Hello!
Below I've posted on this blogs all of the emails that I sent from South Africa. Unfortunately they've forced my teammates' posts farther down - check out those, too! I would always love to hear from you and share more about going to South Africa.
For the Kingdom-
Carl
Monday, August 27, 2007
South Africa: Final Thoughts
Sent on August 22, 2007
Hi everyone,
I arrived back in the States on August 12, and have found the transition to be very comfortable. Though I would have been happy to stay longer in South Africa, I am just as happy to be back with my family and seeing my brother off to college before spending September at Stanford and the next academic year in England. This is my last email to you all, and I'll leave you with some reflections on my time in South Africa. I also am posting some photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/cwerickson .
Unfortunately, I wrote way too much for one letter, so guess what! It's choose your own adventure time. For reflections on cultural differences and the potential of Africa, skip just below to " A." For the most important thing that I learned in Africa, go to "B."
----------------------------------------
A
As I settled in back home in Milwaukee, I had a strong sense that my home here in Wisconsin is not so far from Khayelitsha or Cape Town. It's not just that it amazingly only takes a bit over a day to get from here to the southernmost part of Africa. Rather, Africa does not seem to be so far away because now, when I am in Milwaukee, I can picture the world as a single place that contains both my home and South Africa. It's hard to explain much more, but Martin Luther King Jr.'s saying comes to mind: "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."
Working in the townships each day in Africa was tremendously refreshing. It took some time for me to get used to sharing my faith, but the other activities like physical labor, playing and doing Sunday school with the kids, and spending time with the local people that work with African Leadership, were immediately uplifting. Though it was an adjustment from my very self-controlled Stanford life, there was so much freedom in letting the long-term missionaries plan out my day, leaving me only with responsibility to obey and use my hands and voice. Singing! Everyone sings there, and especially in the rural Transkei area, many know how to harmonize through learning by example. The singing, and the very Spirit-centered worship and prayer, gives all of the visitors great strength.
At the same time, there are elements of the Xhosa culture and history that make for difficulties, both between missionaries and the Xhosa people, and in their own struggles to live in the world. For example, Xhosa people tend to have an event-based sense of time, while westerners tend to quantify it. This requires us, especially Germans like our leader Simon, to learn patience. More importantly, we learn to open up our day to God's plans instead of concealing it within our own plans. People of different cultures can learn a lot from differences - God creates beautiful children, and even if they're foreign to each other, they're still brothers and sisters.
One more difficult cultural difference is, to stereotype and oversimplify, that Xhosa tend to expect that gifts or other actions done once be done regularly and broadly. Pastor Ohm described this as "and again" culture. Because of this, the only thing that we are able to give away are snacks to the kids after Sunday school - and we have to make sure that no one gets two, otherwise everyone demands two. Another example that demonstrates the cultural trend more generally is that long term missionaries whose ideas change over time are confronted with confusion and resistance. Thus we cannot follow the command to give to the poor naively: the question that the missionaries constantly confront is how the gospel can be put into practice; how they can most efficiently serve the people. At the same time, missionaries learn so much. The flip side of these apparently negative cultural traits include such traits as that people give to their neighbor without hesitation. If a family is without food, their neighbor will give them what they need. Really.
The picture of Africa in many of our minds is that of the "dark continent." There are some reasons for this. For example, the Korean missionaries that we were with noted that the Korean church became very strong very quickly after the first missionaries arrived around 100 years ago, but that Africa, though it has hosted missionaries for much longer, has not developed such a strong church. In their view, this corresponds with African cultures being much less vulnerable to westernization than Korean culture. This part of why they seek to build up the church in Africa through a ministry developed by looking at the people with the eyes of Jesus, and not looking at them with their own eyes. African Leadership is an "indigenization ministry," truly intended for African leadership.
At the same time, the fact that Africa is the "dark continent" is the reason that the people who work with African Leadership, as well as people like me who visit, have so much hope. We have so much hope because Cape Town, and South Africa, and all sorts of places in Africa have suffered and are suffering from poverty, racial injustice, disease, and hopelessness. And does not God promise that the first will be last, and the last will be first? The place that the world considers dark is the place through which the world may most readily come to see the light.
We hope for the young children that we taught in Sunday schools to someday come to America to build up our church. For we in America are familiar with poverty, racial injustice, and despair. I told high school classrooms about the parts of my city Milwaukee, the poverty-stricken black areas, in which I would not be caught dead after dark. On the plane from Cape Town to London Heathrow, the two South Africans in the seats next to me told me that they would never go into Khayelitsha because of their fear. See, we're not so different. All nations and peoples stand equally under God, and we need each others' support in Christ to build God's Kingdom.
