Charlie, Tommy, and Wesley Cameroon '06-'07

Safely home

2007-06-23T07:55:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

I'm sitting here in my parents' house in Conway, Arkansas. Wow. Just a few hours ago I was drinking espresso at a cafe in Zurich, thinking back over a year in Africa and looking forward to the familiar-yet-strange world of America. Now I'm here. I wanted to write a quick note to let you all know that I made it back safely. With just minutes to spare, I made all of my connecting flights. I arrived back in Little Rock around 8 p.m. last night. Tommy and I said goodbye to Charlie in Zurich, then the two of us flew to Paris while he flew to Copenhagen. Then Tommy and I flew together to Atlanta, went through customs together, and said goodbye as I boarded my next flight.

What a year!

I hope to see and/or talk with as many of you as possible this summer. If you have questions about the trip, feel more than welcome to ask. I'd love to talk about it.

Thank you so much, again, for your loving support this year. We could not have done it without your help.

Under God's mercy,

Wes

“Si’a beri,” Cameroon

2007-06-19T12:38:00.000-07:00

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven. There was a time for us to travel to Cameroon; there was a time for us to leave Cameroon; and there most certainly is a time for us to blog about the start of our homecoming. That is the introduction, as I have just informed Wesley, who is crashed in the German-constructed Ikea bed next to me.
We spent our remaining days in Cameroon enjoying the simple, slow-paced life that paradoxically came to fill our schedules to the brim. We all felt, quite honestly, a bit guilty as our days thinned out. What to do with our last few days, and what to do when we had done everything else imaginable, proved to be wearisome. But our parting was sweet. When we left the house, we had numerous students down to see us off. The last hand that I hit was Emma the tailor—a short, grinning, well dressed young man. When I looked at him, my throat closed up. You know that feeling? It’s a hard one to fight. Emotions were short lived, though, as Pa called out, “Enter the vehicle.” Meaning, I presume, get out of here because I want to go home.
We arrived in Douala, where we ate substantial meals and tried to soak in as much of this country as we could prior to our departure. One day for lunch we actually went to this somewhat-hokey African restaurant, where our waitress spilled her life story (including her baptism into the Catholic Church) onto us. Mais elle a parle seulement en Francais. You probably understood as much of the last sentence as I understood of her story. But she was nice, and she gave us a final glance at the openness of many Cameroonians—an ingredient here that makes relationships so easy to form and so hard to leave.
When we got on the plane, after jumping through the somewhat excessive security hoops (did they really need to look at our boarding passes four times?!), I found that something very interesting happened. I had not expected to see so many white people. I mean, it makes sense that nearly everyone on the flight was white, but it had been quite some time since we had seen so many similarly-colored people. In fact, I found myself gawking at whole families of white people as they flanked my airplane seat on both sides. The way they talked and walked, the way they kept their noses lifted high (as though smelling something directly in front of them), the way they moved about the airplane’s cabin (as though it were a summer home or something)—all of these firmly held my attention for the thirty minutes prior to takeoff. Unflinchingly so. And the verdict, after watching these people file in? Different. And strange. I wanted to poke at them, and see how they would respond. No, I really wanted to shake their hand and try to snap them as Cameroonians do, and see if they knew how to do it. Were they initiated into this culture as I thought we had been? Would they get me if I said something like, “You done come for airplane for walka for white man country?”
The flights, I am happy to say, were uneventful. After storing most of our luggage in the Zurich airport, we hopped a train for Munich, and have been here since. On Wednesday we will head back to Zurich, and after a day there, on the 22nd, it’s au revoir to this half of the world, and bonjour to the other half. I will bypass commenting on our feelings as we return home. I know that all three of us have had very different experiences, and so will reflect differently on it. Questions will help us to reflect, so ask away.
We are excited to return home. You all are in our prayers, and we would ask that you remember us in the days ahead.

Grace,

Charlie, for the team

Our itinerary

2007-06-12T14:05:00.000-07:00

Just a bit of an update on what's happening here the next few days.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) we leave CBTS to go to Bamenda (about a four hour drive). We'll meet with two (former!) students there to say goodbye. Our friend Ally will go down with us to see us off.

On Thursday, we'll travel from Bamenda to Douala.

On Friday night, we'll fly out of Douala to Zurich, Switzerland via Paris.

Then from Saturday through Thursday, we'll be in Munich, Germany and Zurich. We're planning to rest, relax, and debrief with a lot of espresso. We're also planning a day trip to Dachau.

On Friday, June 22, if all goes as planned, we'll arrive back in the States, Charlie to Seattle, Tommy to Evansville, Ind., and me to Little Rock, Ark.

We covet your prayers.

Saying goodbye is so HARD!!!

--Wesley, for the team

Class portraits

2007-06-11T07:15:00.000-07:00

Here are three pictures of us with our students. Tommy is with his Greek class, Charlie his Hebrew class, and me with my Systematic Theology class. A year ago these were just nameless faces, but now they are friends who will be in our thoughts and prayers from now until… always.

Wesley's Letter to Supporters

2007-06-06T12:04:00.000-07:00

5 June 2007

Dear friends,

This will be my last update letter from Cameroon. I can hardly believe it, but in less than two weeks I'll be on a flight out of the country.

Here are some snapshots of what's been happening here since I last wrote. You'll also find listed below some specific ways you could be praying for me.

· My teammate Charlie's mom and dad came for a visit (we just got back to Ndu last night from dropping the two of them off at the airport in Douala for their flight back to the U.S.), and we had a fun three weeks of showing them around CBTS and other places in Cameroon. One of the highlights of their time with us was a trip we took to the East province, to a small village near the town of Bertoua. A couple of missionary families, the Abbotts and the Conrods, live there and are working on a long-term strategy of planting a church among the Baka people. It was eye-opening for all of us to stay for a couple of nights in a very primitive setting and listen to our friends tell us about the ever-so-slow process of learning the Baka language and culture and trying to build relationships with the Baka. Our friends' ultimate hope is that, three or four years down the road, they will be able to share the gospel with the Baka and see the Baka worship Christ in their own way, as Christ makes himself at home in their particular culture. In between great conversations about frontier missions, we also made time for an exotic rainforest hike, complete with half-submerged log bridges, tree trunks that were literally 40-50 in diameter (at their base), made-on-the-spot Baka animal traps, and more sweltering heat and "no-see-ums" and fularia-carrying flies than you can imagine!

· One of my students, named Linwe, asked me a few weeks ago if he could come over to the house and talk with me one-on-one. Linwe has been in four of my classes. He started the year as an average to below-average student. Occasionally he would ask incisive and insightful questions, but it was not at all unusual during my first semester of teaching for me to see him asleep at his desk in the middle of my lectures. As the year has progressed, he has become more alert and attentive in my classes. When he came to the house, he started our conversation by saying, "I just want to tell you that when I started seminary, I hated to read. But through your classes, especially the Missions class where we read those difficult articles by Andrew Walls and Christopher Wright, I have learned to love reading. I feel like I can follow an author's train of thought now. I no longer fixate on sentences, but now I look for connections between paragraphs and larger units. It makes me excited to write my thesis next year!" Needless to say, at this, I wanted to jump up and shout "Hallelujah!" (As a side note, many of you will know that in African culture, it is socially acceptable and very normal for people to ask directly for what they want. Many of our students who know that we're leaving soon are asking for things they want from our house. For example, one of our friends asked Tommy for his Nalgene "flask" and his coffee carrier, Charlie for the sconces he brought from the States, and me for my stapler and laptop. When Linwe came to meet with me, he said: "I know that we Africans are always asking for things. But today I want to ask if there's anything I can be praying for you or doing for you as you get ready to leave.")

· CBTS' 60th graduation was held on Friday, June 1. It was held at Ndu's First Baptist Church, with (I would guess) around 1,000 people in attendance. It lasted from 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., with no lunch break! Despite the fact that it was a joyful occasion, for me there was a dark shadow cast over the whole day. Shortly (too shortly) before graduation, the faculty had two long meetings to make the difficult decision to disqualify four students from walking. I made a recommendation that one student whose thesis I was reading not be allowed to graduate because his thesis needed much more work. One of the disqualified students had already butchered a cow for an after-graduation reception for his family and friends (a HUGE expense here in Cameroon), and he felt that the faculty were being unfair and unreasonable. Quite honestly, as I sat up front in academic regalia for the graduation ceremony, I had serious doubts as to whether we had done the right thing. Such doubts are especially sharp when you realize your decision has affected the lives and futures of students who are struggling to complete their seminary education in the midst of (relative) poverty.

