Remembering Chuck Colson

Yesterday, April 21 was the 1 year death anniversary of Chuck Colson. To commemorate this event, I'm re-posting an article I published about Chuck and how he influenced my life. The article was also published around this time last year immediately when Chuck died. Continue reading below for the entire article. It's an honor and a blessing to work alongside my boss and mentor Chuck Colson. I was personally drawn to Chuck because of his personal connections to my personal hero, Ninoy Aquino (I think they also look alike).

Manhattan Declaration: A Filipino Christian Blogger's New Gig

I accepted an invitation to be a regular contributor/blogger for the Manhattan Declaration’s new blog site. The Manhattan Declaration is a 4,700-word declaration defending the sanctity of human life, traditional marriage and religious liberty in the United States. The declaration was released on November 2009 in New York City and to date has almost half a million signatures in support. Moreover, the Manhattan Declaration is a growing grassroot movement of people taking a principled stand on critical moral issues.

Is the Church Failing Our Society?

My big boss Chuck Colson was interviewed by TIME recently and he had some interesting things to say about the current Christian church. Thought what he said was so important and applies not only to Western churches but around the world. He talks about how churches today can and are failing society by loosing its sights on its true purpose of making people holy and disciples of Christ. I'm posting the whole article so you can read it for yourself. I would like to hear your reaction.

Thursday, Sep. 24, 2009
Q&A: Religious Leader Chuck Colson
By Amy Sullivan

Chuck Colson has spent a lifetime atoning for his involvement in the Watergate cover-up. The founder of Prison Fellowship has spent more than three decades working with prisoners in more than 100 countries, and he has mentored generations of conservative Evangelical leaders. This month he launched the Chuck Colson Center, an online research and education center that he calls "the Lexis-Nexis of resources on the Christian worldview." The last of the original religious-right leaders still actively engaged with the movement, Colson spoke with TIME about his latest endeavor, why he thinks churches have failed society and the biggest mistake the religious right made.

You say you've been wanting to create this center for decades. What first prompted the project?

It goes back to the earliest days of our prison ministry. At the end of the first year, we'd gotten to all 42 federal prisons. But in that time, they'd built 10 more. As fast as we would get a Bible study started, they'd build a new prison. I realized that we could be working in the prisons forever and doing good work, but it wouldn't matter if we didn't address the bigger cultural questions, the things that were causing crime. So many of these kids in prison came from broken families. They were products of a failed worldview — that modernity would make everything better.

But most of your resources are for pastors and others in the church who could have been teaching another kind of worldview all along. Why do you think they have failed to do that?

The church has fallen into a therapeutic model. It believes its job is to make people happy and take care of their problems. It's a feel-good kind of Christianity. I don't think the job of the church is to make people happy. I think it's to make them holy.

Is part of the problem the fact that so many Evangelical churches focus almost exclusively on getting people to the moment of being saved and don't give them the tools on how to actually live as Christians?

That's it. [Megachurch pastor] Bill Hybels was right two years ago when he released a study about the people coming into his church. It turned out he had been great at recruiting people, but they hadn't grown and matured once they were there. He had every reason to be really concerned about the methodology of his own church. If you go to his church now, you'll see a lot more teaching going on, a lot more discipleship.

But what you're advocating is a tougher form of Christianity. Is that too much of a challenge for many people?

A lot of people don't want to bother with it. [Many] people have reduced the whole Christian faith to just a relationship with Jesus. That strips the faith of its doctrine, its sovereign nature. The biggest problem is getting people to be serious about what they profess to believe.

In recent years, religious leaders have often preached about how to apply a Christian worldview to, say, making a political decision to vote for a certain kind of candidate.

