Free Methodist World Missions - Africa

It's good to be here. I want to give you a report because let me tell you,

you guys were one of the first churches to support us, and you have been faithful.

Every month we can count on Richland Center, and for that reason,

everything that we've been able to participate in is really an extension of your ministry.

And so we're here really to say thank you, and we're here to tell you what you've

been doing in Latin America and now in Africa.

Let me just kind of give you a brief history of us, or at least of me.

This isn't really my wife.

She can tell you about herself, but starting from bottom and going around that

way, I don't know why I did it that way, but I did.

I grew up in the redwood forests of California until I was 25 or so,

and this is San Jose, California.

Went to San Jose State, and then we went to Asbury, and this is where I met my wife in Kentucky.

I met my wife there. And then we moved to a little town in Northern California

called Oroville, and I was an associate pastor there for about three years.

And then we went back to Asbury, and I did some graduate work.

And then we went to Arizona, a little suburb of Phoenix called Gilbert,

and planted a church there. We started a church there.

And then I went to Central Christian College of Kansas, and I was the chair

of the Department of Ministry and Theology for about six years.

And that's where we were when God called us to Costa Rica right here.

And that's a long story that I probably won't get into right now.

That was seven or eight years ago now.

And this is, we lived right here, essentially, not on this picture,

but that's the national stadium right there.

And that's the town of San Jose, Costa Rica. It's their capital.

And we've been there for the last.

We were there for seven years. And this is what we did. And I'm telling you

this because this is past work that you guys supported.

And then I'll talk about future work in just a minute. But this is what we did.

We built this team. There's about 50 people there.

And there's about 10 white people. What we're trying to do is to be encouragers,

coaches where necessary, bridge people to the United States so that some support

that still comes from the United States can get to the right places and people.

But we really want to be following the lead of the church leaders in the countries that we're in.

And so, we're in 17 countries in Latin America, and this represents most of

those 17 countries and a couple of other people, like there's a bishop up there

and an area director and these kinds of people in there.

But we want to build teams of national leaders so that they can do the work themselves.

And we're simply there to kind of help with some initial

formulation and because that team is

built then we could leave so two years

ago well october of 2022 i started

working for africa while living in costa

rica because everything can be done virtually now or much of it can be done

virtually you can't do a lot of the relationship building stuff but a lot of

the organizational stuff see most of our most missions work these days isn't

somebody moving to the jungle and living with a group of ten people. It's.

Happens at more of an organizational level because we've found it's most effective

to reach nation with the nation's people.

And so, once you have somebody there, then what we can do is support that person

with things like pastoral training.

We can help them develop curriculum because you start with one pastor maybe,

and that one pastor isn't usually gifted to do all all of the things that God

has in store for a church.

There's evangelism, but there's also discipleship. There's also counseling.

There's also training. There's all sorts of things that need to happen for a

church to develop and grow.

So that one pastor then goes to the country and then we can come,

or lives in the country anyway and build relationships initially,

and then we can come in and support that by building a team around them.

So, that's why we can live virtually sometimes, depending on our role,

and then support what's happening in the country.

So, we learned about missions, we learned about teams, we learned about mutuality,

and we did some curriculum development and integration.

We started a seminary online, pastoral formation program online.

While we were there, we built a curriculum of 19 courses.

But one of the things that I'm responsible for now is to help bring that curriculum,

do some translation work, do some culturally contextual work to bring what we

did in Latin America to Africa.

And so we are working in 12 countries in Africa right now.

The Free Methodist Church is in many more countries, but you should know that

the Free Methodist Church is very well developed. There are seven general conferences.

If you know about how we're organized, that means that they're interdependent.

They're a fully grown-up church in seven different countries,

so Burundi and Rwanda and Kenya, and there are several more in Eastern and Southern

Africa that are already grown-up churches, mature churches.

And so, Free Methodist World Missions, our job is to reach out into the places

where it's not yet fully developed and to help them to develop their programs,

their financial sustainability.

All of the things that they need in order to become fully interdependent.

I don't want to say fully dependent or fully independent because no man is an

island, right, entire to himself.

So, we're not looking for church splitting.

We're looking for mutual interdependence and maturity.

So, this is the beginning, and those are the countries that we're in right there,

and this is our mission statement.

So, we're participating in God's redemptive purpose in Africa,

and I would say really West Africa, by supporting the work of African leaders

to develop healthy leaders, to multiply committed disciples,

and to empower transformational churches.

So what does that mean? We're planting churches, we're training leaders,

and we're helping them to do compassionate care.

