If you’ve been visiting SOLA’s website for a while, you’ve probably read an article by Daniel K. Eng. Perhaps it was his essay on how to know if the person you are marrying is “The One” or his suggestion to follow “An Untraditional Bible Reading Plan.” Most recently, he’s written on ethnic-specific churches, both showing Biblical support for these ministries and addressing their critics.
To get to know the story behind the articles, SOLA Digital’s Aaron Lee interviewed the author, Daniel K. Eng. Daniel is an editorial board member for SOLA Network, and he is also assistant professor of New Testament at Western Seminary. He has a D.Min. in Asian American Ministry from Talbot School of Theology and a Ph.D. in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge.
The two discussed Daniel’s motivation behind his articles and how they went from ideas to published works. We hope this conversation will be edifying to you and encourage you to tell your own stories.
Editor’s Note: Below is an automated transcript of their conversation with very light editing. There may be typos and other discrepancies from the video and audio. You can listen to the audio here.
Aaron Lee: Hi, everyone, this is Aaron. I am the Social Media Manager for SOLA Network. And today we’re talking with Daniel K. Eng. Daniel, how are you doing?
Daniel K. Eng: Doing great. Thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to our conversation.
Aaron Lee: I saw you recently in person for maybe several minutes. And then I had to go because my kids needed my attention. But you were a guest preacher at FCBC Walnut. I actually was not in the congregation that week because I was leading music in Children’s Worship. But I did listen to your sermon on the video and on podcast. How was it preaching at FCBC Walnut?
Daniel K. Eng: Well, it was really, it was a really good experience just being with your community and being able to, to worship together. I know, it’s an awkward time of year because some people are traveling. So I’m sure it wasn’t the typical Sunday. But I mean, everybody I met was very welcoming. And it was really good to see how, how there’s families worshiping together. And yeah, just you know, catching up with Pastor Hanley, and Pastor Terrence, and just kind of hearing about what God’s doing within your church, I was encouraged.
Aaron Lee: The sermon is available online. So for anybody that’s listening to this right now, I’ll put the link in the show notes. And you can check out this sermon, “The Father Chooses a father” — and that’s a capital “F” and then a lowercase “f.” Very important. But yeah, thanks for coming to guest preach. I won’t make that the focus of our conversation. What I really want to talk to you about are some of the articles that you’ve been writing, mainly for SOLA. I feel that you’ve been a little bit more prolific this past year. Am I just imagining things? Or have you really been churning out a little bit more content?
Daniel K. Eng: I’ve had some more ideas and things that I’ve been meaning to write about. So it was really good to get them out and get them. Get them out so that people can read?
Aaron Lee: Yeah, the first one that comes to mind: Biblical Support for Ethnic-Specific Ministries. You gave four biblical points for the support of ethnic-specific ministries. First was different gospel accounts. Second was Paul became all things to all people. Third was apostolic preaching. Fourth was the Creeds at the Jerusalem Council. I enjoyed this article. And again, I’ll link it in the show notes. But Daniel, I want to come at this from a different perspective. I want to ask you, as the writer of this article, did you always think this way, regarding ethnic-specific ministries?
Daniel K. Eng: So I grew up at a Chinese heritage Church in New York City. And so I actually had a lot of my spiritual growth and community and mentoring come through the ethnic specific church. And I think it was in college when I started hearing people challenging the idea that the ethnic-specific church is an illegitimate expression of the body of Christ as a whole.
I heard things like your churches aren’t biblical. And it was hard to hear. Because you know if you’ve been at a Chinese church like me, church is family. I’m like, “Don’t diss my family,” you know what I mean?
I was trying to get over the emotional part of that. But then also realizing that there’re a lot of ideas that we bring into the biblical texts that sometimes bleed us to conclusions and I don’t see them being there. And so what I wanted to do, instead of having an apologetic, which is more defending, it was more like “Okay, let let let me start with having some biblical support in a more positive way.”
So there are some ideas for me about writing about it in the future, just kind of answering some of the objections. But for now, I really wanted to have a positive one just to talk about, “Hey, this is actually something that we see in Scripture.”
And the key word that I had in the article is contextualization? And contextualization is something that might be a more modern word to describe when an author or a messenger takes a message and customizes it for the audience. And we actually see that in Scripture, and this is some things I wrote in the article.