We made a big mistake in the '80s by politicizing the Gospel. We ought to be engaged in politics, we ought to be good citizens, we ought to care about justice. But we have to be careful not to get into partisan alignment. We [thought] that we could solve the deteriorating moral state of our culture by electing good guys. That's nonsense. Now people are kind of realizing it was a mistake. A lot of people are going back and saying, "Let's just take care of the church and tend to our knitting."Both positions are wrong. There's an intelligent way to engage the culture in every area, including politics. But you can't fix politics or culture unless you fix the church. What we're seeing in society today is a direct consequence of the church failing to be the church.

Has there ever been a time when you think religious people got the balance right by engaging without becoming entangled?

Yes. What happened in 18th and 19th century England, with the Wesley Movement and with William Wilberforce, was ideal. Wilberforce and others formed hundreds of small societies for improving human welfare, preventing cruelty to animals, reforming poorhouses and prisons. And there were great Christian leaders in politics as well. In that period, Christians were not divided by political parties.

Christians aren't divided by political parties today, and yet there is definitely division. It's not unusual to run across liberals who say there's no way Jesus would ever be a Republican, or conservatives who preach that it's not possible to be both a good Christian and a Democrat.

That's dreadful. It's so much bigger than politics. Jesus would have seen the Republican and Democratic parties like the money changers in the temple. They just didn't get it. Now, I'm going to vote for a pro-life candidate if given the choice. But that has nothing to do with partisanship. Democrats do a lot of very good things that we should be supporting. And I say that as a conservative.

Probably the Best Place to Find Your True Love

Thought this is a good post to share on Valentines Day. Colleague and fellow FilAm and The Point blogger Angelise Anderson shares her thoughts on a best place to find your true love.

Young people today, of whom I am one, seem to have this focused goal of finding "the one." It makes sense, since most of our parents and grandparents were already married by our age. But I believe that sometimes the obsession can sidetrack us from really fully living. Funny too, because in that place of fully living, one is not only fulfilled, but also will meet those with common passions.

Fox 5 anchor Laura Evans met her husband, Mike Manatos, at the 2002 Make-a-Wish Foundation triathlon. A year later, they were married. Evans told the Washington Times that she recommends doing charity work as a means to romance because "you can meet like-minded people, have meaningful conversations, and it's not over a beer."

Too many singles, especially here in the city, spend their weekends clubbing, many hoping to meet someone. Dating coach Jess McCann says that's half the problem with meeting people at bars: "You don't know what to say." How do you strike up a conversation with a complete stranger, and how -- even more difficult -- do you luck-out on introducing yourself to someone who actually has the same calling and passions?

It's time for young people of this generation to step out of the traditional dating box and find their purpose in a world that desperately needs their helping hands.

John and Staci Eldredge, in the bestselling book Captivating, write, "There is much life saving that needs to be done yet, and someone needs to do it. We must live this out, no matter where we are." One should not be sitting around waiting, but working toward a goal, pouring one's life out for the purpose of helping the world in some form or fashion. As Frederick Buechner's wise words remind us, "The place that God calls us is that place where the world's deep hunger and our deep desire meet."

A word to the wise on getting involved: Pick a way to get involved that you are actually passionate about. Cathy Alter, author of Up for Renewal: What Magazines Taught Me About Love, Sex, and Starting Over, reminds her readers, "If you are doing things that are charitable...you will attract people into your life with the same values. The most important thing is to do things you like to do. Don't do things because you think you will attract a man."
So if you are, or you know someone who is, looking for love -- and I know most of us know somebody -- please encourage them to start living their lives out for a cause, and wait to see God open doors to friendships and relationships that will not only change their lives, but the communities around them.

"If I'm killed I know I will be with Jesus" - Ninoy Aquino

Thanks to my friend Brian of The Emerge Network , he posted a video clip of Ninoy Aquino's interview on The 700 Club in 1981. On the clip, Ninoy had a profound message on his Christian faith, finding God and human suffering. The clip shows why I consider him as a personal hero and why I admire and consider him as the greatest Filipino who ever lived. Hope Ninoy's life will influence your views and patriotism for the Filipinos as he did for mine.

