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.

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.

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).

During all of this, we had some good ideas cooking about DTS that we’re excited to develop, and we’re glad for this extra time to give it more thought, planning, and action. YWAM Belfast is smallish in staff numbers, and so we need to run the DTS in a way that it comes alongside everything that the staff are already doing. So we’re looking at how to do that… and we think it’ll be good.

Another idea that has come up is to develop a volunteer programme that runs before the DTS that some of the attendees can apply to come early for. We’re now in full swing of putting this together, hoping that the earliest of them could arrive in mid-November. We want them to get some input on reconciliation and Irish history, but primarily to link them with our ministries and our contacts based on needs. We’ve launched this under the name of Mission Belfast, and it has generated good interest.

The next few weeks will get us a solid foundation for putting structure to the coming year.
]]> http://nakedicame.com/2009/08/new-ideas/feed/ 0 http://nakedicame.com/2009/04/end-of-dts/ http://nakedicame.com/2009/04/end-of-dts/#comments Fri, 03 Apr 2009 13:09:48 +0000 Mikael http://nakedicame.com/?p=67

The end of this DTS snuck up on me like a forgotten birthday (‘Oh, is this what day it is! Do you mean to say there’s only a few left?’). It was different to be the leader of the school, so involved, but to not go on outreach, and then all of a sudden they’re all back in Ireland and we’re really busy, and then a couple weeks later they’re all gone. Whoosh.

I’m writing this over a week since the last student left, and I miss them. They were a really good group of individuals, and also a good team, and I would be proud if they came back to serve with us here.

They returned from outreach in South Africa to a few days of rest, then a week of debriefing with Emmanuel and Janice Entee, over from Harpenden in England. We culminated in an evening of good food, stories, songs and sharing, followed by an informal graduation ceremony where myself and the DTS staff, Greg and Ariette, prayed for each of the ten students.

Last year, I felt the Lord lay on my heart for this DTS the line from the Lord’s Prayer: Thy kingdom come, as a simple prayer to be said and lived out in word and deed. I shared at the graduation a short word about this not being really the end of DTS but hopefully some sort of a beginning of their active citizenship in this awesome kingdom. I read again from Isaiah 61 (actually from Luke 4 where Jesus reads from Isaiah 61), as a scripture that has often come up during this DTS; we stood with the unknown prophet:

The spirit of the Lord is on me,
for he has anointed me
to bring the good news to the afflicted.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives,
sight to the blind,
to let the opressed go free,
to proclaim a year of favour from the Lord.
(NJV)

I recently traveled to South Africa to visit our DTS outreach team and see a few people ahead of planning for a mega outreach from Ireland to Durban in the summer of 2010.

After waiting at our gate only to find out our flights were cancelled, Chris (a staff member from Closkelt) and I were finally able to fly out early morning three days later. Skip ahead 30+ hours, we arrived in sunny Durban – a city of 3.5 million situated on the east coast of South Africa adjacent to the Indian Ocean.

We joined the team after a drive outside the city to a former sugar cane plantation, where a community of missionaries live, going into towns and collecting bread and food discarded by stores, sorting out the bad stuff, cooking or preparing the good stuff, and distributing it to hungry people in local poorer areas. Our team were serving for a week with this ministry, Missions Ablaze, after having worked the last few weeks closely with YWAM Durban in a township called Burlington.

During the course of my time with the team (only about five days), one of my objectives was to gauge the health of the team in spending time with them corporately and individually, as well as do a bit of ground work in preparing to promote a mega outreach YWAM Ireland is planning to organize for July of 2010 in South Africa. About half way through my time in Durban, we migrated across town to Word Changers Academy, a training facility for the World Changers organization, where I was able to see a few of YWAM Belfast’s sponsor students who work with the organization in various positions of leadership. It was really great to sit down with some of these guys and hear how they’re doing, also collecting video clips for helping to promote our 2010 outreach (‘I came to Belfast and served; now you should come here!’) and have them explain some of the things they’re involved in – life skills courses in poor townships, empowering people in health (some townships have an 80% HIV prevalence) and finding work, among other things.

Overall, I was really pleased with the health of our DTS team and their willingness to roll up their sleeves and do practical work with Missions Ablaze, as well as go out with World Changers and teach practical and spiritual skills in the townships. As I was leaving Durban, I was talking to our local YWAM contacts and got some great feedback; one of the leaders of a ministry the team had worked with said they were the best team they’d ever had.

