Deep joy. Intense pain.

Deep joy.  Intense pain.

Those four words encapsulate some of the reality we experience at CBM working through church partners.  On a good day, I can’t imagine a smarter way to do transformative work in our world, other than locating that work in the local churches that are present in nearly all the villages and towns and cities on the planet.  Imagine not having to set up a mission base, or a development office, but instead potentially being able to have each local church be a base.  Imagine sowing seeds of change not just at an external level, but also deep inside the human heart.  When it works well, it is a thing of beauty, and joy results.

But on a bad day, I can’t imagine a more complex way to do good work in our world, because, frankly, you’re not in control when you choose to work through partners.  (C’mon, let’s admit it — we LIKE to be in control!)  Also, if and when something goes wrong in the partnership, what you experience is not just a programmatic failure, but the rupture of friendship and of community.  Hence, the pain.

I was reminded of these realities just yesterday as I met with some of CBM’s individual and church supporters.  I’m travelling in Western Canada with Gordon King, CBM’s Director of Church and Constituency Relations, and we are meeting individuals and churches who partner through CBM with church partners internationally.  We are thanking our supporters and expressing our accountability to them by telling them how things are going.  Along the way, we hear stories of joy, as partnerships between Canada and our international partners bear fruit and produce relationship.  But we also hear stories of pain, when partnerships experience difficulty.

Sometimes it’s hard.  As are most worthwhile things.  But whether the experience is one of joy, or of pain, in the end, if we trust God, the transformation that happens in us is awe-some.

def’n: Unity or agreement of feeling or action, esp. among individuals with a common interest; mutual support within a group.

That’s what the dictionary defines as “solidarity”.  It seems, to me, to be a pretty good description of what a church or mission movement should be.  (Granted, a church or mission movement should be MORE than that, but not LESS.) 

Mission today isn’t about doing things “to” people or even “for” people; it’s about being “with” people and in our with-ness being transformed.  It’s about sharing with one another — sharing resources, sharing relationship, sharing our life in God.  That’s why CBM often calls it “The Sharing Way”.  It’s about solidarity — about working together with common purpose and with common strategies and with mutual support.

This Sunday is Mother’s Day.  It is also “Solidarity Sunday” — a day when Canadian Baptists join together in common purpose with our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world.  This year, CBM’s Solidarity Sunday focus is on maternal and child health in India.  Despite being an emerging economy, India still has high rates of maternal and child mortality.  By standing in solidarity with our co-workers and friends in India, we can make a difference.

More information is here.

Building Peace

There was silence on the other end of the phone line.  I had just told my friend that I was going to Lebanon.  Every time I told someone that this is what I was doing, I was met with a stunned silence.

Followed by, “Really?  Why?”

I must admit that before I first visited Lebanon, in 2008, it had never been on my list of “places I want to visit”, and most of what I knew about it had to do with war and conflict, mediated through the news media.  But by the end of that visit, I had been inspired by what God was doing there and throughout the Middle East.   So much of what we hear in the news from the Middle East is negative; it was good to hear some positive (even, amazing!) stories.

Why is CBM involved in Lebanon?

• Lebanon is one of the few countries in the Middle East that has significant populations of both Christians and Muslims (along with some others).  This means that Christians from all over the Middle East can come to Lebanon to be trained at Arab Baptist Theological Seminary.  By being involved in one country, Lebanon, we can share God’s love throughout many countries in the Middle East
• The Lebanese Baptists are demonstrating what it means to live as a minority-people in a culture that is dominated by another faith-group.  They are not withdrawing from the culture nor are retreating into nostalgia for the “good old days”; rather, with focus and passion they are demonstrating God’s love in a multitude of ways
• The mix of faith-groups in Lebanon mean that it is a laboratory for learning how to live with peace and goodwill with people of different religions.  Without watering down our devotion to Jesus Christ, we grow in our love for the people Jesus loves, regardless of their particular faith-commitment.
• We were invited to be involved in Lebanon . . . by God, I think.  A few years ago a man walked into the CBM office and told us that God was calling him to return to Lebanon to provide leadership at Arab Baptist Theological Seminary.  It was Elie Haddad.  And he asked us if we could help make it happen.  We said “yes”.  (Sometimes God works through ongoing routine planning and work, and sometimes He surprises us with something totally unexpected.  It is wise to be attentive to both.)  Since then, we’ve added Rupen and Mamta Das to our Field Staff team in Lebanon

The Spring issue of “mosaic” magazine is devoted to the amazing things God is doing in Lebanon.  Click HERE to read more, or email communications@cbmin.org to get a free copy (or multiple free copies for you and your friends or church).

Contents: one Earth. Handle with care.

“The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it. The world and all its people belong to him.”  (Psalm 24:1) 

But here’s the deal:  He lent it to us.  To explore, to develop, to garden, to play with, to understand, to dwell in, to name, to protect, to work, to weed, to smell, to taste . . . God made an amazing Creation (how long He took to make it is irrelevant) and then created humans to be His stewards of what He made.

Genesis 1 puts it this way [with my interpolations added in blue]  “Be fruitful [express yourself, be creative, produce, take what is and make more of it] and multiply [um, I'd rather not explain this one . . . ]. Fill the earth [it's all lent to you so don't be reticent about moving into all of it] and govern it [i.e. govern it as I govern you, with love and care and faithful attention]. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground [in the same way that I reign, as the Servant-King, you should reign over all the life I have created].”  This gets unpacked even more in the second Creation story, found in Genesis 2, when God invites humanity to “tend the Garden”; with the Garden being the “centre” of Creation, this is actually an invitation to tend the whole Earth, as a garden.

