Set A Stone In Nairobi

Becca receiving the traditional Kenyan farewell gift

 Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, “Thus far the LORD has helped us,” –I Samuel 7:12-

This is it. This is the last blog post to be written from this side of the pond. In a little over 72 hours, Rebecca and I will be on a plane that will take us away from Kenya for all of the foreseeable future.

Amidst all of the chaos of mixed-emotions and packing fever, I can’t help but wonder what the real missionaries feel like at this point, what someone who has spent 10, 15, 20, or even 30 years feels like when they realize that they’re about to leave behind friends they may not meet again, their second home, and a huge portion of their life’s work. I can hardly imagine that. But what I can say is that for us the strongest emotion now is one of deep, deep gratitude to Jesus.

In our blog, updates, meet and greets, prayer letters, and conversations, Rebecca and I have tried our best to be honest about the struggles we’ve faced living here. The work with the farmers has been taxing and overwhelming, and even now it’s often difficult to see whether or not we’ve had much of an impact. We’ve experienced severe road rage in the daily life-risking activity of driving in Nairobi, we’ve been overwhelmed by myriad cultural differences that can grate on you like nails on a chalk board (particularly in terms of being asked for money), and we’ve been irate and undone by the stories of deep injustice we hear daily about so many of the politicians, schools, churches, NGOs, and businesses. And yet, the last two weeks leave all of this covered by a deep sense of thanksgiving.

Govind teaching Michael how to do Koroga Bonga: Stir and Talk

Each of our farmers groups gathered specifically to send us off Kenyan style. Each group lavished us with gifts from hand woven bags, to banana leaf canvas paintings and hand-carved gourds. And then, each and every group told us how much they loved us, how we had become good friends, and how they would continue to pray for us. One of the goals we had from the beginning was to be people who connected with folks on the ground, who ate the food our friends served us and slept in the guest beds they offered us. At each meeting I was amazed by how clear it was that this had happened. God honored our efforts and the Kenyan people are among the most hospitable and gracious on earth. We truly feel like we have mamas, babas, ndugus, na dadas in the faith all over Central Kenya (mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters in Kiswahili). At our pilot project send-off, one of the leaders stood up and thanked us for helping them see the resources they had that they hadn’t recognized, and helping them to work together to use those resources. Creating that kind of experience was a full half of what we hoped for with that group, and by God’s grace it seems to have happened. We made so many mistakes! We can be nothing but be thankful that God used us all the same.

Our experience in Nairobi has been more of the same. Last Saturday I was in an accident which was not my fault. Under the weight of culture stress, car stress, leaving stress, and all-round sinfulness I succumbed to the temptation to be pretty completely unChrist-like to the lady who hit me (who claimed it was my fault). Followers of the blog: this should sound familiar (remember the police incident). I went to church the next day ashamed of myself, feeling like I had failed Jesus and wondering how I ever expected to represent him well in all my lousiness. I girded up my loins and led worship for the last time at NCF all the same, and received the body and blood of Christ through communion afterwards. And then the church gathered around Rebecca and I, gave us incredible gifts, and spoke of the great maturity, love, and passion with which we have served at NCF. Afterwards every demographic of our extremely diverse church came up and thanked us for serving, expressed their love for us, and told us how grateful they were for our friendship. Over and over again people said, “From the very beginning, you were reaching out and befriending people from every group in the church.” And finally a close friend came up to me and said, “I’ve seen lots of people come and go here at NCF, but I’ve never seen two people showered with love as much as you guys.”

Rebecca and Michael wearing our gifts with Pastor Joe and his wife Elfi

And in that moment I realized: the good I do is not my own, it is Christ who lives in me. But for Christ uniting Himself with me through the power of the Holy Spirit, I am nothing but that angry jerk on the side of the road. All of our righteousness before the Lord is like filthy road-rage rags; but Christ has shone through Rebecca and me in ways we did not even recognize with a light that is not our own. Let the Lord be praised! And we are so grateful.

Later that evening all of our friends from Nairobi came to a good-bye party thrown for us by the church. We have slept at the homes of 5 different families in the last 9 days. We have feasted, partied, remembered our time here, and grieved our departure with dozens and dozens of brothers and sisters in the Lord who showed hospitality to these two American aliens and strangers on our sojourn through this foreign land. We have seen Christ in the hands and feet of our brothers and sisters, and seen how Christ has worked through our grubby hands and feet to do the good works he prepared from the beginning of time for us to do. And we are grateful.

Two farmers and Beth, who will continue working on the pilot project

“Here I raise my Ebenezer, hither by Thy help I’ve come.” So says the great hymn. The story comes from the Old Testament when Samuel rallies the Israelites to return to the Lord. They gather together and fast and pray and repent of all their idol worship. While they’re there the Philistines come after them, but Samuel says that the LORD their God will fight for them. And so they cry out to God, and God answers with loud thunder and sends their enemies into confusion, and Israel wins the day. Afterwards Samuel raises a stone at Mizpah and tells the Israelites to remember “thus far has the Lord brought us” when they see it in later days. Samuel had been around faithless Israel long enough to know that they would be tempted to forget God’s goodness when things got rough in the future; so he gave them a stone to help them remember Yahweh’s everlasting faithfulness.

Us with the Khans, who run a ministry for people with handicaps

As many of you know, Rebecca and I are coming home with a vision for our next several years. Rebecca is applying to programs that would qualify her to teach in one of Memphis’s struggling inner-city schools. I will be returning to work at Advance Memphis, where I will be trying to “do justice and love mercy” by helping low-income African-American adults in the 38126 zip code develop economically through the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We’re hoping to find a place to live in or near that neighborhood. Having seen racial, tribal, and socio-economic reconciliation among Africans and Asians, we feel called to enter into that work in a place where our own tribe is involved in the problem. We’re excited and very, very nervous. The work will not be easy, and because of our time here we’re more aware than ever of the complexities of poverty and injustice, and the depths of our own inadequacy and sin.

So here we raise our Ebenezer. With thanksgiving and hope we’ll remember the long drives through the thousand tiny farms filled to overflowing with electric green life. We’ll remember the friendship of hundreds of farmers, some of the world’s poorest of the poor from the slums in Nairobi, and Christian brothers and sisters from some of the world’s least reached places (like Pakistan and India). We’ll remember that despite our great personal failure and sin, Christ nevertheless baptized our half-hearted efforts and turned them into stones built into the kingdom of God. We’ll remember the power of His presence to us day in and day out through His word, prayer, the Eucharist, and the faces of brothers and sisters from every corner of the globe. Come what may, we call ourselves to remember and each of you to remind us, “Thus far has God brought us. And we have confidence that He who has brought us here shall bring us home.”

Having climbed Mt Kenya, about to head down. Cue the symbolism.

Thanks be to the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! The LORD has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy!

Thanks for following us in this journey. Keep checking the blog for a few State-side reflections and eventually a link to our new blog (location TBD). Pray for us, write us (michaelandrebeccarhodes@gmail.com), visit us (Memphis), and call us (901-849-6345 from December 27 onward). Your encouragement, financial support, prayer, friendship and love have helped make all of this possible. When we look back at all we’ve learned and what God has done in us and through us, we believe it has been worth it. But more importantly than anything else, let each of us now, when we celebrate the time of Christ’s visiting us on Earth during Advent, remember the great things the Lord has done for us with great gratitude and full joy:

No more let sin and sorrows grow

Nor thorns infest the ground!

