• Work. That we may work well and build good relationships in what we do. Specifically, Renee has started her work a couple weeks back, and there’s a lot to learn and a lot to do.
• For YWAM Ireland’s progress in the UK visa areas: they have recently undergone an inspection by the Home Office so they can get approval to give their staff 2 year renewable visas. This will mean a whole lot to people who want to work with YWAM long-term, as it costs a lot to renew more frequently (if it’s possible at all), and it allows them to work towards residency in the UK. This has been a struggle for the last two years, since the immigration laws changed in 2008. Though we’re not YWAM staff anymore, this will mean a lot to people who we are close to and are doing work we continue to support.

This past Thursday was another of YWAM’s monthly global prayer days, when YWAMers from around the world gather to pray around a central theme. This month’s topic was China, and I took a carload of my colleagues from Belfast to a little Carmelite convent in North Dublin to join a handful of the other YWAMers, representing Dublin and Banbridge.

Each month, a newsletter [1] is sent out from YWAM Int’l with the prayer day topic and usually a collection testimonies, as well as a suggestion on how to pray. This month’s newsletter featured a selection of stories from missionaries in China, as well as some statistics on the number of Christians in China (130 million, or 11-13% of the population, according to the newsletter) and a history of Christianity in China. This history is rich and complicated – not just the story of 19th century missionaries trudging their way up the Yangtze, but reaching back to 7th century Nestorians, and being presently and significantly rolled into China’s relationship with the West of the last couple hundred years.

In the West, we have confused the political pursuits of various nation states with the mantle of the Church for many hundreds of years. The banner of Christ has flown alongside campaigns for power consistently across Western history – through colonialism and Manifest Destiny, present and past. In many areas of the world, Christianity has been and is often still seen as a Western religion, going hand in hand with the other ideals of the states and cultures that employ its vocabulary. The colonized, formerly colonized, and non-Western countries have often had the understanding that our own nation’s present values, be they representative democracy, capitalism, materialism, colonialism, etc., are part of the package that also includes Christianity. This fallacy creates a tremendous problem for overseas missions: someone may reject one of these Western -isms and thus be averse to the gospel because they came in the same package. However, Christianity is the Kingdom of God, not Christendom, which is a kingdom of someone else with a bunch of religious vocabulary thrown in.

I will not delve into 19th and 20th century Chinese history, which saw both the Boxer Rebellion and the Cultural Revolution as reactions to foreign influence, into which Christianity was lumped with violent consequences for both Chinese and foreign followers of Christ. Today, Christianity is on the rise in China, in a mix of underground house churches, a regulated state church, and student movements. Despite the historical stigma on Christendom, people are being drawn into a meaningful relationship with Christ and community within the Church. Loren Cunningham, the founder of YWAM, postulates that Church growth could come to some sort of ‘tipping point’ at around 300 million or 25% of China’s population (what this ‘tipping point’ would then lead to is still unclear to me, but I think some sort of large-scale societal transformation is implied, or maybe mass conversion).

At the same time, China’s political and economic power is on the rise. In my understanding, it’s unlikely that they somehow ‘supersede’ the United States as the world’s leading economy in the next couple decades [2], but nonetheless China is certainly the top three economies, and some foresee a future where China is the world’s leading superpower. Loren Cunningham recently said:

In 2000, I felt God saying that China could become the leading power this century, providing they continued to move towards God and His Word, and provided the West continued to turn away from God and his Word. I can’t see any nation close to China to become the world leader after Europe and North America lose their leadership, which they will do unless they turn around. The West can return to God. It would be wonderful if both the West and China came in peace to evangelize the world, but this looks unlikely.

There’s a lot about this quote that I won’t unpack or comment on, because it would take me in a completely different direction, but as we prayed together last Thursday, and as I thought about this statement, I realized what a fascinating and precarious situation the Chinese Church is in. With the increasing economic and political power of their nation, as well as an increasing number of Christians with increasing sense of legitimacy and influence, they have very important decisions to make. Indeed, if this ‘tipping point’ of Christians came about as China became a superpower, they might be somewhere near where our Christian forebearers were in the early centuries of the Church, first under a hostile empire, then with increasing power in that empire.

