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We had our second week of community outreaches this week. As I wrote before, Juli and I are in Masi so that location should be assumed throughout this note. A lot happened in my group (I walk around with our coach, named Munya who is from Zimbabwe and Lucas who is actually from Masi) so I’ll break it down into days.

Thursday

Thursday was our second official day in the community (our first being last Friday). Our goal was to meet some new people in our quest to find people of peace (a concept I’ll develop more on this blog soon) as well as follow up with those we met last week. Munya put me in charge of our time, and charged me with leading the way, so I first had the three of us stop at the playground at the library in Masi to pray and seek guidance about who Jesus wanted us to find that day (basically treasure hunting for those familiar with the concept). Not 30 seconds into praying Munya yells at a guy and ran after him. I followed and on the way he said that he saw a picture of the guy where the brown shirt that was passing. We flagged the guys down (there were two of them) and started talking to them and they immediately asked if we would sit with them and explain more (a good sign). They were actually so excited that they wanted to do a Bible study then and there, in the park. So I facilitated and taught them how to facilitate as well (the steps for praying and reading the Bible which I’ll get into more in a separate post soon). It took about an hour and they were just really excited and promised to gather their friends and family for another Bible study on Sunday. When we left they actually turned around and walked back they way they came — it was almost as if they were just prompted out of their homes to meet us.

We next went to find another Zimbabwean we had met last week. We went to the place we thought we were supposed to meet and he wasn’t there so Munya called him. He explained that he had gathered people at his home at 1 and that he was waiting for us there. This was a good and bad thing to hear. It was awesome to hear that he had gathered and was really taking the initiative to learn about Jesus but bad because it was 3pm, which is the time we’d set for the meeting, and not 1 and most of the people had gone home for the day. He met us back at the fruit stand though and took us to his home, which opened into a big courtyard. There where several people there and they all informed us how excited they were that we were there to share and how they couldn’t wait for us to come back but that it would have to be earlier (1ish) so that the women would have time to cook. So, next week on Thursday we are going to do our best to get there between 1 and 1:30. Pray for this gathering as there is a distinct hunger in the people we met and they are apparently bringing many more.

Before we left the courtyard, we had the opportunity to pray for one of the woman who was having foot problems (named Christine). She seemed touched by the prayers and told us that she could walk better afterwards but we’ll find out more in regards to this next week when we see her again. Pray for full healing!

After all of this, it was time to head back for our ride. But we were encouraged. It was definitely a fruitful day, I must say.

Friday

Yesterday was a pretty incredible time in Masi — it rivaled our other times, I must say. We started off treasure hunting again but I was the only one to get clues: a serious leg issue that required crutches or a cane and a shorter, stocky palm tree. So we started off with those in mind looking for folks to share with, pray with and start churches with. The first guy we encountered was a younger man (probably younger than me) who seemed really excited; he says he is gathering a group for Sunday, so we’ll see.

We left his house and immediately found the short, stocky palm tree and there was a woman doing laundry underneath it. So, we went up and engaged her in conversation. Once we told her what we were doing she stopped what she was doing, took us to her house, and welcomed us in to sit with her. She also immediately invited her sister in as well. We shared and explained more and she is inviting friends and family, hopefully for Sunday afternoon.

We left there and immediately found the leg problem. There was a man with crutches across the street and a foot in a cast and bandages. We ran across to him and explained what we were doing and that we thought Jesus wanted him to know His love today and asked if we could pray for his leg. He said yes and immediately sat down. We laid hands and prayed and when we finished he pointed at his leg and drew barriers (pretty much where the bandages were) and said “Here it felt very very strange as you prayed. It felt like everything was moving around and changing inside me. And now it isn’t really hurting.” He then got up saying “Thank you Jesus! King of kings and Lord of lords!”. He gave us his name and number and wants to connect again to learn about what we are doing. Pray for this encounter to — it sounds like he’s not going to have bandages and such the next time we see him but more importantly we are hoping his heart stays fixed on Jesus and that he will be a catalyst for change in his community. It feels like a lot to ask but completely within the realm of God’s possibility.