He comes to make His blessings known

Far as the curse is found!

Peace,

Michael

Lesson #7- The Body and the Bride

Finally, Rebecca and I have been overwhelmed by the power of the church. In our individualized, ultra-mobile American culture, the church can seem on the surface to be little more than a voluntary-society. In Kenya, we have seen glimpses of how the church as the community of God can change the world.

Kenya is one of those countries that has had a long history of all sorts of organizations of every stripe trying to create positive change within the society. Billions of dollars and probably millions of people have tried to make Kenya a better place. But only one oft-overlooked community in Kenya has the specific promise of the Creator God that they will be the hands and feet of the King in His world, and that community is the church. If we look at the metaphors the New Testament uses for the church, metaphors like “people,” “family,” “bride,” and “body,” all of them are incredibly intimate and personal. The church is less like an association you join than it is like a community you inherit as a birth-right, a community which demands your highest allegiance. Our first births bring us into the world heavily committed to our biological families, to the nation we live in, and to our ethnic group. But our new birth in Christ brings us into a community that Christ says claims a greater allegiance even than these. And that is the church.

We have seen the best and the worst of the church here. We have seen pastors abuse their spiritual authority in despicable ways, and we have also seen pastors and parishioners alike literally lay down their lives for the gospel. Whether with our friend Julias, who has taken a massive pay cut to pastor a small church in the village and yet finds a way to take care of 30 orphans in an orphanage that the church (whose total tithe is probably around 300 dollars a month) somehow manages to support, or the entire fellowship at New City Nairobi, which has stood together as a witness to the love of Jesus that reconciles enemies together before God and takes care of the needs of its congregants at the deepest levels, we have seen Christ changing the world through the hands and feet of his church.

There are some things that now, in the middle of packing and saying goodbye and all the emotions of leaving, I simply cannot find words to express or explain. The experience of church here in all of its body-of-Christ fullness is one of them. I can only say that after two years of seeing the poor and vulnerable be abused by churches that failed them on the one hand, and seeing new life and hope springing forth among the poor and spiritually broken in churches that embody the kingdom on the other, that we are more committed to the church than ever before. The church in our minds and hearts can no longer simply be the place where our family chooses to go and worship on Sunday mornings; it is the community that demands our highest allegiance at every level of life. We have been given the task of embodying the kingdom: to demonstrate in word, deed, and sign what it looks like for a people pulled from every corner of the globe and from every economic status to recognize the reign of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. We are the hands and feet of the Creator. As Tim Keller said, we are the aliens and strangers in the world who nevertheless are radically for the world in our love for our enemies, our generosity to the poor and broken, our moral purity, our love for each other, our fervency for the Lord, and our proclamation of good news that is found in no other place but in Christ and in his church.

We live in a time in which more and more people are looking around at their lives and seeing the fragmentation and isolation that comes from our Western culture’s rampant pursuit of individual choice and total rejection of outside authority. People feel alone. Maybe one of the reasons why the old methods of evangelism seem to become less and less effective is that they address one’s connection with God but ignore one’s connection to the world. But the blood of Jesus not only reconciles humans with God but humans with humans. The blood of Jesus brings us together, and the feast of communion anticipates that great feast in the new heavens and the new earth in which every tear will be wiped away and people from every tongue and tribe and nation will worship the Lamb. It is in the church that we come to the Table, and take the bread and the cup, and proclaim the Christ’s saving blood “until he comes.” And it is in the church that Jesus gives the world glimpses of what his rule and reign will look like. We in the church have an immense challenge, and an incredible opportunity. And it will cost us all of who we are. But one thing we’ve learned in Kenya is that it’s worth it.

May Jesus Christ make us His hands and feet through the power of the Holy Spirit for the glory of the Father.

Michael

Lesson #6- Citizens In The Kingdom Under The King

So if Christ is the King who is coming to reclaim His world, what about us? What do we do? What's our role?

We all know the simple (but not easy) answer: Jesus calls us to follow after him. To take up our crosses. To wash each others' feet. To go and make disciples. After the resurrection, Jesus breathes on the disciples and says "as the Father sent me so send I you." That, coupled with Paul's insistence that the church is the body of Jesus makes it pretty clear that we're to go about living like Jesus is Lord, telling others about Jesus, and embodying the Kingdom of God in our local contexts.

And of course a huge part of this is serving the poor. Moreover, an even more difficult part of living in the shadow of the kingdom is to treat the poor as contributors, even especially valued members of the kingdom community ("for theirs is the kingdom of heaven") rather than as passive needy recipients.

I think the thing that has struck Rebecca and I over the past two years, though, is how often we confess with our mouths that we are servants of the King of kings who has come to make His blessings known throughout the cosmos, and then we deny it with our lives by going about our work half-heartedly or without careful thought. It is so easy, especially when we're working with the poor, to think that just because we showed up, we've done enough. After all, our intentions are so good, and a whole bunch of other folks just stayed home . . . right?

 The nugget of truth here is what John Calvin meant when he talked about how Jesus' work not only cleanses us from sin but even makes our shoddy works great in his kingdom. Jesus takes our filthy-rags righteousness and makes it into something beautiful. But this mentality can become an excuse to neglect careful thinking or hard work.

We almost titled this post "The Importance of Professionalism." While at the end of the day I don't think that language captures the fullness of what we're talking about, I think it's crucial for each of us to realize that Christ doesn't want our leftover moments and half-baked thoughts; He wants our biggest dreams and greatest efforts. If we start a business we probably do all sorts of feasibility studies and serious research; if we want to do medicine we go to nine years of school. But somehow when it comes to working with the poor, we can fall into the lie that all we need are good intentions.

In her memoir about her conversion from orthodox Judaism to Christianity, Lauren Winner writes about how a Jewish mentor of hers would always use sparkling water to make the bread for Passover. Initially Winner wonders why, considering how it costs more and makes no difference in the taste. But eventually her mentor tells her that the bread is an offering, that it is consecrated to the Lord, and that no expense is to be spared. I think that that's a good metaphor for what God wants for us when we serve Him; He wants us to quit bringing those sickly lame lambs and go find the biggest snow-white sheep we can find.

Again and again we have been challenged to read more, ask more questions, talk to wiser counselors, and to work harder. There is so much that we can learn about how to serve in whatever capacity we find ourselves in simply by taking the time to do some research and by hanging out with the more experienced folks around us. Listening is one of my weakest skills in general, but a number of counselors have surrounded me in our work, and we have witnessed real improvement as a result.

The question for all of us as we look at our lives of service is, "Are we offering the first fruits, or the mealy rotting left-overs?" How can we grow in our ability to serve the poor and the marginalized, to work for justice, to do mercy, to care for the widows, orphans, and aliens in our own communities? Who is doing these things well around us that we can learn from?

I've never lived under an earthly king. As an American, I tend to hold fast and loose to authority, and to consider charity and service volunteer activities that I enter into out of my own beneficence. The problem is that my real citizenship isn't in a democratic republic founded on individual freedom. My real citizenship is in a kingdom under the King of kings, who demands my allegiance and service, and who is calling me to get on board with some projects He's working on. I think if I really pondered this and took it to heart, it would radically increase the level of seriousness and energy I'd put towards the work. Maybe that's true for many of us; regardless, it's something Jesus has really hammered home to Rebecca and me these last two years.

May we all grow in our zeal for the Lord's work, and in our willingness to shape our lives around service to Him.

