Where Everybody's Crazy

It's been a horrible three days. Both my servers have been down, which meant no mail for me, none of my web sites up, no mail for WEC Japan, no WEC Japan web sites up, no lists up, no mail or web for my other users. Sorry, guys. We would have got things together much faster were it not for the hosting company, RapidSwitch. They were worse than unhelpful to begin with, but redeemed themselves towards the end. To keep things fair, I've interposed their excuses with the story.

On Sunday afternoon my time, there was a power failure at the hosting company's facility. They say:

At 4.43am on Sunday morning the building lost mains power. The building suffered a power failure which caused the automatic systems to start the generator, which ran as expected. The system is then design to switch off the Air Circuit Breaker (ACB) to the mains feed, and close the ACB to the generator, thus supplying the UPS with generator power. This worked as expected and the generator took the load. Approximately 2 minutes later, the power cut ended, and power was restored switching down the generator and operating the ACB's to switch back to mains, which all worked as planned.

Shortly after this there was a further power cut, which re-started the above sequence, in that the generator started (successfully), the mains ACB opened (successfully) and the signal was sent to close the generator ACB. This signal was sent to the ACB, however the ACB failed to close, thus meaning that the generator could not supply the UPS with power during the power cut. The UPS worked as expected and took the load. During this time the mains came back on. The ACBs have a physical and electrical interlocking system, which prevents both ACBs from being operated at the same time, thus preventing the possibility of both mains and generators feeding the load, which would result in a severe failure. Because the signals were sent to the generator ACB to close, but it never did, the interlocking systems got into a state of deadlock, where they were both stuck in an 'open' position, thus leaving the UPS with no feed, resulting in the batteries draining down after 15 minutes, and the system loosing the critical load.

So far, annoying, but not their fault. As a result of the power bouncing up and down, our server suffered a hardware fault affecting the IDE controller. (Also not RapidSwitch's fault, really, as much as I'd like to blame it on them.)

I brought the server back up, but within a few minutes it had become unresponsive even on the serial console. RapidSwitch have a facility for connecting up a keyboard, video and mouse to the server and making these available through a VNC session over the network. I got them to connect this up for me so I could see what was happening on the screen. Despite repeatedly rebooting the server, not a thing happened on the screen. I therefore presumed that the hardware was completely dead. In reality, however, the RapidSwitch technician had managed to connect up the KVM without actually noticing the server was powered off. Not great.

I have checked our logs for this and found a KVM session was processed at 11:38:27 on 29th June. The session was activated by one of our newest technicians and unfortunately he has clearly made a mistake. I will never condone rushing a job, but given the circumstances during the day, I think a slight mistake by such a junior member of staff is at least partially understandable. I will speak to him and highlight the effect that not checking his work has had. I am confident this is not something that happens except in extreme circumstances.

Because we thought the machine was dead, we thought the best thing to do was to order a new dedicated server from RS. And since a server is kinda useless without data, we asked them to help us transfer the disks from the old hardware to the new one. This was, apparently, anathema to them, so they very kindly cancelled the order and left us to start again.

I am sorry this is not part of the process we can do in our standard order processing. We have cancelled your orders because we cannot fulfil them to your requirements.

So we started again. They built the machine, it arrived in the rack and I started to set up the infrastructure; at this point I still held the vain hope that they would help us to transfer the data later, since, you know, a server without data is useless, and, well, we'd told them several times we needed to do this. While I was setting things up, the machine failed, twice. I guess they had given us a new computer with dead IDE hardware as an exact replacement of our old computer with dead IDE hardware.

I can assure that providing defective hardware is a very rare occurrence and usually only happens with new hardware that is faulty. If a piece of hardware is faulty it is highly unusual for the installation and update process to complete successfully without it being noticed. We certainly taking [sic.] the testing of our hardware very seriously.

I complained about this, and was told that if I wanted them to investigate the hardware I would have to agree to potentially being charged thirty pounds a half hour if they didn't find a problem. Faced with the fact that I was being asked if I was willing to accept a new, non-working server and a bill for the privilege, I stepped away from the keyboard and went to bed, leaving Jamie to respond before I did something I might regret.

Before doing so, I asked them to try rebooting the old server for me so I could try to get the data off that. Roughly six hours later, someone went and pressed the power button.