I thank the Lord for all of your support and would love to share more with you about Africa personally, via email or otherwise. My final prayer request is for the expansion of the Kingdom of God in Cape Town, the world, and our own lives.
For the Kingdom!
Carl
------------------------------------
B
The most important lesson I have learned from my time in South Africa is that if the Kingdom of God is the Christian answer to the meaning of life and of history, then I should act and think accordingly. Pastor Ohm teaches two things that are necessary to fulfill this meaning: Kingdom perspective and commitment.
Having a Kingdom perspective involves what I would describe as a "worldview conversion." A Kingdom perspective is a worldview that interprets the world in terms of the teachings, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the present and coming Kingdom of God. I'll try to describe just a bit of what the world looks like with this perspective. Say I am doing something banal like sitting down to dinner with my family. How am I looking at the people around me? Well, Jesus Christ has reconciled me to God, making me a son of God. And the people around me are children of God too. We have eternal life together. How much joy is there in that! How much easier is it to be gracious to them when we are conscious of the dimension of eternity in our daily lives!
The world tells us lots of corrupt things about how to look at other people, for example, that we should compare ourselves to others, take comfort in how we are better than them, and hate both them and ourselves for how we are worse. But actually, they are both sinners and beloved children of God, as we are. If we are in Christ, then we are both building the same Kingdom, God's, and not building jealous and warring kingdoms of our own. This is how a Kingdom perspective allows us to see other people: we look at people, and ourselves, with the eyes of Jesus. That is how we know who we are.
This perspective has to be asserted over and against what the world tells us, because the world is persistent with lies such that having more money and property is a capital-G good thing. It's not like I need to be remembering in every moment that Jesus died for us, but I should at least remember it sometime. This is the purpose of the African Leadership mantra, "For the Kingdom!" We have to remind ourselves that everything we do each day is either for the Kingdom, or for naught.
The second thing necessary to live according to God's Kingdom is commitment. There is a commitment to open oneself to the Kingdom perspective, but the Kingdom does not come about merely by interpretation. Action is needed. But what to do? The stereotypical dilemma at Stanford is, "I want to change the world, but there's so many options for the next step that I can't decide." I've seen people become upset at God for not clearly revealing what his calling is for them. But why ask for a calling? When we believe in Jesus and receive the Holy Spirit, we already have power and authority. All that is needed is commitment to bring about God's Kingdom in the ways that he sets before us. The commitment of the Xhosa people that we worked with was probably the example that I learned most from. Imagining myself in the position of the translators that repeated our sometimes awkward words into their neighbor's tongue left me in awe of their courage.
Commitment like that sounds quite foreign and frightening to me at first, but I gradually got used to the fact that it is possible. For commitment to God's Kingdom doesn't mean abandoning my old life. Even if one goes though an relatively concrete experience of being born again, new life in Christ doesn't destroy the old life, but rather is its redemption. It means that what I do, which for much of my time in the coming years will be the study of mathematics, is for the Kingdom. I study Mathematics for the Kingdom. There are so many opportunities to work for the Kingdom in the university. I'm blessed to have had this time among people in South Africa who taught me to be dedicated to looking at the big and little things in my life as opportunities to build God's Kingdom.
So I need a Kingdom perspective and a commitment. I may sometimes think that I am still lacking. For where am I going to get the strength to do these things? Well, this goes back to one of my first emails. I was happy to be going to South Africa because I was tired from all of the things I did at Stanford. I considered my activities to be worthy ways of serving God, but my schedule could take the place of God as my master, and wear me down. One thing I may have been missing is knowledge of the assurances that I have when when I work for God's Kingdom. When I try to build my own Kingdom, I have only my own strength to go on. But when I work for God's Kingdom, the Holy Spirit gives me strength. And since God's Kingdom is in God's hands, failures don't count against me - they're just signs to repent perhaps, and work in a different way, though that may be hard to accept. I'm very thankful for this newfound sense of the Holy Spirit that I bring back from Africa.
I thank the Lord for all of your support and would love to share more with you about Africa personally, via email or otherwise. My final prayer request is for the expansion of the Kingdom of God in Cape Town, the world, and our own lives.
For the Kingdom!