Michael

Lesson #5- Jesus Is The Risen King

It has not been easy for Rebecca and me to begin learning the lessons which we've highlighted in the last four posts. I expect that many of you might be discouraged simply by reading how two folks who've spent two years trying to help the poor are heading home with the sneaking suspicion that it's all more complicated than they ever imagined. And in the face of our own sin-sick hearts, the sin-sick hearts of the poor folks we want to help, and the sin-sick cultural, political, family, and economic systems in which we live, we need more than the slice of humble pie we blogged about in the last post.

And in the face of all of this each of us has essentially three options. We can give up in the face of the difficulty. Or we can learn more, work harder, give more, try our darndest to love more, and simply seek to live better lives in the face of the pain and brokenness. Both of these are long roads that lead to nowhere, and every world religion basically walks one or the other of them: escape from the world, or become a good enough person to fix it.

Every religion save one. Only in the Christian faith do we find a third answer, the answer to which Rebecca and I find ourselves driven to over and over again. And that answer is simply this: Jesus is the Risen King.

The Biblical narrative tells us mostly what we already sense in our hearts to be true: that though we were made for greatness and glory we ourselves have done something so horrible that at times we can barely find anything good among the wreckage of what we should be. And though God spoke in many times and in many ways to our forefathers, yet all of them fell short of the glory; none were able to save. So God Himself took on the flesh of fallen humanity, overcame the temption of the Satan who had lured Adam and Eve out from under the Father's protection, took on hell face-to-face at the cross, and overcame all the power of sin and death at the Resurrection. Jesus has won the victory against the sin that hides in our hearts, in the hearts of our neighbors, in all of our human structures and systems, and in all the principalities and powers of darkness.

So often we talk about the cross and the resurrection as Christ's saving work on our behalf, that we might have eternal life with him. And oh how true that is! But that glorious truth only makes sense in a larger story, the story of the God whose world ran away from Him, and who suffered death to bring it back. God walked among us in the person of Jesus, declaring the good news of the kingdom of God, the good news that though the world had rebelled, God Himself was bringing it back into its proper obedient place under His feet.

And this is the solution also to so many of the squabbles the church has gotten into lately. Should we do social justice work? Is evangelism more important? What about the environment? Is the gospel directed primarily to me as an individual, or is it a community thing? One side accuses the other of following an other-worldly faith that's no earthly good; the other side responds that eternity matters more, and that it is the saving of souls that matters most. But either one without the other is a half truth! The Christ has come! And as Paul so powerfully declares in Colossians, through Jesus all things are being brought back under the rule of Jesus! All things! He comes to make His blessings known far as the curse is found! This is the solution to all of our broken marriages, to the lusts of our hearts, to the injustice of our political systems, to the brokenness of our cultures, to the sinful hearts of rich and poor alike, and to the groaning created world that cries out around us. Jesus created it all for His glory, and though sin has marred it for a moment, He is bringing it all back to Himself for eternity.

In the cross and the resurrection Jesus won the victory over death, hell, sin, and all the powers of darkness.  So where do we run when feel beaten down by our own inadequacy, or by the brokenness of the cultures or political systems in which we live, or when we're overwhelmed by the sinfulness of the folks we work with, or when we're broken by the blackness in our own hearts? We run to the King. He is reconciling and restoring all of it. And He calls us to work alongside Him.

Robert Webber talked about how the early church fathers saw the Biblical narrative as being creation-incarnation-recreation; they believed that the entire cosmos would be recapitulated, that it would be restored to its former glory under the reign of Jesus. And it is this idea, this belief in Christ as King of the cosmos, reconciling and restoring all things, that has comforted us in our weakness, challenged us in our sinfulness, encouraged us in our efforts, and called us to greater striving alongside our Lord.

And the angels will cry "Hail the Lamb," who was slain for the world, "Rule in power!" And the earth shall reply, "You shall reign, as the King of all Kings and the Lord of all Lords!" Sunday is the first day of Advent, the beginning of the Christian year, and the kick-off for a season of reflection on how our Old Testament fathers waited for the coming of the Messiah, and how we ourselves await his coming again. This Jesus, who traded "sapphire-paved courts for stable floors" is the only hope for creation. And in the face of all the struggle and suffering in the world, our answer is now and ever shall be: the King has died. The King is risen. The King will come again.

May we all acknowledge the rule and reign of Christ in our hearts more and more every day of our lives.

Peace,
Michael

Lesson #4- Humble Thyself In The Sight of the Lord (and the farmers, and your neighbors, and your work, and . . .)

One More Farewell Party

The last three posts of this series will focus on the power of the gospel, both through individuals and through the church. But before we get there, Rebecca and I can’t help but mention what must be one of the most dramatic lessons of our time here in our own lives. It could be summed up this way: we know less than we think we know, we can do less than we think we can, and we’ve messed it up more than we thought we did. Or in our oft-repeated phrase, “(Fill in the blank) is just really, really complicated.” But in light of the previous posts on what the poor have to offer us, and about how complex the culture and structures are, if we want to use Biblical language, I think what we’re really talking about is the importance of humility.

So you show up thinking, “Hey, I’m educated, I’m a “doer,” Jesus is on my team! Let’s help some poor folk!” And then you actually meet some of those people, and their authentic faithful dependence on God shines light on your own materialism, and shames you in your spiritual whininess. And then you see how hard they work, and how the system is stacked against them so that your projects and plans somehow seem very small. And then you find out that your thoughts, your attitudes, your involvement in the world is actually part of the problem, that you’re part of the system, that you’re “the man!” And suddenly you find yourself feasting on a fat ‘ole slice of humble pie.

And the complexity of it all becomes overwhelming! And you begin seeing that all your simple solutions don’t work, mainly because you don’t understand as much as you thought you did, nor are you as smart as you thought you were. At least that's our story. And I think for us, and for lots of fairly well-intentioned folks like us, you come to an almost existential crisis.

So what do you do? For starters, you take off the Superman outfit, put away your Messiah complex, and start afresh. And as far as we can tell, the only place to start is where the earliest Christians started: “Jesus Christ is the Risen Lord.”

And that’s what the next post is all about.

Peace,
Michael

Lesson #3- Culture: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Cross-cultural bible story telling with our missionary friend George Mixon

Every missionary everywhere deals with culture. While sometimes in our home countries we can remain so blind to our own cultural assumptions as to forget that we have any, the moment you get off the plane in any other place you’re smacked in the face with the reality that groups of people think differently from other groups of people.

Broadly speaking, missionaries tend towards one of two poles in dealing with cultural differences: either you tend to see the cultural differences positively, as unique expressions of other image bearers from whom you can learn a great deal, or negatively, as a unique set of sin patterns and habits which a given group of people has.

Or, in case that sounds real technical, you either say: “Wow, these Kenyans are so hospitable and kind, I can really learn from that!” Or you say, “Why don’t these crazy Kenyans learn how to drive?”

Rebecca rocking some cross-cultural garb with friends Hash, Deepa, and Aman

Rebecca and I have trekked from one pole to the other and back on this spectrum (and many other missionaries do as well), and our conclusion is this: People are fallen. People are made in God’s image. Culture reflects both of these theological points in powerful, visible and hidden ways. In other words, love it or hate it, culture is a big stinkin’ deal. Ignore it, embrace it completely, or reject it totally, only at your own peril.