So, Aaron, I didn’t always think this way. But in the back of my mind, I kind of knew that these things were there. But actually, it took some time to actually think through some of these things and see the way things like this are modeled in Scripture. And then what follows is, “Can we build a ministry around that?” And so that’s the question I was trying to answer.
Aaron Lee: Daniel, you have an article that’s going to be published around MLK Day and the title of your article is “The Ethnic Specific Church and ‘MLK’s Most Segregated Hour’ Line.” By the time this podcast is published, people can read it on their own. But I want to ask you what was your intent and publishing this article and speaking to this issue, in particular.
Daniel K. Eng: So one of the things that I consistently hear from people who object to the ethnic specific church is this line that they repeat from Dr. King. And that’s “at 11 o’clock on Sunday morning as the most segregated hour in America.” It was meant to move the church at the time when he was in—during the Civil Rights Movement. It was meant to move the church in the direction he wanted. He wanted to call them out and say, “Hey, are you being part of this and this fight against inequality?”
I really wanted to address the fact that these words are often misused and to talk about the context of what Dr. King was saying and say, “Hey, that’s not what we’re doing. And that’s not what our intent is,for those of us who are involved in ethnic specific churches.” It just seems to me like a misuse.
And this is the case I’m making: It’s a misuse of his words and his authority to disparage the church. And so I just kind of wanted to do it in a little bit more detached, more cerebral way to say, “Hey, this was out of context. This is not what he meant by these words.” And actually I kind of give little hints towards Dr. King and that I think he would actually promote contextualization. So actually pull a few quotes from some of the papers that he wrote, talking about that. And so like I said earlier, I think we’re misusing his words if we’re using that, to talk about the ethnic church.
Aaron Lee: Yeah. I know that the article is still being edited right now. But I’m excited to see the final form. And again, thank you for tackling these difficult issues.
You wrote an article called “How Do I Know if Someone is ‘The One.’” You talk about dating. You’re talking about marriage. And I want to read this quote to you from your article. This one stood out to me because I think it’s a strong statement.
You said, “Unless your spouse has broken the wedding vows through adultery, negligence, or abuse, Jesus teaches that we must remain committed. Once you start entertaining the idea that your spouse might be the wrong person, you’ve become unfaithful to your spouse. If you ever wonder if you’re missing out, you’ve mentally broken your wedding vows and are walking on the path to divorce.” Now, when I was reading this, they seemed like strong words. I want to ask you if you can speak more to this? Not personally, but I want to hear your voice in this.
Daniel K. Eng: Sure. I think one of the things that my wife and I have thought about in marriage and what the Bible talks about is that we don’t see any evidence in Scripture that every single person has one person right that’s designated for them and that we have to figure out some kind of mystery.
You know, once in a while you actually have God saying, “Hey, you’re gonna marry this person.” Like, we have Isaac and Rebecca, for example. But in general, we don’t see how people chose their spouses. In fact, we’re talking about a culture where often marriages were arranged, and so people didn’t choose who they married.
So the Bible address is much more about, about the commitment that you have in marriage, that it’s a covenant that you make between one man and one woman with God, and saying that I’m committed to this person for life.
I remember having a formative conversation with somebody I consider a mentor about dating. And the Bible doesn’t talk about dating because that’s not there was not a thing back then. And he said something really important, and I’ll never forget this.
He said aside from your decision to follow Jesus, the person you marry is the most permanent decision you’ll make. Because people talk about vocation, and they say, “Oh, I know that I’m supposed to be a missionary to these people.” But that can change. A vocation like being in the marketplace, or being in pastoral ministry, or serving in a certain ministry—all those things can change.
But according to the Bible, your spouse doesn’t. God’s not gonna call you to suddenly be in a different marriage, but he would call you to move or call you to be in this job and so on. So I kind of ran with that.
The question from single folks when they asked me, “How did you know that you would spend the rest of your life with her?” I’m like, “I didn’t know.” I didn’t know. You know what I knew? I knew when we were making that promise, and because I’m intending to keep that promise, and my wife is intending to keep that promise.
And so there’s been times when that promise is tested. I feel like there’s times every day. If you’re married, you know what I’m talking about. You’re talking about moments every day, where that promise is tested. Because you’re a sinful person, and you’re trying to live with another sinful person, and you try to remain committed together. And it’s hard. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done being married.My wife is a wonderful person. And still, it’s hard.
