Concerning the Church (those rowdy Lutherans, them)

Hello friends,

To the Lutherans reading and anyone who knows anything about Lutherans you are probably thinking: 'Rowdy Lutherans? isn't that an Oxymoron?' [and that isn't an over oxegenated moron either ; ) ] But really you need to read on and throughout this message to get what I am getting at.

If you read the title you are probably thinking: "the church I know about the church". And you probably have one of 5 different images coming to mind:

1) The building with a steeple on it,

2) The denomination of your thinking

3) The service that is part of worship

4) The institution

5) The gathering of fellow believers

So Since being here in Pietermaritzburg I have been to a total of 5 'churches.' So they have been any where from a Presbyterian, to a Methodist, to a Neo-Charismatic, to an evangelical to the Lutheran Theological Institute. And I think that they all have advantages and disadvantages to them.

The Lutheran Theological Institute is becoming very home like for me. It is just a hilarious place to worship on Sunday mornings (hilarious in a good way). It is mostly university students and their families so there are a lot of people from my classes that I get to worship with on Sunday mornings and worship gets hectic. So think liturgy, think structure, think tradition, but see the passion and the heart. We worship a Capella, and as such some of the hymns take on different tunes, We sometimes sing in isiZulu, sometimes we clap and dance, other times we sing with our whole heart. The best thing about it is that we worship unashamedly as a congregation. This past Sunday I noticed that we were worshiping in a bit more of a reserved manner. Which I found disheartening. It was a special all-Lutheran service involving several churches and communities from around the area. We had a brass band, a worship group, and wonderfully skilled musicians, yet something felt off. By the end of the service I realized that it was because we were in the presence of people from other churches we were acting more reserved. At one point I had a woman sitting in front of me shoot eye daggers for continuing on singing when the piano stopped jamming. I was kind of hurt but realized that it was not my fault that she wasn't willing to keep on worshiping when the piano stops. (I was hoping to talk to her after the fact and gently rebuke her but I couldn't find her, oh well for another time). At one point in the service we were singing "Shine Jesus Shine" and we were just sounding so very dead. So I took up the clapping part and started clapping loudly and unashamedly. :D It is so unfortunate that Lutherans take such a strong stance (whether overt or behind closed doors) against being actively involved in worship with their whole heart, and whole selves. I have been struck by the joy of worshiping with whistles and with wonderful joyful beats made on a beat. Not that it is unstructured it is just more free.

Anyways enough on worship, because that is only one part of the Church. To me the Church is a community of like minded believers who gather together to share life. Worship, prayer, bible study, are traditional elements, but does your image of church include playing cards? or board games? Does you image of church include having a braai (BBQ)? Or does it include staying up with a friend until 2 am or 12am talking about faith and God, and what it all means? I am slowly starting to see that really it isn't about the building or the worship but about the community and the people in the building. The Church is designed to be a community that builds each other up into the fullness of the stature of Christ. We are to speak the truth in love, and share our gifts with each other. I think back on the last couple of weeks and I think about the moments of real Church that I have experienced and I am encountered with hanging out with some friends over at their digs after having lunch and just chatting away the afternoon (Quite literally, I was hoping to hangout for an hour and change and then finish an essay but God had other plans.). We had lunch and then I got chatting with a guy (Peter) and we spent the afternoon hanging out. Eventually other people joined in the room, we had cake, and coffee, and before we knew it was 4 o'clock and I had to get myself sorted out for going to worship at NCF (neo-charismatic). To me the experience of lunch and chatting with people was more of the church than anything else I had experienced. Emily and I have been studying through Acts together and I have been struck by just how informal the Church seemed. It is amazing and incredible! It is so unfortunate that we often put church into a box like options 1-4 (see above) and ignore option 5, but truthfully the Church is when 2 or 3 are gathered in the name of Jesus.

That makes the church much more organic and frees us from certain drawbacks and constraints. The Church is supposed to be the Kingdom of God here on earth. Or at least we should be pursuing God's Kingship for our lives here on earth together. Yet we try to make church an event, or a building, but really it shouldn't be tied down.

