edward johnson reports

And here we go...

2011-01-26T18:58:00.002-05:00

This is Columbus.

After a seventeen months in the doldrums, I think it is time for me to get to writing about the issue of this world from the unique perspective that I can offer. Hopefully this blog hasn't fallen into complete disrepair and maybe a few followers will still pick up on what is written here.

And just to close up this little re-introduction, I'll give a brief update on my life. Since last we met, I was a short-term recruiter for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, traveling around the Midwest to persuade young Lutherans to sign up for the Young Adults in Global Mission program. Afterwards, I matriculated at the largest Lutheran university in the United States, Valparaiso University in northwest Indiana. In December 2010, I completed my work towards a master's degree in international commerce and policy in one year and graduated with highest distinction, placing me in the top five percent of all postgraduate degree candidates.

That's my life for the past year and a half with more to follow soon.

Welcome home sermon

2009-08-30T14:48:00.000-04:00

(As prepared for delivery)

Good morning congregation!

It has been quite a while since I have been able to say those words to this group. Pastor Chatman asked me to deliver the sermon today, and I will be honest, at first I agreed and then for a couple of days I had wished I had not agreed. One thing that I have realized is that I have a very difficult time sharing the specifics of my time in South Africa. I do not know why, but it is just the way I feel.

I hope you don’t mind, but this sermon today isn’t going to be a day by day listing of the things that I did in South Africa. There will, of course, be time for that, but later. I think one of the lessons I learned in South Africa is much more important to be shared with you today. Being good Lutherans, I also know that our justifications need to be scripturally based as well; so please let me reference the Transfiguration of Jesus, specifically Matthew 17:9 where Peter, James, and John had a mountaintop experience with Jesus and on the way down the mountain Jesus says “tell no one about the vision.” So, of course the specifics are important about my trip, but not right now.

Pastor Chatman, I hope you don’t mind but I’m going to have to use a dirty word in church. In Global Mission we call it the “m” word, “missionary.”

I would like to start with a question to the congregation. How many missionaries do we have in the house today?

(Pause for response)

Pastor Chatman, I think we have a bit of problem.

Well, Pastor Chatman, if you and the congregation don’t mind I would like to impart one of the first lessons of missionology to those present.

(Wait for Pastor Chatman’s response)

Well, I’m going to tell you one of the first things you have to acknowledge about mission – it’s hard. It is not a comfortable thing to do mission. When we do mission, you have to talk to people you might not have wanted to talk to, and go places you might not want to go. You may even need change the pew you in.

I will, however, share with you my favorite story about “mission” from the Gospel. I’m going to chose the version of this story from Luke’s gospel in the ninth chapter; I imagine many of you are familiar with this story since your youth. This is the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand. The childhood version that we’re told of this story is that Jesus, through miracle, feeds five thousand men with five loaves and two fish. I do not dispute that event occurred; however, I would like to provide another interpretation that became clear to me during my time in Johannesburg.

What if I told you, that we’re capable of the same “miracle” that occurred in this story? I think most of you would like at me as if I were a mad man. That’s fine, before this year in South Africa I would have done the same.

I beg the pardon of those of you who prefer to focus on the divinity of Jesus, but this year has revealed the importance of Jesus’ humanity to me. The importance of Jesus’ humanity is revealed to me through this story and exemplified in John 10:10 – “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” Jesus was fully human in order to show us how to live our lives.

If this story is about magically multiplying manna from heaven then a lot of us need not apply. I believe this story is about showing how to live our lives when we truly believe in the message and gospel of Jesus of Nazareth. If we look a few verses before the actually story of the feeding, we notice that this crowd had been following Jesus’ ministry for a couple of days at this point. Now, obviously, things were a bit different in those days – there were cars, there was no McDonalds’ take aways. So, if you’re going to leave your home for a number of days – you’re going to be smart and take the things you need. That means these people brought what they needed to be nourished for a few days of following this man. After being in South Africa – a country where hunger and poverty are very real issues – you realized that the miracle contained therein is that Jesus taught us how to share what we have by sharing what he had.

Magic manna from heaven isn’t going to work for the poor, tired, and hungry of this world. But a real solution, found in the Gospels will. We can feed five thousand with few resources; the question is are we looking for the easy answer to the question posed in the Gospel, or are we willing to look within ourselves – which is a place where Jesus can be found – to find answers?

I hope that in the year I’ve been gone that this church has become ready and willing to realize that we are able to feed five thousand, and that we must now ask ourselves if we are ready to feed five thousand.

I would like to simply close with these words: let’s get to work.

"The Issues" (part one)

2009-06-10T05:21:00.009-04:00

This is Johannesburg.

With this blog, particularly in reference to my time in South Africa, I have tried to place the focus on people and issues here in South Africa that the outside world should know about, particularly my primary audience in the United States. As my time in Johannesburg nears its end, I would like to share how the big issues of South Africa have personally affected me as a person that I am.

At first when I tried this I realized it could end up being far too long of blog post; as such I will try to post every couple of days on a different issues about South Africa and the issue's meaning to me.

Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS)

The HIV/AIDS infection rate in South Africa is higher than anywhere else in the world. Statistically, four in 10 people that you know or meet in South Africa have this disease. When I look at numbers like this the first thing that comes to my mind is the statistical problem of underreporting. With a disease that creates such social stigma like AIDS, I cannot imagine that all persons with AIDS in South Africa actually admit to it.

The hardness of the reality AIDS creates in South Africa first hit me at a training session with my youth soccer club which caters to ages 10-15. One of the boys said he would not be able to make it to the next training session; as his coach and being interested in his life, I asked him why not, to which he responded, "I have to go to the clinic. I have AIDS and need my treatment." In that moment I realized that this 12-years old boy did not have AIDS because of his own choices, but rather because of the choices that he had no say in - choices made before he even existed or was a twinkle in anyone's eyes.

This experience reinforced somethings that I already knew, and taught me something new. It reinforced that fact that we must fight against AIDS with every sinew of strength until a cure is found. It reinforced the sex-education curriculum I was taught in middle school and by my mother; and if anything showed me that it needs to be expanded so that it's principles are second-nature to all adolescents.

And it taught me something slightly more philosophical. It taught me the difference between society as a community and society as a collection of individuals. In South Africa there is the term ubuntu, which roughly means "I am, because we are." Those three simple lines of dialogue between the young man and myself finally made me understand ubuntu. The person that he is, the person that I am, or the person that you are is not because you are an amazing individual that has the power to overcome all obstacles, but rather the end result of innumerable forces, both seen and unseen, acting on you, for you, through you, and despite you - whether those forces or positive or negative. I am, because of the circumstances in my life that I could not possibly have any control over. I am who I am because hundreds, if not thousands, of years of choices and actions taken.

When we take decisions, even the most deeply personal ones, we must realize that they effect so much more than our own personal spheres of influence. We are so much more than the sum parts of our personalities, psyches, etcetera.

Good night and Godspeed.

Happy Mothers' Day

2009-05-10T02:38:00.001-04:00

This is Johannesburg.

Today is May 10, 2009 and it is Mothers’ Day worldwide. With that being said, I would like to send special greetings to all the mothers who read this blog, in particular Mrs. Mary Johnson, Mrs. María Roberts, and Mrs. Jenny L. Johnson. Without these three mothers in my life, I would not be the young man I am today, nor would I even be here. So, unequivocally and undeniably I would like to say Happy Mothers’ Day to those three women.

As I think of Mothers’ Day I begin to ask myself, “If I could give one present to all of the moms in Africa and the developing world, what would I give them?”

A child is a gift from God, but for many mothers in the developing world this “gift” comes far too early in an adolescent’s life and is more of an onerous burden than anything else – physically and psychologically. One reason that young girls often bear children is the cost of education and the family’s need to turn a buck on the dowry offered from a male suitor. If these girls were able to stay in school longer, many adolescent pregnancies would be avoided in the developing world.

So, if I could give one gift to mothers of the developing world it would be an education for their daughters to ensure that these young girls stay in school longer and delay pregnancy until their bodies are more able to handle it. Also, by ensuring higher educational attainment, these young girls are more likely to have a higher income level than if they’d truncated their educational careers; these translates into a higher likelihood of avoiding the complications in childbirth that can result in the death of the mother and/or child.

As we attend church more Mothers’ Day, hopefully we can remember those mother’s who labor and work and sweat out of love for their families – all of them, everywhere around the world.

Good night and Godspeed.

John 20.19-29

2009-04-22T02:16:00.002-04:00

On Sunday, April 19, 2009 I was privleged to deliver the sermon message to the Midrand congregation of the ELCSA Central Diocese's Western Circuit. The highlighted portion is the sermon text from John 20.19-29; followed by the sermon.

The disciples were afraid of the Jewish leaders, and on the evening of that same Sunday they locked themselves in a room. Suddenly, Jesus appeared in the middle of the group. He greeted them and showed them his hands and his side. When the disciples saw the Lord, they became very happy.

After Jesus had greeted them again, he said, “I am sending you, just as the Father has sent me.” Then he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, they will be forgiven. But if you don’t forgive their sins, they will not be forgiven.”

Although Thomas the Twin was one of the twelve disciples, he wasn’t with the other when Jesus appeared to them. So they told him, “We have seen the Lord!”

But Thomas said, “First, I must see the nail scars in his hands and touch them with my finger. I must put my hand where the spear went into his side. I won’t believe unless I do this!”

A week later the disciples were together again. This time, Thomas was with them. Jesus came in while the doors were still locked and stood in the middle of the group. He greeted his disciples and said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and look at my hands! Put your hand into my side. Stop doubting and have faith!”

Thomas replied, “You are my Lord and my God!”

Jesus said, “Thomas, do you have faith because you have seen me? The people who have faith in me without seeing me are the ones who are really blessed!”

(As prepared for delivery)

Today’s sermon text is from the Gospel according to John. The text presents us with two very important and much related stories: the Great Commission, and the story of Doubting Thomas.
The Great Commission appears in all four Gospels, and in the Book of Acts (which is a continuation of Luke’s Gospel). The Great Commission is also a text that has caused a lot of trouble for Christians from the north. Western Christianity has interpreted this piece of Scripture as its mandate to go all over the world and do many things. Taking Christianity to people isn’t necessarily a bad thing…but there is a saying in my family, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” As history tells us, Westerners went to many different locations with the Bible in one hand to give to people while they were taking from people with their other hand. With all that being said, I shall try to deliver the best message I can giving my inherent prejudices that I possess as an American coming to South Africa.

There is a standard interpretation of the Great Commission that the members of this congregation have heard more time and time again. I would like us to use the Great Commission as a text to look inward as we seek to convert people with this text; we look inward to convert ourselves first because until we take the first step to fixing our broken lives, we cannot do that for others.

It’s very easy to say that we’re Christian. I can say whatever I please, whenever I please. I can say that I’m South African, I can say that I’m German, I can say that I’m Japanese; but that doesn’t make those statements true. As easily as I made those statements, I believe many people go around saying they are Christian with such ease. Obviously, I’m not talking about people in this congregation, but I’m sure we all can think of someone like that. I want people to know that we are Christians everyday of the week, not just when we wear our black and white uniforms on Sundays. I can wear a uniform with a big golden cross around my neck, but that doesn’t make me a Christian. Our actions and our behaviors determine our religion.

God does not ask as much from us as we think; simply to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves (Mk 12). I think that loving God is the easy part of this equation; the more difficult of the two is to love our neighbors as ourselves. I believe it is difficult because it is very easy to be selective about who are neighbor is or what constitutes love. How many of us see a beggar on the street when we are driving or when we’re walking? How often do we ignore that person because it is easier than engaging them? I think that ignoring that beggar and acting as if they do not exist is a sin; how can we, as Christians, ignore God’s creation? If we are truly Christians and we love God then we are called to acknowledge that God lives and work through that beggar just as much as we believe God does so for us. Even if we don’t have any change for the person, just talk to them.

We can already see how neglect for God’s creation is affecting our environment through the massive amounts of pollution, deforestation, and extracting of the planet’s natural resources. As a human race, we’ve already shown what we can do when we don’t care about any of God’s creation in terms of nature. We’ve also shown, throughout history, what we can do when we don’t care about God’s most favored natural resource – human beings. Are we truly prepared to answer to God when our Divine Majesty asks why we acted with such blatant disregard for all the things placed in our lives?

Like I said, a person’s religion is not revealed in the eloquence, rather in their exploits.

Micah 6:8 tells us exactly how God wants us to behave. We must act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly. I would like to think that these three requests are easy, but they aren’t. History and time has shown us that they’re very difficult apparently. So let’s start doing it here. If Christ’s church is to persevere throughout the ages then it will not be because it hid behind archaic traditions, social clubs without purpose, or the articulacy of a few. If Christ’s church on Earth survives, it is because we decided that the model of Christ’s life is more importantly lived as an example than used as a proselytizing tool.

US court allows apartheid claims

2009-04-13T02:22:00.001-04:00

From the British Broadcasting Corporation.

A United States judge has ruled that lawsuits can go ahead against several companies accused of helping South Africa's apartheid-era government.

IBM, Ford and General Motors are among those corporations now expected to face demands for damages from thousands of apartheid's victims.

They argue that the firms supplied equipment used by the South African security forces to suppress dissent.

The companies affected have not yet responded to the judge's ruling.

'Wilful blindness'
US District Judge Shira Scheindlin in New York dismissed complaints against several companies but said plaintiffs could proceed with lawsuits against IBM, Daimler, Ford, General Motors and Rheinmetall Group, the German parent of an armaments maker.

"Corporate defendants accused of merely doing business with the apartheid government of South Africa have been dismissed," she said.

The plaintiffs argue that the car manufacturers knew their vehicles would be used by South African forces to suppress dissent. They also say that computer companies knew their products were being used to help strip black South Africans of their rights.

