More old friends

We're in Hermiston this afternoon: we had a missions service at Irrigon Assembly of God this morning and tonight we'll be going to Umatilla Assembly. This is our old stompin' grounds.



We were excited to hear about Sarah Palin's selection as the Republican vice-presidential candidate. Chuck grew up in Alaska and he still has family there. We were aware of the birth of her Down's Syndrome baby and of much she has done in Alaska. MacCain has taken a big political risk choosing her.

I'm now on Facebook

I spent the evening signing up for Facebook and trying to figure it out. I'm not sure I understand how it's better than e-mails, or even how it serves a different purpose than e-mails. But we'll see.

Old Friends

Chuck performed a wedding this morning for a friend of ours that we've known for years and years. We only met the bride yesterday, but the groom was a teenager in our youth group when Chuck was youth pastor in Hermiston, Oregon. Children of both the bride and the groom participated in the wedding, making it a family affair and a happy and touching ceremony. It was held in Columbia Park along the Columbia River in Washington, just over the state line from Hermiston.

Last night we spent the night with other friends who were in the church in Hermiston and who now live in Kennewick, Washington. We really enjoy spending time with old friends. On Monday we will drive through the Dalles and visit with other old friends from Hermiston; it'll be lovely. God is good.

Email from Botswana

Last year, just before we left Botswana, I developed three courses for the first-year classes: the first is called "Methods in Home Evangelism" the second is "Home Evangelism Practicum 1" and the third is called "Home Evangelism Practicum 2." (We have 3 terms of school in Botswana, so each course runs for one 10-week term.) The purpose of the practicum is two-fold; the first goal is to familiarize students with an unfamiliar method of ministry. The second purpose is to make disciples.

During the first term, the teacher introduces the concept and explains just what it is the students are expected to do. At the same time, the teacher is responsible for contacting local pastors to arrange for students to have ministry in the homes of some of the members. The point is to connect students with church families that speak the same local language; this explains the "home" part of Home Evangelism Practicum.

During the second and third terms, students begin meeting with the assigned families and with a few neighbors of the same language group that the church family may invite. We encourage the church families to invite either other believers or unbelievers. Thus the "evangelism" part of Home Evangelism Practicum.

I hesitated to introduce this new series of classes because Chuck and I would not be there to help, encourage, and monitor. But I did all that I could and left in in God's hands--and I also left it in the hands of one of our Batswana teachers, Pastor Phodiso Ntwaetsile. I was extremely encouraged to receive this e-mail from Pastor Ntwaetsile just a few days ago.

Phodiso wrote:

Hi the Wilsons.

It's a long time without hearing from each other. However God is still sustaning us and keeping us in his love. We are still praying for you and believing that soon you will be joining us here in Botswana.

Well, regarding the Home Evangelism, everything is in place. We managed to complete Practicum 1, and now looking forward to do the last Practicum, thus Practicum 2. However, I want to admit that I still have some problems with making the pastors get motivated to influence their church members to give us opportunities to use their homes. For example, pastors around Gaborone are happy about the program, but they are failing to influence their members. This forced me to look for opportunities at the Botswana Prison to run the program with them. Of course it was a good thing to penetrate the prison apartments, but the problem is some prisoners who participated in the program are executed before the end of the program. And this will mean that at the end of the program we will be left with few persons who completed the program and can therefore remain doing it with other prisoners.

Apart from the prison, we are running the program with at least one family, and some of my students are compiling their lessons in Sekhalahari language since we failed to find a family that speaks Sekhalahari. I have a strong hope that their material will aid the next year students during their preparations for the same program.After all, I want to tell you that the goals and objectives of the program are being met. I believe next year we will have many families involved in the program as I am still discussing the program with pastors around. Some pastors from Apostolic Faith Mission are showing interest on the program, of which I still want to ask you if you are comfortable with running the program with them?After all, everything is in place. You will hear good reports when you return.

Lastly, pray for me and my wife, we are opening a church branch in Kopong. The village has got 5571 people. We have started the cell-group and people a responding to the gospel.

Yours in Christ.

Two thoughts for the day

We’re in Gold Beach, Oregon, and I’m sitting at a coffee shop/ book shop that has wireless internet access—not for free, but for a reasonable price. Chuck went fishing today, but I was not interested.

I mentioned something about romance novels last time. The thing that bugs me about romance novels is that there’s always a bad boy who falls for a nice girl and she finally overcomes her aversion to his bad habits and falls head over heals for him. I first noticed this story line some years ago when I watched “Carousel” (Rodgers & Hammerstein?). What really stopped me in my tracks is when the girl (I can’t remember if it’s the young wife or later the teen-aged daughter) says, “When somebody who loves you slaps you, it doesn’t really hurt.” Oh, right! That gives permission for men everywhere to continue beating their wives, as long as they really love them.

Danielle Steele (sp?) and Victoria Holt are not much better. There’s always a pirate or a gambler or a womanizer who is drop-dead gorgeous and the heroine always chooses him over the reliable, respectful—albeit slightly boring—lord or earl or businessman. I thank my God I chose the reliable, respectful, and never boring Chuck Wilson; yesterday we celebrated our 35th wedding anniversary and I have not regretted even one day of our life together.

