed to his child. I get there thinking through these questions with my own children, in dialogue with them, sometimes. They’re mostly grown now — I still catch myself remembering them as toddlers — but the two teenagers and two young adults engage me in genuinely mature conversations about all things AI. I’m fifty-four. Maybe that’s why, alongside whatever hindsight I’ve gathered, I find myself more interested in developing foresight into the future of re-creation. The vision is cosmic in scope, not limited to the nuclear family. Maybe it’s a different season of life. Maybe it’s just where I already stood before I sat down to watch.

Hope, for me, was never only a mood. It’s a method, a mindset, a movement, and a metamorphosis of my way of being, thinking, and doing. This is where I want to move beyond apocaloptimist as a word for what I am after this film. I can relate to it, but it isn’t my primary posture now.

I’m a Hopetimist who holds the imperfections on the inside — mine, the world’s, the people around me — and still acts from a posture of hope. I’m suspicious of depending on moods, which rarely arrive on schedule. That’s the difference between a feeling and a practice. That’s why, beyond being a Hopetimist, I call myself a Transformationist.

To be fair, Daniel Roher’s film doesn’t leave things in the abstract either. It closes with real options, personal and public, and a companion website offering ways someone could actually go and act. I recognized myself in the film’s method as much as its conclusions. I followed closely the one-on-one interviews and the conversations with actual people about what any of this means for them. Transformation isn’t a thing that happens to us in isolation. It happens in conversation within a person, between people, and in the actual place they’re standing, spanning local and global all at once.

A Room That Is Also Empty

I haven’t been back to Palexpo since. There will be another day for that — no rush. But there I was anyway: quietly alone, and yet not alone.

Because it turned out I was sitting in a room that’s empty too. Just me, God, my gadgets, and my surroundings. The corner where I work from home is also the corner where I sit in solitude, where reflection happens, and where change comes from the inside before it shows up anywhere else. My screen in front of me. iPad, iPhone, MacBook, and a small bladeless fan I bought recently, turning in slow circles, keeping the room cool.

So, when my mind runs hot with too many thoughts firing at once and my body heats up in this crazily extreme weather, I need something turning quietly nearby to cool me down: a clear head, a calm heart, confident hands, and an energized body that can do their work and let whatever change is coming, come.

The Corner Seat

I stepped off Bus 28 into 34 degrees Celsius, passed through security, and walked into the large hall at Palexpo, Geneva. The space was dark, cool, air-conditioned, and full of buzz. Grateful for a couple of rows still vacant near the back, I took a seat second from the end. I glanced around to see who was near me. There was one recognizable face across on the other side. Everyone else around me was a stranger.

The master of ceremonies with a British accent had already asked us more than twice to take our seats while we waited for the high-level people to make their entrance so the opening ceremony of the United Nations Global Dialogue on AI Governance could begin (I have always wondered why we can’t have masters of ceremonies with accents that aren’t American or British).

When I go to conferences, I always like sitting at the corner so I get a good view and have easy access. A delightful surprise was when António Guterres passed by; he came close enough that I caught a quick photo. That is as near to the Secretary-General as I am ever likely to get. This is not a fan-boy moment; it is simply seizing the opportunity in front of me. The hall vibrated with anticipation across a sea of people. What would the opening speeches say? How would he frame the dialogue?

Then Gadi Sassoon stopped all of us before any of the heady stuff. The title of the piece he played was Embodied Emotion. He sat down with an electric guitar, the tech gear arrayed around him, and simply played with his fingers dancing across the fret, holding notes, sustained tones, and shimmering overtones. Above him the screen split in three, the camera on him in the center. On the right, the notes were transcribed as they happened, the musical analysis running alongside the detected emotion: Energy 92, Melancholy 55, Tenderness 40, Wistfulness 35... The numbers and the technicalities were beyond me. On the left, the same playing was rendered as emotional inference by agent perception, which I could follow: His fingers dance across the fretboard, constructing a dense tapestry of melancholy arpeggios that shimmer with the exotic pull of Phrygian tension...

There was no long explanation of what on earth he was doing. He was simply doing it. Maybe that was what people expected — the artistic opening as decoration before the serious material begins. For me it was serious material, or at least I took it seriously: the human, the music, the skill in his hands, and the feeling underneath it were all held in one moment. A good place to start and worth keeping close to mind and heart even as we turn to the wider social and global challenges.

Rights, and What Is Right for Us

The Secretary-General gave us the phrase that framed the dialogue and probably the one the UN would like us to carry:

And so the choice before us is not between faith in AI or fear of it. It is between governing by design – and drifting by default.

The sentences can flow easily in our speech, the kind of line built for a slogan and useful for inviting us into the debate. But for in-depth dialogue it will need unpacking once we get into the details. In these multi-stakeholder meetings, full of jargon I have grown familiar with since 2019, the claim is that we all have agency and responsibility: governments, industry, civil society, and basically everyone. Civil society is where faith actors are parked.

And yet the honest observer at this first Global Dialogue on AI Governance would conclude that what we were flooded with was a long series of monologues, and few came from faith-based organizations or religious institutions representing any significant number of religious communities around the world (at least it wasn’t that visible or audible in the main plenary sessions). The real work in these settings is organizing that flood of words into something coherent enough to engage with meaningfully. Which usually means still more reports. I hope people will read them. At least some of us have to.

A highlight was the launch of the first report from the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence — forty scientists from every region, co-chaired by Yoshua Bengio and Maria Ressa. It was meant to give member states and other stakeholders a shared evidence base to conduct this dialogue from.

The report is thin next to something like the Stanford AI Index. An LWF colleague familiar with the UN climate process put it plainly: this is where the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was decades ago, before it had the depth we now take for granted. For a UN setting, a thin report is a conversation starter, not a conversation stopper. The thicker one will come in time.

Walking out to look for coffee, I bumped into the co-chair, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Maria Ressa, and one of the scientific panel members. I appreciated how Maria had kept the presentation human, bringing liveliness and energy into what could easily have been dry. The stakes are high when it comes to AI. We shouldn’t let boredom distract or disempower us.

During one of the high-level multi-stakeholder sessions, I sat listening to what member state representatives could convey in a three-minute slot, which takes real skill. What I noticed most was a gap in how countries framed the whole thing. From the Global North and West, the language tended toward rights — human rights, regulation, the worry that the technology might go rogue, the need for safety measures in place. From the Global South and East, the language was closer to what is right for us — economic development, building infrastructure, national AI strategies, capacity building for the young, and a refusal to be left behind.

The countries that stress rights and regulation are often the ones less preoccupied with building their own economic development — the richer ones, clearly — and are facing aging populations. It is a necessary and understandable posture and also a narrow one, and it cannot be transplanted onto others uncritically. The younger countries, a mixture of developing ones and emerging economies, many from Africa and Asia, spoke about development: about not wanting to be only recipients of technology but to have a stake in what gets made and how. More constructive, more future-oriented, focused on young people.

You could hear it in the voices on stage. Rwanda’s minister Paula Musoni pressed the agency of African countries and how dedicated AI institutions can accelerate responsible adoption, talent, investment, and public impact. Singapore’s minister Josephine Teo was clear and to the point and reached for an image of the AI gardener that fully resonated with me. She said:

It takes more than big bang announcements and high-profile projects. It is more like the patient work of tending a garden – sowing seeds and removing weeds before the flowers bloom. The Global Dialogue on AI Governance and other platforms can be a community of AI gardeners.

Later, the President of Iceland asked the question worth our time: what kind of society, and ultimately what kind of humanity, do we choose to be? Its impact, she said, will not be determined by technological capacity alone but by human choices about power, access, and accountability.

I was also listening closely to the representatives from China, who were lyrical about robust international cooperation, a people-centered approach, openness, and multilateralism. I skipped the translation, since I could follow the Mandarin directly, and noticed the language of civilization sitting there in the middle of all the tech and geopolitical talk.

Walking through the exhibition later, a group of us gathered around the latest robots, whose movements were far more human-like than clumsy. One of them walked toward me and the man standing next to me, greeted us, and named the colors of our shirts. Fascinating. For some of us, it might also be frightening.

So the views ran from a little island to a vast civilization and everything policy and practical in between. I did not expect consensus to come easily in a space like this, and I am not sure negotiation can move at the speed of the technology it is trying to govern. At least it is moving, and the attention is real. “Collaboration” was very much in the air.

The Pope, Mentioned in Passing

As a theologian, I expected more of the Pope’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, to surface in the proceedings. Only one speaker raised it at the beginning — the ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin, who noted that the Pope had used the word dialogue thirty-four times. It was a short speech. The number stayed. The substance never got deep engagement across two full days. In the rooms where AI governance was actually being discussed, the encyclical was almost entirely absent, and so were faith actors more broadly. The Vatican representatives were present. Other religious voices were hard to find.

A couple of weeks earlier, there had been a wave of media attention on the Pope’s intervention. Here, in the setting where his questions might have landed, faith actors, religious leaders, and theologians sat at the corner.

Four of us were there from the Lutheran World Federation — two theologians and two advocacy colleagues. We were there to listen and to observe, not to raise our hands and offer a view. It would be easy to jump on the bandwagon now, since it is AI here and there and everywhere. For now this is a listening phase, and I think that is the right exercise for us. We have something to say, but not yet. Not before a deeper understanding of what we are actually confronted with.

Then Religion Did Arrive

At the AI for Good summit that followed, I was pleased to see the Pope and religion get more airtime. A personal message from him was delivered, and there was more actual dialogue than at the UN, alongside a marketplace of almost everything else: art, robots, digitalization, music, booth after booth. Afterwards, I met the three people who had represented the Pope, exchanged a few words with my Catholic counterparts, and was glad religion was in the room. It returned in the closing panel on the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas itself. Pope Leo XIV is focused on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence, so it’s a timely and relevant message, especially for all three gatherings assembled in Geneva this year and beyond.

The master of ceremonies did not seem to know what to do with religion in the room. There was an awkwardness in how it was handled — not quite dismissive, but something close. In public spaces like this, I would want to tell my secular and non-religious friends that there is no need for the discomfort. Science and religion have been in conversation for a very long time, and religion at its best has kept company with every field of knowledge we have.

The panel itself showed exactly how comfortably a religious perspective can engage the conversation on AI. The law professor made the point that we cannot confine this to law and governance alone. The industry voice spoke about rethinking the decisions and products he makes so that they actually serve human dignity. Bishop Paul Tighe, Secretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, offered the Pope’s word that needs our attention: disarming. The relevance here is peace and the handling of war and conflict — timely, given what is still ongoing in our wounded world.

Then the master of ceremonies closed the day by saying we had traveled from different parts of the world and landed in the part that takes us to the heavens. It was scripted, and it misread the moment entirely. Maybe everyone was as tired as I was in that other dark, spotlit, center-stage plenary hall. It was all very glitzy, and a theological perspective often isn’t. The theologians in the room were not only preparing people for heaven. God's kingdom comes on earth as it is in heaven, and many of us who are religious spend our days on very earthly matters because we are serving people on the ground.