Dear Friends I urge you to consider deeply on what it means to be the Church and take it up, Live the church, We should become the bodies of believers we are called to be, in the relationships that we are called to be in. Dream of alternatives and I will dream with you.

I will have more thoughts on the Church later on, it seems to be something that I am in a learning process about.

Peace and blessings!

Hey Guys super sorry for not having updated or written anything. Somehow everything is getting hectic with school and stuff. But I do need to get myself into proper rhythms of reflecting so I don’t type out like 10 pages worth of Blog material in one weekend. That being said I have so many wonderful thoughts to share with you, and many a wonderful story. A lot of these past 2 weeks without posting have been filled with Classes, studying, and being involved in people’s lives here on campus. Just really good stuff. A preview of the next few Blog Posts:

Masculinity: Masculinities to be more accurate. Thoughts on the MMC (Mighty Mens Conference) Thoughts on how people are adopting the theology, thoughts of the results of the theologies presented by the conference, and where do we go from here?

Church: Thoughts on what the Church actually is! And some wonderful experiences of what it looks like to be the church, and how we actually do worship and celebrate that which God has done in our midst.

Random stories and events of the Last few weeks: Crazy conversations, Horrible Debates, loving chats, Sit down and hear my reflections on life in SA over a cup of tea/Coffee and some rusks hmm rusks...

(By the by these posts need to get caught up in the next week. If I don’t make a deadline for getting caught up then it won’t go too well. That being said I am thinking by September 6^th I should have posted on all of these topics if not holler at me!) And I then need to be in a good rhythm of posting weekly. Please forgive me for my absence from writing. And please continue to tell me good stories. Many thanks!

Andrew

So today’s blog post is devoted to sharing and showing some problems with the way the global economic system actually negatively affects people in our world today. And yes it has everything to do with theology, because our God is a God of Social justice, and dares to love and live amongst the poorest of the poor.

So Last Friday my Studies in Industrial mission class piled into a van and we went up into the rural areas of KwaZulu-Natal. Which made for a wonderful experience, and a wonderful chance to chat with people in my class, it was a really blessing. We arrived in the community around noon, and went into a community center to talk with some locals. (the building was the community hall, not owned by the community, but rather the municipality).

We were meeting with some local contacts from the Ujaama center. Ujaama is an organization that works with and through SORAT as a means of bridging communities, to theology, and theology to the community. It serves as a way that ensures theology maintains its roots in people’s situations. Many of my professors do work with and through Ujaama, and it involves many really cool projects, like community mobilization, or HIV awareness, or Development programs, Or organizing contextual bible studies to discover how the Biblical text can be used by ordinary people to see their world in a new light. Some really cool stuff.

So when we arrived we were greeted by uBaba John Mkizi, who is a Methodist Minister from Pietermaritzburg, who has been serving in Mt. Elyas for the Christian community there. He doesn’t have a church building as the community has a strong distrust of religion and the way it works. uBaba couldn’t get enough of a body of believers together to justify the building of a church, and (not that the building is important for a church to exist, but it could have practical applications) therefore was not being paid by the Methodist church in South Africa.

We then as people arrived and moved in, sat down in a circle together, and we the Students from UKZN introduced ourselves to them, saying where we were from and what we were studying. Which was wonderful (I love being centered out as the North American, I am not the only foreigner in the group though, we have a Tanzanian, Indian, and a Kenyan I think). We then had a few people introduce themselves and share their stories of Unemployment and underemployment.

We heard several stories that were all very similar, often times people have been unemployed or underemployed for at the least 7 years. They survive by taking the occasional 2-3 days of casual labour that is unfortunately not sufficient for them especially if something were to happen. It provides base necessities, rather than any security for living. Of the people who were at the meeting from Mt Elyas Only 3 were currently employed. One was a woman working for the Government coordinating NGO’s and social services through those means. Another was a teacher in a nearby school, and the other was uBaba John Mkizi, the minister. There was nearly 34 people at the meeting (this is only a small representation of the population of Mt. Elyas).