If we change our paradigm from “the one” to “the person I’m married to” and that’s the one for me, the one for me for life, that frames the way we make all our decisions about where you live and what you do together and how you raise the kids and all those things. Because you’re in this for life. You’re one flesh.
So my challenge to folks who are thinking about this is, don’t start entertaining. If you’re married, don’t start entertaining the idea that you’re in the wrong marriage. There’s nothing in scripture that talks about that kind of thing. It was more about hey, you remain committed.
The Pharisees came up to Jesus and asked him about divorce in the law. Moses put that in because of the hardness of your hearts. The reason why divorce exists is because of your sin.
Aaron Lee: Yeah, because we’re sinful people.
Daniel K. Eng: But that’s not the way it’s designed to be. It’s designed to be and he goes back to creation, it goes back to Genesis 2, before sin entered the world. Basically, this is the way God designed it to be that it’s between one man and one woman for life. A lot of times we talk about the biblical definition of marriage a lot of times these days and we talk about the one woman and one man thing. But we don’t talk enough about the “for life” part.
Jesus says this is the way it was designed. This is it. This is who you’re with for life. And so if we see marriage that way, we start to explore what it means to be one flesh and the decisions that we make and the ways that we interact and the big decisions, the small decisions.
Aaron Lee: And I love the fact that you emphasize the word commitment and lifelong commitment to be specific. I don’t know if you feel this way, but I feel like in the culture, we get a lot of negativity about marriage, right? And just being tied to one person for the rest of your life. Like it doesn’t sound like a fun thing. But I want to ask you, what are some of the joys that we can experience as Christians and a lifelong commitment to our spouse?
Daniel K. Eng: I would say the knowledge that you are committed to somebody and for that person to be that committed to you. There’s a certain security in that you always, you always have your partner, your spouse. That that you are doing things together, and you’re making decisions together. I find myself saying “we” a lot more than “I” you know, when people ask me about something. I was like, well, but we’ll talk about it. Yeah. And they immediately know, it’s when we say when I say we, it’s me and my wife, we’re talking. And so I think that’s so I think that’s one of the blessings, you know, that, that there’s things that you share together, and you’re sharing everything.
And it’s not just your house and your finances, but you are raising children, if you have children, you’re making decisions about where you’re living, and what kind of ministry you’re involved in, and how you’re, how you’re being salt and light to the world. And so one of the questions I would ask people is like, you know, how is God using your union? You know, how are you? How is your marriage, blessing other people? And so and so we’re thinking through that a lot at home.
Aaron Lee: Yeah. Now I appreciate that man. And actually, I think if I remember right, at the bottom of your article, you did have questions for single people to think through and for married people to think through about this concept of “the one.” I think that this article resonated with a lot of young people.
And there is another article that also resonated with a lot of young people. And I know this because I’m managing social media, and we resurfaced an article of yours. I forget how old this was, but this was “An Untraditional Bible Reading Plan.” It wasn’t from this year. Let me see what year that was. It was 2020. It was December 30, 2020. It’s “An Untraditional Bible Reading Plan” and you actually said that you stay in one book of the Bible for an entire month.
And this article actually blew up on our social media. If you look at our Instagram, you can see there’s a little, you know, picture graphic that we have there. And it’s got a lot of likes, man. I think a lot of comments, a lot of people sharing that. It seems like it resonated with a lot of people. So I want to ask you a couple questions about this one.
The first one is, are you still following this plan? And then how does the time that we have impact our Bible reading? Because I think the premise of your article is that, hey, if you spend just a month in a book of the Bible, you can take from different resources, but you can get a lot more than you can, in terms of soaking in, saturating, letting your mind be filled with all of that, instead of just hey, I’m just gonna have a Bible reading plan and check it off. And then I’m gonna move on to the next thing. That sounds like what the premise was. Is that true?
Daniel K. Eng: Well, first of all, I want to preface this by saying I’m not saying that everybody who has a checklist and has a Bible reading plan a year is just doing it to get it done or they’re not getting anything out of it. That’s not what I’m saying. I was realizing for myself that after a while I just treated it like a chore.
