Archive for October, 2008

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The tribal god

Saturday, October 25th, 2008

This excerpt comes from pages 33-36 of Christianity Rediscovered. In it, Donovan recounts his discussion with a Masai village in East Africa after asking them what they thought about God:

Then they told me of God, Engai, who loved rich people more than poor people, healthy people more than the sick, the God who loved good people because they were good, and rewarded them for their goodness. They told me of God who hated evil people–”those dark, evil ones out there”–and punished them for their evil. Then they told me of the God who loved the Masai more than all the other tribes, loved them fiercely, jealously, exclusively. His power was known throughout the lush grasslands of the Masai steppes; his protection saved them from all the surrounding, hostile, Masai-hating tribes, and assured them of victory in war over these tribes; his goodness was seen in the water and rain and cattle and children he gave them……Each African tribe believes in God, and it is generally considered to be a monotheistic God. But each tribe likes to restrict the attention and protection of this God to its own territory, thus planting the seeds for polytheism.I continued talking with the people who were now listening very closely: “When Abraham followed God out of his land, there began on this earth the story of the one, true, living, High God.”Everyone knows how devout you Masai are, the faith you have, your beautiful worship of God. You have known God and he has loved you. But I wonder if, perhaps, you have not become like the people of the tribe of Abraham. Perhaps God has become trapped in this Masai country, among this tribe. Perhaps God is no longer free here. What will the Kikuyu do to protect themselves against this God of the Masai–and the Sonjo? They will have to have their own gods. Perhaps the story of Abraham speaks also to you. Perhaps you Masai also must leave your nation and your tribe and your land, at least in your thoughts, and go in search of the High God, the God of all tribes, the God of the world. Perhaps your God is not free. Do not try to hold him here or you will never know him. Free your God to become the High God. You have known this God and worshipped him, but he is greater than you have known. He is the God not only of the Masai, but also my God, and the God of the Kikuyu and Sonjo, and the God of every tribe and nation in the world.”And the God who loves rich people and hates poor people? The God who loves good people and hates evil people–’those dark, evil ones out there’? The God who loves us because we are good and hates us because we are evil? There is no God like that. There is only the God who loves us no matter how good or how evil we are, the God you have worshipped without really knowing him, the truly unknown God–the High God.”There was silence. Perhaps I had gone too far. The mention of a wandering search that took a lifetime must have evoked memories of their own ancestors recalled from generation to generation around nomadic campfires. Abraham himself must have seemed like a long lost ancestor to them, he who used to like to “fill his eyes with cattle.”……Finally someone broke the silence with a question. Whether he asked the question out of curiosity or anger, I do not know. I only know it surprised me:

“This story of Abraham–does it speak only to the Masai? Or does it speak also to you? Has your tribe found the High God? Have you known him?”

I was about to give a glib answer, when all of a sudden I thought of Joan of Arc. I don’t know why I thought of her, but suddenly I remembered that since the time of Jeanne D’Arc, if not before, the French have conceived of God (le bon Dieu–what would the Masai think of him?) as being rather exclusively and intimately associated with their quest for glory. I wonder what god they prayed to?

Americans have some kind of certainly that “almighty God” will always bless their side in all their wars. Hitler never failed to call on the help of “Gott, der Allmächtige” in all his speeches, in all his adventures. A Nazi doctor once told me that they could always count on the Catholic school children to pray for Hitler every morning, to ask God’s blessing on him. What god, the Teuton god?

I have been to many parishes in America where they prayed for victory in war. I recognized the god they were praying to–the tribal god. I will recognize him more easily now, after having lived among the Masai. And what about the God who loves good people, industrious people, clean people, rich people, and punishes bad people, lazy people, dirty people, thieving people, people without jobs and on welfare–”those dark, evil people out there?” Which god is that?

I sat there for a long time in silence looking at the Masai people. They called their God Engai. Well, that is no more strange-sounding than our gods. The god invoked by the pope to bless the troops of Mussolini about to embark on the plunder of Ethiopia, and the god invoked by an American cardinal to bless the “soldiers of Christ” in Vietnam, and the god of French glory, and the German god of Hitler were no more the High God of scripture than is “Diana of the Ephesians” or Engai of the Masai of East Africa.

To each one of these cultures must ever be presented again the proclamation of the message, symbolized in the call of Abraham–to leave their land and their nation, to learn of the High God, the God of the world. All nations are to be blessed in Abraham.

