Travel Diary - Day Twenty Nine

Day Twenty Nine – Knock ‘em down and running out…
Sunday 27 Sep 09

The first church service here is a 7:30am…AM!! Good Grief! To quote Charlie Brown. Fortunately I had had plenty of warning and time to prepare my sermon NOT and so there was no time pressure MUCH. The biggest issue to my mind is finding illustrations that work in this cultural context. It’s not just a matter of coming up with a good story, the story has to make sense to the average person in this part of the world.

Overnight I had decided that I wanted to preach on focus and so I used Hebrews 12:1-4 as my text. I decided that my illustrations would come from cricket – a West Indies passion – and athletics since Hussain Bolt, the fastest man in the world is a West Indian. To begin I asked two little boys sitting down the back to come and help me. As they came up I explained that I was going to do something that only a visitor could get away with and that the boys were going to help me do something that is not normally done in church, at least not without being frowned at. That got a grin from the deacons so I knew I wouldn’t be tortured afterwards. And so I set the boys up to run a race down the aisle of the church, as hard as they could go, something they did with gusto, much to everyone’s amusement. I then asked who had won the race. Of course I hadn’t set them a finish point so it became obvious that it is difficult to win a race without a finishing line. That illustration expanded by talking about the same thing happening to Bolt. Then we did cricket without a scorecard. Point made – of course it is the same as Christians – you get my drift. Then I segued into things that take our attention away from the race like, relationships, study, work, etc. From there it was talking about endurance and finally not growing weary. By the end everyone was coming right along with me and I was getting ‘Amens’ and ‘Thankyou Jesus’ coming in gusto. Very cool. I could really enjoy preaching here!  !

As for the rest of the service – we sang to Marvin playing the drums. The prayers were everlasting prayers – I was starting to wonder if there would be time for me to preach by the time we got to the end of some of them. Because it was a youth service the first lot of songs were led by the young people. They have a nice bunch of youngsters but they have a bit of work to do if they are to really get things going. Overall I would have to say that except for the length – nearly two hours – they wanted me to preach for 45 minutes, I could have, but that would have meant rushing out the door to get to the next service and I wanted some time to talk to the people – it wasn’t really that different to what we do in NZ. Strangely, at least to me, there is very little sign of the deep roots of slavery that exist here in Plaisance – the settlement was purchased as a village by 63 released slaves. The church shows no obvious signs of its roots at all. Curious.

Immediately following the service at Zoar we headed off to Beterverwegting (at least I think that’s how it is spelt). Here two deacons who are being trained were taking the service. It was alright, nothing to write home about. After the service I was invited to talk to the youthgroup to tell them all about their problems – eh?!? These people need their heads read if they think that a visitor who has never met a group of young people can simply give them the answers they think they need. To keep everyone happy I listened to what they had to say and then asked them why they came to youth group. After very little listening it became obvious they had no real idea why they were meeting or what their ultimate goal was. In the end I did give them some advice. I pointed out that it was pretty obvious that they had no raison d'être. I told them that they needed to get together for youth group and devote however long it took to prayer to find out what God wanted them to do. And I suggested that it could take some months to come to any conclusion. Actually I had a strong sense that God has his hand on these young people but that they needed to work out what that meant for themselves. We finished with a conversation with the church secretary. Pastor Bourne told him what I had said to the young people and suggested that it might not be a bad idea for the church to do the same thing. When he responded it was like she hadn’t spoken – there are major issues here!! Glad I’m not having to work through that one with them.

On the way back to Plaisance the pastor and I talked about some of what was happening. She is not an ordained minister as such – she has some training, kind of like our Local Ordained Minister situation – but it is not recognised as being real by some people. And the pastors who have had this training have fallen between some cracks because the GCU hasn’t been able to work out how it ordains them into their position. Very messy.

Got back in time for lunch and then had a brief relax before I was off to a Catechism Class. It was on the sacraments. The pastor kept asking me for comments and I added bits and pieces in here and there but it became clear after a while that she was struggling to explain some of the points. The system is reasonably well laid out but there is a real need for good teaching practice and that is not something that I have seen evident in the church at all. Having said that, I have only seen a handful of churches so don’t make too much of the comment. The class went more than 30min overtime which would be OK except that it started at 3pm and there was a deacons meeting at 4pm. I ducked up to see the Sunday School in action, but they were just watching a DVD so I came back down to the church where I was invited (darn it) into the deacons meeting. That was pretty stock standard Session come Managers stuff and by the time they finished just after 6pm (they were supposed to finish at 5pm) I was bored out of my tree. From there we went to the weekly prayer meeting that kind of doubles as a Bible Study or Cell Group. Man these guys can compose the neverending prayer! I nearly fell asleep a couple of times and that was just in one prayer!!

We finally headed home about 7:30pm, had dinner and sat and talked for a while before heading to bed.