3 May 2010

We’re puttering along in the midst of the third and last term of the academic year at the Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology (NEGST). I (Stephanie) am teaching Gospel of Luke and Greek Exegesis, while Bill continues the core Systematic Theology sequence and a new-to-him course on Apologetics. Bill says apologetics courses tend to be about giving answers (primarily Western answers, at that) to questions no one is really asking, so he’s been trying to reorganize this course around an exploration of different religious worldviews and how we as (African) Christians might interact with them effectively. The first hurdle he faced was when he realized that none of his students had ever dealt with the concept of ‘worldview’ before, and that the preliminary step was to show them that each of them have one—i.e. a set of interconnected assumptions about reality, truth, God, etc., that shape the way we perceive the world—and that other people may have different ones that make perfect sense to them. This past Thursday Bill was able to invite a Buddhist lama to speak to his class about Buddhism, not so much so that the students could engage in Christian-Buddhist détente, but so that they could practice listening to someone else’s perspective in terms of that person’s own worldview. This ended up being a helpfully revealing exercise, as most of the students felt the lama made little sense and that he was just confused. Afterwards Bill tried to explain patiently that it was in fact a very clear and well-organized presentation on Buddhism—as long as you were willing to listen to it in terms of a Buddhist’s own basic assumptions. The whole point being, how can we present Christ to someone unless we understand the questions they’re asking from their own starting point? The students’ major class assignment for the term is to choose a specific religious and/or cultural community in Nairobi to explore what that community’s worldview is and what sort of faith questions they might be asking. Stay tuned—we’ll see how they do!

The big news in Nairobi at the moment is that Kenyans are about to vote on a new national constitution. There’s one item in the proposed constitution that some people feel pits the interests of Muslims against the interests of Christians, and there’s another item dealing with the legality of abortion. Some Christians want to jettison the whole draft constitution because of these two provisions, while others are advising that Christians make finer distinctions in their response. (It’s an all-or-nothing vote in the referendum coming up this month.) I’ve found it fascinating to listen in as the Kenyans in the NEGST community debate the approach they should take. It’s reminiscent of Christian political debates in my home country, but a process I rarely get to see in Africa, since Kenya is somewhat more open on these issues and—at least in this vote—more genuinely participative than many other African political systems. All in all, I’ve been quite impressed with the insight and theological sensitivity shown in the rather lively conservations I’ve overheard on campus. I feel like I’m watching the future unfold since, given that the numerical centre of gravity of world Christianity has shifted to the southern hemisphere, especially Africa, Christianity’s interaction with larger society will more and more be focused here.

Before the term started and we launched into our current courses, we had a lovely Easter break with our friends Mark and Barbara Phippen visiting from the UK. Since I’ve just about completely lost my eye for what’s unique about living overseas, I always ask our visitors to share some of their impressions as new arrivals. Here’s what Barbara noticed:

• Once I got off the plane and arrived at the airport, I knew that I was in Africa. There was the slower pace and slight chaos of administration as we were obtaining our visas. Then there was the initiation into African roads and transport. Road users of every description filled the muddy and deeply rutted highway—cars, vans, minibus ‘matatus’, lorries belching black and smelly fumes, animals and people, people walking everywhere! Stalls selling anything from furniture to mangoes lined the roadside.
•  For the first couple of days I felt disoriented by the lack of clear signs on the roads and in shopping/market districts. I couldn’t understand how life was organised or where anything was. Just lots of people milling about.
• I was disturbed by the huge contrast between the skyscrapers of the city centre and the tin roofed huts of the nearby slums of Kibera.
•  Easter Sunday worship at the Anglican Cathedral was a surprise to me. Although the congregation was mostly Kenyan, the service itself was more English than in England. Of course, we had chosen to go to an English-speaking service. However, unlike in England, the place was packed and the worship genuine.
• The life of mission workers like Bill and Stephanie was another area of contrasts. On the one hand—glamorous and exotic, on the other hand—hard work and totally relying on God to provide.
• I felt that Nairobi was a vibrant and colourful place—its people, the scenery, animals, birds, flowers and trees—and I had the feeling of being very much alive—excited and terrified all at the same time.

