Encountering God in the last stage of college after the entire menu of secular education gave me the vantage point of honestly dealing with the integration of life and faith.  Starting as two separate domains, (as if two competing regions in an Ising Model), I have slowly struggle to synthesis the two into (what I at least theorized, if not practiced,) a genuine life journey of faith.  The articles in NHF newsletter articles (see chinese-chrisitans.com) hinted to the steps I have taken for these thoughts.

The high level view can be summarized: people easily take two separate extremes, one being mysticism, of rejecting much of the physical realm and pursue the purely spiritual realm ungrounded in reality, and likely fall prey to New Age thoughts or easily sway by random fads or figureheads. (To be fair, there are much great revelations and insights that I have learned from Christian mystics such as Guyin or Singh. But Chinese churches have often fallen prey to this thinking due to the culture's historical perspective on religion.) Furthermore, even if one were not dedicated to the pursuit of mysticism, there is the tendency to value the "spiritual" above the everyday, sort of an elitism when viewing the clergy or ministry work, but don't find meaning in everyday life.  We need to recognize the equal importance of lay leaders and ministries.

The second extreme is basically social gospel (I will find the official term for this later). It focus on making life better for people, to the total disregard for the spiritual reality.  Many 19th century or early 20th century Christian organizations such as YMCA fits this bill. Yes, social justice and care for the poor is critical in the Christian life.  But not taking them into the journey of discipleship is essentially making comfortable their journey toward hell. Our agape love shows in our regard for people's long term well being: do we simply help people temporarily (feeding them a fish today) when an Earthquake strikes or when the beggar extends a hand? do we pride ourselves by extending the help into a lifetime (teaching them how to fish)? or beyond this lifetime because eternity is real?

 

The best high level writing I found on describing a balanced Spirit-filled life is Eugene Peterson's series on Spiritual Theology. Among the 5 volumes,  "Eat This Book", discussing the approach taken in the making of the Message, and "Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places", (the latter title is a particularly beautiful work), reveal Peterson's approach of Earthy Spirituality, that Jesus came to live among us, giving up the ethereal and taking up the practical, and so we too should learn to identify and to live sacred moments in the everyday mundane life.  

Having been convinced that we should take our physical life seriously, but infuse it with faith along the lines of "take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ" (2 Cor 10:5), there is the real work ahead of us: how best to do it?  (It is easy to settle for a mediocre solution or do a poor job of this issue if we are not serious about our commitment or faith.)

My NHF articles so far deals with one's internal disposition, of why we need to make a difference in this world for others, against our natural tendency for selfish needs and advancement, but now the challenge is external display and implementation, of how best to use our resources for the  advancement of God's Kingdom on Earth.

A few books that share some of my instinctive or inspired thoughts and feelings on the subject:

Tim Keller, Mercy Ministries

Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger

Yamamori, On Kingdom Business

If we consider the problem of impacting people's lives (physical and spiritual), we can approach it in business language as making large impact, or in physics language as finding the principle term in the Hamiltonian. Basically, let us view how people live life by the way they spend their precious resources: time, energy, and money.  That most of it is spent at work, family (raising children), or entertainment, means that we need to have proper Christian teaching in these areas first and foremost.  

For example, while it is important to stress in our sermons our "personal" relationship with Christ, left alone this will only impact the fleeting minutes of our "quiet time"s in the week.  Instead, a sermon would be bolstered by developing our "personal" relationship with Christ at work, in our family, and in our entertainment.  i.e. How do we define our personhood? Trimming it down from our everyday life dimensions would left it little, (Campolo would go further to say there is nothing left).  Contemporary (post-modernist) people need to be taught to engage our faith in all the layers of our contextual lives.  Lay leaders are particularly needed to live out such teachings as examples.