Ministry Together

Our community here in South Africa has been trying to figure out what it means to do ministry together. Just as we are intentional to make ways and times to connect with God as a group, we want to explore how to be Good News corporately.

This may seem to be an obvious (and perhaps easy) thing to accomplish, but it has been a challenge. Frankly, it has been a challenge for the past several years! One reason for this is that when it comes to ministry, most of us want to “explore God’s individual calling on our lives.” That’s a good thing. In fact, God often uses the NieuCommunities experience to show us how we are made and shape our understanding of how we can best serve. However, this pursuit can easily lead everyone in their own direction. In the process, we have lacked a strong sense of corporate mission, and some would argue corporate identity.

We should not simply be a team of people who all do our own thing for ministry, then come back together to pray and share meals. The 3 streams that run through who we are and what we do: communion (connecting with God), community (sharing life with one another), and mission (helping others experience God’s Good News) must all be practiced individually and corporately. Especially in the area of mission, this is not easy. We have to corporately seek God’s guidance on who and how God would have us serve together. This may mean limiting our personal desires or time in order to participate in our community’s ministry. For most of us, those are things we hold on to fiercely.

Over the past few years, a Sunday afternoon gathering with a meal and time to connect with God has developed at Pangani. It has been a great opportunity to invite people to our place, make new friends, eat, and celebrate and experience God together. But, those of us who have been doing this for a few years are ready to change the pace a bit. So, we are all talking together, once again, about what it means to do ministry together.

Then, a strange thing happened this past week. On Thursday we got a phone call from a local ministry we are connected to. They have two children that have been living with them that are finally going to be placed in the home of a relative. Great news! However, the home where the children are to live is in bad condition. So, on Friday, some of the staff from this ministry were going to clean, repair, and paint at the home. Could we help? We all agreed that this would be something we could and should help with, so we dropped Friday morning’s program and several of us went to help.

We went to the home of a woman we had never met, and started helping. Emptying rooms, scrubbing walls, patching holes, washing curtains, cleaning floors, painting bedrooms, and completely painting the outside of the house to prepare it for the two children who are moving in. The neighbors were so impressed that they thought we were a crew from a home-fixing television show In the process, we had lots of conversation with the woman who lives there, as well as the staff from the other ministry. I think everyone involved came away feeling blessed.

In the midst of it all, it struck me: Here we are, doing ministry together. We’ve had several important conversations about what that should look like, and several attempts. Yet, with a phone call, we were doing it. No planning. No strategy. No long-term goals. And while I know that we will continue to explore what it means to do ministry together, to be who God wants us to be together, I learned something important from this. It’s as simple as hearing and responding. May we – and you – hear God’s voice and move into action more every day.

Two Weeks

My last two weeks have been an interesting journey.

Two weeks ago, I found out that my grandfather had passed away and less than 24 hours later I was on a plane bound for home. So my family had the chance to come together, traveling from all over, to remember, celebrate, and honor my grandfather. The travel was intense – Africa to Atlanta to Dallas to East Texas to Dallas to New Mexico to Dallas to Atlanta to Africa in a week – but I’m so glad I could make it.

The day after I returned to South Africa, my fellow apprentices and I left for a reflection weekend in Mpumalanga. We stayed at the wonderful Florence Guest Farm, only three hours away by car but a world away from our normal routine here at Pangani. The purpose of the weekend was to take time, alone and together, to reflect over what God has been teaching us through the lessons and experiences of the Listening Posture. Interestingly enough, God had another significant experience for all of us. On our last planned day on the farm, Carissa fell off a horse and suffered an acute dislocation of her left elbow. There isn’t enough room in this blog to recount the events of the next several days so you will have to count on those of us you know to fill in the details. However, the next several days included little sleep, multiple hospitals and doctors, sheep herding, flooding and farm irrigation, numerous hours spent talking/negotiating with doctors, nurses, the insurance company, NC staff, and Carissa’s family, and many other unknowns. Carissa has had reconstructive surgery and is doing much better now, she is tentatively scheduled to return to Pangani today.