The judge disagreed with IBM's argument that it was not the company's place to tell clients how to use its products.

"That level of wilful blindness in the face of crimes in violation of the law of nations cannot defeat an otherwise clear showing of knowledge that the assistance IBM provided would directly and substantially support apartheid," she said.

More than 50 companies were initially sued, but after a court demanded more specific details, the plaintiffs decided to target fewer companies.

The US and South African governments supported the companies' efforts to get the complaints dismissed.

They argue that the legal action is damaging to international relations and may threaten South Africa's economic development.

Mission From Africa

2009-04-12T16:32:00.004-04:00

By Andrew Rice of The New York Times Magazine.

PASTOR DANIEL AJAYI-ADENIRAN is coming for your soul. It doesn’t matter if you are black or white, rich or poor, speak English or Spanish or Cantonese. He is on a mission to save you from eternal damnation. He realizes you may be skeptical, put off by his exotic name — he’s from Nigeria — or confused by his accent, the way he stretches his vowels and trills his R’s, giving his sermons a certain chain-saw rhythm. He suspects you may have some unfortunate preconceptions about Nigerians. But he is not deterred. He believes the Holy Spirit is working through him — aided by the awesome earthly power of demographics.

The Redeemed In the United States, members of the church, which practices a vigorous brand of Pentecostalism, are for the most part African immigrants — although church leaders are hoping for more diverse congregations. Above, the Chapel of Restoration in the Bronx.
Africa is the world’s fastest-growing continent, and Ajayi-Adeniran belongs to one of its most vigorously expansionary religious movements, a homegrown Pentecostal denomination that is crusading to become a global faith. In the course of just a few decades, the Redeemed Christian Church of God, founded in a Lagos shantytown, has won millions of adherents in Nigeria while building a vast missionary network that stretches into more than 100 nations. “The rate of growth,” Ajayi-Adeniran says, “is becoming exponential.” As the man coordinating the Redeemed Church’s expansion in North America, the pastor spends his days shuttling from his home base, a storefront church in the Bronx, to the denomination’s continental headquarters, a 550-acre compound in Texas, and to mission outposts scattered from Vermont to Belize. This places him at the vanguard of a revolution in worldwide Christianity, one that it is quite literally changing its face, as a faith that was once exported by white missionaries from Europe and America comes to draw its strength from the peoples of the Southern Hemisphere.

Revival is an eternal theme in the history of Christianity. Time after time, evangelical fervor ignites, burns itself out and then re-emerges in some altered and surprising form, in constant cycles of migration and renewal. The ferment of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation sent Puritans to New England, Quakers to Pennsylvania and Jesuits into the wilds of South America. The missionary movements of the 19th century inspired pious adventurers to travel to Africa and spread, in the famous formulation of David Livingstone, “Civilization, commerce and Christianity.” Today the process is reversing itself, as the population of churchgoers dwindles in Europe, remains fairly static in the United States and erupts in the “global south” — a geopolitical term that encompasses Africa, Latin America and much of Asia. Seven years ago, in a book titled “The Next Christendom,” Philip Jenkins, a Penn State religious scholar, predicted that the global south would eventually come to represent Christianity’s center of gravity. Now it appears that phenomenon is starting to manifest across a broad spectrum of Christian belief, challenging patterns of leadership and notions of religious identity that in some cases have stood for centuries.

Take, for example, the Anglican Communion. Spread along with the British Empire, its membership now tilts heavily southward: Nigeria alone, with some 20 million adherents, makes up around a quarter of the entire Anglican Communion. The church’s recent schism over gay rights, which pits liberal white bishops against traditionalist counterparts from Africa, has upended old colonial lines of authority, leading to the odd spectacle of dissident conservative ministers in America formally shifting their affiliations to authorities in faraway countries like Uganda.

The story is similar within the Catholic Church, the world’s largest Christian denomination. Roughly a third of the College of Cardinals currently hails from the global south, lending support to predictions that someday, perhaps quite soon, they will elect a non-European pope. If that were to occur, it would only echo what is happening in Catholic parishes throughout the developed world. In the United States, where a shrinking number of young men are willing to accept the sacrifices required for ordination, one in six of all diocesan priests, and one in three seminarians, are now foreign-born. The world’s largest Catholic seminary is in Nigeria. When I went to my childhood home in South Carolina for the holidays last year, a visiting Nigerian priest celebrated Christmas Mass at my own family’s parish, surprising his passive audience with an upbeat, stemwinding, almost evangelical homily on God’s glory.

Christianity is practiced differently in the global south, and especially in Africa, where it has been invested with cultural values that long predate the first missionary efforts. During the 20th century, the population of Christians in Africa grew from 10 million to around 360 million, and that could double by 2025, by which time demographers project the continent will be home to a quarter of all believers. These Africans are making Christianity their own, in ways both subtle and profound. This is evidenced in political debates over subjects like homosexuality, which is scorned throughout the continent, or condom distribution, which — despite the current pope’s opposition — some local Catholic bishops have countenanced as a practical response to AIDS. But it can also be seen in a style of worship: colorful, musical and suffused with a belief in the presence of the supernatural in everyday life.

This Africanization is obvious in Pentecostal sects like the Redeemed Christian Church of God. Here again is a story of revival. The Pentecostal movement is said to have begun in 1906, in a rundown church in a Los Angeles ghetto, where a black preacher gathered a multiracial congregation to pray in a fashion that contemporary critics saw as radical and strange, maybe even possessed. Today there are around 600 million Pentecostals worldwide, the vast majority of them in developing nations, and Africa is a hotbed. Pentecostalism is not so much an organized religion — it has no central authority — as a set of beliefs and practices that can be adapted by local entrepreneurs. It is perfectly suited to harness the modern forces of global crosspollination.

Pastor Raphael Adebayo during a service at a Redeemed Church service in south Dallas on Feb. 24, 2009. Pastor Adebayo has tried to appeal to the most desperate members of a poor area of Dallas, welcoming ex-convicts, the homeless and addicts. Part of his appeal is through charity. “If I give them food and clothes,” he said, “they will come to me.”

American televangelists like T. D. Jakes and Benny Hinn are received like rock stars when they fly into African capitals, where they preach to crowds estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. Their African counterparts, meanwhile, are moving in the opposite direction, winning converts in Europe especially. In Kiev, a Nigerian minister leads a predominantly white Pentecostal church that claims a membership of 30,000, including the city’s mayor. Four of the 10 largest megachurches in London are run by Africans. Of all the many new sects, however, none are as organized as the Redeemed Christian Church of God. “I always cite the R.C.C.G. as the best example of a rising church that, probably by the time I die, is going to be a global denomination,” Philip Jenkins said. “It really is pushing so hard in all possible directions.”

The Redeemed Church offers a case study of the crosscurrents that are drawing Christianity southward. Its leader and guiding force, Pastor Enoch Adeboye, sums up the church’s history this way: “Made in heaven, assembled in Nigeria, exported to the world.” He preaches that his followers — known as the Redeemed — are a chosen people and have a special covenant with God, one that promises that the church will one day claim an adherent in every family on earth.
The Redeemed mission to the United States represents perhaps the greatest test to date of these immense ambitions. The church is still in its infancy here, with only around 15,000 active members, most of them Nigerians, but its goal is to make gradual inroads into the wider culture, at first aiming at members of immigrant groups — other Africans, Caribbeans, Latin Americans, Asians — and then moving on to African-Americans and whites. They are filled with the confidence of miraculous faith, though they realize they are contending with cultural impediments. “Initially, it may be rough,” says Pastor James Fadele, head of the church’s operations in North America. “But some of our children grew up in America, and they are affiliated with the church, and they have white friends, they have African-American friends, they have Asian friends. They will come to the church. It’s a matter of time.”

Fadele has entrusted the task of increasing the number of Redeemed churches to Daniel Ajayi-Adeniran. Reed-thin at 44, the minister carries himself with the earnest conviction of someone who has already surmounted many obstacles. He came to this country in 1995, without a job or a place to live. At first he slept in homeless shelters and subways until he landed a job at a Brooklyn car wash, where the owner let him bed down in a hallway. He now presides over a parish with around 400 members and branches in other cities. “I believe that when there is raw power, when the lame come to church and can walk, when the blind can come and see . . . when things begin to happen like that, people will come,” the pastor told me. “It’s going to be very, very explosive.”

THE BEST EVIDENCE OF THE REDEEMED CHURCH’S outsize aspirations, at least in this country, lies in the prairie lands of Hunt County, Tex., about an hour northeast of Dallas. Down a gravel road, past barns, a white clapboard Methodist church and flat fields of dark, freshly turned soil, a large brick-and-glass auditorium appears from behind grain silos. A sign points the way to Redemption Camp, the church’s North American headquarters. From this unlikely base, in the course of less than a decade, the Redeemed have spawned nearly four hundred parishes. Over the long term, church officials plan to develop the site as a mixed-use community, with homes, stores, a university, a commercial fish farm and perhaps even a water park.

In January, Ajayi-Adeniran traveled to Redemption Camp with other church leaders to celebrate the end of a month of fasting. Several hundred people, most of them Nigerian, gathered in the auditorium for a service that began in the morning and went well past midnight. It was televised live on the Internet for a global audience. A succession of evangelists asked God to heal sickness, to keep the faithful from harm, to cancel debts “supernaturally” and, most of all, to multiply the ranks of the Redeemed. Wearing a white linen jacket and clutching a crinkled Bible, Ajayi-Adeniran stood in the front row, hands raised and eyes closed, his head bobbing, his face fixed in an ecstatic grimace.

The faithful in the Bronx following prayers in a service led by Pastor James Fadele and Pastor Daniel Ajayi-Adeniran. Like other Redeemed churches, the Chapel of Restoration was founded by transplants from Nigeria, where the church claims to have five million followers.
Even by the passionate standards of Africa, the Redeemed are renowned for the intensity of their prayer. In Nigeria, it has been called “the weeping church.” During services, members of the congregation will clap, whoop and break into glossolalia — speaking in tongues — which Pentecostals believe to be the verbal expression of the Holy Spirit. They will collapse to the floor, burying their faces in the carpet, and writhe in the throes of divine communion. “I don’t know how to explain it,” Ajayi-Adeniran once told me when I asked him what he felt when he prayed. “There’s a kind of aura that comes from above that envelops you.”

It is this spiritual zeal that the Redeemed Church hopes to bring to Americans. Though its successes so far are tentative and anecdotal, they appear to be real. In my visits to many Redeemed churches in different parts of the country, I encountered non-Nigerians at every turn. That night in January at Redemption Camp, I met an African-American woman named Della Faye Sowunmi. A native of Indiana, Sowunmi is married to a Nigerian and was first exposed to the Redeemed by her sister-in-law. “I just wasn’t getting what I was after spiritually in the Baptist Church,” she said, explaining her conversion. “To watch people praise and worship like that, it touched my heart.”

Enoch Adeboye, the Redeemed Church’s leader, calculates that there are countless Americans who feel such spiritual longing. “There is an emptiness in man that can only be filled by God,” Adeboye told me in October. Adeboye was visiting Baltimore to preside over a conference of the church’s ministers and activists. We met in a high-ceilinged Marriott hotel suite, which was guarded by two mountainous security men. Adeboye sat in a wingback chair, next to a gilt fireplace, dressed casually in black slacks, a collarless African patterned shirt and white sneakers.

To understand what the church plans for America, it is crucial to appreciate what it has become in Nigeria, largely because of Adeboye’s personal charisma and sophisticated appeals. Born into a family of poor cocoa farmers, Adeboye taught mathematics at the University of Lagos before he became a full-time minister. His followers, who revere him as a patriarch, call him the General Overseer, or Daddy G.O. The church he has built echoes his personality: it is disciplined, nurturing, systematic. Back in Nigeria, Adeboye claims to have at least five million followers, including some of the country’s most influential figures. As general overseer, he presides over financial ventures, including private schools, a bank and a media business. He’s innovative at developing methods to spread the word, as well as coming up with fresh revenue streams. The church produces inspirational movies on DVD, which are big sellers, and offers a service that sends daily text messages, believed to offer divine protection, to subscribers’ cellphones.
In our interview, Adeboye began to talk, as he often does, about his own personal journey to salvation. It is a story with the usual Augustinian elements: prestige, women, booze. But Adeboye’s distinctive weakness, one he also glimpses in this society, was what he describes as an idolatrous reliance on reason. “It begins to give man the impression that man is the almighty, that man can do anything,” the pastor said. “He can go to the moon, go to Mars, perform operations with a laser beam without spilling blood. The problem, the way I see it, is that because of the advance of technology, science and investing, the Western world began to feel that they didn’t need God as much as before. Whereas in Africa, we need him. We know we need him to survive.”

Nigeria’s evangelical surge dates to the late 1960s, when university students formed campus prayer groups. Christian students, rejecting their parents’ less-vigorous beliefs, became born again and embraced Pentecostalism, which had long been present in Nigeria but previously was considered lower class. Political factors spurred the revival, too, particularly in later years, as Nigeria suffered through a series of military dictatorships dominated by Muslims from its northern region. Though Adeboye seldom mentions Islam, Nigeria’s other proselytizing faith, it is clear that religious tension fueled the awakening. Like everyone on campus, Adeboye was exposed to Pentecostalism, but he says he didn’t give himself over wholeheartedly to God until he was in his 30s. Seeking a cure for a daughter’s persistent illness, he wandered into a modest church overseen by an aging pastor who was reputed to be a miracle worker. According to Redeemed lore, the moment Adeboye appeared, a vision told the old man that he’d found his inheritor.