When we asked people about why they thought there were no Jobs the answers were pretty diverse, from The Economic recession, to the lack of government involvement. From the companies not caring enough to protect the labourers. The majority of Jobs in the area are for a sugar company and working in the sugar cane fields. They increasingly have made a shift towards making labour as cheap as possible by letting full time employees go, opting more for the cheap and easy option of Casual employment. They hire enough workers for the day, and because the workers are economically dependent on this system they lack the ability to negotiate strongly their wages. As such they get paid very little for their work, and are further impoverished. This cycle of economic indebtment maintains the poverty in their area.

As for what the Government is doing, the community doesn’t know. The Council members are dropped in by the party and are not residents to the area. The Larger and broader officials are the same way. They don’t provide information, and they don’t go about telling the community about the processes and the decisions made in the government. The local leadership (tribal) is often times at odds with the government officials so little to no communication is made between them. This lack of communication deadlocks the community in underdevelopment. The Government promises Jobs, and infrastructure, but when it comes down to the results of it, they are lacking proper and safe water, they lack electricity (in their entire community), and they are on a dirt road (the paving was spotty at best when we came in for at least 15-20 min of a drive).

They asked us questions as well. They were trying to figure out if Poverty like this exists elsewhere in the world. They asked me that question. And the truth is that in Canada we do have economic poverty much a kin to this. Nowhere near as bad but still it is similar. One area that it is evident to me is within the Native reservation system where the Government doesn’t seem to be doing enough to be responsible or to work them out of the poverty that they are stuck on. (I Told them about that situation.). Urban poverty is very different especially with problems of homelessness, that is often times caused by other structural pressures that are different than that of the economic situation of Mt. Elyas.

They also asked us what we promised to do. That is a very hard question to be asked. Yet it is so key. My response to it is as follows. I will chose to actively remember Mt Elyas, to remember it as an example of many situations of Economic injustice. I will tell their story to others so that Economic Injustice doesn’t become a thing of theory, but so that it places faces to people affected by casual labour and so many neoliberal practices within our world. I will tell their story and let it be made know that this isn’t right. And in doing so I hope to awaken people to the realities of the Neoliberal structures that we are adopting and encouraging in a variety of ways.

It is so important to address these issues of underdevelopment, as without addressing these things as people are getting caught up in the societal hopes and goals, of riches and success, they will turn to more destructive means to either achieve those expectations, or destructive ways to avoid the experience of those expectations. If they remain as they are (and all ready it is happening) they will become a crime and Gang invaded community. And the hope for successful development will be left in criminal activity.

So it is my hope that we will pray and also we will act, consider and ponder deeply on this sort of thing as it is important!

Also I am deeply sorry for not posting for almost 20 days ( just realized) so you know this weekend is going to be busy, but up I will be posting again the up and coming themes in the next post coming just now!

A Hectic Weekend!

Hey friends! So I promised to add more stories to the blog this weekend, (as of friday) as I feel like I am getting behind both in journalling and blogging, I really need to start to commit to writing more frequently. So perhaps by the end of this weekend I will get you caught up really quickly my friends!

So firstly this weekend was hectic! (in a really good way). Friday Night I went with my friend and we played touch rugby (3 on 4 switching back and forth through out) which was a wonderful wonderful experience. I have fallen in love with playing touch rugby, and the guys who play are wonderful men to play it with.

So Following touch rugby, John invited me and kate (my friend) to join him and a bunch of his friends in Durban for the Night. We needed to leave in like 15-20 min so that was the real start of the hectic-ness for the night. We went to Durban in a couple of cars, with all of our stuff that we needed, (Sleeping bags, clothes etc...) and went to a wonderful Morracan Restaurant called Yarris. I had a pasta dish with lamb meat balls, very delicious. and it was a wonderful time to celebrate and hangout with friends, Margot's Birthday (A room mate of John's). We then went to one of their friend's houses (that lives just outside of Durban) to crash for the night, the men slept on the ground floor and the ladies upstairs. Which made for an epic way to sleep. Especially when the morning came and we were able to sit, and Spend some time with God, (I prayed, and read scripture) and just enjoyed the scenery. So we were staying in a house that overlooked the ocean, so as I was sitting and reading scripture, I could enjoy watching the waves, and the surfers. Truely a blessed experience! Following that we packed up our cars and went down to the beach to grab breakfast at a little restaurant called the Green Dolphin. As we did that we watched the Rugby Game between Australia and New Zealand which was epic! it was a really great spot to watch the game and the guys, and gals made amazing company to.