· On our way down to Douala this past weekend to take Charlie's parents to the airport, we stopped for a few hours in the coastal town of Limbe and hung out on a black-sand beach. We swam, threw a Frisbee, jogged through the surf, and rode body boards. It was spectacularly beautiful – a reminder of our Creator's delight and overflowing goodness. The sky was overcast – it even started raining at one point as we swam – and there was virtually no one else around, so we had the beach to ourselves. I felt more relaxed that day than I have in months. It was a great way to conclude our time with Charlie's parents, not to mention our time in Cameroon.

Here are some ways you could be praying for me specifically over the next few days:

* For travel: We fly out of Douala on June 15 (my 26th birthday) and then the three of us, Charlie and Tommy and I, will spend almost a week (on our nickel) in Munich and Zurich before we fly back to the States. Pray for safety, a good time in Europe, and joyful reunions with our families and friends in the States.

* For goodbyes to our students: Today I am planning to meet with probably a dozen students here at my house. They have asked me if they can come by to say farewell and talk and pray one last time.

* For goodbyes to Tommy and Charlie: When you spend almost every waking moment of a year with two of your best friends, your heart becomes knit together with theirs in a profound way. Pray that God will show us ways to grow in our friendship even as we have to part ways in a short time.

* For knowing how to process this year I have had in Cameroon: Over the summer I want to think and pray about what God has done in the past ten months here. I want to think and pray with an openness to coming back to Cameroon, if that's the way God directs. Pray with me that God will continue to expand my heart for panta ta ethne, "all the nations."

* For next years's plans: I am hoping to apply for a student visa this month so that I can study in Durham, England next year. Continue to pray that God will guide my steps into the University of Durham and will make it a fruitful year.

Thank you so much, again, for being part of God's work in Cameroon and at Cameroon Baptist Theological Seminary. What a joy it has been to tell you stories of his faithfulness. Perhaps this sounds cliché, but there really are no words to describe the delight that God has given me in my ministry here this year. The people of Cameroon and the work of CBTS are securely in my heart. Thank you for making that possible through your generous financial support and your persevering prayer. "From God and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever" (Romans 11:36).

"The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all" (2 Corinthians 13:14).

Full of gratitude,

Wesley

Plethora of Pictures

2007-06-04T14:10:00.000-07:00

Pic 1: A great action shot of Wesley and me duking it out in a ferocious game of darts. Wesley looks hopeful, and I look cold and calculating. Or tired. Notice the hanging bananas and plantains.

Pics 2, 3, and 4: Jungle expedition shots. In Pic 2, I can’t tell if Ally has fallen in the stream/swamp yet. Looks like Wesley is wondering if he brought enough water. I searched for tropical species in Pic 3, to no success, and Pic 4 shows Charlie and his mom in the lush foliage.

Pic 5: Charlie’s Dad, Earl, with some of the Baka children. He has been wonderful with the Cameroonian children he’s come across.

Pic 6: All of us with the two missionary families we visited, along with our driver and one of the Baka people.

Pic 7: Charlie clearly unimpressed by the roadside meat that awaited him for lunch as we traveled back to Ndu.

Tomorrow, we had off to Douala to take Charlie’s parents to the airport. They fly out on Sunday evening. We’ve had a great time with them, and will be sad to say good-bye. It’s incredible that we’re saying our own farewells to students. Please pray for safe travel!

--tg, for team

Highlights from Traveling

2007-05-30T06:35:00.000-07:00

(1) On our jungle forage, Ally slipped off a treacherous log, planting her legs on both sides, submerged in jungle water. We could laugh at this, because Ally has emphasized to us time and time again that she’s the slipping type. UPDATE: Her shoes now smell horrible.

(2) While we spent the night in Yaounde, I was able to catch a replay of Game 2 Cavs vs. Pistons. I already knew the outcome, but it was still fun to watch, despite Lebron’s sub-par performance.

(3) In Bertoua, we slept in a two bedroom rest house; Wes, Charlie, and I in one room, Charlie’s parents in the other, a curtain separating the two. At 2:30am one night, I woke up to hear some one pounding on our door. I was terrified. I almost woke Charlie up, who was slumbering next to me, but I realized that the rapping was strangely rhythmic, sounding like 3 quick pounds followed by a pause. After some hazy thinking, I decided that the circumstances better fit a large, rainforest-sized moth, trying to escape through the screen windows of our porch. Then, it came to me—Charlie’s dad’s snoring. It was incredible, surpassing all the hype I had heard about it.

(4) Listening to a tape of Celine Dion four times through on the drive. At the end of the trip, we were quoting Jack’s soliloquy to Rose in the prelude to My Heart Will Go On.

(5) Finally, as Wes said, it was wonderful to be with the two missionary families working with the Baka people. Their main goal now is learning the language; hearing them fluidly converse with their Baka neighbors caused us to stop and marvel at their devotion to their ministry and to hope that a some sort of breakthrough comes soon. We also enjoyed hearing about their concern for preserving the Baka’s culture. Wes mentioned how a philanthropic group built rows of black-sheep concrete houses for the Baka, which look like colonialistic disturbances in their land. The Conrods and the Abbotts deepest desire is that Christ to transform the people’s culture, yet it’s clear that they value and respect the Baka traditions. The last thing they want is to make converts to Americanism.

(6) I can’t end on too serious a note. We had a fierce dart competition one night. Nathan Conrod placed first, I was a near-miss at second, Wesley came in third, and Earl limped in at fourth.

--tg

Ps. Wes has assured me that he’ll put up some pictures later this week.

Back from the East

2007-05-29T09:22:00.000-07:00

On Sunday night we arrived back in Ndu from our excursion to the East province. We were able to spend two days near the village of Dimako, which is about a 45 minute drive away from Bertoua, a larger town. As I mentioned in a previous post, we made this trip in order to visit two missionary families (from the U.S.) who are working with the Baka people (formerly "Baka pygmies") in a VERY remote part of the bush country in the East. It probably goes without saying that it was extremely hot and muggy when we arrived. Mosquitoes, big orangeish-looking flies (that can carry a disease called fularia), and "no-see-ums" were everywhere, so we were extra careful to take our malaria prevention pills every day. We hiked through a rainforest and had to walk across logs in murky water. We got our picture taken next to trees that, at the base, where the roots were extending out, the diameter was probably close to 50 feet. We watched two of the Baka make a trap in the forest with a sapling bent over towards the ground, a piece of wire, and a strip of bark carefully concealing a hole in the ground for the animal to step in. And we got to eat exotic Eastern dishes and see the Baka make a mongulu (which is a small, igloo-shaped hut) from scratch just a few feet from the house where we were staying. Oh yeah, and we got to visit a Baka encampment and see some sad examples of a well-meaning international aid organization's attempt to "improve" the houses of the Baka (the organization had replaced all the mongulus with dozens of ugly concrete houses that the Baka told us were too hot and too different from what they were used to). All in all, we had a fantastic time. I'll see if we can upload some pictures of the trip soon.

One of the missionary families we went to visit -- Barry and Desma Abbott, and their two adorable kids, Brianna and Brendan -- live in a house that is literally three rooms (two bedrooms, and a TINY kitchen) and a bathroom, with a bucket suspended on a hook in the ceiling that you pour hot water into if you want to take a shower. We were reminded that, despite the fact that CBTS is in a fairly "bushy," backwoods area of the Northwest, and despite the fact that our power and water goes out for days at a time, we do live pretty comfortably, nonetheless. It was a whole different ballgame with our friends in the East. They truly live in a remote, inconvenient, uncomfortable place. And they're doing it all because they want to see a church planted among the Baka. So they're spending years (literally) just to learn the culture and the language, then they'll begin to try to teach the story of redemption from Genesis to Revelation, along the way work on a translation, and then, as Desma put it to me, "We want to the Baka to know the gospel, believe it, and then figure out what 'church' should look like in their context. We don't want to give them any direction on it other than encouraging them to make it authentic within their culture and keep it faithful to the good news of Christ's death and resurrection."

If you think of them, pray for Barry and Desma Abbott and Nathan and Laurel Conrod, two couples who are living a very simple existence and taking a lot of risks in order to participate in God's kingdom work among the Baka. I was totally inspired and encouraged by their (in the world's eyes) reckless, foolish existence.