The pastor, Josiah Akindayomi, founded the Redeemed Church in the 1950s, with God’s promise, according to doctrine, that it would eventually reach “the ends of the earth.” But the faith had not spread very far by the 1970s, in part because Akindayomi spoke only Yoruba, which limited his ability to evangelize beyond the bounds of his tribe. The next leader of the church, he knew through prior revelation, needed to be “a man of books,” capable of reaching the wider world. And so, in 1979, Akindayomi unveiled his succession plan.

Enoch Adeboye, the leader of the Redeemed Church, in a service in London, November 2008.
Adeboye recently celebrated his 67th birthday — with a huge revival held at Redemption City, the church’s worldwide headquarters, located 30 miles north of Lagos. The model for the Texas site, Redemption City is built on land that was formerly occupied by animist shrines. Since the 1980s, Adeboye’s followers have constructed homes all around the grounds, along with schools, supermarkets, banks and a water-treatment plant. Every December, inside a mammoth hall, Adeboye holds a six-day event called the Holy Ghost Congress. Crowd estimates — never an exact science, especially in Africa — are in the millions.

“It is the largest prayer meeting in the world, and there is not another prayer meeting in the world that is a close second,” said Dr. James O. Davis, a Pentecostal minister based in Florida and the founder of the Billion Soul Network, an organization devoted to spreading Christianity around the world. “Everything that the Redeemed Church does is huge.”

UNLIKE MANY PENTECOSTAL DENOMINATIONS, the Redeemed Church is a tightly regimented organization, with authority flowing down from the general overseer through geographic zones and into individual parishes. Adeboye, for all his talk of blind belief, is still a numbers man, and he has shown a strong preference for delegating authority for overseas missions to leaders who have training in business or science. Pastor James Fadele, the head of the church in North America, is a former automotive-design engineer as well as a close relative of Adeboye. Fadele left a job at the Ford Motor Company to run the church full time from Texas. He holds an M.B.A. and has some practical business experience — he used to own a Wendy’s franchise in Detroit — and he says he has to think like a marketer when it comes to his mission here. “Everything,” Fadele told me, “is Americanized.”

That applies, in a narrow sense, to things like the books the Redeemed Church uses in its American Sunday schools, which have been purged of parables about market women and chickens, and more broadly, to the way the church positions itself in society. In Nigeria, church leaders speak out against corruption and make efforts to fight AIDS, while here they’ve assimilated the political rhetoric of the Christian Right, condemning abortion and pledging to take prayer back to public schools. The most Americanized aspect of the church, though, is its missionary strategy, which bears a striking resemblance to the business plan of a successful corporate chain — like Wendy’s, for instance. For now, in the United States, the emphasis is as much on erecting infrastructure as on making converts. Enoch Adeboye would prefer to have many small parishes rather than a few megachurches. So the Redeemed spread through a process similar to mitosis. When a parish reaches a certain size, it is encouraged to divide in two, with part of the congregation moving to a nearby location, usually with a newly ordained pastor, a process that the Redeemed, adopting a bit of American evangelical lingo, call “church planting.”
Last fall, I saw James Fadele give a presentation on missionary strategy to a gathering of church leaders. A short man with big voice and an endearing sense of humor, he spoke over a series of PowerPoint slides, in which Venn diagrams and bullet points alternated with pictures of the targets: black, white, Hispanic and Asian faces. “How do we love people?” he asked rhetorically. “We love people by planting churches.”

One slide, a bar graph, showed a set of ambitious growth objectives. Each of the church’s 22 zonal coordinators in North America, he said, had been charged with planting seven churches during the previous year. He announced an award for Pastor Daniel Ajayi-Adeniran, who, in addition to overseeing the overall effort, had also managed to consistently hit his numbers in the zone he administers, which encompasses New York and Vermont. Other coordinators reported less success, and Fadele cheerfully scolded them.

“Last year in October, we had 297 parishes in North America,” he said. “As of September of this year, we have 374. Praise the Lord!”

There was a round of applause, and Fadele’s voice turned stern.

“To Daddy G.O., that’s a failure,” he snapped. The number of parishes had increased by 25 percent in just a year, but Adeboye had asked for twice that.

One way that the church promotes growth in this country is by encouraging successful congregations to start satellites in other cities. Della Faye Sowunmi belongs to a church called the Holy Ghost Zone, in Irving, Tex., which grew out of a similarly named mother church in London. Both are led by female pastors. Victory Temple, based in Bowie, Md., has spun off outlets around the Southeast. Probably the most successful example is Jesus House, which was established by a large Redeemed church in Lagos. It now has branches all over the world. The Jesus House brand signature is “empowerment,” and the churches cater to the well-to-do, including businesspeople and others who have benefited from Nigeria’s recent oil boom. Jesus House’s Washington outlet is located in the Maryland suburbs, in a glass-fronted building that looks like a software company’s headquarters. “Our congregation is 90 percent professional,” said Ghandi Olaoye, the pastor. “We create avenues to give knowledge to people so that their lives can be better.” Olaoye’s church offers computer classes and hosts weekly business networking meetings. A recent celebration, “Empowerment Week,” featured American and African preachers and the motivational speaker Willie Jolley.

Church leaders are quick to contest any suggestion that they preach the “prosperity gospel” extolled by American evangelists like Creflo Dollar, which teaches that God will grant material wealth to those he favors, but whatever distinction they’re making is small. (“I am not a prosperity preacher,” James Fadele said at one sermon I attended, “but I am rich!”) Redeemed pastors routinely petition God to transform their followers into millionaires, members are encouraged to tithe and the Sunday collection is accompanied by joyous fanfare. At various events I attended, I heard Fadele ask members to raise money to help Adeboye buy a private jet (which duly arrived in March) and to sign up to accompany the general overseer, at a cost of up to $8,500 a person, on a coming pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which is to feature luxury hotel accommodation and a re-enactment of the Last Supper.

A sizable portion of the money collected in the United States is directed back into the North American organization’s centerpiece project, the expansion of the camp in Texas. Since 2000, Redeemed officials have been buying up large parcels of farmland around a rusty rail-stop town called Floyd (population: 220). They picked the spot, they say, in accordance with a vision Enoch Adeboye had many years ago, after a layover at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. Progress on the project has slowed, at least temporarily, since a $20 million loan was delayed. But in mid-January, when I visited, Fadele told me that construction would soon begin on a hall that seats 20,000.

The larger quarters are necessary, Fadele said, to accommodate the many thousands that flock to Redemption Camp for an annual June revival ministered by Adeboye. The event, which goes all night, has caused some consternation among neighbors. Some cities in Texas, especially Houston, have large Nigerian communities, but the area around Floyd is pickup-truck country — very rural, with a long history of racial prejudice. Until the 1960s, a banner hanging over the main road in downtown Greenville, the county seat, read, “The blackest land, the whitest people.”

Over time, however, the Redeemed have become accepted — if a bit warily — as a part of the community, says John Horn, the Hunt County judge, its highest elected official. “I came from the law-enforcement field prior to running for judge, and I had heard some of the issues regarding the Nigerian Internet scams,” he told me. “I think there were probably some preconceived notions about that.” But Horn said the church had made efforts to reach out, inviting him, for example, to attend Fadele’s 60th birthday party. Fadele explained that the Redeemed had tried to bring all their neighbors to the camp for such public occasions to show them “we are a Christian church,” he said, “not a cult.”

The Redeemed Church has made a similar effort to quell any suspicions that American evangelical leaders might have, portraying itself as firmly within the Pentecostal fold. American evangelists are routinely invited to preach at the church’s revivals both here and in Nigeria. Those who have gone to Nigeria have come home with the impression that the Redeemed Church is a force to be respected — a potential partner, not a competitor, in a common struggle to revive Christian worship. “I often say,” says Bishop Bart Pierce, a white Pentecostal minister from Baltimore, “that the African is the midwife for next great move of God in America.”

RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION IN AFRICA is an omnipresent element of life: pastors are celebrities, waiters quote Scripture, gospel music plays in government offices and secular newspapers report miracles with the same credence they extend to soccer scores. Salvation is never too far away. When Daniel Ajayi-Adeniran woke up on Christmas morning in 1989, on the floor of his house in a town near Ibadan, hung over and convinced he had to make a change in his life, he knew where to find the Redeemed Church. There was one across the street, with a loudspeaker mounted on its roof, through which sermons bombarded the neighborhood every Sunday.

As an educated man with a civil-service job, Ajayi-Adeniran was a prime recruit, and within five years he was ordained an assistant pastor. Committed as he was to the church, he couldn’t endure Nigeria, which was then under the rule of Gen. Sani Abacha, a particularly nasty dictator. He immigrated to the United States, part of a wave of African migration that has come to many American cities. At the time Ajayi-Adeniran arrived, the Redeemed Church was just getting started in the United States. He began attending its first parish in New York, on Roosevelt Island. When some Nigerians from the Bronx decided to start their own church, he became its pastor.

The parish subdivided several times, according to the Redeemed model, before Ajayi-Adeniran settled at his current location, a yellow-painted, two-story brick building. When he first leased the property, it was derelict and gutted. Gradually, Ajayi-Adeniran renovated and built a substantial Sunday following, directing his proselytizing toward the souls available in the neighborhood. “My focus here is the black Americans, Caribbeans, Africans and Spanish,” he said. “For me to get whites in the church, it will take a miracle.”

His parish’s population has fluctuated over time because new churches keep splitting off. There are 13 so far, in locales as distant as Syracuse, Buffalo and Burlington, Vt. Some require more nurturing than others. The parish in Burlington, for instance, has been a particular struggle. “Vermont is 96.2 percent white,” Ajayi-Adeniran points out. But the general overseer wants the Redeemed to have a presence in every state, so a few years ago Ajayi-Adeniran drove to Burlington, scoured phone books for African names and eventually located some Congolese and Sudanese refugees. “Now they have maybe two or three Nigerian families, and the rest are Congolese, Sudanese, then black Americans and whites,” he said. “They’re not too many, but they average 40, 45” attendees on Sunday. “It will definitely work,” he predicted. “But it will take time.”

You might reasonably question why a church with limited resources would expend effort and capital in such an unpromising location, but that misses the point of Enoch Adeboye’s vision of ubiquity. He is preparing to meet a demand that so far exists only in prophecy. “If it appears as if initially our church is sent to target the immigrants from Africa and so on, it’s because you have to start somewhere,” Adeboye told me. “But then, later on, the people who are natives of this land will sooner or later come to the realization that they need God, and we will be on the ground when that time comes to present God to them.”

The Redeemed Church believes that this country has fallen into the thrall of wickedness. With an adoptive boldness that seems quintessentially American, Redeemed preachers talk of restoring a bygone God-fearing era. In their sermons, they invoke the founding fathers — many of whom had no problem with buying and selling people from Nigeria. “Right now there is moral decadence,” Ajayi-Adeniran said. “Things are not the way they used to be. All kinds of things: pollution and watering down of the Gospel — the gospel of convenience, the gospel of tolerance. You want to please people rather than pleasing God. That is one of the purposes, why we are here, to bring sanity to the church.”

Like many evangelists, Ajayi-Adeniran sees this as a particularly ripe moment: hard times are good times for belief. His flock in the Bronx, full of people at the margins of the work force, looks to him for spiritual guidance. On a snowy Sunday morning in January, two days before Barack Obama was to be inaugurated president, Ajayi-Adeniran strode to a clear glass lectern as his church band played an African-tinged rendition of an old American gospel hymn. In one hand, he clutched a white handkerchief; his sermons are full of sweaty exertion. “We’re going to pray for our nation, the United States of America,” he said, as he opened his Bible to the Book of Zechariah. He read a passage commanding God’s chosen people to rebuild Jerusalem’s razed temple.

“This is our Jerusalem!” Ajayi-Adeniran shouted, as he began to jump and swing his arms in loose-limbed fervor. “You want to talk to God?” he asked. In response, his congregants dropped to their knees and began to speak in tongues, which to the uninitiated sounds like a babble of sharp syllables. Above the din, Ajayi-Adeniran voiced a series of petitions to God, seizing certain phrases and repeating them, almost as if he were chanting an incantation. “Father, restore the old glory back to our nation,” the pastor said. “The old glory. The old glory.” Ajayi-Adeniran jabbed a finger toward heaven, his sermon crescendoing in a high-pitched, swooping cry: “Churches are in pain. Children of God are in pain. People are losing their jobs. Many are losing their jobs. Marriages are breaking up. God — God almighty — come and heal our land. Come and heal our land! Come and intervene. Move! Move! Move!”

IT IS A TENET OF PENTECOSTALISM that the divine is an active force, which is revealed through signs and wonders. The broad movement, however, encompasses a wide variety of practices. All the Americans I met who had gravitated to the Redeemed Church described their motivations similarly: they were searching for something that they felt was missing from this society, a feverish engagement with the worship of God. “I’ve seen in other churches such a laid-back sophistication,” said Keith N. Green, who drifted through a number of African Methodist Episcopal and nondenominational churches before joining a Redeemed parish in Columbia, S.C. “When I came here I didn’t see that. I saw a congregation of people who really enjoyed praise. I didn’t see any shyness in here about dancing for Jesus.”

The Redeemed see God as a magical presence in their lives. Like most Pentecostals, they believe that when the Holy Spirit inhabits them, they can perform miracles and see the future. Enoch Adeboye is said to have publicly prophesied the untimely death of General Abacha in 1998, three days before it actually happened. In “Let Somebody Shout Hallelujah!” a hagiographic biography of Adeboye written by his former secretary, the general overseer is credited with using his God-given powers to raise the dead, avoid traffic jams, foresee coups, restore hair to the balding and cure kidney disease, depression and H.I.V. Bart Pierce, the Pentecostal minister from Baltimore, says he witnessed such miracles while attending Adeboye’s services in Nigeria. “We watched people get right out of their wheelchairs and walk,” he told me.