Carl
Hi everyone,
I arrived back in the States on August 12, and have found the transition to be very comfortable. Though I would have been happy to stay longer in South Africa, I am just as happy to be back with my family and seeing my brother off to college before spending September at Stanford and the next academic year in England. This is my last email to you all, and I'll leave you with some reflections on my time in South Africa. I also am posting some photos at http://picasaweb.google.com
Unfortunately, I wrote way too much for one letter, so guess what! It's choose your own adventure time. For reflections on cultural differences and the potential of Africa, skip just below to " A." For the most important thing that I learned in Africa, go to "B."
------------------------------
A
As I settled in back home in Milwaukee, I had a strong sense that my home here in Wisconsin is not so far from Khayelitsha or Cape Town. It's not just that it amazingly only takes a bit over a day to get from here to the southernmost part of Africa. Rather, Africa does not seem to be so far away because now, when I am in Milwaukee, I can picture the world as a single place that contains both my home and South Africa. It's hard to explain much more, but Martin Luther King Jr.'s saying comes to mind: "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."
Working in the townships each day in Africa was tremendously refreshing. It took some time for me to get used to sharing my faith, but the other activities like physical labor, playing and doing Sunday school with the kids, and spending time with the local people that work with African Leadership, were immediately uplifting. Though it was an adjustment from my very self-controlled Stanford life, there was so much freedom in letting the long-term missionaries plan out my day, leaving me only with responsibility to obey and use my hands and voice. Singing! Everyone sings there, and especially in the rural Transkei area, many know how to harmonize through learning by example. The singing, and the very Spirit-centered worship and prayer, gives all of the visitors great strength.
At the same time, there are elements of the Xhosa culture and history that make for difficulties, both between missionaries and the Xhosa people, and in their own struggles to live in the world. For example, Xhosa people tend to have an event-based sense of time, while westerners tend to quantify it. This requires us, especially Germans like our leader Simon, to learn patience. More importantly, we learn to open up our day to God's plans instead of concealing it within our own plans. People of different cultures can learn a lot from differences - God creates beautiful children, and even if they're foreign to each other, they're still brothers and sisters.
One more difficult cultural difference is, to stereotype and oversimplify, that Xhosa tend to expect that gifts or other actions done once be done regularly and broadly. Pastor Ohm described this as "and again" culture. Because of this, the only thing that we are able to give away are snacks to the kids after Sunday school - and we have to make sure that no one gets two, otherwise everyone demands two. Another example that demonstrates the cultural trend more generally is that long term missionaries whose ideas change over time are confronted with confusion and resistance. Thus we cannot follow the command to give to the poor naively: the question that the missionaries constantly confront is how the gospel can be put into practice; how they can most efficiently serve the people. At the same time, missionaries learn so much. The flip side of these apparently negative cultural traits include such traits as that people give to their neighbor without hesitation. If a family is without food, their neighbor will give them what they need. Really.
The picture of Africa in many of our minds is that of the "dark continent." There are some reasons for this. For example, the Korean missionaries that we were with noted that the Korean church became very strong very quickly after the first missionaries arrived around 100 years ago, but that Africa, though it has hosted missionaries for much longer, has not developed such a strong church. In their view, this corresponds with African cultures being much less vulnerable to westernization than Korean culture. This part of why they seek to build up the church in Africa through a ministry developed by looking at the people with the eyes of Jesus, and not looking at them with their own eyes. African Leadership is an "indigenization ministry," truly intended for African leadership.
At the same time, the fact that Africa is the "dark continent" is the reason that the people who work with African Leadership, as well as people like me who visit, have so much hope. We have so much hope because Cape Town, and South Africa, and all sorts of places in Africa have suffered and are suffering from poverty, racial injustice, disease, and hopelessness. And does not God promise that the first will be last, and the last will be first? The place that the world considers dark is the place through which the world may most readily come to see the light.
We hope for the young children that we taught in Sunday schools to someday come to America to build up our church. For we in America are familiar with poverty, racial injustice, and despair. I told high school classrooms about the parts of my city Milwaukee, the poverty-stricken black areas, in which I would not be caught dead after dark. On the plane from Cape Town to London Heathrow, the two South Africans in the seats next to me told me that they would never go into Khayelitsha because of their fear. See, we're not so different. All nations and peoples stand equally under God, and we need each others' support in Christ to build God's Kingdom.
I thank the Lord for all of your support and would love to share more with you about Africa personally, via email or otherwise. My final prayer request is for the expansion of the Kingdom of God in Cape Town, the world, and our own lives.
For the Kingdom!