We'd also appreciate your thoughts and prayers this week as we grade stacks and stacks of papers. We're working around the clock trying to get everything done before Friday, graduation day!! Everyone on the faculty here, not just the missionaries, is in the same boat. It's a hectic time for CBTS, but it will all be over soon, Lord willing.

Peace to all of you, and thanks for being interested in our adventures,

Wes

Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, and Wesley Hill: at a theatre near you…

2007-05-21T07:14:00.000-07:00

Tonight we watched Pirates of the Caribbean (the first one). Wes liked the movie so much that he wanted to give us his best pirate impression. We grabbed the camera, and here is what we saw...

Tommy and Charlie

Travels and ceremonies

2007-05-21T07:07:00.000-07:00

Last night CBTS held the 60th annual Senior Dinner for students graduating from the Certificate, Diploma, Bachelors degree, and Master of Arts programs. True to form, the program lasted over four hours, and that includes a lengthy delay when the decorations hanging from the ceiling fell down on the head table where the president and other school administrators were sitting while two fluorescent lights were changed by the station headman (with a little help from Charlie's dad) standing on a wobbly chair. Sometimes you just have to sigh, shrug your shoulders, and laugh. Despite the length of the program (6 pm to a little after 10), it was a special occasion. At a couple of points in the evening I felt my throat getting tight and my eyes getting teary with gratitude and sadness. I'm so grateful for my students -- for the lives that have intersected with mine, with the impact going both directions -- and I'm sad to be leaving them in less than a month.

The official CBTS graduation ceremony will be on June 1, in a large Baptist church here in Ndu. If the Senior Dinner last night was any indication of what is to come, the commencement ceremony will be uncomfortably long, filled with rhythmic music, dancing, speeches, acknowledgments, endless thanks and honors bestowed -- and, yes, emotion and flashes of delight and thankfulness to God for what has happened at the flawed yet powerfully effective institution of CBTS.

Before graduation, Charlie, Tommy, and I -- together with Earl and Denny, Charlie's parents, and our faithful friend Ally -- will travel to Bertoua, a smallish village in the East of Cameroon where some missionary friends of ours work with the Baka (spelling?) pygmy people. On Wednesday, we'll head down to Yaounde, spend the night, then travel on to Bertoua and spend a couple of days with our adventurous, fun-loving friends the Conrods, and then head back north to Ndu. It will be a whirlwind trip but also a nice break for us, since by that time we will have administered our last final exams and officially concluded our second semester of teaching here at CBTS. SO hard to believe, let me tell you!

Here are a couple of pictures. One of them is of Charlie, his folks, and Emmanuel ("Emma"), our tailor friend in town. If it looks like he's beaming in the picture, that's because he's just gotten a lot of business from the Shepherds!

The second picture is of Charlie and me dressed in our most formal Cameroonian attire -- "saros" -- for the Senior Dinner.

And the third picture was taken on the first night that Charlie's parents arrived. We went out to dinner at a Mediterranean restaurant in Douala immediately after picking up Earl and Denny at the airport. Here we are with another missionary friend, Elsie Lewandowski.

God's peace to all of you, and thanks for reading, always,

Wes

Photos for Friday

2007-05-18T07:10:00.000-07:00

Here are two pictures from the service for Charlie’s parents. We had about 50 of our students jammed into our living room. (Interestingly, they crowded around the perimeter of the room. I had envisioned them organizing into rows in the center of the room. Now that I think about it, this probably says more about me than about them. I remember how my family had a house-cleaner who would evenly distribute pillows in a straight line across couches. It drove my mom crazy; she preferred having them bunched together in the center. That’s how she always does it. And now, either through nature or through nurture, it may be my ideal formation as well. I always favored zone defense over man-to-man in basketball.) These pictures were taken before Wes, Charlie, and Charlie’s parents had arrived. When they did, everyone was on their feet, dancing to the drums, singing about how good God is. One of the traditional dances features the left arm crossed over the stomach and the right arm extended as if to pull a slot machine lever. In this position, one keeps the left arm stationary and rocks the right arm rhythmically to the beat. It’s fantastic. The program turned out to be one of our most memorable experiences here. We sincerely felt honored and loved by our students, as they gathered together with us to welcome Charlie’s parents. We’re going to miss this place.

These last two pictures show two of our younger friends, Victory and her little sister Favor. I think Favor was hoping the mango would have an enriching effect on her skin, seeing as she smeared it all over her face. I think Victory believed the mango’s exotic power to be most effective on dresses. In the picture, Victory had already polished off her fruit snack and moved on to her cookie. After they came over, I went up to the football field with them and their cousin, Glory (in the last picture), to watch the final CBTS football match of the year. Many students where there; intra-class football matches are probably the primary organized social activity among students. Afterwards, they handed out trophies to the top teams and to honored players.

Thank you all for praying. There’s one encouraging aspect of the past couple weeks I thought I’d share. In one of my classes, I’ve noticed that an older woman who is typically withdrawn throughout every period has begun to ask questions, both during class periods and after class. Today I met individually with groups of students to provide guidance for group projects, and I was blown away when this student confidently and naturally asked multiple insightful questions. It’s a small grace that has been a blessing. Thank you for praying.

--tg

"You are highly welcome, Pa and Ma Charlie!"

2007-05-16T06:22:00.000-07:00

Hi friends,

Some of you know that Charlie's parents have been planning to visit us here in Cameroon for a few months now. Well, yesterday evening around 7:30 p.m. Charlie and I arrived back at CBTS after picking them up at the airport in Douala on Monday night. Earl and Denny Shepherd, Charlie's folks, arrived a bit jet-lagged but in one piece -- and with all their luggage! -- and we had a long but good day of traveling the length of the country in a small car to make it all the way back up here to the "bush" of the NW province.

We'll post more about this later this week (with pictures), but we had 30 or 40 students at our house pounding drums and singing at the top of their lungs and dancing in our living room to welcome us in last night. There was lots of fufu and njamanjama and rice and stew and "sweet drinks" (=pop/soda), and a whole lot of laughter and handshakes and hugs and speeches and jokes. It was a ton of fun. Earl was even gifted with a traditional cap that students enjoyed helping him try to fit on his head. And he confirmed for Charlie's incredulous students that, yes, indeed, Charlie has a black belt in karate. "But how then can Charlie be afraid of the big cows that wander around on the campus?" demanded one student, still not convinced.

We'll post more on all this soon, but, for now, just know that they made it safely and were able to sit in on our morning chapel service and several of our classes today. They're doing great and having a great time.

Wes, for the team

Some Photos for Friday

2007-04-27T06:16:00.000-07:00

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.”

2007-04-18T07:23:00.000-07:00

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

--tg

Next weekend

2007-04-16T06:32:00.000-07:00

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…!

2007-04-11T07:46:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-05T05:45:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-05T05:44:00.000-07:00

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

Coming to a milk carton near you…

2007-03-30T11:12:00.000-07:00

A couple days ago, my L’Oreal for Kids shampoo, which I’ve used everyday (we’ve had water) since I arrived, disappeared. In the picture, you can see my second and last bottle of the shampoo, sitting in the same place that its predecessor dwelt every day since August. I think someone walking behind our house saw the neon-green bottle, reached through the open window, and nabbed it. That’s the most plausible explanation I can think of. So, if you see a Cameroonian with No Tears!, No Knots!, smelling of a burst of sweet honeydew, please let me know.

The second picture is of two kids who visited our house recently. I’m only familiar with the girl on the left, whose name is Sandrine. She’s adorable, both in appearance and personality.

--tg

CBTS videos

2007-03-16T15:39:00.000-07:00

Here, at long last, are the links to videos of the CBTS campus. (Sorry it has taken me this long, guys!)

Video 1

Video 2

Video 3

Alex, for the team

Women’s Day

2007-03-09T11:58:00.000-08:00

Today was Women’s Day in Cameroon. It’s not a public holiday, but it’s celebrated around the country. Here in Ndu, the women marched down the town’s main street as part of a town program. The day’s slogan is, “Whatever a man can do, a woman can do better.” There were some other cheers yelled out during the program, but I couldn’t discern them. Here are a couple pictures of the women marching, a women’s group dancing, and some children being children. Most of the women are wearing this year’s Women’s Day fabric, which came in purple, orange, and green. When I asked my tailor, he said that having my own Women’s Day shirt made would be an acceptable way to show my support for the Cameroonian women. Other Cameroonians, however, convinced me that it would be a social faux pas, generating widespread laughter over the white man wearing the women’s day shirt. I stuck with my polo shirt. As usual. At the bottom is a picture Charlie and I took with our friend Ally, sporting her own women’s day shirt. She wanted to have some authentic puffy sleeves sewed onto the dress, but her tailor told her it would not be proper, since Ally’s a white woman.