Where the Encyclical Lands

Read slowly, the encyclical is anything but otherworldly. It touches the here and now, and it resonates with what many of us are already doing in promoting a constructive role for religion in society. Two excerpts:

Like the natural environment, the “digital ecosystem” can be preserved or exploited, shared or monopolized. Solidarity demands that decisions regarding data, algorithms, platforms and artificial intelligence take into account not only the immediate benefit for a few, but also the impact on all peoples and on future generations. (76)

In the digital age, a just social order guarantees everyone equal access to opportunities, protects the youngest and weakest members of society, combats hate and misinformation and subjects the use of data and technology to public oversight, so that the guiding principle is not solely profit but the dignity of every person and the common good of all people. (80)

Data governance. Public oversight. The protection of the weakest. The encyclical fills a gap, and it moves the global conversation on AI forward. It complicates the discussion and confirms its importance at the same time by putting the magnificence of the human person back at the center — a center that was missing across the discourses running in parallel that week. The UN was mostly governance. AI for Good was a marketplace of ideas, cool gadgets, robots, and a wide range of creative initiatives. And in another hall at Palexpo, the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Forum 2026 had member states sharing what they had actually built: broadband, undersea cables, and the physical ground beneath all of this. I sat in the Malaysian presentation and came away impressed and proud of what my home country has accomplished, nationally and across the ASEAN region.

Sitting through all of this as a theologian, I found myself watching how the pieces fit and where they do not. I do not have the answers yet, and I do not think we do collectively. We are clear on some of the perils and some of the promises. We are much less clear on how to move forward, except that it has to be done together. Thought leaders from religion do not need to dominate — we should not. But there are those among us who can contribute meaningfully, and there we should. I would advocate for that space, and I would urge my colleagues, whether theologians or experts in other fields, to be ready to step into it.

From Embodied Emotion to Embodied Wisdom

So I come back to where I started: Sassoon’s split screen. The chords on one side, the feeling on the other, and a person holding both at once.

I entered the week with embodied emotion, in a body weighed down by the heat, carrying some mixture of fear, joy, anxiety, and anticipation. What we need in the end is neither simplistic answers nor an analysis so elaborate it leaves us paralyzed. Neither the apocalypse some predict nor the utopia others promise. Cynicism is the most dangerous of all. What we need is wisdom.

As a Lutheran, I do not trust any account of human goodness — or human intelligence — that leaves out our frailty, our weakness, our sin. We do foolish and harmful things. We have dangerous thoughts and ideas. And still: I want to trust that there is wisdom worth receiving. In a crowd. In the philosophers and the scientists. In our cultures. In the ethical and religious traditions that have been asking the largest questions for a very long time. Wisdom is carried in bodies, in a life, in someone who learned something the hard way, and often painfully.

I would not want to lose the wonder in the process of acquiring the wisdom. We are made for wondering, the way a child is. But the older I get, the more I move between a child’s wonder and an elder’s wisdom, the kind that only comes through experience, and I have come to think we need both.

By the time the AI for Good summit ended, I was drained. My brain was full, insights sparking in every direction, and I had voice-memoed far too much just to keep from losing it. There is plenty here I will be returning to for a long time. When I got home, all I could do was let it settle, even while trying to follow the World Cup. Because on one side of that week were the robots on the exhibition floor I had been weaving in and out of — science-fiction techno-optimism right there in front of me. And on the other were the warnings, which gave me a real headache, the kind of techno-apocalypticism that is not so easy to shake off at the end of a day.

Alongside the lens of justice, which was mostly present at the UN Dialogue, hope is the lens I look through and prioritize. This listening phase, and the debriefing that followed it, charged me again to keep discovering another way of meeting this AI age. And for that we will need wisdom. Deep wisdom. The kind that takes time.

A pastor needs wisdom to discern what AI means for sermon preparation and for pastoral work. A church leader needs wisdom to discern what all this technological change means for the church’s work with indigenous peoples. Young people have much to contribute, and they also carry an AI anxiety heavier than any generation before them. And let us not forget the older folk in our churches, who worry about a new world they did not expect to see. There are warranted fears and concerns here that we cannot ignore. Yet where do we see hope — and how do we look at this world through a lens of hope that would energize us to find answers that actually fit our situation?

Sassoon brought his classical training, his musical prowess, his research, and his machines into one performance. Three screens ran at once. The music was embodied in him, expressed through the help of AI, and the two of them were cooperating. Which leaves me with the question I am carrying home from the week and have not answered: might the human and the machine together add something real to what we know — while human wisdom, the embodied kind, remains the thing that reigns?

My thinking is still a work in progress. But some of us are taking this seriously in thought, in reflection, in discernment, and in practice. We are doing it because we still hope for a better world and want to be part of what makes it possible. This is less about finding the answers. More about embodying them along the way.

It’s a hot, sunny Sunday afternoon in Geneva at 32 degrees Celsius. I’m fortunate to have a nice little white fan blowing on my left side as I scroll through the notes, restacks, and comments on my Substack.

One note caught my attention. I had restacked it and wrote:

What would a Hopetimist do? Find more water.

This was after I came across the note that came up on my feed:

Dear Optimists, Pessimists and Realists,

While you guys were arguing about a glass of water, I drank it.

Sincerely, The Opportunists.

Kawalpreet replied to me:

Wow, so much hope in your statement. Let us fill our cups with hope. Hope can help us find gold as well.

This little exchange triggered my early blogging memories — the surprise of a stranger helping me pause for a moment with their comments.

In another exchange, I restacked a note by Sterling and wrote

Simple doesn’t mean simplistic.

The original note from Uncomfortable Thoughts read:

Using dense, academic jargon is often just a polite way of hiding a lack of clarity…

Thomas Coombes joined in replying to me:

1000% times this. been having this conversation my whole career!

Somehow this exchange brought all three of us together, with reflections that resonated across different fields. In a sense we are recognizing each other, and our streams of thought converged together.

Then there was one precious exchange I had with Mariangela, which I’d like to highlight, the full original note posted on 21 June:

I have a soft spot for people who are hard to explain in a sentence.

Too many countries.

Too many careers.

Too many interests.

Too many versions of themselves.

The world likes neat categories.

Some of us were built to contain multitudes.

I feel the same way about “the world likes neat categories.” But some of us want to go beyond that, so I wrote:

I resonate with this — especially, about the world 🌍 likes neat categories.

But so many of us, particularly my children are even more multifaceted than when I was young.

She was kind enough to reply:

I see this with my son too. 💙 I also wonder whether they simply have so many more opportunities to discover different parts of themselves. I don't know about you, but I grew up in a tiny town with a grocery shop, a newsstand, and five churches. 😊 Books were my only way to explore other worlds... and perhaps other versions of myself.

What’s fascinating is how in this exchange the tiny town with five churches reminded me of my own humble beginnings in Kuala Lumpur and in England, navigating between the familiar small world of our community and the wider world just outside it. The brief sharing on how we relate to our children and nurture our families was a bonus and rather personal.

These weren’t the usual “thanks for sharing.” These were actual conversations. Strangers helping me pause and surprising me. Reminding me of something I hadn’t felt in a while — the early days of making contact with people around the world through my blog, Sivin Kit’s Garden. The feeling of I’m not just broadcasting here; I’m connecting with human beings that I normally wouldn’t have.

Scrolling through these exchanges reminded me of how we used to engage online in the early days of blogging — that is so different from what happens now in social media like on Facebook (and I don’t want to even talk about X/former Twitter). It’s closer to a conversation that I would engage in with someone face-to-face at a neighborhood party, not an academic debate, and surely not a social media fight.

When the conversation is about expanding my horizon, I feel energy. I feel energized. I feel more fulfilled. Some of these connections have come from unexpected places and people.

Leonard Sweet liking a note where I tagged him was the pleasant surprise from someone whose books shaped me. I read his books when I was a younger pastor, dealing with postmodern ministries and church planting and figuring out different ways to think about theology and mission and ministry in a culture that is different from my own parents’ and many of the older pastors whom I have served with. A like by David Gushee, whose work on ethics was very helpful to me, was also a delightful surprise because most of the time I don’t expect it. I like good surprises — anytime!

I have enjoyed Thomas Coombes’ work on hope-based communication. This is where a self-declared Hopetimist meets a hope-based communication expert. We are operating in and contributing to different fields yet converging on “Hope”. Thomas is swimming mainly in the human rights arena and different public policy spaces, and I am mainly in churches, religious communities, and engaging faith actors. I do step into spaces that he might be in (probably more than him in mine). But because of our concern for the common good of the world and a world that is so polarized, we meet here on Substack.

When I first started going deep into Substack, I was drawn to Sam Illingworth’s Slow AI discussions around critical AI literacy. When I had a chance to go to Edinburgh, Scotland, I was hoping to meet with him in person to further some of these conversations. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, but who knows, maybe someday we would. And that was my experience when I was blogging, where I actually did meet some of the bloggers whom we only met online.

Mariangela describes herself as translating complexity in big tech, and I would probably say I do something similar: translating complexity in churches and communities. We seem to be living in different worlds but addressing the same problem in our ‘industries’ (in my case, ‘ministries’). Of course, I’m always interested in technology. I don’t know whether she’s interested in faith or religion, but I guess we are both interested in solving problems. There are plenty of them everywhere we go.

The reconnections have been precious. Tero Massa and I are regular friends over a cold beer or dinner, where we talk about all things culture, theology, leadership, philosophy, and many other things. So it’s nice to see him going into Substack while I share some of my lessons with him and we learn together. It’s nice to see my friend Dion Forster, both of us who were bloggers in the past, now in our respective different roles, me as a director and him as a professor, both doing similar thinking but at different scales. It’s lovely to reconnect with Tall Skinny Kiwi and Maggi Dawn, both of whom are former bloggers like me finding each other again, whether from the old emerging church conversations to reflections inspired by Trinity Sunday.

At first I wasn’t sure whether I would reconnect with some Malaysians, but I have, and some of the Malaysian restacks are a little bit surprising compared to others who have restacked my stuff, with both Michelle and Dina Zaman coming into my radar. Really an unexpected gift of being seen from home.

Of course, there are so many more people that I could add. Without coming across as name-dropping, I simply wanted to highlight the recent exchanges that inspired me to write this post.

What I’m still trying to figure out is what Substack is doing that the blogging era didn’t quite manage and fizzled out. Is it the cross-disciplinary, intercultural engagement that was there? I feel a bit of the warmth that is going on; maybe not so much friction at the moment (which is nice for a change in the social media space). So this is something that I’m still discovering along the way. But so far it has been quite rewarding.

I have been thinking quite deeply about the dialogical aspect of theology and our understanding of God. I wouldn’t go so far as to say there’s mutual indwelling going on between me and those who are writing. But I do see the dialogical dimension opening up space for each other to share thoughts and feelings and what resonates. When it’s working, there is something special about that. Other times it’s just a simple connection. The conversational part is there. Maybe communion is a bit too much for now. It’s felt in different ways, gently and quietly. Perhaps more for those who have existing relationships. But still, it’s interesting to even think about that here.

So there’s a little bit of nostalgia where my mind travels back to RSS feeds, the excitement, and energy of the blogging past, but there is something new and different, and I still don’t have the answer yet.

I also wonder what all this means for you, the readers, whether it’s other Substack writers who read me or others who may be just following. I wonder what you gain from reading what we write. Why do you show up? Why do you click on the like button? Why would you restack? (It’s not often I speak directly to my readers; I’m curious to know.)

Before I head off for a cool drink (maybe ice cream), I pause for a moment today with this post and recount this pleasant week of notes, restacks, and comments. These connections are part of a larger picture: a genuinely dialogical world that is a work in progress.

I was sitting on the side, helping with the slide presentation of “Confessing the Hope of the Gospel,” presented by Bishop Emerita Leila Ortiz. The council members were all anticipating her report, probably imagining a dry recounting of what we had done and discussed; it’s common enough and what most would expect in governance meetings like this. But Bishop Leila started with the following. Hear her own voice:

I don’t want to begin with a document. I want to begin with a moment.