Of course, I welcome and pray, as others, that the believers may start to exist with more freedoms, less state interference, and have more influence in all aspects of society. But my most earnest prayer for the Chinese church is this:

• That they would feel and exist united to a global Body of Christ, and would not feel isolated.
• That they would hold first their citizenship in the Kingdom of God before their citizenship in their nation.
• That they would remain pure and dedicated first (if not solely) to the purposes of Christ, not the purposes of power and wealth.
• That they would learn from our mistakes and our history – the violence, the materialism, the emptiness of power over others, the idolatry possible in our nationalism.

Moreover, this is my prayer for all Christians living in a place of power and wealth – especially where our influence is heard, if not accepted, by the powers that be.

Links/References:

1. Prayer Day website – November 2009: China. Loren Cunningham quotes came from the recent Nov. 2009 newsletter, which is available if you sign up.
2. NPR’s Planet Money Podcast Episode 103: Here Comes China.

We had made our way to the cafe up the Shankill Road that afternoon on foot because of the parades of marching bands and partying onlookers crowding the street. We hopped over cases of beer, ducking the blinking tips of cigarettes, and parrying precariously strewn lawn chairs. Someone told us later that eighty bands were on the street that day, all of the protestant flute & drum variety. From the sky they might have looked like neatly sorted jelly beans in their uniforms, escalating through the neighborhood according to color, village, and slogan.

When we arrived, ice cream and popcorn were in full demand at the cafe, and there was a man asleep on the sofa – a well-known, neighborhood alcoholic and a sort of cafe refugee who feeds the fish in the cafe aquarium. The bands and the party, we were told, were for his brother, an alleged paramilitary who was gunned down by the SAS (British special forces) while sitting on his bicycle. And while the crowds drank themselves into double negatives, and the local strongmen divided their praise, our friend slept through the day, unnoticed and unbothered.

We set up our little village in the car park behind the cafe. Our establishments were those of inflated castle, inflated football goal, facepaint station, balloon sculpting station, and friendly guides, bearing encouragements, prayer, and hot-dogs for the kids. Somehow the merriment and binge drinking down the street faded into an inaudible blur, and we had our own good time.

Throughout our celebration with the kids that day, I was impressed by how little the general occupation of the neighborhood affected them. In one way, maybe they had simply grown accustomed to drunkenness and revelry; however, I largely think their ability to play, laugh, apologize, bounce, kick, run, trick, and cry are a testament to a child’s ability to be true to their own playfulness and curiosity no matter their situation or environment. I’ve seen this around the world: minus food, minus bouncy castles, minus face paint, minus shelter, they are children the same (I remember a slum in Thailand where the only open play space was amongst graves…). No wonder Our Lord challenges us to become like children. If somehow we manage, perhaps our imagination and sense of self will not be oppressed by our present occupations.

Please pray for Ramy and Roula in their work through the cafe. In the midst of the practicalities of serving, cooking, and cleaning, they are ambitious in their outreach. They’ve recently started a homework club at the cafe for kids after school, where they can come and be helped with their exercises. The government recognizes that there is a gigantic void in progressing past basic levels of education for kids on the Shankill versus kids in middle-class or wealthy areas (check out this Belfast Telegraph Article). The homework club aims to aid kids in learning, to encourage them, to pray for them, and give them a safe place to hang out. Please pray for this new venture and for general opportunities within the community for the cafe ministry.

As far as actual facts and figures go, by the end of the month, we’d received nearly twice the normal rain for August and about half the sunshine – a total of 69 hours for the whole month. Being the darkest since records started being kept in 1880, it’s also an average of just over two hours per day, and for being supposedly in the middle of summer, that’s somewhat disappointing.

It’s time to fix the leaky roofs.

(All the facts came from this BBC Northern Ireland news story).

Last week, most of the staff from YWAM N.I./Ireland met up for a time of praying, worshiping and hanging-out. Though we try to get together every month or two for similar reasons, the annual staff conference is when we go away somewhere together for a few days and dedicate the entirety of those days to refocusing ourselves as a national community. It’s usually a great time for reviewing the past year, sharing vision, and looking to the future. And it’s a lot of fun to be together.