--women’s advocate in spirit, though not in attire, tommy grimm

An appreciation letter from a student

2007-03-07T06:22:00.000-08:00

One of my students, Ernest Seka, has recently fallen on hard times financially. Several weeks ago I got involved with about 40 U.S. dollars worth of assistance, so that he could complete his registration for this semester. Today I received the following letter of appreciation from Ernest, a very warm, friendly, good-hearted student. I am posting this letter on the blog because the financial gift I was able to make to Ernest comes from the financial support I’m receiving from you.

Ernest Seka
C.B.T.S. Ndu
Donga-Mantung Division
North-west Province
Cameroon
7-3-2007

Appreciation Letter

Beloved in the Lord, accept greetings from Cameroon in Africa. I have the joy to present to you this letter of appreciation for the help I received from you through my tutor Mr. Wesley Hill. In fact I was not able to make up my fees at the required time. This made me to be so confused and even lose hope in the continuation of my studies at the seminary. I came to him for prayer as one who had concern and he gave me advice not to worry so much about tomorrow for it holds its own problems. After this advice I was presented with a gift of 20,000 francs [=$40] to support me and to pay the balance of the school fee. He also told me that this money was given him by Christians in America to support needy students.

In fact I feel that I owe a lot of appreciation and credit to this wonderful gesture. I thank the Lord for all of you and pray that the Lord should strengthen you in faith and bless you more for his glory. I also thank God so much for Wesley and I pray that God should give him knowledge and wisdom to advance more in his theological study so he can find hope and nourishment in the word of God.

Maybe I should let you know about my marital situation. I am married and a father of four children—one boy and three girls. I am doing the Diploma of Theology programme at the Cameroon Baptist Theological Seminary and I am a Presbyterian Christian.

May the peace and joy of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ be and remain with you forever. Amen.

God bless and reward you for me.

Yours,
Ernest Seka

“Tssssst!”

2007-02-23T10:08:00.000-08:00

1) The other day, I was speaking to my friend, Prisca. In front of our house, at the bottom of a slope, there is a well to which children are sent throughout the day to collect water. They carry large plastic “gallons” on their heads, in preparation for cooking, bathing, or washing “dresses.” One afternoon, I encountered a group of kids, one being Prisca, a five-year-old girl with attitude. I grabbed her gallon and carried it on my head as I talked with her and her siblings. I told them that I wanted to help, which everyone appreciated except for Prisca. She hid behind her brother, Suri, and started yelling at me. “You will give me my gallon!” I tried to explain I was just trying to help, but she started to cry, so I gave it back to her. Her brother and sisters found it hilarious. I grabbed Suri’s gallon as a replacement, and accompanied them to their house. Later, I asked Suri why Prisca was afraid of me, and he said she thought I was going to “catch her and beat her.” A white monster, I guess.

Anyway, since then, Prisca has warmed up to me. Yesterday, she let me carry her gallon halfway to her house, a favor for which I was grateful. While I was walking and talking with her and Suri, I noticed a long black scar on Prisca’s cheek. I asked Suri where it came from (Prisca’s English is respectable, but not great). He said that their mother beat her. I asked more, and he chuckled, saying that Prisca would not go get water, so their mother threw her against the wall. (Suri is only a year or two older than Prisca, maybe six-years-old.)

It’s been on my mind since he told me about it. It sounds so cruel; yet here, it’s culturally acceptable. I asked my students about it, and the reaction was mixed. Some said it’s not right, while others had no qualms over it. I tried to explain the difference between punishing a child out of anger or hate, and disciplining a child in love. Fortunately, I saw enough heads nod that I felt like I had plenty of supporters.

2) Last Saturday, one of the grounds men showed me the water system here. He showed me where they tap water from the ground, and then the large room where the water is then filtered by osmosis. Of course, this filtration room is unlocked; anyone can go down there and fulfill any mischief he fancies. Then, I was shown the pipe that leads to the water pump, which sends the water to the holding tank. Again, not surprisingly, the pipe has two major leaks, releasing water that I would love for my morning showers.

3) I was flipping through my faithful dictionary the other day, trying to find some word from Gilead, and in the process, I made a discovery. Since we arrived in Cameroon, we hear almost daily from someone who’s suffering from “katar,” which is the same as a cold in the states: runny nose, sore throat, and general discomfort. Charlie, Wes, and I had assumed all this time that calling this condition “katar” was just another African/Cameroonian peculiarity. And then I discovered in my trusty Oxford “catarrh”—“inflammation of a mucous membrane; especially: one chronically affecting the human nose and air passages.” Catarrh...who knew? Africa is like the land of opportunity for English vocabulary: no matter what its background in the West, a word can find a home out here.

4) Alcohol is such a big deal among the seminary’s denomination that students will often screen out or censor anything that might suggest a possible allowance for alcohol in the Bible. In my New Testament class today, we discussed 1st Corinthians, and after class, a student named Gershom asked about Paul’s writing about the Lord’s Supper. “It says that some of the Corinthian Christians were becoming drunk. Does this mean they were…[awkward, groping pause]…drinking…water?” I just gave him a look, and, smiling, told him I wasn’t going to answer that.

5) An unfortunate story from about a month ago. I was walking by the female dormitory, and wanted to wave hello to a student. I made a sound to get her attention—a “tssss!” sound I had heard other Cameroonians use. When she turned around, smiling sheepishly, and said, “Thank you,” I was a bit frightened. When I later found out that in some parts of Cameroon, that sound is used to…ahem…compliment women…I was horrified. If that’s not a classic/type stupid-Western-missionary story, I don’t know what is.

6) Here are a couple pictures I took as I administered a Greek exam today.

--tg

Baptism service at Calvary Baptist Church, Njimntoh

2007-02-19T06:58:00.000-08:00

Here are some pictures from the baptism service. The man baptizing and leading the procession is Pastor Benjamin Ndzi, the head pastor of Calvary Baptist. (This is the church where Tommy and I worship, about a half-hour walk from the CBTS campus.)

The picture of Tommy and me was taken right outside the church building.

Wes, for the team

A baptism service, a Super Bowl party, and the familiar routine

2007-02-08T14:18:00.000-08:00

It’s been an eventful week. Last Sunday the church that Tommy and I attend---Calvary Baptist in the small village or quarter of Ndu called Njimntoh---had a baptism service. It lasted five hours, and, I’ll be honest, I felt drained and exhausted afterwards. But it was really moving and worshipful and encouraging as well. It started with a gathering at the church building. Then we processed along a dusty road to a small stream that church members had dammed up the day before, creating a murky, grayish pool. In the water were two crudely constructed archways made out of saplings. We found out once we got there on Sunday morning that the pastor, Benjamin Ndzi, stood in between those arches and those being baptized stepped into the pool through one and exited through the other.

There was a short sermon, some singing, and then seven people were baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Onlookers heading to market or just strolling along the main road gawked at us. The fon (=traditional ruler) of Ndu showed up with a noisy entourage and sat uphill from the pool on a patch of brownish grass to watch. We ended with a prayer dedicating these newly-baptized Christians to God and processed back to the church, singing loudly all the way and stirring up a cloud of dust.

Back at the church I got to preach the morning’s (second!) sermon. I preached from Romans 6:3-4 about the new life in Christ. I brought a plastic kitchen glove from our house to use as an illustration. “Without my hand inside of it, this glove cannot lift a finger,” I said. The church was packed---much more so than it usually is. People were standing outside listening through the windows, and my friend Tamfu Dieudonne even came to show his support for me as I preached, which was encouraging. “But when I put my hand in the glove,” I went on, “the glove comes to life. It can wave and wiggle its fingers and pick things up.” I tried to explain that baptism signifies the transformation that God works in spiritually dead people. He takes lifeless people and grants them a new kind of resurrection life in Christ. They die with Christ, are buried with him, and are raised to walk in “newness of life,” and they receive the indwelling Spirit (Romans 8).