Honestly, with everything going on, the last two weeks have not provided me with a lot of time to focus on God. Even though I’ve needed it, very seldom did I set apart specific time with Him and even then I was usually falling asleep. Mercifully, I’ve seen God more times in the last two weeks than in many before. While I feel like I did see God in the beauty and vastness of His creation and in the wisdom and comfort provided in His Word, the medium God used to jump out at me and communicate with me the most was people. I saw God in the midst of friends and family coming together to celebrate my grandfather’s life lived with Him. God inhabited the prayers of His people lifting up my family in our time of loss. A couple’s sacrificial care for strangers in need reflected God to me. I experienced God through the faithful, tireless help of a hospital employee. I even, and maybe especially, saw a glimpse of God in the reassuring wave of a 5 year old leaving the doctor’s office. Through friends and family, acquaintances and strangers, people of different ages and backgrounds, God communicated with me these last two weeks.

And really, it shouldn’t surprise me. God has made a habit of revealing Himself through people throughout history, most clearly in the person of Jesus. As Christians we believe that, as fully human and fully divine, Christ is the clearest revelation of God. The scandalous thing about the incarnation is not that Christ is God-like, but that God is actually Christ-like. In Christ we see God himself as someone who loves us, contends for us, and wants to be near us. Immanuel, God with us, is not just a historical idea but a present reality, and many times He uses people to incarnate that reality in our lives. The scary thing may be that He would want to use us to be that reality in the lives of those around us, even in our most broken state.

Who might God be calling you to communicate that reality to through your life?

Faith and Freedom

             Faith and freedom have been the ongoing theme for me during this listening posture. I feel absolutely grateful to God for all that he has done in me this month. He has spoken in ways I never expected him to. One of the greatest things I think he has done since I’ve been here in South Africa happened this past week. He has really been speaking to me about two things, the first is the faith of a child, and the second is the freedom that comes with that.  Children are so innocent, so pure, so trusting. They are free to be who they are. They are free from all the legalistic rules that are many times placed on us as Christians. And of course they have amazing faith. They just believe.  Without analyzing, and without searching for proof, they believe.
             I think many times as Christians we get so bogged down with all the rules, that we forget the main point of Christianity. It’s not about what we do or don’t do; it’s not about what we say or don’t say, what denomination we are, or what Bible version we use. It’s about a relationship. That relationship will look a little different to everyone, but it’s still a relationship. In a relationship there is freedom. You’re free to be yourself, you’re free to speak your mind, and you’re free to disagree. You’re free to laugh, to cry, and to be silent. God longs for that relationship with us. He longs for us to come honestly before him. With our hurts and joys, our laughter and our tears, and our praises and our requests. And yes, believe it or not, we can come before him with our anger. He’s God, he’s mysterious. We don’t always understand why he does what he does which many times results in anger toward God. For the first time in my life I have realized that coming to God with all these things is okay. We don’t have to put on a “holy” face and heart to come before God. 
             In a book we are reading called Spiritual Direction by Henri Nouwen, he tells a story about prayer. This story reminds me so much of true, genuine prayer, and the freedom we have in Christ.  It says:

~ Three Monks on an Island ~

Three Russian monks lived on a faraway island. Nobody ever went there, but one day their bishop decided to make a pastoral visit. When he arrived, he discovered that the monks didn’t even know the Lord’s Prayer. So he spent all his time and energy teaching them the “Our Father” and then left, satisfied with his pastoral work. But when his ship had left the island and was back in the open sea, he suddenly noticed the three hermits walking on the water—in fact, they were running after the ship!   When they reached it, they cried, “Dear Father, we have forgotten the prayer you taught us.”  The bishop, overwhelmed by what he was seeing and hearing, said, “But, dear brothers, how then do you pray?” They answered, “Well, we just say, ‘Dear God, there are three of us and there are three of you, have mercy on us!’” The bishop, awestruck by their sanctity and simplicity, said “Go back to your land and be at peace.”

             This prayer of simplicity has been in my mind all week. It is once again a result of freedom. I would not use thee’s, thou’s, and other fancy words while in conversation with my best friends, so why would I with God? I wouldn’t hide my hurt and anger from my best friends, why would I hide it from God? There’s freedom in the relationship. Freedom to be who we are. Freedom to live!! As I was preparing for a service here, where I would talk about the faith of a child, God gave me an awesome song. It is called “Innocent” by Third Day. The chorus says:

But you came to me and opened my eyes
You gave me a brand new life
I am innocent and I have been set free
I no longer have chains around my feet
And no matter where I go or what they say
I am innocent

             There is amazing freedom in Christ. He really has loosed the chains around my feet. I am free from the guilt and shame that have held me in bondage for so long, I am free to be who he made me to be, I am free to speak my mind, and I am free to come to him with every heart ache, every joy, and every fear. HE has given me that freedom. My hope and goal is to not only enjoy that freedom while here in South Africa, but to live in it for the rest of my life.