Unfortunately the technicians who were on had no idea how quick a fix your server might be. In that situation they have to deal with problems in order of the oldest ticket first. However, I completely agree, this was too long a period of time for the work to happen. Unfortunately one of the technicians for the night shift called in sick, which was particularly bad timing. I'm sorry that they had so much work on and that we were a technician short. Again, under normal circumstances the problems you had would not have impacted you the way they did.

While I was asleep, Jamie managed to sweet-talk (actually it probably wasn't very sweet) someone into building a second new machine. That one actually seemed to work, and I set up the infrastructure again but still we had no data. I asked them to connect up the old disks to this new, surprisingly-working server, but was told:

I'm sorry, but fitting the drives from a colocated server into a dedicated one is just not feasible. For starters, we obviously don't know what drives are in the existing chassis, not to mention that these are old drives going into a new chassis. We are (believe it or not!) quite particular about our components, as standardisation is a very effective tool for providing constantly high levels of support.

"Constantly high levels of support." At that point the red mist came down and I had step away from the keyboard again. And we still had no data, and it was now Tuesday.

Things started to improve at this point, though. RS, to their credit, offered to send up a technician to the old box with a USB drive so we could get the data off. They get points for the thought, but of course, the old box still has failing IDE hardware, so it's just going to crash again. Which it did.

Oh, did I mention that throughout all this, I'm in Japan and Jamie's on holiday in Cornwall?

He eventually came up with the plan of getting his parents to go into his house, pick up a spare server chassis, take it to the IT guy at one of our clients, and have him drive down to Maidenhead, get the old box out the rack, swap the disks into the spare server, and put it back in the rack. He used the work room at RS to do this, for which we were charged 30 pounds per half an hour, this time for the privilege of supplying our own technician. Do any other hosting services charge for build room time? I know Redbus doesn't.

With the old server resurrected, I started transferring the data onto the new server, finishing around 4:30am on Wednesday morning. My time. Again while I slept, Jamie persuaded RS to give us another KVM session (they were going to charge us for that as well) so we could reboot the new server safely into Xen, at which point we were cooking with gas. Well, there were a few little niggles, one with kernel drivers and one with networking - RS had put the new server on a different subnet to the old one, so we had to do clever forwarding tricks - but by midday on Wednesday, everything was back up and running.

I don't know what to think about RS. They were great once the dust had settled, but when we needed them, they were atrocious, and that's what makes the customer service experience. It's a bit like the Army. An army which is great in peacetime but completely pathetic in the fog of war is going to get routed. And not in the networking sense.

So yeah, I'm learning sign language. For the past few nights, I've been getting myself to sleep by watching sign language videos, and in particular these guys, who are especially easy to follow. But on Tuesday I had my first proper lesson.

I've been interested in learning sign language for a few years now, but never actually got around to starting. I have a little book of all the activities in the Nagahama community centres, and looked in there but there were no sign language classes; but since I was in there to play go on Tuesday, I asked at the desk if they actually did have any, and they told me that yes, there was one that evening, and should they tell the leader that I'd be there? Swept along by the flow a little I said yes, and later that night I was part of a sign language circle at the local Social Services center.

There were seven of us in the group altogether, six hearing people and one partially deaf. There was supposed to be an instructor for the group, but apparently she hadn't been turning up for the past few weeks, so the partially-deaf guy lead the group. Everyone had a workbook, and we took it in turns to try signing Japanese sentences from the book. He also took us through a couple of vocabulary lists.

I actually found it quite easy to pick up the signs, and was able to get almost all of the vocabulary right when they tested me on it afterwards. I'm not sure I'd be able to remember it all now though.

The one important thing about sign language is that it is not an international language - we are learning Japanese sign language which is distinct from English sign language, which is distinct from American sign language, and so on. In fact, there are regional dialects of JSL, just like there are any other language. But the other thing about sign language is that it is not simply a translation of the "host" country's language. Japanese sign language is hugely influenced by Japanese, and the grammar follows Japanese word order, but it's not Japanese. During the lesson I found myself trying to translate word for word between Japanese and JSL, but word-for-word translation is a bad way of thinking about any foreign language, sign language included.

For instance, JSL has four signs for "to eat", as opposed to Japanese's one word, dependent on what it is you're eating. There are two different signs for "year", depending on whether you're talking about a point in time or the passage of time. In Japanese, you would take "year" and then slap "+duration" on the end of it, but in JSL it's a different sign. Similarly, one of the sentences that someone had to sign was "Where shall we have the meeting?":

Japanese: 会議はどこにしましょうか？
Gloss: meeting +TOPIC where we-shall-do +QUESTION

They were told off for trying to literally sign "we-shall-do". Instead, the signs should be:

Gloss: meeting what place decide +QUESTION

Apart from the fact that "where" doesn't get its own sign but gets broken into "what place" (meanwhile "who" does get its own sign), there's the change from "do" to "decide", which reminds me that, hey, this isn't just Japanese-with-your-hands, this really is another language. If I'm going to get anywhere with JSL, that's a realisation that I'm going to have to hold in my head the whole time.

