Loving Others is Africa

Lately, besides teaching our SIM missionary candidates, I've been diving deep into writing and re-writing training material for helping congregations engage cross-culturally. It is so encouraging when its intent is realized, like on Wed. when a young, local pastor took me to lunch (always fun!) with a hundred questions about intercultural ministry. He shared that two Ethiopian immigrant couples had started coming to his church...and it was changing the dynamic. The regular members were wary and uncertain at first, but now they are proud of these new friends and intrigued to have this diversity and wanting more! Now the leadership of the church desires to pursue diverse outreach opportunities, not merely for evangelism, but for inclusion into their congregation… This is a huge paradigm shift for them and they heard about our ministry of coaching churches in intercultural relationships, so he contacted me. This is our driving passion, to help open up a whole new world of cross-cultural vision and ministry!
As I thought about this church I was reminded of a lesson that God taught me on loving others. Some time ago we prayed that we would be freed from the oppression of a bar and prostitution joint which was just 20 feet behind our house...the loud music, the carousing, the clientele. We had sought to reach out to these folks, Gwen treated the prostitutes’ children for malaria, and helped in other ways...all to no avail. For weeks we were under all that oppression, then, one night, someone stole their big boom box and ran off into the darkness. There was a bunch of yelling... then silence. Without the music, the operation was sunk. Within three days, the lady who ran the business moved away during the night. (in Africa, it is a shame to move at night...) Wow! A huge answer to prayer! Then, I took over. I didn’t want that building (actually a mud block house) to rented out to someone else who would do the same type of business, so I tracked down the property owner and rented it ourselves... (I justified it by saying that we could use it for the church ministry somehow...but it was really to keep others away.) That very night, there was huge rain storm and we heard a loud ‘crunch n’thump’. We looked out back...and the mud house had fallen down into a heap! I immediately felt the sting of guilt for my lack of faith. God had a sense of humor to wait until I had paid the money to rent the property before crashing it down! A good story of how we should be focused on loving others and trusting God more, instead of thinking that God needed my wily cleverness to help Him out...