And here are Mark’s observations:

• First impressions? We’ve landed in paradise—a wonderful climate, colourful birds, exotic flowers and trees!
• Then we encounter the traffic—bouncing and swerving erratically, trying to avoid the potholes and ruts, the people and animals, and the other cars. Or just being stationary for indeterminate periods for no obvious reason.
• The people mostly smile, are open, friendly and welcoming, though some of those loitering beside the road feel more threatening—but I cannot tell if this is just my fear of the unknown, or reasonable caution.
• The NEGST campus is impressive, a mixture of old and new buildings. There’s a big vision for growth but currently limited by insufficient funds. And the faculty members we met seemed like an assortment of ordinary people held together by a common commitment to doing extraordinary things with God.
• Other impressions—the washbasin has two cold taps, the cistern doesn’t flush reliably and the electricity goes off unpredictably. Of greater significance—the huge slums are filled with mud and people trying to scratch out a living somehow. No, it’s not paradise. But it is a place where God is working.
• We came wanting to bring encouragement and blessing to Bill and Stephanie, but we leave with a greater sense of the immense need for mission work, and feeling that it is us who have been blessed.

Our thanks to Mark & Barbara for coming all that way to visit. We did feel blessed. And the four of us had a great time exploring Nairobi and the surrounding area, since it’s easy for Bill and me to become so absorbed in what we’re doing at NEGST that we forget to look up and around at this fascinating country. The photos at the end of this letter are a sample of Mark’s beautiful photography.

That’s our news and here’s a list of our current prayer needs—which I notice are almost identical to last month’s…

• Prayer for our classes at the Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology (NEGST): Greek Exegesis and Exposition of Luke for Stephanie, and Systematic Theology and Apologetics for Bill.
• Prayer for Stephanie’s work as Accreditation Officer for the Accrediting Council for Theological Education in Africa (ACTEA)—trying to finalize revisions and updates to ACTEA’s standards for accreditation across the continent.
• Prayer for summer plans for Linnea (21) and Caroline (19). Linnea will be a short-term missionary with Africa Inland Mission (AIM) as part of her concentration in global public health at the University of Virginia, but in the past few days she’s been asked to change her assignment from Kenya to Senegal—a big shift for all of us! Caroline (19) is trying to find a summer job and to decide whether to stay in Virginia or live with Bill’s folks in South Carolina for the summer (depends largely on job prospects). She’ll spend a month with us here in July-August, including a short visit to her ‘roots’ in Ethiopia.
• Prayer that we will finally be able to sell Stephanie’s parents’ house in Virginia—we’re having lots of showings, but unfortunately no offers yet.

So that’s what’s happening in our corner of the vineyard. We pray that God is equally blessing and equipping you for whatever part he’s asked you to play in his Kingdom!

blessings,

Stephanie

for Bill, Linnea and Caroline Black

Safari Snapshots (courtesy of Mark Phippen)

Our house on the NEGST campus. (If you think ‘cottage’ rather than ‘house’ it sort of works better…)

Barbara at our front door on Easter morning. No, she doesn’t always dress like this, but I’m impressed that she’s achieved the ‘out of Africa’ look here!

Bill and me (Stephanie) at the original ‘Out of Africa’ house, Karen Blixen’s former home a few miles from ours.

Nairobi National Park on a wet early morning

Bill as game park safari driver (note mud on car)

Me contemplating a giraffe

Sykes monkey—these are the kind that come into our garden and gleefully torment our dogs

Ostriches always look at you sort of just like this.

Cuteness factor: orphaned baby elephants at the Sheldrick Trust elephant rescue centre

Mark & Barbara being very brave near cape buffalo (On a walking safari at a private game reserve where we stayed in Naivasha, in the Rift Valley about 1½ hours from Nairobi)

Zebra in Naivasha. Don’t know why, but the zebra are always my favorite.

Night sky over our camp in Naivasha. Can you pick out the Southern Cross?

Hell’s Gate National Park, near Naivasha

Hiking the Ol Njorowa Gorge in Hell’s Gate

I confess that Barbara and I needed a bit of extra help at key points. That’s me in the background after the guys hauled my 50-year-old self up that ascent—wondering how I’m ever going to get back down…

We made it! Relaxing in ‘Heaven’, at the top of Hell’s Gate

(Thank you, Mark & Barbara, for the special getaway to Naivasha—and for the photos!)