Many, or most, of the Christians at this church are uneducated and illiterate village farmers. I wanted so badly to communicate with them, so I tried to speak in short sentences and use clear wording, hoping my friend Theodore who was translating my sermon into the local tribal dialect would be able to follow it for himself and make it accessible for those who have trouble following my English. I received some encouraging feedback afterwards. I’m glad I had the opportunity.

The next morning the three of us plus our friend Ally left for an overnight visit to the village of Mbingo, about four hours from CBTS and Ndu. We didn’t tell any of our students that we were going to watch the Super Bowl! Thom and Ellen Schotanus, some BGC missionaries who are involved in construction with Mbingo Baptist Hospital, administering a primary school, and planting a church, live there. They invited us to come since they have a satellite dish that’s able to receive ESPN from South Africa. It was quite a party. We projected the game onto their living room wall. Thom made sweet and sour meatball sandwiches. And we stayed the night in their guest bedrooms afterwards. Needless to say, Tommy was quite happy. It would have been a long car ride back to Ndu---longer and more uncomfortable than it already was, with four of us crammed into a van just a little bigger than a minivan (think Mystery Mobile from Scooby Doo) with eight or nine Cameroonians besides!---if the Colts had lost!!

Well, I think that’s about all for now.

I have two stories in closing, one of encouragement and one of discouragement.

I’ve been able to sponsor several students by paying this semester’s tuition fees for them, which gives me a lot of joy. Thanks to the support of friends and churches in the States, this is possible. One of the students I’m sponsoring is prayer partner. My weekly meetings with him continue to be really life-giving for me. Last week he asked me if I would be willing to guide him in his discipleship as a spiritual mentor, so I think our weekly times together will continue to focus on prayer but will also include more of a mentoring dimension, which I’m quite thrilled about. I gave him a copy of a C. J. Mahaney book today (Living the Cross Centered Life), and I hope it provides good fodder for discussion. I think it will be easily accessible to him and also encouraging and probably helpful to him in future ministry.

By contrast, my Intro to Missions course today was particularly discouraging. Here’s a snapshot of what it can be like to teach here. Last week I assigned a reading from Andrew Walls’ book The Missionary Movement in Christian History. I knew it would be difficult. Walls’ prose is technically excellent and, in my opinion, very graceful and also exciting to read, but for my students, it probably makes them feel the same way I felt trying to read Immanuel Kant for a philosophy class in college. So, I got to class today, and one of my best students was very obviously scowling. About five minutes into my lecture, he blurted out without raising his hand, “Sir, this man [referring to Walls] has no right to write like this. He’s so difficult we can’t understand him.” Then this student proceeded to put his head down on his folded arms and didn’t look up from his desk for the next half hour. Another one of my best students, near the top of the class, looked totally dejected and overwhelmed. I immediately got defensive, then I felt deflated and panicky about whether my students could understand future assignments I have planned, and then just discouraged about which direction I should go with the class, since my syllabus has them reading Walls for the next three weeks, and then after that a piece by Christopher J. H. Wright that will probably be equally discouraging. What to do? I have no idea. Welcome to my life.

I hope to post some pictures from last Sunday’s baptism service in the next couple of days.

The peace of Christ to you,

Wes

Why are they called s'mores? Because you have s'more on your face. (Wipe it off, Tommy. Please.)

2007-01-27T13:46:00.000-08:00

Our friend from the Peace Corps, Ally, gave us some marshmallows and chocolate a month ago, and finally, last weekend, she returned from traveling to make smores with us. I can proudly say that we did not eat any of these scrumptious Western delicacies until she returned, though at times Charlie's and my self-control waned at times (Wesley's sweet tooth is not nearly as strong as Charlie's and mine). The marshmallows were accompanied by Hershey's Symphony chocolate and some cookie-wafers from town. After all
was ate and done, Charlie and I felt a bit sick-but the good sort of sick.

First day

2007-01-24T12:31:00.000-08:00

Well, we’ve just about wrapped up the first day of classes of our second semester here at CBTS. As I type this, it’s 3:00 PM, Tommy is asleep in his room (I think)---it’s that new early morning schedule we’re on again now (breakfast at 6:45 AM; chapel at 7:30; first class of the day at 8:15)---and Charlie is teaching Hebrew. A faculty and staff meeting starts in half an hour (and will probably last four or five hours, if last semester’s track record is any indication).

All in all, the day has gone well. The campus is alive again. After a deathly quiet Christmas break, students are now bustling here and there, ringing our doorbell constantly to greet us after the long hiatus, and there’s a fresh energy to campus now that classes and student clubs, etc., are meeting again.

Last night we had a vespers service in the campus chapel that included a foot washing ceremony. The faculty washed the feet of maybe a dozen students who volunteered to come to the front of the chapel. I remember doing something similar in college, and, while sometimes things like that can feel a bit forced, this service was meaningful and very moving for me. I think that washing the feet of Cameroonians, many of whom wear sandals and flip-flops in the dry season here, is much closer to what it would have been like to wash feet in Palestine in Jesus’ time, than is washing the feet of Americans who shower every day and don’t have to trek through dirt and clouds of powdery red dust every day. At any rate, it was a good reminder of why we’re here---to serve students and to commend to them a model of “servant leadership” that is miles away from the heavy-handed “big man” leadership style that prevails in many quarters of the Cameroon Baptist Convention (not to mention the evangelical church in the U.S.!!!). I had to fight back tears as I helped an African friend who eagerly and lovingly volunteered to wash Tommy’s feet.

God, this semester make us humble followers of Jesus who took up the towel and water basin for his disciples!

--Wesley

P.S. Some readers might like to know that the three of us, and our friend Ally, will actually get to watch the Super Bowl (instead of just downloading real-time text updates). We’re planning to travel over three hours to the village of Mbingo, where some other missionary friends of ours who have satellite TV. They’re going to record the game in the middle of the night on Sunday, and then we’re all going to make a pact that we won’t check email, internet, or answer any phone calls so we won’t know the outcome of the game, and then we’ll watch the recording of it on Monday night. There will be other people there, and we’ll have snacks, stay overnight at these missionaries’ house, and then head back to Ndu on Tuesday morning. As you might imagine, Tommy is very happy about this arrangement. Just don’t expect to hear from him until Tuesday.

What a night...

2007-01-21T22:01:00.000-08:00

It's 5:30 in the morning here. The Colts finally defeated their mythic nemesis, the Patriots. After Belichick and Brady gave their all, Peyton finally will be able to go home the victor.

Charlie and Wesley were my Aaron and Hur, upholding me throughout the game at my left and right hands. Unfortunately, though, the sun did not stand still. I just went to investigate because I thought I heard voices outside our house, and I realized it was a bird chirping hello to the sunrise. It's off to bed-classes don't start until Wednesday, so I should have plenty of time to recoup.

I can't believe the Colts are heading to the Super Bowl. We're this season's Steelers. We have to be.

(This wonderful night in Cameroon would not have been possible without the hard work of those at CBS Sportsline Game Update. Thank you.)

The second semester

2007-01-19T06:57:00.000-08:00

I would say the winter/spring semester is upon us, but it doesn’t feel like either one around here. It’s only the middle of January, but already we’re anticipating the beginning of rainy season in March when the dust will go away!

Some of you have asked what courses the three of us will be teaching next semester, so here’s the rundown.

Charlie will be continuing two year-long courses that he started last semester: Church History (for the third-year Bachelor of Theology students) and Hebrew (for the second-year Bachelors degree students); and he’ll be picking up two new classes: Old Testament Introduction (for the first-year Diploma of Theology students), and the book of Jonah (for the second-year Certificate of Theology students).

Tommy will also be continuing two year-long courses: Old Testament Introduction (for first-year Bachelors students) and Greek 2 (for first-year Bachelors students too); and he’ll also be picking up two classes: Evangelism and Discipleship (for first-year Bachelors students) and a New Testament Introduction class (for first-year Certificate students).

And, finally, I’ll be continuing three year-long courses that I started last semester: Introduction to Missions (for second-year Bachelors students), New Testament Introduction (a combined course for two groups of students---second-year Bachelors students and first-year Diploma students), and Systematic Theology (for second-year Diploma students); and I’m picking up a course on Acts and 1 & 2 Corinthians (for second-year Diploma students).

In addition to teaching, each of us has also been asked to preach four times in chapel this semester.

