Travel Diary - Day Twenty

Day Twenty – Theologically Speaking

Friday 18 Sep 09

We had two meetings today. The first was titled, ‘Pastoral and Theological Issues.’ My understanding of it was that there was going to be a bit of a roundtable conversation about particular issues in the church. Well that was true in a sense…Keith invited me into the lounge and the two of us sat and talked together – not much different to any number of conversations we have had since I have been here. In this instance we talked about Baptism. He quizzed me about how we practice Baptism in NZ and we worked our way through the practical aspects, some of the theological questions and issues that are current and examined some of the thinking that is prevalent here in Guyana as well. I think the main differences that were highlighted for me were two. First was that there appears to be no real connection between baptism and membership, there is no requirement for one to precede the other. We spent a little time on that.

The other, and this took a bit longer, was the idea that if a child is baptised and the parents are not believers then the baptism doesn’t count. There is a strong line of thought here about the importance of the human element in the process (also indicated in the thinking about the marriage process). In fact I would almost go so far as to say that God’s part in these ceremonies is effectively relegated to observer in the minds of the participants. When I challenged this thinking the justifications were quite esoteric and seemed to have little or no relationship to a clearly thought through Biblical stance. It made for an interesting 90 minutes.

The second meeting was the weekly leaders meeting. This was held at the church office, a room lent to the church by an interested 3^rd party. The strange thing here was that we all (me, Keith, Patrick, who is the volunteer pastor) piled into a taxi for a 10 minute to a home that was nowhere near the parish. It was nice from my point of view simply to see a different part of the city, but I couldn’t see the purpose of being there apart from the fact that it was different, and someone had offered it.

I had been asked to talk about strategic planning. We had just on an hour and so we spent some time talking about hopes and dreams and some ways of processing these as a congregation and as leadership. Then we looked at different forms and styles of leadership. I built that around the five aspects of leadership mentioned in Ephesians, and then, just because I could, added in administration as another aspect. We talked about identifying leaders, training leaders, being leaders. I talked with them about involving the whole congregation in different forms of leadership and mentioned some of the strengths and weaknesses of apostles, prophets, pastors,… It all seemed to go well.

One of the things that I find amazing here is that no-one seems to understand what is really going on at Sophia Mission Church. It has all happened rather by accident and yet God is doing something highly significant among the people. And this is at a number of levels. The most obvious is that people are coming to trust in Jesus by the bucket load. One of the conversations we had in the morning was about the practical aspects of baptising 40 people at one go. With that of course is how you educate people in the Word and in practices of worship without simply coming in over the top of who they are and their experiences. Of course there is a balance here that is best highlighted by the concept of being in the world but not of the world. In a community where spiritual practices are common the need to cut off certain practices is important. The problem that you seem to face at that point is where cultural practice ends and spiritual practice begins. In fact it seems to me that they are intricately interwoven and in some instances the only place to cut is at the root. In others there is some leeway for negotiation. And this is all a thousand times harder when you see it up close and personal than it is when you are reading about it in a book!!!

We finished up and caught a bus back to Kitty where I grabbed my laptop and headed off to the internet café so I could call Ruth and Alisha before Alisha left for Japan. Skype is great! The sound quality at my end was a bit rubbish but we talked and typed for about 45 minutes and then I had another 15 minutes on the internet for $G200 – that’s about $NZ1.40! The other day when I called on my cell phone it cost slightly less than that per MINUTE. I know which I prefer!!!!! If all else had failed I would have just gone with the per minute cost, but having the option is certainly a good thing in my estimation.

Had a bit of an early night – my sleep was quite broken the night before but I slept really well this time around.