Cultural Surprises!

Surprises in other cultures are a part of serving in other countries.  Last Sunday, March 25, 2018, we traveled with our new missionary friends, David and Sylvia Potter, to an area where there is a
fairly new Nazarene church plant.  This church plant ministers to family members who are from the nearby island of Tanna, an archipelago country in the South Pacific.   This island is located about 140 miles from where this large family lives.  You can fly there or take a ferry there; although, rough seas can make bookings very unreliable.   This tribal family church that we visited has lived in this area for 35 years, but they own a little land back in Tanna, and someday, they will return there.  For now, their jobs are here in Vanuatu and their children are enrolled in a local school.

David Potter preached from Isaiah 55, " Come, all of you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come..." in Bislama. 

As in other churches, there was no guitar, but the voices of the members made some beautiful music!  

"...You can have all this world,..."

Caught:  Reading God's Word!

"Give me Jesus, Give me Jesus, Give me Jesus.
You can have all this world,
Just give me Jesus."  (Jeremy Camp)

Some cultures just don't want the world.  This is a baffling concept for the affluent Western and European culture to grasp.  "Blessed" can travel two different have and have-not paths:   



Their Culture:                                                        Our Culture:

• They feel blessed when their kids can afford school while we feel blessed when our kids make the LaCrosse team.
• They feel blessed when all the tin stays on their home during a storm while we feel blessed when our kitchen pipes don't freeze.
• They feel blessed when they have a black kettle in their lean-to kitchen while we feel blessed when we have a state-of-the-art outdoor kitchen.                                Ouch!  Why is it that we measure what we have only after seeing what we perceive to be"the lacking" in others' lives?   Through our Mission Corps assignments, we have seen severe poverty;  yet, we have not seen abject poverty.  We have seen cultures without; yet, with!  We have seen people exactly poor; yet, with perfect hope.  We have been in cultures that don't know they lack.   We (probably not you) are guilty of placing our comparative grid of everything over their grid of nothing. And, our heart has opened our ears to Jeremy Camp's song, "Give Me Jesus."  The churches we visit in the jungle bush are true definitions of New Testament churches: the people! 

A World of Intersections

Wednesday morning, Jim and I
decided to walk to the town center, which is a little further than 2 miles from our apartment.  Two miles should take 30 minutes...or less, but we arrived in town about 2 hours later.  This island is a melting pot of cultures, and we are always looking for ways to be stirred into the pot. We saw this sign, La Parisienne Boulangerie.  We made our first unintended stop. It was filled with baquettes, croissants, chocolate croissants, small feta quiches, and one more surprise, a lady from Globe, Arizona! She and her husband are ministers of an active denomination here.  After sharing a little Arizona, we crossed the street, and dropped by a business to visit a friend who had attended our English conversation classes last week.  Twenty minutes later, we were at the far end of Main Street and through a spotless storefront window, we saw a large, shiny rotating cylinder.  We were curious.  We stepped into chocolate air!  There were pallets with sacks of cocoa beans and a welcome from the French chocolatier.  He had come to Vanuatu to start a chocolate business.
We have intersected with people from the states, from Australia, New Zealand, China, Korea, and more.  We have new friends who serve with SIL International, formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics, an organization that finds, develops and documents new languages.  Peace Corps, Wycliffe Bible Translators, and YWAM (Youth with a Mission) are here, each with a different assignment but living in a world of intersections.

Tracking Our First Week

Last Monday night, Jan. 29th, we weren't sure how many people would attend our evening Conversation Groups held at the District Community Center from 6-7:30 pm.   But the curious walked in, and we had two small groups who shared inter-culturally on the theme of Education.
      We plan our conversation classes to include this basic format: a theme, an
icebreaker, a model conversation, conversation prompts, and an interactive activity.  We want to keep the evening moving and they feel the same way.

The following Tuesday night, we had one adequately-sized group who taught us a great deal about Communication Strategies, which are quite different from Western and European cultures.
Wednesday night, we set up, but no one came.  Thursday and Friday nights, we were back in business!