Carl
------------------------------
B
The most important lesson I have learned from my time in South Africa is that if the Kingdom of God is the Christian answer to the meaning of life and of history, then I should act and think accordingly. Pastor Ohm teaches two things that are necessary to fulfill this meaning: Kingdom perspective and commitment.
Having a Kingdom perspective involves what I would describe as a "worldview conversion." A Kingdom perspective is a worldview that interprets the world in terms of the teachings, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the present and coming Kingdom of God. I'll try to describe just a bit of what the world looks like with this perspective. Say I am doing something banal like sitting down to dinner with my family. How am I looking at the people around me? Well, Jesus Christ has reconciled me to God, making me a son of God. And the people around me are children of God too. We have eternal life together. How much joy is there in that! How much easier is it to be gracious to them when we are conscious of the dimension of eternity in our daily lives!
The world tells us lots of corrupt things about how to look at other people, for example, that we should compare ourselves to others, take comfort in how we are better than them, and hate both them and ourselves for how we are worse. But actually, they are both sinners and beloved children of God, as we are. If we are in Christ, then we are both building the same Kingdom, God's, and not building jealous and warring kingdoms of our own. This is how a Kingdom perspective allows us to see other people: we look at people, and ourselves, with the eyes of Jesus. That is how we know who we are.
This perspective has to be asserted over and against what the world tells us, because the world is persistent with lies such that having more money and property is a capital-G good thing. It's not like I need to be remembering in every moment that Jesus died for us, but I should at least remember it sometime. This is the purpose of the African Leadership mantra, "For the Kingdom!" We have to remind ourselves that everything we do each day is either for the Kingdom, or for naught.
The second thing necessary to live according to God's Kingdom is commitment. There is a commitment to open oneself to the Kingdom perspective, but the Kingdom does not come about merely by interpretation. Action is needed. But what to do? The stereotypical dilemma at Stanford is, "I want to change the world, but there's so many options for the next step that I can't decide." I've seen people become upset at God for not clearly revealing what his calling is for them. But why ask for a calling? When we believe in Jesus and receive the Holy Spirit, we already have power and authority. All that is needed is commitment to bring about God's Kingdom in the ways that he sets before us. The commitment of the Xhosa people that we worked with was probably the example that I learned most from. Imagining myself in the position of the translators that repeated our sometimes awkward words into their neighbor's tongue left me in awe of their courage.
Commitment like that sounds quite foreign and frightening to me at first, but I gradually got used to the fact that it is possible. For commitment to God's Kingdom doesn't mean abandoning my old life. Even if one goes though an relatively concrete experience of being born again, new life in Christ doesn't destroy the old life, but rather is its redemption. It means that what I do, which for much of my time in the coming years will be the study of mathematics, is for the Kingdom. I study Mathematics for the Kingdom. There are so many opportunities to work for the Kingdom in the university. I'm blessed to have had this time among people in South Africa who taught me to be dedicated to looking at the big and little things in my life as opportunities to build God's Kingdom.
So I need a Kingdom perspective and a commitment. I may sometimes think that I am still lacking. For where am I going to get the strength to do these things? Well, this goes back to one of my first emails. I was happy to be going to South Africa because I was tired from all of the things I did at Stanford. I considered my activities to be worthy ways of serving God, but my schedule could take the place of God as my master, and wear me down. One thing I may have been missing is knowledge of the assurances that I have when when I work for God's Kingdom. When I try to build my own Kingdom, I have only my own strength to go on. But when I work for God's Kingdom, the Holy Spirit gives me strength. And since God's Kingdom is in God's hands, failures don't count against me - they're just signs to repent perhaps, and work in a different way, though that may be hard to accept. I'm very thankful for this newfound sense of the Holy Spirit that I bring back from Africa.
I thank the Lord for all of your support and would love to share more with you about Africa personally, via email or otherwise. My final prayer request is for the expansion of the Kingdom of God in Cape Town, the world, and our own lives.
For the Kingdom!
Carl
South Africa: Serving our Neighbors
Sent on August 6, 2007
Dear friends and family,
It was a rainy day down here in South Africa, causing us to abandon our plans to put up the walls of a church and rest a bit. So here I am writing to you!
Dear friends and family,
It was a rainy day down here in South Africa, causing us to abandon our plans to put up the walls of a church and rest a bit. So here I am writing to you!
