Orphanage Ministry

For the last few years a group from our church has been visiting an orphanage/boarding school (called an Internaught) in the village of Kuzmintsy (just outside of Kaharlyk).  This Internaught is an intermediary stage for children who have become wards of the state but have not yet been placed in either an orphanage or a foster family.  

Recently Liese joined the ministry team and they have been visiting the Internaught every other Monday to spend time with the kids doing crafts, telling bibles stories, and playing games.   On the weeks that they don't visit the Internaught they bring the children into Kaharlyk to be a part of the Kids Club that is at our church on Saturday afternoons.

Global Mission Mondays: Niger

By area Niger the largest nation in West Africa and over 80 percent of its land area covered by the Sahara desert. Its population is about 15 million.   Much of the non-desert portions of Niger are threatened by periodic drought and desertification.

Since independence in 1956, Nigeriens have lived under five constitutions and three periods of military rule.  Niger remains handicapped by its landlocked position, desert terrain, poor education and poverty of its people, lack of infrastructure, poor health care, and environmental degradation.   A Nigerien study reports that 800,000 people are enslaved, almost 8% of the population. According to the organization Save the Children, Niger has the world's highest infant mortality rate.

Between 80 and 98% of the population is Muslim, with small Animist and Christian communities, the latter a consequence of missionaries established during the French colonial years, as well as urban expatriate communities from Europe and West Africa.  Missionaries are allowed to work freely and the Christian population is growing.


[Information via wikipedia, the US Department of State, and Save the Children ]

CC Kaharlyk video

Our friends at the Halle Project put this video together as an overview of our church's vision and mission:

Global Mission Mondays: Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso ranks as the third least developed country in the world.  It is home to about 15.3 million people.  The average life expectancy was estimated at 52 for females and 50 for males. The median age of its inhabitants is 16.7.  As of 2009, it was estimated that there were as few as 10 physicians per 100,000 people. The UN Development Program Report ranks Burkina Faso as the country with the lowest level of literacy in the world with only 22% of the population above age 15 being able to read and write.

The official language of Burkina Faso is French. In addition, there are about 60 native African languages. 80% of the Burkinabé live in rural areas where there is little contact between different communities and as a result, monolingualism is predominant.

19 percent practices Catholicism,60.5% of the population practice Islam, and 20% practice animism.  Wikipedia quotes a popular saying in Burkina Faso that "50% are Muslim, 50% are Christian and 100% are animist". This shows the large level of acceptance of the various religions amongst each other. Even for Muslims and Christians, ancient animist rites are still highly valued.  The JoshuaProject.net says that many of the people groups have portions of the bible translated into their language and available in audio format.

Road trip to Budapest

 

Last week we took a road trip with our friends Jake and Anya Knotts to Budapest.  Thanks to the Christian Hospitality Network we were able to stay at a hotel for free.  We had a great time spending 3.5 days on the road with the Knotts talking about everything under the sun and 3 days in Budapest sightseeing, shopping at Ikea, and resting.  
 

Global Mission Mondays: Ivory Coast (Côte d'Ivoire)

Ivory Coast (or Côte d'Ivoire as it prefers to be called) is a country of 20 million people and is the world's largest exporter of cocoa.   Political corruption has caused economic instability and 2 civil wars over the last 10 years.  Because of this about a quarter of the population lives below the international poverty line of US$1.25 a day.

An estimated 65 languages are spoken in Côte d'Ivoire. French, the official language, is taught in schools and serves as a lingua franca in the country.

Religion in Côte d'Ivoire remains very heterogeneous, with Islam (almost all Sunni Muslims) and Christianity (mostly Roman Catholic) being the major religions. Muslims dominate the north, while Christians dominate the south. In 2008, 38.6% of Côte d'Ivoire was Muslim, followed by 32.8% Christian, 11.9% practicing indigenous religions and 16.7% with no religion. Wikipedia explains some of the complexities of religious life:

Lineages are important in understanding the organization of many Ivoirian religions. The spiritual unity of the descent group transcends distinctions among the unborn, the living, and the deceased. In this context, religious differences are not based on disagreements over doctrine. Rather, groups living in different social and physical environments encounter different spiritual and physical dangers, and their religious needs differ accordingly. This diversity accounts, in part, for early missionaries in West Africa who often described the spiritual "chaos" they encountered, when they were actually observing different social groupings, each with different spiritual obligations to ancestral and other spirits, acting in accordance with common beliefs about the nature of the universe.

The economic situation has resulted in poor health care and education. There are 12 physicians per 100,000 people. The literacy rate for adults remains low: in 2000, it was estimated that only 48.7% of the total population was literate (60.8% of males and 38.6% of females). Many children between 6 and 10 years are not enrolled in school.

Part III: We live our lives based on our understanding of the gospel

If we do not understand that the gospel tells that the plight of all mankind is that we are utterly lost, utterly guilty before God, spiritually dead, and deserving the eternal wrath of God then the call to take the words of Christ to the whole world teaching all men to obey them is something that God calls special people to do, but it is not very important.