25 March 2010

It’s exam week at the Nairobi Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology (NEGST). Which means that while the students are sweating their way through final papers and examinations, Bill and I (Stephanie) are scrambling to put our courses together for the next term which starts in just a couple of weeks. We have friends and supporters from the UK coming to spend Easter with us, and I’m choosing to be optimistic that we’ll have enough of our marking (for this term) and course prep (for next term) done by the time Mark and Barbara arrive that we’ll be ready to relax and enjoy showing them a bit of Kenya—and explore some new places ourselves. Why is it that even though we live in a world-renown safari destination we always wait until guests come to do the great tourist stuff? On some days the only thing that reminds me I’m in Africa are the monkeys in the trees in our front garden. …Or maybe the regular power cuts… Or Maasai guys in red blankets driving their bony cattle down the road in front of the grocery shop… Or gunshots in the night like the ones that woke me up at 3 a.m. yesterday morning… Or… OK, maybe there’s a lot that reminds me I’m in Africa. I just forgot for a moment there.

I’m actually rather sorry to have this past term’s course on 1 Corinthians come to an end. 1 Corinthians is so much a reflection of real life in the church today—certainly in Africa, but probably just about everywhere—that it practically teaches itself. Leadership rivalries like the ones Paul addresses in chapters 1-4 are more the rule than the exception in our churches. My students had no problem identifying with the situation in chapters 5-6 where one man’s blatant sin was tolerated by the church. Perhaps because he was a high-status rich person in a church of mostly low-status poor people? Paul’s affirmation of singleness in chapter 7 hits a nerve in Africa where marriage is the assumed state, very few adults (including no Christian leaders my students could think of) are single, and there is strong prejudice against never-married adults. The issue of sharing food sacrificed to idols in chapter 8 reads like local news to our NEGST students who regularly have to negotiate their way through extended family events that include traditional sacrifices, not to mention interactions with their Muslim and Hindu neighbors. The parts in chapter 11 and 14 that touch on the subject of women in worship are certainly a live issue in patriarchal African communities. The question in chapters 12-14 of what makes someone truly ‘spiritual’ (speaking in tongues? frenzied prophecy?) has to be considered against the backdrop of African Pentecostalism—quickly becoming the most numerous expression of Christianity in the world. And any discussion of resurrection (chapter 15) has to take into account traditional African perspectives concerning the ‘living dead’ ancestors. I’m tempted to think of this as an exotic approach to 1 Corinthians. Until I remember that these cultural perspectives are probably a good bit closer to the Corinthians’ own experiences than my North American upbringing was.

Bill had to exert considerably more creativity to make a connection in his Contemporary Theology class to our NEGST students’ real-world experiences, since the first portion of the prescribed syllabus covers 19^th century theologians like Schleiermacher, Hegel and kin (‘dead white guys’). But once he began to show his students how the questions and paradigm shifts of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment western thinkers were merely responses to their own cultural contexts, just as we (Africans) need to respond theologically to ours, things began to take off in a good direction. Still, even I find it a challenge to visualize Bill and his group of nine students from Cameroon, Zambia, Denmark, the US, and four different ethnic groups in Kenya huddled together in deep conversation about the likes of Barth, Bonhoeffer, Pannenburg, Hans Küng, Carl Henry, Gustav Gutièrrez, and John Mbiti. Bill told me they were particularly astonished at Rudolf Bultmann’s statement (in 1953) that “It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to available ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and demons.” I doubt any African person living in today’s world of satellite television and wireless internet, while at the same time in close touch with the everyday presence of both the divine and the demonic in traditional African communities, would find that statement anything but naïve. But the students appreciated having their minds opened to a variety of theologians and to the challenges of formulating and expressing Christian truth in a wide range of historical and social contexts. One of the highlights of the term was the field trip Bill organized for the students to see the movie ‘Avatar’ and discuss its worldview and theological implications. Without exception the NEGST students—like many I’ve met in this first generation of mass media in Africa—told Bill this was the first time they’d ever considered thinking about the assumptions behind a film or probing its underlying message. If you want to read more thoughts and ideas from students in this class, you can read Bill’s blog entry at http://onesimusonline.blogspot.com/2010/03/is-african-theology-possible-transcript.html.

