We returned to Belfast on Friday after six weeks in South Africa leading a Discipleship Training School (DTS) outreach, making about 9 weeks total away with the prior three weeks with the team in Cork. Our team continues their work in South Africa for another two weeks without us, then they will be back in Northern Ireland for their final debriefing at YWAM’s new base in Rostrevor during the last ten days of this month.

Our time in South Africa went really well. We had the opportunity to work alongside a few partner organizations in kwaZulu-Natal (Durban area, mostly), and our team was involved in quite a few different types of ministry: leading worship, home visits and praying for the sick, youth evangelism and discipleship, running ‘Bible camp’ and kids’ programs, practical work, prayer ministry, giving teaching and testimonies. We (Mikael & Renee) were active as well in trying to facilitate spiritual growth and leadership abilities in our team members. As usual, we tried to open up opportunities for them to be active in their particular gifts and talents, as well as help them take more and more responsibility in every aspect of the outreach. Thus, we’re confident in them and their progress while we are away. Each team member has clear responsibilities (from organizing team worship times, to doing the accounts and organizing grocery shopping), and we turned the overall leadership over to two of them.

South Africa is a beautiful country of many contrasts. It has one of the largest income inequalities in the world, with some of the poorest and richest people within its borders. In some places, we felt as if we could easily be in an opulent Southern California suburb. Out of town and down the road are the offspring of informal settlements, with open sewers, ramshackle dwellings and no indoor plumbing, where the inhabitants (almost always exclusively black) live on less than $2 a day. With 11 official languages, South Africa is layered with different cultures. The kwaZulu-Natal province, though, is 80% Zulu, with English and Afrikaaner whites fitting into the remaining percentage alongside the other people groups. Durban has also the largest Indian population outside of India.

Our work was mostly in Zulu communities. When not with YWAM Durban, we had the opportunity to stay in the tribal areas, once at a community centre, and the next with one of team member’s (Spha) family. We traded indoor plumbing, showers and privacy for the beautiful views of valleys and red earth, spotted with brightly-colored traditional round houses. Alongside our official ministry, it became apparent that our presence as a team of mostly white people in areas where white people don’t often come was a ministry of reconciliation in and of itself. People were delighted to see us fetching water, crammed into the noisy minibus taxis, and trying out our lackluster Zulu language skills. We often heard the phrase, ‘You’ve made us feel human.’ Our words about Christ came more alive in these experiences.

There is much more to say about our time in South Africa – about the beautiful and inspirational people we met, the challenges they face, and what we’ve learned – but we will save it for another time.

You can see photos from our trip in our photo gallery, or by following the link below:

	South Africa: Outreach 2010 Pictures from the DTS outreach we lead around Durban area May – July 2010. The last two weeks are student-lead, and we are back early. 54 photos

Also, we encourage you to check out some of the amazing groups we’ve been blessed to work with in South Africa. Here is a summary (they’re all Christian organizations, by the way):

• YWAM Durban – They do a whole host of stuff, but we have been (and the team will be again before they leave) primarily involved in outreach in a local township called Burlington.
• Maskhane – A community organization in kwaNzimakwe tribal area (South Coast) where we did evangelism, discipleship, and kids programs, as well as some home visits. They do counseling, home care for HIV and AIDS patients, and many other things.
• Light Providers – A organization in kwaNyuswa in the Valley of 1000 Hills that seeks to empower youth with vision for their life. It was started by Vusi, who did his DTS in Closkelt, and a couple of their staff have done DTSs now in Belfast.
• Sethani – A community organization working in kwaNgcolosi, Spha’s community, offering life skills, counseling, and youth programs. We ran a program for kids and youth there.
• World Changers Academy – Offering life skills and leadership training in various communities around kwaZulu-Natal. It was started by a YWAMer about a decade ago. Several of its staff have done DTSs in Belfast, including our current trainee, Spha, who works for them. Our team is working with WCA this week, helping with life skills courses.

You can check out photos from our recent outreach to South Africa here.

We’ve also added some thumbnail links to other videos we’ve created in the video section.

We’ll fly from Dublin to London to Johannesburg, then to Durban. Our ministry will be in Durban and surrounding villages.

We’ll have very limited internet access until July, so if you need to get in touch with us, be patient! As always, keep an eye on Facebook and Twitter, and we’ll see if we can get updates going this way.