Richard Baxter wrote (sometime in the 17th century) "but now as I better understand the case of the world, and the method of the Lord's Prayer, so there is nothing in the world that lies so heavy upon my heart as the thought of the miserable nations of the earth. . .No part of my prayers are so deeply serious, as that for the conversion of the infidel and the ungodly world, that God's name may be sanctified, and his kingdom come, and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

Understanding two things: the plight of mankind and the coming of the kingdom of God should affect us the same way it affected Baxter - it should change what we value in life and how we pray.

Part II: We live our lives based on our understanding of the gospel

This is the second in a series of posts about how understanding the gospel affects the way we live our lives. 

If our understanding of the gospel is rooted in the phrase "God loves us and has a wonderful plan for our lives" then we will live in agreement with that phrase.  We will seek the best for our lives.  We will seek to protect ourselves from harm, from suffering, from the stress of not knowing if we'll have enough tomorrow.

While the bible doesn't say we are to seek those things, an understanding of the gospel that starts and ends with God as the center of the universe and shows us our place in his cosmic plan to display the greatness of his glory, will inevitably lead us away from a life that is free of suffering.  It will lead us to put ourselves in harm's way for the sake of others because their good becomes more important than ours. It will cause us to trust in the provision of our Father instead of our ingenuity and hard work, and it will cause us to not care about seeking the best for our lives because we will be seeking the best for others' lives so that God's glory might be exalted more fully in us.

I'm not saying in this that we are to seek suffering, or foolishly suffer, or not work hard to provide - I'm talking about a value shift as we live a new life that is radically different from the life we lived before we heard the gospel.

We live our life in agreement with our understanding of the gospel

At the retreat that our church went to a few weeks ago one of speakers was talking about what the gospel is (and what it is not) and as he spoke he said that we live our lives in agreement with our understanding of the gospel.

A few days after the conference a conversation with my family gave a good example of how the gospel affects not only our salvation but how we live.   My mom was telling me about the funeral of her brother Wayne who died in a mountain climbing accident in the Rocky Mountains.  At the funeral one of her brothers spoke about how he had asked God why God didn't save his brother, why God didn't catch him and keep him from falling.  The answer that God gave in that moment was wrapped in the gospel as he felt God saying "I was there. I saw Wayne fall and in the same way that I didn't save my own son when he was dying I didn't save Wayne". 

 The gospel proclaims the good news of Christ's love in enduring the cross to save us, it speaks of God's great mercy in allowing his son to die in our place, it speaks of plan that is bigger than momentary suffering, it speaks of a kingdom in which death will no longer reign and in which unrighteousness will have no place, is speaks of a King who knows what is best for his subjects and rules them in justice and mercy.  It is knowing this gospel that comforts us when someone dear to us dies in an accident, it is knowing that God knows not only what happened but how it is affecting us and He is the King who knows what is best for each of us.

I'll be writing more about how this in the next few days.

An Austalian named Merv and the magnitude of the mission

An Australian named Merv was visiting our church recently and he shared a few words of encouragement with our church from the book of Joshua.  In Chapter 13 God speaks to Joshua and tells him that Joshua is very old yet there is still much land that remains for Israel to possess.  Merv encouraged us to look at our city and our country and see that, though God has done much, there is still very much land that remains to be possessed.

I had spoken a few weeks ago at our church retreat about the mission that the gospel compels us toward and how it is a lifestyle that we never finish, that we never retire from.  Joshua was old, he had led God's people into the land of promise and at the end of his life God doesn't give him a pension, or say "mission accomplished" God says "there is still very much land to possess".

The magnitude of the mission of God - redeeming a people from every tribe and tongue - means that there is always very much left to do.  Our calling to follow Jesus, to make disciples, to spread the gospel is not a career it is a lifestyle.  We don't retire from it because it is not simply what we do, it is who we are in Christ.  No matter how much we do, like Joshua we look out over the land and see that there is still very much that remains for us to possess.

Books and the need for truth

This month In Lumine media is getting two books back from the printer: This Momentary Marriage, and The Jesus Storybook Bible.  As we get two more books ready for print this month I am reminded of an article by Ernest Reisinger about Christian literature in which he quotes Daniel Webster as saying:

"If religious books are not widely circulated among the masses in this country, I do not know what is going to become of us as a nation. If truth be not diffused, error will be; if God and His Word are not known and received, the devil and his works will gain the ascendancy; if the evangelical volume does not reach every hamlet, the pages of a corrupt and licentious literature will; if the power of the Gospel is not felt throughout the length and breadth of the land, anarchy and misrule, degradation and misery, corruption and darkness, will reign without mitigation or end". 

Truth needs to be proclaimed, spread, taught, read, absorbed, known, manifested, and discussed in Ukraine and Russia.  The propaganda of times past and the lies and corruptions of the current society have blurred the lines between truth and lie giving rise to a relativistic and pragmatic approach to life.   That is why I am part of In Lumine Media; to shine the light of God's truth through the written word.  Because as Samuel Zwemmer said "No other agency can penetrate so deeply, witness so daringly, abide so persistently and influence so irresistibly as the printed page."