“They move — ‘they’ being the Africans — in the supernatural,” said Cheryl Broadus, who attends the same multiethnic South Carolina parish that Green belongs to. Born in Brooklyn, Broadus said she happened into the church after she moved to Columbia to work for a local public television station. “They have brought those miracles that we read about in the Bible, that we know Jesus performed,” she said. “This is what really drew me and a lot of the Americans.”

Her pastor, Kwesi Ansah Jr., describes himself as a “pioneer missionary.” A few days before Christmas, he pulled up in a Nissan Pathfinder — its license plate reads, “Fear This God” — and led me into his church, which is located in a building vacated by a defunct mortgage broker. A jovial, pie-faced man, Ansah told me that in contrast to most Redeemed pastors, he is not a Nigerian but a Ghanaian, and he has spent his life preaching the Gospel in locales as disparate as Israel, Australia and Spain. His current posting, he says, is one of his most difficult. There’s a lot of evangelical competition in South Carolina, and not many Africans. But Ansah has managed to establish a congregation of around 100, with satellite parishes in other South Carolina cities.

“It was the Westerners, Europeans and Americans that brought the Gospel as missionaries to us on the dark continent of Africa,” Ansah said. “So the seed was sown, is grown, germinated, and it is now bearing fruit. So we’re now here to also give back.”

The Redeemed often cast their mission as a recapitulation, but the reality is that their church did not originate, in any meaningful sense, as a Western import. Its founder, Josiah Akindayomi, was born around 1909, into a family that worshiped Ogun, the Yoruba god of iron and war. According to “A New Paradigm of Pentecostal Power,” a study of the church by the Nigerian scholar Asonzeh Ukah, Akindayomi may have been a babalawo, a priest and healer in the indigenous tradition, before his conversion to Christianity. He started off as an Anglican and briefly attended a mission school but left that church to follow a local prophetess who belonged to a grass-roots Christian movement called aladura, or “owners of prayer.”

The aladura movement began in western Nigeria around 1920. Though its teachings and style of worship bear a resemblance to American Pentecostalism, which sprang up roughly contemporaneously, many scholars believe the aladura churches were an entirely independent phenomenon, probably a response to cataclysms like the 1918 flu pandemic. Philip Jenkins, whose most recent book, “The Lost History of Christianity,” is a study of missionary movements, points out that charismatic practices have a long history and arose with eerie similarity in places like Los Angeles and Brazil. “A lot of the stuff they’re getting, they’re getting from the Book of Acts,” he said, referring to the portion of the New Testament that describes the miracles the apostles performed during the early spread of Christianity. To scholars, this coincidence is evidence of a theological undercurrent, and to sociologists it speaks of a deep human need, but to believers it’s simply proof that some truths are everlasting.

The aladura movement incorporated elements of traditional belief systems, which revolved around a diverse pantheon of natural and ancestral spirits. For its first generation of followers, like Akindayomi, aladura represented a bridge between two worlds. “There’s a lot of homegrown material in these churches,” said Elias Bongmba, a Rice University religious-studies professor. “The members — though they may not accept it — actually share a similar worldview with the indigenous religions.”

Akindayomi, as an itinerant preacher, wandered the roads of western Nigeria in all-white garments, ringing a bell and winning converts through his healing abilities. Eventually he formed the Redeemed Church in 1952. By this time, Akindayomi had communicated with some Pentecostal missionaries who were based in South Africa, and he became convinced that the aladura tradition had gone astray. He banished the most obvious remnants of the indigenous religions, along with any suggestion of worldliness. Men and women were strictly separated at services, where there were no musical instruments, and Akindayomi refused to take up collections for fear of the corrupting influence of money. He also banned polygamy, an accepted practice in Nigeria.

Many aladura churches still exist in Nigeria, but the Redeemed now distance themselves from them. “Even though they love to pray, they are not sound biblically,” James Fadele said. The same adaptive process that produced the church in the first place has, more recently, moved in a homogenizing direction. Adeboye, who has made a close study of American evangelists, has altered some teachings to conform to biblical orthodoxy while simultaneously loosening Akindayomi’s more strident prohibitions. Music had become an integral part of worship, patriarchal restrictions on women have been lifted and the asceticism on which the church was founded has been replaced by a joyous embrace of materialism.

The Redeemed following, which was small, poor and uneducated when Adeboye became the general overseer, is now full of members of Nigeria’s elite. Adeboye has made an explicit effort to recruit the upper classes and prominent government figures by setting up what are called “model parishes,” churches where, in the words of the general overseer’s biographer, the affluent are able to “have the company of their likes at fellowship.” Adeboye enjoyed a close relationship with President Olusegun Obasanjo, a professed born-again Christian who ruled between 1999 and 2007, and though Adeboye often speaks out against corruption, the church has clearly profited from its relationship to powerful figures. Recently it has come in for criticism in Nigeria for securing lucrative government concessions and for making extravagant expenditures, like Adeboye’s new plane.

For all its transformations, however, the Redeemed Church’s primary appeal is still what it was in Akindayomi’s day: it offers its followers the chance to harness otherworldly forces. The Redeemed don’t deny that the gods of indigenous religions exist and possess real powers. But they say such spirits are satanic. A major theme of Redeemed teachings, to its Nigerian audience especially, is that becoming saved protects you from the curses, spells and sorcery that Africans, even Christian ones, commonly blame for all manner of misfortunes, from car accidents to impotence. Church officials in the United States are somewhat averse to talking about this aspect of doctrine. They are well aware of the ridicule that was heaped upon a Kenyan preacher after a video clip of his prayer to protect Sarah Palin from “the spirit of witchcraft,” offered during a guest sermon at her Alaska church, fell into the hands of bloggers. In fact, like many elements of Africa’s indigenous cosmology, the belief in evil spirits is entirely consistent with mainstream Pentecostal teaching, which holds that God and the Devil — an actual being — are engaged in continual “spiritual warfare.”

At services I attended, James Fadele frequently prayed aloud against “divination” and “enchantment.” When I asked him what he meant by that — if he thought witches were real — he replied, cautiously, “Some people don’t believe it.” Then he quoted St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, which refers to “powers” and “principalities” and calls on Christians to “stand firm against the tactics of the Devil.” “So there are enemies around us,” Fadele said. “Because our eyes are not open doesn’t mean they are not there.”

Redeemed pastors often attribute afflictions like poverty and addiction to demonic possession and preach against “generational curses,” which can explain everything from inherited illness to family dysfunction. Cheryl Broadus, the South Carolina follower, told me that Kwesi Ansah had proved his effectiveness in combating evil by performing an exorcism on a woman at her church. “She was slithering on the floor like a snake,” Broadus said. “My pastor was sound, firm, using the word of God as a weapon.”

One winter night, in the poor southern part of Dallas, I attended a prayer service at a tiny Redeemed church overseen by a slight, earnest man in a blue hooded sweatshirt, Pastor Raphael Adebayo. A biting ice storm was on the way, and rain was already falling as wet and shivering people started filtering in. Every one of them was American, most of them were black, some were homeless and all of them were grasping for some kind of deliverance. Adebayo, who has made it his mission to win Dallas’s most desperate people over to the Redeemed Church, did what he could to offer it. One member of the congregation after another stood up to testify. One man said the church had helped him to stay out of trouble since he’d gotten out of jail the previous April. Another said Adebayo helped him to reconcile with his wife, who had sent him to the hospital by throwing scalding water into his face. “I am battling a huge addiction that I know is the Devil,” said a young woman in a gray puffy coat.

Adebayo called for anyone else who was dealing with addiction to come to the altar, and almost everyone in the audience moved forward. He told the congregation to repeat after him: “Say: ‘Lord Jesus, I know by the way of Scripture, you did not create my life for disaster. You did not make me for shame. I am not an American by chance. I am in this country of plenty because you have a plan for me.’ ” The pastor pulled a bottle of olive oil from beneath his lectern and anointed each person’s forehead.

After the prayer service, the pastor offered free fried chicken, and some members of the congregation began rummaging through boxes filled with secondhand clothes and odds and ends donated by a Nigerian-owned supermarket in Plano, Tex., that was going out of business. “I am from Africa,” the pastor told me. “So I know I have a lot obstacles. But I know one thing: If I give them clothes and food, they will come to me.”

A convert from Islam, Adebayo was brought into the Redeemed Church by his wife, and he started ministering in south Dallas because he knew the place, having worked there as a gas-station attendant when he first came to America. “We don’t want to start from the top,” he said. “We want to start from beneath.”

There has been some resistance to this bottom-up approach. Adebayo was one of several Redeemed pastors who expressed the opinion that some elements of the church may have become too focused on fund-raising and wealth-building and with creating a community for immigrant Nigerians rather than exporting the religion to others. Kwesi Ansah, a Ghanaian, told me that some non-Nigerians did not feel completely accepted by certain Redeemed pastors, who mostly still come from the Yoruba tribe. “Some of them think: let us keep it to ourselves,” he said. This is a common tension in young churches: St. Peter and St. Paul, after all, initially disagreed about whether the salvation of Christ was available only for those who followed Jewish law or, as Paul decisively argued, was meant for all believers. The experience of pastors like Raphael Adebayo suggests that if the church is serious about spreading its message among Americans, its best approach would be the one it had in the beginning, offering help to the needy.
“The vision of the church is to reach out, but some people want to stay in the comfort zone,” Adebayo said. “That was not the original plan.”

THE MOST IMPORTANT FIGURE in the early history of Christianity in Nigeria was a Yoruba named Samuel Ajayi Crowther. Born at the turn of the 19th century, he was captured by slave raiders as a boy, only to be freed from bondage by the British Navy and transported to the free colony of Sierra Leone, where he was converted and schooled by Anglican missionaries. In the early 1840s, Crowther returned to his homeland as a leader of the first Protestant missions. He translated the Bible into Yoruba and began the ponderous work of persuading his skeptical people to give up their gods, measuring success in terms of tiny footholds and handfuls of souls. Those few initiates who learned the Scripture, who were called “readers,” were often dispatched into the interior to preach in untouched regions. But every bit of progress was accompanied by many more frustrations, setbacks, even martyrdoms.

Mission work has always been an exercise that pits faith against futility. At the time of Crowther’s death, his biographer wrote that the vast majority of Africa remained “utter heathen, living in the densest darkness of superstition and sin.” To contemporaries, the idea that the continent could ever become Christianity’s redoubt would have seemed as far-fetched as the Redeemed Church’s vision of an African-based world church.

The Redeemed are fully aware of how impossible their mission appears: that’s why they speak in terms of miracles. Like the missionaries of old, they have put a great deal of effort into recruiting Americans who show interest in being trained as pastors — their own “readers.” Della Faye Sowunmi leads a volunteer group in her congregation, in which she urges the sometimes reluctant Nigerians to reach out to other African-Americans, and she says she hopes to one day lead a church herself. Kwesi Ansah told me that he hoped that Keith Green, one of his American parishioners, would become an effective emissary to the local black community. And last fall, when I first met him, Daniel Ajayi-Adeniran said he had particularly high hopes for one member of his congregation, a half-French, half-Dominican Bronx resident named Patrick Darge.
Darge joined Ajayi-Adeniran’s church in 2003. At the time, he was facing a long jail term on federal narcotics-distribution charges. He attributes his relatively light sentence, three years, to God’s intervention. In prison, Darge was born again and became the head of the Christian fellowship, and when he got out he came back to the Redeemed Church. He is now one of Ajayi-Adeniran’s assistants and a constant sidekick. A slight, mild-mannered 36-year-old, Darge recently started ministering his own Spanish-language service, held on Sunday afternoons, which he has tailored with a mind toward breaking down what he calls “cultural barriers.” When I visited one Sunday, there were around 10 people in attendance, and Darge struggled valiantly to shake them out of their torpor, exhorting them to sing and shout as the Nigerian Pentecostals do.

On an evening in October, shortly before Enoch Adeboye was to take the stage to preach at a revival in downtown Baltimore, Ajayi-Adeniran told me that, from this modest start, he hoped to soon plant Darge in his own church. Then that would divide, and divide again, and soon enough the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans wouldn’t view the Redeemed Church as African but as something their own. “I see us making a major breakthrough in the neighborhood,” the pastor said. “I can see new things happening now.”

We were sitting at a Starbucks. Before we left, Ajayi-Adeniran made sure to chat up the fellow sitting at the table next to us, a Cameroonian as it turned out, and he invited him to see Adeboye speak. Later, the pastor took a seat on the floor of the First Mariner Arena, a 13,500-seat venue that is the home of Baltimore’s professional indoor soccer team. Around the subterranean dressing room where the general overseer was granting audiences, a phalanx of suited ministers and bodyguards were furiously tapping on their BlackBerrys. By 10 p.m., when Adeboye finally made his way to the stage, accompanied by a pair of American guest ministers, the arena was getting close to full, with an audience of mostly black faces.

In his sermon, Daddy G.O. was his usual self. He spoke in a honeyed baritone, mixing talk of proofs and equations with colloquial parables, both biblical and African. Periodically, a startled expression would pass across his squarish face, and he would say, “Thank you, Father,” an indication of that he had received a message from above. The revelations were general and irrefutable. “Somebody here today, you will never lack again” went one. Another was: “This very night, the activity of witches in your family will come to an end.” As the clock approached midnight, Adeboye gave the audience a prophecy: “You will yet make history in this nation — amen!”

Adeboye wrapped up with the altar call, in which those who are not yet saved are called forward to become members of the Redeemed. Hundreds of people streamed to the foot of the stage.
“In Africa, we get excited when people give their lives to Jesus,” Adeboye instructed his flock. “Go ahead,” he said, “talk to the almighty.” And then it came, in a roar like a wave, thousands of voices raised in the unknowable language of heaven.

It's the economy stupid. Or is it the stupid economy?

2009-03-09T10:34:00.003-04:00

This is Johannesburg.

