Monday, March 30, 2009

I smell bad

That is what I said.
Michël, my reading partner was being nice and correcting some texts for me and I said "I smell bad that you are doing this extra work for me"
What I meant to say was I feel bad but the french have this crazy habit of putting a pronoun in front of a verb and causing it to change its meaning. That was one of them. Another is a verb that means to season meat without a pronoun in front of it and with a pronoun it means to persevere. So I guess I should season some meat with my language learning!

I also wanted to say "I smell bad" (read feel bad) that I haven't been thanking all of you enough.
Some of your are giving financially in financially difficult times and we do appreciate it and we are praying for you. I also realize that live is hard for a lot of you as well. Not just financially but with relationships, with internal pressure, external pressure etc. Thanks for reading this and thanks for praying for us despite all of that.

I also "smell bad" that we haven't given a lot of planning information out for the summer.
In the next couple of weeks I hope to provide you a lot more info on where we will be after language school, what you can do to help, how you can pray, and when we hope to head for Africa.

There is one specific thing to pray for this week and that is that on Wed Anna and I will give a 20 min presentation on our mission in the Congo... in french....to the bible school students here.

Thanks again
and try not to smell bad.

Stephen

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

As an athiest, I truly believe Africa needs God

Editors note: My brother in law emailed this to me about 2mos ago and I am just now getting around to sharing it with you. The perspective is interesting and deserves thought.


Times Online Logo 222 x 25

From
December 27, 2008

As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God

Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem - the crushing passivity of the people's mindset

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.

We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.

Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open.

This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. “Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.

It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.

There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.

I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.


Matthew Perry



Thanks again for praying

Sunday, March 8, 2009

ARDS and financial support

Well here it goes again,
I am going to try another medical illustration while I talk about finances. I will italicize the illustration so you can skip that and go to the end to see where we are with our financial support and I will answer some questions

Now the medical illustration. I think that talking about any type of support and especially financial support is like trying to treat ARDS after acute injury ( ARDS is acute respiratory distress syndrome). The best way to think of ARDS is reaction from the lungs to an injury (pneumonia, a big hit like a car crash, or other stuff) and this reaction shuts the lung down. Doctors have to sedate the patient and put them on a breathing machine. This can cause more injury.

To understand why you have to look at the lungs as a pair of upside down trees with the trunk and branches being the airway tubes, and the leaves being these little sacs called aveoli where oxygen goes in and carbon dioxide goes out. When the lung is injured not all airways and aveoli (think tree branches and leaves) are injured equally. The injured sacs fill with fluid and or collapse

Therefore when docs pump oxygen into the lungs the oxygen goes to the good ones but the collapsed stay collapsed. When there are a lot of them like that the patients blood levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide are out of whack so doctors pump more oxygen in and that hurts the sacs (aveoli) that are working and the patient gets worse. it is a bad spot to be in.

To prevent this docs try to do things to recruit, yest recruit those air sacs. this helps but is hard to do.

So for me when I talk about support I envision people reading this as little sacs in lungs (of the body of Christ if you want), and the more I talk about giving and praying the more the working sacs (the ones who pray and give) are pressured until they pop. The other ones who are not working very well stay not working well. As in the patient with ARDS it is hard to recruit new working aveoli and supporters, but it is vital to the patient to do it and for us to do it as well.


SO
the medical illustration is over. Suffice it to say we want the people who are praying for us and/or giving to our ministry to keep up the good work. We thank you. If you have not thought about praying for us lately or giving to us, then prayerfully consider it.

Some questions now.
Where is the money going? Right now the money goes to the C&MA, 6% is taken out for admin costs, and the rest is going to a savings account and earning interest. This is being saved for the getting over there costs. We are still living on our savings from last year from a different account.

Why give through the C&MA when they take 6%? There are three main reasons. One is that it then qualifies for a tax deduction for you. Two, some of that 6% goes to paying our medical insurance. Three, it provides financial accountability and we want to avoid evil and the appearance of it as well.

How does the giving work again? See the bottom of our blog page, but essentially you make a check out to the christian and missionary alliance and in the memo line on your check you write IFAP-Wegners and they will do the rest. If you want to make sure, send me an email and i can check up on it.

Don't you earn a salary? NO, the hospital finances are based on the premise that the docs will not get a salary.

How much money do you need again? Right now we are operating on a 4,ooo/month budget and that may go up or down. This budget has been seen and approved by C&MA HQ and has been seen by the Pioneer Christian Hospital medcial director.

How much money do you have? We have 750 per month committed but Feb statement from IFAP for giving in jan recorded only 320. We recieved ~5k last year and that is in the savings account as well.


Thanks for your prayers again. Please continue your prayers for us. We do covet them


Stephen