Deeper Roots in Christ 2.0

Purdue UBF news

Paul Ho who is serving the Purdue UBF came back after visiting Korea. He went there to present his research paper.
Pray for Paul so that God can lead him after Ph.D. this Spring. He also met Dr. Peter Kim while visiting Korea.

Uruguay UBF Christmas News

Missionary Jose Park sent us two pictures. Thank God for the work of God at Uruguay.
Continue to pray for them to raise disciples and disciple makers.

Charles Kim of MN

Christmas Greetings from St. Paul, MN.

Sarah and Charles
Happy, Abe, Yeboon and Hope

The Walkers

The Walkers send their Christmas Greetings from U of I

Christmas?

An evangelistic short film (10 minutes) from St. Helen’s Bishopgate in London on whether or not the Christmas story happened and what it means—featuring New Testament scholar Paul Barnett (From UK):

Here is video on Christmas from U of I. (Paul Toh and Josh taped this video.)

Christmas Intro, 6 Dec 09 from Jerry Park on Vimeo.

Barna Studies the Research, Offers a Year-in-Review Perspective

Based on his company’s interviews with thousands of people during the year, researcher George Barna synthesized the findings across numerous studies and summarized four themes that emerged from his research regarding religion in 2009.
Here is the link.

Theme 1: Increasingly, Americans are more interested in faith and spirituality than in Christianity.

Theme 2: Faith in the American context is now individual and customized. Americans are comfortable with an altered spiritual experience as long as they can participate in the shaping of that faith experience.

Theme 3: Biblical literacy is neither a current reality nor a goal in the U.S.

Theme 4: Effective and periodic measurement of spirituality – conducted personally or through a church – is not common at this time and it is not likely to become common in the near future.

We are doing counter cultural movements knowing the landscape of our time. We know trends and where are counter trends?

We are praying and plan to do several gospel centered projects next semester. In particular we are looking into these:

1. We need to proclaim the good news of the Christianity. In addition, we will do apologetic with book clubs. We have to know why Christianity is the answer vs. vague spirituality. Most people are not giving us a chance to talk about Christianity and its good news. We are also hosting a Veritas Forum working together with Evangelical Christian Union at U of I. This is a goo forum where we can invite our non believing friends and ask them to investigate and explore Christian Faith. Jerry Park and Grace Sun will lead this effort.

2. We are praying to build small communities where we share struggle and faith. We believe that healing comes from being in Christ centered community. As one expression says, "A long ranger is a dead ranger." Our God is a communal God. He wants to be with us and with his people.

3. The Word Club (the Bible reading club) will deal with the Bible illiteracy issue among us. We plan to read the Bible once a year so that we can get a big picture of the story line of the Bible. We are Deeper Roots in Christ. Our roots must go for the streams of the living water, the Bible that sustains us and nourish us.

4. It is vital to do annual review of each person and as a community so that we can accept the good news newly and repent our sins. This break is a good time to reflect and meditate and review and plan for the next year.

We can plan but we need God's help on this. We need your prayers and support.

I am...

We will explore who Jesus is based on Jesus' claims in the gospel of John.

Here are texts and points to ponder.
(The points to ponder are courtesy of Northwestern UBF).

Merry Christmas

Greetings from the U of I, Champaign/Urbana, IL USA
Imamnuel -God with us.Thank God for granting us baby as our savior.
Happy Christmas.
(Click the picture to enlarge it)

News from Houston UBF

We thank God for blessing our First Christmas Worship Service with 6 students. God sent us students from Rice University( Undergraduate and graduate from Engineering), University of Texas (Natural Science), University of Houston (Premed) and Princeton University (Physics). Their names are Valery, Cecilia, Jenn, Atilas, Jeremiah and Jin.

Four girl students came before worship Service to help with cooking. All of them participated in preparing delicious food. Then we started our historical First Christmas Worship Service. Grace played beautiful music with piano and violin. Then Dr. Joshua Choo delivered clearly that most urgent matter of our life is knowing our Savior, Jesus who came from heaven as a baby. " A Savior has been born to us!" God came to save to all the people from power of sin and death. In our C.W.S. we had four different nationalities. ( U.S.A., Turkey, Korea and China) We learned that a Savior came to save all of us!!!

After Christmas Message brother Jeremiah shared his life testimony. He mentioned that he was spiritually blind and empty but Christ came to his life as a way, truth and life by Bible Study. After that, we had eating fellowship. We concluded our Christmas Worship with Bible brain storming time and talking.

We praise the Lord who came to this manger so humbly being a king of kings and Lord of Lords. We are just small manger ministry but God blessed abundantly with baby Jesus. We pray to keep this peace and love of Jesus in our heart on concluding this year 2009.

Thank you for your prayer and Immanuel!

Josh and Grace

Creation, Evolution and Christian lay people

Is science and Christian compatible or mutually exclusive?

Francis Collins, National Institute of Health Genome director says, "Yes."

Richard Dawkins, a biologist at Cambridge said, "No."

What does the Bible say? What does science say? How do we help those struggling with science and Christianity?

Tim Keller wrote an article at BioLogos site about Creation, Evolution and Christian Lay people. As we teach U of I students we pray that we can be faithful to the Bible and teach the Bible to the U of I students.

