Africa

After seminary, my father and mother were in campus ministry in New England. It was right after the Second World War when Germany had decided Jews were unwanted and her government implemented her Final Solution in her abort-the-Jews clinics across Germany and the Bloodlands. Dad was at an international student conference where Christian students who had served in the German army under Hitler told of their conscientious Christian witness during the war. What was that witness?

Dad writes...

He makes the barren woman abide in the house As a joyful mother of children. Praise the LORD! - Psalm 113:9

Because of joy, which is reason enough; and because of thanksgiving which this week is; and because of Scripture's close tie-in of a man's work as a pastor and his family; and because multiplication of family members is one of the most frequent promises of God to His people, as well as God's personal promise to me when I returned to him that night out in California; and because daughters raised by a misogynist and daughters-in-law married to men raised by a misogynist love to give themselves to stay-at-home-motherhood, pregnancy, adoption, and childrearing; and because testimony to His faithfulness is displayed and commanded throughout the Psalms; and because we just received another grandchild from God—Moses from Ethiopia; for all these reasons, and more, here are a couple pics...

Here's an interesting piece by an Indy doc who says hospitals are not the place to treat sick people with Ebola or the flu. He makes one or two good points, but note how hospitals have changed from Christian institutions of medical care—St. Francis, Divine Savior, St. Jude, Presbyterian-St. Luke—to businesses streamlined to make lots of money for corporations and their stockholders.

Love used to be the inspiration and motivation for most of these institutions; love inspired by the love of Jesus Christ. Now it's money and any name put on the hospital that speaks of love is merely an attempt at window dressing. In fact, hospitals' names have become meaningless.

Our local hospital (where Baby Doe was murdered by starvation by her parents and their doctor and Judge Baker thirty-two years ago) was called "Bloomington Hospital" until a couple years ago when a large "non-profit" corporation, Clarian, licensed IU's name and logo. So now "IU Health" is plastered everywhere—on our Bloomington hospital's facade as well as the facades of hundreds of medical facilities around our state (look west as you drive south on I-65 between Merrillville and Crown Point).

The process is something like Waste Management, Inc. licensing Apple's name and logo and plastering it all over their garbage trucks, sanitary landfills, garbage cans, and dumpsters because their garbage truck drivers use iPhones...

About World Vision, I'm sorry for what I wrote before. This matter deserved something more than snarkiness, and for that I apologize. I've pulled the former content off this post. So now, here's something I hope is more helpful:

I have never given any money to World Vision and I'd recommend against any of our readers giving them money. They are a hugely wealthy business and that's how you should think about them. Their marketing is as sophisticated as Apple's, although their product is slightly different. Instead of "Think Differently," it's "Feel Globally Compassionate."

But compassion should never be global. Normally, it should be personal, but not pseudo-personal through a marketing machine. Personal-personal. Like in adoption. I could go on about this, but time and priorities cause me to leave it with that. It's a trajectory of thought that many of you would do well to follow, though.

Beyond  the issue of the nature of Christian compassion and service, I would never give money to World Vision because it's hugely rich; it's richly huge and it's my conviction what's rich and huge in America is never ever godly. It may be Evangelical. It may have IRS non-profit status. But it's not at all godly. Which is to say Godliness—true Godliness—doesn't sell in America, let alone selling as supremely well as World Vision has sold for several generations, now.

Beyond the issues of the nature of Christian compassion and service and World Vision's all-American Evangelical success, there's the issue of exporting America's sins. For instance, ask yourself whether you believe in empowering women?

Of course you do. You're a Christian and Christians have always been leading the rest of the world in that uniquely Christian revolution of the empowerment of women...

Nelson Mandela has died. As Scripture puts it, God has blown upon this fair flower and he has returned to dust:

All flesh is grass, and all its loveliness is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the LORD blows upon it... - Isaiah 40:6, 7

But who was Nelson Mandela? If you recognize that Reformed theology is simply Biblical theology, it's important for you to know.

Why?

The history of Nelson Mandela's fatherland and apartheid is bound up with Reformed men and their theology just as the history of the Confederacy, the Civil War, and slavery in America is bound up with Reformed men and their theology. God hates injustice, oppression, and the bloodshed of innocents, whether the oppressor is Pharoah in Egypt, Jezebel in Israel, Nero in Rome, the Roman Catholics in the Middle Ages, or Protestant and Reformed Christians in South Africa or these United States.

So then, to help with an understanding of Nelson Mandela's work, here is the text of the opening speech he gave at his Rivonia Trial in 1964. The title of the speech comes from the speech's final words, "I am prepared to die."

For what was Mandela prepared to die? Read on and see. I've provided links for names, organizations, legislative acts, and terms average readers would find confusing. Near the end of the text, I've provided a link to an audiotape of the speech you can listen to as you read the final paragraphs of the text.

Nelson Mandela spoke for four hours. When he declared "I am prepared to die," as he said it, he looked directly in the eyes of the presiding judge, Dr. Quartus de Wet.  During the rest of the trial he never again made eye contact with Judge de Wet. Following his conviction, Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison, eighteen of those years on Robben Island. South Africa's President F. W. de Klerk released him on February 11, 1990.

My son Taylor is married to a beautiful Afrikaans-speaking South African woman...

Our son-in-law, Pastor Lucas Weeks, is the descendant of two generations of missionaries to the nation formerly known as the Congo or Zaire, but now variously referred to as the Democratic Republic of Congo, DR Congo, Congo-Kinshasa, or the DRC. His parents, Ron and Doris Weeks, live in Kinshasa and Lucas just forwarded this piece from the National Geographic that does a good job describing life in Kinshasa.

A couple excerpts:

“I met an eastern Congo woman here in 1998, a pregnant rape victim,” Tsimba tells me. “I asked her if she would keep the kid.

She said, ‘Yes, he’s innocent.’ This became my inspiration. I showed her the sculpture when I was done. She was excited, even delighted, that someone was telling this to the world. She said, ‘Yes, this is how I suffered.’ I sold the sculpture and used the money to... pay for the hospital and for clothes, so that she and her baby could go back to Goma.”

And:

Praise God for this piece demonstrating the Hound of Heaven (we hope) baying a man to repentance and faith; but praise God more for the faithful servants of Christ who have quietly given their lives to one man and one woman and one child and one village and one tribe and one nation while NGOs, Christian and otherwise, get all the money and hobnob with Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Bono.

Having grown up in Africa, I learned at a young age that football (alright, soccer) is best played with bare feet. Playing on grass is nice, but not required.

A ball, however, is not optional. That's why this article caught my eye. Apparently, Sting has funded the development of a soccer ball that even the rough, grassless pitches on which the game is generally played in Africa can't destroy.

Too bad for Bono. And he thought he was going to save Africa...

(TB: this is a guest post by David Wegener.) A lot of pastoral care these days concerns the problem identified in this article: young men who haven’t grown up, aren’t growing up and don’t have much of a shot at growing up. The related problem is dealing with middle-aged men who never did grow up and have turned pouting and temper tantrums into an art form...