We’re excited for what’s in store, and, as always, we’d appreciate your prayers!

Grace and peace,

Wesley, for the team

Gardening with Edith

2007-01-16T08:01:00.000-08:00

Here are a couple of pictures of Tommy and Charlie harvesting potatoes from our garden, directly behind our house, with our friend Edith. Unfortunately, most of our cabbage and carrots were eaten by marauding goats who wander freely through the seminary’s campus. Reverend Peter Nyumnloh, a professor here at CBTS, has called on all students to “arrest” as many of these destructive animals as they can. :)

CMF Photo

2007-01-16T07:56:00.000-08:00

Here's a picture from the CMF conference two weeks ago, which includes the team that was here from Bethlehem Baptist Church.

(Note to Mom--I know I look like a bum in the picture, wearing bright green athletic shorts. No need to bring it up. I went for a run that morning, went to breakfast...yes, looking like a bum, I know...but I hadn't been informed yet that the group picture was immediately after breakfast. It wasn't my fault!)

--tg

Another perspective on life in Cameroon – What I have learned in 2 weeks

2007-01-13T18:00:00.000-08:00

-If you make a trip from Ndu to the aiport in Douala, you must really want to greet the people that are coming.
-The dry season is just that; dry! There is dust everywhere and one just gets used to dirty feet, dirty clothes, dirty feet, dirty windows, dirty feet, etc. It just doesn’t matter anymore – you’re just happy to be together.
-People in Cameroon are very friendly and gracious – they always seem to have a smile and a greeting for you.
-Diet coke is a precious commodity – not readily available after heated ping-pong matches
-The missionaries called to work in Cameroon are fortunate people – they appear to love their work and the people that work with them.
-Fires in the fireplace are wonderful – especially early in the morning and later in the evening – it is very chilly in Ndu despite being close to the equator.
-Pa is a fabulous cook, indeed, and a gentle-spirited man who works very hard without complaining.
-Taxi rides are a great adventure, especially with 5 people, 3 suitcases and a guitar. (Let’s not forget the 4 backpacks.)
-The Cameroonian kids are lovely – and boy, can they sing!
-Ah, the stars at night – nothing can compare!
-Even if the power goes out, games can still be played. (Candles are great!)
-Everyone should experience church in a foreign country – the worship brought tears to my eyes. Those people love the Lord and you can see it on their faces.
-You might think you’re coming to “bless missionaries” BUT chances are better that they will “bless” you! It happened; we were blessed!
-Tommy, Charlie and Wes are gracious hosts – we are very thankful for them! We will miss being with them.
-I would happily come back again, if the Lord wills!

Liz Holst, “Official”guest blogger

Christmas pictures

2007-01-05T05:00:00.000-08:00

Here are the pictures that go with the last post.

We've spent most of this week in Bamenda for the annual Cameroon Missionary Fellowship conference. There are over 100 people in attendance from three different mission sending agencies---the Baptist General Conference, the North American Baptists, and World Team---and, best of all for us, the conference is being led by a team of short-termers who are all great friends of ours from Minneapolis and Bethlehem Baptist Church. Dan Holst has been leading us in singing, and Tom Steller has been teaching. Tomorrow morning the conference wraps up, and we'll all---the team included---head back to Ndu, and Alex Kirk and Dave Sowers (pastor of Morningside Baptist Church in Sioux City, Iowa, which is one of our supporting churches) will lead J-term modular courses on Biblical Theology and Pastoral Theology. We're really looking forward to having this team see our "stomping grounds"; I said to Dan Holst a couple of days ago that it feels a little bit like bringing a new friend back to your hometown and showing them all your favorite places where you made many memories.

It's been a whirlwind week, so that's why there hasn't been much on the blog. We'll try to write more of an update about the conference and the team's time here soon.

Until then, blessings,

Wes

An excessively long post on dresses, Christmas, and the man who makes us food

2006-12-29T08:51:00.000-08:00

On Christmas I wore a dress and didn’t get in trouble. In fact, I spent Christmas with two other men wearing dresses and none of us got in trouble. We were even complemented by most everyone we saw. They applauded the fact that we were wearing attire that would elsewhere be deemed questionable for people of our gender. Tommy hasn’t bought a dress yet, so he was stuck with slacks, a dress shirt and a power tie, which is okay, but simply not the same as a dress.

Now, I should qualify that these “dresses” are called “Saros,” and really are quite wonderful. You get matching trousers and a matching cap, and a very long matching shirt that extends from your shoulders to below your knees. It is quite the getup, and when you walk through Ndu town in such an outfit you are met with laughs of unbelief, cheers, handshakes, and exclamations such as “Cameroonians!” “Nigerians!” “Muslims!” We had no idea what we were getting into when we decided to outfit ourselves with these Saros. Muslims? On Christmas, Wesley and I wore our gowns, and all three of us presented one to Pa as a Christmas gift.

This picture is taken at Pa’s house, on Christmas day. He was excited to have a new Saro, and even more excited to have his three white missionaries at his house to eat and celebrate with him. We really did have a wonderful time, and ate more country chop than we have up to this point, combined: Fufu corn, njama-njama, rice, stew, chicken, coco-yams, jin-jin, it was all there.

One of the highlights of going to a Cameroonian’s home for Christmas (or for any occasion) is that you get another opportunity to see life from a fresh vantage point. We know Pa as the man who works on the other side of the left wall of our living room. He makes good smells waft through the house from about 6:30 to 12:30. He drinks coffee whenever you offer it. He carries food out of his hidden doorway, and we always eat it. We know that if we ever compliment his cooking he will make a strange, happy noise, and give us two thumbs-up. Some days we greet him in the local dialect, “We sa’a ke” (“How are you?”) already knowing the obvious response he will give, “Me sa’a yu ka” (“Fine.”). We pay him money from time to time to buy ‘needed’ food at the market, and when he returns from the market we ask him how it was. “Fine.” All of these encounters are usually short, brief. When I see him in town, we usually lapse into the rhythmic, “We sa’a ke,” “Me sa’a yu ka,” and I leave those moments knowing that there is much more to this man than any of us know. So we decided to spend Christmas with our Pa, in his house, which is made out of mud bricks, a cement floor and an aluminum top. It looks like it has three large, empty rooms, and next to this bare structure is a small hut in which his family cooks.

Sometime when we were sitting in Pa’s entry way, I learned that Pa doesn’t live on the other side of the left wall of our living room. He lives in a house, across town, with his wife and children. He actually has friends, believe it or not. Really—they drop by his house to chat and steal food from his table. Pa is a good listener. I know this because he leans toward you when you are speaking. He has a sense of humor. He firmly corrects those who suppose that we are with the Peace Corps (heaven forbid!), “No. They are teachers at CBTS. I am their cook.” He is loyal. Very loyal. He is loving. He is full of surprises. He is, in short, one of our life-preserver in Ndu, and for that we are very thankful. So thank you Pa, even though you will never read this, since you’re still not really sure what a computer is or how it works.

You will ask me what are the top 10 things I am most thankful for this year in Ndu, Cameroon, and Pa will be in the top three. Wesley informs me that I have two days to make my top 10 list, so when it is up, look for Pa. He will be there.

Charlie

Thanksgiving at Christmas

2006-12-23T12:09:00.000-08:00

A quick update on our Christmas plans. Many of you have been asking us by email what we’re doing, so here’s the answer. Tomorrow, Christmas Eve, we’ll go to church as usual (Charlie’s preaching at a small French-speaking house-church at the nearby tea estate) and then have lunch with the new vice president of CBTS, Joshua Webnda and his family, and then spend the evening together at our house. Our cook, Pa Zachieus, has invited us to come to his house for lunch on Christmas Day and eat Cameroonian food with him and his wife and children. (Charlie and I will wear our new “saros,” a traditional formal kind of gown that men wear on special occasions---pictures to follow!) We’ll end the day with the Yongs, eating leftovers, hanging out, and maybe watching a Christmas movie or two.

Charlie, Tommy, and I had the idea that maybe we could close the year on the blog by each writing “top ten” lists of things we’ve experienced so far here in Cameroon that we’re especially thankful for. So, without further ado, here’s my list, in no particular order:

1. My prayer partner Ngankeng Divine. It is great to have an opportunity to “go deeper” with one of my students, sharing and hearing prayer requests with him every week and in the process developing a good friendship.