So any kind of well drilling or a food closet or a clothes closet or whatever

they find the need for in their area, we want to help them to do that.

Sometimes at the beginning, that means us giving dollars, but more often than

not, this is going to have to do with helping them organize,

helping them build a team, helping them to know what it means to, how to do that.

And then this is where we are in Africa. And so once a church is fully developed,

one of the things it does is it sends missionaries to other countries.

And so we have free Methodist missionaries in these countries that have nothing

to do with the United States because they're being sent by other African countries.

That's fantastic. That's what we're trying for. And so that means that these

are mature churches that are really reaching their neighbors,

reaching the lost. So this is where our work is right here, right now.

This is all Muslim area.

This is the Sahara Desert right here.

And this is a different cultural context and a different religious landscape.

And so we have another group that has to do with that. But what we're doing

is this sub-Saharan West Africa, this is Senegal, all the way over to Cameroon.

And we just, Wendy and I just went to Equatorial Guinea, which is right there.

It's still white on the map or whatever color that is, because we don't have

work there yet, but we're thinking about opening that work this year.

It's a spanish-speaking country so our friends

down in latin america have said hey can

we send missionaries from latin america to

africa so that's the that's the

changing shape the changing landscape of world missions

today because we have fully mature developed

people i mean the holy spirit works in people

in other countries just as much as he works in us so we

have a role to play we have giftedness that we can bring to the table but really

our role is no longer pioneering or leading necessarily but it's rather taking

the lead and walking alongside of taking the letting others take the lead and

then walking alongside of what's happening in their country.

That's really an exciting development the then the thing that we're thinking

about now we haven't done anything this way yet but one of the things that we're

kind of excited about for the future and hopefully next time we come here we'll

be able to talk to you about this is that we can send Africans from this coast the west,

formerly known as West Indies down in the Caribbean area,

and if you know your history you know that we took from this,

this coast is the slave coast right here where most of the slaves from the 1800s came from.

I just feel like that's the kind of restoration and redemption that God does.

So it wouldn't surprise me at all if the next time we come, we aren't able to

report that we're sending missionaries back to the Caribbean to kind of reclaim

the years that the locusts have eaten.

So I'm pretty excited about that, pretty passionate about that.

I'm just not sure what that looks like yet.

So we'll see what happens. That's just a snapshot from Cameroon to Senegal.

Right here and this is togo right

here this little sliver of a country this is

benin and we have relationships and actually

niger is right here not nigeria but niger n-i-g-e-r you might see it as niger

but it's actually french speaking so it's niger so we're looking to open work

in niger in burkina faso and in benin this year we we're praying about that

we have some things in place for that.

So, this is just my shameless plug. If you want to be an international Christian worker, talk to me.

I can give you my card and you can live and work in West Africa advancing the

kingdom of God. You say, oh, I'm not a pastor. I don't need pastors.

I necessarily, I mean, we need pastors too, but we need administrators,

we need teachers, we need all sorts of different skill sets.

So, there's my shameless plug. Come talk to me afterwards.

If you're retired, fantastic. That that means you have life skill.

If you're young, fantastic, it means you have energy. So we'll take either way.

So if you have an experience in any of that or passion for any of that,

we will have that conversation at some point.

We graduated a few people from the Wesley Missionary Institute,

and there were five graduates that their role is to go back to go back to their

home country and be missionaries to unreached peoples in their home country.

And so this guy right here, if I can find the right face, went back to Guinea-Conakry,

which is one of the little ones over on the coast, and planted five churches

this last year. So we're pretty excited about that.

This little guy's name is Fortunate, and his parents are going to go to Benin

next year and be missionaries to Benin. They're actually from Togo,

but they're going to go to Benin, which is right next door.

So we need to pray for Fortuné and his little brother Gregoire and his older

sister Josephine. I don't know how to say it in French, but it's Josephine.

So Jean-T and Caroline are going to go to Benin. So we want to be praying for those kids.

That's what I'm doing right now. And then my wife's going to come up, tell you what she does.

And then I'll come back up a little bit later and talk a little bit about the

Bible. We will open the Bible this morning. I mean, it's church, right?

Good morning. I want to start with Psalm 1.

Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked,

or stand in the way of sinner,

take a seat in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the

Lord, and who meditates on it day and night.

That person is like a tree planted by the streams of water which yield its fruits

in season, and whose leaf does not wither, whatever they they do prospers.

And so Psalm 1 is a psalm that my kids learned when they were in kindergarten.

It was one of those, we were homeschooling at the time, and it's just a great psalm, right?

Like, blessed is the one who follows the way of the Lord.

