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?

Reorientating ... again!

Martin has been teaching various combinations of missions and missiology classes as a part time lecturer for about 8 years now.  This hasn't been exactly how he imagined his "second half".  He had expected to be still in Thailand church planting.  Then he had hoped to be on faculty at a Bible College participating fully in college life and decisions.  Then he realised that this part time work was his work for now.

This was the result of three things:  

1.     Bible colleges in South Africa need to be committed to racial transformation.

2.     Bible colleges are cash-strapped and cannot not afford a large full time faculty.

3.     Bible colleges everywhere tend to marginalise mission.

We wholly support the first of these.  We struggle to understand why God allows the second.  We feel sad about the third.

David Bosch, in his book "Transforming Mission" reminds us that mission is nearly always marginalised by the church as a whole, and that the worst mistakes (and sin) in mission have happened when it has not been in that challenging 'edge space'.  That encourages us.

But.

Ever since Martin started on this strange borderland existence, the mission and missiology courses at both of the colleges where he serves have gradually eroded.  

One of the colleges, which started about 50 years ago as a missions college, is no longer a Bible College, but a liberal arts college with an increasingly minor theology stream.  This year he has no courses there in the first semester, and none in the second either.

At the other college, one of the two first semester courses he used to teach has been cut.  He will be teaching the other, but we have no idea about the second semester courses.

... The next blog will be about what is happening instead, but losing this outlet is psychologically challenging.  

Martin is having to reimagine his life at this point.

Plus, we feel helpless about the lack of availability of training for missions and in missiological thinking.

Discipling Nations

Martin has been working several awesome people since Willem Conradie started an organisation several years ago.  It is called "Discipling Nations" and the aim is to offer training in cross-cultural missions at a grassroots level.  People who can't afford training in churches that can't afford big-time sending meet together weekly for a few months.  At the end of the course there is a weekend conference - often with several groups together.










These conferences are lots of fun and totally exhausting.  They are held on a beautiful apple farm in the mountains.  The owners have built a special mini conference centre for Christian groups to use.

What they are doing in the training is gradually evolving.  They have been using some material from franchised courses. But they also give their own lectures.  These are gradually developing as the cover more topics.  Martin often get the job of sorting out other people's PowerPoint presentations because he does really good ones.

Now they are at the place where they want to take the next step in development of the unique "Discipling Nations" material.  It is our winter break for colleges so there are no courses at the moment.  Martin is spending this time tasked with organising the material into a more harmonised form, and producing a work book for the weekend conferences.  From there they hope to begin to be less dependent on the franchised course.

... 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.

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.

a post about posters

Long ago, academics gave learned lectures to small groups of like-minded people.  Then they also started publishing the lectures as collections of 'papers' in journals.  They began to have large conferences, which were like live journals.  Then they realised that there is too much going on for it all to be presented to huge plenary sessions at the conferences, so they started having elective sessions, where everyone divided up for smaller presentations.  Now, they also have 'posters': one A1 with pictures, headings and a small amount of text with 5 minutes of talking. 

So, one project in the Theology of Mission course is a poster on a significant figure in the history of mission.  The list they have to choose from contains the names of about 50 men and women who lived and sorked all over the world during the last two millenia.  These are people like Ulfalas who re-evangelised the pagan Italians, or Matteus Ricci who wrote one of the classic Chinese essays.

 These people form nodes in the time-space matrix (vs time-line) of Christian history.  The class becomes excited as they hear the stories from each other.

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!

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!

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