Missionary Stuff

So occasionally, very very occasionally, we act like “real” missionaries. Some recent examples:

Rebecca has been involved in several women’s outreach events, using them as an opportunity to try to help some of our Kenyan friends from town get plugged into a church (ours, preferably). Two of our former neighbors have been really good friends to us, and have come to church events with us on a couple of occasions.

Rebecca drove a car load of Kenyans and Congolese refugees out into the Rift Valley last Sunday to be a part of a soccer match between our church’s youth (18-35) and a group of IDPs (internally displaced persons) living in a refugee area because of the violence after the last election.

Rebecca actually gets asked to play a lot, not surprisingly, and both of us played with a team of Congolese refugees one Saturday morning a few weeks ago. The refugees we know come from two families who attend New City Fellowship. Despite being “aliens in a foreign land,” they have been incredibly hospitable to us, and Rebecca and I have enjoyed playing soccer with them, making a visit to their home, and watching the dance group they’ve put together for the young folks. They’ve got a lot of free time on their hands but they’re making the best of it, and Rebecca and I have been brainstorming about how to be more involved in their lives (see below).

Rebecca and I got to do a “follow-up” lunch with a couple of deacons at our church, New City Fellowship. You may recall that we got a chance to lead two Sunday schools on working with the poor with the new deacons in June, and now they’re working hard to come up with a set of policies that will guide them in their work among the poor. Because New City is a small, highly inter-racial church, with a high number of very poor families from the slums, we can say that they have their work cut out for them! It was awesome to get to kick around ideas with a few of them, and to simply be a part of the conversation about what it means for a church to holistically care for the poor. In the next few weeks, we’re hoping to visit a few of the folks the deacons have worked with (particularly the Congolese refugees) to begin trying to do with them what we talked about in our last blog post: discussing what God has done for them, what gifts and abilities He’s given them, and how they can better use those gifts to provide for their families.

Rebecca lead our small group Bible study last Friday. We talked about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, with Rebecca helping us to look carefully at Mary, Martha, and Jesus’ characters specifically. The small group has been awesome for us, giving us a real base for making friends and real encouragement in our own lives with Jesus.

I got to lead worship the past two weeks at New City because our normal worship leader was sick. Although I’ve participated before, these were my first opportunities to actually lead. And while I’ve lead music for years in numerous different venues, this was, to put it mildly, a completely different thing altogether. The team consisted of about eight people with six different national ethnicities represented (India, Pakistan, Madagascar, Kenya, Korea and the US). We sang in English, Hindi, Kiswahili, and some language from Zimbabwe for good measure. I had lots of help, to say the least. But as someone who has been thinking and convicted about the importance of racial and stylistic diversity in all worship everywhere this is like a dream come true. And because the worship leader’s doctor asked her to stay away from singing for a month, I’m on the schedule twice more in November.

Moreover, Jesus has put us in relationships with several different individuals or families who are either Muslim or openly nominal Christians. Please pray that Jesus would use us to bring some of these folks to himself!

All of this is very exciting for us, not only because we’re passionate about Jesus and His church, but also because it allows us to bring our heart for his kingdom into our lives in Nairobi itself, instead of leaving all of that to our actual job descriptions. And things are happening all the time. I visited a Teen Challenge residential facility recently that is literally three doors down, and have been asked to preach at New City in November. So please pray for all of it.

Peace,
Michael