2. Pa and his cooking. Conscientious and cynical, protective and fatherly, talented and occasionally humorous in a wry and dry sort of way, Pa looks after us in more ways than one. His hamburgers and French toast and banana bread and chocolate chip cookies and pizzas sometimes make me forget that I’m in a West Africa, not an American, kitchen.

3. Visits to Cameroonian houses. Some of the most memorable and influential experiences I’ve had here are when I’ve had the chance to spend time with Cameroonians in their own natural environments. I especially remember visiting our friend Emmanuel’s sister’s house and holding her newborn baby in her tiny, cramped living room, and, just this week, visiting the village of CBTS student Shifu Elvis and hearing his father tell us about the struggles of trying to eke out a living and give his children educational opportunities in the midst of poverty.

4. Koni Francis and Ndu coffee. When we first got here, I didn’t know whether I could keep up my coffee addiction. I’m glad to report that that hasn’t been a problem. Between Starbucks beans that have arrived here in packages from home and our Cameroonian friend Koni Francis who brings us burned beans roasted at his brother’s house, I’m well taken care of. The Ndu stuff isn’t bad at all. The sludge at the bottom of my cups of French-press coffee has become my friend.

5. The chance to see the gospel lived out creatively in a very different cultural context. I’ll mention just one example: the way I’ve seen Cameroonian Christians wrestling seriously with the gospel’s demand for peaceable living. One of my students wrote recently: “When the Moslems attacked the Ndu Fon Palace [just a couple of months ago], I was so disturbed that the government did not send forces of law and order to arrest them and torture them. I even contemplated that the Ndu people should have gone down to attack them. After reading Raymond [Lull]’s story [in history of missions class], I see that this will only harden their hearts and make it difficult for them to accept Jesus Christ in the future…. In mission, one will need to show love even to the point of death as Christ did.” Or, similarly, when Tommy’s and my computers were stolen, one of our (Christian) friends said, “The only way to deal with thieves like this is to hunt them down and whip out a knife and teach them a lesson.” But most people we have gotten to know here at CBTS told us they were praying, in love, for the boy’s repentance and salvation.

6. The Yong family. Philemon and Linda have been very generous and helpful to me (and Tommy and Charlie), in dozens of ways: showing me how to get more malaria prevention medication at the nearby health center, inviting me up to their house for (chewy!) brownies, talking with me about making class syllabi and grading papers and dealing with sticky issues of students plagiarizing, etc., and, not least, lending us their “LOST” DVDs!

7. Emails, letters, and packages from home. There are few things more encouraging than this. Getting your weekly email updates, Liz, or over 100 of your incredible photographs, Joel, in the package you sent, that are now gracing the walls of my bedroom---these kinds of things remind me that there are friends and family back home who are “holding the ropes” for me.

8. Students’ questions in class. Sometimes they seem pointless, as in my Acts class: “Sir, I wish to know what it meant in that time in history for Peter to ‘look intently’ at the lame man he was about to heal?” But most of the time they’re thoughtful and born out of serious concerns and prove to be hermeneutically illuminating for me, their teacher. They may be what encourages me most in the classroom.

9. Charlie and Tommy. It’s been almost three years now since I first met these guys in Minneapolis, and I’m more grateful for their friendship now than I’ve ever been. It’s a sign of grace, I think, that instead of wanting to kill each other, as we literally spend almost every waking moment together, most days we like each other a lot and support each other well in the continual effort to figure out how best to serve and love our students and other Cameroonians we come into contact with.

10. Sunday night spaghetti dinners. The one day of the week Pa doesn’t cook for us is Sunday, which has caused us to develop a little tradition of sorts. About 5 pm every Sunday, our friend Ally will come over, and we’ll slice tomatoes, onions, and cloves of garlic together, sautee and stew ‘em, add some tinny-tasting tomato paste, paprika and basil, a dash of salt and sugar, and, voila, it somehow usually turns out pretty well. We’re working on perfecting it…

Thanks, Cameroon and CBTS, for a great experience so far. Thank you, Lord, for being with and in and through and under and over our time here. Thank you, family and friends, for supporting us and keeping us in your thoughts and prayers.

Merry Christmas,

Wes

"Welcome to Cameroon," the Dean of CBTS said with a smile.

2006-12-14T13:12:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a fairly atypical day, with far more drama than what we've come accustomed to. Once we adapted to the tentativeness of all plans here--interrupted class, impromptu speeches, abrupt faculty meetings--the only drama that we deal with usually is Wesley hording one pancake too many at breakfast or goats in our garden.

Wednesday morning, a boy from a nearby boarding school visited our house at seven-thirty in the morning and was sent away by our cook. He came back an hour later and asked to come in for water to drink. He had began a friendship with Charlie a week ago; last Sunday, he was at the house for an hour or two, asking Charlie questions about Scripture and faith. He had asked Charlie to come to the boarding school to speak to students about Christianity, and he had asked me to take him on a jog sometimes. I gave the boy two glasses of water to drink and sent him on his way. I was a little annoyed; he had been coming over far too often in the past week, and at fifteen years old, he should have been a bit more conscious of respecting our space and time (even according to the cultural standards here).

Around ten o'clock, Charlie and I left for tea time with the faculty. Charlie and Wesley came back to the house twenty to thrity minutes later. When I returned at ten-forty, I joined them in conversation for a bit. When they got up to go to their rooms, I noticed that our living room seemed a little empty. I had left my laptop on the chair, and it was gone. I poked my head into Charlie's room to see if the computer had been moved, but it wasn't there. Back in the living room, I saw Wesley's computer wasn't there, either. I nervously said, "Wesley, where are our computers." He gave me a funny look, glanced around the living room, and said, "You're joking, right?" Charlie came out, and after we established that none of us were joking--a necessity in this house, especially with Charlie--we began the process of alerting people and trying to track down our missing computers.

Our cook, Pa, is also an ex-vigilante in town. I'm not sure how to explain what that means here. If someone commits an act deemed a crime in the communities eyes, the vigilantes could be alerted. They would track the supposed wrongdoer down, capture him, tie him up, beat him, and leave him tied up for a period before setting him free. This was Pa's description of the volunteer work, as I remember. About half-an-hour after we noticed our computers were missing, Charlie and Wes were at Philemon's house (another missionary), and I walking around our house with Pa. Pa spoke in the dialect with some boys swinging on a tree by our house, and then he ran into the house. I figured that our lunch was burning. Then Pa comes out with a butcher knife. I followed him slowly, a little afraid--not for myself or for Pa, but for whoever he was going after. He passed through a garden and stopped to pick up a large rock for his other hand. He wasn't running; just walking intently, like a killer in a movie who is above running. He didn't stop to tell me what he was doing, so I followed behind, deliberating whether I should tell him to chill out. Not far away, there were two men sitting in a the forrest next to our house. Pa spoke to them harshly in the dialect (harsh to my ears), and then his composure relaxed. It was just two CBTS students reading their Bibles together. I had approached them from the side to flank them, and was glad to realize that Pa wouldn't be using his knife for anything beyond our green beans and carrots.

Anyways (I told myself I'd keep this short), after we discovered our items missing, CBTS administrators called to alert the administrators of the school. The school disciplinarian found the boy and pulled him into his office. Three slightly-intense hours later, the discplinarian (a strange title--their language, not my invention) met with us on CBTS' campus and returned our items. The boy had stolen my laptop and Wesleys, along with Charlie's power chord. He put it all into my laptop, which already contained two large Bible commentaries. The boy also stole our cell phone. Fortunately, all of it was recovered and none of it was damaged. Yesterday and today, we've had many visitors come by to give us their consolations and to show their support of us. Students and faculty members have been very kind. We've found out just how fast news travels around here.

We later found out that the boy had stolen Charlie's keys at some point, and that's how he entered the house.

All of it made for a crazy day. I think Charlie and Wes would agree with me that it was a good reminder of God's sovereignty. Even if our computers are used to teach here at the seminary, we're still ultimately just stewards of them. If they're taken away from us, they're taken away from us. While the items were missing, I kept thinking about the text in Hebrews describing how the community had "joyfully accepted the plundering of their property." The students here reacted with much indignation over the crime and sympathy for us when they heard the news announced this morning in chapel, but we've heard far more serious announcements far too many times this year in chapel to get _too_ upset over stolen computers. Some of the students here have responded to the incident with words of grace toward the boy, which has been encouraging. From what we've been told, the boy was most likely beaten for his actions--something the three of us find disturbing and unsettling. I heard today that he's run away, probably anticipating that he'd be dismissed from school for this and previous offenses.