After we finished watching the game we went to the beach to sit and enjoy and hangout a bit longer. So we went to a different beach, and just hung out. Soon there came along the beach trucks with these baskets on the top, with lots of young guys (some boys), driving down to a point where there were nets being pulled up out of the water. Apparently in Durban there is a migration of Sardines that happens once a year, that takes place over the course of a month (with a particular weekend being more busy than other times) and during this migration there are loads of people who fish for sardines. So we got to experience them pulling this net out of the water, with loads of sardines! Pretty cool and amazing.

It was truely a wonderful chance to hangout with a bunch of guys and gals (all of whom are christians) and who invited us out just to become good friends with them. It does make me wonder if I would do this at home for a stranger who comes into my community. (or also it should make you wonder what you would do for a stranger who comes into your communities)
Think about this, I think it is actually a cool way for a church community to be a blessing for other people who come into their lives. Would you be willing to invite someone to go with you to hangout after a church service? If you are heading to another city to visit with friends, are you willing to take the person who maybe doesn't know anyone outside of the town they are in? Is this a way that God is calling us to practically love people who surround us in our day to day lives?

Just some thoughts for now. Other cool things that have happened this week, Cell Group on Tuesday Night! Really a cool way to meet other christians from a church here in the area. Slowly I am getting better with Zulu names which is a huge blessing. But it is still going to take time. So at cell group we learned about convictions and we journalled and applied what convictions we have. So I am convicted of the need to be more actively journalling as I journey hear. Also that is going to apply to this blog. Afterwards, John and I just chatted about the evening, and different beliefs and strategies around bible studies, and life etc... Just a cool way to dwindle away an evening.

Wednesday Night I had a really chill evening with TBT (the Bible Talks) as they do a Wednesday night bible study looking into a book (which the name escapes me right now) but is investigating how the Church actually works. What it means to be the church, and what it looks like to live as the church. It is promising to be a good foundational relearning of why and how I should be a member of the church as well.

Thursday evening I went and chilled out with Kate over at her residence. We had tea and then just chatted faith sort of stuff for the evening. and Also we chatted about life, and the universe. Totally cool that I am developing a good strong friendship with people surrounding me.

Even still I do deeply miss many good friends back home. (If that is you or if you are unsure as well) I would love to hear stories! Any sort of story that is happening in your life. Or if you would rather chill over skype, or msn, or facebook chat. All you need to do is send me a message or e-mail and I would love to hangout with you. (I know it isn't like spontaneous sort of hanging out, but nor can I actually live attached to a computer, 24-7 (and nor should you) so it gives me an idea of how to love and live with you better over a longer distance.)

For know I think that is all that I have! maybe as I journal this evening and tomorrow afternoon, I will come upon more exciting stories from my week! (or maybe I will have more stories happen this weekend you never can know eh?)

Peace!

A week of Classes!

Hey so It has been an epic week with many a good story to tell! (Which is wonderful because it is how good God has been to me this past week)

So I guess sharing a bit more about my classes might be helpful as I have finally had a lecture in each of the classes.

