You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Wild Branch' category.
My friend Bruce Campbell of Assisting Missions Ministries came for a visit. He was a big encouragement to Courtney and I. I was able to introduce him to my friend Phearum with Evangelism Explosion Cambodia. We together found some ideas for raising money for more Evangelism Explosion seminars.
S came over today. He is a friend from the gym. He has been a regular there since it’s opening, and we have had dinner a few times together. We have shared with him our faith on a number of occasions, having some great discussions, but no mutual understanding. He is a Buddhist and has no desired to change.
He came over today to talk to me about leaving his wife. S, his wife, and two kids, live with her parents and her siblings in a small house near my home. He has skills in making jewelry, but since the financial crisis hit Cambodia, he has had a dramatic drop off in work. There isn’t much need for jewelry in a country where money is tight. A year has passed and S’s family is still struggling to make ends meet. Now arguments are regular; the endless blaming one another as to why they are struggling.
He came to me asking for work. If he divorces his wife, he will have nothing, except the clothes he wears. He will be homeless, because even the tight quarters he lives in now will be obviously closed to him. He will be without transportation as his in-laws own his motorcycle. And he will be without income, as he will be leaving her family business during a down financial climate (half the population without work). He will also be without family, as his own mom and dad are also destitute in a province worse off than my province of Koh Kong.
So what was my advice to S? Obviously, I though leaving his wife was a bad idea. I was actually surprised he could not see that his options were somewhat limited. He argued with me, thinking if he only had a job, or a bit more money, he could divorce his wife, be respected again, and have peace. I told him I thought he would be jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, penny-less and alone.
The problem with S is he thinks that his reality now, will be his forever reality. He believes the present fighting issues with his wife, will be all that his future holds from now on. He wants to be free from the pain he feels. I do not denying he is going through a hard time. I take issue with his pessimistic view of the future.
What S doesn’t realize is the force his Buddhism plays into his decision. This world view does not focus on the past, as there is nothing you can do about it. Nor does it focus on the future, because that is just speculation. S is looking only to the here and now. His present situation is not peaceful, and he wants peace. Even Gautama left his wife and new born son to find peace, later becoming the Buddha.
Wanting peace is not a bad thing. Everyone wants peace in their lives. My perspective is peace is still possible for S within his family, especially if a redemptive force is added into the mix. Sure he is fighting with his wife and times are tough, and he has no peace now. But who knows what tomorrow will hold? It may just get better. And if he is redeemed, I know for sure, he will have a true and lasting peace.
Please pray for S. Pray that he will look beyond his current struggles. Pray for his redemption and healing in his relation with his wife.
From The Times December 27, 2008 As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa’s biggest problem – the crushing passivity of the people’s mindset Matthew Parris
Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it’s Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work. It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I’ve been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I’ve been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God. Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good. I used to avoid this truth by applauding – as you can – the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It’s a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith. But this doesn’t fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing. First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world – a directness in their dealings with others – that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall. At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi. We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission. Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers – in some ways less so – but more open. This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. “Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service. It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man’s place in the Universe that Christianity had taught. There’s long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours. I don’t follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition. Anxiety – fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things – strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won’t take the initiative, won’t take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders. How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds – at the very moment of passing into the new – that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it’s there,” he said. To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It’s… well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary’s further explanation – that nobody else had climbed it – would stand as a second reason for passivity. Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I’ve just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates. Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted. And I’m afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.
The Koh Kong team has slimmed down it’s members in country. Our teammates, James and Lynette and family, and Pat and Jeannie and family, are temporarily in the US on home assignment. Pat and Jeannie return first this coming January. This leaves Sret and Daah, our Cambodian teammates, and us pushing forward, waiting for our teammates to return. We have set up our work here expecting this time with half of our team in US. It is a common occurrence with missionaries; always coming and going. I anticipated these few months would be a time in which I could just maintain what was going on, and not push forward with any new endeavors. Courtney is pregnant, and busy with Weston (15 months old). I figured there would be needs for me to help her out at home. However, our Boss, the Lord, had other plans for me.
We have see a lot of results from our Evangelism Explosion seminar. Not in the way of many new believers, yet, but a fire among the believers trained to share the Gospel. They are hungry to get the message out. Especially in the neighboring village of Bak Kong. Bak Klong was the village I had mentioned in my previous post: “Swiper no Swiping.” Only one believer from that village was trained in EE, but what he had learned he shared with other believers there, and a new group has formed. This group, including well as Sret and myself, meet together on Friday afternoons. We have been practicing the things they learned in EE, and are even making new illustrations to use in sharing. They are boldly going out now, meeting with people they know already, sharing the Gospel.
Our plan is to quickly include any new believers in with our group. Going in with the prayer and singing together before we break up into smaller evangelism teams. We will include those new believers with the older, more experienced believers, in these smaller teams to get them exposure and experience in sharing. They will be mostly observing in the beginning, of course, later as they feel led, also participating in sharing.
My current thoughts are this: as the groups grow, we will split off in an organic fashion, half the group staying in the original Friday meeting, and the other half starting a new evangelism group. Bak Kong is big enough for maybe two or three teams, but there is room in the Koh Kong town and out lying villages for groups to go.
The second big task God has given since my teammates left is a young fellow by the name of Kamrint. I am hesitant in mentioning Kamrint to you, because he is a young man, without a family. What has been the case, in my experience here, is young men are very unreliable, and those who do not have family ties to a community are a nuisance, looking for action, and moving on. Yeah, I have been burned, but I can’t dismiss them all.
