Congolese Culture and Missionary Musings

I don’t have many stories about becoming a missionary in the DR Congo now.  Probably because I’m still in Waxahachie and will be for the next… oh man… only two and a half months.  But what I do have are updates about how preparation for the trip is going, info about the culture of the region I’ll be staying in, and an ever-thinking mind about missions.  So for now until then, I’ll keep this blog alive with some missionary musings.

First, a quick report on fundraising for the internship:  As of Nov. 2, I’ve received tremendous gifts from the Gateway Church Lloyd Craig Ministerial Scholarship, the Gateway Church Missions Committee, the Give Back Willis Knighton Scholarship, my summer job, and many extremely generous friends and family members, which have totaled to $13,990.  The total I will need for the entire trip is $20,410.  That’s already 68%!  Praise God that He is providing through your generosity and thank you for your support!! 

In speech class, we were recently assigned to give a presentation on a different culture.  Seeing as I had yet to do detailed research on Congolese culture, I decided to knock out a couple of birds with one smashing speech about the vibes of the Congolese urban jungle.  Here’s what I learned.

The Democratic Republic of Congo.  First:  the name.  Sometimes such titles are shallower than they appear.  Ever since Belgian colonialization in the 1860’s, oppression, war, corruption, poverty, disease, and malnourishment have incessantly plagued the country.  Even today, DR Congo is ranked 164 out of 182 in Transparency International’s governmental corruption ranking.  Proper nourishment, sanitation, and education are still huge hurdles to overcome. 

How do the people react to this?  They’ve lost all reliance upon the government to take care of the country’s issues.  Instead, they use their own creativity and ability to make it work.  The Congolese are a resourceful people who struggle against struggle.

So no, the DR Congo is not a peaceful island amidst a desperate sea.  This is still Africa.

Missionaries and Congolese pastors have labored hard for decades through the power of the Holy Spirit to bring people to a knowledge of Christ.  But while many people profess Christ, syncretism and nominalism are rampant among believers.  There is a widespread fear of evil spirits, and to appease these spirits from bringing sickness or poverty on their households, people will participate in ancestor worship or witchcraft.  Children who wet the bed are sometimes considered demon possessed.  The lucky ones are sent to pastors or priests who attempt to drive out the demons using any sort of traditional technique.  The rest are kicked out of the house and onto the street.  Much Biblical teaching on spiritual matters in needed in Congo.

But regardless of the state of any country, Jesus’ encouragement to all disciple makers still rings true:  “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”  Which is a really encouraging thing indeed.

What else has been stirring in my mind in this wonderful academic institution?  I’ve been challenging some of the ways Americans view cross-cultural missions.  A combination of three things may have created a misconception about missions:  Testimonies from missionaries about the amazing things God is doing; the lack of such testimonies we hear regularly in our own communities; and the mysterious awe of cultural diversity around the world.  Then, we see missions as this this magical endeavor, this fantasy expedition to venture across the wild parts of the world to tell people about Jesus, a journey reserved only for the missionary heroes of the Kingdom of God. 

So is thinking that taking the gospel to the ends of the earth, across physical barriers and cultural divides, and among the quirks of learning to live in another culture is stinkin awesome a bad thing?  No!

It’s just this:  missions is essentially the same everywhere.  People are in your neighborhood, high school, college, downtown, work, Walmart, Starbucks, and work.  The same people are in the Mexican drug cartels, the red light district in Amsterdam, the remote village in Eastern Asia, the pub in London, the businesses in Dubai, the streets of Paris, and the slums of Mumbai.  Wherever you find yourself, people will be hungry, poor, addicted, hurting, abused, lost, and desperately in need of Jesus. 

So where is the best place to be make a disciple of Christ?  The easiest is where you’re at now.  You don’t have to contact missionaries, write support letters, raise funds, create prayer cards, deal with plane tickets, pack, learn a new language, get accustomed to a new culture, or go through extensive training to teach the guy who walks around the neighborhood that how he can be freed from his sin through by putting his trust in the resurrected Christ and following Him.  The hardest might be halfway around the world in a completely different social structure and cultural context.  But none of those are necessarily the best places.

The best place is wherever a lost soul may be.  The best place is wherever the Spirit leads you to go.

Will you go?