It’s the 25th of June, 1530. The city of Augsburg, in southern Germany. The Holy Roman Emperor, the most powerful political authority in the Western world, is seated in the palace. A group of Lutheran princes and their theologians stand outside the door, about to be called in.

They know what’s at stake. Some of them have been threatened with arrest. All of them face the possibility of losing everything: their lands, their freedom, their influence. And still, they go in. When they’re asked to recant, to take back what they believe, they stand up and do something that gives us our theme today. They confessed.

They submitted more than a document. They didn’t only read a statement.

They were “confessional” without being “confessionalist.” They confessed in an affirming and outward-reaching way. They said: this is who we are. This is what we believe. We’re not here to break from the church. We’re here to speak the truth about what holds us together, and what the Gospel demands.

The journey toward this day began a year ago, when the Council gave the CA 500 steering committee a mandate to come up with a framework to guide the Global Lutheran Communion and more than 150 member churches across the world toward 2030. We had an intense season of meeting online to bring together representatives of the seven regions, who have different experiences and expertise. In January 2026, we met in person for days in the Lund Conference Room with a flip chart, discussing around the white rectangular table, sometimes tired and sometimes doubting whether we could get the report done. Part of it was simply that there were so many ideas and so many different experiences of the Augsburg Confession that I found myself wondering, honestly, how we could ensure this would matter to our member churches and whether we would fulfill the task entrusted to us. That work continued online with time pressure, but with great relief, we had the report ready for the June Council Meeting.

Before coming to the Lutheran World Federation, I knew the Small Catechism well, had read Luther’s works, and had even published a journal article reflecting on Luther's two-fold governance in Muslim-majority Malaysia. The Large Catechism mattered to me too—especially for pastoral and leadership formation. But the Augsburg Confession, for many of us in Asia, especially in Malaysia, was never really on our radar. It felt like a reference to a book from the past, too distant, not personal, and hard to imagine applicable directly for local church pastors. Even though it sat in our church constitutions, we hadn’t spent the time on it that it deserved.

Like many, I’d held the Augsburg Confession as an ancient document, part of a history that didn’t press into the present.

But when Bishop Leila presented, there was real excitement, real passion, because she didn’t simply present a report we could have read on our own. She preached. She proclaimed the spirit of a courageous and clear confession, and she embodied the act of confessing in her presentation itself.

When June 25th came and went last week, of course it wasn’t on the radar for many. But this week it has surfaced as a far more important date than I’d realized.

It’s clear that 25 June 1530 was a different kind of moment from Luther’s protest with the 95 Theses in 1517, the one we remember every Reformation Day, the 31st of October. We can picture Luther walking up to nail his theses in Wittenberg. Now, we can picture the Lutheran reformers bringing their confession of the evangelical faith before the emperor.

I have a fresh appreciation even more for the Augsburg Confession when I recognize it for what it was: a collection of reformers together, facing the emperor. It’s natural to relate to Luther; it’s easier to identify with one man. But when I look again at confessing today, I find that for many of us, it’s the reformers we stand closer to, not the lone figure but the company facing risk together. I had to learn both during my years as a Lutheran pastor in the public space in Malaysia, and I’ve witnessed it in other parts of the world since coming to the Lutheran World Federation in 2019.

Both were forms of confessing, but different ones. And I find myself drawn, with new eyes, to the Augsburg Confession not as a document but as an act of confessing together; the way the 95 Theses was never really the point either, only a reflection of one man’s act of protest — posting his thoughts for public debate.

That’s why I was glad the Lutheran World Federation’s Facebook page posted a reminder of the 25th of June to bring it into the consciousness of our member churches. Most of us remember the 31st of October. This is a date newly worth marking.

What was interesting, though, was that a commenter challenged the post, citing Article XIV on women in ministry. I wondered whether I wanted to engage at all; I don’t enjoy social media debates, but I felt it mattered to clarify a few points. If someone is bold enough to make a claim publicly, they should be reasonable enough to engage with a response.

There was some minor back-and-forth over translation, an older translation by Tappert against a newer translation by Kolb and Wengert. But what mattered most to me wasn’t winning a point about wording. It was returning to the actual principle Article XIV was pointing to and to the theological vision of the Augsburg Confession as a whole. What is the spirit of the act of confessing together? That’s why I posted the following:

Similar to Bible translations into English, we acknowledge different translations exist for the Augsburg Confession too, and that shift in the Kolb/Wengert collaboration is worth acknowledging. That shift reflects responsible scholarship, for which I’m grateful.

It’s clear that churches and individuals within Lutheranism genuinely disagree on women’s ordination, or as some put it, women pastors.

The main principle of what AC XIV was guarding against was unauthorised, self-appointed preaching and church order. The concern was always proper call and proper order. That principle endures even as churches have continued to discern who receives that call.

I’d like to encourage our focus back to the original intention and question in the post.

The deeper question still stands: what does courageous, faithful, non-triumphalist witness look like in our very different contexts today?

As a Lutheran coming from a Christian minority Asian context without political power, the proclamation of the Gospel and serving our neighbors in the way of Christ is what motivates me, inspired by the reformers’ act of confessing. I’ve seen this lived out in my own church in Malaysia, where women pastors have been properly called and are serving faithfully. And I’ve encountered that same motivation in many others, especially Lutherans in Eastern Europe I’ve spoken with, whose witness has resonated with me in a new way, and others around the world.

I believe that’s what CA500 invites us to reflect on together.

(Note: CA500 refers to the 500th anniversary of the Confessio Augustana, the Latin name for the Augsburg Confession, to be marked in 2030.)

What matters to me is showing what courageous, non-triumphalist witness actually looks like in our very different contexts today. As Bishop Emerita Leila said in her opening reminder, we are called to be confessional without being ‘confessionalist.’

Confessional isn’t a word anyone owns. It’s like the word Evangelical, sadly hijacked or misleading in some quarters until it no longer means what it should. For me, to be Lutheran is both to be evangelical and confessional. I'm grateful the Steering Committee decided unanimously to emphasize 'evangelical faith' directly in the CA500 report.

The Augsburg Confession, presented on 25 June 1530 before Emperor Charles V in the German city of Augsburg, stands as a foundational articulation of evangelical faith, not as an act of separation, but as an earnest attempt to demonstrate continuity with the Catholic Church while bearing witness to the liberating truth of the Gospel.
— Confessing the Hope of the Gospel, Report of the Steering Committee for Augsburg Confession 500 to the LWF Council

Anyone can claim a word. What matters is what it looks like lived, the kind of witness, and the kind of courage. What I care about most is what’s happening further out: where our churches and my fellow Christians are witnessing, too.

I’m not interested in the Augsburg Confession as a boundary marker, a barrier to keep others from engaging its theological truths. I’m interested in how it invites us to count the cost of following Christ now, in a time when sharing good news has grown harder, when fear and despair so often try to overwhelm hope and courage. For me this isn’t a defensive posture, nor an offensive one, but a transformative one: confessing the hope of the gospel as something that changes the one confessing and changes the world where that confession is spoken.

Lutherans revisiting the Augsburg Confession might seem to be just an internal religious matter, but the act of confessing in the past was an external public matter too. In the same way today, beyond the theological nuances, I see that our reflective process may have resonance with what is happening in the public sphere today, especially with the rise of religious rhetoric in political discourse. I’m deeply concerned that in recent years, religious language is increasingly used by some politicians and faith leaders to claim power over others. The reformers’ example suggests a different posture, one so needed today: confessing conviction and faith without weaponizing it, witnessing to the gospel without dominating others. Our faith is meant to bear fruit in what we say, in how we embody the Gospel, in how we serve our neighbors, and in the difference we are called to make in churches and societies.

I see both together: fruitfulness alongside faithfulness. There’s an article on bearing fruit that matters here too, because it connects confessing our sin in repentance and confessing our faith. I find this combination so critical as we engage in confessing the hope of the gospel in a time surrounded by alternative ‘gospels’ that offer no real hope, only hostility, sometimes hatred, increasing division, and despair.

Such faith, in turn, comforts the heart and puts it at peace. Then improvement should also follow, and a person should refrain from sins. For these should be the fruits of repentance, as John says in Matthew 3:8: “Bear fruit worthy of repentance.” — Augsburg Confession XII, Concerning Repentance

What I’m interested in, finally, is how that fruit shows the quality of our confession. Not just words, not just aspiration, but how all of it is embodied, here and now, and in the days still to come.

Being fruitful and being faithful has a cost. For Luther and the reformers, there was real risk as they stood before the emperor. And Bishop Leila stood too, trying to capture the imagination of every council member so that we might join this act of confessing the hope of the gospel together.

Here we stand too, and we say it again: this is who we are, this is what we believe, and this is what we confess.

We sat around a rectangular white table. The big screen was on my left, but I was determined we didn’t need another PowerPoint presentation. What mattered to me was the whole face-to-face encounter.

We met in Lund, one of the conference rooms named after our first assembly location, at the Lutheran World Federation Communion Office. Four of us from the Department for Theology, Mission and Justice management team were having a conversation with a presiding bishop accompanied by a close colleague.

It was a quiet room. We started with introductions, and these carried something biographical too: roots in Kenya, Finland, Germany, and my own Malaysia. Each of us had spent years in different arenas: humanitarian work in South Sudan and Darfur, serving as a missionary in Thailand, years away from home for doctoral studies in Norway, advocacy work in Geneva, and a wide range of experiences elsewhere. It was a good way to begin, and it let the rest of the conversation become exactly that — questions, clarifications, and dialogue.

At some point, the presiding bishop asked for something more concrete. Stories. Something tangible that he could share with others. How does the work of theology, mission and justice actually impact people on the ground?

The conversation was free-flowing back and forth, compact with information about the work we do, and near the end, I offered a line I’d been using throughout the LWF Council meeting that had just finished: ideas are free, implementation is costly. And then, because stories were what we talked about quite a bit, I was inspired to finish the sentence that has been hovering on my lips the past week: Impact needs stories. That’s how I landed it, at the close of the conversation before lunch.

But the last part of the sentence lingered with me afterward. Something about it didn’t fully settle. I kept turning it over. Impact needs stories. It wasn’t wrong, but it didn’t quite fit either. What felt closer to true was stories show impact, not impact needs stories. And the more I sat with that small difference, I realized the whole conversation hadn’t actually been searching for a better sentence about stories at all. There was something underneath it.

Our work, captured by the four programs (Theology for Transformation, Leadership for Thriving Churches, Churches for Diaconal Action, and Action for Justice), is more than numbers and finances. It’s the people who implement the ideas. Humans embody them, carrying out the costly actions; they are being impacted and being changed by how the ideas are practically realized in concrete situations. Embodiment happens at the level of the idea, at the level of implementation, and, most importantly, at the level of impact. This impact aligns with the LWF strategic priorities: Responsible Theology, Thriving Churches, Dignity and Service, as well as Justice and Peace. This is the language that preoccupied us during the recent LWF Council meeting. When I revisit the full list in this paragraph, I can picture the people whom my colleagues serve through these programs.

Yet the word that transcends all the above, the word that kept returning to me, was embodiment. It’s been on my mind for a while now. Partly because of the AI conversations happening everywhere. Partly because of Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas, with its emphasis on the human being made in the image of God and on human dignity in work and labor. What does it mean to highlight the human being in an age that keeps threatening to reduce us to abstraction? How do we avoid being caught between AI anxiety and excitement over technologies that risk costing us sight of our own humanity? I thought, too, of embodying hope, a phrase from the LWF Global Mission Consultation a little over a year ago. I’m reminded of the men at the pre-council meeting also appreciating a no-PowerPoint meeting that was focused on sharing about transformative leadership and the formation of how we were all shaped to become who we are today. “God is not finished with you yet” was a big takeaway for us. This was a phrase one of the men had carried since he was young, and as he shared it, it rippled through the room, impacting all of us who were there too.