From Durban, I flew to Johannesburg and spent a couple days there before flying back to Dublin. I was able to see Vusi, a friend, graduate of World Changers, former YWAM Ireland DTS student, and extraordinary entrepreneur, who has started various works around Durban related to life-skills teaching and rehabilitation of criminals (please check out the post I wrote about his ministry last year, including video – “Light Providers, South Africa”). He recently moved to Jo’burg to study criminal justice on a full scholarship at Monash University and is also, characteristically, developing a prison ministry there on top of continuing to oversee his ministries in Durban. Aside from just catching up with him, it was helpful to toss around a few ideas for future outreach (especially in 2010).

I had the privilege of witnessing the incredible, community-transforming work our Zulu friends are doing in South Africa. Beyond their own amazing testimonies of personal redemption, they are pouring out their lives into their communities and successfully helping lift people out of crime and abject poverty into living purposeful lives that transform others through local leadership, and through incarnational spirituality.

Consider taking another look at the work of World Changers Academy or Vusi’s Light Providers ministry and supporting them financially. The volunteers generally don’t receive compensation and come from communities in need themselves, where they would be expected to provide for older parents. For about £50/$75 per month, you could sponsor a worker to do this important work full time. Pray about making a donation of £600/$900 through bank transfer to cover a worker for a full year.

Useful, related links:

• Photos I took in South Africa
• Previous blog entry on Light Providers and Vusi
• Light Providers (lightproviders.com)
• World Changers (www.wca-sa.org)
• Greg’s blog (blog.gregcolker.com) – the blog of one of our outreach team leaders
• Zach’s blog (www.zacharystock.com) – blog of a student on our outreach team
• YWAM Durban

We’re almost three weeks into the most recent Discipleship Training School, and I’m struggling to make time to update the blog. So much good stuff is happening!

We’ve added a group of ten (from the US, Canada, Costa Rica, and Ireland) to our community in Closkelt, here for six months of training and participation in some of the works we’re involved with. They’re really a great bunch, I must say, and I am already hoping that a lot of them will stay on with YWAM Ireland long term.

Those of you from YWAM will have varied pictures of what a DTS is supposed to be, and those visualizations will include growth, learning, praying, missions, and a variety of other things. We really need the DTS to reflect the realities of a training programme for missions within YWAM and also therefore to reflect where the Lord has our community at present – which is in a place of new vision, new opportunities, risk taking, and reaching out to a broken and beautiful world (all the good stuff that YWAMers have been doing since the late 60’s). We’re hoping to create an environment of inspiration for these new students, a time of realizing their gifts and their calling, a place of invitation to participate in YWAM Ireland’s mandate for reconciliation and missions (both locally and abroad, especially in nations with a history of conflict).

The first two weeks of this DTS were a mixture of orientation, team building, and teachings on the foundational values of YWAM. We also had a chance to spend a couple days in Belfast, learning about Irish history and seeing the living evidence of present sectarianism, as well as introduce our group to our colleagues in Belfast and thus help our broader community to grow in unity. A few minutes prior to our arrival in Belfast, we’d just secured the lease of a large townhouse to house the DTS students arriving for the Reconciliation DTS in November, and we arrived as the papers were being signed, happy to be the first occupants, hoping to warm the house with our presence and prayers ahead of more new arrivals in a few weeks. Unfortunately, unarranged details regarding utilities precluded any heating or hot water. Instead, we hunkered around at night to hot tea and testimonies, amazed at the many different ways Christ had brought us to Him and, then now, together.

In short, I’m really looking forward to the next couple months. This is only the second DTS I’ve lead and seventh I’ve seen in Closkelt. My two staff are great, fully engaged, creative and gifted leaders, and I couldn’t really ask for much more. The group will be going to South Africa on outreach in January, though neither Renee or I will go with. Throughout the school, you can regularly check out the YWAM Ireland website and blog for regular updates posted by the DTS (first one going up on the 24th or 25th, then every three weeks afterwards). Enjoy!

We’ve been blessed to have colleagues Emmanuel and Janice Entee over from YWAM Harpenden in England this week to help with the creative mission of debriefing our DTS staff and students and help them prepare for the immediate future. They have so much experience to share from their years in YWAM and their relationship with God that has been quite a boon to our community. For Renee and I, it’s been nice to have someone to pray with us and someone from the outside of YWAM Northern Ireland to talk with. We’re really grateful for the variety of different persons walking God’s green earth.

Renee and I are looking forward to a couple months of being able to catch up on preparing for the fall DTS and catch up on ourselves and our first year of marriage. The past few months have been really hard, and we need some time to regroup. The fall DTS, which I’m leading, is less than three months away.

We were only in India for two weeks, and 98% of our time there was spent in a city called Varanasi. We sent a team of seven people (including one staff leader) to India from our winter DTS in early May, and by the time we came in late May, they’d just arrived in Varanasi for a three week stay, after one week in Delhi and two weeks in Calcutta.

