Week 5, September 20
One of the highlights of this week was speaking at the
BotsCru meeting. I was asked by the CORE team (the BotsCru committee of student
leaders) to speak on World Missions, and I humbly accepted. See, speaking is
not my favorite part of the job. In fact, I used to haaate it. Don’t get me
wrong; I know how to speak. I was an education major. The speaking part isn’t
what bothers me. The Bible tells us that teachers of the Word are held to a
higher level of responsibility before the Lord. Handling the Word of God well
is quite difficult. I have heard plenty of accidentally heretical sermons and
misinterpretations and false claims. I never want to be the teacher who
misunderstands and misuses and mis-teaches Scripture, and that makes speaking
exhausting. But, the Lord has provided abundant training and seminary classes
and experience to help me get over the once-crippling fear of speaking. And I
am very, very passionate about world missions.
As I prepared, I referred to a CruPress resource called
Cru.Comm. It’s our Bible study material, made to be interactive and
transferrable, and I have been using it for twelve years now. One of the
studies looks at God’s plan to reach the world as seen throughout the entire
Bible. So, with my twenty allotted minutes, we sprinted through Scripture,
starting with the promise to (and call to) Abraham in Genesis 12:1-3, then
moving on to Galatians 3:14, Isaiah 49:5-6, Matthew 18:18-20, Acts 1:8, and
Revelation 5:9. That’s a lot to cover, but we sailed right through… until Acts
1:8.
At Acts 1:8, we talked about what it meant for the disciples to be Jesus’ witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. We talked about reaching people in our spheres of influence and the people within our own cultural group. And then we talked about crossing cultures. See, none of us would know Jesus if not for culture-crossing missionaries. I’m not a Hebrew- or Greek-speaking Jew from the area of Jerusalem, and I actually don’t know anyone who is. Praise God for those people who crossed cultures to bring the Gospel to me, an English speaker from sleepy old Pennsylvania in the United States! Not only am I passionate about crossing cultures to tell people about Jesus, but I am passionate about doing it well. As a history major, I spent most of my university days studying the ways European colonizers destroyed cultures and forced natives to convert to Christianity as a way of controlling them. It’s truly appalling.
But when the Gospel goes forth with pure motives, in its purest form, it sets people free! The Gospel breaks chains. It rescues people. It changes lives. And it does so within the context of the culture of each of the individuals it touches, not destroying that culture. When we look at Revelation 5:9 (and 7:9-10, for that matter), we see that “every nation, tribe, people, and language” will be present in heaven. We won’t look the same. We won’t even speak the same language. But we will worship the same King for all of eternity, the only King who is worthy of an eternity of praise.
So, as I was sharing this vision, this call to reach the
nations, I introduced our students to the 10/40 Window. None of them had heard
of this concept before, and I got choked up as I tried to explain it. See, this
Window, the part of the non-western world between 10*N and 40*N latitude is
home of the least reached peoples in the world. Encompassing Northern Africa,
the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia, it
holds the majority of the world’s population, and the majority of the unreached
people groups… those groups that have no viable Christian witness. See, as I
explained this Window, I had to fight back tears because every single day,
people are living and dying here without knowing Jesus. It breaks my heart. And
these places are the hardest places for Americans to go for lots of reasons. Which
led me to my next point. Batswana, people who come from a nation saturated with
the Gospel and rich in resources and stability as compared to the rest of the
continent, are poised to have a great impact. The leadership in this area of the world has a vision of
sending fully equipped students north to their northern
neighbors in the 10/40 Window. They can go where I simply cannot. And I think that truth hit some
students in the gut. There’s a perception that Americans are the missionaries
who have the needed resources to go; when they heard that they could have a
greater impact than Americans, they were surprised. And there’s a certain
weight that comes with a realization like that.
After I spoke, several students came up to talk to me, to
ask questions, and to thank me. They blew up our WhatsApp group with
encouraging messages. I only pray that they will take this Great Commission
seriously. Jesus is worthy of our very lives, and I dream of a day when teams
of Batswana are raised up to take the Gospel to the ends of the earth!
Some other highlights include a fun day at the Gaborone Game
Reserve with the staff team and the CORE team. The Game Reserve is adjacent to campus
and our housing complex… so close, in fact, that lots of little gray monkeys
from the reserve walk to campus and to our complex to scrounge for food. But we
had never been. We took food and had a braai (cookout) and spent the afternoon
cooking, dancing, and eating. As the sun began to set, we set off on our game
drive. Piling into our two vans and a borrowed church combi (big van), we set
off on a slow caravan, winding through the Reserve. They only have herbivores,
but we did get to see a lot of zebras, ostriches, springboks, warthogs,
monkeys, and yak-like things. I had spent the morning trying to bake chocolate
chip cookies (which took all morning because we used too much electricity and
the power company cut our power, so we had to take our undone food to the office
to finish.) Even though adapting the recipe and fighting with the rickety old
ovens left me dissatisfied with the end result, the students looooved them and
devoured them while we drove. It was sweet, and I look forward to figuring out
ways to bring my love of baking to Botswana.
We settled on a church home this week, too. After church
hopping, we all fell in love with Gaborone Community Chapel. It’s a church
planted by a team from Kenya. There are only about twelve of us on a Sunday
morning, and we meet in a small classroom at a local school and share the
school with another (much louder) congregation. Pastor Lawrence and Marian and
their team made us feel welcome and loved from the first moment, and their
theology aligns with ours, and the teaching
is really solid. Plus, they start on time and end on time! The small group that meets on Friday nights is nice, too, and
we hung out for hours and hours this week. Everyone is younger than me, and I
miss the momentum of a big church, but it’s a great fit.
