Some Photos for Friday

Pictures 1 & 2: Last night, the three of us had some friends over. One family—Roger and Vivian Mbotto, with their daughter Jonetta Grace—our tried and true friend Ally, and Joke (again, pronounced joke-kay). Roger is a student at CBTS, and his wife Vivian teaches French. Joke is a teacher and the school registrar. Vivian prepared a chicken-plantain dish that was delicious. Wes thought it tasted a bit like Indian cuisine. It was a great evening. We were able to learn more about “making ‘nayg-gah,’” an expressing that means walking and acting with an air of cool confidence. Our friends described it as the air that comes with wearing new clothes, and were able to cite several students as good examples. Despite this being our eighth month here, we displayed a bit of cultural clumsiness. Our friends had brought the food, so we waited for them to initiate the night’s dining. A couple hours after they arrived, when Ally and I were putting forks out, I discovered that they were hungrily waiting for us to make the first move. We’re still learning.

In the second picture, I think Wes is holding Jonetta like a trophy (no offense, Wes). Jonetta had been stubbornly resisting his requests to let him hold her all year until last night. After I gave her some cookies and sweet drink (Topamplemouse), she became uncharacteristically amiable, dancing to her mom’s singing of “I’m a Radical Girl for Jesus.”



Picture 3: Here’s a shot of the school chapel, taken from the back corner. This week is missions week; consequently, chapel has been in Pidgin (an English-French dialect, I think) in order to help students become more familiar with it. I think Pidgin is spoken more widely in Cameroon than English, thus being more useful for missions. Whatever the reason, the three of us can’t make out a lick of it.

Thank you for your comments, encouraging emails, and prayers. It’s strange to think how soon our time here will come to an end. If there’s anything you’d like to see pictures of, let me know—I’m going to try to “snap” more before we leave.

--tg

“Sir, your zipper is undone.”

Taught a whole class with my zipper down. A new low...

--tg

Next weekend

Here’s a brief snapshot of what’s coming up for us and how you might be praying for us. Next weekend, the 21st and 22nd, Charlie will travel with a small team of other CBTS lecturers and staff persons to Bamenda to conduct more prospective student interviews. He’ll stay overnight and will probably speak with a larger number of candidates than he did a couple of weekends ago (check out his blog post on this below). Doing these interviews is tiring, and, while there are great stories of God’s faithfulness that you get to hear (as Charlie already mentioned below), there’s also some discouragement that can be a part of it too, since so many of the candidates who want to become full-fledged students at the seminary struggle to articulate even the basics of Christian faith. You feel torn listening to them talk. On the one hand, you ask yourself, “Should a person who has trouble explaining – even in simple terms – the Gospel message be admitted to a theological seminary in order to become a pastor eventually?” But on the other hand, you think, “This is exactly why a theological seminary exists – to help people who don’t know much about Jesus and the Christian way of life to become equipped and grounded so that, when they go out into a ministry position, they can do so with a good foundation under their feet.” I’m sure Charlie would appreciate your prayers as he travels to Bamenda and as he interviews prospective students.

While Charlie is away, Tommy and I will get to visit a nearby Presbyterian church on Sunday. One of our students attends this church, and he invited us to come. His name is Shey Zacks, and he’s one of about five or six Presbyterian students at CBTS. Zacks’ family recently went through a gut-wrenching situation. Several weeks ago his wife gave birth to triplets, one of them died shortly after being born, and then she (Zacks’ wife) started losing blood. Hospital bills mounted (they were sky-high for almost any Cameroonian), and Zacks was getting more and more discouraged, with no idea of how he would pay the bills. To make a long story short, Charlie, Tommy, and I got involved with financial assistance, and Zacks’s wife is now out of the woods health-wise, though still of course grieving the loss of one of the babies. As an expression of their gratitude for our help, Zacks and his wife have asked the three of us to name the two surviving babies and to be present at their dedication next Sunday. And the pastor of the church has asked me to preach. He even assigned me texts – something totally foreign for us Baptists! – Psalm 23, Ezekiel 34:1-10, Acts 20:17-38, and John 10:1-10. So Tommy and I are looking forward to celebrating God’s mercy at this service with Zacks and his wife (it will be our first time to meet his wife and see the babies), and we’d appreciate your thoughts and prayers as we travel and spend the day with them.