From their we met a lady we had met last week that felt peaceful (she was one that was super touched when we prayed). Unfortunately she right now seems caught up in the old ways and not just Jesus and isn’t super interested in focusing on Him above. Pray that this would change as we’ll likely see her again.

We went from her house to another contact that Munya had. He is a Zimbabwean that currently attends another house church but is interested in gather people in his own area of Masi. This will definitely be exciting if it happens (and involved no work of our own; we just get to come along for the ride, and a good chunk of discipleship).

Lastly, we had a guy run into the street and up to us intrigued about who we were and what we were doing. We told him. He immediately said he wanted to be a part of that and gave us his number. He then said that he’d gather people together for next week. He found us and it all happened in about 10 minutes time.

So yeah — outreach is definitely going well. It’s crazy to walk in the experiences that we are all walking in. All the groups have stories similar (and some can be even more fascinating than the ones from my group, for example the fundamentalist muslims interested in meeting and sharing that one group found). The harvest is definitely plentiful and ripe for the picking. Keep praying for (local!) workers to work it — we foreigners long to be simple catalysts that see a locally lead and driven movement toward Christ.

My last CPx post dealt with what we as missionaries to Africa are hoping to see — vast movements of people coming to Christ. I wrote quite a lot about the broad notion of “church” driving these movements but didn’t deal much with our place in regards to them. It’s an important topic though and one that needs discussing. What we as outsiders do can seriously hinder or empower the people directly touched by the movements.

In more traditional models of mission, the work done typically revolves around the missionary. They are there running the schools, staffing the hospitals, pastoring the churches, or powering other access ministries legitimizing entry into a place. And this isn’t necessarily bad — sometimes this very well may be what needs to happen. It’s not the case though for the movements to Jesus we are hoping to see. They are a completely different animal, and as I started saying, are hindered if the missionary (by nature an outsider to the context of the movement) becomes a focal point.

Instead, our role as church planter becomes that of a catalyst. We most often think of catalysts in terms of chemical reactions. Catalysts are enzymes or similar compounds that are not actually a physical part of the chemical reaction — they are not used up or changed in the reaction; instead, they initiate reactions and help to speed them up. At some point in the reaction, they often become unnecessary and when all is said and done — they finish in the same state they began.

This describes what we are to do as a church planter exactly. We are there to initiate and help speed up the reaction. We do this by finding people of peace that open their networks — friends and family and any other social groups they might be involved with — to the Gospel. The people of peace, not the the church planter, then gathers. They become the facilitators, not us. At no point in the process does anything ever revolve around us; the idea is that if we were for what ever reason unable to go into the area again, the groups would continue because all along in the process, they were empowered to lead themselves and not rely on us.

This isn’t to say we have no place in leadership or discipleship in these movements. Rather we carry an important role: it is we who disciple those initial people of peace. Everything we’ve been trained in — glorifying God, loving one another, and seeking those that are lost — we pass on to those initial people of peace (as well as the basics in simple church facilitation). And we continue to meet with them and stay in relationship with them, often for years, until there truly is no further need of an outsider. But they should quickly carry the mantel of discipling others who disciple others who disciple others. And here is were our job for many becomes difficult: it necessitates a background role. As it works, we should only be “known” by that first generation. As successive generations are produced, our place in the picture fades (and quite rapidly sometimes).

Anyways, this is an important addendum to what I wrote in the last post. It’s important that we see our place clearly and know that, as an outsider, we can never be leaders in these movements to Christ. Instead we raise up leaders on the inside. We do have important roles but being the man on top isn’t one of them (and won’t ever be).

If you keep up with modern missiology (the study of missions) and what various organizations and people are doing and strategizing around, you might have heard the term “Church Planting Movements” thrown around. There is a book all about it, in fact, put out by the IMB (the missions board of the Southern Baptist Church). For the unawares, CPMs are modern movements of extremely large completely unreached and unchurched peoples coming to Christ rapidly. And by many and rapidly we are talking about a scale of tens of thousands of people (or more) coming to Christ in a years time or hundreds or more churches being planted in the same timeframe. So very rapid and very large growth.