So the other day I wrote a Javascript go board.

First, it had a few problems with the rules and liberty counting, and I've ironed those out. Now as I said before, what I actually want is a go problem application for the iPod, and to get that working, I'd need to be able to read in Go problem files. Go games are stored in a format called SGF. The next step to my go problem application, then, is a Javascript SGF parser. So... you guessed it.

Here's a second version of the Javascript go board, this one will pull in an external SGF file and replay it move for move.

Yes, it's a heavy blogging day, but it's the only day of late I've had enough time and energy to put fingers to keyboard and get this stuff out of my head. So anyway, the other day I said:

The idea is that God wants all men to be saved (I have yet another blog post brewing about what that actually means)

The Bible is a book written by people who, on the whole, are first-language Hebrew speakers. Even the bits which are written down in Greek contain a self-expression and mode of thought which is authentically Semitic. When people who are not expecting a Semitic mode of thought read the Semiticisms in the Bible, funny things can happen. A particularly funny one is the use of the word "all".

As you may have just gathered, I have an unusual view of the Law. This view was formed in part by having a leading Messianic Jewish thinker as my tutor at Bible college, who turned me on to some of the Semiticisms going on in the Bible. For instance, one day we were talking about evangelism to the Jews and I, being a little naughty, said "Why bother? Doesn't Romans 11 say 'all Israel will be saved'?" Now of course Richard had probably heard this a hundred times before, and I was just trying to stir things a little, but he still floored me with his answer: "Of course all Israel will be saved. But not every single member of Israel will be saved."

‏כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל. "All Israel". But "כָּל" means, in the parlance of British Law, jointly but not severally. The group known as Israel will be saved, but not every single member of that group.

Once you get your head around this, then other troublesome verses containing the word "all" fall into place. 1st Corinthians says "For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive", and if we follow the standard evangelical line, the first "all" means that "every single person will die" and the second "all" means "only those who believe in Christ and confess their sins and turn to him will be made alive". Even if we permit a certain overreaching of interpretation it would be best to require a little internal consistency. "All" either means "all" or it doesn't.

But we need not follow that line; the Orthodox line is perfectly reasonable under the Semitic interpretation: the group known as humanity died through Adam's sin; the group known as humanity will be made alive in Christ. Which individuals make up that group is a separate question.

And another verse, the subject of my frustration, the insistance on making "God... desires all men to be saved" into a missionary text.

Since God desires all men to be saved, goes the Western reading of this Semitic text, we need to go out and make sure that every single individual gets saved. And, under this reading, since not every single individual actually is saved, God is frustrated with us and it's all our fault for not being good enough evangelists. Bad Christian. Go proselytise more. (Amusingly, the people who believe this also believe that nobody can be saved without the work of the Holy Spirit. But even knowing that, they still blame each other and themselves rather than blaming God for their evangelistic work not paying off. Remember what I said about internal consistency.) We talked about the house church being legalistic and driven. This is where it comes from.

My view is that God's Will is also God's Responsibility. If God really does desire that every single individual gets saved, then, being omnipotent and stuff, He's only got Himself to blame if His will gets frustrated.

A major mission motivation of the sixties and seventies went something like: (I don't have Bosch to hand, but it's certainly in there) "When God holds you responsible for the souls of your generation, how will you respond?" Here's Keith Green, who was a great musician but a bloody awful theologian:

It's our fault because this generation of believers is responsible for this generation of souls on the earth.

But I include the quote because it's typical of the genre: If people don't get saved "it's our fault". It's our fault.

I tell you what, if I die and stand before the Judgment Seat of God and He holds me responsible for all these Japanese souls in my generation, I know exactly how I'm going to respond: (i) "Hey, You're God, You could have made it happen but You didn't, so why are You suddenly blaming me?", and (ii) "Nobody can come to faith without the work of Your Holy Spirit, and it looks like You didn't open their hearts, so let's not try to make that my problem."

The stupid thing is, we could have avoided all of this rubbish if only we'd have been a little more careful about the way we translated the tiny little word "כָּל".

