Daniel Im

Pastor + Author

Leadership

Making Sense of the Atlanta Spa Shootings (A Pastor’s Perspective)

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Last week, when a self-proclaimed Christian yelled “I am going to kill all Asians” and then killed 8 people—6 of whom were Asian American women—it was too much.

Just too much.

So in this article, my hope is to help you understand:

  1. That this senseless murder was actually a racist hate crime against Asians
  2. That Jesus would never endorse or condone such hatred
  3. What we’re saying to God when we allow our churches to remain mono-ethnic

Let’s go in order.

1. This senseless murder was a racist hate crime against Asians

If you quickly Googled “Atlanta Spa Shootings,” you’ll find a lot of reporting about what happened. And the purpose of my article here isn’t to recap what happened—there’s a lot of other better places for that.

Instead, I want to point out what you may not as easily find:

  • Less than 24 hours after the shootings, a captain from the county sheriff’s office said about the killer, “Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.” That same police officer shared a picture last year of a t-shirt that said, COVID-19 is an “imported virus from CHY-NA.” And in that post, he said “Love my shirt…get yours while they last.” [1]
  • The killer drove past hundreds of other potential “sexual temptations” for 35 miles to target three different spas owned and operated by Asian women. [2]
  • There is a long history of the fetishization of Asian women that traces itself back to wars fought in Vietnam and Korea, as well as the porn industry. [3]
  • Hate crimes against Asian-Americans in major Canadian cities are 600-700% higher than the previous year. [4]
  • Although hate crimes have risen in American cities, the majority of hate crimes never get reported, which skews the actual numbers. [5]
  • One source said “it had received more than 3,700 reports of anti-Asian verbal harassment, civil rights violations and physical assault over the last year.” [6]
  • Although the majority of anti-Asian racist attacks involved verbal harassment, physical aggression, and being coughed at and spat on, what’s troubling is how “children were more likely to be on the receiving end of physical attacks than adults. Children also reported significant mental and emotional trauma in rates that outpaced all other age groups.” [7]

If all of that wasn’t enough, here’s what threw me over the edge—an eye witness account in the media heard the killer say, “I’m going to kill all Asians” during the shooting. [8]

The only reason you haven’t heard this last point is because it was a Korean employee who was interviewed by a local Korean media source and was reporting in the Chosun Ilbo, a national Korean media outlet.

My friend, Richard Lee, who works with International Justice Mission, put it like this,

The only source saying that this was a “sexually motivated crime” is from the suspect after being interviewed by the police. If it is classified as a hate crime, the accused will have added time to his sentence. So, the same person who would suffer the most from a hate crime classification is the only source who denies it was racially motivated.

On the one hand, you have an eye witness, who was shot at and escaped with his life. But his voice is literally not being heard, because he does not speak English. Instead, we take the word of a white man, who just killed 8 people.

Why are we letting the murderer control the narrative? Why aren’t we listening to the voices of the victims? Is it because of their language and accent of their voices?

Friends, this senseless murder was a racist hate crime against Asians. Don’t let the killer and media tell you otherwise.

2. Jesus would never endorse or condone such hatred

It’s been widely reported that the killer claimed to have a sex addiction and wanted to kill these women to “eliminate temptation.” Also, he is apparently a self-proclaimed Christian who “goes to a Southern Baptist church that has been connected with Founders Ministries, now best known for its anti-Critical Race Theory efforts.” [9]

Sigh…

As Christians, although we are called to live a life of purity, and be holy because God is holy (1 Pet 1:16), heinous acts like this have nothing to do with Jesus. As I shared in this OMNI TV National Newscast, sinning by killing people to eradicate or eliminate your temptation to sin has nothing to do with Jesus and nothing to do with Christianity. (If you don’t speak Tagalog, you can skip to 3:11 to hear my response in English)

Sinning by killing people to eradicate or eliminate your temptation to sin has nothing to do with Jesus and nothing to do with Christianity.
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Also, see here what it says in Proverbs 16:9 CSB, “The LORD hates six things; in fact, seven are detestable to him: arrogant eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that plots wicked schemes, feet eager to run to evil, a lying witness who gives false testimony, and one who stirs up trouble among brothers.”

That is the very definition of what has just happened…and we see clearly that God is NOT on his side.

Although this killer claims to be Christian, we know in the Bible that Jesus said to beware of ravaging wolves who dress in sheep’s clothing, pretending to be Christian but who actually aren’t.

We are called to love, not hate. “We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” and yet hates his brother or sister, he is a liar. For the person who does not love his brother or sister whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And we have this command from him: The one who loves God must also love his brother and sister.” (1 John 4:19-21 CSB)

We are called to love, not hate.
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Friends, it’s clear that Jesus would never endorse or condone such hatred.