In the midst of this economic downturn many of my church colleagues have two questions for me given my provenance and qualification: what do you think of President Barack Obama, and what do you think of this who economic situation?

Usually the question operates under the assumptions that I will answer whether I favor or disagree with Mr. Obama’s economic rescue package. Often times the questions are also asked with the implicit undertones of how I feel towards capitalism and globalization given the current state of the global economy.

In terms of Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party’s solution to the economic crisis I’d like to approach their plan with a bit of healthy skepticism. The first question is what the actual problem that needs to be addressed is. I do not believe that prima fascia failure of some of these large financial intuitions, such as Lehmen Brothers, is the problem we are confronted with. The problem the global economy is faced with is that should some of these large financial institutions fail then it will create a domino effect, essentially wiping out many business and other sectors of industry. Some would call this the “too big to fail” argument, however, to date I have not heard an adequate argument saying why we should allow these banks and institutions to fail, lest we can stomach unemployment rates of over a quarter of the population.

After we’ve identified the problem at hand, we must ask if the solution address the problem. Without being overly recondite and bringing in the byzantine language of economics the basic issue is that aggregate demand has fallen in the economy because banks and financial institutions are no longer releasing capital. Banks are not releasing capital and greasing the wheels of business because they need to cover their exposure and hoard cash due to their risqué practices of the recent past. This means that any bailout package needs to address that predicament. If the government does not address the bad practices of financiers, then there is nothing preventing them from continuing their habits. Any bailout package that is not accompanied with more regulation on the financial sector is doomed to fail and its efficacy will be greatly hamstringed.

Now that we’ve addressed the cause of our economic quandary and, hopefully, addressed that cause; we would be well served to attempt to address the symptoms of problem. This means addressing the immediate and visible effects of this downturn. Most immediately has been a downturn in production by businesses, which is in turn putting people out of work. The most visible and telling effect of this recession has been the fact that it’s putting a ton of people out of work and recent graduates and new members of the workforce are not being hired. The most immediate panacea would be a slew of public works programs that immediately hire laborers and the necessary administration. The objective of these public works programs should be to build infrastructure that is designed for the future and further assists with human development (health care, education, and etcetera).

Our solution to the problem is to find a way to get banks and financial institutions to free up capital and begin greasing the wheels of commerce by releasing money; which should also be accompanied by tighter regulation because these institutions have shown an inability to do the ethical things without have those rules in place. We’ve also suggested a public works program in order to address the immediate effects of the recession. In order to ensure that we’re appropriately addressing the problem we must ask ourselves whether or not of solution addresses only part of the problem, or the entire problem itself. Only having studied macroeconomics in order for me to officially endorse my own plan, I’d need to consult with micro-economists and finance doyens in order to unraveling and understand the full extent of the problem.

Now we need to know if the solution will make the problem worse. As the old adage goes: the road to hell is paved with good intentions; and we don’t want to contribute to the already derisory economy. Now we must ask ourselves what are all of the consequences of our actions – not just the desired ones. Pouring funds into troubled banks to relieve the pressure of their troubled assets, and spending on a public works program will increase the government debt which has the consequence of pushing out private investment. This could become counterintuitive because the whole objective of a bailout package is to get the private sector to begin pushing the economy along and not the public sector. Concordantly, a plan needs to be devised as to how to service the public debt and how wean the economy off of large public expenditures.

The next exploration and question to be asked is: is this the best solution? Unfortunately, in the interest of expediency, sometimes this is the question that is overlooked, or completely ignored because of the sense of panic. If we block the asking of this question then we are no longer approaching the situation from an empowered, skeptical manner. Why the solution proposed is the only solution? Can other solution work with equal efficacy and just as quickly? Hopefully, these questions are asked, otherwise, we lose the benefits that a diversity of minds and schools of thought can bring to the table in order to devise the best solution possible.

So, who’s wrong and who’s right? Without a more intricate knowledge of the havoc the financial crisis has created, and if the public still remains befogged we can’t really say. Before we can begin prophesying the apocalypse or a new golden age we need to combat the world’s spiral of ignorance when it comes to financial matters in order to well-informed and acquainted skeptics.

Good night and Godspeed.

Will Africa Let Sudan Off the Hook?

2009-03-03T02:10:00.001-05:00

By Desmond Tutu
Cape Town.

THE expected issuance of an arrest warrant for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan by the International Criminal Court tomorrow presents a stark choice for African leaders — are they on the side of justice or on the side of injustice? Are they on the side of the victim or the oppressor? The choice is clear but the answer so far from many African leaders has been shameful.

Because the victims in Sudan are African, African leaders should be the staunchest supporters of efforts to see perpetrators brought to account. Yet rather than stand by those who have suffered in Darfur, African leaders have so far rallied behind the man responsible for turning that corner of Africa into a graveyard.

In response to news last July that Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the court’s chief prosecutor, was seeking an arrest warrant for President Bashir for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, the African Union issued a communiqué to the United Nations Security Council asking it to suspend the court’s proceedings. Rather than condemn the genocide in Darfur, the organization chose to underscore its concern that African leaders are being unfairly singled out and to support President Bashir’s effort to delay court proceedings.

More recently, the Group of 77, an influential organization at the United Nations consisting of 130 developing states and including nearly every African country, gave Sudan its chairmanship. The victory came after African members endorsed Sudan’s candidacy in spite of the imminent criminal charges against its president.

I regret that the charges against President Bashir are being used to stir up the sentiment that the justice system — and in particular, the international court — is biased against Africa. Justice is in the interest of victims, and the victims of these crimes are African. To imply that the prosecution is a plot by the West is demeaning to Africans and understates the commitment to justice we have seen across the continent.

It’s worth remembering that more than 20 African countries were among the founders of the International Criminal Court, and of the 108 nations that joined the court, 30 are in Africa. That the court’s four active investigations are all in Africa is not because of prosecutorial prejudice — it is because three of the countries involved (Central African Republic, Congo and Uganda) themselves requested that the prosecutor intervene. Only the Darfur case was referred to the prosecutor by the Security Council. The prosecutor on his own initiative is considering investigations in Afghanistan, Colombia and Georgia.

African leaders argue that the court’s action will impede efforts to promote peace in Darfur. However, there can be no real peace and security until justice is enjoyed by the inhabitants of the land. There is no peace precisely because there has been no justice. As painful and inconvenient as justice may be, we have seen that the alternative — allowing accountability to fall by the wayside — is worse.

The issuance of an arrest warrant for President Bashir would be an extraordinary moment for the people of Sudan — and for those around the world who have come to doubt that powerful people and governments can be called to account for inhumane acts. African leaders should support this historic occasion, not work to subvert it.

Desmond Tutu, the former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.

What is this Church for?

2009-02-24T12:35:00.001-05:00

This is Cape Town.

As the followers of this blog can tell, I am currently in Cape Town for six days as Rev. Brian and Kristen Konkol convened our second in-country volunteer retreat. I would first like to emphasize the beauty of Cape Town and the comely nature of its environs. If you ever have the opportunity to see this little oasis, I would highly encourage you to do so.

Despite being on holiday at a retreat in one of the most beautiful cities in Africa, the brain juices have still been working and a lot of important thoughts have been percolating.
One of the most important questions that have arisen in my head has been the titular query. What is this church for? How do we do what we do? Do we do what we’re supposed to do?

The question was first provoked when our group met with the Afrikaner wife of an ELCA pastor. The brief history of this woman and her family is that they decided to stay in South Africa and fight against the institution of apartheid; her husband, a White American pastor, and his families were also in South Africa fighting against apartheid. The difference between the two was that one was vilified from all side; the Afrikaner community disparaged this family because they “betrayed” their people, and the Black South Africans belittled them simply because they were Afrikaners and despite their political position were part of the problem. The White American and his family were celebrated by their family and Americans for going to South Africa on a white stallion and fighting against the injustice and corruption of the Nationalist government.

This woman’s perspective on the Young Adults in Global Mission was prosaically acerbic. Why does this group of Americans get to come into South Africa and tell South Africans what’s wrong and try to fix it without ever having to look back and analyze themselves and their own problems? People from the U.S. conveniently like to knock on other people’s doors and tell them to how to order their house while our own house is obstinately profligate and untidy.

Americans will go around the world and talk about what’s wrong with this and that; but we won’t address what’s wrong with us. Recently, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice called for war crimes investigations into Israel’s offensive and she was nearly laughed out of the room for her hypocritical call to action. What is our church for? Why don’t our mainline Protestant churches speak out against the injustices within our own society? Is it because they’re afraid of offending somebody and losing some members?

The reading from the ELCSA almanac today was Matthew 13:31-35 which is titled in the Contemporary English Version Bible as “Stories about a Mustard Seed and Yeast.” This is the story where Jesus of Nazareth tells the disciples that the kingdom of heaven is like the smallest of seeds that grows into one of the largest tree, far outpacing the size of any garden plants; the second parable tells us of a woman who divides yeast into three batches of flour and how the bread rises because of this division.

I prefer to focus on the mustard seed parable. The approach I feel the Western church needs to take when listening to this story is that that yes, it’s a wonderful story, but imagine a mustard tree growing to fruition in your garden. It will block the sun from shining through to any of your other plants, and its roots will drain the water from the ground and kill the rest of your garden.
Is this what the church has become to the world? Has a wild boar entered the vineyard of the Lord in this instance and is it the Church? Are we choking off the kingdom of heaven because of our supine and passive behaviors?

On this most auspicious of compositions let us, as a Church and as the people of God, take this opportunity to list, as comments of this post, the injustices we see in the world. Sometimes, we, as Americans, have this ostensible desire to peremptorily truncate conversations of “sensitive” subjects. There are subjects where we know that somebody will be offended because it’s clear that somebody is doing something they shouldn’t be doing and we don’t want to hurt their feelings so we countenance and aver obdurate and hardhearted actions that we know are antithetical to the kingdom of heaven.

Please - I encourage all of the readers of this blog to post, anonymously if desired, to tell each other what the injustices of this world are that the Church needs to address.

Good night and Godspeed.

The Shaken Faith of a Missionary

2009-01-28T09:04:00.002-05:00

This is Johannesburg.

Recently I went through a rather difficult time in my faith. Around me I heard people constantly proclaiming that something that happened was God’s will, and that God willed this and God willed that. I really struggled with all of these “God wills it” statements because of the context that I live currently live in.

I live in a context of approximately 40 percent unemployment, the highest HIV/AIDS infection rate in the world. I see things that most people in the U.S. only read about – people who live in extreme and moderate poverty ($1 or less a day and $2 or less a day respectively). When you see conditions of life that make you weep at night – how can you give credence to the statement “God wills it”? How can make the statement that “God wills it” when three in ten people you meet in South Africa have HIV/AIDS?

The coming Sunday is Transfiguration Sunday, a Sunday that my human logic struggles with, and at times simply glosses over because my mind cannot grasp it as a reality. To be completely honest, after hearing the story and in light of what I just shared with you it really made me teeter towards disbelief in many ways. Hopefully you’re not worried that I would have become an atheist and completely denied the existence of God; but rather you should’ve been worried that I would have flirted with becoming an apostate – knowing that God exists and consciously rejecting Him.

As I pondered and pondered, and desperately sought salvage my Christianity I think the answer hit me like a coup de foudre. The transfiguration is illustrative of God’s greatest miracle – becoming human. In many ways, God is trying to show humanity that we are the answer to our prayers. Humans are capable of turning this world into the Kingdom of Heaven. The disciples Jesus took with him to the top of the mountain wanted to stay there, build houses, and worship Jesus as this divine incarnation along with Moses and Elijah. Jesus told them to stop look towards the sky and trying to have this mountaintop experience, and rather turn their noses towards the ground, to the lowliness of humanity and realize that’s were their work lied.

Jesus showed Peter, John, and James that he could come in the full glory of God with the act of the transfiguration; and yet he told them to turn around and toil in a hard, unjust world full of sadness and sin. To me, Jesus told the disciples that they did not need a creature in sparkling white clothes to come as a blinding flash of light to bring justice to this world – they needed each other, they needed faith that God was with them in the splendor and squalor that is their humanity. To me, the answer to our prayers isn’t always skyward, but is sitting next to us, is sleeping halfway around the world, is a child yet to be born or an elder than has long since blessed the face of this world.

Did the Transfiguration really happen? I don’t know. I mean, clearly Matthew’s gospel says that Matthew was not there, so how would he know – especially since Jesus told Peter, John and James not to tell anybody. I don't know if it really happened, but I do know that in a masterstroke of divine providence it's the story I needed to hear.

Good night and Godspeed.

And we're back!

2009-01-04T10:10:00.000-05:00

First and foremost, please allow me to mollify all of those who haven’t heard much from me in the past month or two and assure you that I haven’t been interdicted from mediums of communication here in South Africa. My program has been quite busy and time consuming, and then during the festive season, I needed to take time for myself and amble aimlessly through life for a couple of weeks. Ergo, please accept my written words of contrition for my prolonged absence from this blog.

This is Johannesburg.

Very briefly, I just want to share with everybody one of the highlights of my time here in South Africa: my very first Kids’ Week. Kids’ Week is day camp orchestrated by the Lutheran Community Outreach Foundation for children aged 6-13 in Hillbrow and the surrounding areas. This Kids’ Week assiduously marked the tenth anniversary of Kids’ Week in Hillbrow. The primary objective of holding Kids’ Week is to provide a safe and inviting environment for children in the concrete jungles of central Johannesburg from a Christian perspective. The Christian affiliation of Kids’ Week, however, does not preclude any children from participating in the week.

As a member of the coordinating team, I had the unique perspective of assisting with the administration and operation of every aspect of the entire week. This Kids’ Week was the largest yet, as we had to find a way to accommodate over 500 children and co-workers. The average day consisted of serving morning tea (a sure sign that the British Empire was once here) which consisted of like cookies and juice, morning games, ministry time, lunch, and then afternoon activities which varied from soccer to poetry and everything in between.