And so this morning, as we were singing these beautiful songs.

You know, blessed assurance, Jesus is mine.

You know, these are the the truth. This is awesome.

We as Christians, this is what we want.

We want to walk in the way of wisdom. We want to be like a tree planted by streams of water.

And so as we come to church, as we come in life, this is what we all want.

Even the songs, just the love of Jesus, that's what we want to share with the world, right?

And so, as it goes on, verse 4, not so with the wicked.

They are like chaff that the wind blows away.

Therefore, the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.

For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked leads to destruction.

So, we just see that God is powerful.

God is good in that following him, life is good, right?

But sometimes life isn't good.

Sometime life is really hard. And I was talking to, is it Beth,

Miss Beth, this morning, and she lost her husband four years ago.

Life is hard. We go through hard things.

And different things break us.

Even blank breaks us. Even ministry can break us.

Glenn and I, when we were pastoring a church, we ended up leaving because we

were burned out. Ministry broke us.

Dealing with sickness, dealing with health issues, dealing with family problems,

different things can break us.

And so you can look at Psalm 1 and say, but if you really love Jesus,

life will be perfect, right?

It just goes easy, it goes well. well, but it's not only about Psalm 1.

It's also about Psalm 13. And I love that in the Psalms that we have both the

truth that God is good, and if you follow him, life goes well in general.

But there's also the Psalmist crying out, how long, oh Lord,

will you forget me forever? ever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I wrestle with my thoughts day after day and have sorrow in my heart?

How long will my enemy triumph over me?

This is also a heart's cry for hope, for help.

The psalmist is crying out to God.

He goes on to say, look on me and answer me, Lord my God, give me light to my

eyes or I will sleep in death.

And my enemies will say I have overcome him and my foes will rejoice when I fall.

So we say that life is a paradox or a pair of ducks.

So we have, this one's Yuck Duck and this one's Yay Duck.

And Yuck Duck and and yay duck stay together.

They have to always be together.

These are little ducks that my daughter made me last year for my birthday. Aren't they cute?

So yuck duck and yay duck. And so life isn't all yay, right?

And it's not all yuck. We always say that they need to stay together because

whenever things happen, there's often good things, but there's often hard things.

So we just moved here on back to the United States on Wednesday.

And that was really hard.

It was hard to leave our home and our friends and our kitty.

There was a lot of hard work.

But there was a lot of yay too at the same time. We were really happy to be

closer to the family, to be, oh man, this is like, to be in English again.

It's just amazing. So have a lot of compassion.

If you know people who are, English is not their first language and they're

living in your community, have compassion for them.

It's hard, especially when you're old trying to learn another language.

So life isn't all one, right?

Life isn't all good, and it's not all bad. It's this paradox. It's both and.

And so that's one thing we, what I get to do is I get the privilege of working with missionary kids.

That is my pleasure to do.

It is, I think is the best job, and I'm so glad I get to do it.

But what I do is I work with missionary kids, heads.

And we talk about the beautifully hard life that God calls us to.

Wherever you live, whatever you're doing, this beautifully hard life.

And so just a little bit to help you understand.

Our oldest daughter Libby, so she was born in California, then she moved to

Kentucky, then she moved to Arizona, then she moved to Kansas,

then she moved to Michigan, then she moved to Costa Rica, then she went to college.

And she did all that in her first 18 years, where I was born in Spring Arbor, Michigan.

And at 18, I went to college in Spring Arbor, Michigan.

So high mobility is this constant moving.

And every time you move from one location to the next.

Let me see if I can find the right, that it can create different losses.

And those losses will, you'll have different stages of grief, right?

Acceptance, denial, anger, sadness, and bargaining.

But it's not like you go through like elementary school, junior high,

high school, like, you know, like there's a pattern.

The grief wheel is you're going in and out of different things at different

And so one day maybe you're in acceptance, but maybe tomorrow you're in anger.

And so these losses, this moving, and it's not only when we would move,

but maybe a youth pastor would move or the teachers would move.

And there's those losses in each of those things. And so this was one person's,

Alex Graham James, this is his poem about leaving the missionary field.

He says, there was no funeral, no flowers, no ceremony.

No one had died, no weeping or wailing, just in my heart.

I can't, but I did anyway, and nobody knew I couldn't.

I didn't want to, but no one else said they didn't.

So I put down my panic, I picked up my luggage, and I got on the plane. There was no funeral.

And so for years, missionary kids haven't been given permission to grieve.

Even missionary parents would send their kids in grade school to boarding school,

and they were told, don't cry in front of your kids because that will make it harder for them.