God said to his people, "Let us reason together." (Isa 1:18) We can come to him and listen to him. God created everything so God cannot be threatened by the nature he created. As scientists and lay persons, we are always amazed by his creation. We can know God by studying the nature and also looking at the Bible. As we start our vacation, we pray that we can spend some time and enjoy/study God's creation and deeply meditate on the word of God.

Let's take deep rest and spend some time so that we can be ready to welcome and reason with U of I students with the word of God.

A Note from Abe Song

Hi all!

I have just arrived to Moscow safe and sound after a 10 hour stop at London. I finished Counterfeit God while waiting! Thank you for your grace and love towards me. I thank God for everything.

In Christ,

Grainger Engineering Library

Grainger is the epic center of nerd-dom at U of I. Some of our students feel at home.

Everyone is serious and studying assiduously and with intensity during the finals week. In front of the library, there is a statue of a typical U of I engineering student studying the language of God - the second order differential equations.

The most diligent and hard core students are studying at acubicals.

Happy finals.
Happy studying.

Today is the last day of the finals. The end has come. The vacation starts. We will have celebration dinner at Berea house.

Thank God for his son who is Jesus Christ Immanuel:

Savior from our sins

the promised messiah

God with us -Immanuel

Merry Christmas.

Pray for those traveling

Jerry Park and Paul Toh to Turkey
Miriam to Kenya
Abe Song to Moscow and UK and Turkey (during the Spring break)
(Abe's international business team won the number one position. The best out of 12. Congrats)
Danny to Germany for taking a MBA class in Jan.
JJ to Guatemala
Joseph C and Stephano to Korea
Mike Rora to MA (MA is another country). Mike said that he will read, "The Language of God " by Francis Collins while going to MA. Wow, he can finish one book while on the plane. He finished "Reasons for God" on the way back home country last year.
Mary Koh to Atlanta, GA. (In Koh, the letter H is silent but it is the most important letter. H stands for Heaven. Ko mean nose in Korean. So Mary Koh means Mary's nose is pointing to H(eaven) like her heart.)

"I am..." Who Jesus is

U of I UBF and DRIC are planing to learn who Jesus is according to gospel of John next semester.

Below are tentative Sunday passages.

1/24/2010 I Am the bread of life (John 6)
1/31/2010 I Am the Light of the World (John 7)
2/7/2010 I Am the gate (John 9-10)
2/14/2010 Special lecture- Nehemiah
3/21/2010 I Am the Good Shepherd (John 10)
2/28/2010 I Am the Resurrection and the Life (John 11)
3/7/2010 I Am the Way (John 14)
3/14/2010 I Am the Vine (John 15)

Spring break weeks
3/21/2010 Job 1 and 2
3/28/2010 Job 42

School resumes

4/4/2010 Easter conf prep
4/11/2010 Easter conference
4/18/2010 I am the suffering servant (Isa )
4/25/2010 I am praying for you (John 17)
5/2/2010 I am the bridegroom (Eph )
5/9/2010 I am making everything new (Rev 21)
5/16/2010

Let's pray to learn who Jesus is next semester. Leave your feedback. Thank you.

The gospel, the energy of God and Finals lunch

This morning I filled up my gas and while I was waiting, I went into a gas station to get my morning coffee. I noticed that there was one section filled with various energy drinks.

Paul said that the gospel is the power of God. (Rom 1). We need power to do things such as taking finals and doing homework Why do we need energy drink that can only supply energy and let you burn out in 5 hours?

Is it better to sleep and drink water? We are trying to cut sleep but it will soon catch up.

God gave us the energy of God.

Let's pray for our students who are taking the finals and grant them power from above.

As we learned from 1 John 2:2:14

I write to you, young men,
because you are strong,
and the word of God lives in you,
and you have overcome the evil one.

We are strong, not because we drink energy drinks or we are strong. we are strong because the incarnate word of God is strong.

May Immanuel, the incarnate word of God be with you and grant you necessary energy.

Come to our final Final lunch tomorrow. It will be held at Jerry's lounge from 11;30 to 1:30. Our women coworkers are serving students who are taking finals.
Please RSVP to Gloria.

Happy Finals.

Immanuel.

What is the gospel

Dr. Toh sent this link:
D.A. Carson speaks of the Gospel based on 1 Cor 15.

News from Buenos Aires, Argentina

Missionario Don send us a note:

Pray for Argentina UBF...

We will have our Christmas Worship this Dec. 20th jointly with the La Plata UBF. Please pray for me to serve Christmas message from Isaiah 9:1-7 with the focus on Jesus the Prince of Peace. We will sing Unto Us a Son is Given and our brothers and sisters will perform a short drama for Baby Jesus.

May the peace and joy of Baby Jesus be with you and all your family and coworkers. En Cristo, Mro. Don

WPCD 88.7 FM, Champaign, IL USA

Monday Dec 17th, 2009

My Egyptian friend Samaha, who came a Fullbright scholar to Parkland this year invited me to the Parkland Radio talk show. I had a chance to talk about why we celebrate Christmas to the listeners based on Matt 1.

We celebrate Christmas because of three things.

1. Jesus -the name means Jesus saves his people from their sins
2. Christ -Christ means messiah. God is faithful and kept his promise.
3. Immanuel -God is with us. We could not go to God but God came to us.