God wants humanity to be saved. And it will be. Precisely who gets to be a part of that is His problem, not ours.

Oh yeah, this one occurred to me a few years ago but I was reminded by a particularly muddle-headed sermon recently: (Any sermon which contends that God chose the Jewish people as His own Special Chosen People to work with for a few thousand years, just so that He could cynically use them to demonstrate to the rest of the world that they completely let Him down, and therefore they should all go to Hell for being unable to keep his utterly impossible Law, is going to end up in a big bucket of Fail as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, such a view is not so much widespread as omnipresent.)

So, you know how your God demands that you forgive your enemies unconditionally, right? And by unconditional forgiveness, we mean not waiting for them to make the first move but deciding to unconditionally forgive them there and then, yes? They don't have to accept it, you just have to forgive them anyway, right? Because if you don't forgive them their sins, God won't forgive you yours - I think that's in the Lord's Prayer, isn't it?

But you also say that He won't grant forgiveness to sinners until they repent and profess faith in Him. Suddenly they have to turn around and accept that forgiveness before they get into heaven. Talk about one rule for one and another rule for another. Are you guys being held to a higher standard than the God you serve? If so, that makes you morally superior to him.

Anyone who can get their way out of that one has clearly done their homework. Oh, and anyone who comes back with "Well, He is God and so we don't get to question anything ever" ... well, you can work out which camp they fall into.

I'm finding myself getting very busy and very tired these days; I have a lot of things I want to write about but I'm finding it hard to catch up. This entry has been sitting in my editor window for four days. Let's see if I can finish it today...

Saturday was fantastic. I mean, fantastic. In the morning we headed into Kyoto's Tofukuji, to join a meeting of a Kyoto deaf church. Henrietta and I both independently had an interest in deaf evangelism for a while now, and we've both come across more deaf people in the past year than one would expect. H took a course in sign language while she was at university; I always wanted to but never got to it. And last week, at the house church conference, we met an American couple who are working as evangelists to the deaf here in Japan, and they gave us an introduction to a church in Kyoto, and volunteered kindly to interpret for us.

After worrying that we might be a bit of a nuisance, we were incredibly warmly welcomed by the church there, and gave testimonies and received prayer. And it was a strange and very moving experience to be in a silent church service; even the worship was done purely by signing, and somehow it gave it an added meaning. It was also interesting to contrast deaf Japanese culture and hearing culture - they told us that deaf Japanese were a lot more "straight talking" than hearing ones!

I don't know whether we will be involved in deaf ministry in the future - I know I am someone who has many plans and projects and only a few of them come to pass - but I sure hope so.

In the afternoon we went on to a gospel concert; H is in a couple of gospel choirs and one of them was giving a concert in one of the Kyoto underground stations - supported by Kyoto City Transport Department. There were about forty or fifty people there, and between the songs the leader explained the Christian message behind them.

This really, really, impressed on me the difference between what I will call centripetal evangelism and centrifugal evangelism. As those with better elementary physics than I will remember, centrifugal force flings things outwards; centripetal force tries to pull things inwards. Most of our evangelism is centripetal. At our missionary conference this year we had a great talk by a pastor in Tokyo whose church runs all kind of small groups and activities. And people come along! But his basic model is that the church puts on activities which people come to. Come to the church! Come to the church! And people come.

But there are a couple of problems with this. First, surely we don't want the church to be an inward-pulling organisation which plucks people from the surrounding society so that they can join the sacred communion of the saved, but rather to be an outward-pushing body which gets people into the highways and byways and get the message out there where it belongs. Church surely has to be outward focused, not inward focused; centrifugal not centripedal. Second, pragmatically, putting on loads of small groups and activities and events takes a whole load of time and effort.

You try putting on an event in your church in Japan and getting forty or fifty non-Christians to hear the gospel. I'm sure you can do it, but it'll take you a year of planning and probably quite a lot of money. And yet we've got this gospel choir, made up of both non-Christians and Christians, and when they want to spread the Gospel, they get the city council to provide a prime location, lay out the seating, do the advertising, put the banners up and bring in the punters. All the choir needed to do was just go out and share the Gospel, which is what it's supposed to be about, isn't it? Surely being a missionary is about just going out and sharing the Gospel, not working on providing venues and preparing events and organising the damn seating.

On Monday I spent the day at our mission camp site, getting ready for the summer camps we host. In other words, me and a bunch of others in our mission spent a whole day as missionaries providing venues and preparing events and organising the damn seating. Maybe, just maybe, we've missed the point of what this is all about. Still, it was good exercise.

