Mid-month news August 202
Jimoharries@gmail.com
Dear Friends,
Present and Upcoming
As I write, I am daily teaching a group of 31 trainee Tanzanian pastors to know how to preach. This is on a certificate level course. The wonderful side of this, is that these are men (and a few women) who have ongoing leadership responsibilities in their churches. They come for two weeks, then they go back to their churches. This means as lecturer, one is assisting people on frontline ministry to do their ministry better. (Higher academic instruction tends to be to people more removed from the coalface.)
Once completed here, on 15th August, I am to return to Kenya. I have a number of visits planned on my way home (it is about 6 hours from the Tanzania border to home) to help a missionary colleague learn the Luo language, and to visit and encourage a number of my grown-children. God willing I will on 22nd August go to spend a weekend visiting friends in Kampala.
Many of you will have heard that a very well-known Baptist ministerial training college in UK is closing its doors. I have never been to Spurgeon’s college, but always had great respect for the work it did:
Prayer is valued in Kenya, even at the top governmental level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxyXxiIYdSQ
You may recall, that I recently participated in outreach to sex-workers near Nakuru in Kenya. It transpires that the BBC has done an investigation in a very similar location, highlighting a serious problem of prostitution that includes the recruiting of under-age girls in Kenya today. Pray for church leaders as we seek to guide local people to a healthier way forward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHINoFq8GvE&list=PLajyiGz4JeyO2qgCvioQO-BzP1XCajJqt
I recently shared about a murderer who has been killing women around my home in Yala in Kenya. He was apparently captured by police then lynched on 7th August. Here are details for those interested: https://www.kenyans.co.ke/news/115004-yala-murder-suspect-beaten-death-body-burned-police-accused-handing-him-over-mob
Is Love Allowed?
Loving people (and I am talking of agape love, for those familiar with that term) is difficult. Relationships can be a jungle. All kinds of false motives can easily be suspected as underlying what one does. Love brings vulnerability, to the person loving, and of the person being loved.
‘Distant love’ is not always love. Giving money might be love. But, a donor may be making money out of giving you money (raising money to give it to you). Then it may not be love. To love is to give that which you cannot afford to lose; to sacrifice yourself.
Yet, I believe Christian mission should be about love. The missionary needs to imitate the love of Jesus in reaching to people. Love being risky can tempt governments to make it illegal. Yet, to prohibit love is to deny people hope. Let’s keep loving!
Sexuality and Mission
Issues of sexuality are often sensitive. My motivation for bringing them ‘to the surface’ is partly through just having read 1 Corinthians chapter 7 in the Bible (highly recommended!). It is partly as a result of the intense scrutiny currently being expended into exploring my sexuality, or lack of it.
I have long looked after children here in Africa. I love (agape) children (not love (eros)). I consider the rearing of children to be the most important work in the world, and was (am) honoured to have been able to share in this role. The role carries considerable responsibility. I have taken this responsibility very seriously, and kept to it.
But then, why did I not marry?
My initial three years in Africa, in Zambia from 1988-1991, were life-transformative. I was absolutely amazed at what I discovered was going on in Zambia. I realized, that the man on the street amongst my own people (Brits) just did not know what is happening in Africa. Many Brits seem to be deceived into thinking that African mindsets and ways of looking at life are almost identical to those of Western people. Yet on the ground in Zambia, I found people living vastly different lives. I found this way of deceiving people in the UK to be unhelpful because it orients British (and Western) involvement in Africa away from Africa’s key issues. Assuming African people to be the same as Brits often makes a mess of relationships. It prevents African people from progressing on their own initiative.
Privileged as I was, around 1990, with youth, and health, and supporters in churches, and reasonable intelligence, I realized that God was calling me to address this issue. From about 1991, it became very clear, that helpful addressing of the issue is to share the Gospel of Jesus with African people. (The good news of Jesus was in dominant UK society at the time seen as of peripheral value to people with small minds! Yet it became increasingly clear to me, that basic differences between African and British ways of life were a result of Britain’s deep exposure to the Gospel over many generations.) I tried to share my understanding and conviction with folks in the UK, and later also the USA and Germany and beyond. A few understood. Many did not. I have struggled ever since to getting people to understand. (Hence we founded the Alliance for Vulnerable Mission, see vulnerablemission.org). A difficulty continues to be, that cultural differences between African and European people are often concealed in the West.
I clearly needed to commit myself to mission service in Africa over a long term. Of course I would have loved to have done that in partnership with a wife. A careful survey of the scene, however, soon revealed the difficulty inherent to this. Time after time, missionaries from the UK (and the West in general) who went to Africa, were prevented from relating closely to locals as a result of being married. Often they had to return home because of issues related to their being married. This could be because their wife wanted to go home, because their children needed to be educated in a Western way, because illness could be better treated in the West, because of marital tensions, and so on. Hence to marry, given today’s expectation regarding a man’s subservience to his wife, was akin to murder, as I shared in my last news.[1] That is – my tying myself to a woman, would be very likely to shorten the time I could spend doing Christian mission amongst Africans themselves in African context. It would quite likely prevent me from learning local languages. It would be in effect to refuse the calling God had put onto my life, to seek to enlighten the West about Africa in helpful ways. Could I forego the love that God had put into my heart, to save African people, just for one woman?
To say my abandoning Africa would be murder, is a strong term of phrase. … The West these days believe strongly in ‘mission from a distance’. That is, Westerners pay people to do mission for them, they use the radio, internet, books, fliers and so on. They listen to nationals from around the world who use English with them. That may all be OK, until one realizes that the people encouraged to use means from the West are incentivized to tell that they are working, to get more money. Only being on the ground for a long time, as a part of local community using indigenous languages, enables someone to see what is going on. Faith comes more through personal sacrifice than dollars. Such sacrifice can rarely be borne by couples or families. These days ongoing blind Western domination around the globe is ENORMOUS. Eyes of people who ‘see what is going on’ are desperately needed. Enormous damage being done around the world by today’s leaders’ blindness amounts, it seems to me, to be a shifting of peoples towards their destruction. For me to have refused to be the eyes to see, thus technically, can be seen as murder.