Daktar

Upon hearing about my missionary mandate, many friends and family have given me books and biographies about missionaries to further fan my future into flame.  The first, loaned to me by a dear faithful sister of Gateway Church, Mrs. Pat Widener, was rather daunting.  Titled Daktar:  Diplomat in Bangladesh, weighing in at 452 pages, boasting about size 8 font and yellowed from 30 years since publication, I was tempted to let it rest on the shelf a while.  And I did.  Until Mrs. Pat reminded me about it at the beginning of this summer, I just then picked it up and started reading, but not without my fair share of conviction. 

Those aged pages told of a man named Viggo Olsen, once a brilliant but party-friendly young agnostic in medical school, then a man who found the truth about God through failing at discovering flaws in Scripture, afterwards a successful surgeon presented with an opportunity for a highly distinguished fellowship, and finally a medical missionary who instead decided to open a hospital in East Pakistan for hurting bodies and souls.  Daktar gave an incredibly detailed description of Dr. Olsen’s early life, missionary calling, ventures to build a team and erect the hospital, strains with the East Pakistani government to secure visas and permits, relationships held with the Bengali people, medical work in the hospital, life on the field, persevering persecution, surviving two ghastly wars, the bloody independence of East Pakistan into Bangladesh, and most importantly, trusting God through it all.  Every paragraph that told of the Lord working miraculously through a situation despite his fears and shortsightedness, he never failed to follow with “Thank you, Father!” 

Near the end of the story, Dr. Olsen reflected upon an Indian war monument and related the young liberators of the Bengalis to Jesus Christ.  When India could have stayed out of the war and watched West Pakistan obliterate the feisty Bengalis, they stepped in and fought; when the Father saw our lostness in sin, He also could have chosen to stay out of our mess, but instead he sent Jesus to step in and die for us.  I then realized that this was also what Dr. Olsen and his medical missionary team did – instead of living their own comforting life, they went to a desperate nation, cared for them, loved them, served them, endured hardships for them, shared the gospel with them, and lived a passionate example of Jesus before them, even when the Bengali people could provide nothing in return.

And suddenly, I realized what missions is all about.

A Home and a Hope

Ever since I've been at SAGU, I've been struggling with unbelief.

It's hard to believe that there are so many young people with such amazing calls to ministry.  It’s out of place to see such a warm, encouraging atmosphere radiating from these students and faculty. It's difficult to fathom there exists such a place with the same nuances as Magnet (the chapel speaker two nights ago wrapped his whole sermon around Adventure Time and I lost count of how many other people brought the entire Star Wars series) and an entirely Christian fellowship.  It’s incredible to sit in a class while listening to the professor lecture about world missions.  It’s stunning to see the answer to the prayer for the Lord of the harvest to send passionate young people into His harvest field.

But this isn’t fake.  This is real.  This is SAGU.  This is home.

Yet at the same time, this doesn’t feel like home.  Back at Magnet High, I was always ministering to someone in some way on campus—making a disciple, giving encouragement, sharing the Word of God, praying for someone in need, telling someone about Jesus, teaching the Scriptures, empowering the leaders of next year.  Here at SAGU, those opportunities, at least towards the unsaved, are no more.  Yes, we Christians still have needs and issues that are sought out and met within the love of this incredible fellowship of believers.   Yet as I talk with my Christian friends, learn in my Christian classrooms, and worship in my Christian chapel, my missionary soul grows restless.  This passion for lost souls to come to know Christ and desire to be poured out into someone’s unsaved life burns uncontrollably.  It is suffocating.  In hopes of channeling this anguish into ministry, I’ve joined several outreach ministries, one to international students at UTA, another to neighborhood kids, and soon one to the juvenile detention center.  But this fire remains unquenched.  The cool thing is that God noticed that.  I may have received some direction from Him to do something extraordinary… we’ll see how that goes.  

So for now, this longing “to preach the gospel where Christ was not known” (Rom 15:20) continues to outgrow this amazement of “how good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity” (Ps 133:1).  Maybe these are just freshman emotions; maybe this is just zeal without knowledge; maybe it's God.  My hope is that this turns into a good thing.

The Squeaks

I recently just told about everyone I knew that I was going to Congo for one-and-a-half years for a missions internship.  So how did I end up here instead of a normal American university? 