I want to share a blog post I made for The Point in 2007 for Ninoy's 24th death anniversary for all of us to to ponder on.

Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, recipient of BreakPoint’s first Wilberforce Award in 1988 and my personal hero, was a well known exiled leader of the Philippines against dictator Ferdinand Marcos. What is not well known, especially to his countrymen, is his conversion to Jesus Christ. Inspired by Chuck Colson’s Born Again, Aquino was in his prison cell when he surrendered his life to Christ. But his conversion took away none of his heartfelt concern for his nation. Aquino vowed he would one day return to the Philippines, stating that “If I’m killed, I know I’ll be with Jesus Christ..."

Aquino’s decision to return despite the risk of death made him both martyr and hero. But it was his faith in Christ that strengthened his courage to return and made his conscience not let him do otherwise. As Chuck Colson says in his new book, God & Government, “One can never quite calculate how one conversion like Benigno Aquino’s in a lowly prison cell may set a motion a train of events to shake a nation.” His return and his death sparked the well-known People Power revolution in 1986 that toppled Marcos and inspired democratic change not only in the Philippines but also around the world.

As the late Jaime Cardinal Sin of the Philippines said, “it is hard for our doubting hearts to believe that spiritual power -- which is peaceful, prayerful, humane, forgiving, willing to suffer on the side of the poor and oppressed -- can change society. We know the gospel affects the lives of individuals, but can it make an impact on institutions and governments, where the heartless realities of power pierce like a knife?” The answer to this question is, yes, it is possible. Because in the end, aligning our will to Christ compels us to surrender the worst times and the most difficult political situations into the hands of the sovereign God.

(image @ Facebook/Ninoy Aquino)

Love Life & Twilight

(Filipino Christian Blogger) I came across an online community of Filipino enthusiast of Stephenie Meyer's book Twilight. The site shows that many Filipino girls (and boys) are captivated by the book. In fact there were rumors that a local adaptation will be produced by ABS-CBN. Avid Pinoy fans of the book negatively responded to project and ABS-CBN later denied such version.

Filipinos are culturally romantics and are quick adaptors of American popular entertainment that's why the growing Filipino followers of the human-vampire love story is not surprising. The book has a pro-abstinence storyline which is a positive message to Filipino teens. However, through a Christian perspective, the book and now a movie has a deeper message the Filipino audience should also ponder if they think Twilight is the ideal image of romance or what Pinoys refer to as "love life."

Here's an interesting commentary on Twilight which is worth thinking and are good talking points when discussing the film to friends and families:

If we had found a book or a movie that really offered a healthy, chaste, chivalrous vision of romance that was attracting teenagers by the millions, well, that would indeed be cause for rejoicing. And I’d be as eager as anyone to climb on the bandwagon and help promote them. But unfortunately, I can’t do that this time. Because underneath the surface, there are some truly disturbing themes and ideas in Twilight. Chief among these is that old, dangerous idea that a “bad boy” can easily be won and tamed by a “good girl”—an idea that has brought heartache to untold millions of good girls. As a Christian, I obviously believe that redemption and change is possible for sinners. But I also know that human beings alone cannot change each other. So when you’re talking to your daughter about Twilight, here are a few points you might touch on. It is not romantic, or safe, when a boy spies on you, follows you, and sneaks into your room without your knowledge (and especially without your parents’ knowledge). It is not romantic, or safe, when someone tells you he’s dangerous and he’s killed people, to give answers like, “It doesn’t matter,” and, “I’m not afraid..." It is not romantic, or safe, to try to see how close you and your boyfriend can get to the edge of danger without going over. And it is not romantic, or safe, to offer yourself up for a boy to do whatever he wants to you—symbolized in the movie by the young heroine asking the vampire to bite her so she can become like him. (Colson, BreakPoint.org, 11/26/08)
(image @ twilightthemovie.com)