MISSION: Uganda Blog Update 02-18-2008
Greetings, everyone! It's been a busy week since we got back to Texas. We have both managed to get all our classwork caught up, and are now busily preparing culture data to turn in at the completion of the class in a few weeks. It's a tremendous course. The basic gist of it is this: as you are learning the language, you must also learn the culture of a people. Your goal is to stop being a foreign outsider, and become a native insider. This requires spending much time with the people, observing how they live, and asking lots of questions. The key is to learn to differentiate between God's culture, which you want them to learn, and American culture, which they don't really need. The difficulty is that American missionaries all too often wind up imposing American culture on a native population, giving it the same weight and confusing it with the Bible, and create ministries that are alien to the people and won't endure well after the missionary is gone. The truth is, 95% of what foreign cultures do in no way conflicts with the Bible, but are just different from "how we do it". Different isn't necessarily bad, you see, although our Baptist culture conditions us to think this to some degree I'm afraid. The Gospel not only must be communicated in the language of the people, but in cultural terms that make sense to them. In doing so, we are imitating the very method used by God to communicate with humanity down through the ages.
Our two meetings yesterday in Central Baptist Church in Center, TX (Pastor Danny Dodson) and Lighthouse Baptist Church in Wiley, TX (Pastor James Rasbeary) respectively, went very well. We drove to Center, TX, about four hours away, on Saturday which was an adventure in itself. A nasty storm system developed, and followed us the whole drive down there. Not only was it quite dark, but it created blinding torrential rain that slowed our travel considerably and increased our four hour drive to six. It began, after a bit, to feel more like steering a boat than driving because of the hydroplaning. As if this didn't create enough stress, every so often, you'd hit this deep pool of water, which sent waves of liquid cascading over your windshield, blinding you totally for about 5 seconds or so. At one point, flash flooding had covered the road we needed to follow. I noticed that the water was getting deep fast, and that it appeared to be swift moving from what I could barely see in my headlights. So, I backed us up very carefully, turned around, and went another way. I've been in some nasty storms before, but you normally drive out of them. I have never been in a situation as severe or as long-lasting as this (two hours of hard rain). Needless to say, we were very grateful to finally reach the hotel in Center, TX. And we wanted adventure…
We had great services the next day (the weather was pristine, of course). God worked and it was a great blessing.
On Wednesday, we begin a missions conference in Haltom City, TX at 1st Baptist Church of Haltom City, Pastor M Mosley. Pray for us, as James has contracted one of the flu bugs we've been exposed to lately. It doesn't affect the stomach (Thank God!), but it does create weakness, cough, aches, and high-fever that can last a few days. Pray the rest of us will remain healthy, and that he will get well in time for us to go to the conference.