Thanks for reading and keeping up with us,

Wes

The countdown to the end begins…!

Happy Easter to everyone! (a bit late, I realize). Christos aneste! – The Lord is risen!

This week marks the "beginning of the end" for us -- the final push until the end of the semester and then our saying goodbye to Cameroon. We've already started having conversations about "reentry" into the U.S. -- how it will be great to see friends and family, how it will be oh-so-hard to say goodbye to our Cameroonian friends and CBTS and the culture we've come to know (at least a little) and love (a lot), how it might be strange in all sorts of ways to become re-accustomed to the American way of life we know so well and yet now, from our vantage point, seems strange. You can start praying for our process of leaving. In many ways, we're dreading it. It will be very difficult to leave.

We spent last week -- our mid-semester break -- in a village called Mbingo, just a few hours south of Ndu. There's a Baptist hospital there that specializes in treating patients with Hansen's Disease, and some of our good missionary friends -- Thom and Ellen Schotanus with the BGC -- are helping with construction projects at the hospital and are planting a church nearby. The hospital is situated in a lush valley bordered on all sides by steep cliffs that will soon be filled with waterfalls as the rainy season progresses here. It looks like something out of "Jurassic Park" -- green, majestic, beautiful. We got to stay for three nights in a "rest house" that's owned and operated by the hospital. It sits perched on the top of a hill directly behind the hospital. The house is more Western-styled than ours here at CBTS, with huge windows and a tile-floor kitchen. I have good memories from last week of waking up late, wandering into the kitchen, making coffee, and staring out over the valley down at the hospital and beyond into rolling green hills dotted with thatched-roof huts and zinc-topped mud-brick houses. I felt relaxed, well-rested, and peaceful.

It was a much-needed break for us. All three of us brought stacks of mid-term exams and papers to grade (I think I graded over 50 papers over the three days we were there), so it wasn't the most relaxing vacation. But it was nice to have quiet for a change and be able to get a lot of things done that had been on our “to-do” lists for too long. The doorbell at our house at CBTS seems to ring incessantly sometimes, so it was great to be able to mark exams and quizzes and papers and have some alone time without the usual interruptions.

The break wasn’t all work, though. I was able to do a bit of pleasure reading – I started Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. We hung out with some fellow missionaries: Our friends Thom and Ellen invited us over to their house for Chinese chicken wings that Thom marinated overnight and fried to perfection the next day for us – they were VERY tasty! And we watched some fun movies (The Italian Job, A Knight’s Tale, and Stand by Me). We also hung out with some third-year medical school students from the U.S. who came to the hospital in Mbingo to do very specialized rotations but ended up (as they put it) like the old-time American traveling doctors with the black bags at their side who literally had to treat any and every kind of medical condition their patients experienced. Working in Cameroon, these med school students said, is like stepping back in time. Hearing these guys talk, it made me all the more thankful for another man we got to spend a bit of time with in Mbingo – Rod Zimmerman, a North American Baptist missionary doctor who has literally given decades of his life to providing medical care to Cameroonians. Guys like Dr. Zimmerman are heroes of mine – he works the same long hours as doctors in the U.S. but under much more stressful conditions and without the same compensation.

We got back from our trip in time to attend Easter services at our home church, and it was surprising for me how Easter didn’t seem to be that big of a deal to the pastor and the people at my little village church. A seminary student of mine was the guest preacher. He preached a sermon on reconciliation from 2 Corinthians 5 with hardly any mention of the resurrection. Other than a 4 a.m. processional around Ndutown, which I opted out of, (“to reenact the women’s journey to Jesus’ tomb,” my pastor said the week before), you would never have guessed that it was Easter Sunday at Calvary Baptist Church in Njimtoh. We Baptists could use a bit of liturgical re-tooling, I think!