After spending almost three weeks down here, I've managed to get a marginal idea of what is going on in African Leadership, the mission organization through which I and many other missionaries work here. Things have become normal! I did not suffer much culture shock, but only lately have my surroundings and daily routine seemed routine. As I wrote in my first letter on my way to Africa, I was looking forward to the blessing of being able to work for God's Kingdom without having to think and plan the details – the "busyness" of university life. Each day here, short term missionaries like me do what we are bid. It is busy in the sense that I work a good deal, but not busy in that I am always putting pressure on myself to keep up with a large number of self-imposed commitments. And it is great! It is easier here to serve just one master, the Lord.
In my prayer letter that I sent out in May, I listed what my activities here would be. Teaching children Bible stories, doing construction and door-to-door evangelism, traveling to a rural area for a week, and several other things. And all of these things for the Kingdom of God. This list ended up being pretty accurate. But as one might imagine, these ways are a small part of the ministry that African Leadership does, and give only the smallest idea of what the day-to-day concerns of the missionary are. They fit into a larger framework of guiding concepts and central ministries that, together, make up African Leadership.
Because of our history, the word "missionary" can carry an imperialistic tone. We may think that a missionary is a person that seeks to give other people something that they don't have, or prompts other people do something that they would not otherwise do. While some activities of African Leadership may look like this in part, what defines African Leadership is its mission to strengthen the local church in native communities all over Africa. I am most familiar with the ministry led by Pastor Ohm in Cape Town, so I'll describe what is happening here. In Cape Town, African Leadership's mission rests on two "pillars": pastoral training and children's ministry.
Pastoral training is a critical part raising up the local church because very basic knowledge necessary for leading a congregation is lacking among pastors in Khayelitsha. There are hundreds of churches, but most are house churches that are led by whomever arises as the best speaker. They may not even have bibles available. African Leadership seeks to give pastors basic biblical and pastoral training so that they can effectively make God's Kingdom real in their communities. To this end, it operates African Theological College within Khayelitsha. It encourages and provides initial support to its graduates whether they lead a church or serve in other worthy ways.
Because of our history, the word "missionary" can carry an imperialistic tone. We may think that a missionary is a person that seeks to give other people something that they don't have, or prompts other people do something that they would not otherwise do. While some activities of African Leadership may look like this in part, what defines African Leadership is its mission to strengthen the local church in native communities all over Africa. I am most familiar with the ministry led by Pastor Ohm in Cape Town, so I'll describe what is happening here. In Cape Town, African Leadership's mission rests on two "pillars": pastoral training and children's ministry.
Pastoral training is a critical part raising up the local church because very basic knowledge necessary for leading a congregation is lacking among pastors in Khayelitsha. There are hundreds of churches, but most are house churches that are led by whomever arises as the best speaker. They may not even have bibles available. African Leadership seeks to give pastors basic biblical and pastoral training so that they can effectively make God's Kingdom real in their communities. To this end, it operates African Theological College within Khayelitsha. It encourages and provides initial support to its graduates whether they lead a church or serve in other worthy ways.
Children's ministry is critical to extending God's Kingdom in Khayelitsha because most people that are Christians were exposed to the Christian message as a child. Thus African Leadership supports a great deal of preschools and Sunday School programs. Almost every day for our team includes some sort of singing, dancing, and bible teaching with children. We will also be participating in the high school ministry, which has brought us into high school classrooms to speak about some sort of concept of character from a Christian perspective.
As a short term missionary here, it quickly becomes apparent to me that the native leaders that African Leadership seeks to raise up are the center of the ministry. These kinds of leaders are the people that I work with most, at least ideally. Short term missionaries like me can serve in the ministries that these people are running; for example, our team is going to speak in high schools for the next two days. This is a ministry coordinated by both missionaries and a native guy.
Pastor Ohm told us about one missionary that worked for many years in a foreign land, left for a year, and found nothing of his work left. Thus when we say that we want to raise up leaders, we really mean it. Pastor Ohm notes that he wants to make sure that he chooses people to support that, for example, do not always listen to him. The missionary, in his words, is like a spare tire and African Leadership is a ministry of "indiginization." The key phrase in all of this is "for the Kingdom!" The Kingdom is God's, and so each missionary must not be trying to build his/her own Kingdom, but helping all brothers and sisters in Christ to build the Kingdom. This is how we as missionaries fulfill the command to love one's neighbor as one's self - we serve our neighbors by enabling them to serve others.
I suppose I've given a shot here at writing down what some of the big ideas on the missionary side of things are. Maybe once I'm back in the States I'll have time to write down some of the characteristics of the culture and situation here in Africa and in South Africa that influence what difficulties there are to overcome and what I have experienced.