Beneath the Din

Since we have begun the listening posture, the first of our six postures of a leader that make up the year here at Pangani, I feel I have been hearing God in various ways. There are many factors that contribute to this. Firstly, there are minimal distractions. None of us have cell phones or even (workable) phones in our rooms. The environment at this historic bed and breakfast, which you can get a glimpse of from our photo, is, in a word, gorgeous. Aside from a weekly schedule that includes study, prayer, and discussion together, our weekly chores, random errands, and visits to see friends and local ministries, we have an ample amount of free time. And throughout our assignments are a number of gentle suggestions for how to spend time with God.

One thing I find funny is the way we human beings, even when presented with such circumstances that lend themselves to priceless, precious time with God, presented in such a way that is doable and even desirable. . . often still choose to ignore Him. I have found myself (and perhaps other participants can relate) at times succumbing to boredom, lethargy, and what my art teacher in college referred to as “rubbishy thoughts.” To be in these set of exceptional circumstances and still find myself giving my time over to lesser desires (be it excessive time on the internet, reading to keep “busy,” watching movies as a form of escape, or just generally filling my time with frenetic, meaningless activity)– this, to me, is disappointing at the least. In one of our texts, Spiritual Direction, Henri Nouwen refers to such self-absorbed habits as our “inclination”:

Naturally, we want to love and be loved by God, but we also want to keep a little corner of our inner life for ourselves, where we can hide and think our own secret thoughts, dream our own dreams, and play with our own mental fabrications. p59

To this end, I find I am frustrated with myself- knowing (or believing) that God is not only near, He is here. And yet I– I am still in hiding. God has been showing me that even as I have been here, attempting to do spiritual things, serve Him, and studiously “seek after Him,” my attention, more often than not, is divided. It is not solely focused on Him. And as it says in James 1:7 of those who are double-minded, “People like that should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.” (NLT) It’s a truth that’s hard to swallow, yet knowing it so keenly from experience, is not one I can refute.

Nevertheless, as I first mentioned, I have no doubt been hearing Him, and where I have found Him is usually just beneath the din. In Marabastad, an African marketplace alive and vibrating with the hum of yearning humanity, we were asked to take an hour and a half and “listen” for God. I saw God in the pleading looks and furtive glances of the hawkers selling their wares. I smelled Him in the wafts of smoke emanating from the streets as people roasted and sold peanuts and mupani worms. I felt Him in the breeze. And under the conflicting music blaring from shop to shop, I heard Him quietly proclaiming “I am needy” and even more subtly, “I am here.”

God has been teaching me to listen for Him amidst noise, amidst clatter, and even–especially–beneath the own din in my head. Back home, during our weekly schedule at Pangani, I have found that when I begin to think I’m not learning anything, I’m not hearing Him, or “He’s nowhere to be heard,” I decide to “listen anyways,” or a bit deeper, and find that He is there, amidst all that is ordinary. Less like some sort of supernatural sense of “Oh! God is really here!” and more like in this ordinariness, that still feels very ordinary, God is actually speaking too. He is speaking in the mistakes and revisions and digressions of our days.

This past week we focused on the spiritual discipline of meditation. In Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster’s suggestion for scriptural meditation is to “take a single event, or a parable, or a few verses, or even a single word and allow it to take root in you” (p.29). God revealed Psalm 86:11-13 to me, and I took just ten minutes one evening beneath the stars and tried to “let it take root in [me]:”

Teach me your way, Lord, that I may rely on your faithfulness;
Give me an undivided heart, that I may fear your name.
I will praise you, Lord my God, with all my heart;
I will glorify your name forever.
For great is your love toward me;
You have delivered me from the depths, from the realm of the dead.

As I sat there crouched like a child on the back steps behind the kitchen, the bright outside sensor light being set off occasionally by the dogs, I watched as the clouds rolled away revealing the almost-full moon. Savoring the moment, I rested my head on my knees and slowly focused my mind. And as I felt the breeze and listened to the sounds of the night, my racing thoughts dissipated and for just a moment, I let God have another little piece of my heart.