A taste of Africa

Thanksgiving greetings from… well, today it's Virginia. Last weekend it was North Carolina, and this weekend it'll be South Carolina. It's what missionaries do. But the week before last it was California – for a very intriguing meeting of African Christian scholars hosted by Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.

Fuller invited a group of African scholars from seminaries in the US and Canada, along with a handful of North Americans who work in the area of African Christianity. We got together to explore the possibility of some sort of African Christian Scholarship program at Fuller as a resource for people studying African Christianity, especially African faculty members and PhD students at North American schools. Plus there’s need for an ongoing network connecting African researchers in North America with each other and with the seminaries and Christian universities in Africa. And I particularly appreciated another value stated in the planning paper: “It is also hoped that the program would be a center for enriching the Global North with the gifts of God from African Christianity.”

So there I was. Not entirely sure how I got invited or what I could contribute, but reveling in the opportunity to immerse myself for several days in this lovely gathering of people who care about the same things that move my heart. I talked with eminent African leaders (Tite Tienou! I’d never met him), reconnected with several colleagues and students I knew from Nairobi, met some gifted emerging young leaders especially among the African PhD students who came from various parts of the US, and got some great feedback and suggestions on my presentation summarizing my ideas about African biblical interpretation. (You can click here to read the article I wrote about this topic in Fuller's magazine.) If I can't be in a classroom in Africa right now teaching students about Jesus and the Bible, this was the next best thing.

Through it all the Lord was reminding me, “Yes, this is important. These young leaders are the way I’m building my global church. This is where I’ve called you to serve.” I came away with my heart filled and re-motivated for the hard work of raising the financial support to stay engaged with this sort of ministry.

And that’s what the rest of my month looked like: visiting churches and small groups to tell people my story and invite them to partner with me in global theological education. Picture me driving my Toyota Camry up and down the mid-Atlantic, with a pile of audio books on the passenger seat, stopping every so often to stretch my legs, fill the gas tank and stock up on junk food!

I love all the visiting and meeting people. And I love helping people understand more about what God's doing in the church worldwide. But seriously, I have no idea how God is going to supply the rest of the funding to get me back to Ireland and my work as Serge’s international Theological Education Specialist – hopefully by March 2018. We’re still hovering at about 70% of the ongoing financial support needed. I just keep reminding myself that my job is to tell the story and God’s job is to supply the resources. Please pray with me that God confirms his call to this ministry by providing everything needed to make it happen – in whatever way he wants to do that, for his own glory. Thank you for praying!

Meanwhile I’m looking forward to celebrating Thanksgiving next week with my daughter and son-in-law and their friends and relations. I’m feeling thankful for my first grandbaby, who’s due to arrive in mid-January! And I’m so very thankful for the many of you who’ve prayed, given, and encouraged me in this work all through this year. You are truly a gift from God in my life.


 
Having way too much fun at Fuller Seminary's African Christian Scholars Consultation - connecting with old and new colleagues and friends...

...and looking very scholarly as I give my presentation! 

I 💛 India

Greetings from… Charlottesville, Virginia! After 30 hours of travel from India, a full weekend of presbytery meetings and preaching in North Carolina, followed by that zombie-like jet-lagged re-entry stage, and then being felled for a week by a local virus, I think I’m finally up and running again. And glad to be back in the US of A!

But I left part of my heart at the South Asia Institute of Advanced Christian Studies (SAIACS) in Bangalore, India, where I spent September. This is the fourth year in a row I’ve taught hermeneutics (theory and methods of interpreting the Bible) to the incoming class of graduate students. So now I’ve taught pretty much every masters-level student at SAIACS and it’s lovely to return and know their faces and names. It’s also exciting to see them grow from year to year in their theological understanding and in their commitment to take what they learn into their own ministry contexts – India, Nepal, Myanmar, Thailand, and beyond.