So after ruminating on it for a while, the line finally settled here: ideas are free, implementation is costly, impact is embodied. Not embodied in a report. Not in a number. But in people and in communities on planet Earth.

What does that actually look like? It looks like the Global Mission Consultation in Taiwan a year ago and Rodolfo, a young person from Bolivia who represented his whole region in shaping the consultation’s thinking. He also brought what he learned back home, and now he’s applying it in his small church in Bolivia. It looks like a Ukrainian refugee, a woman who was able to get a driver’s license and move freely in her host country.

The programmatic person in us or donors might ask, “Is this the best use of the money or resources for maximum impact? Are these the right people to focus on?” Those are necessary questions. But they’re not the most important ones. Before that, we need to ask something more fundamental: what does this mean for the person on the receiving end of the support and the accompaniment? Because that’s where the impact is actually embodied.

This made me think about the comments I heard during the Council this year. There were reasonable comments about saving money, having fewer meetings, doing more online, cutting days, and cutting costs. And there were Council members who pushed back, who said that meeting one another matters, that something is lost when we don’t. This was already in the air for the people around the room. I wonder what the people whom we serve might say to us if they were there in the room.

What struck me was where each kind of comment came from. The efficiency language and the sustainability questions tend to come from consultants and donors from our related organizations and from staff like me, whose job is to think about resources and how we can be good stewards. That’s our natural constraint. But the Council members entrusted with actual governance don’t just read the reports. They reach for the story instead and dig deeper beneath the surface to that which is more lasting. They reach for an encounter. Both the efficiency question and the embodiment question need each other. We have been challenged on this since the COVID-19 pandemic. We have been forced to find new ways to do things online, and some of it works well, with gains and losses. But at the end of the day, we still yearn for an embodied experience, a face-to-face encounter with another human being. High tech will never replace the human touch that we don’t want to lose.

That’s what made the end of our meeting in the Lund conference room so fitting. I said, with a tinge of humor, that we never got around to a fancy PowerPoint. There was real appreciation in the room that it was nice to have a meeting without one. That was the whole point. It wasn’t about a polished presentation. It was about the impact that comes from an embodied encounter through conversation, through shared values and stories, and through deep engagement whenever it’s possible. We may not have covered everything we wanted to. But what we were looking for was more than information. We were looking for impact both in others and within us.

This isn’t an either-or. We still need information, reports, accountability, and strategy. There’s a place for all of that. But this is a question of reordering what matters most. Once that reordering happens, I think we’re moving in the right direction.

At least, that’s what I keep being reminded of, again and again. For now. And I believe it’s something I’ll keep probing deeper in the days to come.

A photo landed in my WhatsApp: a group of men in slightly pinkish shirts. Quite intriguing. I have to admit, I’m not a fan of the color pink. I complained about it when I was a prefect back in Malaysia. Back then I had to wear pink shirts and a maroon tie with white pants — it didn’t come across as very strong, powerful, or masculine. And yet we prefects dressed in pink had to assert discipline in the school. How do you be firm with a fellow student when you’re approaching them with this strong pinkish feeling?

But that’s the irony of it all. Why do we stereotype one color over another when it comes to who we are as men or women today? Why must blue be for boys and pink for girls? I guess that’s part of what it means to rethink our identity — and what leadership really means for us. Note: I still prefer to wear black (only because it makes me look slimmer).

This coming week, a group of us men with women and youth will gather because we are representatives tasked with contributing to what a global communion thinks about different issues. And yet, before the official meetings, we have this men’s pre-meeting, where the greatest value is to have a space that is not too agenda-driven. A paradox — at least for us men.

Not an agenda-heavy meeting for men who are often perceived to be asserting their interests or their dominance. The goal was never about amplifying our manhood or whipping up a men’s movement. And yet, it is an opportunity to pause and reflect — building on what we have learned through years of self-reflective and sometimes self-critical moments. Especially when it comes to how we think about power, how we exercise it, and how we as men may have expectations of others — particularly women which may often be misguided or simply wrong. From where I come from, my culture, and also many others, that is still very much something to engage with honestly.

As I was approaching this year’s annual meeting, I had this flashback to 2023 . That was the first men’s pre-assembly in Krakow (we wore red back then) — it landed on my desk at the Lutheran World Federation assembly. I never saw myself as a men’s work person. I did not see this as my primary calling. And yet here we are: a first men’s pre-council meeting in Geneva in 2024, a second gathering in Addis Ababa in 2025, and now this third edition.

Sometimes you are drawn into work that wasn’t on top of your mind. But here I am, facilitating the men’s gathering again. And I’m grateful I’m not doing it alone — a lay leader, a bishop, and another church leader come alongside. We will facilitate this pre-council men’s meeting together this year.

I’ve heard this a few times from participants from our previous meetings: they really appreciated that they didn’t have to come to this meeting as representatives of their institutions — but first as human beings shaped by their faith, their context, and their experience.

This is a space for reflection, mainly for themselves, but with implications for their leadership. That’s why the theme this year — Be Mutually Encouraged by One Another’s Faith — is helpful and timely for starting conversations about personal leadership formation.

When we met as a core group on our Zoom call to prepare, one member mentioned that family is an important space that has been neglected — and this matters deeply in his culture, which resonated with my own Chinese background. I didn’t expect this to come up, but then again I know that where we come from, for better or for worse, our family has shaped us. Whether it has resulted in feeling more insecure in a world that demands so much achievement or a sense of safety that allows us to be confident in all that we do. Like it or not, that influence is there. This is not about advocating one ideal form of family — it is about paying honest attention to where we come from. There are spaces where friendship has a greater influence than family, but they are all interrelated.

And out of all of this comes a different way of talking about masculinity or what does it mean to be a man — not as a movement to be managed or tightly orchestrated, but as a reflective conversation about our identity to be honestly examined in relation to women, young people, and one another. Having a healthy confidence about who we are while keeping an eye on the dark sides of how we can hurt others and press women down.

So I’m grateful that what began as a seed in 2023 has grown. One of the lay leaders has since organized two consecutive national men’s assemblies in his church. You can never underestimate the impact of one event that wasn’t on anyone’s radar — seeds sown that slowly grow in a context beyond where they were first planted.

Perhaps there were different ideas floating around in 2023 about what this could become. What matters more now is staying open to where this gentle movement could lead. It’s not too driven, but there is a direction. The ingredients are there.

Since Trinity Sunday, I’ve been sitting with the Trinity and perichoresis — that ancient word for communion and mutual indwelling, the movement of God among us, within us, around us, and even taking us beyond ourselves. It has even found its way into my director’s report to the council.

I find I can interpret all these different strands of our men’s gathering through that lens. The Triune God moves in highly relational ways — and this invites men to relate to one another not in transactional, interest-driven, agenda-driven ways, but in genuinely relational ones. This is not about promoting a feminist movement among men, and certainly not a machismo movement (I can already imagine the eyebrows raised by the terms in the last sentence). It’s about revisiting who we are as human beings created in the image of God.

Whether we come dressed in pink or black or red or any color, we come to appreciate what God is doing among us — and to stay open to where this gentle movement could lead.

I've always been fascinated by the doctrine of the Trinity. In fact, it shaped my own Master of Theology thesis and gave me a fresh appreciation of how one's understanding of God, or at least maturing appreciation of the mystery of God, relates to the reality of life on earth and in society.

For many, the Trinity is too difficult to talk about. I love what Maggi Dawn pointed out in the last phrase from her post: “We are invited …to join in... ”:

The Trinity shows us that God is not a distant, admirable but untouchable divinity that we can only worship from afar. Nor is God a monolithic being, that you might encounter like a huge rock face — impressive, imposing, and impenetrable. No — God is a Trinity of relationship. They have been in this conversation of love and mutuality since the dawn of time. And there’s a place at this table for you. And for me. We are invited, not merely to admire or adore, and not to run in the other direction for fear, but . . . to join in.

And here's a prayer from the Lutheran World Federation, which some of us might find helpful to invite us to join in, too.

God of the cosmos,
we thank you for making yourself
known to us in the solidarity
of your Word and flesh.
In the unity of the Holy Trinity,
we know life-giving love.

Nurture our unity,
that the world may believe
in your love, and live.

Amen.

Today is not a day of many words for me. I return to a prayer and welcome a blessing on this quiet, warm, and sunny Pentecost Sunday in Geneva.

This prayer during my daily lectionary reading has stayed with me this past one week.

Perplexing, Pentecostal God,
you infuse us with your Spirit,
urging us to vision and dream.
May the gift of your presence
find voice in our lives,
that our babbling may be transformed into discernment
and the flickering of many tongues
light an unquenchable fire of compassion and justice.
Amen.

The blessings written by Jan Richardson have been so timely during significant days like today. Here’s one which is timely to overflow into Ordinary time too.

WHAT THE FIRE GIVES

A Blessing for Pentecost

You had thought that fire
only consumed,
only devoured,
only took for itself,
leaving merely ash
and memory
of something
you had believed,
if not permanent,
would be long enough,
enduring enough,
to be nearly
eternal.

So when you felt
the scorch on your lips,
the searing in your heart,
you could not
at first believe
that flame could be
so generous,
that when it came to you—
you, in your sackcloth
and sorrow—
it did not come
to consume,
to take still more
than everything.

What surprised you most
were not the syllables
that spilled from
your scalded,
astonished mouth—
though that was miracle
enough,
to have words
burn through
what had been numb,
to find your tongue
aflame with a language
you did not know
you knew—

no, what came
as greatest gift
was to be so heard
in the place
of your deepest
silence,
to be so seen
within the blazing,
to be met
with such completeness
by what the fire gives.
—Jan Richardson

from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons
janrichardson.com/books

Image: “What the Fire Gives” © Jan Richardson
janrichardsonimages.com

What surprised me most about this series was that I was able to retrieve some old writings in the light of the new moment and find them alive in renewed ways. Going back to the archive taught me what remains constant through the years, what seeds have grown and matured, and where I have changed. There have been relationships that have persevered and others that have disconnected or been neglected. I accept the reality of how life moves on. And yet so much treasure remains to be unearthed.

Even though most of the posts were retrievals with new prefaces drawing on my current reflection, at the end, I was able to focus on that one tree, an original post inspired by a precious moment in Scotland. It reminded me that even though I appreciated revisiting the past, I’m not a fan of being nostalgic (maybe there’s a tinge of that). I am more drawn to creative pursuits in the present and moving back to the future. This urge within me continues to be a driving force. I write for myself and share along the journey for whoever is interested in joining in.

Looking at the photos now in the series, it’s quite fascinating. I started the Easter Sunday post walking towards the church, passing trees I walk past every week but never stood in front of for any length of time. They were just harmonizing in the background. And then one day in Scotland I paused and stood still in front of one tree, much longer than usual. It has continued to carry a stronger melody within me until today.

It’s nice to paradoxically receive from many and still focus on one. This is the story of my life. I have been blessed with much and am easily distracted by even good things, but writing has been my way of bringing them into reflective focus.

Here comes the compilation of the eight posts during the Easter season, accompanied by six-word memoirs. Most of them have been drawn directly and adapted from the posts to bring into focus what I value now.