And so what we get to do now is to say, it's okay to feel sad and to be, to admit this is hard.

And so the ampersand is something that we do. It's both and.

It's hard and it's beautiful.

And so different hidden losses that TCKs will experience. So the TCK is third culture kid.

It means that you have your host culture. So for my kids, it has been their

host culture is Costa Rica.

Their passport culture is the United States.

And then the third culture is they're part from the United States,

part from Costa Rica, but they're still putting their worldview together.

And so this is like, it creates a third culture.

And so when you transition cultures, transition, you have a loss of your world,

a loss of your status, maybe a loss of lifestyle.

This is especially true for military.

Loss of possessions, things that when we left, we took eight suitcases with

us when we left on Wednesday. day.

And there's not a lot that fits in eight suitcases.

And there was a lot. We had seven carloads a friend just took because we tried to sell what we could.

And then there's stuff left over, but there's no U-Haul that you can stick it in at the end.

Loss of relationships, a lot of good friends.

Loss of role models, because you build those relationships with different people,

loss of system identity, loss of a past that was and a past that wasn't.

And so there's a lot of different things that we don't even think about when

we're dealing with hidden losses.

And so what can happen if you, and this is not just for third culture kids,

missionary kids, this is for anybody, but if you don't deal with those losses,

those grief-inducing experiences.

The big T traumas or the little t traumas, they can stack up.

And what happens is often post-college, that grief tower will fall over and

cause havoc in our TCK's lives.

And so what we're trying to do is help them unstack their grief tower so it doesn't create havoc.

And so then I ran across this idea of kintsuki. Does anybody know anything about this?

Okay, this is really fun. So kintsuki is golden joinery, also known as golden repair.

It is a Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage

with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. them.

As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of the

object rather than something to be disguised.

I just love that concept that instead of discarding the broken,

Kintsuki enhances the beauty and the value by celebrating the imperfections. Isn't that great?

So Kintsuki shows us how to be beautifully broken.

And even more than Kintsuki, our lives have been broken because we live in a broken world.

Even the song this morning says we have a broken generation, right?

And whereas Kintsuki repairs pottery with gold, Jesus has repaired us with his blood.

God, 1 Peter, I love this verse, like 1 Peter 1, 18 through 19.

For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver and gold

that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors,

but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or death.

So you are more valuable, you are more precious than a potter of Kintsuki, right?

Because it is with the blood of Jesus that God has taken your broken pieces

and fit them back together.

In Psalm 13, 5 and 6 ends, but I trust in your unfailing love.

My heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the praise,

the Lord's praise, for he has been good to me.

That even when we are having a hard time as the psalmist starts in the beginning

of Psalm 13, that we know this both and.

Life is hard and it is beautiful.

And so as Glenn comes back up, I just want you to know that I love being able

to work with my third culture kids and remind them that life is both beautiful and hard.

It is yay duck and yuck duck, but God is always there for us.

And first of all, our identity is as children of God.

Second of all, we belong to the body of Christ.

And thirdly, that God cares cares about our losses and griefs,

and He understands and He wants us to come to Him.

I think that there is a passage in scripture that exemplifies really well this

concept of beautifully broken.

And it's in chapter 7 of Luke. If you want to turn there, you can.

I'll read it. I won't change the words so you can trust that I'm telling you

what it says. But it's an example.

Kintsugi, the idea is that brokenness turns to beauty. I think that you'll see

that in this passage, where brokenness turns to beauty at the feet of Jesus.

One of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, so he went to the

Pharisee's house and he reclined at the table.

So, you can picture Jesus, the table's low, so everybody's sitting on pillows

on the ground and leaning kind of like that. Jesus' feet are behind him.

So, this is what it says. When a woman who had lived a sinful life in that town

learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee's house, she brought an alabaster jar of perfume.

And as she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with

her tears, and she wiped them with her hair, kissed them, and poured perfume on them.

Well, when the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself,

if this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind

of woman she is, that she is a sinner.

Jesus answered him, Simon, I have something to tell you. Well,

tell me, teacher, he said.

Two men owed money, Jesus says, to a certain money lender. One owed him 500 denarii, the other 50.

Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he canceled the debts of both.

Now, which of them will love him more?

Simon replied, well, I suppose the one who had the bigger debt canceled.

You've judged correctly, Jesus said.

And then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, do you see this woman?

I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet,

but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair.

You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered,

has not You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet.

Therefore I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven, for she loved much.

But he who has been forgiven little, loves little.

And Jesus said to her, Your sins are forgiven.