My favourite part of the week, however, came on the last day. We took these children on the annual march through Hillbrow. For those of you who have followed this blog, you’ll understand the type of environment that Hillbrow is – a moribund inner city neighbourhood that has been relatively neglected and left to the devices of less than desirable elements of society at times. So imagine over 500 children singing, dancing, and marching through this neighbourhood. This was their way of saying Hillbrow and its future belongs to them. All of the obstinate elements in Hillbrow that occlude its transformation were served notice.

The challenge that we, as a society, now face is to ensure that the probity of these children is sustained, nurtured, and approached with the appropriate gravitas that we actually learn something from these children. The children of Hillbrow have spoken in many ways as to what they want now – will we behave in such a way that their concerns are neglected and their environs influence them; or do we equip them to be the architects of their lives?

Can we demand the same things for the children of Hillbrow that we demand for our own? Or do we countenance the indigence Hillbrow and relegate its children to lives of penury or worse?

After asking all of these questions I implore you to ask were your Hillbrow is. South Africa is half a world away, and although it deserve our attention, where can we make these differences locally?

Good night and Godspeed.

My time in Hillbrow

2008-12-03T07:46:00.003-05:00

This is Johannesburg.

Recently I was asked the write a brief article for the Lutheran Community Outreach Foundation's bi-annual newsletter concern my time in Hillbrow up to this point. The following post is that article.

When I arrived in South Africa, I was at Pietermaritzburg for orientation. Many people there were extremely excited that eight young adults from the US would be here for the next year. Even more exciting for our hosts was discovering our placements. Eventually they’d get around to asking me where I’d be and I would tell them very plainly – Hillbrow.

The reactions were perfunctorily ones of shock and dismay. Some even said they would go as far as to ask my country coordinators to find me a new placement site.

What I have found in Hillbrow is that the physical surroundings do not reflect the hearts and minds of the people that live here. The people I have encountered in Hillbrow are just like the people in Sandton, and my home in the US. The people of Hillbrow want the same things as everybody else; they want a good education for their children, they want to feel safe and secure in their homes, and they want the opportunity to partake the unprecedented opportunities available to South Africans today and tomorrow.

Seeing society neglect this neighbourhood causes me great umbrage, yet at the same time I hope that I am able to see the probity of God’s call and God’s vision for Hillbrow. This is not the Kingdom of Heaven, yet if we each work towards the Kingdom it can become reality.

Good night and Godspeed

Expectations

2008-12-02T12:26:00.000-05:00

These are the Drakensberg Mountains.

As a political scientist and economist I’d like to take this opportunity to discuss expectations, both here in South Africa and in my home, the United States.

Since the end of apartheid, many economic opportunities have opened up to the Black community, so much so that the small yet rapidly growing black middle class have been given the moniker “Black Diamonds”. This group is reaping the benefits of economic growth begun under former President Thabo Mbeki; that growth, however, has been a veneer for the majority of South Africa because it has been jobless growth.

The African National Congress (ANC) has delivered many opportunities for the Black Diamonds, but has left innumerable South Africans behind since 1994. The institutionalised divide between Blacks and Whites in pre-1994 South Africa has yielded to a new more painful divide in society: the gap between upper and lower income Blacks. What is a social democratic government for if it is exclusive in distributing its benefits?

In development economics South Africa is commonly looked at as the economic powerhouse and engine of the African continent. So goes South Africa, so goes the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. In 2007, the Institute for Race Relations found that the number of South Africans living in extreme poverty (less than $1 a day adjusted for purchasing power parity) in 1996 was 1.9 million, in 2005 the number of South Africans living in extreme poverty was 4.2 million.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime ranked South Africa second for assault and murder per capita and first for rape per capita in comparison to 60 similarly developed countries between 1998 and 2000. These numbers are significantly higher than before 1994.

The question is one of expectations. The United States has recently elected a new president (I don’t know if you heard...) and the majority of the U.S. is agog and indeed the world is convivial at President-elect Obama’s election. Just as South Africa was fond of the ANC’s rise to power, so too is the U.S. of our new president but let us always approach politics from our mutual Christian perspective that much work is to be done. I, like many Americans, love what my new president represents, but I expect many things from him.

Let us always approach those in power with a critical mind, and ensure that our policy platform is one that is consistent with the Kingdom of God, and not simply that of a man or political party; a platform that finds poverty to be unacceptable, a platform that realises that there is much injustice in this world that needs to reconciled.

Our goal should be to foster an environment in which injustice is unjustifiable; if we live in a land and time of plenty, then that promise should be fulfilled for the greatest of society and the least of society. Recently, my pocket was picked for about 50 rand (less than $5) at a grocery store. In hindsight, I think I know who did, when they did it and how they did it. I also feel certain that I know why they did it: because they were hungry. Although being a victim of crime is not a pleasant experience, for some reason I am not angry; their crime was justifiable because we live in a time of unprecedented economic prosperity and they have been excluded from that for some arbitrary reason, and without their input.

What is our expectation, as Christians, of our government and our economic systems? Many people say that the government should have no role in the redistribution of wealth, the payment of remittances or, by extension, the alleviation and eradication of poverty. My question to those people is why not? God has placed a serviceable tool in our midst to work towards the Kingdom of Heaven and some people do not want to use it? How do we answer for that when we stand before our creator?

Good night and Godspeed.

Full time for the Springbok?

2008-11-18T10:23:00.005-05:00

By Mohammad Allie

BBC News, Cape Town

In the face of intense political lobbying, the South African Rugby Union (Saru) has finally decided to replace the 102-year old emblem of the national team, the Springbok.

But officials are still hammering out exactly what will be used instead, with Saru calling for a compromise emblem that would see the King Protea - South Africa's national flower - emblazoned on the left of the jersey and a smaller springbok on the right.

Given South Africa's traumatic, racially divided past it is hardly surprising that apartheid-era symbols, emblems and names are still highly contentious issues.

For many black people who suffered under apartheid laws that condemned them to a second-class existence, place and street names, emblems and monuments can be a stark reminder of a painful past.

Nelson Mandela famously donned the Springbok shirt in 1995.

They say the Springbok emblem represents a continuation of dominance by the Afrikaner community and white supremacy.

They point to a statement by the late Danie Craven, former president of the erstwhile whites-only South African Rugby Board, who said blacks would never be allowed to wear the Springbok jersey because they had their own symbols.

Several incidents of racism against black supporters at rugby venues around the country have also highlighted problems still facing a game which is a great source of Afrikaner pride.

While all South Africa's other national teams now use the King Protea as their emblem, the Springbok, representing a graceful, fast and elegant antelope, retained its place as the rugby symbol largely due to former President Nelson Mandela's unequivocal endorsement when he famously wore the shirt during the team's historic World Cup victory on home soil in 1995.

Yet the debate is not clear cut along colour lines.

'Shooting the Springbok'
Several leading and influential black people including Nobel prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former Saru President Silas Nkanunu and star winger Bryan Habana, who was voted the International Rugby Board's Player of the Year in 2007, have all come out in support of retaining the Springbok.

"I support the retention of the Springbok and I pray we will look for better things to fight over," said Archbishop Tutu.

Bryan Habana has said he is proud to be a Springbok

Mr Nkananu, who served as head of rugby between 1998 and 2003, was more forthright, saying the transformation of rugby from an Afrikaner-dominated sport to one that represents all South Africans will not change with the "shooting of the Springbok".

"The removal of the Springbok will not change the fact that enough resources aren't ploughed into the development of the game," he said.

"Rugby is not being played in many black schools where it used to be the case. You can address transformation through support of schools and clubs."

Habana said he had "grown up wearing the Springbok on my chest".

"I'm very proud to be called a Springbok and proud to be called South African," he said.

'Oppressive'
The vast majority of white people support the retention of the Springbok.

But Luke Watson, who represented the team during the Tri-Nations series against Australia and New Zealand, caused a major uproar in October when he allegedly told a private rugby gathering at the University of Cape Town that the Springbok jersey made him want to vomit on it.

"I have grown to understand the culture, to understand what the Springbok represents and I have become even more accustomed to the oppressive nature of the Springbok toward a majority of the people in this country," Watson was widely reported as saying.

Watson's father Cheeky sacrificed an opportunity to play for the whites-only Springboks in the 1970s, opting to play for a black union instead as a gesture of support for the anti-apartheid struggle.

The latest furore was stoked by a comment from Butana Komphela, the controversial chairman of parliament's Sports Portfolio Committee, who told a national Sports Conference in October that there could be no negotiation on the future of the Springbok.

"The Springbok divides us," he said.

"We have a responsibility to unite our country on one national emblem."

Beyond rugby
The compromise idea of combining the Springbok and the King Protea has already received support from former Education Minister and ANC stalwart Kader Asmal.

Calling the anti-Springbok posturing by politicians "old-fashioned, anti-reconciliation and counter-productive to fashioning the united non-racial society we yearn for", Mr Asmal said the Springbok now belonged to all South Africans.

Saru President Oregan Hoskins is due to put his case to Sports Minister Makenkhesi Stofile on Tuesday, though a final decision is not expected yet.

It is believed even if the Springbok were to be abandoned, it would take at least nine months for that decision to take effect as jersey stocks have already been ordered that far in advance.

A paradox of the debate is that several non-racial sports bodies used the Springbok head as their emblem during the apartheid era, while the Protea was the symbol of a discredited coloured (mixed-race) national rugby team used by white sports authorities in an attempt to break the international sports boycott.

The future of the Springbok goes beyond the sport of rugby, and when the protagonists discuss the future of the emblem, issues of reconciliation, commercial marketing and South Africa's overall transformation will have to be carefully considered before a final decision is reached.

Thanksgiving

2008-11-16T15:36:00.003-05:00

This is Johannesburg.

As the United States perfunctorily approaches the holiday that is second in its ‘American-ness’ only to the Fourth of July it is my sincere hope that my assiduous efforts through this blog, and my conversations with colleagues, peers and family back in the US will bring new meaning to the word Thanksgiving.

It is my hope that this word is still serviceable and relevant here in the twenty-first century, and that time has not relegated it and its meaning to the realm of the moribund.

The first question that we should ask is what we have to be thankful for. What has God blessed us with in our lives? Importantly, however, we must discern what God has blessed us with in our lives and what is ancillary and superfluous to those blessings. Has God blessed us with unprecedented economic prosperity in human history, despite a looming recession, so that we may enhance our own material wealth? Alternatively, has God blessed us with an opportunity to help the poor and suffering in this world with the most powerful tools we’ve ever seen?

The congregation at Orlando East in Soweto

Ergo, the meaning of Thanksgiving is revealed as thankfulness for the means God has given us to ameliorate this world into the Kingdom of Heaven; whilst our thankfulness is expressed through giving that is oriented towards God’s Kingdom. Thanksgiving without consideration for others, or the vital altruistic actions that are implicit in the word is not truly thanksgiving; but is a surfeit of gluttony, overindulgence, and is demonstrative of a poverty of spirit and love.

I hope that the holiday we celebrate, as the wealthiest nation ever, is not a simple veneer of thanksgiving, but that we, as the body of Christ, give it the meaning that it so richly deserves. Will we choose to simply enjoy an tremendous meal with family (for whom we are, of course, thankful), watch American football, and fall into our systemic food comas or will we be able to reflect on what we are truly thankful for and how our giving should correspond and be reciprocate our thankfulness?

Good night and good luck.

Capitalism: feast or famine

2008-11-08T03:44:00.000-05:00

This is Johannesburg.

As I’m certain many are aware the world faces a global financial crisis, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since 1929.

Being here in South Africa, a country that unlike the U.S. is not the doyen of capitalism, one of the things that are commonly heard is capitalism’s obituary. As a student of economics, and a consummate American I am oft asked my opinion of this whole thing. Perhaps I am more American that I would like to think, but I find such talk to be pantomime.

Ever since John Maynard Keynes revolutionised the field of economics, every economist worth his weight in salt has known that the market requires varying degrees of intervention. Additionally, none of the intervention that we constantly read about on the part of the various global and national institutions ostensibly will be permanent, nor is it required to be. Every government capitalisation plan that we read about carries with it the exit strategy of eventually selling the shares that the government acquires; the issue in this case is that the timetable is anomalous.

If anything, capitalism will emerge from this crisis stouter, and hopefully more humane. The important thing to remember is that economists acknowledge that the market is cyclical; the role of economists since Keynes has been to mitigate the effects of the troths of the business cycle. That is what we see now, perhaps a little late, but the actions of the world’s governments were inevitable in the long run. We see that fiscal policy, monetary policy, bailout plans, and whatever it takes will be used to mitigate this downturn in the economy until it begins turning into a peak.

Capitalism is sick, but far from death.

Good night and good luck.

Mission is OUR responsibility

2008-10-31T14:18:00.007-04:00

This is Johannesburg.

As I become acquainted with my new surroundings a new culture I am learning one of my favourite parts of any culture – sport.

In the United States we have our two, very unique sports: American football and baseball. Here in South Africa I am learning to love two similar, yet global, sports: rugby and cricket.

Now, some of you are probably reading this and wondering what sport has to do with the title of this blog post. Well, I’ll tell you! When the Young Adults in Global Mission (YAGMs) where in Chicago for our domestic orientation we listened to a lecture from Winston Pernaud, who is a professor at one our prominent Lutheran seminaries. Rev. Pernaud is from the Latin American nation of Guyana, which is also the only English-speaking country in South America. Guyana is also a cricket-playing nation that participates in the West Indies cricket team. Rev. Pernaud taught us a lesson that was greatly enjoyed, however, not fully appreciated until some YAGMs went to their countries (particularly the YAGMs in India, South Africa, and the United Kingdom).