My marriage counselor Robby Holt predicted two historic days that I should expect in my marriage, but he made it very clear that there’s no way to predict which day will come first. One day is the day when I would say “Oh my goodness, I never knew Rebecca was such a HUGE SINNER!” And the other day would be when I would wake up and say “OH my goodness I never knew I was such a HUGE SINNER!” In a sense this is what happens to people who spend time in a foreign culture as well. For a while, maybe, you just see all these sin patterns and habits ingrained in a culture. Then one day you wake up and see new, equally horrible, sin patterns in your own.

For instance:

(1) Abusive authority, corruption, and haughty attitudes toward the poor reign supreme in this culture sometimes. (2) A cultural aversion to shame keeps what I would call Biblical confrontation from happening very often, and also often keeps parents and pastors from preaching about Biblical sexual standards. (3) The cultural practice of dowry makes it nearly impossible for poor folk to get married, which means that parental commitment to tradition encourages promiscuity and co-habitation: take marriage as an option off the table, and sexual fidelity becomes mighty difficult. (4) And a cultural complacency about asking for money means I get hit up for cash by people from the wealthiest to the poorest on a regular basis.

On the other hand (picture Tevyan from Fiddler on the Roof now), (1) my culture doesn’t even know the poor anymore. White flight, zoning, suburbanization, segregated churches, and just downright personal effort make sure that the rich hardly ever even see poor people; oh, we’re more politically correct most of the time, but Kenyans almost across the board live among and help support the poor in their midst way more than we do. Which is worse? To be friends and family with the poor and occasionally let pride get the better of you, or to escape pride over the poor by making sure you never see them? (2) Compared to the rest of the world our “upfrontness” and “forthrightness” is just a code word for being a jerk; we’re ruder, meaner, and downright crueler on average for all of our “openness.” We leave churches, families, friends, whatever, at the drop of a hat because of our constant quarreling. (3) Dowry may be outdated but it was meant originally to bind families together for their mutual benefit. Compare that to our own totally individualized, “me-oriented” society in everything from family to church. See above: we leave churches, spouses, whoever, assoon as it doesn’t fit us, and, as a young person I can say confessionally we don’t hardly give any respect to anyone older than us or other than us unless they happen to agree with us, whereas here, a greater sense of respect and admiration for the old means that wisdom gets passed down more effectively. And (4) I don’t like people asking me for money because I live in a society built on greed! Kenyan culture lives by this crazy idea that “to whom much is given much is required” (who said that again?) and everything in me hates it! Why? Because my culture idolizes money to such an extent that it tells me I have money because of my hard work and I get to do what I want with it! Which is more Biblical? Give to those who ask? Or make sure you’re totally financially self-sufficient and learn how to get rid of beggars and borrowers who want to take what’s rightfully yours?

And these are just a few examples.

Cross-cultural fire instructions (Appliances? Tackling?)

Culture makes communication, relationships, worship, and everything else that matters much more difficult. But cross-cultural involvement also makes all these things richer as well, by reminding us that some of the things we assume are Biblical aren’t. At best, a cross-cultural community allows each culture to bring its strengths to balance another culture’s weaknesses and to have the reverse done to them in their turn. And, when this happens, it’s beautiful.

Which leads me to one of the most prevalent sins worldwide, a sin that crops up in every corner of the globe, and goes oh-so-often-unnoticed even in the church. I’m talking about racism.

See, as soon as we think about culture as both a danger and blessing, then we realize how damning it is to look at another culture or ethnic group with disdain. And one thing that’s obvious in Kenya is the power of doing just this; racial stereotypes are so powerful here. “Kikuyus are thieves,” “Luos are just violent,” “Indians steal our jobs.” And I shouldn’t have to remind any American reader that we do the same thing to each other back home all the time. You can’t have the body of Christ without having cultural collision. And so racism not only leads to violence and hate and injustice, but it deprives us of the very person of Jesus, who reaches out to us through his church.

And, honestly, that’s one of the number one reasons we’re coming home. Being in Kenya has given us the opportunity to see the devastation of racism, and also to see the incredible resurrection power released through Biblical racial reconciliation in the context of our time at New City Fellowship Nairobi. But it has not given us an opportunity to participate fully in that reconciliation. We’re outsiders. Kikuyus don’t like Luos, and none of ‘em like Indians, and maybe a few folks are still ticked at the Brits, but nobody’s got any problems with us. But that’s not true everywhere. There are places where confessing with Nehemiah our sins and the sins of our forefathers takes us right into the heart of racial conflict. And having seen where the Spirit of God leads His church in the context of racism here, we want to be led into new places back in the neighborhoods where we are participants in real and living racial tension and strife.

The story of Babel teaches us that culture has at least some of its roots in sin. But both Isaiah and John’s apocalyptic vision remind us that at the end of the ages the kings of the earth will bring their best gifts to Yahweh and to the Lamb. Culture is a double-edged sword, a spring mixed with salt water and fresh, but that’s not where the story ends. Jesus isn’t content with life as we know it. He has traded the one ethnic people of God for the plurality of the kingdom, and yet he also rejects all “melting pots” as well. Christ is redeeming culture, claiming culture, overcoming culture, creating a symphony of praise out of a cacophony of voices. And it’s time that all of us open our eyes . . . and start singing.

Peace,

Michael

Lesson #2- Poverty Is More Complex Than We Thought It Was

What does it mean to be poor? Why are people poor? Most people would say that to be poor means you lack material possessions. Others might say a lack of knowledge, or maybe even values. Some people might say that poverty is a result of spiritual, moral, or value deficits: bad choices, as a result of bad morals or values, lead to poverty.

If, like me, you take some time to read up on poverty, maybe even study it at school, you come across increasingly complex explanations. For instance some have suggested that poverty is being trapped in a web of various systems, such as cultural, religious, political, family, and economic systems. Others point to history as the cause of poverty. The Chalmers Center at Covenant emphasizes poverty as broken relationships between God, one's community, one's self, with the created world, and with people outside your community ("the other").

But even after all of the books I've read, all the conversations I've had, all the projects I've studied, I have routinely been shocked during my time in Kenya by just how complicated poverty really is! And in this post I don't want to argue for one or other understanding of poverty so much as to show how the causes and effects of poverty are complicated beyond our wildest imaginings.

What caused the poverty of our friend "Magdalene," and what does being poor mean for her? "Magdalene" grew up in a remote Kenyan village that survived through raising small amounts of food on a small piece of land. Because of a patriarchal cultural system, enforced by Kenyan law at the time, she could not inherit land as a woman, so when her mom no longer had money for school fees for her education, she married her off to an older man in her village who she hardly knew.

This husband immediately moved to Nairobi and left her back home. He would come home every Christmas; she got pregnant almost every year, until she had 8 children. Somewhere along the way she began brewing illegal beer to try to pay for her children's needs. Later, she decided to go move in with her husband. When she arrived in the Kibera slum, she found he had, like so many of the migrant workers here, started a new family. She chased away the new wife; her husband beat her, drank a lot, provided nothing for the family. Eventually he tried to kill her, and she ran away to another house with her children. In the new house, her landlord routinely raised the rent double what it had been; she could not keep him from doing so, because he might have the thugs kill her. Later on this same woman got a job with some white friends of ours. She did excellent work, and they trusted her for several years. One day they found out she had been stealing from them.