My second thought for the day is a bit more religious in nature, because after all this is a missionary blog, so you do expect it to be religious, don’t you? We have majored for about 5 years now on God’s blessing to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12. God promises Abraham to bless him and make his name great and to bless the whole earth through him etc. etc. In our presentations at churches, we have tended to stress the fact that when God blesses, He intends the blessed person to be a blessing: “We are blessed to be a blessing” is the jist of it.

Recently, though, my attention was drawn to God’s promise to “make his name great.” I began to contrast that promise with the efforts of many a man to “make a name for himself.” For several days I couldn’t track down a verse in the Bible that refers to a person “making a name for him/herself” and then I finally remembered the Tower of Babel story. Those people wanted to build a great tower, using brick and mortar, to make a name for themselves (and to keep from being scattered througout the earth). It’s no coincidence that most of the people who have impressed me recently as trying to make a name for themselves have done it with brick and mortar.

I have often regretted the fact that Chuck and I are not in-demand conference speakers. You won’t find our name on brochures for camp meeting speakers, church-growth seminars or big revivals. We have not risen to leadership in our mission organization either. Nobody knows our names.

Except for the God of heaven. I will leave it to Him to make our names great.

Waiting room

Aug 22, 2008

I am sitting in the waiting room at the Salem Edoscopy Center, waiting for Chuck to be scoped. He has suffered indigestion and heartburn for years and we knew that he would eventually have to be scoped, so today that day has finally arrived. It’s not that the problems have gotten worse, really, so much as they’ve just hung on for so long that our doctor didn’t think we ought to ignore it longer. Well, we hadn’t really been ignoring it, but, you know, zantac and prilosec will only take you so far!

We’re sending out a paper newsletter this week, and I’ve spent the last hour or so updating our mailing list. If you are not on our mailing list but you’d like to be, just post a comment to this blog and let me know your address. If you are on our mailing list and you don’t want to be, please don’t write an irate letter, but do let us know.

We spend so much time in the car these days, traveling from church to church, that I’ve done a lot of reading. I know that makes some people carsick, but I usually do ok if I take short breaks frequently. I read a lot of romance novels, but they are not very satisfying.

But I’ll have to save that for tomorrow, Chuck’s scheduled to be done pretty soon here.

Children in Africa

I got an e-mail today from somebody who attended the worship service Sunday in Klamath Falls. Her heart was especially touched by something Chuck said: we don't see much (if anything) going on in Botswana in the way of children's ministry. We would like to see that changed, and we have been recruiting people who hear God's call in that direction.

For those readers who have gifts in various areas of service and who feel that God is calling them to serve His people in Africa, we recommend a couple of excellent books:

Ministering Cross-Culturally by Sherwood Lingenfelter and Marvin Mayers

and

Teaching Cross-Culturally by Judith and Sherwood Lingenfelter.

God bless you and make you more like Christ.

from Janet

Poetry

Poetry is easy to recognize, yet hard to define, kind of like the "syllable." Well, maybe poetry in your own language is easy to recognize, anyway. I remember studying Hebrew poetry before, probably when I was in Bible college, and it seemed a bit circular when they said that poetry is identified by poetic language. You know, English poetry has rhyme and meter, and in European languages, meter is a characteristic of poetry, but the Bible scholars say, meter is not a characteristic of Hebrew poetry: that leaves only that elusive concept, poetic language.

Now that I've gone to school for so many more years, I begin to understand what poetic language is, and I would rather say "figures of speech." Then you avoid that circular reasoning. But as I reflected on what to tell my own students, I thought that a contrast is the best way to describe poetry. I told them:

You use ordinary language to appeal to the mind.
You use poetic language to appeal to both the mind and the ear.

In other words, poetry is language that has been fashioned to be beautiful. And beauty is something that is very culture-specific; that means that utterances that are beautiful in one language may not be so beautiful in some other language.

Then, just the last few days, I also thought of another contrast:

You use ordinary language to make your listener know something he/she doesn't know yet.
You use poetry to make your listener feel something he/she doesn't feel yet.

Of course, neither of these contrasts is truly a definition, because they are not precise enough to define poetry and differentiate it from all prose. But I find that definitions are not always useful in helping students understand a concept.

Meditating on the Bible

I have read much in the Bible about meditating on God’s word. Remember. . . "Basic Youth Conflicts?” I can’t remember the guy’s name that used to do those seminars, but I remember something I read one time and I think he was the author. He wrote about meditating on scripture. He said that to meditate on the scripture, you need to memorize it; he emphasized that memorization does not equal meditation, but that it’s hard to have one without the other. I have found that to be true: if you want to memorize scripture, the process demands meditation, and if you meditate on scripture, you memorize it even if that was not your intent.

And then, in some course that I prepared to teach at the Bible College—it must have been a Global University course, because nearly all our courses are G.U. courses. In preparing to teach that course, I read that the Hebrew word that’s translated “meditate” has as it’s basic meaning something like “to mutter under your breath.” To mutter, to mumble, to meditate, to recite in a whisper. . .that’s what I do as I meditate on the Psalms, in an effort to memorize. I memorize so that I might meditate, and I meditate so that I might memorize.