Varanasi
Varanasi (formerly known as Benares) is considered the ‘holy city of India,’ and is an important place of pilgrimage for Hindus; a contact described it as ‘the beating heart of the Hindu universe.’ The river Ganges flows through the city, and along it are a multitude of ghats – the famous steps leading down to the shore of the ‘holy river,’ on which temples are built, religious ceremonies performed, and bodies are cremated. The river is considered a Devi goddess, and bathing in her is supposed to grant forgiveness for sins committed in many lifetimes; although samples have put the fecal coliform bacteria levels at 1.5 million per 100mL, bathing and scrubbing in the Ganges is a common sight (safe bathing levels are 500 bacteria per 100mL! [1]).

Currently, Hindus comprise the vast majority of the population of Varanasi, but in the past, the city has had a vibrant Buddhist history. Saranath (or Sarnath) is a park basically on the north-eastern outskirts of Varanasi, a two minute walk from where our team was staying, where Gautama Buddha is said to have preached his first sermon [2,3]. Since it’s currently off-season, the area was scant of the tourist and pilgrims which normally flock there in the winter, although quite a few temples and monasteries are run and stocked by foreign Buddhists, such as Japanese, Thai, Korean, etc. Very few locals are Buddhists, according to a contact, who said the number is probably less than 1%.

Local Christians are also quite few, though definitely worth mentioning because of their commitment to prayer. With the spiritual centrality of Varanasi coupled with a multitude of 330 million Hindu gods, the heavenly atmosphere can feel quite intense (and I’m not one to say such things very often). We found that most of our organizational colleagues based in Varanasi are from other parts of India, and that they, along with the visiting teams and volunteers from YWAM and other groups, feel strongly that unlocking Varanasi for Christ will be key in unlocking the nation as a whole.

Team and ministry
Our main purposes in visiting our team in India were to offer support to the students and staff leader, to see how ministry was going, and to ascertain the potential for a long term relationship with the contacts. We knew the team had been facing some difficulties in dynamics and in health, especially as one of the students had been diagnosed with appendicitis a few days before our arrival. On the day we landed in Varanasi, that student went into a local hospital for emergency surgery to remove her appendix and would spend the next week recovering after a successful operation. We were thankful that another of our students is a fully trained nurse who has previously been to India and that she was able to stay with our recovering student and make sure they got everything they needed before a parent arrived to bring her home for recovery.

In the midst of this, the rest of the team were pressing on with their ministry, despite travel-related sickness and heat that hovered between 35 and 45 °C (95 – 115 °F), exacerbated by constant power-outages (no fans then!). Local YWAMers run a home for widows [4] (often treated poorly in India) where the team helped with practical work in and around a self-run bakery. They were also running computer and English courses for Christian Indian workers, as well as going out with local YWAMers for ministry and evangelism in nearby villages and prisons. In light of the spiritual atmosphere, praying and prayer walks, especially along the ghats, were also important.

Our time
Our last impressions of India were of an extremely helpful and friendly people. Though wary of touts and salesmen, we were so encouraged and blessed by the random strangers who would so willingly help us out of sticky situations. In particular, during a stopover in Delhi city centre before our flight back to Europe, we were having a really tough time finding a proper taxi to take to the airport until we came across a man who offered to walk around for us to find good transport. That sort of thing happened at least two other times that day alone. (But if we came again, we’d pick another time of year, like winter!)

After spending time with the team as individuals and as a group, we decided to change their plane tickets so they would return to Northern Ireland to finish the last two and a half weeks of outreach directly with YWAM NI, and particularly working with us at an upcoming festival (Summer Madness). Finishing their time in Varanasi, they would have spent their last couple weeks at a prayer house and in Delhi, and we felt it would be best in their circumstance to come and be actively engaged in the variety of things we have going on here right now. Thus, we’ve been busy modifying our plans, but the team has arrived this past Thursday, rested and debriefed a bit over the weekend, and I’ve dropped them off to work with a ministry contact of ours in South Armagh this morning.

Photos: Check out photos from India in our photo galleries.

References:

1. According to Lonely Planet’s India Travel Guide (ISBN: 9781741043082). Also a similar entry about the Ganges on the Lonely Planet website.
2. You can read more about Saranath at this Buddhist website.
3. Sarnath on Wikipedia.
4. A website on the YWAM widow’s home can be accessed here. The website looks a bit out of date, though, and the picture of the home on the main page is not at all how it looks now. Great info on the roles of widows in Indian society, as well as more info on Saranath.