This year, we didn’t have any speakers from outside our community come and share, as we usually do. Instead, Jonny Clark our national director shared a bit, as well as Renee and our colleague Erin Seibel. We also spent time praying for our focus nations (Serbia, Lebanon, South Africa, India, Rwanda, Burundi, Israel and Palestine) and welcomed a couple new staff.

One of the biggest themes that seemed to come up in our times of prayer and reflection was this idea of sharpening. God seemed to be saying that he wanted to make us, as a community and individually, sharper. We were challenged to look at some of the disappointments of the last year like sparks of metal being shaved off an axe by a metaphorical grindstone, with the goal of restoring the efficacy of that instrument. Renee also brought a story of farming – of planting and growing crops, then the devastation of violent rainstorms, and the farmer not questioning his calling to be a farmer, but replanting in faith and hope the next season.

I think this past season has had some hefty disappointments for the two of us. I feel like the last half-year has been the best part of my life, seeing as it’s been the only time I’ve been married, and being married has been great; but it’s also been one of the most difficult, especially in ministry. God did a lot in us during the latter parts of this summer, as far as rest and restoration goes, but he wants to do more.

Erin shared a word at our staff conference that she had for our organization that really struck me. She described the coast at low-tide when the water leaves all sorts of interesting tidbits exposed in its absence. In essence, this is a time of low-tide for our community, where we can see our mistakes and our triumphs, areas of failing and areas where we excel. This idea really connected with me because I’d physically experienced it a couple weeks ago, standing on the edge of the Irish sea in a little seaside village on the Ards Peninsula. I wrote in my journal:

Yesterday, I walked down to the beach front during a break in the rain to see the tide have taken the sea back a few hundred meters, leaving an apocalyptic landscape of human history exposed to the birds in its retreat. The previous day’s high tide had left frustrated little piles of seaweed and super-size bottles of alcopops (now vacated by their spirits) pushed up against the crumbling wall that marked a theoretical barrier between the seaside village and nature. Yet now, as I looked out at the sea, she seemed to have given up, sick of pushing back against civilization, and made a temporary escape eastward.
I climbed in her wake, over rocks and partially buried tires, past wilting dunes of sea weed peppered with feathers and deflated grocery bags, to an island crowned in lichen, thick with a beard of barnacles, where I stood and surveyed the evidence of my existence. The tide had revealed a no-mans-land of contrasting and indecisive features: the harsh beauty of beaten rock, the softness of sand, an abandoned and rusty lobster cage, a defeated orange flag, partially buried. And most of all, birds …

Pray for us, that we may love the Lord with all our hearts – He who challenges and comforts.

More photos from the staff conference in our photo galleries…

Nonetheless, every year “the Twelfth” is commemorated in Northern Ireland with nationwide parades (starting after Easter but culminating on the Twelfth) and bonfires the night before. Many Protestants say the Twelfth is a celebration of their cultural history, but for other parts of the community (certainly Catholics), it’s an annual reminder and agitator of the communal divisions that still haunts this place. The symbols of celebration are often sectarian – such as the placement of Irish flags or a Papal effigy in the celebration fires – and the parade routes of the Protestant fraternities sometimes find their way into Catholic neighborhoods, occasionally sparking conflict.

On the news this year, officials were hinting at the possibility of marketing the Twelfth as some sort of tourist attraction. Certainly Twelfth-related riots are increasingly rare, and two years gone are the soldiers policing contentious parade routes under the mounted weapons of armored vehicles; however, folks traveling to gawk at a spectacle still steeped in tension may continue to seem a bit… uncomfortable, to say the least.

Having spent the previous evening indoors with the wife and not with some colleagues braving crowds for photos in Belfast, I arose on the morning of the Twelfth this year, forgetting which day I was greeting, and was somewhat surprised, when driving some folks that morning to the airport, to find myself driving at 2 miles per hour down a small country lane, directly into an oncoming parade. We’d been directed to that road by police advising us on how to avoid the parades scattered between the country villages, and to no one’s delight, instead turned up in the midst of one. It was an awkward situation: bowler-hatted Orangemen and a full flute band flowing over my bonnet and dousing us with percussion and knitted brows. I was driving through the bulk of them on a very skinny road, fighting a nervous smile. People were gracious, splitting at our bow and letting us through, and we were eventually on our way.

