Men's Fellowship on June 10th

There were altogether 6 of us joining our fellowship this time even though our brothers dropped in at different points along our meeting. We had a good discussion at the home of Thomas Tsang, deacon of our Chinese chapel as well as one of our founding members. Though our brothers are so busy nowadays, we managed to sit together and talk about “God-representations in the face of trans-cultural experience”–an extract of a paper by Brian W. Grant , Professor of Pastoral Counseling, Christian Theological Seminary. Grant cited a number of his trips to India each of which had produced crises - physical and spiritual - generating questions about the impact of physical and cultural context on his identity and experience as a religious person.

For example, Grant visited Bangalore in June 1997. He said, “We shopped for three hours on MG Road before the Globalization in Theological Education meeting, combining stifling heat with retail claustrophobia. I collapsed on the bed with a sense of spiritual emergency. I felt I had lost track of God while battling the heat and the crowd. A few hours later, leading worship for the meeting, I forgot the words of the last half of the Lord's Prayer. And the gout came back.” Such experiences prompted Grant to ask the following questions:

1. What relationship exists between God and our experience and/or image of God?


2. When our most direct psychic representations of God change so dramatically and unsettlingly in response to changes in our contexts and circumstances, what does that tell us (if anything) about God's reality and how God is known?


3. What implications do the answers to these questions have for our understanding of how God acts in human life, and how we can, do, and should behave towards God?

You may not be able to understand all his questions without reading his article. However, the 1st and 3rd questions are rather plain and meaningful. I wonder whether you have such similar experiences if you were a foreigner coming to Hong Kong the first time especially when you are a missionery. Hong Kong is quite westernized and yet China at large is still quite oriental and her people (not the government) quite superstitious. I heard stories of demon possessions in China (the rural area especially) once in a while and I am sure you could dig out numerous cases of reported exorcism in China if you so wish. The question then becomes how severe is the spiritual warfare (2 Cor.10:3-4) between God's and the devil's camps nowadays? To put it differently, do and should our experince affect our knowledge of God and vice versa, and is our experience dependent on the culture around us? Please share your experiences or views with us. Blessings.