Back in January, I shot John Merrell a facebook message about how I was called to his organization, college plans to prepare for that calling, high-school goings-on, and the whatnot.  He just got out of a conference that shared about Engage, a missions apprenticeship program that gave college students the opportunity to be discipled and trained by veteran missionaries on the field while taking online courses for up to two years.  Due to the timing of the conference and my message, he felt that it was for me.  So I checked it out for myself.  A particular site in the Democratic Republic of Congo piqued my interest, since OLI works mainly in southern Africa.  After talking with parents, pastors, friends, admissions counselors, missions department heads, and God, I became certain that Engage was for me. 

And so I've spent the majority of my summer preparing for this trip, which will start in less than 4 months.  Less than 4 months.  It’s a little hard to imagine moving in to college in 3 days.  It’s a bit harder to imagine moving to Congo in what will soon seem like 3 days. 

I've been carrying on conversation with the Congo site missionaries, Bill and Sonia Shaw, for some time, and one of the main areas he has stressed about the missionary life is communication with supporters.  Which is the main reason why I started this blog.  He and I have this joke going, that I’m the guinea pig in his Engage operation since I will be the first student with him in Congo.  You know those squeak sounds they make?  That’s what I want this blog to be.  I want to squeak about how God is preparing me to be a missionary in Congo so that everyone who is supporting me through finances and prayer can see the harvest from what you have sowed into me. 

So what will I be doing over there?  Since Bill and I will be building this whole program deal from the ground up with my tiny rodent hands, I really can't squeak much from experience now.  The main thing I will be doing is learning—learning how to establish indigenous churches in cross-cultural contexts through my online SAGU courses, learning how to be a missionary through working alongside Bill and the Congolese pastors, and learning to live with purpose in another country so that I don’t fall victim to dropping out in my first term as an actual missionary, as an alarmingly high percentage of new missionaries do.

But for the 4 months from now until the day when I leave the DFW airport on January 15, I won’t be a guinea pig just yet—I’ll be a lion.  For one short semester I’ll be studying at Southwestern Assemblies of God University.  So until January, look forward to posts about the indelible texture of ramen noodles, what my roomate’s socks smell like, incredible professors, amazing witnessing encounters with international students at UTA, and preparing for, well, this once-in-a-lifetime preparatory experience in DR Congo.

*Squeak*

The Beginning

It all started on February 20, 2011.  Another Sunday morning.  The high school Sunday school, led by none other than Stephen Burnett, was held in the children’s center.  Slightly distracted, my eyes wandered around the room... the candy table, the puppet stage, Buddy the Buddy Barrel, and the block pyramid.  In the following children’s service, the kids would play this game where 6 large blocks were hidden throughout the room, and they had to find and stack them so that they correctly displayed the week’s scripture verse.  Today, for reasons unknown, I paid special attention to verse on that pyramid: “But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” – Matthew 6:33.  Soon into the main morning service, I learned that the guest speaker for the final week of Misisons Emphasis Month was John Merrell, director of the Oral Learners Initiative (OLI).  He shared his vision of delivering the gospel through stories and pictures to oral-learning cultures with no written language, training illiterate pastors in the Maasai tribe of Kenya/Tanzania using solar-powered handheld audio bibles, and much more.  His entire discourse on these ancient yet novel methods of telling the gospel captivated us, but his exhortations during the closing call forever changed my life.  Sorrowfully, he announced that his retirement was drawing nigh, with his head of grey hair and wrinkles giving testimony to a long service on the African missions field.  He then challenged the youth to step up and take the call to missions.

You know that feeling when someone special giving a speech mentions your name honorably and you squirm a little within yourself, or you’re about to present something before a group of people and you fidget about beforehand?  I felt that after he gave that challenge.  He was talking to me.  Inevitably, the infamous thoughts of “But God…” followed.  As a counter those doubts, the scripture verse printed on those children’s church blocks echoed that simple reminder of trust in the Lord.  I thought about it more during the afternoon, and come the evening service when John further shared, the feelings were confirmed.  God was calling me to be a missionary in the Oral Learners Initiative!

Actually, maybe it all didn’t start on February 20, 2011.  This is the purpose that God had destined me to fulfill since the beginning.   This is the niche that God has been working and molding me to fill my whole life.  This is my aim.  This is my call.  This is the making of a missionary.