27 November 2010

Believe it or not, lately I (Stephanie) have been thinking nostalgically about electric garage door openers. The sort where you go out of your kitchen directly into the garage, get in the car, hit the little button clipped to the sun visor and the door goes up, you back out, you hit the button again and the door goes down as you cruise smoothly down the street. The stuff of dreams. That’s because to do the same task here at our house in Nairobi involves the following steps: (1) slam the iron security grate that covers the front door and lean into it to throw the bolt; (2) lock the padlock on the security grate; (3) walk across the garden and prop open the gate, hoping the dogs don’t run out; (4) walk back to the detached shed, reach in through the slot in the door—again leaning into it to get the right alignment—and unlock the padlock by feel (the lock’s inside so that thieves can’t come at night and use a hacksaw to remove it); (5) pull open the wide metal doors and prop them open with a rock; (6) drive the car out of the garage and make a tight curve through the gate onto the gravel driveway; (7) stop the car, get out, close the gate; (8) get back in the car, go. Then come home and do the whole thing in reverse. Full disclosure: actually, Bill usually does this for me. (Thank you, Bill!) And normally I walk the ten minutes along a dirt road it takes to get to my office, so it’s not like I have to do it every day. Just often enough to dream of little buttons on the sun visor.

But in a way all that awkward locking, unlocking and assuming unusual positions to get the alignment right is a bit like what it’s meant for us to live and work cross-culturally in Africa for the past decade. American Thanksgiving this week, November 25^th, happened to be the ten-year anniversary of the day Linnea, Caroline and I first arrived in Ethiopia. Bill got there about a week before us to set up our new home while the girls and I stopped in Cambridge for them to say good-bye to one phase of life before encountering an entirely new and alien one. It was such a relief, after a long intercontinental flight with a 10- and 12-year-old, and a midnight drive from the Addis Ababa airport along dark and mysterious potholed streets, to collapse into beds Bill had already made up with our own familiar sheets and comforters. Ever since then our lives have been about ‘unlocking’ many of our comfortable preconceptions and our assumptions about what’s normal or even what’s ‘Christian’ (astonishing how much of Africa culture is closer to a biblical worldview than my own American experience is), and ‘locking’ ourselves into a commitment to new communities and new perspectives. In the process it sometimes takes a little extra ‘leaning in’ and fiddling a bit with things we can’t quite see clearly in order to open the doors to new relationships. No one said it would be easy. But I wouldn’t trade a day of it. (Well OK, maybe one or two specific days I remember…) I feel so unbelievably privileged to be part of the emergence of Africa as the global center of Christianity in the 21^st century and to have been given a small role to play in it. This Thanksgiving I am very, very thankful for eight years in Ethiopia and these past two years in Kenya and all God has done during that time. I’m also very thankful for the many of you who have stood with us as partners and encouragers during those ten years. We are blessed!

And hopefully there’s more to come. Who would think that after teaching in Africa for ten years I’d still constantly be stumbling across basic cultural and worldview assumptions my students hold that are (surprise!) quite different from mine. One of the things I’ve been doing this past term at the Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology (NEGST) is working with the new cohort of PhD candidates on critical thinking and academic writing. All these years I’ve been marking student papers and scribbling the same corrections in the margins over and over and over again, until it finally dawned on me—fairly recently, I confess—that the repeated ‘mistakes’ in the students’ writing are actually very specific cultural patterns of organizing and presenting ideas that leave an imprint on their English writing. On the internet I eventually came across what other people are saying about something called ‘contrastive rhetoric’, which looks at how patterns of communication learned in home cultures can affect international students trying to succeed at UK and US universities. So what I‘ve tried to do this term is help the PhD students become more conscious both of Western conventions of academic writing and of the ways similar communication works in their own communities (which means I’ve had to learn more about how it works), so that they can choose just how ‘Western’ or ‘African’ they want to be in any particular piece they’re writing.

Of course what would be even better is if we—really, they—can find or develop a writing style to use in their doctoral dissertations that speaks both to the international academic community and to their home cultures. One of the most enlightening things we did as a group this term was to have each PhD student write a short essay representing an example of persuasive oral ‘expert rhetoric’ in their own village or community. I asked them to be as imaginative as possible and to make up something that spoke in a way they felt particularly comfortable with. (I wanted to see what sort of styles and patterns they would use.) They came up with all sorts of great things, mostly along the lines of someone trying to convince their village to do something that would benefit the village as a whole. Lots of great stories, clever proverbs, and African ways of showing appreciation for the elders were in there, along with a less explicit and direct, more involve-the-listener way of communicating. When we read and discussed the essays in class the students kept saying things like, “This feels so comfortable.” “This is us.” “Why can’t we write like this all the time?” One quite gifted Sudanese doctoral student said, “If books were like this I could read four hundred books. But I struggle with books because it’s difficult to figure out what they’re trying to say.” They were intrigued to start putting some descriptive labels on their own styles of communicating. (One said, “I didn’t even know we had a style.”) So now our goal as a group is to try to come up with some way to do academic writing that’s scholarly and also truly African—in spite of the fact that given Africa’s primarily oral cultures there are hardly any local models of writing styles at all. If these students can find their African ‘voice’ in their own scholarly writing it might be a significant move forward for other emerging African theologians as well. Who knows, it might work. We’re just making this stuff up as we go along.

