Monday Musings
Every Blessing to you today! Mondays are special. I get to refocus on projects geared towards fulfilling my 'call'. I
feel charged and ready to face the world...
BUT...there are times when I can't focus,
my body experiencing hormonal imbalance - pains and aches ...
We have all been blue some Mondays. Right?
Today though, the energy is up, I am fighting my fears, coping with challenges, being strong in the Lord.
While my heart bleeds for reformation, revival ... and countless times have had a voice saying to me...
"Leave Veda, you have done your years of service..." ( my local Church), I am still at the wheel.
Is it loyalty? Is it the 'call'? Is it what I do?
Am I stubbornly fighting or trying to engage a culture that continues to resist what we call church in Agricola?
Eleven churches and yet the stigma it bears - the 'thieving village'. Even our church was robbed a few months ago. I walk often down the Water St. Agricola. I trudge into yards. I say Good Afternoon to the young men liming around... They smoke their weed, they nod or grunt their replies. The young ladies clad in very short or tight fitting pants sporting tops that must show some boobs, swinging down the alley way are just about ready to have a nice evening. Boys run along playing football or just hang out waiting for evening to go on home...often to no mom or no dad. Like most other churches in Agricola, most of our members are not from Agricola. Agricolans prefer to go out of the village to find their home churches.
Green-man who loves to play tricks and can show a real mean streak, fought with Terry the other day - a boy about five years his senior. Then a few weeks ago while we were doing Bible memorization, he threw an almost dead fowl into the church. I saw that hen heaving heavily, gasping for breath. I was almost traumatized. Shemar, a precocious twelve year old took care of the dying bird. We went back to the Bible. Some giggled but some decided to copy my show of dismay and pain.
I can say that I have been to a soul-less ( opposite of soulful which means 'expressing or appearing to express deep and often sorrowful feeling') place called church.
After 6 weeks of prep for QUIZ... the teens and the primary groups did not turn up on Sunday for the competition. There was no water in the village. And who was there to get the kids dressed...? No-one. I called. Encouraged. Then the stalwart Chriso went after his competitor. She came. And for 25 minutes, the quiz was held with quiz-mistress, scorer, timekeeper...the works. I was not going to call off the quiz. At Church we give up/give in easily. Again culture.
Did Jesus die for Agricola? Community transformation? Cultural transformation?
Are we expecting Jesus to do something as big as transforming a village, bandits, child molesters, promiscuous...and all?
I leave us with...
Costas words in David Bosch's seminal work to admonish us:
A gospel without demands ... suggests, a conscience-soothing Jesus, with an unscandalous cross, and other worldly
kingdom, a private, inwardly limited Spirit, a pocket (sized) God, a spiritualized Bible and an escapist church.
Its goal is a happy, comfortable and successful life, obtainable through the forgiveness of an abstract sinfulness by faith in an unhistorical Christ.[1]
[1] David Jacobus Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, Twentieth anniversary ed., American Society of Missiology Series (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2011), 391.
