Kouya Chronicle

When we lived in Kouya land we had some interesting times trying to print out Scripture portions when we had no mains electricity. I recall printing twelve copies of Matthew’s Gospel on our dot-matrix printer (remember them) by almost driving the car into the office and then, with the engine running, connecting the car battery up to our solar panel set up to give enough juice to keep things running. The dot matrix printer finally gave up the ghost when a family of mice made their home in it and ate all of the wires.

That all sounds rather primitive fifteen years on, but this wonderful BBC production reminds us how the Bible and the printing industry have been closely linked since the invention of moveable type.

There are a whole series of short videos to watch: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

HT TSK

For a long time now, the New Living Translation has been the Bible that I use on a day to day basis. I tend to preach from the NIV because that is the Bible most churches I attend use, but for personal use I much prefer the clarity of the NLT. I can hardly wait for the NLT study Bible to come out in a few weeks.

I know that there are many people who are are suspicious of the NLT. If you fall into this group, you should take a look at this long (very) post by Rick Mansfield. The NLT blog is also well worth a look if you want to know more.

I like this sign which is in the corner of the conference room I’m meeting in this week.

This is the first of what risks turning into a longish series of posts exploring the nature of Christian mission. This isn’t the first time I’ve done this sort of thing and I’ll link to a number of my other musings at the end of this post.

At the heart of the question I want to discuss is the relationship between proclamation of the Gospel and doing good works as a feature of Christian mission. For many Evangelicals, the question is very clear: proclamation of the Gospel and mission are one and the same thing. Good works have a value in that they allow missionaries access to countries where they could not work otherwise, or they provide a hearing for the real work, which is preaching. At the extreme, I have heard people say that Bible translation is not really mission because it isn’t preaching the Gospel and I’ve heard more than one person say; “our job is to get people into heaven, not make the road to hell more comfortable”. There seems to be a simple logical assumption that as resources are always limited we should concentrate on work which potentially has eternal consequences (proclamation) and only get involved in social works when we have time and resources to spare.

However, for most Evangelicals the question is far more nuanced: Christians have a Social Responsibility, but they also have a duty to evangelise. The original Lausanne Covenant on World Evangelism placed these two side by side without ever clarifying the relationship between them. Eight years later a study group met at Grand Rapids to discuss this question in more detail and to “reach a greater unity of mind on the relationship between evangelism and social responsibility, not by a superficial semantic consensus but by a real theological agreement according to Scripture.” The Grand Rapids conference produced an excellent document which gives a historic overview of how evangelism and social responsibility have been viewed and which expressed the relationship like this:

Thus, evangelism and social responsibility, while distinct from one another, are integrally related in our proclamation of and obedience to the gospel. The partnership is, in reality, a marriage.

However, when push comes to shove, the primacy is given to evangelism:

…evangelism relates to people’s eternal destiny, and in bringing them Good News of salvation, Christians are doing what nobody else can do. Seldom if ever should we have to choose between satisfying physical hunger and spiritual hunger, or between healing bodies and saving souls, since an authentic love for our neighbour will lead us to serve him or her as a whole person. Nevertheless, if we must choose, then we have to say that the supreme and ultimate need of all humankind is the saving grace of Jesus Christ, and that therefore a person’s eternal, spiritual salvation is of greater importance than his or her temporal and material well-being (cf. 2 Corinthians 4:16-18).

The Grand Rapids paper is excellent and it draws a lot of threads together. However, it leaves a number of questions unanswered. The simple distinction between evangelism and social responsibility is perhaps too simple. For example, how does evangelism relate to disciple making (Matthew 28:19). The Great Commission calls us to more than simply preaching to get people saved. And where does NT. Wright’s discussions on mission in Surprised by Hope which stress the continuity between the current earth and the ‘new earth’ fit in?

A simple binary split between evangelism and social responsibility, between the sacred and the secular does not really help us get to grips with the complexity of God’s mission to the world and pushes us to some places I’m not sure we really want to go.

