5 to midnight and counting

Martin is tense.  Very tense.

His PhD thesis must be ready for final approval by his supervisor, also known as a promoter, by 15 November 2017.  Then it must be printed and bound and handed in by 30 November 2017.

 Martin started writing in earnest in January and has kept up a demanding writing schedule since then.  He is in the tidy-up-and-finish-off phase now with a chapter a week on the table.  I get requests for calculation of % done (25 pages of 58, this instant)!

Every now and then a whole paragraph must be relegated to footnotes.  Occasionally a small section needs to be written or rewritten now that everything is in place.   Mostly it is finding the reference behind the [cit] which was left as a marker in the previous draft! 
The book situation in the house is pretty dire!

Whilst navigating these dark tunnels, Martin’s trusty PhD computer went into a coma and was diagnosed dead-on-arrival at the computer shop.  This event nearly sent Martin over the brink into some unknown place of trauma in spite of full (multiple) backups!  However, Charis came to the rescue with her laptop, which is similar enough to feel familiar!

The background tension is the potential hostility of theological faculty to the subject of evangelism.  This will result in increased panic when we get near the viva, but we won’t go there now!

Ultimately, can God use this to touch (the Methodist part of) his church (in South Africa)? 

The ups and downs of academic mission ...

So ... last year we reported in a post here that Cornerstone Institute in Salt River abandoned their (already much reduced) mission courses altogether.  Martin was grateful for the continued opportunity to teach (also much reduced) mission courses at Bible Institute in Kalk Bay.
At the end of November Martin got an email from Bible Institute saying that they no longer require his services.  They are "integrating mission into their other courses" ...
At the beginning of December Martin go an email from Cornerstone Institute asking if he would develop an online mission course for their new program.  WOW.  God's timing, right?
Well December and January have been flat-out busy for Martin as he has developed the course, learned the platform.  Many hours a day, every day.
(Except for a brief hiatus while he attended and presented at a Missiology conference - see a previous post.)
He has signed up for a course in online teaching.  His mother (what an amazing woman at 87) has been reading the course material with fascination, questions and corrections (she was an English teacher).

Martin and his mom on a break: going round the botanical garden on an electric cart tour.  (Tuesdays free for pensioners!)

Yesterday he popped in to see the program convenor just to check on some platform issues and protocol.
NOT ONE STUDENT has selected the mission course option.
Three days before it is ready to roll ... he has been told he will not be running it.
How does one let go of all that pent up energy?  What does one do with all that sense of having things to pass on?  Yesterday evening Martin is wrestling with the disappointment.  What about God's timing?

Today he has gone to the board meeting for the tiny entity "Discipling Nations".  They are planning for the year of grassroots mission teaching.  Does God have plans here?

The Proactive Pastor

This is Pastor Felix of "Those who Trust in the Lord Church" in Montana (Western Cape, South Africa).

In June they are having a mission event hosting a speaker from Nigeria.  Big stuff.  Big expectations.

But Pastor Felix knows that most big events just make everyone already in the church feel excited for a few days and proud that they have done something important.  Then, it is business as usual.

Enter "Discipling Nations" (see post from 19 January).

Pastor Felix is also on the board of Discipling Nations (now you can see how forward-looking he is).  So he called Martin in to have a conflab, becasue Martin is the chair while Willem is on sabbatical.

The upshot?


A Storyboard Street Art course will run 22-23 July to enable the members of  "Those who Trust in the Lord Church" to get out onto the streets with the good news in a form people are able to receive.  Told in a way that allows people to move off with a story in their hearts which can speak to them until they are ready to find out more.

Adventure into the Bible

This is what I call inductive Bible Study.
Every time I am asked to train people in facilitating this sort of group Bible Study I try to improve the way I present it.  This is my latest diagram of the process:

Those who know this method will see that I have renamed most of the steps.  I also added a concrete action step a number of years ago.  I also try to impress on people that, although it must be done in an order, it is non-linear in the sense that everything refers back to the passage.

I am feeling happy with the new words!

Why this iteration now?  Last week Wednesday I was doing a seminar for a group of new small group leaders at out church - Claremont Methodist.  This week I will be workshoping with the same group.  It is quite difficult to help people get enough of an idea of how it works in a total of 2 hours, but ... I do my best.

Reorientating ... which way now?

So ... with most of his formal college teaching off the agenda, what will Martin do instead?

For a number of years now he has been working with a group of people helping to found "Discipling Nations", the brain-child of a good friend, Willem Conradie.

They offer a suite of franchised courses (plus some offerings of their own) for people to study in their churches.  Their key vision is to offer quality missions and missiology courses at a grassroots level.  They want training to be available to people who can't afford college, or who don't have enough formal education to qualify for entrance.

As they work with groups in churches they hope to train not only people to go, but people who will send.  They hope to inspire people to reach across barriers where they are as well as to get involved in other places where they are needed.

In 2014 Martin piloted a Discipling Nations "home-grown" course which he developed to fill a need that they identified.  He has also slowly been collecting the lectures that various members of the team give, and creating the visual packages which will make them more effective and enable others to teach them.  This work has been stalled for a year.

Part of the vision for this year is that he will have time to make this happen in 2016.

You can check Disciplining Nations out here: http://www.disciplingnations.org.za

... and (simultaneously) there's marking

So Martin is not frantically making puppets today, nor was he frantically making puppet yesterday.
He is frantically marking!
And I have no nice picture for this because I am writing it just before I start work at UCT ... sorry to be boring.

Moonlighting - Lesley this time

This time it was Lesley: exploring fynbos with Belinda's grade 1 class on a rainy day in Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens.

.

