Vocational Holiness and Marketplace Spiritual Formation

This course for STM-TEE will be held over two weekends in June/July 2017 in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia

Vocational Holiness and Marketplace Spiritual Formation

Committed Christians are often concerned about discovering God’s will for their lives in terms of what occupation to take up or who to marry. The deeper question will be to discern what is God’s calling. Another concern is how they are to live and have their being in their workplace and marketplace. There are always questions on how to maintain the vitality of their spiritual life and growth in the modern lifestyle that is extremely hectic and exhausting. This course will deal with Christian discernment or decision-making and the theology of God’s calling and vocation. It will examine Ignatian, Quaker, Puritan and Wesleyan approaches to discernment. The issue of hectic and busy lifestyles will be examined and approaches developed to nurture the spiritual life. The concepts of Missio Dei and Sabbath in their vocations will be developed. Central to this course is how followers of Jesus Christ live out their Christian lives that is glorifying to God in their workplace.

Suitable for people who wants to know more about making important life choices, about Godly decision-making and God’s calling; about Christian discernment; about spiritual maintenance and growth in busy and stressful lifestyles.

Speaker

Dr Alex Tang is a paediatrician, medical educator, practical theologian, spiritual director, author, preacher, Bible teacher, hospital administrator and grandfather. He regards being a grandfather as one of his more important vocations. Alex practice paediatrics at a private hospital and is associate professor of paediatrics in Monash University clinical school in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. Aside from a busy preaching and teaching schedule in different churches he also lead retreats in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. He is adjunct professor to East Asia School of Theology (EAST), Singapore and several other seminaries. His areas of research are Christian spiritualities, spiritual formation and biomedical ethics. He is married with two grown children and two growing grandchildren.

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New and Old Websites

I started the Kairos Spiritual Formation website in 2006, starting from a scratch using Microsoft FrontPage and a couple of website building guide books. It was an exciting challenge for me to learn programming language and website design. That is almost 10 years ago.

I have been continuing updating the website on a weekly basis, adding all my writings, reflections and other stuff. In these years, website designs and language has changed tremendously. Microsoft Frontpage has been discontinued by Microsoft when better and more user friendly website builders became available. Many nowadays do not require the knowledge of any language.

I find my Kairos Spiritual Formation website very useful. Though it has an aged look to it, it still serves me well as a resource and hopefully to others out there. The original purpose of this website is to serve as a free resource on spiritual formation, spiritual direction, engaging culture, spiritual nurture and other areas I am interested and is researching in.

I have considered updating it but the website has ballooned to about 9,800 files! I once consulted a website designer to upgrade the website but the poor guy turned pale and ran out of the room. I guess it will not be easy to upgrade such a large website. Since it is difficult to upgrade, I have decided to maintain it as long as possible. Microsoft has since stopped servicing and updating its Frontpage.

I am still keen to have a fresh look. I cannot do anything more to my present Kairos Spiritual Formation landing page (front page). I have twitched the software so much that I fear it will just die on me. So I decided to start another website which will link to my Kairos Spiritual Formation website. This new website will have all the frills and bells of  new website designs. It also gives me the opportunity to update my skills on website designs. So here it is, Alex Tang, Seeing God in all things www.alextang.org

I know the title is a bit Kuyperian and Ignatian. Will I be transferring all my files to this new website? I am not too sure I want to do that for two reasons. One is that it will involve a lot of work and time to manually transfer the files. I know there are programs to do that but so far these program do a reasonable transfer but often mess up the files. The second reason is that I am afraid that by the time I have finished updating the new website, a new generation of website will have arrived with more bells and frills. I know how that feels. I still have old cartridge tapes, LD, VCD, DVD, HDVDV and now Bluray of the same movies!

Do come and visit my new website at www.alextang.org while my old website www.kairos2.com is still open for business. Shalom and welcome.

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