3. What we’re saying to God when we allow our churches to remain mono-ethnic

Seeking first “the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (Matt 6:33) has a future and present aspect to it. For the future, it’s about trusting that God will fully establish his rule and reign over all things when Jesus returns. For the present, it’s about actively praying and being a part of the growth and expansion of his rule and reign everywhere that darkness reigns.

And as we’ve experienced over this past year, one place darkness continues to reign is in the division of humanity—and the church—through racism, which is a systemic evil that’s deeply embedded in our society and culture.

Racism is a systemic evil—deeply embedded in our society and culture—that divides humanity and the church.
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In the Kingdom of God, when God’s rule and reign is fully established, we know that there will be people “from every nation, tribe, people, and language, which no one could number, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Rev 7:9 CSB).

This doesn’t mean that race will go away or that ethnicity doesn’t matter when you become a Christian.

No, not at all! Rather, this means that God has uniquely designed every nation, tribe, people, and language to reflect a different aspect about Himself. So we need to celebrate and learn from every race and ethnic group, so that we can know and worship God deeper and more fully.

We need to celebrate and learn from every race and ethnic group, so that we can know and worship God deeper and more fully.
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Now when someone who claims to be a Christian kills eight people because he was “addicted to sex” and wanted to “eliminate temptation,” we need to pay attention to what we are teaching and discipling the church about sex and temptation. And when six of the eight people are Asian American woman, and he yells “I’m going to kill all Asians” during the shootings, we need to pay attention to what we are teaching and discipling the church about the Kingdom of God.

We need to pay attention to what we are teaching and discipling the church about sex, temptation, and the Kingdom of God.
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This is what happened in Atlanta last week.

We live in a society and culture that’s racist and has an imbalance of power. And the reason this seeps into the church is because of a lack of understanding about the Kingdom of God. If someone claims to be Christian and hates a particular “nation, tribe, people, or language,” they are essentially saying that they hate a part of God and want to fix God’s perfect vision for humanity. And if someone who claims to be Christian is driven more by hate than love, there needs to be an inner awakening because Scripture is clear about us being people of love, not hate.

We live in a society and culture that’s racist and has an imbalance of power. And the reason this seeps into the church is because of a lack of understanding about the Kingdom of God.
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Let me quote 1 John 4:19-21 again, “We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” and yet hates his brother or sister, he is a liar. For the person who does not love his brother or sister whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And we have this command from him: The one who loves God must also love his brother and sister.” (1 John 4:19-21 CSB)

Friends, please allow a vision of the Kingdom of God to shape how you talk about race, power, and the future of your church.

Come Lord Jesus come.

A vision of the Kingdom of God must shape how we talk about race, power, and the future of the church.
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Footnotes:
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/7704008/atlanta-spa-shootings-bad-day-racism/
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56433181
[3] https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/17/us/asian-women-misogyny-spa-shootings-trnd/index.html
[4] https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/reports-of-anti-asian-hate-crimes-are-surging-in-canada-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-1.5351481
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/18/fbi-pressure-anti-asian-hate-crime-atlanta
[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/17/anti-asian-attacks-shootings/
[7] https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/new-report-details-disturbing-rise-in-anti-asian-hate-crimes-in-canada-1.5358955
[8] https://www.chosun.com/international/us/2021/03/17/XSDXYLMAQZCC5JWMQ4HGRZGOG4/
[9] https://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2021/march/religion-race-and-atlanta-murders-untangling-multiple-layer.html

My Interview on 100 Huntley Street

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I was honoured to be interviewed today by Lara Watson on Canada’s longest running daily TV show, and the sixth longest running daily TV show in the world, 100 Huntley Street.

I pray that today’s episode encourages you by helping you identify any lies you might have mistakenly come to believe about yourself.

You can watch the episode here:

If you would like to learn more about my book, You Are What You Do: And Six Other Lies about Work, Life, and Love that Lara interviewed me on in today’s episode, click here.

Why You Might Be Feeling Busy

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Are you busy?

I’m not asking whether or not your calendar or plate is “full.” I’m asking whether you feel busy, rushed, or hurried deep within?

One researcher discovered that many Christians fall into a vicious cycle of busyness that leads to distraction from God:

  1. “Christians are assimilating a culture of busyness, hurry and overload, which leads to…
  2. God becoming more marginalized in Christians’ lives, which leads to…
  3. A deteriorating relationship with God, which leads to…
  4. Christians becoming even more vulnerable to adopting secular assumptions about how to live, which leads to…
  5. More conformity to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload. And then the cycle begins again.” [1]

This year, I want to challenge you to actively resist that.