I know there’s people like me with this. There was a lot of joy taken out of it because of that and so and I really wasn’t connecting with God in the way that I would like. It just became something to do, kind of like washing the dishes. Okay, well now I read my three chapters so that I can finish the Bible in a year. I had lost a lot of vitality to it. And that was what I was experiencing. I’m not saying that’s the case for everybody. I’m just introducing another thing to do that just keeps us in the text.
And so one of the things that I realized was like, “Man, I have I books of commentaries. I have a Bible dictionary, and then I have Mr. Podcast Preacher who just preached about this passage. And so on, I have access to all these things. And I’m not using them because I need to get through thi— I need to get through the Bible in a year. So I just need to do my—how many is it? Like five chapters a day to get it done.
There’s some times where I was saying, “Man, I wish I could just sit with this passage for a while.” Or there’s times where I wonder, “I wonder what my favorite podcast preacher has to say about how this applies?” Or I wonder what the commentary says or let me look up this one word in the Bible Dictionary and just see where that leads, and so and so. And so what, what if I just sat in one book of the Bible, let me try that. And so I tried that. And it was really, really good for me specifically.
And then I realized that one of the things about my wife and I, my wife’s name is Sanjung. Sanjung and I are not good at reading the Bible together. It’s just awkward sometimes, like sitting there reading it out loud to each other and stuff like that. And I don’t know about other folks, but we actually have tried to do the thing where I’m like, okay, I read chapter one, you and make sure you read chapter one, too. And then we can talk about it later. And that didn’t really quite work either for us. Because we’re always kind of waiting for each other to catch up.
Aaron Lee: Yeah, that’s tough.
Daniel K. Eng: So then I said, “Hey, honey, how about this?” And we started, I think, a few years ago. I said, “I’m gonna read John for the entire month of January. How about you read John for the entire month of January. And then once in a while, let’s talk about the things that you’ve seen.”
And so I did what I described in the article where it’s like, okay, some once in a while, I just kind of zoom in on something. And I just sat with something. So for example, I spent a lot of time in John 15. And that’s, that’s, that’s where Jesus is teaching. In the farewell discourse, he’s talking. He’s, he’s talking about, I’m the vine of the branches. And he goes on to talk about different things. And so I just wanted to spend a lot of time with that. Spend a lot of time meditating on that chapter.
And so that’s an example of where I spent a lot of time. I think I spent a good week and a half on John 15. There’s so much in there. And I was reading commentaries, and I was looking at articles and I was listening to, you know, I found, you know, it’s so easy to find a podcast where somebody preached about that passage, you know, just want to hear what somebody else says, and it was really edifying for me.
And so my wife would come and say, hey, you know what, I noticed in that chapter, this, this and this, I’m like, okay, that’s really helpful, honey. And then so we felt like we connected in a new way. And so that’s my encouragement to other people.
Actually, spending that much time in John 15 led me to a journal article that I wrote, that ended up being a TGC article that got published, and that was about Jesus and friendship.
But because I did that, you know, I just felt like, man, you know, there was freedom in kind of sitting with the passage for a while. It was It felt it felt like I, you know, I could kind of meditate on it longer and then kind of tug at a thread and let the sweater unravel and things like that, and kind of just kind of see the, the depth and beauty of scripture in a way that I needed to renew.
Aaron Lee: Yeah. So do you still follow the plan?
Daniel K. Eng: Oh, yes. So, Sanjung and I kind of got out of that habit last, the middle of last year. I think lockdown just made everything weird. Yeah, but we renewed it recently. So right now we’re going through Nehemiah. And so I’m not sure if we’re gonna spend the entire month of January and Nehemiah. We might, we’ll see.
But one of the things I said is that you might want to adjust for, you know, the different lengths of books. Like you’d probably, you know, you might want to spend less time on 2 John, and more time on Psalms. So, you know, things like that. And so I don’t know, I mean, we’re, we’re enjoying the time again, kind of renewing that, this Bible reading plan together where we, where we go through that.
Aaron Lee: And you ended the article by saying that you hope that people are just in the text regularly. You know. I think the reason why it resonated with so many people is because you got people that are in different life stages for SOLA, the audience of SOLA. You got collegians, you got maybe young adults, you got maybe people with kids, young kids, you got pastors, you got lay leaders. I think everybody, as we get older, we find out that time is really, really important. How would you say that time impacts our Bible reading? How can we value our time in such a way where we know how to spend it on Bible reading, and just being in God’s Word?