When I first saw the tree, I was just surprised. It was tall and rather slim, not really very thick. I didn’t really expect anything, except I knew that we were going to walk past a tree planted by Neil Armstrong. While I was looking up, just in awe of the tree, I also looked down to see that once upon a time, it started with a seed and slowly grew from there.

The texture of the bark wasn’t very impressive. It was kind of rough, but ordinary. And the thin branches were just reaching out. It didn’t look like a very impressive tree. And it was just surrounded by other trees too. It was just one of them. It stood out because of the sign. But I would have just walked past it without noticing it. The green rugged sign made it very clear — this was his tree:

Red Oak (Quercus Borealis) planted in March 1972 by Colonel Neil Armstrong, Astronaut, First Man on the Moon.

The tree is a few months older than me (it was planted in March, I was born in October), but we were born in the same year. It’s really fascinating to stand in front of something planted the year I was born. The tree here in Drumlanrig, Scotland, and me back in Setapak, Malaysia. Two very different worlds in the same year. For the tree, it arrived after Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon in 1969. For Malaysia, we had just passed through the racial riots of 1969 — a young nation wrestling with itself, quite far away from going to the moon. And yet here both the tree and I are, 53 years later, standing in front of each other.

When I think about Malaysia in 1969, a traumatic moment had already occurred before this global milestone of a man walking on the moon, which that happened months later in July 1969. But for Malaysia, the May 13 racial riots were a defining moment that deeply marked Malaysia’s history, while this moon landing marked our global history. One marking humanity’s technological triumph. The other marking a young nation’s most painful wound. Both happening in the same year in different spaces. But then again, in all things history, it would have been much more complicated, although I’m making the contrast more vivid this way.

I only saw one dimension of Neil Armstrong for most of my life — the astronaut, the celebrity, the man who walked on the moon, who was on TV, who made history. But this is also the same man who was a guest at the Duke’s home next to this site, who had very human conversations and did a most grounded, simple act — he planted a tree. And that tree continues to grow and to stand tall here. He no longer is here, but the tree remains.

This is an intriguing moment for me to pause and think about the different dimensions of myself and how others may see the public side of Sivin Kit. But there are also the other very human sides, very simple acts. And for Neil Armstrong, he’s no longer here, but the tree remains. It makes me wonder: when the time comes when I also will no longer be here, what might remain?

This was a precious walk into the woods and gardens — trees, flowers blossoming, rocks, streams, insects, and birds. There was something about that walk that was different from the conversations we had in other spaces. The freshness of the environment was able to seep into my being through the air, through the sight, through the sunshine, through the breeze, and through everything around me. It was less about me sitting in a meeting room absorbing wisdom from meaningful dialogue and encounters. This was more of an embodied experience — the walk, the interaction, immersed in an environment that was just rejuvenating.

I was carrying a lot of the different conversation bubbles in my head and a range of emotions in my heart I have had during the last couple of days when I was there. I was also thinking about the questions that people asked me and various moments that excited and inspired me, as well as other moments where I felt a little bit more frustrated. Whether walking alone or alongside others, I was carrying many more people in my heart and mind from other parts of my life and work. Yes, part of that may mean that emotionally, socially, mentally, and even physically, I was a little bit more tired because it took a lot of energy out of me. But at the same time, this whole walk was so energizing and refreshing and renewing. This kind of restoration can only come from an embodied experience.

I’ve lived between Malaysia, the United Kingdom, Norway, and now Geneva, Switzerland. There’s a sense that I’m always on the move — a slightly nomadic life, but in long periods rather than short spurts. My childhood was very much in Brighton and mostly in Leicester, England, before returning to Setapak for primary school. My teenage years, through seminary and the beginnings of ministry, were in Malaysia — Taman Maluri, Shah Alam, Ampang, Petaling Jaya, Setapak, and Bangsar. My intellectual and academic development was in Kristiansand, Norway, followed by a significant time of teaching and public engagement in society based in Seremban. And now my most focused contributing years are in Geneva. But this rootedness means that wherever I am, I remain rooted where I am located while never forgetting where I have come from. All of that rootedness contributes to this tree of my life and work — of who I have become.

Among the many different seeds that were planted in different places so far, I’m now pondering about the intellectual formation that has deepened through the years and especially sharpened when I was in Kristiansand and now revisited again and again while I’m in Geneva, enriched by my professional travels. The seeds and plants of wisdom have been growing — less visible perhaps, more hidden — but at the right time, I trust what has matured through the years will surface so that others would be encouraged, renewed, and inspired in their walk and reflection on their own journey too.

My earlier blog was called Sivin Kit’s Garden — I started off thinking about a very rooted image of different plants and trees. And here I am, closing these thoughts this Easter inspired by a tree that was planted in the year I was born, in a garden in Drumlanrig, Scotland. The paradox is this: on one hand, there’s always that sense of being in a garden, rooted and growing. But I’m also on a journey beyond a thousand miles, always on the move. He no longer is here, but the tree remains. And I think that’s the image I carry with me as this Easter series closes — not a resolution, not an arrival, surely not a monument, but a tree that has stood through 53 years of sunshine, storms, snow, and every season. Still rooted. Still standing strong. Still fascinating.

I’m inspired and grateful — that is enough for now.

I remember leaving a blog comment in 2010 that started this journey, “Do you think I’m someone who could apply?”. I was scrolling through RSS feeds as part of my way of following blogs back in the day. I was pondering and talking with mentors about whether a sabbatical to pursue further studies might be possible. I was already years into church planting and leading a congregation, and I was just considering whether I might be a suitable PhD candidate. It was encouraging to hear that I was. The words, “You would be an excellent candidate to apply” were really motivating and inviting.

Going from Malaysia to Norway was not an obvious route for a Malaysian-Chinese Lutheran pastor. Normally when we — Malaysians — think about further studies, we consider Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, even Germany. Norway never crossed my mind — but that was the place that opened up, and in a way it was a call all the way as far North as I could go. I had to have the necessary distance from South East Asia, which meant to leave behind quite a lot of things. Perhaps the toughest was leaving behind the church that had become so much part of my identity — that shaped my understanding of ministry, mission, and the seeds of what interfaith engagement and the understanding and practice of public theology really should look like. My wife had to leave behind her job. It was the first time for her and all our children to live overseas together as a family. Anja was less than a month old and I carried her in a basket onto the plane. We left behind family, memories, a sense of security, and what was familiar — for what was truly unfamiliar, not only for me but for everyone.

So after over 3.5 years of hard work, there I stood in the room at the University of Agder, Kristiansand — first for the public lecture, then for the public defense — I was nervous and excited at the same time. One of my supervisors reminded me, “For the public lecture, as long as you keep to time, you’ll be fine.” When it came to the defense and answering the questions of my two ‘opponents’ or examiners, the words that came to me were, “You are the expert of your own work, so be confident.” I needed those words. There had been moments of genuine imposter syndrome, times when I wasn’t sure I could even submit the dissertation. But to stand in that room after years of quiet work behind the scenes, to defend publicly and have an intellectual conversation with two scholars — with humor and all — was something I had not expected to enjoy. I was trembling and proud at the same time. It was a climax and a transition in the same moment. It was part of my process of “becoming” too — forming my profile.

So many strands of that research connect to where I am now at the Lutheran World Federation. Solidarity, communion, transformation, reimagination, religious controversy, political religion, and so much more — back then rooted in Malaysia but also grounded in the years that I’ve spent in Norway, my second home, which went through a traumatic historic moment in 2011. Now all that I had thought and felt deeply about is encountered across different countries with an even greater diversity of contexts. New media was what I was interested in then, now expanded into questions of the internet, social media, and artificial intelligence that resonate with what I’m hearing about digital theology. Those were kindergarten moments; now I’m truly working through the garden — and at times, in the woods, in the jungle, across the vast landscape of the world. What was very concrete back then has scaled up. And from my current standpoint in Geneva in 2026, I find it even more challenging and intense. But the seeds of how to imagine ways forward remain relevant even now.

Looking at the kids the way I described them then — I find it still holds. Gareth, gentle and intelligent. Elysia, creative and inquisitive. Ewan, strong on fairness and caring. Anja, who was carried onto that plane in a basket, is now quite grown up. And for my lovely wife May Chin — I could not have done the PhD without her, and I continue not to be able to do anything I do now without her and the kids. Times have changed. But so much of what was planted then continues to grow. A journey of a thousand miles began with a single step — the blog comment — as well as many other steps that followed after that. I continue to take seriously every single step — and every step that others take alongside me.

A brief glance back to this journey of a thousand miles now traced through named individuals across Malaysia, Norway, Denmark, and the USA fills me with so much gratitude. More than twenty people accompanied my deeper formation as a thinker and practitioner, which I later framed in my public lecture as a researcher and advocate. The community dimension of hope back then now continues with new actors that have stepped in. I feel that together we are stepping forward toward many thousand miles here on this earth.

As I move from Easter toward Pentecost, this acknowledgements page from my PhD dissertation is a way to resurrect the gratitude I had then — not that it has died, but to remember all those who played such a significant role in my life. Some I may have lost touch with. But they played a part. And now, every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer in our different languages, I am reminded that this resurrection life is not only about me. It is about transformation in the world — the community that forms, the many languages, the people gathered and sent. That is Pentecost, which is coming soon in a couple of days. That is what this page of thanks below from my PhD dissertation points toward. I still find joy reading it; I hope you will too.

The ancient wisdom from the Book of Changes above reminds us how many adventures in life begin. My own journey all the way from Malaysia to Norway began after a comment I left on a blog in 2010.

I am grateful for the opportunity to be part of the Religion, Ethics, and Society program coordinated by the Institute of Religion, Philosophy, and History. I also appreciate the academic environment, intellectual freedom, and stipend from the University of Agder (UiA) necessary for the completion of my Ph.D. journey.

Now to express thanks and appreciation more personally:

First, more than a thousand thanks—tusen tusen takk—go to Professor David Herbert for being an exceptional main supervisor that has patiently guided me through this project. His intervention at critical moments during this process kept me sane. I am grateful for his openness and genuine interest in my growth as a researcher, a scholar, and a fellow human being.

Professor Jan-Olav Henriksen, my second supervisor, kept me moving on with insightful questions and general advice. At crucial moments, he made sure I would take the next step.

Professor F.Leron Shults played an important role to get me started (and cheered me on near the end); Professor Ole Riis, who coordinated my ‘initiation’ course REL 600 on Theory and Methods, provided my first ‘dyne’ during a cold winter, and the extra Danish support and humor were most welcome.

Former institute leader Årstein Justnes ‘mindfully’ settled me into this new ‘milieu,’ and I appreciate current institute leader Ingunn Breistein for facilitating my process towards completion.

Both Professor Pål Repstad and Professor Paul Leer-Salvesen have been helpful at different junctures personally and practically. During my 90% Ph.D. seminar, Professor Knut Lundby (University of Oslo) offered insightful questions, incisive comments, and positive feedback that were exactly what I needed at the right time.

Hilde Daland has been an extraordinary librarian. Many thanks also to Kari-Mette Walmann Hilde, Hilde Inntjore, and Irene Trysnes for providing help in practical ways.

Fellow Ph.D. companions have enriched me deeply: Tale Steen-Johnson, Linn-Mari Solberg, Anne Mari Røsting Strand, Morten K. Beckmann, Sivert Skålvoll Urstad, and Caroline Hoel (for whom I am grateful for the extra help during the final days).

To Levi Geir Eidhamar and Anne-Lisbeth Eidhamer for their kindness, hospitality, and spending time with my family—terima kasih banyak banyak.

Professor Iain Sutherland’s (Noroff University College) timely ‘fresh’ read of the manuscript and feedback was a needed bonus.