The NEGST term finished with exams this week, and while these students are having a break till January, Bill and I leave tomorrow for the town of Eldoret in western Kenya where we’ll teach a three-week module from 29 Nov - 17 Dec for NEGST’s cohort of MA extension students there. I’ll be teaching first-year Greek, while Bill does Old Testament Theology. Eldoret is a regional agricultural market center but unfortunately isn’t particularly known for anything else. I’ve been asking friends, both Kenyans and foreigners, what there is to do in Eldoret for three weeks, and the answer seems to be “not much”. I guess that means Bill and I will have plenty of time to get caught up on reading and email. Oh well.

The big family news this month is that it looks like we’re about to sell my parents’ house! We have a signed sales contract and the closing is tentatively planned for mid-December. I’m holding my breath, not quite able to believe this 3½-year saga may be drawing to a close. If the sale goes through it will be a huge burden lifted from my shoulders as the executor, it will relieve some of the financial pressure on us from trying to maintain the house, it will give me the chance to move on from my parents’ and brother’s deaths, and it means Bill & I can start looking for a small house to buy in the US since we currently have no permanent ‘home base’. So you can see this is a very big deal. Thank you so much to all of you who have been praying us through this long sad tale. God is faithful.

The other happy news is that Linnea (22) and Caroline (20) are coming to Nairobi for Christmas. They arrive just three days after we get back from Eldoret so I’ve been busy baking and filling the freezer in advance. Then two days after Christmas Linnea’s boyfriend William will join us for a couple of weeks, his first trip outside the US. We’re looking forward to some great family time and to showing him a bit of Kenya.

So that’s our news and here are our current prayer points:

• Praise for a good term just finished at the Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology (NEGST), and prayer as we prepare our courses for next term: Systematic Theology and Contemporary Theology for Bill; Exegesis of Greek Narrative and Exposition of Acts for Stephanie.
• Prayer for our travel to Eldoret in western Kenya from 28 Nov - 17 Dec to teach at NEGST’s extension program there: first-year Greek for Stephanie and Old Testament Theology for Bill.
• Praise for the sales contract for Stephanie’s parents’ house, and prayer that the sale will be completed in December. This has been a 3½-year ordeal and we’re excited that it may be coming to an end.
• Praise that we ended the SIM fiscal year with all the financial support we needed. And please pray God’s blessings on our wonderful and faithful supporters!
•  Prayer for safe and smooth Christmas travel from Virginia to Kenya for Linnea (22) and Caroline (20) on 20-21 Dec, and Linnea’s boyfriend William on 26-27 Dec, and for wonderful family time together.

And may God grant each of you, our friends around the globe, relaxed and worshipful holidays this month with your own friends and family, celebrating his goodness to each of us in Jesus Christ.

Christmas blessings,

Stephanie

for Bill, Linnea and Caroline Black

Recent Bits & Pieces

NEGST Ladies Fellowship

NEGST women students, wives of students, and staff women got together this month to show off our various cultures and traditions. I love this photo of women from Eritrea, Sudan, Zambia and Malawi listening to their friend from Kenya explain some favorite foods.

Showing how to pound grains and spices in DR Congo

Demonstrating how Kikuyu ‘aunties’ welcome a new bride

Then everyone got to taste the food samples (my favorite part!)

NEGST ‘Grace Group’

Every Friday morning from 10-11 we have small fellowship groups on campus with students, support staff and faculty members mixed together. Here’s our ‘Grace Group’ meeting at one of the student flats.

The snacks: ubiquitous tea (above) and steamed sweet potato and arrowroot (below).

Happy Grace Group members (wouldn’t you be if you got a hour’s break from class or your office on Friday mornings?)

Bill savoring a cup of Kenyan chai

Stephanie’s Greek Class

There’s probably not much that can be as mind-numbing as two hours of Greek syntax just after lunch every Tuesday and Thursday (who came up with this course schedule?!) so we do a lot of keep-everybody-awake-and-moving stuff like getting up and writing on the chalkboard

Here’s the whole class, mostly MA/MDiv students and a sprinkling of PhD candidates relearning their Greek. They’re an all-star group—but don’t tell them I said that!

