Preparations - December 2007 (1)
Dec 23, 18:02
:: This blog will be simulcast on the new V-Blog ::
I’ve been spending a lot of air time recently touting my need for funds for my work in V-Land next year and thought it would be nice to jot down a few notes on my other preparations if only for my own future reference.
The thing I’ve been doing for the best part of this latter half of the year is chatting with friends and contacts who have been involved in overseas or university work before. This has taken quite a range of forms, from just chatting with mates and family who’ve grown up OS and the sort of feelings I’ll have settling into new cultures; to meeting with senior co-workers who have similar gifts to me and how I can hone what I’ve got to serve God; to catching up with well-known and respected missios and church leaders for ministry ideas, advice, and (the occasionally controversial!) coping strategies. I think in the long run this may turn out to have been the most fruitful preparation time as my eyes have been opened to new challenges I’ll face, opportunities I’ll have, and given lots of ideas to integrate into the stuff I’ll be doing in Vanuatu.
The thing I’ve done the most of in the past month (aside from stressing over the letters some of you will be getting in the mail any time now) is reading. There’s been some more general theological reading to stretch myself now that I have a bit more time and brain-power to spare: Resurrection and the Moral Order (O’Donovan); Recovering Theological Hermeneutics (Zimmerman); finishing The Cross of Christ (Stott); and keen to get started on Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross (Boersma); and Reflections on the Bible (Bonhoeffer). More closely applicable to the next months has been some mission-oriented reading. The general consensus amongst a lot of my missionary friends is to be wary of overdoing the missiology before you have a solid grasp of the culture, so I’ve limited myself to two books by Elmer. He’s one of the more respected authors on books that deal with developing cross-cultural skills. The first one I read, Cross-Cultural Connections was openly written for a North American reader, and apparently one with very little multicultural experience, but had some pearls of wisdom especially to do with learning how to deal with and appreciate how different cultures teach and learn information. This was illustrated in comparing typical ‘Western’ preaching – which prides itself on linear logic – with ‘Two-Thirds’ preaching such as might be heard in a central African context – characterised by repetition and ‘spiralling’ logic. The second, Cross-Cultural Servanthood was actually the first book on mission recommended to me, and while I haven’t got very far in it as yet, it promises to challenge the little superiority complex I’m sure lives in all of us Sydney evangelicals ;-)
As well as those more practical texts, a book that I’ve found very encouraging is Piper’s Let The Nations Be Glad. Its exegesis is quite heavily based on Desiring God and its sequel, but its raw passion and exhortations to prayer and suffering for Christ’s name have been a welcome balance and refreshment to the more calculated planning I’ve been doing.
...Looks like I had more to say than I thought, so I’ll leave it there and come back with Part II tomorrow.