To my mind, a much better framework for discussing the nature of mission lies in the Five Marks of Mission, which are:

To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom
To teach, baptise and nurture new believers
To respond to human need by loving service
To seek to transform unjust structures of society
To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth

You may remember that I discussed these briefly when I reviewed Ross and Wall’s excellent book:mission in the Twenty-First Century: Exploring the Five Marks of Global Mission.

What I plan to do now is to work through the first few chapters of this book in more depth, and using the five marks as a framework to bring some order to my own thoughts on the nature of mission. I hope that others will join in on this exploration and bring their own thoughts to the process. If nothing else, you should buy the book!

The next post will appear in a few days: watch this space.

Various older posts on the nature of mission:

What is Mission: highlighting some ideas from Hamo.

The Centrality of Mission picking up on ideas from Brian.

Is the Age of the Great Commission Over? All mine, and the answer is yes/perhaps.

Who Do We Translate The Bible For? Me again.

This YouTube video is only five minutes long, but it is incredibly powerful and very important. Please take the time to watch it and then pass it on to others. HT Wycliffe UK Blog

If  you would like to know more about the trauma healing workshops you can download (PDF 2.4Mb) a copy of the Wycliffe UK magazine which goes into the subject in more detail, including this short piece which talks about the part of Ivory coast we used to live in when we were working with the Kouya.

Astounding changes occurred in the lives of Nyaboa people at a trauma healing seminar
in Ivory Coast during the uneasy peace after the civil war. Four former rebel soldiers had killed
several local people. They asked three others to go with them to beg the victims’ families for forgiveness. Another ex-rebel soldier had killed a pastor’s two children with his machete,
because he didn’t want his brother to become a Christian. He repented and committed his life to God. Since the pastor was absent from the seminar, he asked for forgiveness from the pastor’s  wife and relatives. They forgave him and prayed with him.

A group of young men had stolen from several pastors, hoping that this would make them leave the area. They thought the pastors’ prayers would spoil their fun. But during this seminar, God  moved them to return all the stolen property to the owners—mattresses, barrels, radios, tools,
kitchen utensils, all in good condition.

Sorry that I haven’t posted much in the last few days, moving house has taken a good deal out of both Sue and I. Anyway, in the absence of any sensible thought from me; I can refer you to this excellent post from Mark Sayers.

However today with our tremendous relational breadth, we have little relational depth. Sure you might be able become friends with someone in Iran, and talk chat online with them about your favourite album; but you have no idea what they get up to in their real life. They could sell crack cocaine from a school bus for all you know. We move jobs today often, we move homes, we even move cities, many rarely see family, we don’t even know the names of the people in our street. This creates tough turf for the growth of the gospel.

In order for the gospel to grow again, we need to match the breadth of our relationship, with depth of relationships. In our facebook world where it is possible to have a thousand friends on your page, but still sit at home lonely. Part of our kingdom mandate is to go deeper with people, to again create depth of relationship, the growth of the gospel depends on it. Read More

Many thanks to the colleague who sent me this by email. It looks as though the staff of this restaurant thought that the English error message was actually the English translation of a Chinese dish. A nice plate of Translate Server Error anyone?

Error Messages on a Plate

I spoke at the Wednesday morning chapel at OCMS in Oxford yesterday. OCMS is an amazing international community of mission scholars. They are based in an old church building on the Woodstock Road, with the library and study areas being in the nave of the church. It’s all very cramped, but the atmosphere is great. Getting into a discussion about the Biblical basis of mission around a table with people from five nationalities was quite literally a foretaste of heaven.

Our flat is not in this picture!

Well, today we got news that we have exchanged contracts on the sale of our house in Southampton. After months of waiting for lawyers and estate agents to do their jobs, it’s finally happened. On Friday, a big van will pull up outside of our house and our furniture will be loaded up and put into storage until we can find a house to buy up here. Meanwhile we are living in a flat on the Wycliffe Centre.

It’s almost 27 years since I first arrived in Southampton to work in the University Biology department. Though we’ve moved around a fair bit since, Southampton has always been the place we returned to. We keep close links there now, not least with Above Bar Church, but leaving still isn’t easy.

Still, we can’t complain, we are only moving just over seventy miles and we could even drive down to Southampton just for the evening if need be. Rob and Lois are leaving Benin altogether: they will be in the UK for a year and are then returning to another African country. That’s a lot harder. Read their excellent and very poignant blog post here.