I took a van full of boys and bags from Belfast on Wednesday morning while the girls took the train, and we’re now in Cork. In the next couple weeks, we’ll be helping with a couple local ministries, including the Haven – an interdenominational ministry of a coffee shop, bookstore, and prayer room. We’ll also be on the streets busking for money for homeless ministries, praying for people, and leading worship and services in churches.

We’re back in Belfast for a few days mid-May, then we’re off to South Africa for the remainder of the outreach.

Our team will be working with a variety of ministries in the Durban area, primarily helping with discipleship, evangelism, and helping empower people in practical skills. I’ll tell you more about these ministries later…

We certainly appreciate your prayers. We’ll be leading nine trainees from this DTS – four guys and five females; five Americans, one English, one South African Zulu, and one Israeli Arab. They’re a great group with lots of talent.

Well, we’re nearly through this DTS’s lecture phase. We’ve got just a few weeks left before outreach begins at the very end of April. In summary, what’s happened:

• Mike Oman teaching on the Father Heart of God. (also a nice group shot photo here)
• Derek & Trich Dodd teaching on relationships and forgiveness.
• Jonny Clark and Davy Kidd teaching on the Holy Spirit
• Local outreach in Belfast (my small group hosts an evening for elderly people on the Shankill every Monday at Feed Cafe)
• Patricia Green (founder of Rahab ministries) teaching on human trafficking.
• Jon Hatch teaching on the Kingdom of God, and why Jesus is more than just personal salvation.
• The DTS serving at the Western European Leadership Consultation (WELC) in Dublin.
• A week of prayer, outreach during St Patrick’s Day, and learning about how to work in the Catholic world as an ecumenical mission (taught by Rob Clarke, of YWAM’s Kerygma Teams)
• Jonny Clark teaching on reconciliation.
• Alec Cartwright teaching on ‘discipling nations,’ and why missions is something every Christian is called to, no matter what profession.
• Emmanuel Entee, filling in gaps of our curriculum, and teaching on freedom in Christ.
• Next weeks: a week of outreach in Belfast and workshops, then story telling and evangelism, then a week on worship. (Then outreach)

(A heads up: all the photos linked in the bullet points above are taken with a phone camera, and the quality isn’t great)

The Discipleship Training School (DTS) started just over a week ago now, with 21 trainees from America, Canada, Germany, England, New Zealand, Israel, and South Africa. After the new year, we have felt like we’ve really hit the ground running – first in terms of preparation and continuing staff training, and now in all the little details of organising a group this size for activities, housing, food, ministry, etc. We’re glad for Saturdays like this one where we can take time to just breathe and be with each other.

The experience of staffing a DTS in Belfast is new for us and offers some unique opportunities and challenges. The variety of ministry possibilities for the DTS is abundant, and hosting the DTS on the Shankill Road (where we live) connects the trainees directly to a lifestyle of outreach, where we live in the same places as the poor, addicted, and bereaved. As you may know, we don’t have a central ‘base’ in Belfast, and our staff are housed in various flats in the Shankill area, and the trainees are in two different houses about a 15 min. walk apart. Our lecture space is rented from a local church. The challenges, therefore, that are most different than in Closkelt are in managing the community aspect of DTS. We think it’s going quite well, but it’s a lot of work to get meals organised and have people show up at the same place at the same time.

Our DTS staff team are these people: Jonny Clark, the Belfast and Ireland director, is leading the DTS; Mikael is assistant leading with Jonny (as he is also busy with other responsibilities); Renee is staffing and helping train the new staff; Rob is a pastor of many vocations – from prison chaplain to hospital chaplain – and is staffing a first DTS after many years in ministry; Stephanie is a talented artist and graphic designer staffing her first DTS; Bless is helping with the DTS part-time after moving with her husband and son from Thailand where she is from and has been with YWAM for many years. Other YWAM Belfast staff are helping when possible.

The group is strong and talented, but we are a bit stretched after one of our DTS staff had to return home suddenly the day the DTS started.

Yesterday, we announced that our outreach phase locations will be 1. Ireland & South Africa combo and 2. Ireland, Israel & Palestine combo. The trainees have until Tuesday to pray about where they feel they should go, and then we will form the teams.

Locally, Renee and Steph are leading a small group which will be doing children’s ministry in a school on the Shankill and with a church working in a socially deprived area across town. Mikael is leading a small group that will be working in the Feed Cafe on the Shankill doing ministry from there, as well as ministry around town (the group is quite musical, and we’re excited to get them involved in open mics, etc.). Jonny and Rob’s small group will be working with teenagers.

We appreciate your prayers very much.