Daniel K. Eng: I think part of it is that we start to see how God is is working in us through the Word. You know, and seeing how a lot of times, even with a Bible reading plan, the passage you come across is exactly what you need to hear that day. And I hear so many stories about how man the spirit really kind of convicted me today, specifically about this was happening in my life, even though this was a plan that I was following. And you hear so many stories about that.
Because people have a growing relationship with Jesus and they’re following, following him and, and he’s, and he’s working through the Spirit and working through the ways that the the things that we read, and so on. So I believe that God can still work. When it’s an untraditional Bible reading for sure.
So that might mean that you spend less time in the Bible one day, and more time in the Bible the next day or something like that. And that’s okay. But when I was doing the more traditional, like finishing the Bible in a year kind of plan, this, inevitably, what’s going to happen is that I’m going to miss a day and then I look back and I’m like, shoot, do I catch up? This kind of this guilt attached to like, oh, man, I’m just so behind and this and then that kind of makes me it, at least at least in my fleshly desire, it makes me reluctant to continue.
Whereas with this plan, I was just like, okay, well, I missed it yesterday. I’m just gonna jump back in. And so on. And then, a lot of us drive. And so what would it look like to use your drive, your commute with an audio Bible, or a podcast within that book of the Bible or something like that? And you’re just kind of saturating yourself with the Word of God, and that is always going to play that’s always going to pay dividends.
Aaron Lee: Absolutely. I love it. Well, we are running short on time right now. So last question. The last time I talked to you was actually a while ago, and you said that you had a project, a book, “The New Testament in Color.” So can you give me an update on this? And do you have any other projects coming down the line?
Daniel K. Eng: Sure. “The New Testament in Color.” It looks like the earliest it’s going to be released is Spring 2023. At this point. I think I think things got delayed. We were, I think we were looking at Fall 2021. And so I think things got delayed for I’m not sure what. The editors told me that we’re gonna want to take a little more time. So actually sent in a new draft just now. Just like yesterday. So because actually, the process was a bit delayed. So apparently, this is pretty typical for publications.
I am working on a book called “Faithful Ministry to Chinese Americans.” That was so you might, some of our listeners or watchers might be familiar with an organization called FACE. The Fellowship of American Chinese Evangelicals. And this was started, it was started in the 70s by a group of pastors. English pastors at Chinese churches, who really wanted to bring better health and more effective ministry to Chinese Americans. And really, really urging churches to really think about things like having an English service. And things like giving, giving leadership opportunities to younger people and so on. And so they would have these meetings and conferences and so on talking about these things.
They also had a newsletter called “About FACE.” And so there’s probably 25 years worth of archives of these newsletters that went out to a small readership, maybe a couple hundred people. And they’re just articles about ministry in Chinese American churches. So one of the things that I’ve committed to doing is to really seeing us have more publications for Asian American ministry, especially the Chinese American church in general.
And then I realized that, if I’m going to do that, I need to start with our pioneers, and you need to start with people who were, who had been there and to honor their legacy. And so basically submitted a proposal, I talked to the FACE directors who are now retired and in towards the end of their lives. And I asked them, would you be supportive of me trying to get a publisher for a selection of the articles from About FACE?
Took me a few tries, but I got a publisher. So it’s gonna be published with Urban Loft Publishers, and they specialize in Urban Ministry. And the way I pitched it to them was that the majority of Chinese churches are in urban areas. And they said they’ve actually been meaning to try to get into the area of ethnic specific ministry. I was really encouraged. So I’m working on basically curating articles from the About FACE archives that would probably be more timeless, like they’re still applicable today. And there’s really good content in there that really has only been seen by a few hundred people.
And so I’m excited about this. I’m gonna curate these articles, edit them and get them ready for publication. So that is probably we’re probably also looking at 2023, 2024 as well.
Aaron Lee: Daniel, thanks for sharing that with me. That sounds really fun. I’m looking forward to that one. And “The New Testament in Color” of course. I’m a fan of your work, man. Thank you for writing. And thanks for speaking to me so I can hear it from you personally, and also get a little bit of insight into how your mind works and what you think. Thank you for this time.
Daniel K. Eng: Thanks, Aaron. It’s always good to chat with you.