We weren’t out on the street this year to snap any photos for you, but some of our friends were. I would highly recommend you check out some of the sweet shots a colleague of ours (Heather) took of the bonfires and decorations from the Shankill in West Belfast a few nights ago and posted on her blog.

Thanks to Heather Clark at hebsclark.blogspot.com for use of the photo.

We were two weeks in the United States seeing friends and family, which was mostly good, minus allergies and mild sickness affecting our short off-time.

We’re used to the possibility of air travel delays in our mode of living. However, I am still a bit frustrated at the lack of airline responsibility regarding weather related delays. They basically have to do nothing, and as a result I’ve spent overnights and days in airports in the past because of cancelled flights, and recently, these five hours of little information, and of course, no vouchers for food or anything. I know it’s not really their fault that aircraft get held up by weather, but is it the travelers fault that they don’t have any extra aircraft or air-traffic management to deal with those largely common occurrences? And certainly it’s not the company’s fault in those situations, but they are still under law responsible to pay their staff overtime. Why not any sort of concessions (at least regarding food and accommodation) for their loyal customers?

Anyways, we’ve still time to make our flight to India and get ready. And we’re not loud complainers. I’m just giving some thoughts towards the logic of ‘market guided’ consumer related laws. Perhaps the FFA should take a look at some of their regulations and some of what their European counterparts have in place. But I understand it’s hard times for the airlines. Right?

Catch you in few weeks! God bless.

Lately, we’re in the office quite a lot, especially myself. I added the job of DTS registrar in mid-January, which has been a lot e-mailing and filing, and since there’s only one office computer, I’ve also been the main person to forward or handle the rest of Closkelt’s office correspondence. Most of my time in the office, however, I’ve been trying to organize the DTS programme, collecting and creating training, administration, discipleship, financial, evaluation, and legal information and organizing it in such a way that new DTS leaders can have a definite place to start and so that experience will be recorded and passed onwards. And we’ve both been using the office to look ahead to the fall as well. Renee has worked on methods and schedules for training DTS staff, while I’ve corresponded with students and organizing potential lecturers, and it’s nice now that she’s taken a step back from the classroom to join me with the work in there.

However, work-weeks mostly spent in the office are new to me, and I think my brain is catching up with the repetition. I’m well used to being in and out of the office in my time with YWAM, but whole days are a new phenomenon. In some respects, I’m good with office work – I’m organized and enjoy writing – but in areas of sorting out detail after detail, communicating repetitive information, and reading various documentation, I’m working out of my weaknesses. I like to make new things or make weak things stronger, and although that’s really the bigger picture of our office work, I’d much rather get the ideas, figure out the plan, and have someone who likes administration making the copies, finding the addresses, and stuffing the envelopes.

Outreach logistics

This week and next week will be crunch time for finalizing all the logistics for the DTS outreaches leaving on the 6th of May. We’re excited at sending out twelve students and two staff between Ireland and India, and we’re happy to serve in order to get them ready to go. The next week will see meetings with staff to double check locations and details, as well as some of the finer details of handling issues within the teams. Our finances person is away, so Renee and I have been doing the budgets for the first time, as well as figuring out exactly how much everyone owes, etc. We are trusting God to bring in about £4,000 to make it possible for everyone to go on outreach.

Cultural Snapshot
YWAM Closkelt is situated in a rural farm community, and this is the time of year when the farmers fertilize the fields. In other words, tractors are criss-crossing the landscape with tanks filled with various animal feces in tow, replenishing the earth with its natural goodness. Today, the odour is particularly pungent, as the field across from our facilities is being repeatedly serviced (I think our friend is on his ninth trip), and the resulting mist is permeating the base choking the inhabitants (us). To make matters worse, farmers here generally don’t plow, so the matter will remain fresh and above ground. Fascinating!

An early spring?
We’ve been blessed with a gorgeous past week or so, with about two-thirds of the days clad in sunshine and decently temperate weather. In addition, the days are quickly getting longer; whereas a few weeks ago it was dark around 4:30 in the afternoon, the sun stays out until nearly seven these days. As a result, I’m thinking a lot about how much I love spring and summer in Ireland lately.

In any case, I’m amazed at how much weather affects the human creature. Morale always seems better when the weather pleasantly surprises. I think I probably hear laughter more often.
Or perhaps I’m imagining things.