Tuesday didn't get any better. The morning's prayer meeting was worthwhile, and in a sense the afternoon's Shiga county pastors' meeting was a good opportunity for fellowship and cross-denominational unity. We watched a very interesting video about the Gospel in Bunraku, a presentation of the Gospel using traditional Japanese puppet theatre. And then, unfortunately, we tried to do something together, and that's where it all fell apart.

Next year is the 150th anniversary of Protestant mission in Japan. So it would seem like a good opportunity for all the Protestants to get together and do something. Maybe put on various consciousness-raising events throughout the year. But oh, no, that might actually achieve something. And besides, we're not Protestants, we're Evangelicals and none of our denominations have a 150 year history, so why should we care about the 150th anniversary of Protestant mission in Japan? Obviously working with the non-Evangelical churches is impossible - obviously! - and if we did something without them it would look like we're in disunity and be a bad witness. (Even though we actually are in disunity and it's a bad witness, and this would be a good way to get over that. But that would be impossible. Obviously.)

In a consensus-based society like Japan, a group proceeds at the pace of its least-imaginative member. (Incidentally, WEC International is a concensus-based society.) So we're doing nothing.

This works for me. After all, the hallmark of Protestantism is to subdivide into innumerable tiny factions, close yourself off from everyone who doesn't completely agree with you, and make enemies out of people who really ought to be your friends. So our way of celebrating 150 years of Protestant mission seems strangely appropriate.

So that was Tuesday.

Today I spent the whole day writing my sermon for Sunday, because it needed doing.

I haven't spoken to a non-Christian this week. I haven't had the time.

I had four things I wanted to do today. I've done two of them and I've started on the third but I'm probably too tired to actually finish it. Unfortunately, the third is the one that I actually have to do today, my sermon for Sunday. So what have I been doing instead? Um, well, messing with Javascript, actually. (OK, I also spent some time helping a local evangelism group learn how to improve their Internet communication, and I spent the afternoon with the old guys in the local community center, so it wasn't a complete messing-about day. But there certainly was some messing-about in it.)

Well, to be honest, I see messing about with Javascript as part of keeping my hand in with the latest technologies, which is useful both for me personally if I need it for professional work, and for the mission as I am frequently called upon to do various computer jobs for them. Even a relatively old technology like Javascript has undergone a seismic shift in the way it's been used and understood, from being a hackabout way to get web sites to do something interesting into being a fully-fledged dynamic programming language with object-orientation and complex data structures.

I've known that Javascript was something that I need to spend some time re-learning, and so I set myself a challenge. (This is the best way to learn or re-learn a programming language - to have something specific you want to do, rather than follow other people's tutorials which don't relate at all to your own goals.) And my challenge is to do with Go.

I study Go (baduk in Korean, weiqi in Chinese, igo in Japanese, and pretty much impossible to Google for in English), a Chinese strategy board game which is very popular here in Japan. It's both a good way for me to relax and to meet and get to know some of the older folks in town. As part of my Go studies, I have a bunch of books of Go problems, which give you an isolated portion of a Go game and ask you to look ahead several moves and come up with the best sequence. The books will tell you several possible enemy responses for your moves, so if you make bad moves, you will be shown why they are bad. One computerised version of this idea is at goproblems.com.

But that particular site requires quite a lot of processing firepower to get going: first, you need a Java client, and second, you need to be connected to the Internet. What I want is a problem engine which can run as an off-line application on my iPod, and for that, the best way is to write it in Javascript. (OK, we can debate whether that's really the best way, but it's certainly the best way for me.)

As a first step to a full-blown Go problem engine, it'd be nice to have a Javascript class which models a Go game, knows when stones have been taken, and so on. So (you guessed it) I wrote one. Please see this page for a very-much-prototype, Javascript-only Go board simulator.

People using Songbee - by the way, please email me, so I know that there actually are some - particularly those using Songbee on Windows, should upgrade to version 1.1, released today. Get it at the usual place. It fixes a few display issues with furigana, and it also gives you a search bar that you can actually see, rather than having to just stab wildly at.

This weekend I've been at the first Japanese House Church Conference. It was quite an amazing and enjoyable event; I felt spiritually refreshed and privileged to be there. It was great to hear many stories from people around Japan who are seeing God do fantastic things through the house churches, to hear the problems they're facing and what they're doing about it.