I finally spoke out again, and I marveled at how small my voice sounded. I said something I had no intention of saying when I had come to speak to the Masai that morning:

“No, we have not found the High God. My tribe has not known him. For us, too, he is the unknown God. But we are searching for him. I have come a long, long distance to invite you to search for him with us. Let us search for him together. Maybe, together, we will find him.”

(Above photo courtesy of TangoPango)

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Photos from an afternoon drive

Friday, October 24th, 2008

On a day of rest a few weeks ago, our family took a drive through a couple of villages in the area. Here are a few photos:

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Who appoints leaders in the church?

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

I have said that this year I want to learn more about leadership and authority structure in the church. Alan Knox intrigued me this past week with his republished post “The Holy Spirit has made you overseers“. Here’s an excerpt:

According to Acts 20:28 (above), it is the Holy Spirit who makes someone a pastor. Does the Holy Spirit do this as a response to the actions of a church? I don’t think so. Instead, I believe that the Holy Spirit makes someone an overseer regardless of the actions or lack of actions of the church itself.

In other words, the Holy Spirit places someone in a group of believers and subsequently gives that person the responsibility of “caring for” (that is, being an overseer for) that group of believers. The church is then supposed to respond to the work of the Holy Spirit and to recognize that individual as an overseer.

This is an interesting thought, one that has some scriptural support, and one that goes against a lot of our actual practice in the church. Alan’s post caught my attention because I was thinking about similar things this past week.

Last Tuesday, at our weekly church planting team meeting, a couple members of our team were relating challenges they’ve been facing with a budding home fellowship. This fellowship has two couples who meet together semi-regularly for Bible study, prayer, etc. One man is viewed by the four adults involved as the leader of the group, though he has not officially been given that position. Some holes in his leadership, possibly rooted in some sin issues, were concerning our team because of the negative effect they could have on the fellowship. They asked my advice.

Though this man is not an “official” leader in the fellowship, I focused on the fact that the rest of the group views him as a leader. They are placing themselves under his authority. God has driven home to me recently that (without arguing technicalities) the only time to disobey someone in authority over us is if that person tells us to sin. The leader in question was not telling others to sin.

Some might say this man shouldn’t be in leadership or doesn’t actually have any authority. Maybe the other members of the fellowship should resist him if he’s not leading in a good way. Whether or not humans have formally placed this man in authority, though, I could not see advising other members of the flock to step out from under his covering if they have submitted themselves already to his spiritual authority. It seems that they have given him authority. And maybe their submission to him is actually an extension of the Holy Spirit giving him authority.

If this man is not in leadership, the only other choices are the other man in the group (who is great but doesn’t seem cut out for leadership), the two wives in the group (we won’t raise those questions here), or members of our expatriate church planting team (we are trying to empower local leaders and work ourselves out of a job). I advised our team to instruct the rest of the group to continue to submit to this leader’s authority and then pray that God would bring about any needed changes in his life.

Our conversation took place Tuesday morning. By Saturday morning, our two church planters who raised the issue already had a great testimony of a noticeable change taking place in the life of their disciple.

This post is more just a “thinking out loud” regarding a situation, rather than a tidy box of something I feel like I’ve figured out. I welcome any perspectives or additional thoughts you, my readers, would like to contribute in the comments.

What do you think of my advice to our church planting team? Can the Holy Spirit place someone in a position of authority in a church without it ever being formally recognized by the people?

Posted in Church Planting and Discipleship | 1 Comment »

Why you should read Christianity Rediscovered

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

Since I intend to post a few things from Vincent Donovan’s book Christianity Rediscovered, I figured I should go ahead and give an official plug for the book.

First allow me to share an excerpt from Donovan’s introduction that may pique your interest:

…Suppose you were a missionary and you realized how questionable the whole system was. And yet suppose you believed in Christianity, believed that Christianity had something to say to the world that is pagan–for that is what it is, more than three-quarters pagan. What then? What would you do?

Maybe you would do as we did, begin all over again from the beginning. That means precisely what it says, starting from the beginning, with, perhaps, only one conviction to guide you, a belief that Christianity is of value to the world around it. That is presumption enough. Beyond that, no preconceived ideas either as to what Christianity is or what paganism is. What it means is a willingness to search honestly for that Christianity and to be open to those pagan cultures; to bring Christianity and paganism together and see what happens, if anything happens; to see what emerges if anything can emerge, without knowing what the end result will be.