That impulse inside of you, which makes you believe you are what you do. That whisper inside your head, which causes you to think your worth comes from your output. And that voice from our culture, which glorifies the busy and vilifies the idle.

That. That thing. That impulse. That whisper. That voice. In 2021, let’s together resist THAT.

I love how Ruth Haley Barton puts it in her book, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership,

When we keep pushing forward without taking adequate time for rest and replenishment, our way of life may seem heroic, but there is a frenetic quality to our work that lacks true effectiveness because we have lost the ability to be present to God, to be present to other people and to discern what is really needed in our situation. The result can be “sloppy desperation”: a mental and spiritual lethargy that prevents the quality of presence that would deliver true insight and spiritual leadership…When we are rested, however, we bring steady, alert attention that is characterized by true discernment about what is truly needed in our situation, and the energy and creativity to carry it out.[2]

The path to resisting that, is not found in holidays, vacations, or getting away.

Freedom from busyness is not found in holidays, vacations, or getting away.
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The path to resistance is the Sabbath—one day a week where we are not doing what we have to do, but a day where we get to be. It’s a day to rest, a day to rejoice, and a day to worship.

The Sabbath is that day—once a week—where we are reminded that we are not human doings, but human beings, and that God is God, not us.

The Sabbath is that day where we remember that God did not rest on the seventh day because He was tired, but because He knew how much we needed it. And heck, if HE RESTED, what excuse do we have not to?

The path to resistance is the Sabbath—one day a week where we are not doing what we have to do, but a day where we get to be.
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I love how Mark Buchanan describes the Sabbath in his book, The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring the Sabbath,

Sabbath is that one day. It is a reprieve from what you ought to do, even though the list of oughts is infinitely long and never done. Oughts are tyrants, noisy and surly, chronically dissatisfied. Sabbath is the day you trade places with them: they go in the salt mine, and you go out dancing. It’s the one day when the only thing you must do is to not do the things you must. You are given permission— issued a command, to be blunt—to turn your back on all those oughts. You get to willfully ignore the many niggling things your existence genuinely depends on—and is often hobbled beneath—so that you can turn to whatever you’ve put off and pushed away for lack of time, lack of room, lack of breath. You get to shuck the have-tos and lay hold of the get-tos.[3]

Wow. Sabbath is that day once a week where we get to “shuck the have-tos and lay hold of the get-tos.” I love that.

Sabbath is that day once a week where we get to ‘shuck the have-tos and lay hold of the get-tos.’
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Here’s the thing though. It will be nearly impossible to start practicing the Sabbath, unless you first edit the other six days.

Did you catch that? You can’t just add the Sabbath onto your proverbial list of to-dos. If you take that approach, the Sabbath will feel more like a burden than a blessing.

Practicing the Sabbath is a re-orientation to life, a re-orientation to ministry, a re-orientation to priorities, and a re-orientation to grocery shopping, vacuuming, and all the other “have-tos” of life. We must edit the other six days before we can start practicing the Sabbath.

We must edit the other six days before we can start practicing the Sabbath.
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So this year, what do you need to move to the other six days, so that you can observe the Sabbath?

I’ll leave you with a few words from Ruth Haley Barton on this matter,

Sabbath keeping is the linchpin of a life lived in sync with the rhythms that God himself built into our world, and yet it is the discipline that seems hardest for us to live. Sabbath keeping honors the body’s need for rest, the spirit’s need for replenishment and the soul’s need to delight itself in God for God’s own sake. It begins with the willingness to acknowledge the limits of our humanness and then to take steps to live more graciously within the order of things.

And the first order of things is that we are creatures and God is the Creator. God is the one who is infinite; I, on the other hand, must learn to live within the physical limits of time and space and the human limits of my own strength and energy. There are limits to my relational, emotional, mental and spiritual capacities. I am not God. God is the only one who can be all things to all people. God is the only one who can be two places at once. God is the one who never sleeps. I am not. We can’t remind ourselves of this enough. This is pretty basic stuff, but many of us live as though we don’t know it.[4]

Let’s ensure that this is the year we have a weekly rhythm of being still and knowing that He is God by practicing the Sabbath.

*My article here was originally published on January 27, 2021 on Impactus.

[1] Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership, 118.

[2] Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership, 120.

[3] Mark Buchanan, The Rest of God, Location 1443.

[4] Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership, 122.

Before Changing Things In Your Church, Read This First!

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Everything has changed.

Okay, maybe not everything, but doesn’t it sort of seem like everything’s different?