When thinking about mission we need to view it as cricket and not as baseball. Baseball is played from the corner, and you only need yourself to score a run. Cricket is played from the centre and you need a partner to tally runs.

When we perform mission from the corner we are not willing to allow anybody to approach us, except on our own terms, or we turn into the corner and refuse to accept anybody. If we are truly performing mission, then we should be willing to go out to others and allow others to approach us, this is much easier from the middle of the pitch than the batter’s box of a baseball diamond.

Additionally in order to score runs in baseball you don’t need others; it’s nice to have others, but they’re ultimately unnecessary. In cricket you must have a partner to score runs; so much so that the eleventh and last member of the team is unable to bat if the penultimate teammate in the order is out. And so, how do we do mission? Do we do mission in such a way that it’s nice to have the help of others, but that they’re ultimately surplus to requirements. Or, do we look at the other and realise and say “I need you to do this, will you help me?”

Ian Bell of England (left) reacts as South Africa's Hashim Amla (centre) and Neil Livingston (right) makes their runs during the first test at Lord's in London 14 July 2008

When we do mission it isn’t about just going somewhere, depositing what we know and then leaving without receiving anything. This year would mean nothing to me if it were just me coming to Johannesburg as the imperious American, telling everybody here how to be a Christian with ‘recondite’ German-Lutheran theology, and coming home after one year. How indigent in spirit, and love I would be if that was how mission were to be done. In about fifty years, Africa will be the centre of Christendom with more Christians than anywhere else will in the world; what can I possibly teach this beautiful continent that it doesn’t already know? Truly it is the Western world that needs to learn from Africa seeing as how Church numbers in the West are dropping.

I urge you to recognise that mission is the responsibility of every Christian. So often I am lauded and applauded because I decided to take a year of my young life to go to South Africa and be a ‘missionary’; but we are all missionaries. Being a ‘good’ Christian is not reserved for missionaries, monastic orders, or the seminary; being a ‘good’ Christian is for all of us, it is our responsibility, and it’s is what Christ expects of each and every one of us each and every day.

Good night and good luck.

Update: 29 October 2008

2008-10-29T14:47:00.000-04:00

This is Johannesburg.

First and foremost, let me offer my most sincere apologies for not staying on top of updating everybody back home through my blog. Thankfully, our brothers and sisters here in Johannesburg have found many different ways to keep me busy!

In terms of just updating people of my programme over here I’ll start with the last handful of days in September and first few days of October. For that week I was in the province of Mpumalanga (take your time, and pronounce it phonetically) about 15 kilometres outside of Middleburg with the Lutheran Community Outreach Foundation’s Music Centre. Those five days were spent with 27 children (aged 8-14), most whom are string musicians learning and practising their craft.

The time spent with these young people from the Hillbrow area was truly an eye-opening experience. When you know the stereotypes and pre-conceived notions that people approach the topic of Hillbrow with, and then you spend time with these young people you begin to realise the true potential of a neighbourhood like Hillbrow. These young people practise almost daily, and have a deep appreciation for the music they play. Even more of an insight was just watching the children play in a camp setting away from the concrete fortress that is Hillbrow; you begin to realise that the people in Hillbrow are just normal people that have the same desires in life as everyone else. The only difference between someone in Hillbrow and someone in New Albany, Ohio is the circumstances of life that surround them. After the dust had settled, and the bows were packed the camp was a success. These young people had a chance to be children – to play, to laugh, and do all of the things we expect children to do.

After coming back to Hillbrow that Friday, I had to pack another bag for the weekend to go to Bela-Bela in the province of Limpopo for the ELCSA Young Adults League conference. This conference was similar to a synod assembly where all of the diocesan level Young Adults Leagues assembled to elect new Church level executive committee members and to learn from each other about things that were working and not working to bring young adults (21-30) into the Church. Also in attendance at the conference were several of my colleagues from the ELCA Young Adults in Global Mission programme, and it was a nice opportunity to network with them as well on how their placements are going. Despite some logistical hiccups during the weekend, it was a very informative weekend, both in terms of Church life, but also culturally.

Then on 10 October I had the privilege of participating in a seminar with the South African Council of Churches (SACC) at the University of South Africa (Unisa). This conference was about reading the signs of the times and reacting accordingly as a unified Church body as best as possible. The seminar was one of the most intellectual stimulating and draining events I’ve attended thus far. With so many great minds of South African theology, bishops, esteemed reverends, academic theologians, and the like, it’s difficult not to be intimidated, and humbled.

One of the central themes of the SACC seminar was ‘signs of the times’. The SACC is acutely aware that Christ placed the Church on this earth to be involved in bringing about the Kingdom, not to sit by idle on the sidelines and countenance injustice and sin in the world. Reading the signs of the times was not limited to just internal matters of the SACC, ecumenical movement, and its individual churches; reading the signs of the time meant commenting on what was actually going on it the world. Dr. T.S. Maluleke, the President of the SACC, gave his speech on the signs of the times and in it he identified ten signs of the times in South Africa, and they are as follows:

1. Invitation to risk
2. Succession matters
3. The arrogance of power
4. Corruption of the arms deal
5. Battle for power and patronage in and through government
6. Myths and mists of the struggle rhetoric
7. The forgotten poor
8. Citizens and churches abdicating their agency
9. Constantly lying to ourselves
10. The 2009 elections

Now, of course, some of these are contextual to South Africa, but many of them are applicable to our lives in the United States. Are we discerning God’s will in certain situations and speaking up; or are we afraid to risk the disapproval of our peers and colleagues? What are the signs of times in the U.S. that we, as a good and godly people, must recognise and stand up and speak on?

I cannot tell you what the signs of the times are in the U.S., very simply because I am in South Africa. So, please keep me informed, tell me, what are the signs of the times? Where are we, as Christians, called to act as Christians first?

Good night and good luck

What is Christanity all about?

2008-10-07T04:40:00.005-04:00

This is Johannesburg.

I remember being asked that very question in the summer of 2007 when I was reading my Bible early in the morning in rural Tanzania by a soldier in a small village. The question really took me aback at the time because I had never been asked that question by someone who’d never been exposed to Christianity. What do you tell that person out of all the things that people had taken nearly twenty years to teach you when you only have 50 seconds?

I responded to him that he should love God and that he should love his neighbour as much as he does himself (Mk 12:29-31). That was all I could tell him. I wasn’t going to make sure that his beliefs were in line with the creeds, the declarations and documents of the church over the course of 2000 years. All I could tell him were those two simple things.

What is this life for if it isn’t about making this unjust world the kingdom of God?

Love God. Love your neighbour as yourself.

I remembered this story because recently I was at a gathering of young people where we discussed our faith and related topics. Theologically, many of these young people were at the same place; but some were not. Many of these young people seemed to understand Christianity as their relationship between God and themselves. Very rarely, if at all, did anybody’s reflections revolve around anything but themselves. This is simply my opinion, however, isn’t Christianity about more than just you and God; there was an important component that was lacking from their reflections, the other.

As Christians, our relationship with ‘the other’ is just as important as our relationship with God. If our relationship with others were not important, then why would all of the Law of Moses and the Books of the Prophets be based on love for God and neighbour (Mt 22:40)? Even in one of Jesus’ most popular parables, he bemoans the selfishness of his own people who focused on their own ‘holiness’ and praises the life lived for others by the least in society (Lk 10:25-37).

I mention all of this because I generally do not agree with most of the theological minutia espoused at these meetings (many of them being differences between Pentecostal and Protestant Christians), but it is important for us to remember what the core essence of being Christian is – loving God and loving each other. For all of the debates that I, as a more liberal Christian, could have with more conservative Christians the most important thing for both sides to remember is this that even King Solomon believed that nothing made sense, even after knowing everything (Ec 1:1-2). This whole world is not for us to understand because God has placed for too many mysteries in it for human understanding to grasp (Ec 1:13-14).

God does not ask as much of us as we think; simply to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God (Mi 6:8). If we are kind, merciful and forgive one another (Eph 4:32) we will never do anything to be ashamed of and always bring honour to God and Christ (Phil 1:20).

Good night and good luck.

"The Poor"

2008-09-17T04:03:00.003-04:00

This is Johannesburg.

Recently my flatmate, Chris, and I went for a walk around the neighbourhood of Hillbrow. Now our security dossier has deemed it of highest importance that when leaving the Outreach Foundation grounds that we remove all jewellery, mobile phones, and cash from our person; hopefully this will give you idea of the neighbourhood.

If you still require a picture of Hillbrow here you go: if you know the Roberts family and that Grandma Susie lives on Wisconsin Boulevard (if you don't know just imagine the “worst” neighbourhood you’ve been in or heard about) take that space, multiple the population by 40, throw in 90 different languages, and reduce the median income by four-fifths and imagine what the result will be.

Why is it that we are so often bothered by the sight of the poor? What is that we find to be unpalatable about their presence? That is a legitimate question as well; because we do not have a problem with their existence, hence the existence of such a large lower class, but solely with their presence. Are the yearnings, the desires, the dreams, and the very essence of the poor any different from those of the middle-class or the wealthy?

Is it the smell? The look? What is it that when we see a poor it just makes something in our spines shiver and our toes curl? Please do not take this as a “holier than thou” tirade from the “missionary” living amongst the poor; because the truth is that I get the same feeling from time to time. I think the feeling that metastasises through our bodies is fear. But why? What are we afraid of?

The most interesting thing about people after an interaction with a “poor” person is their reaction afterwards. Some people have a legitimate feeling of concern for the human being that just crossed their path. Others use victim language to describe their encounter: “I can’t believe that just happened to me!” As if they are the one who came out worse for the wear. As if they won’t go home to an actual house, be fed, be healthy, be happy.

If you follow this blog regularly, it’s obvious that I could bloviate on this topic for minutes, hours, and maybe even days; but that isn’t useful for anyone. What I’m curious about, and I do hope that posts are made on this question (you don’t have to use your real name), is are “the poor” our problem, and if so, why? Why should we care that Hillbrow/Wisconsin Boulevard/or wherever is the way it is? We don’t live there, we don’t have to go there, and those children aren’t biologically ours, so why should we care?

Good night and good luck.

Welcome to Hillbrow

2008-09-12T10:28:00.002-04:00

This is Johannesburg.

As of 8 September I have officially arrived at my placement site in the Hillbrow neighbourhood of Johannesburg. Hillbrow is a community that is busting at the seams with humanity awash everywhere. I will be staying at the Lutheran Community Outreach Foundation in an apartment complex on the centre’s grounds. It is a homely flat that I’ll be sharing with a young German volunteer named Chris.

The view of the tallest building in SA from my flat

When I reflect on what Hillbrow is and what the Church’s role is here it makes me think to a book I recently read by a prominent member of ELCSA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in Southern Africa). In the suburbs it is very easy to praise God for all that is around is, and for all that we have; but when you enter Hillbrow you ask yourself if God is the god of the suburbs or if God is the god of the city. If Jesus, the rabble-rousing social insurgent, were alive today, where would he be? Would Jesus be with the drug-dealers, prostitutes, homeless, hungry, poor, and marginalised; or would he be with the well-to-do, wealthy, suburban, bourgeois class?

Now, please do not mistake my question as an attack on the wealthy, or those that make money and are comfortable. Making money is NOT a sin; loving money at the expense of other humans is. I hope that all of my friends become wealthy millionaires, if not billionaires one day. I hope that they have so much money that they don’t know what to do with it. I pray for that day so that they may fulfil their own prayers. Remember how we prayer: Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The Kingdom of God is here on earth and we are responsible for bringing it about; I hope they make all of the money they can so that they can give it to programmes like ELCA Global Mission or whatever programme they choose and help “save the world” (yes, I know, very clichéd).

I hope that my time here in Hillbrow will give me insights and lessons that I will never forget and that I will be able to convey and pass on to others. I hope that living on R2000 a month will give me a greater understand as to why people deserve better. I hope that the God we know is a god of the city and hears the call of Hillbrow. Most of all I hope that each of you prays; that you pray the Lord’s Prayer and you really think about each word, that you pray the world, for those you should pray for and those you don’t know you should pray for.

Good night and good luck.

Update: 04.09.2008

2008-09-04T07:10:00.002-04:00

This is Pietermarizburg.

As I approach a special day in my personal history (see the biography to the left) I felt the need to post and keep those who are interested abreast of my situation.

On Monday I shall depart Pietermaritzburg for my service site - the Hillbrow community of Johannesburg - and at that point I'll be able to give everybody a more in depth report. Right now the average day is really just spending time with my host family (who is firmly insistant on packing the kilogrammes on me) in the morning, speaking with prominent South Africans in the service community, and then spending time in the host community.

The most powerful moment of my time here in SA thus far happened yesterday when I was on a combi-taxi going to the Lutheran Theological Institute. On the taxi and man sat next to me and asked me where I was from because he didn't normally see people like myself or my colleague. He asked if we were also staying in the townships. After we answered his questions he told us that it was a good thing that we were simply there because it symbolised that perhaps SA was moving in a more positive direction that people like us would CHOOSE to ride the taxis with the poor and margalised Black population.

I hope that each of us can reflect on that expierence. I hope that each of us can understand the power of a ministry of presence. By each of us simply being somewhere (not doing or saying anything), we can effect the world around us for the better. Be that person in your own contexts.

Good night and good luck.

Safe and secure!

2008-08-28T15:34:00.002-04:00

THIS IS JOHANNESBUG.

On Tuesday, 27 August 2008 at 3 p.m. (local time) I and six other members of the ELCA Young Adults in Global Mission (YAGM) program landed at O.R. Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg where we were greeted by our country coordinators, the Reverend Brian and Kristen Konkol. Unfortunately, one of our travelling companions’ passport and visa did not arrive back from the South African consulate in New York City in time for her to travel with us. As such, she travelled the exact routes we did except one day later; our prayers were with Miss Crystal Hall as she made her trans-Atlantic sojourn by her lonesome.

