T I ME L I N E

Mission To the Makua of Mozambique

Cultivating Christian Communities
Volume 3 Number 1 January 2004
to pray fervently for Ashers eye to heal. At a point when culture shock was setting in and we were in the midst of such stress with all of our traveling, God answered our prayer of almost two years. We praise God for being the kind of father who has listened to our daily petitions and daily frustrations with this whole situation. We also thank all of you who have been so faithful to pray and encourage us when we felt discouraged. I wont say the journey has been pleasant, but my faith has definitely been renewed in the past couple weeks since Ashers eye healed. I dont claim to understand the mysteries of our prayers any better now than I did before we experienced this kind of (albeit minor) struggle, but I know that God is the Great Physician, and he deserves all praise for this miracle in our lives. (GH)

This week: Kyle & Rolands go to Lichinga for last survey March 14-21 Evaluation Week of All Surveys Decide where to Move & acquire land for building Start Building Start Learning the local, ethnic language

Holton Update
This sure has been an exciting month for our family. We feel like weve been busier the past few weeks than since we left the states. It is exciting to feel like we are getting closer and closer to deciding what town we will live in, moving out to build our houses, and living and working among the people. We have been basically consumed with our surveying tasks- doing research before our trips via e-mail, phone calls and interviews. Then, making the trips where we travel out and meet the people, conduct interviews, and compile all the information. Survey is exhausting but its also interesting to see different parts of Mozambique as well. Some of our biggest

Luke Smith, Asher, Ben Gardner (child of missionaries in Nampula), & Abby Howell news this month is news weve been waiting to share with all of you for the past 23 months. Ashers tear duct has completely healed!!! For two weeks now his eye has drained like a normal eye. It has never looked like this! We were encouraged before we left Portugal when the doctor was hopeful it would heal, but since we have been here in MZ, it has been infected several times because it is so difficult to keep it clean (we cant seem to keep that boy out of the dirt!) I was sharing my discouragement with Kyle a few weeks ago, and we recommitted to one another Our survey covered areas where five people groups live. We surveyed areas that were heavy in Islam & the African traditional religion. We interviewed people asking about their needs and sense of marginalization. I want to highlight a few things that defined the trip. First, I had my first getting stuck in the mud experience. We got stuck in a place that happened to be the most remote, wild area I have ever been in. Put it this way,

PR AY E R S
Safe Travel on These Last Surveys Discernment During Survey & Evaluation Week Our health during this time of transition Team Unity Fundraising the remainder of our start-up fund

The Survey
We survived our first survey trip! We drove back into Nampula last weekend and have been busy giving presentations to the team and evaluating and praying over the information since we returned. Let me tell you what we saw & experienced!! Alan, my teammate, and I spent the first week traveling together. MAF (a missionary aviation organization) flew our families up to a town where we met them half way through the trip.

Lots of Onlookers with no Ideas! animals like lions, elephants, rhinos & monkeys lived in this region, vehicles were said to come down this road only on a weekly or even bi-monthly basis, and the nearest place where we could send word to anyone we knew was a days walk away. (see pg 2)

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What am I doing here, & why? What was a difficult thing to experience soon became an opportunity to learn about the plight of the people in the area. We learned, from the villagers who helped us get out, that four people had already starved in their village this month. They showed us the grass they were eating to fill their stomachs. They were obviously weak with hunger. Most of their day was spent trying to keep the wild animals from destroying what little crops they were trying to grow. They told us that the government had forgotten them. We were able to pay them a good wage for helping us & we also gave them all the food we had before we left the area. men who helped us get out of the mud, we interacted with several other groups who felt isolated because of their locations- some even lived in villages only accessible by boat! We feel like we were able to make some good assessments about the people in this region and hopefully our team will benefit from our information. (KH)

The Survey Cont

We got stuck in the early afternoon and didnt get out of the mess until 24 hours later. As the sun set that evening, I think culture shock hit me. I hadnt seen my wife and son for a week (& we were supposed to pick them up the next morning), parts of the truck were literally sinking into the African earth, I was hungry, there were these gnats that swarmed like the locust of Exodus around my head, & I heard a lot of strange sounds in the bush!!

Well, I slept in the car with one of our guides while Alan and our other guide spent the night in a village an hour behind us in order to recruit some men. The essential culture One of our main priorities on this survey shock question resonated in my mind was to find the marginalized people with buzzing of mosquitoes in my ear, throughout this region in MZ. Besides the

This picture was taken right after we escaped from the tomb of mud. These were the men who helped us.