When her children get sick she goes to the hospital, but the staff are rude, and do not explain anything to her. She thinks they charge too much or want a bribe, but she can't understand because it is too technical for her. In church on Sundays, "Magdalene's" pastor preaches about giving every week, but never about sexual purity, because, as Magdalene says "he is the worst of all." He regularly calls her for big donations, because she works for white people. When the husband spoke to the pastor, the pastor told Magdalene that God was mad at her for leaving her husband, and that if she got back together with him, she could be a part of the leadership team. Even though she explained that her husband had tried to kill her and had never given anything to the family's income, the pastor said divorce was wrong so they had to get back together. Another time the pastor preached on how black people are cursed because they are descended from Ham, but white people are blessed because they have descended from Shem. This pastor is a part of a large church with generally well-educated preachers, but because this is a slum, the worst pastors, sometimes even pastors who have done bad things like embezzle money or sexually harass church members, are sent there.

What caused Magdalene's poverty? Bad decisions? Occasionally. She shouldn't have stolen from her employers, and if she loses her job this will increase her poverty. But bad decisions don't really explain most of it. Is it a lack of knowledge? Sometimes. If she understood medicine more she could get better care, or if she were more educated about the Bible she'd know that her pastor is a wolf in sheep's clothing and wouldn't believe his lies. But even still, would knowledge have solved all her problems? Not by half. Does a lack of material possessions cause her poverty? Again, the answer is sort of, but not really.

What does poverty mean for Magdalene? It means constant fear for her physical safety and the safety of her children. It means she is vulnerable to the Wild Wild West of a Kenyan slum, where gangs run the streets, people are kicked out of their homes, the police beat and rape and take bribes, and where the worst of all services, from electricity, to plumbing, to education, to health are all crammed into one place. It means that her children sometimes go hungry, that she sometimes feels forced to do things she knows are wrong, like stealing.

But more than all of this, being poor for Magdalene means having a perpetually marred identity. Being poor means that everyday she is taught in a thousand different ways that she is not an image bearer of God, that she is less valuable, less important than people who are not poor. Her religious system tells her lies that say she is cursed, and that if she gives money to a corrupt pastor God will give her health and wealth. Her political system tells her she is worthless by "pay-to-play" politics, where justice is bought and sold. Her cultural system tells her she is worth less than men, and should be subject to the whims of a violent husband, and also that she is worthless because she has to do menial labor. This marred identity, this feeling of shame and worthlessness, is at the back of many of the decisions that Magdalene does get to make: being told time and again that she has no value, she begins to believe it and eventually act like it.

Poverty is not mud walls and dirt floors. I have been on small farms with people who I believe live lives closer to the prophetic vision of everyone sitting under their own vine and fig tree than I do in my materialistic affluent life. I have seen people that we would think were "destitute" who are active leaders in their church, who provide for their family with the literal fruit of their labor. No, poverty is not mud walls, but broken identities, it is powerlessness, and entrapment. It is being oppressed, kicked around, constantly taught implicitly and explicitly that you are less. This ain't your Papa's view of poverty, but it's the one we've found here.

And all of this means that solutions to poverty that are one-sided don't work! If we think people are poor simply because they don't have stuff, and we give it to them, often we only increase their sense of worthlessness. We leave feeling like gods, and they leave feeling less than human. If we think the issue is just a job, so we provide a job, but don't address a political system that robs and steals, or an oppressive religious system that curses and embezzles, than we're just feeding the beast. If we address knowledge, or values, without addressing cultural systems that take all decisions about child birth out of the woman's hands, or that turn a blind eye to sexual harassment and adultery, we're sending people out to simply be more aware of how everyone treats them like nothing.

Take a look at the poor in your community and the "reasons they're poor" that you've accepted in your own mind. Take a look at the projects that you're involved in to try to help the poor, and ask yourself: Have we thought about the system? Is the culture, or the church, or the political system somehow contributing to their poverty in some way that we haven't seen? What is the implicit message of our charity? Are we giving people material things while reinforcing the lies they believe about themselves??

This has been a constant theme on this blog, because it has been a constant theme of our lives here. The system is real, if we have but eyes to see! The Bible teaches us that the powers are at work and that they corrupt every human institution! And our charities really do often reinforce lies the poor believe; we put a bandaid on a hand, and then chain feet to the floor.

I'm tempted to end on this fairly dismal note, because I think every Christian and every church needs to take another look at what we believe about poverty. But I won't leave it here for one reason: Jesus is the Risen King. The kingdom is coming. Aslan is on the move, and winter's bite is ended. And when Christ comes he makes his blessings known wherever the curse is found. The kingdom of God brings solutions bigger than Satan's snares. Sin's hidden complexity is over-matched by the kingdom's all-encompassing healing and redemption. And as we draw near to Christ, as we join in the Biblical story as the story of our lives, as we learn to look with His eyes at the poor as image bearers and the systems as corrupt and unjust, we will begin to live out of this kingdom and find ways to really engage with the poor in life-giving ways. And as a reminder of this, we've included a whole bunch of really joyful pictures from celebrations we had with members of our farmers groups this past week. So let's all ask Christ to guide us into true understanding and merciful and just living.

Peace,
Michael

*Most of my understanding of these models comes from Bryant Myer's life-changing but very technical book Walking With The Poor. For a lighter, also life-changing read, try When Helping Hurts, by Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett.

Lessons Learned #1- Walking Among the Oaks, Rebuilding the Ancient Ruins

Well, Rebecca and I are wrapping up our time in Kenya, and sadly, probably wrapping up this blog as well. So as we wind up nearly 2 years worth of blogging about our time here we wanted to take some time to discuss some of the ways we've grown in our understanding of God and His world through this experience. As with many shorter-term missionaries, when we look back at our time it can be difficult to see how little we've accomplished, but we're blown away by how much Jesus has taught us. We want to share some of that with you over the next several weeks, starting today:


Friends from NCF, Magadalene (Right) is a Sudanese refugee
who runs a small craft business that employs other refugees



If anybody had asked me why I spent my senior year looking for a way to get over to Africa as a missionary, my answer would have been immediate: read Luke 4. Jesus, quoting Isaiah 61, declares that the Spirit of God has anointed Him "to preach good news to the poor . . . to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." Jesus' kingdom, I would have said, is inextricably bound up with the prophetic vision of radical justice, mercy, and blessing for the poor. If we want to follow Jesus, we'll embrace his kingdom vision and serve the poor like he did. If the gospel ain't good news for the material poor, it ain't Jesus' gospel. 

It's a good question to ask ourselves from time to time, particularly in so-called vocational ministry: why are we doing what we're doing?  Why are you going on a short-term missions trip to Africa? Why do you volunteer at the soup kitchen? Why are you on the deacons board or the outreach committee at your local church? Maybe like me, your primary answer would be something like, "Jesus loves these people. They have needs that I can help them with. This is part of God's kingdom."

If so, then I think you've got fully half of the reason why God calls us, the affluent, the "haves," to ministry to the poor, the "have-nots." Because it is 100% Biblical to say "Jesus loves the poor and so should I. I can help." But if I've learned one thing about ministry among the poor over the last year it's that this is only half the story.