I recall at times lying in bed alone, wishing that I had a wife. Yet, I reasoned to myself, as my falling victim to sexual desire (desire for a wife) would very likely pull me back from the task God had given me, I must live without sex. It was really as simple as that.
I have never had an African girlfriend. Marrying an African would bring many of the disadvantages of marrying a Western woman. Experience of others tells me that she would want a relatively wealthy and set-apart lifestyle in which a Western language was used. She would try to make sure her children ended up getting the best education in English. The difference in earnings in parts of Africa known to me and that of the UK, is a factor of between 10 and 40. That is, in the UK people earn 10 to 40 times as much as in Africa. Entering into relationship with an African woman could quickly be interpreted by others and maybe herself as a means to wealth. If I ever proposed to an African woman, I think the chance of her refusing would be very small. The wealth she and her family would acquire as a result of being married to a Brit would easily in African terms be enormous. As a missionary one needs to be known for loving Jesus, not for having a lot of money.
I started living with African children, literally from day 2 from my arrival in Zambia, in 1988. I spent almost all of my three years in Zambia living with, and looking after, African children, in my home. A very similar thing happened in Kenya. From day 2, I was part of a household that was looking after a variety of children. It was as a result the most natural thing in the world for me, from 1997 when I had my own home, to bring children in to live with me to be cared for by myself and the housemother.
As a Brit., I could not do things exactly in an ‘African way’. I combined what people do in Africa, with cautions built on UK wisdom. I built safeguards into how I lived with children, as soon as I began looking after them in my own home. A big safeguard was to make my home as open and visible as possible to all neighbours. I have always been very careful to protect myself from false accusations of anything related to child abuse. I have always been very careful to bring up children in an honourable way, in which I as father did not allow myself to be drawn by the attractiveness of girls who grew up in my home. I have looked after children in such a way as to protect them from one another, and from neighbours and other potential ‘predators’.
I did not however, in those early days, anticipate that the UK government could itself be as pro-active as it is today in searching for child abusers amongst its own citizens. Nowadays, my research tells me, mere suspicion that someone may be abusing children, is sufficient justification to launch a police criminal investigation on someone.
Amongst my objectives in devoting myself to the rearing of local children, was to set an example of how to look after orphans that local people could imitate. (This could not just be ‘as we do it in the UK’! I have for years been trying to educate people about ways of life in Africa being different. I appreciate that this is hard for folks in the West to take on board.)
Had I not taken this great care over the years, I would quite likely now be living in a prison cell, and moving around in handcuffs. This could still be my fate should a false accusation be made. (Perhaps by someone wanting to take advantage of the massive amounts of money that they might be able to access by accusing me, a citizen of a wealthy country living in a poor country, of something.) Meanwhile, I hope and pray, that even the accusations made against me by my government, and the investigation going on, may be a way of informing the world of the ‘real’ need of Africa. That real need I believe to be of a knowledge of God through Christ. This is what missionaries share. Sharing it is often difficult. It is too easy to be seen to be sharing money.
What would we have to change to have an economy like that of the UK?
A colleague in Tanzania asked me the above question. ‘An excellent question!’, I thought to myself. I would have like to have given him a comprehensive detailed answer. The problem is, that the components and foundations of what would be needed to build a British-style economy in Tanzania, are really not there in Tanzanians’ thinking. Actually, instead of seeking to help African people to ‘leap’ into the modern world, it is important to prioritize making the best of who they are and what they are already doing. This is what the Gospel of Jesus can do for them. It can be very difficult for missionaries to encourage this if they live (materially and linguistically) at a distance with locals. This results in a horrific situation, when the people with the money always propose their solutions to Africa’s issues, that Africans accept because of the money, that doesn’t connect with who they are or how they live.
Aim: To Live With
Mission work by the West to Africa, often seems oriented to perpetuating the racial distinction between Black and White. Westerners need to be seen as clever, competent, charitable and benevolent. They press that advantage home through use of outside money. There is, in my view at least, nothing wrong for some to do this. Yet, I believe some should do otherwise.
I began wondering, many years ago, whether the racial distinction between African and European needs to be set in rock? I set about using my own life, to interrupt that distinction. Instead of by ‘helping’ Africans from an arms’ length, I set out to share with them in the whole of life. This is illustrated by my looking after orphan children in Africa. In every other case of orphan care known to me in Africa, a Westerner sets up a project of some sort, then funds assistance to African children, while himself living in a Western, or pseudo-Western environment. My interest was not in helping lots of children with lots of money. It was in being a proximal part of local people’s lives. Thus instead of bowing to racial distinctions, to be a part of overcoming them. To not be racist. To, in many ways, to live as local people do.
I have, and I continue, to document how I do and have done this. I have written a lot about this, almost from the beginning of my time in Africa. I continue to write. I am grateful to God for ways in which my writing is getting traction. Please pray for wisdom for me as I continue writing.
Living with people results in picking up values and habits from them. Hence I have in some ways become ‘very African’. Yet, I myself do not realize this. I consider myself to be behaving naturally, normally, and in good ways. For my fellow Brits, I may come across as being an eccentric old man. This is where I very much need the support of people in the UK, and elsewhere in the West. People who write me off as an eccentric old man because of my association with African people, are in effect being racist. Although, if this is what is happening, I acknowledge the difficulty that is there in relating closely to someone whose basic understanding of things is different to one’s own.
Jim