The first night was a very laid-back introduction time, with a great getting-to-know-people game that I will file away and pull out sometime! Then we spent a long time listening to God, something I always think is a great idea and hardly ever do. We got into groups and shared our expectations for the conference, and after that we couldn't stop talking until bedtime! The next day started with some good presentations and case studies from different churches. Then we had a keynote speaker, who was, to be honest, abraisive and a bit offensive. Which was fantastic, because instead of sitting there lapping it up, I found myself poking holes in what he was saying - in other words, actively engaging with it. It gave me something to chew over as I went back, and last night I put a few of my thoughts into order.

I'm interested in what the house church movement is about because right now it's a young and energetic movement and it's seeing fantastic results. But to be honest I don't see it anything more than the latest mission paradigm. As it happened, the Friday morning before the conference I sat down with my pastor as we studied Bosch's "Transforming Mission" together; TM is my favourite missiological book, and its main thesis is that certain ways of doing mission arise from a particular social situation, last for a while, and then are replaced by something else.

The problem is that all these paradigms start with vigour and conviction, and eventually because of the strength of their own conviction, they all delude themselves into thinking that they are the One True Way. Their way of reading the Bible will back up their claim to be the only Biblical model. The latest is clearly the best, if not what it was always meant to be all along. In short, they eternalise the temporary and provisional. I call this the problem of the now.

All young movements end up systematizing themselves. They all end up losing their energy and focus. They all end up dying, and being replaced by another model. This is particularly obvious these days now that the pace of communication and change is so high. The current fad - I mean paradigm - is "Church Planting Movements." I bet that in fifty years time, nobody will be talking about Church Planting Movements.

I don't know what will replace it, but something will. Bosch was a genius, and he was able to look ahead of his current situation and identify the elements that would make up, from his time of writing, the next paradigm of mission. And what he identified sounds very much like the house church. But Bosch is dead, and we're fresh out of geniuses, because I don't know anyone who's looking ahead and saying what the next paradigm is going to be. Pragmatically, the house church paradigm is great for now. But anyone who thinks that it is the one true final paradigm - and there are such people - are either ignorant of history or deluding themselves.

A great example of the problem of the now can be found in the Scofield Reference notes. This was a commentary on the Bible, famous for its interpretation of Revelation. The letters to the churches in Revelation, we are told, are actually "disclosing seven phases of the spiritual history of the church from, say, A.D. 96 to the end... Sardis is the Protestant Reformation, whose works were not 'fulfilled.' Philadelphia is whatever bears clear testimony to the Word and the Name in the time of self-satisfied profession represented by Laodicea." It's always terribly convenient how the correct interpretation of a passage of Scripture interprets carefully all the events up to the writers' point of view but no further, as if Scripture was written just for me, right now this instant. It wasn't.

A similar example I heard this weekend. We were told that Revelation 21:24 - "The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it" - means that the Emperor of Japan will confess Jesus before he dies. The problem is that if that interpretation was true now, it would also have been true sixty years ago. The Emperor of Japan then did not confess Jesus before he died. But hey, since it was said now and about now, nobody can really contradict it. That is the problem of the now, and people suffering from the problem of the now cannot see the internal contradictions inherent in their position. And it's my view that the house church is suffering from the problem of the now.

For instance, they claim that their disciplemaking is contextualised. They also claim that it is just what Jesus did with his disciples, two thousand years ago in the Jewish Middle East. Well, you can't have both.

They claim that they are against the systematisation of theology, but they already have their Four Essential Doctrines and their Three Necessary Elements. (This leads to another blog post about whether we can be simple without being reductionist, but like I said, that's for another time.) You can't have both.

They want their influence to "flow upward" and transform mayors and civil authorities leading to the "discipling of countries", without having to accept that, historically, every single time since Constantine the church has associated itself with the trappings of state it has both hopelessly compromised its message and acted out of civil strength instead of divine weakness. You can't have both.

They seek to denigrate theological study, and paint theological understanding not just as unnecessary, which I could accept, but actually as a hindrance and a waste of time. But they seek to do this based on exegetical understandings gained through theological study. And yet, despite denigrating theological activity, they expect someone to sit down and write up their theology so that other churches can learn from it. You can't have both.

They will argue forcefully from the Bible, even pursuing the theological nuclear option, that the only possible way of interpreting the Bible is a postmodern, pluralist hermeneutic. They will authoritatively say that you should reject the authority of others. You can't have both.