Our friend Agnes and her (huge!) family



The other half comes from the rest of the Isaiah passage that Jesus' quoted.* "They (the formerly poor, brokenhearted, captives, and debtors) will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendor. They will rebuild the ancient ruins . . . they will renew the ruined cities." You see, Jesus rescues the poor for a reason: he wants to use them to change the world.  It's a theme that runs the course of the Bible from beginning to end, from Yahweh's choosing of pagan-and-as-good-as-dead-Abraham to found His chosen people and stuttering-hesitant-murdering-Moses to lead His people out of bondage, to the early church era, when God in all His foolishness chose the weak things to shame the strong, the lowly and despised things to overcome the things that are.

Now where does that lead us, the materially strong, the intellectually educated, the confident and young children of privelege who go out into the world to "help those poor people?" It leads us to realize that Jesus Christ has chosen the outside of the camp as the center of His kingdom work. He chose a 13-year old pauper for his mother, podunk Nazareth for his home, blue-collar labor for his occupation, and 12 uneducated commoners for his leadership team. And therefore if we really understand the upside down nature of the kingdom, if we get God's special care and concern for the poor not just as projects but as fellow employees in His kingdom work, then we will run to the poor because that's where we'll find Jesus doing his most amazing kingdom work! It's a mystery difficult to explain, but I've come to believe that God calls people like me to serve the poor because that's the only way in today's society that I'm ever going to meet any of them, and He knows that without relationships with the poor and broken I'll never really get Him or what He's doing with the world.



One of our best group leader's with his father


Lesson 1 is simply this: if you want to understand the Jesus who spoke those words in Luke 4, you not only have to help the poor, you have to enter into real relationships with them. And through these relationships we'll find that the poor, as oaks of righteousness and rebuilders of walls, have a whole lot to teach us about Jesus. I have come to believe over here that living a Chrisitan life without relationships with the poor leaves you looking at Jesus with only one eye open. Because you miss a great deal of his ransomed-poor-transformed-to-oaks-of-righteousness work.

So why are relationships with the poor so important (besides the fact that Jesus calls us to them)? The answers are endless, but here are a few:

1. We learn what it looks like to really follow after Jesus. Truth is, for most of us, it's easy to follow Jesus, or at least to think we're following him. Not so for the poor. A few stories will illustrate the point. We have Indian friends here who are unemployed and unmarried, at least partly because by becoming Christians they lost their entire web of cultural and familial connections which would normally provide them will all sorts of support (jobs and a spouse for sure). Or what about our friend Iris, who comes to church week after week, teaches the children in Sunday School, loves and greets everybody with the love of Jesus, but goes home to a slum, to a home where her grown children (and thus grandchildren) still depend on her financially, and as often as not can't find work to put food on the table? What about our pastor friend, who takes in about 300 bucks a month, and with that runs an orphanage for 20 some-odd kids, leads the church, runs a small neighborhood school, does high intensity evangelism and discipleship? And then who has gotten car-jacked at gunpoint twice in the last 18 months for his pains? What about our young friends who live in the slums, who have no decent living anywhere on the horizon, who live in a culture where you cannot marry until you have become wealthier than they can imagine, and are trying to follow Christ's sexual ethic in their lives in a culture absolutely ravaged by infidelity and promiscuity? What, for heaven's sake, about Gabriel, the farmer that taught me to plant rice, who has ten kids of his own and takes care of five others who've been orphaned? There are stories at home as well: my friends I met through Advance Memphis, who have risked their lives to leave the gangs, or given up on all the money they could easily be making by selling drugs. Regardless, relationships with the poor force us to realize that following Jesus is costly. They shake us out of our apathy.



Rebecca chatting it up in the rice paddy



2. They help us see the deadly lies we believe. The rich young ruler walked away from helping the poor because he couldn't do without his riches. You and I justify our extravagant lifestyles by making "needs" of everything from car-per-person families, to private school education from 3 yrs to 30, to flat screen TVs. Furthermore, we often secretly believe that a) God blesses us financially if we really follow Him, and b) wealth creates happiness. If you don't think you believe those last two, here's a test: when you've visited poor families, have you ever thought, a) "Wow, these people really need Jesus. They probably have a lot to learn about Him," or b) "How can these people be so happy with so little?" Because if you have, you, like me, have bought into the health-wealth-gospel through the back door syndrome so typical of our culture. But when I think of Ezekiel or Joyce, two farmers who live on less than an acre of land in wooden or mud huts and yet who are two of the happiest, most faithful Christians I have ever met, all of these lies fade away. God does not necessarily bless the faithful financially; sometimes they suffer financially more than anybody else. But neither do riches bring happiness! Because if they did, why are so many Americans struggling with a lack of fulfilment and feeling miserable amidst all the stuff, and so many Kenyan Christians rejoicing daily in the very little the Lord has provided?

3. We participate in the body of Christ. Plain and simple, I have rarely been as challenged in my walk by the physical presence of a church community as I have been at New City Fellowship Nairobi. Why? Because both culturally and economically we're worshiping together in a much more diverse group of people than any I have encountered before. Paul says that we're the body of Christ, but too often our lives are so homogenous that we hands forget about how much we need the feet. Relationships with the poor preclude this.

4. And finally, we meet Jesus in the face of the poor. Jesus said that "whatever you do to the least of these, my brothers, you have done unto me." Mother Teresa regularly talked about meeting Jesus in the face of the poor. Of course this always sounded like garbage to me . . . until I really found myself among the poor and in relationships with them. And then I realized there is a divine mystery here, that to the poor belongs the kingdom of heaven, and for those of us who are not poor, we encounter Jesus in a special way in our relationships with them.



Rebecca with two farmer friends. We regularly sleep in their
village in one of the homes of a group member.



In all these ways and many others our relationships with poor farmers in the rural areas and poor city-dwellers at church have forced us to rethink our reason for wanting to be a part of "incarnational" ministry. Yes, we want to help those who Christ loves. Yes, we want to serve the way he served. But we also desperately long for relationships with the poor, we long to walk among the oaks of righteousness and work alongside the builders of walls. We have so much to learn about God and His kingdom through relationships with all the people that we typically treat as ministry projects, or as total resource-deficits. May God give us His eyes! May God give us His heart! May God knit together His church, founded by the blood of Jesus, and held together by the Spirit, that all people from every corner under heaven, every race and tribe, and every economic class on the planet would find themselves drawn into the great body of Christ, and so meet the Head of All Things, Jesus Himself.

Peace,

Michael

*Richard Hays has written about "echos" of the Old Testament in the New Testament, and my guess is that many who heard what Jesus read from Isaiah 61 knew how the rest of the chapter went. Besides all of this, the whole idea of Jubilee was to give back to the poor resources that would allow them to provide. This was not a soup kitchen jubilee, but a resource/capital jubilee as farmers got back their land. So regardless, I think Jesus claimed the full Isaiah 61 prophetic vision for his own ministry.

Hospitality in the Hinterland

This past week Rebecca and I made the 4.5 hr trek up to our Meru group a little bit earlier than usual. One of our farmers, Samuel, had just insisted that we come and visit him at his home for a meal before the meeting started and we'd decided to do it.

We just happened to run into the group chairman when we arrived in the village after an hour and a half of bumpy, dusty, dirt roads. This was a real God-send since we didn't know where Samuel lived, nor had we any game plan for finding out..