What an invitation!  Imagine — a whole world given to us!  And so, we care for the Earth, not because we worship it, but because we worship its owner.  We are not “environmentalists” so much as we are “Creation Care-ists” — we care for the Creation as an act of worship and obedience to the Creator.

So, Earth Day (April 22nd) is really Creation Care Day.  But really, every day should be Creation Care Day.

We try to care for creation in our international work at CBM.  When we work with people to strengthen their ability to grow good food, the practices and strategies they adopt are not just good for them, but also good for the earth.  Conservation agriculture practices such as crop rotation (so you ensure the soil gets replenished with adequate nutrients) and minimum tillage and mulching and drip irrigation (all of which conserve and protect moisture content) are activities that unlock the natural fertility God designed into the Earth, so that it produces good food.  By adopting organic solutions (such as using manure instead of chemical fertilizers) and locally-sourced seeds (so that costs are minimized and crop diversity is maintained), Creation is “tended” and people are fed.

Here are three ways you can learn more about how we can care for this Creation that has been lent to us by God:

1.  You can learn more about Food Security — here’s a start.

2.  Learn about one of our key partners in some of this work, the Canadian Foodgrains Bank (a great organization owned by multiple Canadian denominations who cooperate together in food relief and food security).

3.  Learn about A Rocha, a movement of Christ-followers committed to caring for God’s Creation.    This Sunday, April 22nd, is Good Seed Sunday.

When a little plaster and a bit of cement can save lives

I hadn’t heard of Chagas disease until I was on the CBM Board, a few years ago.  It’s not in the “Top 10″ list of well-known diseases, not like malaria or typhoid.  But it’s still an all-too-effective killer, and the thing is, it’s entirely preventable.  Entirely.  Replace the adobe walls and roof with plaster and concrete, and voila, you’ve removed the habitat for the nasty insect that carries the disease.  Then you test the residents of the house for the disease, and provide proper medicines so they can live healthily.

Simple.  Sometimes the work of helping people is not rocket science.  Sometimes all it takes is a little plaster and a bit of cement.

Fighting Chagas Disease is CBM’s Project of the Month for April 2012.  Click here to find out more.

Still not really into the “dying” thing . . .

It’s almost over — this season of learning to die, this season of learning the mysterious reality that suffering can be redemptive and in fact may be the primary pathway to transformation.  That’s kind of what Lent is about, isn’t it?  We focus our attention on the journey of Jesus to the Cross, knowing that He made the journey first so that we may make it in our lives.  I have “done” this season for many years, and, I’m sorry to report that it hasn’t got any easier for me.  Let’s face it, for those of us who live in the Western world, we are addicted to comfort and pleasure and it is EXTREMELY difficult for us to deal with suffering — we want to “solve” it or fix it, instead of trusting the God who is found in it.

Of course, on the other side is resurrection.  Death isn’t the end.   But the deal with resurrection is this:  you need a death to precede it.  And in our own lives, for new life to be born, death needs to precede it.  I know this in my head.  And gradually, over the years, with many journeys through Lent, it is slowly sinking into my heart.  Maybe one day it will dwell more fully there.

I find the quote below by C.S. Lewis to be encouraging — it helps me understand why the battle is so hard:

The real problem of the Christian life comes when people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back: in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in, and so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.

We can only do it for moments at first. But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system: because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us. It is the difference between paint, which is merely laid on the surface, and a dye or stain which soaks right through. He never talked vague, idealistic gas.  When He said, ‘Be perfect’, He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment. It is hard; but the sort of compromise we are all hankering after is harder – in fact, it is impossible. It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird; it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you can not go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

Blessings to you all this Holy Week.  Stay on the journey.

Sometimes you don’t need language to connect

We first saw her peeking shyly from a distance:  a little girl, obviously curious, but a bit overwhelmed as she saw a group of unannounced visitors begin walking through her village.

My wife Cindie and I were in rural India, staying at a hospital guest house near a small town named Serango, in Orissa state.  We had spent the day meeting with ministry partners, and I wanted to go for a walk, so about five of us walked over to the next village with the hospital’s guard. Cindie said:  “He quickly became our  tour guide, showing us his house and the church and the things they grew in the village.  Everyone was curious about us and we began to attract a crowd.  I saw this girl peeking at me shyly from a distance and smiled at her. She beamed. After a minute or two, she had moved closer. By this time, the villagers had started handing us fresh coconuts to enjoy.   At some point in there she had moved closer and I offered her my hand to shake. More smiles. A lot of hand shakes with villagers followed. Then she approached again with the pink rose. It was probably less about me, more about how Canadian Baptists have helped their community over many decades with a hospital and other investments into their lives. The biggest doors had been opened long before I got there.”

One of the things I’ve learned in my time at CBM is that mission involvement builds community.  We get to know the people we work with, and we build bonds of caring and love.  The Canadian Baptist work in Serango has been going on for nearly 100 years, and so multiple generations of Canadians have built deep friendships with multiple generations of Indians.  (If you want to read the amazing story, pick up this book:  http://bit.ly/GYFh5I)

When Cindie and I walked into that village, we were walking on the shoulders of generations of people who co-laboured to demonstrate and articulate the love of God in ways that bring life-transformation . . . and who, along the way, became friends.  That flower was given to all who had gone before us.  It was an honour to receive it.