I started memorizing consistently only about 4 years ago, though my first feats of memory came decades ago, when I was a Bible college student myself. As I memorized the book of Hebrews, I discovered that it had meaning as a whole, as an entity in itself, as a book and not just as a hodge-podge of verses. I’ve always been an avid reader, since first grade, but I could never read the Bible with the same enthusiasm as I read a novel. That’s because at each verse, I started over; like Abraham Lincoln’s description of reading the dictionary, I found it very interesting, but the plot was a bit hard to follow. I thought to find in each single verse a whole universe of meaning, instead of connecting each sentence, each paragraph, each argument, into a unified discourse.

I memorized Hebrews from beginning to end, but I determined to memorize the Psalms from the end to the beginning. I started with Psalm 4 and memorized the last verse first: “I will lie down and sleep in peace, oh Lord, for you alone make me dwell in safety.” (If my memory serves me well.) Then the next day I memorized the next-to-the-last verse and strung it together with the last one: “You have filled my heart with greater joy than when their grain and new wine abound. I will lie down and sleep in peace, for you alone, oh Lord, make me dwell in safety.” And I mutter it under my breath, because I have found that when I merely form the words in my mind, my errant mind tends to wander and I don’t even notice. If my lips stop moving, sooner or later I notice and force them to start up again.

I mutter, I meditate, not so that I can recite God’s Word for an audience, but so that I can live God’s Word for His honor and glory. Meditation soothes the anxious mind and brings serenity to a frazzled life. God is good.

Home-Based Bible Fellowships

Chuck and I have talked a long time about an alternative way to “do church.” I tried to explain to my students in one class at the Bible College (in Botswana), that the church grew exponentially in the first couple of centuries, as long as it was based in homes. After congregations started building themselves structures whose unique purpose was the Sunday worship meeting, church growth slowed considerably. One student objected that the church only started erecting buildings after they could afford to, and that it was just a coincidence that the church growth slowed significantly at the same time the church began to put its money into brick and mortar.

Not that I would advocate tearing down existing church buildings and favor putting all congregations out into homes, but just think about this: if a church in a town of 100,000 has the resources to build a building (on faith) that will seat 15,000, they have just excluded 185,000 in the community from attending their church. However, if that same church begins to establish home-based congregations and teach them to observe all that Jesus commanded us (as in Matthew 28:19), the entire population of the town could become congregations and they could all worship in the houses that have already been built there! We could release the church to grow to 100% of the population.

God is good. We want to glorify Him in every way that we can.

On the East Coast

We're in Connecticut today, having flown all day yesterday. We're staying at a nice B&B, called the Watson House: built in the 1700's.

We have 3 things scheduled here in the area this week: a meeting with a pastor in East Hartford today, tomorrow we're cooking our African stew at a church in Philadelphia, and then Thursday we are tentatively scheduled to have lunch with a pastor in Springfield, VA. Chuck had e-mailed the pastor (today's lunch meeting) before we left Sunday, and when we finally got online today, we had an e-mail from him cancelling that meeting! AAAAAACK.

But then, Chuck read me his explanation--he had experienced a possible TIA last Wednesday: I think that stands for transient ischemic attack, basically a mini-stroke. He had gone to the ER at the time, but he had to schedule a follow-up with his own doctor. He suggested we meet for breakfast today instead; but we had a hard time getting online this morning and didn't even SEE the e-mail till about 10:00. We couldn't reach him by phone at first, but we did finally talk and he told us we were close to the church and to come on over before his doctor's appt. So that's what we did.

On the road again

I actually wrote this in the car on Friday as we were driving and pasted it in here today. Now today, Sunday we are on the road again, and then tomorrow in the air.

August 1, 2008

We’re finally on our way home—from travel to School of Missions and from visiting several churches and friends and family throughout the Midwestern part of the U.S. Today we went through rural Caliornia—I bet you didn’t know there was such a thing! We passed through towns such as Ravendale, population 20 and Termo, elevation 5,300, population 26. Now we’re on the road between Lakeview and Klamath Falls. Our GPS says we’ll arrive back in Gresham at 10:28 tonight, but we know we’ll get home long before that; the GPS calculates our speed as about 36 MPH on secondary roads and 60 MPH on the Interstate. We go a bit faster than that!

At first we were planning to drive to Winnemucca, Nevada yesterday, after visiting Chuck’s cousin in Henderson. But when Chuck checked on the internet, he said there are virtually NO hotels in Winnemucca, and the only one that was fit to stay at was full. However, Reno offers rooms at their casino hotels for next to nothing, so we drove there! Of course, they expect that they’ll make up the loss on your room when you indulge in the slot machines, but I’m afraid they lost money on us.

God is good. May He bless you and your family just as He is blessing us.

First day

OK, I've set up a blog. I thought I had a lot to say, but now my mind has gone blank. I guess I'll figure it out as I go along.