It’s something we often don’t hear much about in the west. We’ve probably all heard about one popular example though — the underground church in a certain large Asian country that is slowly opening up. As I said, these tend to be the focus more than anything else of mission organizations across the board as God is moving in mind blowing ways. They tend to all have several characteristics, which I’ll dig more into in the coming weeks as we study here at CPx; we’ve only begun to scratch the surface, and it is a quite deep topic.

It’s an important topic to us as a part of All Nations as they have missionaries across the globe focusing on seeing this very thing. In the face of an increasingly flattening world, and the threat of an ever encroaching secularism of the west, these CPMs (or Movements to Jesus as we are more apt to call them) are changing this planet for the better. It’s because of them that the two thirds world is rising up to take the spiritual mantel from the west.

In our first week, we began to talk about these movements, and it started with a frank discussions about the nature of church and how we view it. We started by discussing our views of church, particularly our terminology in describing it. We have many words and phrases used and it’s interesting to compare those within the Bible to those external to it. Some of the external (read: nonbiblical) words we came up with were, “Building”, “Place”, “Parachurch”, “Organization” and other such words. These words tend to focus on church as meeting — as something external to a people — to more of a gathering or venue or more simply put, a non living and active thing. Words that describe church that we pulled directly from the Bible were things like “Body”, “Bride”, “People”, “Ecclesia”, “Brethren”, “Saints”, “House”, “household”, “Living Temple”, “Royal Priesthood”. The focus in this terminology set is not on the place or building or any non-living thing, but rather on the community itself. Church is a community of people — of followers of Jesus — and its this collective that makes Church what it is.

All Nations (the organization we are training with and joining) sees themselves (rightly) as this. Better put — they are a community of small simple churches. Simple church is the focus as they are (a) easily reproducible (b) put church in the hands of people and not in a the hands of a few leaders and (c) frankly, the form in which the vast majority of movements to Jesus are taking across the globe.

But its important to note that the focus shouldn’t be on the wineskin, so to speak. We had a frank discussion about Luke 5 and wine and wineskins. When I say wineskin in this context, I’m simply referring to some sort of structure. Simple Church then is a wineskin and it isn’t the focus. Yes — it is what is working best in our context and in our particular mission but that isn’t to say we chase after to the exclusion of all other models. We have to be attune to the Holy Spirit and the wine (getting back to the aforementioned parable of Jesus) that’s being poured. It could very well be that a different structure (perhaps a more traditional model?) is what is appropriate for other contexts.

I’ll admit to be slightly biased here — it’s hard to think of a context where simple church wouldn’t work fantastically well. It empowers people rather than leaders. It involves the church as a whole, inviting everyone to truly bring something to the table. It’s bent around fellowship and more often than not involves people walking in mission together. I’ve seen it work in American contexts (NormCom for example) as well as African, Asian and Latin American. But you never know — as surely as I write this I could easily one day find myself back in something more traditional.

Anyways, as I wrote it’s the structure that is much less important than what goes into it. Really this God’s concern (even though its so often not ours). As a church, All Nations sees three key ingredients to church: Worship, Mission, and Community. These three things are necessary, in fact for the health of the church. When you boil the Bible down, we see the purpose of the church wrapped up in these areas: to glorify God above any other, to love one another as He loved us and to go forth and disciple nations. And these three things are what we are seeing across the globe as necessary pieces in the movements to Jesus. It’s where we start and where we start them.

Look for more on this and other aspects of Movements To Jesus coming soon!

Yesterday (Friday) was our first outreach day. I’ll back up a minute — during CPx, every week we have two day of lectures and 3 of outreach where we go into the communities and practice what we have learned. Masiphumelele (Masi for short) is the community that Juli and I will be working in. We are definitely excited about working here for several reasons — for one, it is where we have worked in the past so there is some sense of it that kind of feels like home and for two, it is the type of community we envision ourselves working in long term. This isn’t to say that Masi is the community we will forever work in (for various reasons, we aren’t expecting this) but it is the atmosphere and type of community that tugs at our hearts.