This all leads to my first question for the house church: What will replace you? If you think you are the one final paradigm, then you are either ignorant of history or deluding yourself.

My second question goes back to the hermeneutics of the inductive Bible study. I went round and round in my head about hermeneutics for years, and ended up coming to the completely arbitrary position - because I think that's the only kind of position you can come to in hermeneutics - that an authentic hermeneutic must be community-based. It can't just be one guy sitting down trying to interpret the Bible; there has to be accountability and correction. So was initially interested in inductive Bible study, and have been doing it in my church.

Now I see two problems. The first is that there is neither accountability or correction. Everyone gives their interpretation, and... well, that's it, basically. In fact, nobody is permitted to say that "this is actually what it means". It's the whole postmodern "this is what the truth is to me" thing. This won't get you to the truth of Scripture, which was what my whole hermeneutic crisis was about.

The second is also related to the problem of the now. To sit around without commentaries, without "theology", and simply talk about "what the Spirit is saying" is certainly doing hermeneutics in a community, sure, but it's an isolated one. Indeed, to do this is to be deliberately ignorant of what the Spirit has already been saying to the church over the course of the past two thousand years. Doing this seems to me to be dishonouring to the Spirit, and I think Jesus had some pretty horrible words for people who did that.

So my question about Bible study is how will Bible study turn up the truth of Scripture, instead of just "my truth" of Scripture?

My third question actually didn't come from me. I sent someone my notes I took at a previous house church training event, and they said "Interesting, but it looks a bit legalistic." I didn't understand what they meant until this conference, when I realised that there was a tendency to interpret the spiritual maturity of a believer in terms of their ability to lead churches, to multiply cell groups, to witness to their friends and so on. I like to make things extreme in order to make a point, so my question is: How does this understanding of spiritual maturity differ from that of the Jehovah's Witnesses?

The fourth question comes from understanding that the house church movement is basically Campus Crusade Meets The Church Growth Movement, and my views on the Church Growth Movement are well known. The idea is that God wants all men to be saved (I have yet another blog post brewing about what that actually means), and he has a plan to achieve this (so far so good) and that that plan requires massive amounts of activity right now. There's a world of difference between "God is strategic" and "God is efficient", particularly if efficiency is measured in, let's face it, American commercial terms.

This "efficient" God, when man sinned, spend four thousand years working with one single tiny insignificant nation, including spending forty years to get them to move 450 kilometers, so that eventually the Saviour would appear. That's a lot of unnecessarily dead people in the meantime. But that's what God decided would happen before Jesus appeared. And when he did finally appear, four thousand years later, he appeared in a small Middle Eastern fishing village, found basically twelve people he could rely on to pass the message on, and still two thousand years later there are many people who don't know about it. That was God's plan for the salvation of the world. You still think God is efficient?

This is another unconscious fallacy in the house church movement. It claims to be all about relationships, but it also claims to be all about doing the fastest and most efficient thing. You can't have both. Relationships take time. (Tell me, have you tried doing relationships in a Middle Eastern context? It takes more time than you think, and then still more time than that.) Time that an "efficient" person would believe is wasted.

But praise God I believe that I am not wasting my time doing what I am doing; I am not rushing away for the most pragmatic and "efficient" thing, because I believe that God puts a high value on relationships. The people I meet, the churches I serve, they are worth the time. I still want to learn from the house church, and from the relationships I have developed from people working within it; I hope they will also want to learn from me.

Update: I hesitated about adding this bit, but finally I decided to add it. The book of James is a book written to Christians, as a circular letter. In James 2:2-3, it describes seating arrangements in a Christian "meeting" (NIV translation) or "assembly". (KJV, NET translation) Both translations are wrong; the literal word is "synagogue", and it means a synagogue; let me quote the JNT commentary:

The word in Greek is “sunagôgê”; it appears 57 times in the New Testament. Fifty-six times it refers to a Jewish place of congregational assembly and is translated “synagogue” in virtually all English versions. Yet in the present verse KJV and the Revised Standard Version render it “assembly,” and other versions translate it by “church,” “meeting,” “place of worship” and other avoidances of the word “synagogue.”

This is an instruction about how to arrange seating in a Messianic synagogue, a building designed (or borrowed) for corporate church meeting; so this is not about Jewish synagogues, since Christians would not have control over the seating arrangements of Jewish synagogues. This, written around the early 60s AD, is a letter to Christians meeting in churches. So when people tell you that house church is a Biblical model, yes, yes it is. But when people tell you that house church is the only Biblical model, no, no it is not.