A mixed day, mostly bad but some good. Rather inauspiciously, Sue woke up with a headache and a slight fever, both of which point to malaria. A Nivaquine treatment seemed to do the trick, it seems that she needs to recognise the symptoms early on, so as to knock it on the head. Moving out to the village, coupled with being tired out from the cold have left her wide open to it. Fortunately I haven’t been at all prone to it so far.

The morning was more or less evenly divided between listening to our Kouya recordings and working on the fridge. Perhaps I should just give up on it, at the moment it is only a little cooler than room temperature and our meat is slowly going off.

The doodle-doo bit the dust this afternoon (and very nice it was too). Unlike her, I had a very good afternoon walking round the village. I spent a good while talking to a friend of Sue’s, Colette, who speaks very little French. It’s amazing how much you can communicate with a few gestures, lots of smiles and a tiny spattering of Kouya. Later on I joined a couple of guys who were roasting peanuts, very pleasant! Bokassa turned up obviously the worse for wear, I refused the proffered beer (although it would have gone well with the peanuts) in deference to the local church view on alcohol.

Around seven the electricity people came round to see about hooking us up to the mains (imagine British electricity board men turning up at seven on a Friday evening).  Apparently much of the wiring will have to be redone if it is to meet Ivorian safety standards. Just the sort of news we were hoping to have! We are sitting on an awful lot of equipment that we can’t use at the moment, expecting to have power, we didn’t invest
heavily in solar panels or what have you. I feel like I’m up a gum tree without a panel.

I love the photographs in this exhibition. They were all taken at night with an extremely long exposure time and they show how beautiful the English Lake District is, but also show a worrying amount of ight pollution.

I’d like to kick off with a quote from Todd Bentley. Now please note, I’m not making any comment about what is happening at Lakeland - others can argue about that.

In a quote which appears in USA Today (HT Agathos) Bentley says:

“Miracles and healings are evidence. They are signs of the Kingdom, and if we don’t have signs then all we have is a bunch of theology.”

As I read this, Todd seems to be implying that if we don’t have miracles then there are no other signs of the Kingdom. Whatever the value of Todd’s ministry in Florida, I am concerned that this statement seems profoundly uninformed and doesn’t stand up against the evidence of experience or the Scriptures. What’s more, it risks being harmful to the Christian Gospel. I have no problem with miracles and wonders as signs of the Kingdom, but I’d have been much happier if Todd had mentioned some of the others.

I remember being shown round an AIDS hospital in West Africa by a highly qualified Christian doctor who could have been earning a fortune in the West. Patiently, and lovingly he helped care for babies who were born HIV positive and who would be very unlikely to live beyond three years old. I didn’t see any healings, but I did see a lot of self-sacrificing love; the sort of love that caused the Son of God to humble himself and be obediant to death. If anyone thinks that this sort of action is not a sign of the Kingdom, they really need to get out more.

As a Bible Translator, I’d have loved it if a miracle had put the whole of the New Testament into Kouya with a single word of power. It would have saved a lot of work, isolation, tiredness, malaria and sheer intellectual effort. But God didn’t do that; nevertheless, the example of a plainly fallible English couple who were prepared to sacrifice themselves had an impact on at least one young man who is now in a major leadership role in his country. Oh, and the New Testament was translated and is being read. No signs, wonders or miracles - sometimes more or less the opposite - but God’s Kingdom was being revealed!

What do the Scriptures have to say about this? Yes, in Jesus ministry miracles are very definitely shown as signs of the Kingdom - John even uses the word sign to describe them. I’m not knocking miracles. But look at these two sections taken from Hebrews 11.

13 All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.

They were living by faith, but they hadn’t received the things that God had promised them. The sort of theology of faith which tells you that if you believe enough God will give you exactly what you want just can’t stand in the light of a verse like this - much less in the burning intensity of the whole Scriptural witness to God’s people being called again and again to suffer. But let’s take it a step further…

33 who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised; who shut the mouths of lions, 34quenched the fury of the flames, and escaped the edge of the sword; whose weakness was turned to strength; and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies. 35 Women received back their dead, raised to life again. Others were tortured and refused to be released, so that they might gain a better resurrection. 36 Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison. 37 They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated— 38 the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground.