Anyways, yesterday was our first day of getting into the community for outreach and the our first opportunity to practice all that we had learned. We’ve been broken up into d-groups of 6 or 7 for these outreaches, and further divided into 2s and 3s and 4s for the purpose of ministering (a group of 7 is rather intimidating to people — we aren’t wanting to gang up on them!). For this and future trips, we are really focused on planting simple churches and so we were looking for peaceful people — people that would open a community or network of people to the Gospel as well as finding people that would intentionally gather their friends and families for little “Bible Studies.”

This last part is key (and in many ways paradigm shifting). When we’ve been here in the past, we’ve focused pretty heavily on finding as many people as possible and grouping them together. Often the people aren’t in any way relationally connected which makes the groups dependent on the outsider for gathering and providing the special sauce that makes the people stick together. This time though we are intentionally not doing that but rather getting locals to gather their people. For more about this, keep following my blog.

Back to the story of outreach numero uno. I went with two other guys — our coach Munya (who is from Zimbabwe) and Lucas (who is actually from Masi). We went out and pretty immediately found 3 different guys who told us that they (a) were interested in studying the Bible and (b) were interested in gathering their friends and families. And they were interested enough to give us their phone numbers so that we could SMS them to remind them. The last man in particular (Richard) we felt particularly good about. He not only seemed interested but also excited.

As we were leaving Richard’s place, we passed a house where a woman called out to us. She had heard about us (or people like us) and had some questions about faith and wanted prayer. We shared with her about Jesus and answered her questions and told her testimonies of His love in Masi. We then prayed for her and it seemed incredibly impactful — she was in tears when we got done and immediately asked us to come back to study the Bible with her (and that she wanted to do the same as the guys: gather friends and family). So we were quite encouraged by this point. I wasn’t expecting quite this response. I knew Masi as a spiritually hungry place, but expected a bit more resistance to the gathering concept. And we may run into it — we’ll find out next week if anyone is “gathered” but I have a lot of hope.

I know I would have probably been thrilled if this was the end of the story for the day but it wasn’t. Our next encounter was with a man named Eddy. He was also from Zimbabwe and was just passing through Masi. We still got an opportunity to share with and pray for him though. And he was another person left changed by the love and presence of God. He’d been struggling with pretty serious neck pain for several months. When we first met him he actually couldn’t move it at all. But we prayed! And Jesus healed! And the pain went away and he could move it again!

And this isn’t even the end of the story — we had two more significant encounters with people! They both revolve around a Zimbabwean house church that meets in another part of Masi. Susan, a woman in it (but who lives elsewhere in Masi) took us to her home and had us pray for her pregnancy. I felt like the Lord was asking me to pray Isaiah 40:31 for her (which I did) and she was really touched. She is even wanting to try and gather her neighbors to start a Bible study (which we were all surprised and excited about since she is already a part of the other). After this, we got to teach the Zimbabwean house church how to facilitate meetings and pray times without us which is significant — prior to this they had been reliant on us outsiders for meeting times and facilitation.

Anyways all that said and done — we were really excited about our first trip into Masi and can’t wait to see what else God does with our time there.

Our first week at CPx was filled with lots of ground work to set up the coming days, weeks and months. One of the first things we did was talk debriefing. Debriefing is the act of coming together as a group (or personally if you are the journalling type) and actively talking about something (it could be anything) that you walked through. Some might call it an art form as it involves mulling over the events and their associated thoughts and emotions to connect them in such a way that you grow and learn from the experience.

It’s something I’ve actively done on mission trips in the past but haven’t been as adept at applying it more generally. It does have application though and can be a great tool to process life and everything within it. It also does have a Biblical basis; the narrative underlying the first portion of Luke 10 is just one example of this. In it, Jesus sends 72 disciples out in pairs to visit villages, find people of peace and bring the Kingdom of heaven to their doorsteps. He then also calls them back to Himself and has them report on what they saw and felt. In any case, I think debriefing is a practical tool to help process through whatever life throws at a person.