Thanks to Professor Kenneth Surin (Duke University) for introducing me to Enrique Dussel’s work and unforgettable walks and talks at AAR San Francisco 2011 and Chicago 2012; and to Dr. Patricia Martinez for quiet support and openness to share life experiences.

Former Bishop Philip Lok and current Bishop Aaron Yap of the Lutheran Church in Malaysia (LCM) and the Church for encouraging me along this journey.

Both Seminari Theoloji Malaysia (STM) and Bangsar Lutheran Church (BLC) have inspired me in my quest for knowledge, wisdom, and transformation.

Friends in Conversation (FIC) gave me ‘a safe space for dangerous conversations,’ and I appreciate the personal support and intellectual stimulation from the Core, especially Yoon Yew Khuen and Christopher Chong.

Wes Roberts has been a fatherly mentor that keeps me grounded in my ‘circle of life’. Whether it was meeting face to face for the first time or sharing life consistently over Skype all these years, Wes is graciously amazing.

Jon Andreas Lauvland and Maryann Jortveit not only welcomed us at Odderness Kirke but also transformed Kristiansand into truly our second home through the love and care they have showered on the Kit family.

To the Kit Kids: Gareth (gentle and intelligent), Elysia (creative and inquisitive), Ewan (strong on fairness and caring), and Anja (who was born when I started the doctoral program); all of you have taught me the joy of discovery and the wonder of being a child.

And finally, to my lovely wife, May Chin, thank you for sharing this journey with me. Indeed, I could not have done this without you.

I dedicate this project to you and our wonderful children.

— From the Acknowledgements in my PhD Dissertation, “Transforming Solidarity: Social Discourses around the ‘Allah’ Controversy in Malaysian New Media (2007–2014)”, defended on 5 December 2014 at the University of Agder.

When I woke this morning, my wife, May Chin already gone for her walk. After lunch, Anja, my daughter, left to join her friends for a brief outing. Later in the afternoon, Ewan, my son, was the third to leave the apartment to exercise with his friend. I was left with this space where I am now alone to rest, reflect, and recuperate.

I’m grateful that Ascension Day in Geneva is a public holiday. For most people here, it’s just another holiday. I wonder if anyone really thinks about its significance. I feel that it’s a rather neglected day in the Christian year, and it’s not emphasized among Christian theologians too.

What does it mean for Jesus to withdraw his physical presence to heaven but then continue to be with us through transformed real presence even on earth? That seems paradoxical. He’s physically away and yet somehow still present with us. It’s hard to wrap my mind around it. I guess that would be similar for many others too.

I like the message that Samuel Tranter brings up in his sermon Ascension: Christ’s Path and Ours published in the Expository Times. Helpful questions and answers as we look into the biblical text around Ascension.

We might look at it from two angles. First: what promises might we receive – what gift of hope might be given – as we follow the direction of the doctrine, as we turn our attention to the path of Jesus’s heavenly ascension? Second: what form of life, what work of witness, might we be called into, as we follow the focus of the text, as we ask what all this means for our own path of discipleship to him? We could sum them up as invitations to reflect, first, on the deep realities of participation, of being caught up in the life of Christ, and, second, on the high calling of proclamation, of witnessing to that life.

I find his invitations to reflect on participation and proclamation very helpful, because the Ascension of Christ does invite us into these two dimensions of Christian thought, life, and witness.

It’s fascinating that I’m sitting here alone in Geneva, treasuring the space offered to me by the absence of family members to revisit reflections from my writing on the good news for Kuala Lumpur, which now has transformed into good news from Kuala Lumpur. Back then, I was reflecting on the resurrection. I think when I look back into this post, it’s true that it invites me to take notice of the influence and ongoing impact of the person of Jesus Christ, whose story is not frozen in the past but continues in the present. I think even more about the meaning of the risen Christ in our life and work now; there’s still more on how we can continue to participate in life with Christ today and proclaim the good news of the Risen Christ that shapes the future.

The distance from the past and the present experience of absence have opened up a space to welcome blessings on this Ascension Day in Geneva. I’m happy to have received three blessings: from a sermon by Samuel, my own previous writing, and Jan Richardson’s Blessing the Distance, which is a timely gift for me today.

BLESSING THE DISTANCE

It is a mystery to me
how as the distance
between us grows,
the larger this blessing
becomes,

as if the shape of it
depends on absence,
as if it finds its form
not by what
it can cling to
but by the space
that arcs
between us.

As this blessing
makes its way,
first it will cease
to measure itself
by time.
Then it will release
how attached it has become
to this place
where we have lived,
where we have learned
to know one another
in proximity and
presence.

Next this blessing
will abandon
the patterns
in which it moved,
the habits that helped it
recognize itself,
the familiar pathways
it traced.

Finally this blessing
will touch its fingers
to your brow,
your eyes,
your mouth;
it will hold
your beloved face
in both its hands,
and then
it will let you go;
it will loose you
into your life;
it will leave
each hindering thing

until all that breathes
between us
is blessing
and all that beats
between us
is grace.

—Jan Richardson

from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons
janrichardson.com/books

The Good News for Kuala Lumpur (2009)

THE GOOD NEWS
There has been a lot of bad news in Malaysia for quite a while. Perhaps more will come. The fabric of Malaysian society in public and in private are faced with forces pulling people apart and pulling people down, crushing dreams and aspirations, and sowing seeds of distrust or destruction.

We are moving into the 6th By-election in the coming month after a roller coaster ride in Malaysian politics since the last 12th General Elections March 8, 2008. Corruption, power play, law suits, racial religious sentiments played up, political coups and turmoil occupy our newspaper every day until I have concluded subscribing to cable TV is a waste of money when reading the front page has more twists and turns.

We have had a new prime minister sworn in during April 2009. But we don’t know whether it means we are geared to a better future. That is front page news.

Out of the sight of the public eye, there battles with cancer, struggles with credit card debt, shaky marriages, children at risk, no job security, refugees on the run, the list goes on and on. Life must go on, somehow. Of course, there are those who will say it is not that bad. Maybe, but we have to tell it as it is. In all honesty, we all know it is not that good either. Let’s agree it is a mixed bag of news for now.

So, What is the Good News for our city? What is the Good News for the people living in Malaysia?

The story is not over yet.

As a Christ-follower, I do not want to and cannot slip into hopelessness, numbness or worst cynicism. On Easter Sunday, I heard the good news again — in the form of a personal reflection after meditating on the words of the Apostle Paul in his letter to a young church found in the New Testament (1 Corinthians 15:1–11).

“Everything can change, will change, or more precisely has changed because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Every change we desire, or better God desires for the good of the world and all people works through us not out of obligation but from an overflow of the grace of God in us, and working out through obedience and an ongoing re-orientation to the reality of our Living Lord.”

It is good news when after I sat and listened to my new Buddhist monk friend share about how and why she became one, the parting words were, “How did you become a pastor?” We will continue this conversation again as we work together to share strategies on Religion and Society for common good in a project directed to the government and the public.

It is good news when more than a few Muslim friends who are unhappy with the way Islam is used for political mileage in our country, have begun to sit down and work things through with respect in small steps. It begins as simple as an email exchange on a controversial topic on the use of the word “Allah” to translate “God” in the national language Bahasa Malaysia which we have done for ages.

It is good news when two car loads of people could sit with new friends who ran away from their home country and have been stuck here for the past 5 years weaving palm crosses celebrating Christ and God who has not abandoned them. There was no short term possibility yet, mere presence of people who cared enough to be there was sufficient for now.

It is good news when the life story, convictions and dreams of my 23 year old friend and fellow Christ-follower, Markus impacted almost every sphere of society that is fragmented by race, religion, national identity, economic standing, and politics. He died in his sleep on February 4, 2009.

Yes, even death cannot stop this change where glimpses of the kind of world God is dreaming of is caught by those who stop and take notice. A fresh look at Christ’s resurrection invites us to stop and take notice of the influence and ongoing impact of this person Jesus Christ — his life, his death and most of all his resurrection, who’s story is not frozen in the past but continues in the present.

There’s something good in this story of Jesus. The good news is there is something good which can and will happen here and now even in the midst of a world full of bad news, death and destruction. God is not finished with us yet. I think the good Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says it quite well:

“Resurrection has started. How do we know? Not by working it out and adopting it as well-founded opinion, not by deciding that this idea suits us, not by getting all the arguments straight, but because we are dimly aware of something having changed around us.”

— Originally published in Sivin Kit on the Good News.

2026 — Looking Back, Looking Deep

Brian McLaren was still unknown in the Christian publishing business when I first came across his work. I read him not because he was famous or because he promised church growth. What he did was put into words fragments I had been pondering but couldn’t yet put into my own words in a simple and coherent way. More than that, the book gave me permission, and especially as I followed his writings after this book, permission to experiment with new ideas and approaches to forming a church community within a Lutheran denomination in Malaysia and permission to be a theologically informed and reflective practitioner. I didn’t see myself as an academic theologian then. I only wanted to be a pastor who thought deeply and led strategically at the same time.

The emerging church conversation has largely faded as a brand today, both in Malaysia and the English-speaking Christian world. But what held from the conversations has been the thinking, the questions, and the intuition that anyone doing ministry in a fast-changing world needs to keep asking them. What didn’t hold was the movement’s ability to resist the wider currents—the megachurch wave and the charismatic evangelical streams that shaped not just Malaysia but much of the world. The branding dissolved; I don’t hear anything about the emerging church movement or as I preferred to call it then, the Emergent conversation. But the questions didn’t. At least, I seem to be hearing them in different ways from both younger and older people.

I have met Brian in person — in Malaysia, in Thailand—and exchanged emails across the years (I’ve used McLaren in the review, but he’s always Brian to me). He ended up speaking increasingly to audiences outside the church institutions (I might even say he was no longer considered an “evangelical” voice within the Evangelical circle in the USA), he wrote on topics that moved beyond what interested a church planter and covered a much wider range of churchy topics. But what has remained consistent is his commitment to combining spirituality, ministry and theology in an integrated and embodied way. Some might consider what he writes as a genre of public theology that is accessible. For me, Brian -- the person in the writing is the person I met. And I’m looking forward to meeting him again someday and I guess we would have an interesting conversation of where I’ve landed up serving with where he has located himself too.

Bangsar Lutheran Church was two years old when I wrote my first book review. Now looking back, I had mixed feelings. I was excited and inspired by what I had read, but I was also afraid then — afraid of going too far in a direction that might cost me. I was trying to establish myself, to make connections with senior theologians and church leaders. I did not want to be ostracized, labelled a heretic, or lumped into a group the church’s leadership had already decided to reject. That fear was real, even if I couldn’t have named it so clearly then.

The tectonic activity metaphor in the book still resonates with me. But the tectonic shifts I see from Geneva now are far larger than anything 2002 Sivin could have imagined. Back then I was thinking mostly about church movements and ministry culture. Now I watch the tectonic plates of technology, politics, economy, environment, and planetary survival shifting rapidly and simultaneously. The scale is different. The turbulence is different. The metaphor holds — but it has stretched much further to capture all that we are living through.

What surprises me is that Brian’s 13-strategy framework for ministry in a fast-changing world still reads as relevant. I might adjust number 12 — I would no longer frame our context primarily as postmodern, and I would replace “getting ready for a revolution” with something closer to preparing for transformation, or a new kind of reformation. Perhaps I’m older now with some hard knocks, some wounds, and painful lessons learned. So, maybe my revolutionary edge has blunted. I wonder now, can I still be revolutionary in thought but be a little more strategic and tactical in practice?

