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?

being and insider is easier

It is so hard to do something so simple.
As we become tired or stressed or busy, the thing that gets neglected first is serving the outsider!

Nobody has noticed that I haven't written an outsiders blog for six months.  Nobody has complained that I haven't been systematically walking prayer into the Claremont Urban Hub.  The businesses around this centre don't rely on my prayers.  The workers don't know whether I pray for just behaviour on the part of their employers.  Lonely people don't care whether I am there to notice them or not.  Nobody wants to know whether I have had the peaceful energy to write a poem about the city.  None of the people who can't do church even know that I care about them and wish I could find a way to touch their spirits.

So, it's hard to re-energise.  It's hard to let the call of God take my life by storm when there is nothing else.

Today I have sat in the urban space again.  Sit with me by praying for God to bring about his work in me. Please.

taming the chaos

About once a year even we cannot cope anymore with the mess in our house.  The time has come to TRY to tame it.  We are not aiming for a house that looks like yours (stay with me here), just for ... well, maybe piles of stuff that aren't in imminent danger of collapsing on our heads.

Our house is used in lots of different roles (see the "At Home" page in the tabs along the top) and when things get busy we are inclined to move from one thing to the next without much thought (and usually no action) for what has been left behind after whatever we were doing. 

Right now I'm really glad the weather is allowing us to eat in the back yard:  I'm trying to sort out an accumulation of stuff and the dining room table is the place!  We will be making some new shelves as well as repacking old ones, and hopefully supplying Friends of Valkenberg Charity Shop with several large boxes of stock.

We are really bad at housekeeping - it is our ungift, if there is such a thing.  So we need prayer for this - if you are the praying type, we appreciate your help in this!

We hope to come out of this with more space and less tension, without losing the creative serendipity of reasonable mess.  Our house is a place of service, and the most important thing is that it is a space filled with the Holy Spirit.  Our prayer is always for people to experience Jesus here.

We also want to be faithful in making this gift (a beautiful house in a lovely place) something that Jesus can use - for us and everyone else. 

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!

blog experiment

With the kind of work we do, there are no definitive pathways and no trails blazed.  In a way that is the point ... we are trying to serve those who are strangers to the gospel, or strangers to the church.  That means we need to

• have millions of ideas (no problem there)
• work out what God wants us to try (listening to God is tricky and we need other people)
• be willing to keep going without measurable results
• be willing to fail
• work out when to stop trying something

One of the trials this year is blogs ... not, I hasten to add, trial as in burden but as in exploring or assessing. Now. That means that I am trying to construct each blog well, professionally.  I am trying to write about appropriate things, in an accessible style, with interesting bits and bobs and good pictures.  Oh well ... we have to rely on God for everything anyway, so why not attempt the impossible occasionally, or frequently for that matter!

BUT more challenging still, we have to get LOTS of people to click on the blog - because if people don't see it at least once, they won't even know whether it is interesting to them or not. 

• The aim of this blog is that people who are interested in what we are up to (either because they like us, or because they like what we do, or even both) will become followers and visit often.  We hope that this will help you guys to be more part of our life and service.
• The outsiders-urbanspirituallife blog, has been created for people we don't even know. or at least only know a little, or don't know yet.  We hope that it will enable them to pursue the quest at the heart of being human, that it will help some people to discover Jesus.

So here I am tracking how many people have visited a blog.  (Don't worry about my list of other things I plan to do on the whiteboard under my notebook!)  Of course, I can't tell whether people found the blog interesting or helpful ... so I shall have to keep doing this for a long time before I can decide whether I am supposed to keep going, or whether it is another failure in the matrix of brilliant ideas!

SO ... Outsiders has a facebook persona which people can join to see whernever there is a new post.  I put the outsiders blog on my facebook wall too, and I keep hoping that other people might pass it on.  (BTW the day I had the most 'hits' was when I put up a picture of a mime with a 'prostitute' in it!!)

AND if you know anyone who knows us and doesn't know about this blog, please pass on the link!

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.