Next term Bill continues teaching NEGST’s basic Systematic Theology sequence, as well as Apologetics-–another course that will need to be liberated from western assumptions!—while I continue with the Greek exegesis sequence (this one focused on non-narrative, so we’ll read through the whole Letter to the Ephesians in Greek) and a new course for me on the Gospel of Luke. I’m looking forward to the Luke course even though any brand new subject to teach means a huge amount of work in study and preparation. I’m planning to do two of the four hours each week as a manuscript study, where each student is given an unmarked text of the Gospel of Luke with no paragraphs or other divisions, and they work on sections of the text first individually, then in small group discussion around tables, then finally in whole-class discussion, making their own discoveries about Luke’s portrayal of Jesus and his mission. (Those of you who share our Inter-Varsity roots will know what I’m talking about…) I think it may be quite an eye-opener for the students, and hopefully a technique they can use in teaching the Bible in their own churches.

So that’s some of what’s happening in our world at the moment. No other news except that I made a quick trip to Ndola, Zambia last week for a staff meeting of the Accrediting Council for Theological Education in Africa. I’m spearheading a revision and update we’re doing of ACTEA’s accreditation standards, so lots of interesting challenges adapting those to Africa’s quickly changing educational contexts with all sorts of new emerging program formats. I’m also happy to report that Kenya Airways has just started direct flights from Nairobi to Ndola so that I no longer have to spend up to five hours in transit each way in the Lusaka airport where, take it from me, there are very few shops and no good restaurants. (But maybe the nicest women’s restrooms I’ve encountered in an African airport, all done up in pink marble, with lovely large showers. Why in Zambia has always been a mystery to me…)

Here’s the summary of our current prayer needs:

• Prayer as we prepare our classes for the next term at the Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology (NEGST) which begins 12 April: Greek Exegesis and Exposition of Luke for Stephanie, and Systematic Theology and Apologetics for Bill.
• Prayer for Stephanie’s work as Accreditation Officer for the Accrediting Council for Theological Education in Africa (ACTEA)—currently working on updating and revising ACTEA’s standards for accreditation across the continent.
• Prayer for Linnea and Caroline as they finalize their summer plans. Linnea (21) has applied for a short stay here in Kenya with Africa Inland Mission (AIM) as an internship for her concentration in global public health at the University of Virginia. Caroline (19) will spend a month with us later in the summer and hopes to return to her ‘roots’ in Ethiopia for a short visit with friends during that time.
• Prayer that we will finally be able to sell Stephanie’s parents’ house in Virginia, which has become a great drain on us—but with the Lord’s perfect choice of buyer, timing and price.

Thank you so much to the many of you who pray and give to allow us to be here in Kenya teaching at NEGST. We feel privileged to be here and are so grateful for your support!

blessings,

Stephanie

for Bill, Linnea and Caroline Black

NEGST Ladies Fellowship Retreat (Sat 13 Mar)

The Ladies Fellowship is mostly student wives, with a sprinkling of faculty wives, women students and women faculty. (That’s me in the back row, center right, behind the woman with the bright pink top.)

This one-day retreat gave us lots of time for fun chat…

…a chance to purchase items made by local women…

…and of course Kenyan chai!

The problem was that in the actual sessions I was so distracted by this cutie sitting with her mum in front of me that I wasn’t paying quite enough attention to the speaker.

Bill preaching at Karen Vineyard Church (Sun 14 Mar)

Bill preached at our church the Sunday before last—the first time he’s done that since we arrived in Kenya.

Worshippers at Karen Vineyard

Bill in the pulpit—a familiar sight to many of us, but one I haven’t gotten to enjoy in awhile.

Tokunboh Adeyemo Memorial Service (Tues 23 March)

Dr. Tokunboh Adeyemo, one of today’s best known African Evangelical leaders, passed away last week after a long battle with cancer. Bill and I were honored to have him in our home in Ethiopia for dinner one evening, and he also served as Chancellor of NEGST. Below, NEGST Vice-Chancellor Dr. Douglas Carew offers a remembrance at the memorial service held in Dr. Adeyemo’s home church here in Nairobi.

Leaving the church after the service. Dr. Adeyemo will be buried this Friday in his home country of Nigeria.

Family Photos this Month

Linnea and her Somali ‘little sisters’ in the Bridging the Gap program she co-directs at UVA

After all the snow at the University of Virginia this winter, Linnea & Caroline were happy to escape to Hilton Head for spring break with Bill’s folks… along with a few friends they brought along. (That’s Caroline, far left, Linnea, far right). Thanks, Joe & Kaye, for hosting everyone!

I guess we’re supposed to be reassured that they’re studying? (Caroline, second from right)