Faith in God allowed some to conquer kingdoms and administer justice - I’m not sure that those are miracles, but they are good. Others stopped flames and kept lions’ mouths shut - that definitely is miraculous. But how much faith does it take to be tortured and refuse to be released, to be stoned to death, to be jeered, to be sawn in two. Sawn in two! Now that is real faith - truly the world wasn’t worthy of people who were willing to go through that for the sake of their God.

Yes, there is a place for miracles in the Christian life, but there is also a place and a time for patient endurance and suffering.

I, John, am your brother and your partner in suffering and in God’s Kingdom and in the patient endurance to which Jesus calls us. (Revelation 1:9)

I don’t want to seem to be proof texting here and I could add lots of other passages about Christians being called to suffer, but the blog post would get too long.

And this is why I think that statments like the one that Todd Bentley is reported to have made in USA today are dangerous. If you take the view that either we have miracles or we don’t have the signs of the Kingdom, then you leave out the whole area of suffering for the Gospel. Much more, you leave out the God who himself suffered for his people. Jesus ultimate gift to the people of the world was not miracles - each of the people he healed or rose from the dead eventually got sick again and died - his gift was unimaginable suffering on the cross and a ressurection from the dead. The miracle of ressurection could not have occured without the years of humiliation, the faked trial and the hideous death. You can’t have one without the other.

One of the weaknesses of the Church in the West is that we no longer seem to have an understanding of the reality of suffering. There is nothing wrong with a ‘bunch of theology’ if that theology helps you understand the realities of the world we are living in. I genuinely feel concern for the people who are being told that Jesus will solve all of their problems at a stroke - what happens when they go home and find that their mortgage has been foreclosed (as is happening all over the world at the moment). I hear reports of healings, I don’t hear many reports of money suddenly appearing in Bank accounts. How do you cope with suffering and hardship when you have been told that such things shouldn’t happen to Christians? (Please note, I’m not saying that Todd Bentley is saying this - I simply don’t know - but I have heard plenty of others say it.)

Not only is suffering part of the the Christian life, but Christians actually seeking out hardship in order to witness to Christ is one of the most potent signs of the Kingdom. Paul went to Jerusalem, despite a clear prophecy that he would be bound and imprisoned if he did (Acts 21:10-13). Rodney Stark in his excellent book The Rise of Christianity attributes much of the early growth of the Church to the willingness of Christians to minister to people during plagues which struck the Roman Empire. They did not flee to the hills to avoid the plague and they did not miraculously heal thousands of people - but they showed the love of Christ by ministering patiently and graciously to the sick and dying. Hamo has a nice little post today about missionaries needing to be willing to suffer for the Gospel.

In ch 15 Mark presents to us a ‘king’ - 6 times Mark tells us Jesus is the ‘king of the Jews’ - but a king who rules in a very different way over a very different kingdom. He allows himself to die for others when he could have summoned angels to his rescue. He suffers abuse, ridicule and abandonment when he didn’t have to. This king calls his followers to deny themselves and take up their cross to follow him. He seems more in synch with those old missionaries than with most of us today.

I tend to think we have replaced the cross with the couch and the life of discipleship with what Bonhoeffer called the ‘happy religious life’. Even those of us who would hope to live differently are still trapped in a culture that has formed us and shaped us to look after our own needs first and to trust ourselves rather than God. We hope to live differently, but not so it impinges on our comfort.

It was Kierkegaard who said ‘It is much easier to be an admirer of Jesus than a follower’.

Whatever we think of the lives of those of those old missionaries and the sometimes bizarre choices they made, there was no question who was calling the shots in their lives. I fear for the generation to follow us, that they will know nothing of a gospel of sacrifice and self denial. If nothing changes in the contemporary Christian psyche then we are in deep trouble.

Tertullian said that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. What seed will the church spring from if we have a generation of Christians to whom suffering is a foreign concept?

Praise God when he does the miraculous and people are healed, but praise him too when he gives the grace and patience to his people to suffer without cursing his name.