If you want to stay better updated, you can:

• Follow us on Twitter for insights into our daily life.
• Follow YWAM Ireland on Twitter , where insights and pictures from DTS activities are often posted.

(Someone actually gave Mikael a Blackberry phone before Christmas – quite an upgrade from a phone that was just a phone. After a month of figuring out how it works, he’s trying to use it to communicate while on the go – such as posting pictures from lectures this week via Twitter).

Ok. Enough words.

Thanks for all your love.

Here are some photos I snapped with my new phone (gifted to me just before Christmas by someone upgrading – the first time I’ve had a phone that can do anything but make phone calls), mostly from windows in our flat:

Before…

In the middle of it…

After…

Christmas Eve at St. Anne’s

We continue this as an effort to integrate faith and a vision for reconciliation to make a real-world impact in places of conflict. The sponsored trainees are recommended by partner ministries in countries of conflict where we send outreach teams. They come to Belfast to receive Christian missions training coupled with a perspective on reconciliation and peacemaking given context in the environment of post-Troubles Northern Ireland. They will then return rooted in their faith to their countries with an ability to build bridges, having ministered alongside YWAM in Belfast on their DTS.

2010
—-
For the DTS starting on 21 January 2010, we are hoping to have 4 sponsored trainees. One is from Israel. One is from Lebanon and has been volunteering with us since the summer. The other two are from South Africa, currently working with two of our partner ministries outside of Durban – World Changers Academy and Light Providers. These organisations are involved in a variety of community projects in their area (links: WCA website and Light Providers website).

If you want to know more about these outstanding individuals, please contact YWAM Belfast directly.

Our needs for them are:

• To cover basic living costs – apprx. £2150 minimum for lecture and outreach phases, per person
• To cover travel costs for the South Africans – airfare and visa costs, apprx. £750 per person.

Will you help us raise up ambassadors for Christ in broken places?

Consider making a donation for this cause – any amount will go a long way.

Donations using PayPal are quick, easy, and safe.  For other methods, please contact YWAM Belfast.

Also, join our cause on Facebook and invite your friends to participate.

You can also check out the ywamireland.org blog post of a similar nature (well, I wrote it, too).

‘Redemption & Reconciliation: Heart of Christian Worldview’ Peter Adams from YWAM Ireland on Vimeo.

We were about twenty five people that week, meeting in a couple different locations on the Shankill in Belfast. Usually, this annual conference is held in the summer, so our group was perhaps not as diverse as normal, since most people would be busy during the weekdays in November. However, we were a nice combination of YWAM Belfast staff and volunteers, YWAM Harpenden School of Humanities, and Sword of the Sprit gap-year volunteers. In all, we represented the nations of England, New Zealand, USA, Rwanda, Cameroon, Turkmenistan, Norway, Central African Republic, Lebanon, the Netherlands, and Ireland. A good mix, anyways.

Jonny Clark (Director, YWAM Ireland & YWAM Belfast) led us through a brief but meaningful examination of Irish history to set a practical context for our surroundings and the teaching we would have. Our primary guest speaker was Peter Adams (http://www.reconciliationtalk.com), who is involved in reconciliation work in England and overseas. He spoke at length about peacemaking as part of the Christian mission, as well as God’s plan for the reconciliation of all things, and how we participate in that – in relating to people and in speaking about Jesus. He used many stories about his work in Luton (England) with the Muslim community and his work in places like China and the Middle East.

In the afternoons, there were field-trips to community projects around Belfast to see how various groups engaged with the needs of this city. The purpose of these outings were to inspire and spark ideas, as well as connect the teaching with practical application.

[The video at the top was taken at the conference, and I pieced it together from a 75-min talk Peter Adams presented on God's plan of ultimate redemption for all of creation and our call to participate in it (Vimeo - about 30 min.).]

Peter’s blog: reconciliationtalk.com

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.

Sunday, 4 October 2009, between 7-10pm.
Drop in at the Heisey farm for a good time playing games, eating food, navigating a hay tunnel, or just socializing. Everyone’s welcome!

Any donations will go toward Mikael and Renee’s ministry in Northern Ireland over the next year.

Need directions? Follow our link to Google Maps

Please, invite your friends. If you’re able to RSVP (including numbers of people you might bring), that would be helpful to us. You can RSVP or find out more info using our event posting on Facebook, or send us an email using our contacts page.

Heisey farm
2059 Sunnyside Rd.
Manheim, PA 17545
USA
717-665-2284

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.