Springtime in Kenya

While those of you in the northern hemisphere enjoy autumn leaves, we have these amazing purple jacaranda trees that burst out all over Nairobi. I took this photo on my walk home from my office.

The tree tomatoes ripening in our garden have been attracting all sorts of great birds—and monkeys, too

This one was gleefully tormenting our dogs while making sure to stay safely out of reach on the roof

And on the other side of the ocean…

Caroline (left) demonstrates her college spirit at a UVA football game

As far as I know, this was the only one she went to all year. But maybe I’m underestimating her passion for American football???

Linnea (far right) trick-or-treating with her Somali little sisters (center) in the ‘Bridging the Gap’ mentor program for immigrant families she helps direct at UVA. Evidently they wanted to be vampire cheerleaders but Linnea convinced them princesses were better.

15 October 2010

We’ve just returned from a welcome get-away over our mid-term break to a beautiful house perched on the edge of the Great Rift Valley. For me (Bill), this involved clambering over boulders and sending rock hyraxes and dik-diks scrambling out of the way of an unexpected visitor, and jogging through wind-blown grasses and groves of whistling acacia, past clusters of curious Thompson’s gazelles. For Stephanie it involved lounging on the veranda, a good book competing with the stunning view for her attention. We went with longtime friends from Ethiopia who are in the country for a conference. The chance to thoroughly debrief our current life with old friends was immensely helpful.

But now we are back, exactly half way through a busy first term at the Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology (NEGST). Stephanie is working with another colleague to orient the new cohort of PhD students to the daunting task of becoming true research scholars. She’s also teaching the second-year Greek students. Over the summer she started a biweekly Bible study for women at church, which has blossomed into a significant opportunity to disciple Kenyan women. The pastor has also just called on her to lead several sessions at this weekend’s church retreat, as the main speaker was forced to cancel at the last minute due to illness. And Stephanie also had the opportunity to travel to a conference in Accra, Ghana, in September, where she represented the Accrediting Council for Theological Education (ACTEA)—a great opportunity for her to talk about accreditation of theological institutions with the leaders of theological schools from across West Africa. She’ll be traveling again at the end of this month to Zambia to meet with her ACTEA staff colleagues, and is eagerly looking forward to her first trip to Angola at the end of January.

By contrast, I’ve managed to stay fairly close to home. For me the new term means two courses to teach. One is called ‘Church’s Mission and Ministry’ and the other is the core Systematic Theology cycle covering three terms, which I really enjoy doing again this year. I have all of the second-year students, as Systematic Theology is a required set of courses for most of our masters students. It means I get to go over every controversial theological issue and challenge my students about what they believe. I find that most students have never actually examined what they believe; they have been content to carry whatever beliefs they inherited from home or church or conferences or TV preachers, packed much like a suitcase that accompanies them wherever they go, never mind the fact that they have never actually opened it and looked to see what’s there or why. So we have fun. Actually, I have fun; the students are mainly appalled, until they begin to realize that there is a method to the apparent madness. This usually happens at some point towards the end of the first term. But in the meantime, they are trying to cope with having their fundamental assumptions challenged and proved wanting.

Right now I’m in the midst of trying to help them understand the Trinity. Actually, that sentence is a perfect example of how we in the West have approached the Trinitarian perspective of our New Testament. We Westerners have since medieval times attempted to understand and explain the threeness and oneness of God. This has caused no end of problems and controversy because, to be honest, it just doesn’t make sense. 18^th century Deists like Thomas Jefferson and 21^st century atheists like Richard Dawkins have made similar points in their own efforts to discredit Christians and their Christianity. Our confusion is seen most clearly in how we pray, or, more precisely, to whom we pray. Mostly we pray to ‘the Lord’ or ‘God’ or ‘Jesus’. Our mental map of God rarely includes Trinity, and if we do think about it, it’s something we tack on because we’re supposed to.

The problem is that the Trinity isn’t a kind of attribute of the one God that we can sort of deemphasize if we have to lead prayers at a multi-faith event. It’s not like we talk about ‘the Lord’ and pray to ‘God’ and then at some point remember the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (we are extremely good at using words without thinking about what we are actually saying, or even worse, praying!). Trinity is the essence of who our God is. And when we don’t think about God as God the Trinity, it affects the way we perceive just about everything, including salvation, which means how we understand the gospel itself.