The usual warning: this may be more honest than people expect.

These past few weeks I've really been struggling hard with issues of self-doubt and particularly doubt in my own ability to do this job. Basically I have been feeling like I am a bad missionary. Well, knowing that God wants this bad missionary in Japan, I set about thinking why I feel like this.

Basically my doubt has come from three ideas:

• I know what a "good missionary" ought to be like.
• I'm not like that, so I need to strive and work hard to become like that.
• If I don't become like that, I am a failure.

Each of these three ideas are untrue. I think we all work to a set of implicit assumptions, and until we set them out explicitly, we don't really question whether they are reasonable or not. And so I'm going to explore my assumptions now, not because I think they're right (I don't) but as a first step to exposing how wrong they are.

First, I know what a missionary ought to be like. Deep down I believe a missionary is primarily an evangelist. A good missionary walks into a coffee shop and starts sharing the Gospel in a natural way with the waiter. A good missionary barely goes a day without explaining to someone why Jesus died for them. I don't think I've ever explained to anyone why Jesus died for them in my life. Therefore I am a bad missionary.

Actually, of all the missionaries I know, maybe one or two fit that description. But I feel like they're doing it right, and I'm not, and I feel guilty that I'm not like them. Therefore I am a bad missionary.

I also believe that a good missionary is a people person. I remember part of my Bible college course doing a short-term mission in Cambridge; we'd run coffee shops, invite people in from the streets, get to know them, and tell them about Jesus. A friend from college was doing the same mission and one night after the coffee shops shut I asked her how it was going. "I hate it," she said. "It's all about people. God's called me to be a missionary and I realise I don't like people." I know where she's coming from. It's not that I don't like people. I'm just not very good at them. Therefore I am a bad missionary.

Since I have such a high regard for evangelism, I tend to regard a lot of the work that I do right now as peripheral. Working on the field website or the field newsletter is "support work", which in my own mind is of less value than evangelism. Even preaching, which is what I spend most of my time doing, or leading house groups, I see as "church work". Because it's not "pioneer evangelism", I don't actually respect a lot of what I do.

Or so the logic goes. But I don't think my initial assumptions about what makes a "good missionary" are correct. Evangelism is just one area of mission work. When I'm reading or writing about Bosch, I can argue forcefully that mission is pluriform, that pretty much anything is mission. Intellectually, I know this full well. Intellectually, I disagree that evangelism equals mission. But that's actually the deep-seated assumption that I'm working with and why I end up feeling that I'm deficient. This is a Bad Thing.

I know a guy here who is a missionary. His calling from God is to work in the office of a Christian school. Poor guy, he gets no respect at all. He's even continually having to convince his church that he's actually a missionary. But that's how he sees himself, and rightly so. If I can say that about him, why can't I say it about myself?

Second, I feel like I have to work and strive to turn myself into that image of a missionary that I hold. Part of this is my own natural drivenness and work ethic. I've written about that before. I do tend to find a lot of my self-worth in work, and I know that's not a good thing.

Not all of this is from within myself, however. Yesterday I had a Skype link-up with my church, and we left the call running after my interview ended. So I could hear the preacher say how much they were expecting great things from me, and how much they were anticipating me making a huge impact in Japan in the future. I'm glad of the vote of confidence, but it does add to the pressure I already feel.

I've been learning a lot from Ecclesiastes recently. It's a strange book, but it's ultimately about someone who realises that chasing after fame and fortune is never going to satisfy, and we should learn to be satisfied with the work that we do and the life that we lead. Intellectually I know - heck, I've just preached - that there is no need to strive, to want to satisfy oneself with ambitions rather than where you are right now. But my work ethic and my deep-seated assumptions subconsciously tell me the opposite.

I have dreams of planting many churches, of raising up leaders, of seeing Japan impacted for the Gospel. And dreaming is not wrong. But I keep feeling challenged: If God wanted me to stay in one church, preaching a sermon every week, building up the disciples, for the rest of my missionary career, would I feel satisfied? I'm still trying to answer that question.

I have been studying Vories, who had a huge impact on Japan. But at the end of his life, he saw himself as a failure. That is the problem with chasing after ambitions; you will never be satisfied. My job right now is to learn to life not to my own expectations, nor to the expectations of others, but, in the words of my old Bible college's motto, "whatever thy hand finds to do, do it with all thy might", and in that, find satisfaction. Anything else is like chasing the wind.