Kamrint was, at one time, such a young man as I previously mentioned. So much so, his own mom and dad have disowned him (only after they herd he became a Christian). Fortunately for Kamrint, he was allowed into the Youth With a Mission (YWAM): Discipleship Training school here in Cambodian and he got more excited about his faith. Somehow, WYAM decided to send Kamrint to Koh Kong for ministry experience at a small church I know. Kamrint had finished with his course of study with YWAM and had no where to go. So he came to me.
Not a penny to his name, and only the clothes on his back, he asked for our help in getting a job. We gave him work at the gym in the evenings. In the mornings he teaches English to some local kids. In the beginning he had five or six students. Now he has paying students, too many for him to keep his night job at the gym.
In his off time, Kamrint has started a ministry endeavor, on his own. He teaches soccer to fifty boys and Sunday, after bringing them to the local church. He needed only five soccer balls to get going. I am impressed.
The gym is also coming out of it’s slump. The rainy season is over, and more people are coming. I don’t have enough time to teach all the new people who are coming. I just go around and find out peoples names and answer short questions. I am glad to see more people coming. It was really quiet in there the last month.
Then Weston was sick with Roseola, only we didn’t know what it was. He just had a high fever, 103 degrees, for three days. As a new parent, I was surprised about how much stress a sick kid brought to me. We were worried, thinking he had Malaria or something, He is just a little guy, so such a high fever for so long…we weren’t sure how much he could take. But he is better now. His rash is completely gone.
So, that’s my October thus far, who knows what next week will hold?
We collect rain water off the roof for drinking and washing. We filter it as well. Most Cambodians do this as other water sources are expensive. In this video I clean out the water tank.
My son loves the “Dora the Explorer” cartoon. He doesn’t understand it much at 13 months, but he likes it nonetheless. In the cartoon, Dora has a nemesis, named Swiper the fox. He “swipes” or tries to swipe from Dora time to time in the story.
We have a “Swiper” here in Cambodia as well. We saw the effects of him last week when we went to a familiar village to meet and share with people. Our team has gone there before as we brought the Evangelism Explosion team there to share. Previously, we had seen some people come to faith there and we were hopeful to bring them together to start a new fellowship group. We had even a leader trained and ready to teach.
But our Swiper made it there before us. Suddenly, as we met with these new believers, they didn’t want to study. They were no longer interested in the Gospel as we had thought before. Out of five people who were previously interested, none remained. The Swiper had cleaned us out. All of them had their excuses and each were different.
It still mystifies me. How people can respond to the Gospel, even with tears of repentance and proclamations of faith, and yet a few days later, nothing of it remains. Swiped clean.
This is where perseverance is need on our part. Those five people’s refusal doesn’t mean we should stop our sharing our message there. In fact, this afternoon, Sret and I intend to go back and share more. Who knows what the Lord will bring our way? Should we not expect resistance in the spiritual work? This is the “Swipers” den after all. He has had free reign here for a long time and is not willing to simply roll over.
We are not discouraged. It is all part of the process. Sowing seeds, breaking up hard ground and waiting on the Lord to bring the growth. We just need to be tenacious.
Well, we are not completely alone. Our American teammates are gone, though. Both the Cottle family and the Hartsfields are in the US on a home assignment. This leaves our family here, but with our Khmer friends and fellow workers, Sret and Daah. Sret and Daah are great. We meet together for prayer and study of the Word. We quite often share a meal together. But it’s not the same as having co-workers from your own country to fellowship with.
We have done this before. There have been other times where we were without other US missionary families. It won’t bring our ministry to a halt. But there is a comfort in having them around to bounce ideas from, or watch a movie together. Ah, well, it is only for a few months. The Hartsfields are expected back in January.
So we were beginning to wonder what was going on in your life when we realized you must be thinking the same thing about our lives! We moved to a new house at the end of July and our internet hasn’t been able to be installed yet! We are able to use our teammates internet in the mean time. We arrived back from Thailand yesterday after Courtney’s 4 month check up! Her and baby are doing well. She seems to be getting over the morning sickness or better called “all day sickness” for her! She has a few good days and then a bad day but things are looking better! Thanks for all your prayers! She now needs to work on eating and putting on some weight! While we were in Thailand our teammates, Jamie and Lynette Cottle, came with us. Jamie hasn’t been feeling well the past few days and the hospital admitted for observation and possible malaria! They hope to return today with medication if his blood count continues to improve. Please lift them up! Also Sret, our Khmer teammate, thinks he has malaria too! Courtney will take him to get his blood checked today. He is asking for prayer since he was playing a major role in this weeks activities! Once arriving in Cambodia late yesterday afternoon we had 11 Cambodian Pastors/teachers waiting for us at our house. This week we are hosting an Evangelism Explosion Conference. Last night during prayer and praise they asked us to make sure all our friends in America were praying for this week of teaching… which is when we realized that since we haven’t had internet we haven’t ask you to be in prayer! So, please join us. The conference is 5 days long with over 30 people in attendance from the local area. We are not involved in any of the teaching but organizing and feeding everyone and providing opportunity for them to practice what they are learning! We are really excited for this opportunity the Lord has provided for us and hope you will join us in prayer as 30 local Christians will be encouraged and learning how to share the hope they have within!