For BIST 310 (Biblical Theology) we have two sections of the course. One is focusing on the Old testament and is using themes from the South African Context as studying points. What does the Bible say about: Economic Justice, Homosexuality, HIV/AIDS, and Masculinity. Which makes for an epic course. Random thought for you from this week's lecture... The Monarchy in Israel (which by some is hailed to be a great and good thing), actually was responsible for some of the greatest debts incurred upon the nation of Israel. Check it out see what Samuel had to say about the problem of a Monarchy is 1st Sam 8. Then Read about how Solomon brought some of the worst economic debts upon his nation for the creation of the temple. It is an expensive building and that didn't come for free. He even had to sell 20 cities to another nation because of his debts. Kind of crazy and unfortunate that the people of Israel did not look heed Samuel's warning and advice.
The other half is focusing on the Book of Revelation. Which is totally epic. I couldn't believe how much my perspective changed once I started viewing the text as a continuous act of being read in a worship context that is punctuated by hymns from the congregation. Try reading the destruction of the world and then hearing a hymn declaring how epic and Just our God is. It really changes your perspective on all that doom and gloom into a hopeful read.

My Theologies of Transformation course is going to be equally epic. We are going to be investigating specifically how the state and Theology interact. Trust me the Bible is not impartial in this matter. Old Testament and New Testament. The LORD the God of Israel had a huge deal of love for the oppressed. Jesus called the rulers Foxes, and snakes. Trust me if the Bible isn't partial then the church also shouldn't be partial.

The Issues of Gender and Masculinities course is going to be equally exciting. We are starting off by investigating the current status of Masculinity (Or Masculinities) in this society. So Quick story for you and things to ponder on. Here there is a conference which is called the MIGHTY MEN CONFERENCE. Basically it is a group of men who gather yearly to be encouraged into bolder masculinity... That being said I am not sure that if what they are marketing as masculine (or being a 'Man') is what it is to be a 'man' in our society then I would want to be a man. The whole thing (we watched a video) seemed heavily off setting. The main speaker (Angus Buchan) basically agressively extorted the men to live into the fullness of Christ as men. To be bold, and confident, in control, powerful, to trust and put faith in God, to hold to that faith in the midst of adversity. All of which is good, yet it seemed to be lacking. He seemed to want to make the 'boys' of the crowd into 'Manly men' (read Valiant soldier, Mighty Warrior, etc...). The truth is that Men were created differently then women. Yes, but at the same time we were not created to become gods to others, or provider for others. Men need to hear and understand very deeply the relationship of Love that Christ has for us. Not just the need to sanctify, purify, and make ourselves right with the Lord. We need to also understand that we as men are called to be humble servants not control hungry high priests in our families (at one point he said to the crowd, Fathers, go back home and be the HIGH PRIESTS in your Families, Tell them to pray etc...). Very scary stuff. Especially given that this is becoming increasingly normative for Christian men in this country. If he thinks that there is a crisis of Masculinity in the world now due to feminism, I think that there is a crisis of Masculinities due to this OVERreaction to women's gain in power. Men we need to be lovers, kind and compassionate. Not necesarily weak, but lovers. I will have many more thoughts on this issue as the weeks progress.

My Studies in Industrial Mission class started today, and it promises to be an amazing and tranformative class. We are approaching the world as a faithful theological community using the methodology of SEE-JUDGE-ACT (cf Exo 3:7-10). and we are going to investigate the structural sins of the Global Economic system, and engage with them, to see how to change these systems, and improve the lives of people in order to truely and fully show how God loves the World. In doing so we teach people who God is through our actions of compassion, and justice. We can evangelize and show a God who cares about their experience. and In doing so we can transform the dominant Ideologies of the world and teach people what the Kingdom of God looks like here and now. Totally epic! This class is also going to involve field trips out to the local communities to see the dramatic and horible affects of the Global economic system.

This past sunday I have finally found a wonderful Church which I feel like I am going to commit myself into. So I went to the Lutheran Chapel at LTI (Lutheran Theological Institute) Which made for a wonderful experience. We worshipped acappella and sang in english and Zulu which was wonderful. After service all of the first time guests introduced themselves and said where they were from. So 5 of us stood up and introduced ourselves. Which was wonderful. I am super excited to continue to worship there and be present in a Lutheran community on campus.

I have other exciting stories from this week which I will add on later! but Peace for now! as soon I am going to be getting ready to play Touch Rugby!