Let me leave you with a brief snapshot of what’s been happening here recently. This morning around 6:45 a.m., I was in the kitchen making coffee when a student of mine whom I’ll call Emmanuel showed up at our front door. He seemed agitated. His face was twitching, and he was avoiding eye contact with me. He said he wanted to ask me to pray. Two days ago, his sister died while giving birth. The baby survived, but her situation is precarious. People in Emmanuel’s sister’s village are blaming the child for the mother’s death, and Emmanuel was concerned for the safety of the baby. As I write this, he is traveling on a motorcycle on rocky dirt roads into this village in “the bush” to try to reason with these villagers. Several weeks ago, Emmanuel experienced another family tragedy. His cousin, a woman named Josephine, killed her two children. A Peace Corps volunteer friend of ours (not our friend Ally) saw a video clip on TV of this woman, Josephine, in her underwear and with some bloody bruises on her face being dragged out of the back of a pickup truck by an angry crowd. Fearing the worst, our friend flipped off the TV. “Jungle justice,” as they call it around here, can be brutal. Fortunately, Josephine is now safe. She’s in jail, and she’s pregnant again. My student Emmanuel recently talked to her, and she told him that no pastor wants to meet with her. Perhaps they are shunning her as some sort of further condemnation? Emmanuel told me this morning that he wants to go meet with her and let her know that he cares about her. So, I expect that sometime today, after he meets with his sister’s village friends, he will go to the prison near Nkambe and try to share Christ’s love with his cousin who killed her children. I prayed with Emmanuel this morning and gave him some money and told him to use it to provide for his newly-born niece and his jailed, troubled cousin. (Some people believe Josephine may have killed her children as part of some witchcraft ritual; others attribute her actions to postpartum depression.) Would you pray with me about this situation?

The risen Lord is at work here in the rural Northwest province of Cameroon. It is an honor for us to be part of his body here.

Peace,

Wesley

CBTS Potential-Student Interviews

On Saturday we spent the day interviewing potential students for CBTS. There are many of these interview sessions, all over the country. This was only the first of many, and it was almost 8 hours long. Thankfully it took place at CBTS, so we had only a short walk home, where we collapsed afterwards. When it comes to admission, I think that this seminary (as with all, I'm sure) lives in a tension of both exclusivity and inclusivity. On the one hand, a seminary such as CBTS is not an ideal place for unbelievers to come to study. Hence exclusivity, and this needs to be sensitively discerned through these interviews. On the other hand, in these interviews we want to be understanding and sympathetic toward those who simply struggle with articulating how they are believers, even if they may be. So when someone says that they became a believer at their baptism, it takes some drawing out to see whether or not they mean what we perceive. My interviewing group heard this phrase a lot, and often we were surprised to find out that what the interviewee meant was simply, "I became a believer, and immediately thereafter I was baptized" (not unlike Paul's use of the phrase in the NT!). So in the process of interviewing candidates, I found myself having to articulate the gospel in terms that were familiar to your average Cameroonian. It was difficult. I found myself somewhat tongue-tied as I spoke with some twenty different candidates about their conversion and their spiritual growth thereafter. The theologically-nuanced vocabulary of Incarnation, Divine Impassibility, Hypostatic Natures, Soteriology, Imputation, Sanctification, Ecclesiology, Escatology, etc., was non-existent here. It's not that the ideas are absent, but simply that the vocabulary is very different from that of the West. The struggle to articulate precisely what it means to "believe," what it means to "be saved," what it means to "grow," and what it means to "hope" brought out different emphases from those with whom we spoke. Ellen Davis says that "[t]he church would be hugely blessed if its teachers, preachers, and theologians were to suffer a loss of fluency in speaking about how things stand with us, before God." Struggling to discern with each candidate how things stood with them, before God, did just this for us.

