A Season of Incarnation
2010, at Good Shepherd’s English Congregation was a season of Incarnation. The congregation had called me to be their new priest in charge in May, and then we all spent the summer and autumn waiting for our coming.
Arriving in Advent and serving through Christmas and Epiphany and Chinese New Year seemed like one season of living out the expectations and fulfillments of the Spirit of God present with us. For I trust that not only was I called to serve Good Shepherd’s English Congregation, I believe that I am being “sent” to celebrate and to share in the living out of a new beginning in community with the relationship of God with Us.
What will it mean to become more at home with the presence of God now? I do not suggest that God has been absent from our community before our coming. However, I do believe that with each beginning of new ministry that there is a shift in perspective, worldview, and even a new consciousness of a fresh vision of our common zeitgeist.
In short, since I arrived in November, the English Congregation at the Good Shepherd looks out upon our religious life and our spiritual relationships framed by a new horizon of mutual pilgrimage. It is my hope that we will become more aware of our unique character as an ecumenical, multicultural, and multinational spiritual community that will live with more mindfulness of our blended spiritual heritage and of a higher calling to be universal in our practice of our faith in the new age of social net workings.
It is my hope that we now shape our Christian worship and service in ways that will nurture the formations and practices of a compassionate life that reflects the image of our Lord Jesus Christ beyond our present understandings and dimensions of discipleship whatever they may be.
Stand by. Our next offering in this publication will present our journey and progress toward learning and living out our newfound ways to live compassionately in the midst of God with us, and with hospitality toward our neighbors and ourselves. We are becoming new creatures in Christ Jesus. Amen.