Okay, so I look odd, but we all had fun!  The Kirstenbosch staff were brilliant and opened the glass house 30 minutes early for us ... otherwise it would have been a very wet outing.

Great thing is: now we can pay out water and electricity bills.  God provides, and he uses people to do it.  We won't have to move to a "maatjies" (mat) hut made of reeds (how useful plants are) after all.

marking time

two markers in companionable misery

This week is marking week for Martin. 

Sometimes this is fine, even enjoyable, when one sees people having learned and grown.  Other times it is horrible: people make silly excuses for late hand-ins (I had other assignments); people don't try; people ignore instructions; and worst of all ... plagiarism!  All the time there is the pressure to finish by the deadline, and to be fair.

So this week will have its good moments and bad moments like all weeks.

the demise of the green pen

Martin is marking!

Each lecturer develops, over time, their own style which reflects both intentional values and unconscious personality.  One of Martin's choices early in his growth as a teacher of theology was to use green for marking rather than the more traditional red, or alternatively common pencil.  But this is no longer the case ... marking now has to happen on-line!

So marking no longer involves piles of paper or green pens.  For us this is good as it is a huge effort to make sure nothing gets lost in our house.  But for someone who is inclined to think with his pencil, this is quite an adjustment.  That is apart from the irritations inevitable in any sort of computerised system - they have all been designed specifically for the spiritual growth of their users!

moonlighting with children

I've mentioned before how we sometimes do things we get paid for which contribute to the finances.  We try to make sure these don't divert us from our core business, either by making us unavailable or because they are at odds with the concept of "serving strangers".

Yesterday Martin spent two hours with a Grade 1 class ...

The theme was SPACE:
There is a book specially created for the occasion called "Zooty the Space Girl".
There were hundreds of cut-out bits of corrugated cardboard which assembled themselves into 28 spaceships.  (Yes, don't come to our house today if you have a problem with millions of tiny offcuts of cardboard box!)
There was great excitement about pretending to float, catch a planet and open it to find ... an imaginary smarty inside!

AND much more ...








These occasional stints at school (two or three a year) are enormous fun for Martin, and totally exhausting!  (How do the grade one teachers do it year after year?)  They also often seem to come when we really need the small financial injection: today we'll be able to pay the French teacher and the cell phones!!  We are grateful for the way God keeps us.  We are also grateful for how much fun our work is.

Mission from Africa - the other half

at last ... the rest of the story!

PLEASE let me know if you know a book on the subject of "Mission FROM Africa" - here are some of the fascinating issues...I taught the course, but I feel like I am only starting to learn the subject!

Bryson&DeborahSamboja
Global Team: missionaries in Kenya and Africa Director

Does Africa have a distinctive voice for Mission? Who were the unrecorded heroes of the African Christian Movement, the marginally mentioned Evangelists who did most of the work? What sort of Mission agencies and initiatives have arisen from Africa itself? Uhuru & Ubuntu and other key concepts. Am I an African? Pan-Africanism and adoptive euro-african & asia-african cultures. Can the growing African Church avoid the excesses of the Victorian church in mission?

The African Church is key in God's mission to his world,

and African Christians have been part of it from the beginning and still are!

Martin's Crazy Days

Martin has just finished a marathon of marking exam papers and essays.  BI courses complete!
He collects his final CI essays this afternoon.
He has been preparing a course for BI for next semester ... 'Evangelism'.  He is amped to teach it, but starting a course you have never taught before is a major undertaking.  He has found some fun stuff on how not to do it; up YouTube!

He is just busy finalising his prep for running his street-art-and-talking workshop - happening for the third time over the mountain pass in Villiersdorp.  Tomorrow morning will see five paintings happening on the village main road.

Then he will drive post haste back to the Cape Flats to run a seminar on 'Becoming a Life-Long-Learner' for the lay preachers in our group of churches ... tomorrow afternoon.  He will finish off that preparation tonight at bed-time.

Meantime, we are hoping to leave on Sunday for a long-desired holiday.  Martin was really tired before last week, so you can imagine that he will be a basket case by Sunday!  Also that some prayer for all this would be essential.

moonlighting for a good cause

Martin, as part of his busy week, has been finishing off seventy-two illustrations.

These are a fascinating and challenging variety of pen drawings of people doing all sorts of activities.  He has loved the disciplined exercise of his skill, but it has definitely added to the tricky squeeze in the last few weeks.

These pictures enhance the effectiveness of a workshop manual.  The workshops are run by an NPO called Khululeka which trains and mentors adults working with children who are grieving.

imagine how much better this will be with the pictures

We love what this group does.  Martin enjoys being part of creating the services people need to live more fully in a society where so many people don't have access to resources.  It also helps the exchequer as he gets paid for it!

Mission to Africa - half a story

We are fairly familiar with European mission to Africa, although there are generally two opposing views of the whole enterprise:

the wonderful sacrificial missionaries OR the wicked colonialising missionaries

The reality, as far as one is ever able to apprehend it (!), is almost certainly somewhere in between these two extremes or maybe both extremes in different indiviuals.

  

Jacob Schmidt and Robert Moffat
What most people are NOT familiar with is the early mission to Africa during the first few centuries CE; this was mission from Christians in the Middle East and Asia Minor, often at the express request of rulers and their people who were weary of exhaited and exhaisting religion.  How these ancient churches have survived or failed to survive is a significant learning resource for a church caught in the currents of global secular aggression and resurgent old religions.

 

Ethiopian churches

We are also usually ignorant of the significant role of African Christians in early global-church theology, and even more of the huge battle of the North African church for its own indigenous theology.  The results (positive and negative) of this battle, in particular its affect on the reaction of the church to Muslim colonisation, has useful impications for us (the African church) as we seek to live a truly African theology.

 

ancient North African baptism pools