Two stories in particular stood out to me as I listened to the stories of these people. Each of them challenged me to be a bit less "glib" in how I speak about the bedrock truths of the faith. I hope they do the same for you.

1.) Our first candidate in the second half of the day came in and sat down, with the help of a friend. He was blind. As we spoke with him, we found that he had been blind since birth. He could read brail with ease, and had jumped through some of the governments most difficult academic "hoops." He was genuine, heartfelt, and very sharp. Only he couldn't see. When we asked him how he came to know Christ as his savior, and he told us an amazing story of how he had always blamed his parents for his blindness. Something they had done had resulted in his condition. God was not even in the picture. But then a pastor had met with him and had shared with him Jesus' encounter with the blind man in John 9. Our friends blindness wasn't a result of his parent's sin, but was God-given so that God's works might be seen. If he believed in Christ, then Christ would open his spiritual eyes to see him. In John 9, the blindness is healed. With our friend, he trusted in Christ and God opened his spiritual eyes (his language). He wants to come to CBTS, so that he can share Christ with other "blinds" (again, his language).

2.) Now, don't let this account be a source of information on Islam. I don't know any Muslims who would agree with how it was represented at this interview, but nonetheless, it is memorable. The man had lived his entire life as a Muslim, having been raised in a Muslim family. A pastor had visited his house, on some kind of evangelism tour. The pastor left his family with a tract—yes, a 4 or 5 page tract—and it landed on this Muslim. Soon after he asked for a Bible from his father. That was a no-go. So he saved his money and bought one himself, which meant that he owned both a Bible and a Koran. He started to read the Bible, and to listen to preachers when they would come to his town. Slowly he began to see what were, in his mind, two vastly different claims from the Bible and the Koran. He told us, "Mohammed says that if you worship him, you will get to go to Mecca, and then you will get many wives forever, and just live with those kinds of things. But the Bible," he continued, "says that if you believe in Jesus, and ask him to take away your sin, then you will go to heaven, and will be with him forever, not with many wives." Jesus is our everlasting possession, I was reminded by this threadbare, toothless, simple man.

Two very different accounts, though one person is central in both: Jesus. And the process by which he came to be central in the lives of these two candidates is different from what I have been used to. I was challenged. And that is why, though physically exhausted, the three of us were refreshed in spirit after the interviews. We saw, again, that the Church is alive in Cameroon, and though it may need help articulating what exactly it means to believe, I found myself thinking, maybe the West does too.

Charlie



P.S. Why this picture, you may ask? Well, this post was first going to be called "A Nice Finish to a Long Day." It was a nice finish to a long day. The sunset was enormous and brilliant. And as always, our token African tree is in the picture. There you have it.

Tonight now you will be gassy

Did she really say that? Yes, she did, with rose petals falling out of her mouth. We have frequent visitors here at residence #5, and as you know, many of them are children. After church this morning/afternoon I arrived at home earlier than Tommy and Wes, and was greeted by a whole slough of children—Suri, Prisca, Kindness, Marlise, Marian—all between the ages of 6 and 10. While we stood around chatting about church and airplanes and my name (pronounced Charlie, not Trarlie), Prisca pointed to one of our wild rose bushes and told me that you could eat the flowers. I only believed her after she had returned with her four other friends, chomping whole roses (see the picture), and smiling big to prove it. A little twisting of the arm, and soon I too was tasting rose buds with the kids. Not too bad, so I ate a little more with them, wondering if this was a manifestation of the hidden culinary protégé within me, or if I was just acting childish. Who cares. It was good—really good. And so was the experience, until Kindness said to me, roses falling out of her mouth, "Tonight now you will be gassy." Kindness, thank you. Really, thank you so much for not telling me this PRIOR to eating half our rose bush. So thus have I spent my Sunday afternoon a little anxious over what the rest of the night will bring. But the roses really were quite good.

Charlie