mbjones

I posted earlier today a mind-map of a few verses from Deuteronomy but before that my last CPx specific post was on the great commission, as seen in Matthew’s Gospel.

From it, we learned that our mandate is to go forth, making disciples of every nation, baptizing them in the name of the trinity and teaching them to obey all of God’s commandments. This brings up an important topic of conversation: that of transformation.

Social justice is a hot topic right now. There are folks in the states disparaging the idea at every opportunity that they can. Their are others that make Jesus and the Bible solely about it (a social gospel that removes the sting of evil and the need of a savior). Both are quite wrong — Justice (I’m stepping back now because I think the “social” piece is an unnecessary adjective) is quite important to the heart of God — we see that in God’s design of His society, in the words He speaks through the prophets, and in the action and ministry of Jesus but it’s not the main thing. If we take Jesus’ Words seriously we see that discipling nations is the main thing.

And it’s quite profound to look at discipleship and it’s possible results. At its initiation, repentance is sought out. This is an active re-orienting of one’s life around the ethic of the Kingdom of God by renouncing and walking away from work sown in the kingdom of the world. This, specifically through the conviction and work of the Holy Spirit now present in their life, leads to a regeneration of the inner man (which should produce change in the outer man) and a character that looks much more like Jesus and less like the world. This reformation leads to the renewal of hearts and minds — they are shaped specifically by God — and the end result is a transformation that has changed everything.

This is the idea at least. Through all of this, though, we must act justly, as Jesus did — we heal the sick, we comfort the broken hearted, we clothe the naked, we proclaim and seek release for the captive, we announce jubilee, and teach those around us to do the same — and ultimately place our hope in the transformative power of the Gospel to completely change communities. We see it happen throughout Acts (The end of Acts 2 speaks powerfully to me regarding this) and we see glimpses of it happening in the communities we work in. We should never underestimate the power of the Gospel to radically transform communities united for it. And perhaps its a bonus but as Micah says, hearts radically transformed by God will be oriented around justice and mercy.

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.

Africa needs discipleship, and not just church planters, and definitely not just mission workers unwilling to truly invest in people. Churches are abundant, even in the poor areas, but so often they are syncretic messes (and often they are sponsored by denominations and congregations from outside of the continent so there is limited local oversite). Syncretism is the blending of traditions in such a way that pieces of each are retained and active. This can be very problematic for followers of Jesus as part of what He calls us to is a repentance (an active turning away from) from the track of the world (particularly idols and other ‘gods’ existing in our lives).

We saw this play out in our time in Cape Town this past may in that many of the folks that we met that said they knew Jesus went to churches where ancestor worship played a large part of the religion. It was Jesus and…this. It’s in the this where things get problematic because people make for themselves, often unwittingly because discipleship is non-existent, idols that open them to dark spiritual forces.

Many of you may not be aware of ancestor worship and its problems. Ancestor worship says that when we die, we still have a spiritual presence in the material word and can act upon it through our living descendants. People believe that their ancestors come to them as spirits and that they have to do anything that their ancestors say. It’s always the destructive path that the ancestors lead people on: drinking, drugs, promiscuous sex and the like are common things that people say their ancestors affect. People commonly seek both protection and aid in dealing with these spirits through witchdoctors, who are actually allowed to play a fairly prominent role in syncretic churches.

Syncretic churches aren’t the only reason Africa needs discipleship though. I mentioned previously that many African churches have some connection to outside churches and denominations but oversite is limited and we’ve tended to export our bad along with our good. One “bad” that we’ve exported is our western consumerist attitude that says not only that church is just another decision we make but the church we choose is dependent on what’s best out there (it’s fairly common within the western church to be based on ideas of “attraction” or what we can best do to attract people into our church).

One particularly bad case of this gone awry is seen in Nigeria (and many other places in Africa) where churches are quick to label children as witches in order to attract people in with their supposed power. According to the linked article, over the past decade in two of the Nigerian states 15,000 children were accused of witchcraft (1000 of them were brutally murdered and countless other brutally tortured). If it wasn’t bad enough that these supposed pastors use such false accusations to garner attention, they also often charge an arm and a leg to perform supposed exorcisms (often $60/session to people who make no more than $2/day). And what’s worse it’s often the orphan that’s targeted.

As I started by saying, Africa needs discipleship. This is why we are moving our family half way across the world. More than planting churches we seek to truly disciple leaders, training them to do the same, not in the ways of western churchianity or old African traditions but in Jesus who transcends all of these. He has a plan for this continent and these people; when they truly grab ahold of Him and Him alone, old ways will pass away, lives will be transformed and a whole continent will be closer to the kingdom of God.