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."
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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
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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
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