The other guests began to say among themselves, Who is this who even forgives

sins? And Jesus said to the woman, Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.

There's about 13 sermons in there somewhere, but I'm going to try and stick

to just one fairly simple concept of at the feet of Jesus, the broken becomes beautiful.

And you can see that this woman who comes in and breaks the alabaster jar on Jesus'

feet has understood and received her forgiveness,

and that has overflowed into this beautiful gesture that she does for Jesus

and is recorded forever in the scriptures because of that.

If you go to Africa on a work team or whatever, and you're the guest of somebody

at church, you will be given a seat in the front, whether you want it or not.

And if you go to Africa and you're given a seat on the front,

you will also be brought a bottle of water to put at your feet.

And if you need anything else, that will be part of what is given to you.

If you express the need for anything, it will be brought to you as the guest

of whoever is hosting you.

And in the New Testament, that is no different.

That would have been very customary. It would have been appropriate.

It would have been respectful.

It would have been normal if you are invited over to someone's house that that

person is going to wash your feet, first of all, because the roads are dusty.

Maybe not the person, but the person's servants, depending on whose whose house

you're going over to. So you'll have your feet washed.

You'll have your head anointed with oil.

Help you get cleaned up a little bit and to smell nice, and you will have water for washing.

And here, Simon hasn't done that.

Simon has invited Jesus to his house, but has not hosted Jesus in the way that

you would expect to be hosted.

There is offense given in this case to Jesus.

And that's what Jesus says about the woman then.

He says, do you see this woman? I came into your house. You didn't give me any

water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair.

You didn't give me a kiss, a kiss of greeting. Very common.

Costa Rica, up until COVID, now it's starting to slowly come back.

But in Costa Rica, when you greet somebody, if men greet a woman,

you do kind of an air kiss.

You don't give them a big smack around the lips, but you just kind of her face

here and your face here and you make a noise like that. So you give a kiss of

greeting. Very customary.

Simon didn't do that for Jesus, which would have been customary for men to do as well.

But this woman hasn't stopped kissing my feet. And he didn't put oil on my head,

but she's poured perfume on my feet.

So Jesus concludes, he says, obviously, this woman has received me in a way

that you were supposed to receive me but did not receive me.

And in English, we use the word receive when we talk about, have you received Jesus?

And this woman who has experienced the love of Jesus and the forgiveness of

Jesus and has felt that to the very, I don't know, depths of her being,

she has received Jesus.

I think this is the expression of a conversion moment when she's received Jesus. Simon hasn't.

Simon, the Bible says, invited Jesus to his home, but doesn't welcome him or receive him.

And I think, I don't want to overstate this,

I think we can only receive Jesus when we recognize the depth of our brokenness

in the first place, and we say, we're broken,

and then we recognize the extent of the debt that has been paid for us.

That we're the ones that have been forgiven 500 denarii, not ones that have been forgiven 50.

Simon doesn't quite get that he's self-righteous, but that there's a hardness

in his heart, that there's a brokenness in his being that has been forgiven

by Jesus if he would receive Jesus.

At the feet of Jesus, brokenness turns to beauty. Brokenness turns to blessedness.

And we can all have that. We can all experience that. And maybe you have, and I hope you have.

And if you haven't, you can receive Jesus today in a new, in a fresh way,

in a way that recognizes the debt of gratitude that we owe, and then we can

express that love at the feet of Jesus.

I think that that's one of the sermons that maybe can be preached from Luke chapter 7.

Luke 7 · chapter mention

I think it does have to do, though, with how we receive.

I'll just give you a hint into one of the others. Simon, the question here in

this actual text is, who is Jesus?

It's the identity of Jesus. What sort of person is this that doesn't recognize

that this is a sinful woman? And at the end of the passage, you remember it

says something like, well, this is, or who is this who even forgives sins?

So, the question is all about Jesus' identity.

That's what this passage is about, is Jesus' identity. Who is this?

And the other question is, who is this woman?

Why is this woman, you know, does he not know what sort of woman this is?

And really the question is, what sort of God is this Jesus?

What sort of man is this Jesus, this prophet? And so we have to answer that

question for conversion.

But for a church, in terms of mission, hospitality is key.

And you guys are doing really well at this. I was so pleased when you receive

people in, it's very warmly done.

Done, but the reception of the sort of woman that the sinner is, that is mission.

It includes the message of the mission, which is you are accepted at the feet of Jesus.

It includes the medium of the message, which is you belong to this message method.

And there's one other M. I have it on another sermon. But I got to stop now

because I'm going to get way too beautifully broken at the feet of Jesus.

Amen. How about that? Alright.