Sure, there are the in-your-face differences like masks, social distancing, online school, and the run-for-the-mountain reflex when someone sneezes, but more than all of that, I find it’s the subtle differences that scare me the most. Things like that subtle anxiety when someone gets too close or the crowd is too large, or that subtle knot in your stomach when you wonder whether your church auditorium will ever be full again. Subtle things like that…

Now at some point in the future, I’m quite certain the in-your-face differences will come to an end and life will return to some semblance of normal, but what about those subtle differences…?

We’re in the middle of some permanent changes to the way we feel, think, and live.

Culture post-COVID is not going to be the same as culture pre-COVID, so what can we do today, since we’re in the middle of it all?

What can we do today to better prepare ourselves to reach our neighbourhoods and cities tomorrow, once COVID is a thing of the past? Especially if you’re a church leader?

What can we do today to better prepare ourselves to reach our neighbourhoods and cities tomorrow, once COVID is a thing of the past? Especially if you’re a church leader?
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Isn’t the answer to introduce change?

Yes, it certainly is. But where to start?

In my book, No Silver Bullets: Five Small Shifts that will Transform Your Ministry, I talk about change this way:

Any change you try to implement in your church has one of three fates. 1) It’ll never get off the ground because it will be seen as a bacteria, virus, or foreign matter and subsequently be rejected. 2) The change will happen, but because it doesn’t fit into your vision, strategy, and values, you will inevitably end up changing things again. 3) The change will move you closer to the vision, strategy, and values that God has called you to embrace because you started with discernment by using the three steps for introducing change.


Here’s where most church leaders get things wrong.

We get so excited about the change—or some program that we’ve seen work elsewhere—that we completely forget that we’re introducing this change into a living, breathing, organism (the church) made up of living, breathing, organisms (people).

What I don’t want to do is tell you what you need to change, or even give you a few suggestions on things to change. Instead, I want to advise you to pause, take a step back, and assess what kind of culture your church currently has: Are you a Copy Cat Church, Silver Bullet Church, Hippie Church, or an Intentional Church?

Once you figure this out, your path forward will be abundantly clear.

Pause, take a step back, and assess what kind of culture your church currently has.
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In the first chapter of No Silver Bullets, I’ve included a full explanation of the Influences Matrix (above diagram), and also a few assessments that will help you discern where your church is at, so that you can figure out where you need to go.

Instead of trying to copy and paste all of that into this post, I thought it’d be better just to give you all of that for free. So if you click here, you can download the first chapter for free to discern where you’re at and what needs to change as we adjust to our new post-COVID reality of life.

Friends, don’t waste this pandemic.

Please see it as an opportunity to be a student of your church, so that you can prayerfully discern what needs to change moving forward, in order for your church to be a sign, instrument, and foretaste of the kingdom of God in your neighbourhood, town, or city.

Don’t change things until you first start here.

Don’t waste this pandemic. Please see it as an opportunity to be a student of your church.
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The Role of Mentors in Healthy Leadership Succession

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Two years ago, Christina and I started our journey back to Edmonton by first praying and seeking God’s face for His will and His ways.

In addition to saturating this entire process in prayer, we also sought the counsel of others who had gone before us in making similar transitions. After all, it says in Proverbs 15:22, “Plans fail when there is no counsel, but with many advisers they succeed.”

While this might seem like I’m just name dropping, I want to take the time to publicly acknowledge and thank those who have invested in us through prayer and wise biblical counsel, as we sought God’s will and ways to enter into this succession process at Beulah Alliance Church.

I know I’m going to miss some people, so I apologize in advance, but a huge thank you to Todd Adkins, Ed Stetzer, Eric Geiger, Kevin Peck, Josh Patterson, Kevin Queen, TJ Tims, Chris Freeland, Ron Edmondson, Matt Boda, Brent Trask, Phil Kniesel, Sean Morgan, Carey Nieuwhof, Bill Willits, Gregg Matte, and Brent Dolfo.

This past year in particular though, Dave Stone has been instrumental in my life.

As a humble and godly leader who has been on both ends of healthy succession, I couldn’t think of a better pastor to mentor me and guide our church and leadership through this process. At Southeast Christian Church, he followed Bob Russell, a 40 year founding pastor, then, after 13 years, he passed the leadership baton to Kyle Idleman.

As I’ve been preparing to step into this Lead Pastor role, Dave has been a deep well of wisdom who has been walking with us closely. One of the things that he graciously agreed to do was to speak to our broader church family to help us understand what healthy leadership succession looks like.

Here’s his message:

https://youtu.be/aOpA0ZgMm4w?t=2260

Thank you for praying for Christina and me, and our broader church family as we continue this succession process over the next few months.