Church Voices

Bruce Lee’s name is still synonymous with kung fu awesomeness even 30 years after his death.  I was reading through the wikipedia article on his life and it struck me how talented Bruce Lee was.  Not just with fighting, but in general.  He acted from a young age (his first appearance on stage coming as an infant) and continued through his entire life.  He attended the University of Washington as a drama major and took philosophy classes, in addition to studying traditional Chinese martial arts, he also studied western style boxing (becoming the 1958 Champion of a 12 school competition) as well as fencing.  Even when it came to traditional martial arts he didn’t study a single style but eventually incorporated several different styles into his own personal style. As he matured as a fighter he concluded that traditional martial arts had too much formality, extra movements and requirements that didn’t add any benefits, so he removed them.

After coming to the United States he developed an interest in nutrition and physical fitness.  He said, "Training is one of the most neglected phases of athletics. Too much time is given to the development of skill and too little to the development of the individual for participation. JKD [Lee’s personal martial art], ultimately is not a matter of petty techniques but of highly developed spirituality and physique".  As a result his work out regimen was intense.

All of these swirling interests (along with a mysterious death) propelled Lee to a popularity no other martial artist had achieved and cemented a legacy that anyone ever achieves.  The thing is, if you take away any of these interests and Bruce Lee becomes a foot note.  Drama and philosophy don’t seem to have much to do with martial arts, even nutrtion and fitness, at the time, seemed to be tangiential at best.  Yet, without all these things Bruce Lee dies a mysterious death in obscurity.  Instead he impacted culture greatly.  Setting off an interest in martial arts that wasn’t there before.  i don’t think its a stretch to say that Bruce Lee is at least a major factor in the reason why there’s a martial arts academy in the small town I live in.  Chances are there wouldn’t have been movies like The Matrix if not for him.  And I can guarantee you that the numerous nunchuck injuries that occur in junior high boys across America wouldn’t be nearly so high without him.  And none of that would have happened without his diversity of interests.

This is my way of saying that the church needs to cultivate diverse interests in order to be as successful as possible in obeying the commands of Jesus.  While the study of scripture, and theology will always be necessary (and can’t be replaced by anything else), the church can (and does) benefit from other disciplines.  Whether its art, music, rhetoric, plumbing, carpentry, history, hard sciences, writing or just good old fashioned elbow grease it is difficult for a church to live and communicate the gospel to its community without passions for seemingly unrelated subjects and disciplines.  So in this vein lets end this little entry with some quotes from Mr. Lee, hopefully you can see how his wisdom concerning martial arts could apply to a church.

"Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it."

"I’m not a master. I’m a student-master, meaning that I have the knowledge of a master and the expertise of a master, but I’m still learning. So I’m a student-master. I don’t believe in the word ‘master.’ I consider the master as such when they close the casket."

"Unfortunately, now in boxing people are only allowed to punch. In Judo, people are only allowed to throw. I do not despise these kinds of martial arts. What I mean is, we now find rigid forms which create differences among clans, and the world of martial art is shattered as a result."

"The other weakness is, when clans are formed, the people of a clan will hold their kind of martial art as the only truth and do not dare to reform or improve it. Thus they are confined in their own tiny little world. Their students become machines which imitate martial art forms."