Number 13 — add to the list — remains one of my favorites. I am still adding to the list.

In 2002 I was pastor of a two-year-old church in Kuala Lumpur. In 2026 I am Director of the Department for Theology, Mission, and Justice at the Lutheran World Federation, serving a global communion of 150 member churches across 99 countries. Twenty-four years — that’s quite some time. I find myself genuinely humbled when I hold those two facts together. The strategic spirit that inspired me then has not disappeared — it has deepened and matured. What was a seed has grown in ways I could not have predicted or engineered.

What did this book interrupt in me? And what has that interruption become?

What it interrupted was the assumption that the questions I was carrying were too risky to pursue. What it became is a lifelong commitment to integrating theology, mission, and leadership — pursued now within a very specific stream of world Christianity, with far more resources, gifts I have received from others, and companions along the journey in life and work than I had in 2002.

The interruption has also grown into a language I’m using for myself. I now describe myself as a Hopetimist, an Imperfectionist, and a Transformationist. These three words are only the tip of the iceberg — beneath them lie more than twenty-four years of experience, encounter, failure, learning, and grace. But they are the words I have arrived at, for now. And in some sense, the journey toward them began here, with a book by an unknown pastor that a friend bought at my request from a megachurch bookstore. There’s an irony in all that. But there’s also a reminder that holding apparent contradictions together is itself a patient way of discovering paradoxical wisdom: what I’m holding might be seed thoughts from yesterday that might grow into the surprising discoveries today. That’s how I see how I can shape my future and other futures too.

2005 — The Blog Introduction

When I first came across Reinventing the Church around 1999, I knew I wanted to get the book (especially after reading a favorable review from NEXT WAVE) . So my friend Daniel got it from the bookstore and sent it to me. This was my first Brian McLaren book, which blew me away (I mean, challenged me and comforted me at the same time!). Those days he was an unknown.

Here’s how it looked like (before the revised edition) I think there’s still one copy at the Glad Sounds Resource Centre near my house. 🙂 It’s interesting to compare the reviews on this book on Amazon with the Church on the Other Side.

Anyway, I was asked by Kairos Research Centre to write a book review on a book I was passionate about. Guess which one I chose (this was my maiden book review so I’m still very romantic about it *grin*)? Check out the cover of the magazine …

Anyway, why all this little history? I guess I’m gearing up how would I respond (in my view) to questions like “What is emergent?”, “Why are you engaged in this?”, “Seeing as one of the emergent values is missional, to whom is your mission?” kind of questions. Way before “emerging church”, “emergent” or even “postmodern” became buzzwords or labels or whatever... it was simply a genuine resonance with ideas and questions and possible directions to move forward. Of course, now I might explore the word “post-colonial,” “post-western,” or even “global” to engage further in conversation … but then words are meant to help, clarify, stimulate, not make things too difficult. 🙂

I liked the book because it gave me a picture of how a pastor “reflectively” works through the pressing challenges before him and doesn’t want to be boxed up in pre-fixed answers or pre-packaged mindsets. I gave one away two weeks ago to a fellow pastor friend who was open to sharing what’s going on in the head and the heart in the midst of challenging ministry situations. I felt this book might open up some possibilities or hope (which it gave me)

So here’s my maiden book review written in 2002. I’ll probably follow up with a second thoughts kind of post later.

2002 — My First Book Review

The Church on the Other Side
Brian D. McLaren Zondervan, 2000
BY SIVIN KIT

The author of The Church on the Other Side is not pastor of a mega church; neither has he written books that flood our bookstores. Yet, I believe he has something worthwhile to say that is worth listening to. Unlike purpose driven Rick Warren or seeker targeted Bill Hybels, Brian McLaren sees himself as a “reflective practitioner … focused on the down and dirty of doing ministry, but trying to have a high altitude understanding of when, where, how, and why we are doing it.” This book gives us a glimpse into his thinking and provides us with an opportunity to resonate with his passion for “doing ministry in the post modern matrix.”

His basic premise is simple: “if you have a new world, you need a new church.” But don’t misunderstand him, he’s not talking about forming new denominations or initiating new church movements or religious campaigns. He goes deeper. He defines “new” as new in kind but not in age. McLaren carefully points out, “We won’t need a new religion per se, but a new framework for our theology. Not a New Spirit, but a new spirituality. Not a new Christ, but a new Christian. Not a new denomination, but a new kind of denomination.” His focus is on changing our attitude towards change itself and carefully wrestling with what must change and what must not.

McLaren proposes that we are born in an age of a transition from Modernity to Post Modernity. He uses the analogy of “tectonic activity” which describes the constant but imperceptible movement of the large fractured plates of the earth’s crust. Once in a while, an earthquake occurs. Only then do we become aware of the unseen forces acting on the earth. Almost immediately, the changes in our world force us to admit that our “old maps” no longer fit into the new reality.

It may be said that human history is not unlike the physical earth in that it, too, is susceptible to ‘tectonic activity’, albeit of a different kind. The resulting ‘tectonic’ changes such as those sparked off by scientific discoveries and developments create new situations to which society must adapt.

For instance, think of the impact the automobile has had on the environment, the economy, the family unit, and even courtship and sexuality! Think of radio, air travel, birth control pills, antibiotics. Think of space travel, the personal computer, the Internet, genetic engineering … the list goes on! Even the cultural, political and religious realms are not as stable as we think.

How has the church fared in the face of all these developments? Has it been contented to remain “the way we’ve always been,” and assume that it is doing fine and make good progress using the ‘old maps’ of the past as guides to the new, post modern age? Or should it not, during this time of transition, respond by seeking creative solutions to new realities? In this regard, McLaren helps us by suggesting a 13 strategy framework for doing ministry in a fast changing world:

I Maximize Discontinuity.
2 Redefine Your Mission.
3 Practice Systems Thinking.
4 Trade up Your traditions for Tradition.
5 Resurrect Theology as Art and Science
6 Design a New Apologetic.
7 Learn A New Rhetoric.
8 Abandon Structures as They are Outgrown.
9 Save the Leaders.
10 Subsume Missions in Mission.
11 Look Ahead, Farther Ahead.
12 Enter the Post modern World Understand it, Engage it, Get Ready for a Revolution.
13 Add to the List.

Though McLaren writes from a North American context for a North American audience, he acknowledges that some of his reflections were stimulated by his contacts with Asians. After reading the book, I was pushed to think about what the whole discussion on “Post Modernity” means for us in Malaysia. Whether we follow the Western classification of Pre modern, Modern, and Post modern is up for debate. But one thing we do agree on is that we, in Malaysia, also live in a fast changing world.

Think of the social impact that is the result of our latest economic recession, the political uncertainties after the sacking of the former deputy prime minister and the religious climate since the last general elections. Think about the on going controversy concerning the status of Malaysia as an Islamic State; and the struggles and challenges Christian students in the universities must face as they are exposed to the sciences and to conflicting religious viewpoints. And of course, the recent September 11th incident has undoubtedly changed the world.
Closer to home, think of cell phones interrupting our worship services and Bible studies, the impact of satellite TV (ASTRO) on youth ministry, and the content of our conversations with our non Christian families, and friends. Those in urban churches must think through the demands of the marketplace for their time, attention and energy, and the resulting impact on church participation. We need to grapple with all these issues urgently and understand what the repercussions are, not just for the individual, but especially for the church.

As a young pastor turned church planter ministering in these times of fast changing realities (whether we call it post modern transition or not), I am challenged by McLaren’s book to reconsider many ‘sacred cows’ I’ve inherited in the course of my church life, seminary education, and interaction within the Malaysian Christian community in general. These ‘sacred cows’ include the search for the perfect church model/structure (usually with a “Big is better” mentality), or the particular evangelistic programme that will solve all our problems (usually copied wholesale), or some revival experience that will rev up the whole nation at one go (usually one mass event), or clinging on to a particular theology or tradition that is considered most faithful to God (most of the time without considering the differences in historical and cultural contexts).The list goes on! Certainly, there is much value in these things, and through them I have discovered helpful tools for ministry. My philosophy of ministry has also been expanded and my heart has been warmed by the passion behind these efforts.

And yet I am concerned that in our desperation to make things happen in our churches, we are tempted to grasp at any available answer or to resort to ‘fix it all’ solutions. However, the real answer lies in having a proper understanding of the momentous changes that are happening in the world today. Only then will we be able to develop an effective response that integrates theology, mission and church ministry. In this regard, McLaren’s book serves as an excellent resource for struggling pastors.

SIVIN KIT IS PASTOR OF THE 2 YEAR OLD BANGSAR LUTHERAN CHURCH.

Have I lost touch with my humanity? In a world full of statistical charts numbing our senses, am I still moved by the growing numbers of people forced to leave their homes due to war and conflict? Is my heart able to be touched by the reality of people on the move these numbers represent? In a UNHCR video from World Refugee Day 2021, a female refugee in Europe answered the question, "What does welcoming mean to you?” with this answer: “For me, being welcome means being accepted as a member of society.” Perhaps what we need today is to hear the voices of all who are fleeing from harm in search of hope with openness again.

When we turn to social media, there are loud voices shouting as if we are in a battle between good and evil. The debates about welcoming people on the move become about a battle between law-abiding citizens versus the foreigners who might threaten the security of our society. Fear — or more precisely, irrational fear — seems to be what moves us more than divine love.

During this Lenten season, I invite us to reflect on what the true battle really is and how God’s healing power is demonstrated in a seemingly hopeless situation. When we focus on the person of Christ and his work on the cross, how does God’s love touch the life of someone who is most vulnerable and cut off from life in the present? What is the image of God that will touch us anew so that we will not lose our humanity?

In the Gospel of Mark, when Jesus walked the face of the earth, he came to fight the powers of sin, death, and the devil. He preached the kingdom of God coming in the here and now. His ministry involved casting out demons and healing the sick as he moved from village to village. We catch a glimpse in all these episodes of what would culminate on Good Friday: the overcoming all that separates us from God and one another through God’s sacrificial love revealed in Jesus Christ.

Jesus’ ministry was to touch the lives of those who needed it most. He traveled around the Sea of Galilee with many crowds gathering around him. He crossed over to Gentile territories considered unclean, but is also known to touch the untouchables with healing and grace in Jewish majority societies. Therefore, it is unsurprising that some took further steps to move toward Jesus. They were desperate because this was about life and death, between despair and healing, between hopelessness and hope. These were ‘people on the move’ toward Jesus, yearning for his healing touch.

There was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years, giving one last attempt at life. This was more than about losing blood and suffering one medical failure after another; for her, it was about being cut off from society — because she was ritually unclean. She had to be socially distant so as not to contaminate the surrounding people. How dare she even come close to this miracle-working and holy religious teacher? For her, she was not asking for close contact, she was only asking for the bare minimum when she said, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” Nothing more, just one touch — that’s enough.

Like a person who is facing a life-threatening illness, people on the move merely need a healing touch. But what do they get? For many who are crossing national borders to seek protection and chance in life, they face a lot of people who might see them not only as strangers but also as possibly even enemies. Will these strangers to our societies become enemies of our ways of life? Perhaps it is better for them to keep a distance from us. So often, people on the move are trapped by the debates of politicians and the perceived fears of common people who might have been more sympathetic.

In our increasingly toxic media environment, challenges that could have been opportunities for us to focus on healing and life often have turned into debates of hostility and separation. Rather than “how can we keep our humanity in touching those in desperation?” We are increasingly dragged into framing our thinking in terms of "How can we keep them out?” There are ‘laws’ that are meant to protect people in society, but tragically they might turn into walls that hinder the possibility of promoting healing and life for those crying for help.