The actual carrying out of such a quest has been an adventure, a journey of the mind and of the soul, a disconcerting, disturbing, shattering, humbling journey. I would like to invite the reader to go on that journey with me. But before commencing it, one would want to have the same open-mindedness toward it, with no convictions beyond the one that Christianity is something of value; no preconceived notions about God, salvation, Christ, the meaning of being a Christian, the church, the sacraments, the liturgy, the priesthood, or anything else traditionally associated with Christianity. Without such an openness of mind on the part of the reader, this book would make no sense.

I highly recommend this book to those who are making disciples and planting churches in a cross-cultural context. Most of you immediately think of foreign missionaries when I say that, and they make up a good part of who I am writing this to. But I think in a country like the United States, the church will do well to realize (and is realizing more and more) that a good percentage of the ministry we do within our own cities is cross-cultural.

I recommend Christianity Rediscovered to you cross-cultural ministers because Donovan brings a fresh perspective. He was a Catholic, so his thinking breaks the mold of a lot of what those in evangelical circles are used to being exposed to. He was also a practicioner. He wrote as one who got his hands dirty working and sometimes failing, learning his lessons week-by-week as he brought the gospel to the Masai villages of East Africa. He was not a theoretician, isolated behind the walls of academia.

Theologians can also benefit from reading Christianity Rediscovered, because our theology is richer when informed by cultures besides our own.

If you’re interested in picking up a copy of the book, here it is on Amazon. If anyone does read it or has read it, I would love to hear what you think.

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For Roland Allen fans (or fans-to-be)

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

 

I read Roland Allen’s work Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? four years ago, while a student in GFM’s Mission Training School. I blew through the book so quickly then, that I didn’t learn much that has translated to practical application in my ministry. BUT, I know enough and hear enough good recommendations of it from people I trust, to know it’s well worth reading. That’s why I’m starting to dig into it again.

Alan Hirsch (of The Forgotten Ways fame) lets us know that Allen’s two most-read books are available online for free. If you’re not familiar with Allen’s work, these might be worth checking out. Here are the links:

Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours?

The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church: and the Causes which Hinder it

For those who have been challenged by Alan Hirsch, he says of these two Roland Allen books, “All interested in missional movements MUST read them.” Not a bad endorsement!

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At the fair with our neighbors

Monday, October 20th, 2008

This week is our town’s huge annual celebration and fair, so yesterday evening we went to the fair with our new neighbors who live upstairs from us. It’s neat to see how our friendship with them is developing. We all had a good time, and finished the evening with a round of delicious intestine tacos.

(Really, the tacos were delicious!)

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Vincent Donovan on what the job of a missionary is and isn’t

Saturday, October 18th, 2008

Last year, on the recommendation of a friend, I read Vincent Donovan’s excellent book Christianity Rediscovered. It is one of the very best books I have read concerning cross-cultural mission work. I am now re-reading it, and will probably be sharing a few excerpts from it in the coming weeks.

Donovan was a missionary to the Masai people of Tanzania, east Africa. In the following excerpt from pages 23 and 24, he discusses the convictions he came to regarding what should and should not be the work of a missionary. I have been challenged a lot by the ideas he shares. I, too, have a growing conviction that we missionaries are messengers. Our responsibility is to deliver the message, not dictate the response to that message. Here’s what Donovan has to say:

Going back to the New Testament, to that original mandate which sent missionaries all over the world, we find the command of Christ to preach the gospel to all the nations of the world, to disciple, make disciples of, to evangelize all the nations. The words used in the Greek Testament for “all the nations” are panta ta ethne. In fact, every time it is mentioned the word “nations” is translated by the Greek word ethne. I do not believe that the bible knew of nations in the modern political sense of the word, like the nations of America and Canada and Tanzania.Ethne would refer more to ethnic, cultural groups, the natural building blocks of the human race. While the political nation of the United States might have very little to do with salvation as such, the Masai culture or a Hindu culture or the cultures that make up America might have very much to do with salvation…

…The gospel must be brought to the nations in which already resides the possibility of salvation. As I began to ponder the evangelization of the Masai, I had to realize that God enables a people, any people, to reach salvation through their culture and tribal, racial customs and traditions. In this realization would have to rest my whole approach to the evangelization of the Masai.

I had no right to disrupt this body of customs, of traditions. It was the way of Salvation for these people, their way to God. It was one of the nations to whom we had to bring the gospel–bring the gospel to it as it was. In those customs lay their possibility of salvation.

Christ himself said, “I did not come to do away with the law (the Jewish culture and religion) but to fulfill it” (Mt 5:17).