Reflection: Culture Shock

The topic of cultural shock fills a large section of missionary literature. Psychologists have tracked the phases people go through in culture shock. Support teams are created in order to support missionaries who go through intense culture shock. Supporting churches are told to be aware (or beware!!) of this cycle their cross-cultural workers experience. What is it? In general, cultural shock refers to process a person goes through in adapting to a foreign culture. The shock refers to the life patterns & systems which are foreign to the missionary that create a sense of chaos & frustration to the missionary. We all have scripts which seem natural but are actually learned behaviors. We learn how these scripts arent natural when we cross cultures. What should be an easy errand to the ATM machine turns into a confusing event that breaks our assumptions of how long the process should take, what a line means, what the scripted words are for communicating the desire to get money, and so on. Its like becoming a child again (except you are conscious of the fact that you are not a child!). Recently, I was having a culture shock moment so I wrote an email to some friends and explained how this place was making me ask, Why am I here? I couldnt answer

the question, which was disturbing! The response email I received said this on the first line: Its just life. One thing I can always trust is for this friend to shoot straight! The reply of Its just life really got me thinking. Often culture shock is thought of as something that only happens to culture shifters: missionaries, international businessman, etc. However, perhaps we have missed something when we assign such a human experience to crosscultural workers. Maybe the culture shock of the missionary is a shock that all of us should experience. Maybe, it should be a description of our lives. Maybe its just life, the life of a people called church. Let me make a distinction between two cultures that we often forget to make. Lately, I have been missing my home culture. That is, I have been missing hamburgers, orderly lines at the bank, smooth streets, good music, etc. Technically, this is a description of my national culture. This national culture falls under the broader category of Western culture and contains many scripts, ways of living, & systems of organization that are familiar to me. However, there are other things that I have been missing as well. Besides the obvious family & friends, I miss Sunday dinners and the conversation around the table, special conversations at a coffee shop, songs like Bind Us Together,(pg 3)

No less cultural and political is the very word used to describe the new community of God. Church (the Greek ekklesia) from the fifth century B.C. onward referred to an assembly of citizens called to decide matters affecting the common welfare. A Peculiar People By Rodney Clapp

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Volume 2 Number 9

Page 3 ice cream potlucks that we had in my childhood church in Roswell, NM. Yes, homemade ice cream is an American phenomenon, but what I missed was the act of getting together as a community after worship and sharing food with others. So, there will be different dialects or subcultures of the culture called church all around the world, but they will be able to recognize the commonness they have with others who belong to the same culture base. beliefs, or a internal spirituality. The church is a formed community shaped by practices and speech patterns that resemble the life of Jesus. This culture has a set of ethics and stories that inform and cultivate our lives and our journey through life. Soit should be shocking to us if our primary sense of identity is American or Mozambican. Here, in MZ, people ask me where Im from. My response is usually Sou Americano. But, more fundamentally, sou churchacano!!!! When we see war or injustice, selfishness or inequality, we are not troubled because of our American values, we are troubled because the called out community we are a part of takes the form of Christ, and Christ had a specific response to such evils: the cross. The practices of Jesus are our practices. And these things create a culture of people where the cross is our response to such atrocities. (KH)

Reflection

OUR SPONSORING CHURCH Covenant Fellowship Church PO BOX 8126 Searcy, AR 72145 MZ PHONE (as dialed from the States) 011-258-82-640-016 kyleandginger@ hotmail.com

OUR WEBSITE www.mzmission.org TEAM WEBSITE www.makuateam.org

hearing my grandpa recite his favorite scripture verse around the Thanksgiving table, and so on. Now, one might think, missing hamburgers and hymns from church represent the same thing. I would argue that they are different. I would argue that this second category is our church culture. Of course there is American culture in this second category, but these American attributes are items that the community called church has taken and enculturated into the In these terms, we, the church. church, experience culture Ecclesiology (the study of shock differently. We church) is the study of a experience shock because specific culture. The word, all of us live in a foreign ekklesia (greek work for land. Because our life is church) literally means, enculturated by the called out. In this sense, church which lives out the the church is a community gospel, our surroundings of people called out of their will be foreign. I dont want surroundings to be a people, to argue for a dualistic a unique, strange or peculiar universe of world vs. people. This churched church, because these people have their habits, categories dont properly customs and ways of living describe the complexity of that distinguish them from our lives. HOWEVER, I do those who surround them. want to argue that our Christianity is better The other day, I started described as a culture thinking about homemade instead of a set of

By the tender mercy of our God, The dawn from on high will break upon us, To give light those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, To guide our feet into the way of peace. Luke 1:78-79

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, Gods own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. I Peter 2:9