Lately our work for the Kingdom has been in the form of speaking in high schools, constructing a church, playing with the children and doing Sunday school at the construction site, and doing evangelism in the area of that church. In all of this I've been blessed with a closer grasp of the Holy Spirit - otherwise, what words do I have to share with people? So you can pray in this my last week in South Africa for:
-The Spirit to be active in our ministries, for example, as we speak in high schools tomorrow;
-For my daily work to be always for God's Kingdom, and not can for my own (it's so easy to compete, etc).
For the Kingdom!
Carl
South Africa: The Other Side of the World
Sent on July 30, 2007
Greetings!
Greetings!
I'm blessed with a few minutes to sit down and update you on the work that my friends and I are doing for God's Kingdom in South Africa.
Late last night we returned to Cape Town after spending one week in the Transkei region of South Africa, in the villiage of Gulandoda relatively near Engcobo (in case your looking for something you can find on a map). The time we had in Transkei was a new experience for us. Our days consist of a morning devotion followed by some milled corn for breakfast, then about four hours of evangelism in various nooks in the large valley we stayed in (we began to make light of the phrase "just over the hill" to describe any one of our destinations), a lunch of fried bread, bible stories and songs with the children in a nearby church in the afternoon, then a church service around sunset (it being winter here), and then dinner. The conditions were spartan and foreign, but comparable to tent camping, though we stayed in a normal building instead of tents. The people that we stayed with - the Nositile family, I believe - provided us amazing hospitality.
A few anecdotes and thoughts:
-In huts, the men generally sit on one side and the women on the other. After a few days, this stopped being foreign, and we got used to "talking to the men and looking at the women" and vice-versa, I would suppose. We did, of course, bridge the divide often.
-The people we visit suffer outwardly more than the people I am usually around. Diseases of many sorts cause problems in these rural areas, not near to the medicine that I am usually surrounded by. There are also great problems with family conflicts or brokenness, and with envy between neighbors and relatives.
-On Thursday night during dinner, the family saw grass fire in the valley out the window. So David, Eric, Simon, and I grabbed wet towels and joined the men and boys of the family in fighting the fire. Fire is a real force of nature! It made me understand how we sometimes see it in nature specials on TV or movies: there we hear the sound and see the flames, but in the valley we felt the wind and heat. But a wet towel is amazingly effective against a grass fire! It consumed many acres, though. We pray that it was not too damaging to people's posessions, and give praise that no houses were damaged. However, that fire began in high winds that persisted for the second half of our time in Transkei, and did damage some houses.
-The people that we met and spoke to are very different from ourselves. How can we bridge the gap between our different forms of faith? How can we forge a meaningful connection with people that we want to share God's love with, in less than an hour? I think that the blessing that I gathered from encountering this question in Transkei is that God does the work for us. We can take joy in God's love for us, and take the risk of opening our mouths in the power of the Spirit to say what words we are given. Then we can pray that God will complete our work. I think that this is the most important thing so far in South Africa: I have seen that my faith doesn't depend on my own strength, but in my trust.
-How much do we depend on the translators! To communicate with people whom we evangelize, our hosts, etc. We are very thankful for their presence and partnership.
-The Xhosa people that we are minstering to in Cape Town and Transkei are exceptionally hospitable people to strangers, even just passing by. I'm very thankful for this.
I would love to write more, but my relatively short internet time was taken up by managing business back in the States. However, I think that our daily activities may abate slightly, giving way to writing to you back at the mission house and bringing the message to the internet cafe to send it off. I look forward to writing to you again whether it's in that more coherent fashion or not. But even more, I am excited to work for the Kingdom in the coming days leading up to my return to the states on August 12. The only prayer request that comes (quickly!) to mind as far as this Transkei work is that God would not forsake the people that we were with. We also pray that God would send rain to grow the small seeds that we planted, but even more important is that he be compassionate to these people whom we came to love and help them to overcome the problems that I described above.
For the Kingdom,
Carl
South Africa: Hitting the Ground
Sent July 22, 2007
Dear Friends,
Dear Friends,
Greetings in Christ from Cape Town!
Unfortunately my time to write to you is brief, but I it's important that I share some of this past week with you. After arriving in Cape Town on Wednesday morning, I have spent each day fully immersed in in working for God's Kingdom with the Xhosa people in Khayelitsha with my friends from Stanford, and our team leader Simon Schmid from Germany. To make this message compact, I'll resort to writing in lists.
These are the things that we have done:
-Morning devotions: each morning we either head into African Theological College (ATC) or meet with all the residents of the mission house we currently live in, and one person will share their reflections on some passage of scripture.