I realized when we arrived that these farmers live in the most remote area of any in which we work. This is the "real Africa" that we all seem to have embedded in our subconscious: sun-scorched brown soil, tough, scrubby and sparsely scattered vegetation everywhere, an unimaginable amount of dust. And Samuel's farm and family is equally typical: he lives with his wife and children in one mud hut among many that scatter a large compound on which his father and mother and the vast majority of his siblings and their wives still live. The farm is 17 acres (which is enormous by the standards of some Kenyan regions), but there are four brothers who will divide the land when their father dies; the scads of small grandchildren who ran in and out of the shadows of trees and huts, laughing and pointing at the "mzungus," and munching on the leftover chappatis that we couldn't finish are a fitting reminder that that 17 acres will get real small real fast.

Samuel's wife beamed when we walked into the small hut where they'd set a small wooden table and chairs up for our meal. We ate delicious food, and lots of it. The children love visitors because it means that the "best foods" are prepared, and everything was cooked with obvious concern: the tea had lots of milk in it, there was plenty of chicken, and lots of chapatis (the tortilla-like food that people give to visitors and cook at Christmas). And by now we've been around long enough to read the signs and see that this family had gone well beyond what they had to do to welcome us, strangers from far away.

Halfway through the meal, Samuel leaned back and said, "You know in our African culture, we love visitors. We say they are blessings."

Those words shook me from my slumbers as it were; these Kenyans had saved to be able to serve us meat, had spent the morning preparing. They had given us costly food for them, their favorites for sure. They had washed our hands before the meal, and made sure we were comfortable at every moment through the entire affair. I know nothing of hospitality like this. I can't even imagine what it would be like to welcome someone with half of the lavishness with which they welcomed us. And then, when we have finished, this man and his beaming wife thank us for coming. "Visitors are a blessing."

When we come to a new place our home culture gives us the lens by which we evaluate what we encounter. But stick around long enough, and their culture will become a lens with which to look back at where we came from. And Kenya has taught us the beauty and joy of lavish hospitality, and more importantly taught us that hospitality is a gift that the poorest can give, and find great delight in the giving. And if that is true for Samuel of Meru, how much more for us, who have material wealth beyond the comprehension of these villagers?

The author of Hebrews tells us to be hospitable because in so doing some have entertained angels without knowing it. Well, if an angel is essentially a messenger of God, I can say confidently that some visitors have received hospitality from angels as well, and that the lavish hospitality of Kenyans has been refreshing, challenging, and a powerful ministry of God in our lives.

Peace,
Michael

Under The Vine and Fig Tree

Every man will sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree,

and no one will make them afraid . . .

                                                                                                                     Micah 4:4

Last week I went down to the village in Murang'a where our Pilot group meets, even though we didn't have a meeting scheduled for that day. The road to the village rambles through a hilly countryside along the Sagana river, with small farms crammed  with tobacco and vegetables crowding the river banks on one side of the road, and dry scrub land rising up into dusty hills on the other. And then the road suddenly spills out onto a broad plain. This too was once as dry and dusty as the surrounding hills, but the community irrigation project has turned the dry lands into a vast flood-filled plain separated into countless small rice-paddies. And a good number of those paddies belong to members of our group. The electric green of the rice creates a stark contrast with the brown shabbiness that covers most of Kenya just before the October rains, and amidst the green you can see spots of orange, purple, red . . . farmers in imported American t-shirts and traditional congas hard at work in the fields, as they have been since early morning and will be till after the sun sets. On clear days you can see Mt. Kenya rising up some 14,000 feet above the village, but on Tuesday it was totally hidden behind hot hazy clouds.


Mzee Gabriel

I went to Murang'a to learn how to plant rice from the oldest member of our group, Mzee Gabriel (mzee is a respectful Swahili title meaning "old man"). Gabriel shouted a greeting to me as I got out of my car, and I tiptoed my way along the walls of the rice paddies to get to him. In order to grow rice, farmers have to build mud walls about two and a half feet high around the paddies to keep the irrigation water in place, and these double as "sidewalks" of sorts to get around without wading knee deep in water.

Yet while it's difficult to get to Gabriel's farm because of all the mud and water, when we get there the problem is that there isn't enough of either. Farmers have to plow the land thoroughly and then to level it before planting. The leveling happens after the paddy has been flooded, and then it has to be flooded again for planting. But because the group is still waiting for new pipes, because it's difficult to regulate water rationing in the group leaving the members further down the system vulnerable to shortages caused by those upstream, because so many people are planting rice and the river's water has sunk down in anticipation of the rains, Gabriel hasn't gotten enough water for the last 2 weeks to plant. He had hoped Tuesday would be different, but at least by 10 a.m. when I arrived, it was still too dry.

Gabriel speaks almost no English, so it takes a few minutes for me to realize that he wants to try to rearrange some piping to try to get more water to his rice paddy. But I finally get it, and we spend the next 25 minutes hauling around plastic piping, trying several different combinations to get the water, which is powered only by gravity, to come flowing into his field. But to no avail.

The farmer's life here is shaped by water: almost never enough, and then suddenly and surprisingly so much that her crops rot in the fields, and the rivers become impassable. Even after irrigation infrastructure arrives there are issues of water management, of rising and falling river levels, of maintenance. And you wonder: how does anyone survive in a business where the biggest factor is totally unpredictable and totally out of the business owner's control?

Lucky for me, Gabriel's farm is pretty close to his sister's. She is also a member of the group, and she's got just enough water to allow for a little planting. And so Gabriel grabs his nephew and the three of us begin. While the nephew jogs over to the rice nursery to pick the seedlings we'll plant, Gabriel and I wade into mud up almost to our knees, and begin leveling the surface of the paddy to prepare for planting. The mud is deep, and I sometimes sink up to my knees, but the sun is hot overhead and the cool water which continues to pour into the field mixes with the soil and keeps me surprisingly cool.

Plant seedlings are amazingly tough. If you're new to gardening like me, you tend to treat your seedlings like fragile pieces of glass or china that might break at any moment. But the farmers rip them up by the bunch full and toss them around almost carelessly. They know that God's immense creativity has brought forth unmeasurable strength hidden within those bright green shoots, that if He hadn't few would ever make it to the table. And so I grab a fistful and, following Gabriel's lead, begin planting the seedlings deep in the muddy soil in tight rows. When you plant rice you're bent down to the ground almost the entire time, and you walk backwards, and I do neither of these with anything approaching either the speed or grace of my two teachers.

And as I bend over in that muddy rice paddy and shove fistfuls of rice into the dark sticky soil, we begin to talk and laugh and hear each other's stories afresh. I learn that Gabriel has 10 kids of his own, and takes care of 5 orphans besides, that he used to sell vegetables in Nairobi and that he rented this land when the water came and his business started to lose money. He asked me about America, about our farming, asked me to greet Rebecca. After about an hour we take a break when Gabriel's wife bring us mugs of hot uji, a porridge made from millet and sorghum. We hide under the shade of some nearby maize stalks and I drink two mugs. Throughout the day the exotic birds brought here by the sudden appearance of great quantities of water flit back and forth over our heads, nesting in the trees and resting on stalks of maize still standing in the fields.

And then, after another go at it, we finish planting the small section which has received enough water, and hide in the shade of a small solitary tree in the middle of the rice paddies. We eat heaping bowls of rice and beans. I say my good-byes, Gabriel thanks me for coming. I will go home to Nairobi, but he'll stay behind and work in the fields till after dark . . . till enough water comes for him to finish his field.

