End-Month news November 2023
End-month news November 2023 jimoharries@gmail.com
Dear Friends,
Thanks for your prayers for safety, that I certainly constantly need. 11th November cycling home from the Coptic mission I self-caused an accident – that suddenly had me fall off my bike and lie sprawled on the ground. This was along a village path in the middle of fields. There was no-one else involved. Thankfully, I found a hospital ½ hour on, who cleaned up my wounds, and I am now recovering.
I have been able to pick up on pastoral visiting in the last week or two. I have indicated before, that my home church had split. Myself and a Kenyan church member colleague are now visiting current and ex-members of my home church in their homes when opportunity arises.
Most valued …
If someone were to ask me; ‘Jim, what do you most value about the work you are doing in Kenya?’ Then I might say that it is ‘times when I feel I am communicating Godly truths in relevant ways to indigenous colleagues in their own languages’. This is surprisingly difficult to do; it certainly takes 5 to 10 years of language / culture learning. Of course it is impossible, without God’s help!
Funerals News
Crowds were on the road, as I travelled to join an indigenous church for worship. It transpired they were going to attend a funeral of a man killed when his motorbike hit a car. When I got to the bishop, he told me he was expecting his daughter to come home that afternoon with the body of her still-born baby for burial (that they would do quickly that afternoon). On my way home, a trip of 11 miles, I ‘happened’ to stop to shelter from the rain, only to be told that a friend of mine (an older lady) who had been attacked by thugs, then dumped into a (pit) toilet, was being buried just 50 yards from where I stood! She was found 2 days after being dumped but then died within 24 hours in hospital. Life here can be one continuous round of funerals …
Publications Administrative Executive
Friends – please consider giving Jim a hand in his publishing. Jim is looking for someone who can assist him get his writing peer reviewed and submitted to journals, or as chapters of books. If interested, please inquire to jimoharries@gmail.com
Webinars add to your diary and ‘welcome’ to join us!
Send Money Direct!
Anyone inclined to send Jim some money directly to his phone-bank-account in Kenya can do so without fees at a good exchange rate, from UK or the USA, by downloading an app called sendwave to their phone … ! (Kenyan phone numbers double as bank account numbers! Mine is +254721804282 )
The Gap and White Magicians
Today’s secular world doesn’t like to hear of ‘the gap’. This is – the gap between the understanding of people in Africa, and that of contemporary Europeans. The ‘gap’ arose, when European people were transported into a radically transformed understanding of life through influence of the Gospel and Greek philosophy, within the last 2000 years. The gap these days gets ignored. It makes it pretty much impossible for African children to (really) understand what they are taught in school. It forces them to learn by rote. It means that the West’s engagement with Africa is (almost) always rooted in magic; ignoring the gap, then assuming African people will understand what is going on, on the basis of the pretence that the gap does not exist. African people of course have to pretend that the gap is not there in order to get donor funds.
‘I want to learn the Bible’
The above-referred to gap is very consequential for the church. I have recently had a ‘spate’ of young men come to me wanting me to help them to better know God and his word. Aside from preaching in churches and informal indigenous networks, though, this has become very difficult to do. I do not say that theoretically. Local people realise the difficulty.
Here’s the difficulty. There are two systems ‘out there’. The informal, and the formal. The informal typically uses indigenous languages. It can be very relevant to local contexts. The formal uses English, and borrows 99% of what it teaches from the UK and the USA. The formal, by ignores the above-described ‘gap’. Success in this formal sector can make students very wealthy. The formal is heavily subsidised from the West. The formal eats the informal for breakfast. The formal often has little connection with indigenous reality.
What does that mean in practice? It means, that if you gather some young men together to teach them the bible, they in no time wonder ‘what will I get out of this’? If they are taught how to imitate what Americans believe, using English, then there is potential for them to get degrees, cars, salaries, prestige and position out of it. If they are taught using local languages, they’ll get none of the above. Yet it is the indigenous language teaching that touches the hearts of the people! So, to teach theology in any formal way, the most important thing students have to be able to do is to love America. When young people come to me wanting to know the bible better then, unless I become a big fan of America, I can’t help them. (Let me just add: I have not given up on this! I battle on! But, it is frustrating.)
The Intellectual Abandonment of Africa
My latest book takes the intellectual abandonment of Africa as its theme. To see a summary of this theme, and the contents of the book, go here. (For your hard or kindle copy of this book, see here.)