We were taught two different models: the BASIC model and the AI model.

The BASIC model, as the name implies, is pretty straightforward (not that the AI method isn’t). It involves asking yourself and others 4 simple questions:

1. What did you see happen?
2. What did you feel?
3. What did you learn?
4. What is God saying in the midst of this event?

As I said, there isn’t much to it. The AI method, I think, is a bit more nuanced and attempts to more directly connect past or current behavior and thoughts with what you’ll do in the future.

AI stands for Appreciative Inquiry. The AI method attempts to put the focus specifically on what God is doing rather than on what our enemy has done or might be trying to do. In this way it actively seeks to map the movement of God rather than the movement of the devil (generally speaking, it is always healthier and better to map God rather than the devil). It too consists of 4 similar questions.

1. What made your heart come alive (or phrased differently, what was most life giving or energizing)?
2. Why is it like that?
3. What would you change about your experience or what do you wish would have happened?
4. What are you going to do next time?

The first question seeks to get at the heart of the experience, connecting your passions with what actually happened, regardless of how loose those connections might be. It gets you talking and thinking and feeling the experience in such a way that perhaps connections you didn’t originally see become visible. For example, I am going to consider this question in the light of what I saw and felt upon first seeing extreme poverty several years ago. At that time I had no clue how to process what I was seeing and I (unfortunately) locked those thoughts and feelings away for a good long while where they just festered. Had I been actively looking for what made my heart alive in that circumstance — praying for the TB patients, providing running water to a family without it, seeing the joy in a child’s eyes as he learned to walk — I could have begun to process the passions in my own heart and come up with something of a response. Alas, hindsight is always 20/20 and doesn’t really matter that much now — the processing eventually got done.

The second question gets at the specific values behind the experiences brought up by question one. It places those experiences in the broader context of our life and God’s design.

The third and fourth questions are similar and begin to connect the experience and value to growth. The third question examines specifically what you wished would have happened and what you would change, if you had a chance to do it all over. The fourth actively presses you to think about the next time you might be faced with that or a similar situation and let what you learned mature your response.

So debriefing. I have this inkling of a suspicion that we are going to be doing a lot of this foreseeable future. But that’s OK. I think it’s supposed to be like that. After all, at some level it sounds an awful lot like what discipleship is supposed to be all about.

I’ve often heard it said that short term trips are a waste of time. Some claim that those on them just tend to “get in the way” by distracting long-term missionaries from their mission, whatever it might be. Others have said it’s an excuse for comfortable Christians to take a “vacation” while masquerading as mission focused individuals. Other people tend to make up other stories and excuses too.

I don’t buy it though.

I mean, sometimes it might be true. There are times I wonder with some of the trips I’ve heard about in my days. You’ve probably heard of those I’m talking about too — the ones that sound like wild and crazy adventures that might include a bit of evangelism (or might not). But by and large I think many times when we pull out the “waste of time” card, we do so erroneously.

So why do I say this?

The biggest reason is the overwhelming amount of evidence that lives are forever changed by short term teams. My church in the states, for example, has sent short term teams to Cape Town, South Africa the past 3 US summers (it’s actually winter then in Cape Town). On those trips we saw God move in many incredible ways. Lots of people professed HIS name for the first time. Many of those (and others) were healed of infirmities as serious as TB. Still others saw God move into their lives in ways they have never experienced before.

On those trips, we worked in a particular township called Masiphumelele (Masi for short). And if you are reading this blog, you likely know that my wife and I are currently in cross cultural church planting school called CPx which started a week ago. We were so encouraged upon arriving to find out that their are 3 people from Masi actually in CPx! One woman was led to Christ by a few women on our short term trip 2 summers ago. The other two also have less direct but ties none the less to our short term trips. And it’s so exciting to see that fruit matured and so encouraging to know that God can and will mightily use short term trips. They aren’t just sightseeing ventures for Christians and definitely will, when walked out in the right attitude, radically affect the kingdom.