This year enrollment is up at SAIACS due to newly increased dormitory space, so I had 30 MA students instead of the usual 15. About five of them never said a word, and about 25 of them never seemed to stop talking! I felt like an air traffic controller keeping our lively classroom moving together in the right direction. Since most of these South Asian students come from educational backgrounds where lecture and rote memorization are standard, the sorts of back-and-forth discussion and hands-on learning exercises I do with them may feel unfamiliar at first. But once the students grab hold of what we’re doing the exuberance can sometimes be overwhelming. Fortunately I think in the end we got where we needed to be in terms of how to read the Bible. Lots of good feedback in the course evaluations:

• I'm confident that what I've learnt in this module will greatly impact the way I read scripture for the rest of my life.
• Before this module I had no or only very little knowledge of biblical interpretations. Compare to that now I feel I have learned much about how to read and understand the Bible the way I should. This module has challenged me and made me aware of the misunderstanding and presuppositions I had of the Bible, and that my life and beliefs depend on the understanding I have of the Bible.
• I realized that prior to the module I was misinterpreting many Bible texts and that I was doing just anything that seems right for me and to me. Now I have learned different skills to interpret the Bible text rightly. At the outset of the module month I came to the class with a lot of my personal preunderstandings and predispositions about interpreting the Bible, but after this module I have admitted that in a count of 10, about 8 are wrong and those, I should abandon. The way I read the Bible and the way I got the meaning out of the text is now totally changed.
• Dr. Black has the gift of explaining profound and complex realities in an understandable way. She is clearly passionate about teaching. She never imposed her views and always pushed us to think for ourselves.
• The tutor was so very creative and she knew what she was talking about. The way she communicated was absolutely brilliant and we could communicate well.
• Our tutor really wants us to learn. She taught us with love and care.
• She has a heart to teach and a heart for the students – big enough to cause a little pain at times!

And some sweet thank you notes like this one:

I have learned so much from you this module. Thank you for teaching me and thank you for the many other things that have shaped and are shaping me now as a woman. I hope to become a woman like you someday.

You can see why I love returning to this learning community every year. And of course the multiplication power of theological education increases the value of courses like these. If we imagine that each of these emerging leaders may impact 100 other people throughout their ministry (probably a conservative estimate), my 30 students will take their understanding of biblical interpretation to 3000 or more people. As a result the struggling churches of South Asia will be more deeply rooted in God’s word. I love my job.

So… six months in Ireland (with quick trips elsewhere) laying the groundwork for this new international Theological Education Specialist role based in Dublin with Serge, and one month in India of the sort of teaching that I expect to do more and more in Africa, Asia and elsewhere with this new position, and now I’m back. A well-meaning friend said, “Welcome home from your short-term mission trip!” Well no, not really. A little confusing, I know, since 2017 represents a partial overseas term on a partial budget to take the preliminary steps needed to get this work going. In fact, I’m a full-time long-term missionary of EPC World Outreach and Serge since I went active and ‘deployed’ last March. Like other missionaries on home assignment my primary responsibility for the coming months is support-raising for this ministry. But I’m also busy working from the US on theological education projects internationally; participating in a new initiative bringing together African Christian scholars and theological students in the US and linking them with like-minded colleagues in Africa; doing planning and prep for overseas ministry in 2018 (by faith!); and visiting US churches to speak and teach about global mission. I’m in the US until my missionary support level gets to 100%, up from the 70% we've reached so far. Think of me as an athlete who’s temporarily benched from the overseas field because of an incomplete budget, but still very much part of the team and waiting for you to help put me back in the game!

So that’s where we are at this point. Will you pray, and join me as we look forward to see how God brings together the resources to make the next steps happen? Thanks!

This year's batch of new MA Theology students in my biblical hermeneutics class at SAIACS. 
As you can see, plenty of energy and personality!

 

 

 

 

While in Bangalore each year I connect with New City Fellowship for worship and home group. 
A privilege for me, engaging with these dynamic young Indian believers.

Uh oh... That time I got back to the US after seven months overseas and discovered my driver's license expired while I was gone. Unexpected flight from Charlotte, NC, to Richmond, VA (because, no rental car), then Uber to DMV and waiting in a long line before I could collect my car and drive home.

And did I mention I also arrived to discover my US phone company had cancelled my plan because I was away too long? #missionaryproblems #imtoojetlaggedforthis