What drives Christians to take on this nonsensical (to the rest of the world) doctrine of the Trinity is Jesus himself. Historically, Christians tried a number of different ways to explain Jesus. Most of the efforts produced clever attempts that preserved either his humanity or his divinity, but ended up producing a Jesus that could not accomplish the salvation preached by the early church. In the end, the 'Trinity' is not so much a precise theological definition, but rather the 'area' considered by later Christians both to do justice to the witness of the apostles and also to preserve the gospel from being undone by the various alternative versions of Christianity in circulation. Christians have been around for a long time, and you can bet that if we could have come up with a less incomprehensible way to explain our faith than ‘Trinity’, we would have done so by now. The problem is, every effort to that end has ended up compromising the gospel.

Just as the cross was foolishness to the Greeks and a stone of stumbling to the Jews, even though it was in God’s economy the very wisdom and power of God for salvation, so the Trinity is reviled as intellectual idiocy by the academy, dismissed as blasphemy by Jews and Muslims and written off as incomprehensible by many otherwise religious people. But it bears noting that the God of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures is revealed as a God of love, that love implies a relationship, and that humanity is created in the image of God as a plurality – male and female and with the capacity and call to love. And when humanity exercised our free will not to love and went on to create the mess we now inhabit, and became estranged from one another and from God and subject to death, it was the Trinity’s rescue plan that became the subject of what we call the Scriptures. The Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are in fact all present and active in the New Testament accounts, and the gospel therein described is above all the revelation of the Trinity’s saving love. The incarnation and resurrection of God the Son recreates humanity as the image of the Trinity in its relationships of love. And our own salvation is participation in that love, with one another and with God the Trinity.

The Trinity may be fundamentally incomprehensible, but it doesn’t mean that it isn’t true. It just means that God the Trinity is bigger than we are, which, to be honest, is a relief.

Well, that’s a glimpse of the sorts of things I’m up to in Systematic Theology, and that sums up the news from us Blacks in Nairobi. Here are some ways that you can be praying for us and our work here:

• Praise for a very good beginning to the new year and for our new classes of students at the Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology (NEGST).
• Prayer for Stephanie, that her Monday Bible study may continue to have an impact on these church women in their knowledge of the Bible and their relationship with Christ.
• Pray for Bill as he teaches, that the Spirit may use these classes to deepen his students’ understanding and love of God, and that this in turn would have a positive impact on their lives and future ministries.
• Prayer for Stephanie in her role as Accreditation Officer with the Accrediting Council for Theological Education (ACTEA)—currently working on plans for leadership training events in Ethiopia, Kenya and Zimbabwe in early 2011, as well as trying to keep up with accreditation requests from a growing number of schools.
• Prayer that Stephanie’s parents’ house in Virginia Beach, VA would finally sell. We’re now into year four of this ordeal and it continues to stress our finances.
• Praise that God has provided the additional funds above our normal missionary support we needed for our family contribution towards this year’s costs at the University of Virginia for Linnea (22, in her final year) & Caroline (20)! (And a big thank you to those who helped!)

By grace,

Bill

(for Stephanie, Linnea and Caroline Black)

Sorry it’s been so long since you’ve heard from us! Here are a few photos of things we’ve been doing…

Caroline (20) made a return trip to Africa for five weeks in July-August, including both time here in Nairobi…

…and a ‘homecoming’ visit to Addis Ababa—her first time back in Ethiopia since she graduated from high school in 2008.

Reuniting with best friends and good Ethiopian food!

While Caroline was with us we made a driving circuit of western Kenya, starting with an ACTEA presentation I (Stephanie) needed to give at a theological school in the area.

Then we wandered around western Kenya for a few days. A lot of it looks pretty much like this through the car window:

Sharing the road (That’s sugar cane)

On the way home we visited Nakuru National Park, known for its flamingoes…

and rhino conservation program…

…and Rothschild giraffes.

We also made a special stop to visit our Kenyan ‘mom and dad’, who Bill first stayed with as a university student in 1980. We’re so privileged to have been friends now for 30 years.

(Bill left Kermit the frog with them for safekeeping way back when… and they have!)

September brought the beginning of the academic year at NEGST and new classes to teach. Here’s the new cohort of PhD students I’m working with:

They’re from Kenya, Sudan, Rwanda, DR Congo, Eritrea, and Mali.

Later in September I travelled to a conference in Ghana, where my main responsibility was ACTEA networking with leaders of theological colleges in West Africa. So I spent a lot of time doing stuff like this:

It’s not hard to pick me out in the group photos at these conferences!

After a busy six weeks of class prep and teaching we were more than ready for NEGST mid-term break this past weekend—which we spent at a gorgeous holiday house we rented with friends on the edge of the Rift Valley escarpment. (That’s Bill in the orange shirt, returning from a hike.)

Wonderful relaxation…

beautiful scenery…

…and (my favorite!) zebras.

Come visit us and maybe we can take you there, too.  :)