There are other readily apparent benefits too. Short term trips can do wonders to encourage long term missionaries. They can allow for a more targeted, direct and focus mission that might normally take a long term team a while to get into. They often can allow long term workers to rest for a period (particularly in the case of the AIDs orphanage I worked with 3 summers ago). And they often allow for individuals with specialized skills to briefly provide services to those that might need them.

I’m definitely for short term mission trips and encourage everyone to go on one at some point in their life. If you are looking for a place to go — I heartily recommend Cape Town, especially after the World Cup finishes in July.

I find the prosperity gospel to be most objectionable. The idea that God wants us to be self absorbed — focused on our own health, wealth and western ideals of prosperity — has done more to harm the kingdom of God than build it up. It also directly contradicts Biblical, particularly New Testament, notions of kingdom living.

I was reminded this once again while reading on the plane. I started reading Luke again but before jumping into the text, I asked for God to highlight simple things that I’d missed before. One of those dealt specifically with our false notions of prosperity and kingdom living. It comes specifically from Luke 5 and is the story of Jesus and the fishermen.

3 He got into5 one of the boats, which was Simon’s, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then Jesus sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. 4 When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and lower your nets for a catch.” 5 Simon answered, “Master, we worked hard all night and caught nothing! But at your word I will lower the nets.” 6 When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets started to tear. 7 So they motioned to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they were about to sink. 8 But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” 9 For Peter and all who were with him were astonished at the catch of fish that they had taken, 10 and so were James and John, Zebedee’s sons, who were Simon’s business partners. Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” 11 So when they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

Here is something amazing. Jesus is traveling with these fisherman and teaches some from their boat. What exactly — we don’t know. We could probably guess a little bit — it seems that often Jesus taught about what the kingdom of God is like, through parables and stories and simple truths, like in the sermons on the mount and plains. He often spoke of an alternative lifestyle — one lived in a subversive opposition to the dominant culture.

And here are these fishermen. They first recognized that in Jesus, there was someone worth listening to. Even though they had been out fishing all night with nothing to show for their hard work, they were willing to take Jesus at His word. When He said, ”Lower your nets” they did, and to their amazement caught more fish than they likely had ever seen at one given time. They even had to call another boat over to hold all of the excess. For these fishermen, this likely represented an enormous wealth such that they didn’t often come across.

For us in the states, more often than not it seems that this would have been the end of the story. God is supposed to bless us with wealth beyond measure. It’s an expectation to live and walk in. And sadly this satisfies us. So often we leave it at that (wealth accumulation as outward sign of blessing) and ignore the greater truth of what abundance and wealth truly is.

Thankfully though for Simon Peter and his business partners, this wasn’t a sufficient end to the story. They are amazed at the wealth but more amazed with Jesus. Jesus’ abundance immediately draws attention to their deficiency. But not the deficiency of their pocketbooks — the deficiency of their hearts.

And what they did next is truly amazing. As soon as they got to shore they left all of that new found wealth behind (as well as everything else that they had) to follow Jesus. The wealth truly didn’t matter a single bit when contrasted with Jesus (the source of all our life). Worldly wealth pales in comparison with the wealth of a heart filled with His kingdom.

• An interview with Bill Watterson. He created Calvin and Hobbes (my favorite comic strip — I’m trying to figure out how to take some of the books to Africa) and this is the first interview with him in 15 years.

• A good friend, whom I’ve gone to Africa with twice, writes about the Prodigal Son with a mind for spiritual justice, and not just worldly justice.

• A favorite band of mine, Midlake, has a new CD out today. Stream it for free here.

• Speaking of Midlake, here is a link to download their Denton Session. Need new music? Check it out. Free and legit.

• In more bizarro news, it seems that the Somali pirates fashion themselves as modern day Robin Hoods. For one — they funnel a lot of resources back into their incredibly poor communities and two — they are smuggling in aid to Haiti. I don’t recommend any one get into pirating though; I can’t condone armed robbery/hijacking/kidnapping as a modern valid job.