And I am struck again by the kindness and strength of these people, who know the land and get their daily bread by it, who welcome strangers like me into their homes, their work, their meals, their lives. Amazed by men and women old enough to be the parents of my parents who work from sunup till sundown, and yet who fill their working hours with happy Swahili chatter and often spend their lives working beside their siblings, their nephews and nieces, their own children. Amazed by all of this, and what's more by God's good creation, by His gifts mysteriously given and received. For is not all of this planting and harvesting just a more complicated gathering of manna in the wilderness? For who can explain how it is that the rice which we eat under that solitary tree comes from the small seeds planted in muddy soil four months previously? No, it is all grace and gift from start to finish, divine and mysterious. And my brief participation in this particular mystery is also a gift, a gift given last Tuesday and in nearly 700 other days spent in this country which is just different enough from my own to make God's great grandeuer unmistakeable. And for all of it, I am truly grateful.

Michael

Praying Through The Process

Ok, now it’s time for a work update. A lot has happened, and as we approach the rains there is a lot of work that needs to be done. I want to invite you to pray through this update, asking for God’s grace to be given to us and to these farmers.

The farmers who have gone for loans through Equity Bank in our Pilot have hit a snag in the process, and are frustrated by long delays and broken promises on the part of the bank. I think by now everybody has their rice crop in the ground and is doing ok, but everything was delayed because cows got sick and then the loans didn’t come through in time. This was a classic case of “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is;” the farmers were given a timeline by the bank, they followed through, the bank hasn’t (yet). There are a lot of reasons for this, some valid and some not so valid, but the exciting thing is that our farmers are really looking at this as a learning opportunity; all of the hiccups and bumps along the way turn into ideas and improvements for the future when these farmers see the whole process as a learning experience. And if they carry that mentality into all their work on the farm, that’s a very good thing. In the meantime, keep praying for them, for their rice, and for the market come Nov-Dec!

Our farmers in Ngare Ndare sold a bunch of onions considering El Nino rains flooded the fields and kept them from getting a truly great harvest. About half of the group repaid what they took from the group plus interest (although some of them still have balances from previous projects), and so when we visited them this past month we expected a great report. Unfortunately, things ain’t so simple. The group had used their loan repayments to buy onion seeds for their members, and they went with a new seed company this time. The problem? Only about 30% of the seeds germinated. Again, this is a major disappointment for them, but they’ve been figuring out how to deal with these issues on their own for over a year now, and we feel confident that this is a setback that they will overcome. Those folks up there are smart, hardworking farmers; let’s pray God would bless them in their efforts (and that they will get a refund for the seeds from the company)!

Embu farmers sold all of their sunflower oil and the byproduct with a lot of marketing help from our Anglican partners. That means that a good number of them should be able to get new loans from the group for the next season. That’s a huge success for the project if so, even if there were major issues along the way. Meru farmers didn’t do quite so well, but a number of them will get new loans if the logistics can work out. It’s amazing how many projects get sidetracked because of simple logistical failures (remember the bad seeds and slow banks?), so please pray that they would get through this.

We continue to look for markets for the aloe vera farmers. They’ve sold some, and they’re working hard, but this market is a new and complicated one, so pray that God would give us wisdom in how to search it out and connect farmers with it.

And last but not least, in Kibete we finished our training on Table Banking. It only took us, oh what, like 14 months? But we did it. For those of you who have forgotten, this training will help the group use their group savings like a mini-credit union, allowing members access to loans for investments, emergency loans for death or illness or heavy property loss, and for savings with interest. For a brilliant explanation of what this looks like, check out our friend Trey Nation’s blog on savings groups in Cambodia at http://myfatherwasawanderingaramean.blogspot.com/. Please pray that these farmers would get a good start on this project, that they would have the wisdom necessary to take care of their group’s money, and that this table bank would be a blessing to them and their community.

In our earlier blog post this week, we talked about systems of injustice working against the poor. Here again in our work life, you can catch hints of similar issues at play. Why has the bank gone so slowly? Why would a seed company sell such bad seeds? The loan officer for the bank has routinely not only made promises that he has then left unfulfilled, he has also made mistakes in the process, and then asked farmers to take responsibility for fixing them (come to town again, wait another week till I come, fill this form out now that I’ve fixed it, etc).

We have seen this same thing happening in both the church and among a number of other organizations we’ve run into. Our farmers tell us that the government ministers involved in getting irrigation to their community will call them at 11 a.m., when they are in the middle of work in the fields, and say, ‘drop what you’re doing, I need you right now.’ And so they do it. Church leaders will show up at poor churches and expect them to make special donations as signs of gratitude for their pastoral work. When development organizations make mistakes, often instead of fixing them themselves, they push responsibility for the clean up onto the poor members their projects are supposed to help. Why did this project fail? Certainly not because the development workers didn’t do their job right. Must have been the poor folks.

In other words, one of the systemic issues in Kenya and in the U.S. is the way that perceptions about the poor fuel demeaning attitudes and actions towards the poor. Most cultures have a handful of myths that explain why the rich are and should be rich, and the poor are and should be poor, and neither of the countries we’ve lived in are any different. Maybe it’s the American idea that everybody gets an equal opportunity, that both wealth and poverty are simply the result of a set of individual decisions made by people who could all do equally well, or poorly, if they only made the right decisions. Or maybe, and more common here, is the heretical health wealth gospel, which subverts Jesus blood given ‘not for works we had done,’ and turns it into, ‘hey, if you just have faith, your cows won’t get sick and your kids won’t die.’ Not surprisingly, this anti-Christian doctrine is preached predominately by the rich to the poor, whether that looks like the wealthy Western world televangelists who are broadcast daily on every T.V. station here, or the wealthier Kenyan purveyors of this doctrine who, having learned the script well from the American televangelists, preach the message: ‘if you just ‘plant a seed’ by giving money, maybe one day you can live rich like me.’ These aren’t the only myths, either. There are all sorts of myths that justify the rich man’s riches and the poor man’s poverty.

The result is a callous lack of concern at best, and a straightforward abuse of the poor at worst. We have heard horror stories of the big institutional churches here “punishing” pastors who offended their bishop by “relocating” them to the slums or a poor rural area. The poor get worse service, receive worse advice, and are constantly forced to wait on the wealthy churches, governments, schools, or development organizations to do things in their own, precious time. In short, the myth that the rich simply earned their riches and the poor their poverty gives the rich an excuse to treat the poor as unimportant second class citizens, and the poor every reason to accept and believe this categorization about themselves.

So as you pray through this report about all our various endeavors here in Kenya, join with us also in praying that our hearts and attitudes about the poor would change. Pray that God’s Word would challenge our own arrogance and the arrogance of the wealthy and powerful here, that we would remember that God has a special place in His heart for the poor, that they are equally valuable bearers of His divine image in the sight of Jesus who died for us all. Pray that heart changes would lead to dramatic changes in attitudes and actions, that we would begin to treat the poor as God does, and to recognize that many of them would have done better than we have if they had been given the lavish opportunities we have received . . . and that many of us would have done far worse if we had received the opportunities that they have been given.

All of this is very close to our hearts; we long to see the wealthy, including ourselves, grow in our ability to see the poor as God does, and to refuse to buy into the myths that allow us to look down upon them. None of this negates the very Biblical message of individual responsibility, which is a tremendous factor in the success and failings of all people everywhere, but it is a reminder that the world is a complicated place, and that we’re called to have mercy oozing from our hearts, and eyes sharp enough to see the unjust systems, beliefs, and practices that hurt the poor among us.

May God’s kingdom come in our hearts, that we might truly live the prayer: “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Michael