-Various forms of physical labor: We worked to maintain church and preschool buildings in Khayelitsha. We reinforced a foundation and built a fence.
-Evangelism: Twice, we have divided into various groups, with other missionaries working with our team, to go into the areas around a church that a Korean missionary started in Khayelitsha. The people are very open to speaking with us, and we talk about who we are, why we are here, and often read from the Bible and pray for them.
-Going into numerous preschools: We spend time with kids, sing with them, and do crafts project that teach Bible stories.
-Worship time: we attended an inaugural youth worship yesterday, sang to the Lord with various people that came to a soup kitchen for a long time.
-Sharing our stories with a multi-racial Baptist church outside Cape Town that has connections to African Leadership.
-Other opportunities to share personal testimonies or scripture reflections.
-Sleep: After a long day of work, it is easy to fall asleep and wake up feeling tremendously privileged to be able to be alive for another day serving others.
Here are a few things I have learned:
-Saying that we are all one in Christ isn't just idle talk. "Evangelism" can be a scary word in America, but it is not scary when we remember that evangelism is good news, the gospel - in fact, "good news" is what the root word behind "evangelism" means. The main part of the good news that Jesus Christ is Lord, the part that we speak about and enact most as we share with people so far is that we are one in Christ. As Paul writes, "neither Jew, nor Greek," etc. One man that we visited was almost speechless with happiness when we sang to praise the Lord in his language when we visited his house. As he said, white people never even come near where he lives. I hope that I can open my heart to joy as much joy from the Lord when I hear the Xhosa people singing songs in my language that we brought from our Christian fellowship at Stanford - because as brothers and sisters in Christ, we stand equally in need of encouragement, equally able to give to each other. This is because we are all part of the one Kingdom.
-The Xhosa people who have become involved with African Leadership are the center of all the ministry here. Missionaries are like a spare tire: what those who lead the mission here desire is the serve the people here and equip them to serve the Lord - that they would become leaders. As short term missionaries, we mainly work as extra hands in the ministries that these leaders run.
-I am blessed by this time here. I have learned a great deal from the people that I meet in Khayelitsha: I can see the joy that they experience in prasing the Lord, and reaching and working with them has added new growth to my generally rather intellectual faith.
-As Paul says in Romans 5:20, where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. The widespread hopelessness in Khayelitsha comes from the weight of sin, but the new light of hope that I have seen from them is a great encouragement to me.
Next: Tomorrow we will travel to the rural Transkei area where the Xhosa people are originally from. We will be there for some time. I look forward to sharing with you about this soon.
Here are some things that you can pray for if you wish:
- What we do here is a very small thing, but let us all pray that it will be like a mustard seed (Matthew Ch 13), especially with the children in the preschools.
- Pray for the Xhosa people that work with us, like those who translate when we do evangelism or those who will accompany us to Transkei. I know, as I said above, that their role is very important, but I have not yet developed a sense of that pressures that accompany this importance.
- Pray for our team leaders Simon and David Scudder as we head into the Transkei area.
- Thank God for giving me the blessings of "full-time" work for one master - my prayers of the last letter that I would be able to serve one master have been answered.
Blessings,
Carl
South Africa: Halfway There
Sent July 17, 2007
Hello everyone,
I now find myself in Terminal 4 of London Heathrow airport, where I have resided today. With a scheduled twelve-hour layover, I've had a great opportunity to get some reading and emailing done, including writing and sending this message. I'm almost to South Africa, and very excited about hitting the ground there.
Such a twelve-hour period has certainly been rare in my past few months. Usually, even after graduating, my time can sometimes appear to be filled with a clutter of activities. Jesus was speaking about money when he told us that "No servant can serve two masters," but I've found in those words a lesson that includes a warning about becoming a slave to the pursuit of wealth, but goes a good deal farther. These words point to the continuous danger of neglecting our duty of singular dedication to God. (as an aside, for Jesus word's to make sense, one must first realize that one always serves some master) Many masters in this world demand our dedication, and even those unambiguously good creations of God, human friendship, for example, can descend under the weight of sin to becoming masters to us, usurping the place of God. Sometimes, the desire to fill my time with many activities can become a cruel master to me. Though these activities are generally great things like hanging out with friends, this problem can still happen.