I would like to thank all of my supporters for everything they have done. Here, on our third day here in Johannesburg, we will depart for the east coast city of Pietermartizburg to continue our orientation for the two weeks.

I hope that nobody is worrying too much; and if you are you shouldn’t be! The generosity of the people is amazing and I can say, with confidence, that we Americans have much to learn from our African brothers and sisters. A number of South Africans have already adopted me as their new son or grandson, and I haven’t even made it to my own personal site yet!

God bless you all. I hope that as I try to align myself to God’s mission here in South Africa that all the people reading this understand that they too are missionaries, regardless of where they are and attempt to align themselves as such.

Good night and good luck.

This is the Countdown. 7 days until deployment.

2008-08-17T23:02:00.002-04:00

This is Chicago.

Some of you may be aware that as of Sunday, August 17 at 1600 local time I officially began orientation for the Young Adults in Global Mission program.

This is a fantastic group of 39 young people from all over the country and from many backgrounds (although many of them hail from the Luther-land that is the greater Minnesota/Wisconsin region); hopefully I'll be able to get them to share of themselves on this blog in the future. The South Africa delegation consists of eight people from all over the country. The other participants are, along with their sites are:

1) Crystal Hall: Pietermaritzburg
2) Alicia Kelly: Cape Town
3) Christina Mauntel: Pietermaritzburg
4) Kelly Schumacher: Mapumalo in the Kwa-Zulu Natal province on the east coast (KZN is the province in which Pietermaritzburg and Durban are located)
5) Matt & Jacinda Shields: Port Elizabeth
6) Amy Swenson: Pretoria

Geography tells us that the sites not on the east coast of South Africa are Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Pretoria; with Johannesburg and Pretoria being approximately 63 miles apart. The country coordinators for the young adults in South Africa are Brian & Kristen Konkol and they are located in Pietermaritzburg that is about 488 miles away from Johannesburg.

With all of those biographical annotations out of the way, I would like to share something that I heard in our evening devotions this Sunday that made me perk up and think of everybody that has so thoughtfully supported me. The pastor spoke of one the major characteristics of love; both the love that God has for each of us, and the love human beings should have for each other.

Listening.

Listening, being rapt, and curious in what a person has to say is a quintessential sign of love. I thought of the fact each person who supports a young adult actually loves the person enough to listen to what they are trying doing and then actually do something about it.

I have thanked those who have supported me numerous times and in various ways, and I just wanted to do that again by thank everybody for listening to me because it truly shows an inquisitive nature that usually leads to love of a fellow human being.

So the lesson I'm trying to take with me is that every person in this world is worthy to be listened to because God listens to their prayers and pleas just as the Lord does for our own. Concordantly, because no man is above God we should each do our best to listen to our brothers and sisters with open ears and an open heart, no matter what the plea is is.

Good night and good luck.

Creative Capitalism

2008-07-31T21:50:00.001-04:00

Bill Gates speaks with Time Magazine about making the free market more humane.

I am because we are

2008-07-29T23:13:00.003-04:00

This is Columbus, Ohio. 18 days until I am to report to orientation in Chicago.

One of the questions I’ve been continually asked as we near the date when I have to report to Chicago is whether or not I’m excited about the forthcoming mission.

My typical response is an oblique and mixed one. I am excited because we are finally approaching that which we have worked towards for so many months, and I am fearful because in eighteen days all that I know will go on hiatus and there will be no respite for a whole year (when you’ve only lived 21 years that seems like a very long time).

I do want to take this opportunity to share more of myself with everybody.

I am excited because my hubris tells me that I am going to save the world; and that is an amazing piece to add to one’s escutcheon. I know (really I hope more than anything) that the work that I’ll do for the next year is what God and the world demands of each of us. If you are not excited when someone tells you that might be saving the world, then you may want to check your pulse.

I am also excited at the prospect of gaining a deeper understanding of myself as a person and child of God. There is a concept, the word coming from the Bantu languages of southern Africa, known as ubuntu.

Ubuntu is the essence of being a human being; I am because we are. No persons can be fully human in isolation; we are human because of the relationships we have with others. The individual and the community cannot be bifurcated, nor should they. When one of us is unable to be all that we are, then the other is unable to all that they are, and the community will suffer as a whole. When a person is living ubuntu they identify with others because they are human beings, understanding that nothing human can be alien to them.

There is no such thing as a self-sufficient, self-made man. A self-sufficient human being is subhuman. Not to demean Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, however, its view of the world is antithetical to a prosperous and peaceful world, where everybody’s real self-interest is served.

I am curious as to what many of you think...is your well-being tied to that of a person you have never met and will never meet? Or do you exist for your own sake, sacrificing for nothing, pursuing your own “rational” self-interest and your own happiness as the highest moral purpose of life?

Good night and good luck.

This is the Countdown. 23 days until deployment.

2008-07-24T16:59:00.003-04:00

This is Columbus, Ohio.

Well ladies and gentlemen, as I'm certain many of you have deduced from the title of this post we're twenty-three days away from when I leave for Chicago and orientation.

Everyday we get closer to the day I get a little more excited, like a controlled flow. As we closer to the date I also wanted to take the opportunity the reflect on something that i won't have close to me for the next year.

My family and my friends.

When I reflect on those two important things in my life I am always reminded of a quote from Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather where Marlon Brando's character, Vito Corleone, asks his movie star nephew if he spends time with his family; the nephew answers "yes," and Brando's answer is something that should be imprinting on our hearts:

"Good, a man who doesn't spend time with his family isn't a man at all."

So, not to preach, but I just want to emphasize to import of spending time with those that you love and that love you. There is no greater gift that God has given this world than love; and one of the most cogent examples of that is a person's family and close friends.

Please, love and cherish those who are close to you because you never know when they won't be near you for you to show them how you feel.

Good night and good luck.

The Rainbow Nation, 14 years later.

2008-07-18T23:41:00.001-04:00

The BBC's in depth analysis of South Africa in a post-1994 era.

Contact details

2008-07-18T21:49:00.003-04:00

This is Columbus, Ohio.

As some of you may know, I will be posted in Johannesburg for the coming year. Some of you may also know that I will be working with the Lutheran Community Outreach Foundation and living in a studio apartment in the community centre. The following is some contact information for the centre.

Physical address:
30 Edith Cavell Street
Hillbrow, South Africa

Postal address:
PO Box 17098
Hillbrow 2038
South Africa

Good night and good luck.

Financial Update

2008-07-17T19:37:00.003-04:00

This is Columbus, Ohio

I have some big news to share with everybody

Because of everybody’s generosity and commitment, this candidacy is in a strong financial position.

Thus far supporters like you have raised $6,522.

But more impressive than the number is how you’ve done it. Ordinary people have contributed to this mission. The average donation was $86.

But we can’t stop now.

The crucial financial deadline is approaching: July 31st.

The total cost for the Church to sustain one associate is $10,000, and they ask us to raise $4,000. The more support each associate raises, the more associates and missionaries the ELCA can send all over the world to do God’s work.

God is counting on each of us to do his work in accordance with the gifts he deemed fit to bestow to us. I hope that you will support both myself, the ELCA’s Global Mission office by donating toady.

Cheques should be made out to St. Philip Lutheran Church with my name (Edward Johnson) in the memo line. They can be mailed to 1506 Long Street, Columbus, Ohio 43203.

Neither I, nor the Lutheran Church can do God’s work without you. Thank you for all of your support.

Good night and good luck.

(Red)y Eddie?

2008-07-16T22:28:00.003-04:00

This is Columbus, Ohio.

I was recently thinking about how to raise sustained and continued support for my mission over the coming year. As many of us are aware, it is often times difficult to get people to change their learned behaviours suddenly; and so I was attempting to think of a way to have sustained support without asking too much of people.

And suddenly it hit me.

I picked up my iPod (like any typical twenty-one year old), switched over the BBC Africa podcast, and realised the answer was in the palm of my hand.

(RED) is the answer.

(RED) was created by Bono and Bobby Shriver to raise awareness and money for The Global Fund by teaming up with the world’s most iconic brands to produce (PRODUCT)RED branded products. A percentage of each (PRODUCT)RED product sold is given to The Global Fund. The money helps women and children affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa.

(RED) has teamed up with Motorola, American Express, Gap, Emporio Armani, Converse, Apple, Hallmark, Dell, and Microsoft to provide special (RED) products that cost the same as their like products, except portions of the sales go toward The Global Fund.

This is an easy way to affect change in the world; all that is required is being an informed consumer. Mohandas Gandhi said that we must be the change that we want to see in the world; this is one of the easiest to show your commitment to my year of service that you have graciously supported.

I will be working with the Lutheran Community Outreach Foundation, which is in the epicentre of a country with extremely high incidences of HIV/AIDS. I hope that as I am in Africa for the next year I will be able to share with you the difference that I am making in the world; but more importantly, I hope that I will be able to tell everybody in the US about the difference you are making by being an informed citizen of the world and a child in the Kingdom of God.

Please visit http://www.joinred.com/ to learn more

Good night and good luck.

South Africa at a glance

2008-07-06T23:51:00.002-04:00

The following are links to commonly cited sources by academics and others for information on the Republic of South Africa.

The Central Intelligence Agency's profile of SA

The World Bank profile

Am I my brother's keeper?

2008-07-05T12:58:00.004-04:00

A church service at an ophanage in rural Tanzania in June 2007

This is Columbus, Ohio

Throughout this process of fundraising and preparing for my journey to South Africa I have constantly been challenged to answer the question: why SA, why not stay here in the US where we have our own problems that require our dedication and strength?

I like to begin where most inspiration should come from – the Holy Bible:

“(27) Do all you can for everyone who deserves your help. (28) Don’t tell your neighbour to come back tomorrow if you can help today.” – Proverbs 3:27-28

I also like to share my own personal experience as well. In the summer of 2007 I had the distinct privilege of accompany Bishop Callon Halloway of the Southern Ohio Synod to our sister synod in Tanzania, the East of Lake Victoria Diocese. Upon travelling there I gained a new definition and perspective on what the meaning of the word “neighbour” is. Our neighbours are each and every one of God’s children placed on this planet, not just those that live in our immediate vicinity, look like us, or talk like us.

I also believe that the issues of sub-Saharan Africa (although not exclusive) are absolute and extreme problems, whilst the issues of the US are of a relative nature. The problems of Africa are so extreme that basic life needs cannot be consistently met.

I hope you’ll allow me to close with another quotation from the Holy Bible.

“(9) the LORD asked Cain, “Where is Abel?” “How should I know?” he answered. “Am I supposed to look after my brother?”

(10) Then the LORD said: “Why have you done this terrible thing? You killed your own brother, and his blood flowed onto the ground. Now his blood in calling out for me to punish you...” – Genesis 4:9-10

Good night and good luck.

This is the Countdown. 42 days until deployment.

2008-07-05T03:04:00.005-04:00

Johannesburg skyline, with the Hillbrow Tower peaking above.

This is Columbus, Ohio.

Four days ago, July 1, my delightful country coordinators – Brain and Kristen Konkol – realeased the site placements for the eight members of the South Africa detachment of the ELCA’s Young Adults in Global Mission program.

Yours truly will be in the inner-city community of Hillbrow in Johannesburg for the coming year.

In the 1970s Hillbrow was designated as a “whites only” area of SA, but after the fall of apartheid in the mid 1990s quickly became a racially diverse community. Unfortunately, in the face of an hasty spike in population coupled with lack of planning and poor infrastructure the HIllbrow community quickly fell into an urban slum. Regrettably, many of Hillbrow’s residents live in abject poverty with high incidences of HIV/AIDS, abuse of women, refugee influx from all over Africa, drug solicitation, and indiscriminate criminality. Depraved

The Lutheran Community Outreach Foundation is a non-governmental organisation located in Hillbrow that seeks to influence its immediate surrounds for the better. The four primary objectives of the Foundation are:

1. Be involved in community building initiatives,
2. Facilitate healing through personal development,
3. Encourage self-belief by imparting skills,
4. Engender hope and positive values.

The Foundation serves a part of a greater urban regeneration program of Johannesburg, which will hopefully bear fruit as SA seek to ensure its prolific economic success on the African continent will be disbursed equitably across all societal cleavages. Economic development classes at universities around the world discuss this type of work everyday; however this is the Aristotelian, “boots on the ground” work of helping people build themselves up and buttressing them with the necessary support that they may thrive.

A crucial financial deadline is quickly approaching, however: July 31st.

Your prayers, love, and support have taken us thus far, and I am extraordinarily grateful for that. I, however, need your help to do God’s work. The ELCA Global Mission Office requires each of its associates to raise $4,000 as part of this program to contribute to the total cost of $10,000 to sustain each of its associates.

Please support Global Mission and myself by donating $30 today (the cost of one day of service).

The ELCA is placing young adults in nine countries this year: Argentina, Uruguay, India, Israel, Keyna, Mexico, Slovakia, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.

God is counting on each and every one of us to do his work in accordance with the gifts bestowed upon us. Please donate today.

Cheques should be made out to St. Philip Lutheran Church with my name (Eddie Johnson) in the memo line. They can be mailed to 1506 Long Street, Columbus, Ohio 43203. Thank you, in advance, for you donation.

Good night and good luck

Mea Culpa

2008-07-05T02:53:00.002-04:00

I must take this opportunity to apologise profusely to everybody for the nuisance recently created involving this blog.

Unfortunately, in attempting to consolidate all of my random account in cyberspace eddiejohnsonsblog.blogspot.com is no longer in existence. Henceforth, jamesedwardjohnson.blogspot.com will replace it.

Once again, I apologise for my lack of savoir-faire when it comes to PCs and the internet.