Everything concerning a nation (an ethnic cultural group) has to do with salvation. It is the job of the people of that nation, it is their affair to respond to their own call of salvation. It is not the sphere of the evangelist, of the missionary. If we would be consistent, I think we would see that the field of culture is theirs. Ours is the gospel.

An evangelist, a missionary must respect the culture of a people, not destroy it. The incarnation of the gospel, the flesh and blood which must grow in the gospel is up to the people of a culture.

The way people might celebrate the central truths of Christianity; the way they would distribute the goods of the earth and live out their daily lives; their spiritual, ascetical expression of Christianity if they should accept it; their way of working out the Christian responsibility of the social implications of the gospel–all these things, that is, liturgy, morality, dogmatic theology, spirituality, and social action would be a cultural response to a central, unchanging, supracultural, uninterpreted gospel.

The gospel is, after all, not a philosophy or set of doctrines or laws. That is what a culture is. The gospel is essentially a history, at whose center is the God-man born in Bethlehem, risen near Golgotha.

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Want to know where your income ranks you in world wealth?

Friday, October 17th, 2008

Below, I’ll share the tool for finding out where you rank. Read on…

I don’t know if you knew this, but the Bible only mentions one topic more times than money, and that topic is love. The Bible talks more about money and wealth than it talks about heaven and hell combined. Can we safely say that our handling of wealth is a priority issue for God? Our stewardship says a tremendous lot about the condition of our hearts. If you’re not convinced, check out the following passages of Scripture:

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matthew 6:19-21)

Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”

And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’

Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.” ‘

But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’

This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.” (Luke 12:15-21)

No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money. (Luke 16:13)

I thought this post might be appropriate, given the hard economic times right now. Some of you may already be feeling like you’re on a fast track to the poor house. I have always found it very powerful how the Macedonian believers reacted when money was tight. The Bible says that their “extreme poverty welled up in rich generosity“. They gave “as much as they were able, and even beyond their ability”. (2 Cor. 8:2,3; emphases mine) God makes it clear in Scripture that our stewardship is not tied to how many resources we have available. In other words, we don’t have license to be selfish when we don’t have a lot and only have to honor God with our resources when we have an abundance. Our stewardship is always revealing the state of our hearts.

So in comparison with everyone else, are you and I actually headed for the poor house? If you want to know the answer, open the Global Rich List real quick (opens in a new window). Enter your annual gross income, be sure to select the correct currency, and then click ‘Show me the money!’. The website will show you where you rank in relation to the rest of the world. The first time I did this, I was astounded to learn that my income at a couple of different summer jobs around 18 or 19 years old, as well as my current missionary support, put me in the top 10% of the world’s richest people.

I’ve heard the average college graduate in the U.S. makes $48,000 a year once they graduate. College students, plug this number in if you want to see where you’ll probably rank once you’re out of school.

The following statement by Jesus should probably cause us to pause and reflect a little bit:

I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. (Matthew 19:23,24)

Convicting? Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

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Photos from a Sunday afternoon in the park

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

Lauryn, with our town’s well-groomed park in the background:

The main government building of our town, which sits right on the central park:

Molly and I sitting by the fountain, taken by Lauryn:

Lauryn and Molly:

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Is a negative spin ever positive?

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

I lead a church planting team. God wants to transform our region of Mexico with the gospel, and I have a deep desire to see that happen. I, therefore, am trying to be a more and more effective leader.

Talking about things in negative terms is generally somewhat taboo in Christian circles (at least in theory). “We need to encourage; to focus on the positives,” we say.

Many of us probably realize, though, that mistakes can be far better teachers than getting it right. I am on a steep learning curve right now, and almost everything I’m learning is by mistakes. Can talking about mistakes, about negatives, about what not to do be an effective way to teach others, then? I think that, at least at times, it can be an effective means of communication. I applied this line of thought recently in my post entitled ‘What discipleship is not‘. But how often and/or to what extent should we use this technique (if at all)?

I got to thinking more about this because of a post on Copyblogger this past week talking about the power of negative examples as teachers. Here is an interesting excerpt:

Wendy Joung performed behavioral training research on firefighters in 2006, and the results are published in Applied Psychology. She and her colleagues found that firefighters trained with case studies that focused on others who had made poor decisions and suffered adverse consequences ultimately showed better judgment and better adaptive thinking than a control group provided with case studies that focused on positive results.

Bottom line – mistakes teach better than successes. You might already know this from your own life.

How much does this apply to my leadership of a church planting team? Can we be better church planters by talking and thinking about what not to do?

I would love to hear some feedback from my readers on this one, including from GFMers. Any thoughts?

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