My flight schedule has been all over the place, from delaying it for an illness, to having the illness treated and going on the original schedule, to having that flight canceled and being rebooked to Thursday, to then finding a Monday departure that has in fact brought me to Heathrow today. During the times when I thought I had gained a few extra days back at home, I was thinking about what to do. "Wow, I won't be rushed to send out a first prayer email... I'll sit back and get some reading done... I can pray more deeply in preparation for my travels." And then, when the flight got pushed earlier again, it seemed that I was back to the normal, faster pace. When this first happened was when I saw this cruel master a bit more clearly, and wrote about it in our blog. And since then, I have come to hope for God to be more fully my one master during this time in South Africa.
And so I am ready - because I trust that God will make me ready - to step into what I have described to some, lately, as a bit of a void. I don't know what things will look like, except that some things aren't like here, and I don't know what precisely I will be doing day to day. But I trust that it is worthy. I recognize the need for God to grow me in his ways, and am blessed to have this time to directly serve the one master. I hope to gain eyes to see in South Africa the ways that God has blessed me in the past few weeks and in my time in South Africa, and to carry these things into the future.
That's a lot of stuff about me, but I ask God's blessing upon the two halves of my journey: me, and the world as I encounter it in South Africa. But now, one half of this is a void to me. I look forward to describing it to you! Because the Kingdom of God emerges out of the encounter between the gospel and the world.
Here's a quick list of stuff that you can pray if you wish, in light of all this:
For the Kingdom,
Carl
Hello everyone,
I now find myself in Terminal 4 of London Heathrow airport, where I have resided today. With a scheduled twelve-hour layover, I've had a great opportunity to get some reading and emailing done, including writing and sending this message. I'm almost to South Africa, and very excited about hitting the ground there.
Such a twelve-hour period has certainly been rare in my past few months. Usually, even after graduating, my time can sometimes appear to be filled with a clutter of activities. Jesus was speaking about money when he told us that "No servant can serve two masters," but I've found in those words a lesson that includes a warning about becoming a slave to the pursuit of wealth, but goes a good deal farther. These words point to the continuous danger of neglecting our duty of singular dedication to God. (as an aside, for Jesus word's to make sense, one must first realize that one always serves some master) Many masters in this world demand our dedication, and even those unambiguously good creations of God, human friendship, for example, can descend under the weight of sin to becoming masters to us, usurping the place of God. Sometimes, the desire to fill my time with many activities can become a cruel master to me. Though these activities are generally great things like hanging out with friends, this problem can still happen.
My flight schedule has been all over the place, from delaying it for an illness, to having the illness treated and going on the original schedule, to having that flight canceled and being rebooked to Thursday, to then finding a Monday departure that has in fact brought me to Heathrow today. During the times when I thought I had gained a few extra days back at home, I was thinking about what to do. "Wow, I won't be rushed to send out a first prayer email... I'll sit back and get some reading done... I can pray more deeply in preparation for my travels." And then, when the flight got pushed earlier again, it seemed that I was back to the normal, faster pace. When this first happened was when I saw this cruel master a bit more clearly, and wrote about it in our blog. And since then, I have come to hope for God to be more fully my one master during this time in South Africa.
And so I am ready - because I trust that God will make me ready - to step into what I have described to some, lately, as a bit of a void. I don't know what things will look like, except that some things aren't like here, and I don't know what precisely I will be doing day to day. But I trust that it is worthy. I recognize the need for God to grow me in his ways, and am blessed to have this time to directly serve the one master. I hope to gain eyes to see in South Africa the ways that God has blessed me in the past few weeks and in my time in South Africa, and to carry these things into the future.
That's a lot of stuff about me, but I ask God's blessing upon the two halves of my journey: me, and the world as I encounter it in South Africa. But now, one half of this is a void to me. I look forward to describing it to you! Because the Kingdom of God emerges out of the encounter between the gospel and the world.
Here's a quick list of stuff that you can pray if you wish, in light of all this:
- For full health in Africa;
- For the blessings in experiences of yet unknown culture to overcome the challenges in these experiences;
- For my heart to serve God and His Kingdom during this time;
- And for the Kingdom to remain within me after I return.
For the Kingdom,
Carl
Thursday, August 16, 2007
South Africa Letters
I just put up (on this blog) all the prayer letters I had sent out over the past couple weeks while in South Africa. Enjoy!
Also, I'm thinking of starting a short email list for people who may be interested in staying up-to-date with what goes on in my life--not that it's an important life, but prayer letters for "normal life" seem like a good idea to me. ;)
Also, I'm thinking of starting a short email list for people who may be interested in staying up-to-date with what goes on in my life--not that it's an important life, but prayer letters for "normal life" seem like a good idea to me. ;)
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