I don’t talk about naivete and ignoring the troubles and abuses. People on the move are desperate. They are fleeing for their lives. They may not be well-versed in the sophisticated laws or social norms of the land. There should be ways to discern what is true or false. But for people of faith, we cannot detach the discerning process that is conducted by relevant authorities from the heart of Jesus and his power to heal and to save. Has our use of the law become ‘evil’ when others are cut off from life?

There is a battle between good and evil, but it is not ‘us’ who are good’’ and they who are ‘evil’’ It’s the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ within us and the ‘good’ and 'evil' of our actions affecting them! The tyrants of this world are causing them hurt and pain, but our anxiety and fear of the other may hinder their healing!

The late Bishop and Lutheran theologian Gustaf Aulén’s significant theological text, Christus Victor, challenges us to reconsider the meaning of Atonement and the work of God’s grace through the cross. Too often, we understand the idea of atonement as merely a private salvation and miss the classic view of the cross in overcoming good and evil. For Aulén, he summarizes:

the idea of the Atonement as a Divine conflict and victory; Christ — Christus Victor — fights against and triumphs over the evil powers of the world, the ‘tyrants’ under which [humankind] is in bondage and suffering, and in Him God reconciles the world to Himself.

Aulén draws attention to how Luther might have been misinterpreted as one who has a narrow view of the atonement. He invites us to see that for Luther the meaning of Atonement is not merely about sacrifice, merits, or even the satisfaction of God’s wrath, but rather atonement is about Divine love overcoming wrath, God’s grace touching those who are victims of tyrants too.

Jesus asked, “Who touched me?” when the woman who suffered from hemorrhages had touched his clothes. He recognized something was going on. Jesus is sensitive to the pain that is around him. His power is operating in a way that is ready to respond to those in need — especially when they are excluded by society as unclean, unwanted, and untouchable.

He invites the one who is reaching out to be known. In the Gospel of Mark, we can read that Jesus ‘looked around’ searching for who touched even his cloak. She came forward with ‘fear and trembling.’ Maybe this pure and holy religious teacher might reject her like many others who have done so before. However, Jesus saw in her ‘faith’. She is not untouchable, and she has the agency to be touched — Yes by God’s power! She must not be invisible too. Therefore, he publicly announced a victory and healing over this sickness, this death sentence, this separation: “Go in peace, and be healed from this disease.” Jesus recognizes her faith and offers her a way of peace, wholeness, and hope. Later, we read he is ready to face forces within and without who seek to block healing for the needy. He was ready to do so as he journeyed to the cross, where he will shed his blood to save humankind.

I recall when I was pastoring in the heart of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Our congregation would drive for just over an hour frequently to bring food supplies, offer practical support, and spend time with families, many with young children who fled conflict in Myanmar. Although they were recognized by the UNHCR, unfortunately, they had no status with the government of my home country. The surrounding society did not welcome them. They shared with us how some locals would bully them and even steal from them. The congregation took some risks to accompany them and give support where possible. Often, we felt helpless when we encountered their helplessness.

Nevertheless, as time went by, we saw how our modest accompaniment as part of their journey toward a second chance in life. There were moments when we could celebrate resettlement for some of them. We could share goodbyes filled with joy mixed with tears. Whether it was through sharing practically or spiritually, we too were transformed in the process as we discovered their faith during much fear and trembling. Jesus’ presence was there to heal and to give hope. We rediscovered what our priorities were—what battles are truly worth fighting for—and our humanity, too.

The battle between good and evil is present in our world; we do not need to ignore the reality of such a battle. However, we are challenged by the theme “keeping our humanity” to ensure that we are not fighting the wrong battle. It is not a battle between citizens and strangers, not between locals and foreigners; it is between pilgrims in this life who see others in the image of God and tyrants or forces that dehumanize the 'other'. In the context of the season of Lent, we are reminded of God’s movement to the wounded. Aulén concluded his book Christus Victor that:

The Atonement is above all, a movement of God to [humans], not in the first place a movement of [humans] to God. We shall hear again its tremendous paradoxes: that God, the all-ruler, the Infinite, yet accepts the lowliness of the Incarnation; we shall hear again the old realistic message of the conflict of God with the dark, hostile forces of evil, and [God’s] victory over them by the Divine self-sacrifice; above all, we shall hear again the note of triumph.

Indeed, the focus of atonement is about the divine love of God touching a wounded world. It is what God’s movement of healing grace toward us looks like. Even the clothes of Jesus can do wonders for those who are reaching out to touch God. God’s power is not confined and limited to the walls of institutions of our churches or organizations. We can extend the World Refugee Day 2021 theme: “Together we heal, learn, and shine,” and ultimately we will triumph! May God’s divine love inspire us all to be the clothes of Jesus offering God’s healing touch to ‘people on the move’ who are valuable in God’s eyes.

Introduction

Greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. This entire week has been a blessed time that we could spend together. Like many with whom I’ve spoken, this CMCR has an atmosphere of genuine mutuality. I believe this expresses the first part of our theme, “One Body,” well.

We were also challenged to reflect deeply on the meaning of God’s mission—Missio Dei. I could sense through small group sharing, plenary feedback, and conversations around meals and coffee a shared commitment to respond faithfully to one global calling for God’s mission. And that is key: This is God’s mission, not ours, not even our churches’ or institutions. We are faithful when our response aligns with the vision of God’s “Mission of Love” working through the church, both gathered and scattered, rooted in the Triune God, Creator, Redeemer, and Life Giver. We have been encouraged to keep our focus centered on God while looking at the world with open eyes and viewing ourselves honestly.

We know deep down that the world and the context in which each of us serves are amid massive global and local changes, plagued by conflict and pain. Often, we find ourselves in situations of chaos. The distance between what we are inspired to move toward and the messiness of ministry in the church and society remains. I sense we are all inspired and feel empowered. There’s a sense that this is our time—Africa, Latin America, and so on. I want to say yes to that. But I also want to say that many of our brothers and sisters in the Global North, many of whom are here, see that this is a time for them to rise with us to respond to God’s mission in their context. This is about us as one body together, responding to God’s global calling.

That is why I sense the Spirit whispering quietly in my soul. One issue that could distract us from God’s mission is our becoming triumphalist, or when this whole enterprise becomes about us and what we can do for God rather than what God can do in us and through us.

We still have many obstacles before us. We named some: dealing with ethnocentrism, healing that still needs to be done in the church and society, and uphill challenges for peace-building. We celebrate the growth of the church. But we all know that while we have been blessed so that we can bless the world together, this blessing is amid much affliction and suffering. This is still the reality we will all return to after CMCR—that's when the actual work begins.

Paul and the Corinthian church were tempted to “lose heart” in ministry

Paul captured it well already in the opening verses of 2 Corinthians:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, 4 who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God. 5 For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ.

Both Paul and the church were serving when external and internal afflictions were a reality, despite the advancement of the gospel. The blessings that they received were not without passing through the valley of suffering, affliction, and tremendous obstacles. Paul was accused of so-called shameful things, cunning practices, or falsifying God’s word. Paul acknowledged that there are those who are blinded from seeing the light of the gospel. Nothing in these verses suggests that his response to God’s global calling was anything but easy.

Any normal human being would lose heart or give up. A vision of God’s global calling goes beyond global expansion; it includes the path to respond to God’s calling, a realistic vision of a church that is acquainted with genuine suffering both within the church and in society. For me, being theologians of the cross means that we reject any notion of triumphalism of the past, present, or future. For me, the mission of love is rooted in the love of God shown in and through Christ’s work on the cross. That is what radical discipleship means.

We are and will be tempted to “lose heart” in ministry

The day will come when all of us will be confronted with “losing heart” or giving up, perhaps throwing our hands in surrender, feeling powerless and unable to move on. We need to be prepared for that. The global calling of the mission is a call to be ready to carry the cross as a church together. The cross reminds us that genuine humility is not about looking down on ourselves, but looking up to Christ. The way of the cross is the way of humility.

When I first came with Bishop Atahualpha from Colombia (a church with approximately 2500 members) two years ago to this center for a pastoral leadership and peacebuilding workshop, I recall meeting many of you for the first time. I was impressed by how many of you did not lose heart even during a very complex national situation.

I came again a second time, when I had the privilege of interacting with the Synod presidents and key leaders of the church. I was inspired by your resilience and the commitment that you will be peacemakers and support peacebuilding, the gospel of peace, in your respective contexts.

I am inspired by the growth of EECMY to 11 million, which is almost 15% of the 77 million in the Lutheran communion. But I’m even more inspired when I see the witness of brothers and sisters during times of hardship, both within the church and especially during times of uncertainty and insecurity. It’s the light that shines through you during times of darkness that makes the deepest change and will bring salvation to the world.

God has shone in our hearts to connect us to the face of Christ.

I think verse 5 is the motivation to be faithful in God’s mission and God’s calling: “We do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Christ’s sake.”

Paul goes further:

For it is the God who said, “let light shine out of darkness, “, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

What struck me in this text is not that the light shines in the darkness, but that the light shines out of darkness. It’s not from the outside but from the inside, deep within.

This Christ-centered focus is what we need to carry us to the end. If not, our excitement and inspiration will be short-lived until the end of this weekend. It’s a light that is not external to us but comes from within our communion with Christ and one another. He turned the word “Lord” inside out with his meaning that counters the triumphalist empire of Caesar; his peace that surpasses understanding counters the Pax Romana peace that dominates. The genuine victory of Christ is one that passes through the cross. That’s what the Mission of Love is rooted in.

God has shone in our hearts to connect us to the face of Christ.

We draw heavily on Gudina Tumsa, whom we have mentioned many times. I think his words from 1979 are deeply encouraging for us today. They feel like a paraphrase of the essence of what Paul was saying then but now applied to EECMY then and still relevant now.

The creator and redeemer of the Christian has total claim on the life of the one who confesses him as Lord and Savior. When the Christian confesses that Christ is the Lord, he proclaims that Jesus Christ is the King of Kings, the president of presidents, the Chairman of chairmen, the Ruler of rulers, the Secretary of secretaries, the Leader of leaders, the Head of the heads of State. Christ is the Lord of the universe and the one who guides historical developments to their right fulfillment according the purpose of the Creator. At the same time, he guides us both collectively and individually in such a way that the hairs of our heads are well known to him, so that we can relax in carrying out the commission he has given to us to his church. This assignment has the first and top priority in the life of the believer.

We have so much to think about after this week. We have lots of plans to make, funds to raise, and 101 things in which we will be engaged. There will be hard conversations and difficult reflections. There might be successes, and surely there will be failures. This journey together, in our response to God’s global calling, will also include confronting the suffering and pain both in the Global South and, perhaps to some extent, the sense of powerlessness in the Global North.

Closing Promise

Indeed, today, we are all in this together as one broken body that needs healing but also as one imperfect body God has called to fulfill His mission and not ours. Yesterday, the devotion left out a verse. But today, I’d like to add verse 7 to make things more complete:

But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.

This is God’s word for us today: this power that will empower us is not a power to dominate. It’s a power to serve, to lay down our lives and our ambitions, and to bring all of it under the Lordship of Christ.

We are honest, Lord. We can’t do this on our own. Who are we but jars of clay? Often, we are broken, in need of healing and repair, just as the world needs it. But this doesn’t disqualify us. Rather, God is saying to us, “Come to me; I will let my light shine out of the darkness that you are confronting. I will show my power in and through you as you respond to my calling.”

Lord, indeed, we surrender to you… Amen.