One final thought for this already-too-long post. Many people here have told us not to let people in the house, or to only welcome in those whom we are confident are trustworthy. It's reminded me that love necessarily involves risk. I've had to reflect on what's most important: pursuing people or preserving possessions. The banner of love certainly does not cover all foolishness, but I think it covers some.

--Tommy

PS. Charlie and I are watching the second season of LOST now, at an aggressive pace, and I was sure I could find the trail of the culprit outside our house. I determined the two most likely paths of departure from our house, and scouted them both for many yards to look for any sort of clue or sign. Of course, it was a fruitless venture. Just like how I had hoped being in Africa would improve my health in miraculous ways, just like John Locke was able to use his legs on the island.

Fred? George? Robert?

2006-12-12T07:14:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the lengthy silence here lately. Final exams are this week, and we’re busy making exams, administering them, and finishing up marking assignments, before moving on to mark exams. Last night, I had a study session in the classroom with about ten of my Greek students. They look fairly enthused in the picture, but come 9:30, after reviewing Greek verbs, nouns, and adjectives for two and a half hours, their interest began to lag. We’re going to have another review session tonight. With some of the ministry money you’ve entrusted to me, I’m planning to buy some Greek New Testaments for the students with the highest marks. Another missionary here has some that he’s willing to sell. I love the idea of some of my students gaining a foundational grasp of the language this year and being able to use it in years to come. Greek is difficult for many of the students, partially because many of them don’t have a strong knowledge of English grammar, but also because many of them have trouble finding time each day to review and memorize Greek paradigms and vocabulary.

The other picture shows us with our two friends, Edith and Glory, along with Glory’s older sister, Delphine, and Delphine’s daughter, Victory. (Delphine is on the left, Glory is in the middle, and Edith is on the right.) Victory is wearing a bandanna because hair had been tied into small clumps t hat were not long enough yet to be presentable in public. Glory and Edith came over to say hello and to introduce us to Delphine. On Sunday, we had a possible record-setting twenty-one visitors. Visiting is a fundamental aspect of this culture, a sign of friendship and affection. Proper etiquette dictates that the visitor initiates the conclusion of his leaving. Given all this, it can be awfully difficult at times to be kind and respectful to visiting friends, yet at the same time to preserve time for grading and class preparation (and for personal time). When we saw Glory later than night, she told us that her sister had said that when you visit a white man, he stands at the door and asks how he can help you or what he can do for you (implying that he doesn’t invite you in and sit with you for extended periods, despite possible long periods of silence). We feel a tension at times between integrating as members of the community here and performing well as professors (while maintaining time for ourselves as well).

Thank you for your prayers, support, and encouragement for us. To use a Cameroonian expression, “we are together!”

--Tommy

PS. In church last Sunday, I greeted a student behind me who was holding a baby. I asked for the baby’s name, and he asked me the same. He wanted me to name his baby, which I quickly refused. Maybe it would have been a kind act, but I couldn’t bring myself to it. It’s hard enough naming my blog posts.

Lattes and "Lemps"

2006-11-29T04:23:00.000-08:00

What do paved roads, smoggy skies, lots of heat and humidity, lattes, Snickers bars, people speaking French, mosquitoes, go-carts, missionary team meetings, and one big Chinese restaurant have in common? Answer: They're all things that we saw, felt, tasted, met, experienced, talked to, or ate last week in Yaounde!

Yep, that's right. We arrived back here in Ndu in a cloud of red dust (dry season is definitely here, and the lingering, all-pervasive haze of dust in the air has begun) on Monday night after spending just under a week in Cameroon's capital city. We went, as Tommy said in the last post, to meet with other Baptist General Conference missionaries from around the country. We stayed at Wycliffe Bible Translators' SIL Center in Yaounde and had all our meetings there. It's a nice place, with a boarding school on campus (and a team of technicians who were able to repair my laptop---hooray!). We got to meet great people like Jim and Ina Smith who work with a health clinic in the town of Banyo, just a little northeast of where we live, and Rachel Scherer, a 21-year-old who's spent the last few months living in the village of Mbingo working with deaf students and doing a fantastic job, according to two other missionary families who live near her. (So, Ellie, there's great work to be done here in Cameroon too!)

It was really encouraging to hear reports about what God is doing---the incredible variety of things he's doing---through the BGC missionaries scattered throughout this country. One of the things I came away thinking about is how indispensable career missionaries are. When you think, for example, about Doug and Stephanie Lewis' work among the Fulani---a just-beginning-to-be-reached Muslim people group here---you realize how little can be accomplished in a short burst of activity but how much could be accomplished over a long haul. There's just no substitute for a lifetime commitment, and I can say as one short-termer that I'm inspired and challenged by the commitment I saw among most of the missionaries I met last week.

In addition to sitting in on strategizing and team-building meetings, we also got to play a lot. Our Peace Corps friend Ally told us about a coffee shop that we got to go to. It felt almost European---a big change from the “bush” where we live in the Northwest! We bought ice cream at a real(!) supermarket, and Charlie got to drive a go-cart with Philemon Yong, Doug Lewis, and lots of kids. We watched several episodes of “Lost” (season one) and spent a lot of time just hanging out.

One of the highlights of the week was the worship service for all the BGC missionaries on Sunday morning that the three of us got to lead. Charlie found a guitar, played some choruses, and led a time of corporate prayer, Tommy read Scripture, and I gave a brief meditation on the love of God from Romans 5:1-11. It was great to be worshiping together with others who care so deeply about God's global mission.

Now that we're back at CBTS, we have one more full week of classes left and then a week of final exams and then we're finished for the semester. (Can't wait to see the team from Bethlehem on December 31st! You guys will have a happy welcome at the airport!)

We'll blog more about it as the semester wraps up, I'm sure, but for now I think I speak for all three of us when I say I was really glad to see my students again after spending some time away. I got so many hand-shakes and back-slaps when I stepped back into my classrooms. Everyone was beaming. It felt great to be back among this seminary community.

On a humorous note, to give you some idea of how much fun and how frustrating it can be at the same time to be a teacher here, I gave an assignment last week in my Acts class and have just started grading the papers I received. This class is for second-year Certificate of Theology students---an eager, interested group of people who have about the equivalent of a U.S. seventh grade education. The assignment I gave was for my students to choose a block of text from the latter half of Acts and answer several questions about it in a short paper. One of the questions I wanted them to answer was what their chosen passage contributes to the larger whole of the entire book: Why did Luke include that section in his book? What role does it play in the macro-purpose and structure of Acts? One of my students wrote on Acts 20:7-12, the section that describes Eutychus' fall and Paul's rescue. Verse 8 says, “There were many lamps in the upper room where we were gathered,” and my student had this to say in his paper: “[Luke] want to show us that the Lamps are not exempted from hearing the word of God (v. 8).... I will like to know where Troas is found and know the kind of people that were there, whether they were only Lemps as found in verse 8 or they were other peoples.” Wow. In my comments on his paper, I tried to encourage my student's curiosity---and I referred him to a dictionary. :)

Grateful to all you pray-ers and supporters who keep making it possible for us to be here,

Wesley

P.S. I killed a chicken today for dinner tomorrow.

The Chicken Run again

2006-11-21T14:08:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow, we’re heading to Yaounde, the capital city of Cameroon, to meet with other BGC missionaries for an annual gathering. There will be business meetings and plenty of free time. We’re hoping to visit a Western-style coffee shop to drink lattes and espressos. We’ve also heard rumors that we’ll be able to buy burritos somewhere, and visit a Japanese buffet. And of course, there will be the consumption of many candy bars. It should be great! If you think of it, please pray for traveling mercies and for this getaway to be a time of refreshment and renewal. There will only be two weeks of classes left in the semester when we return next week, and we want to finish well.

Above, you see a picture of a chicken that we ate a couple of weeks ago. Except we didn’t just eat it—Charlie and I plucked it (as we’re about to do in the picture). And we didn’t just pluck it—Charlie held down its talons while pinned its head with one hand and slit its neck with the other. And I didn’t just slit its neck—I had to slice over and over again, over a dozen times, until I had even pierced its skin. The knife was not sharp at all, and the chicken’s neck skin was hardly taut. We got ‘er done, though. And if you’re cringing now, imagine how I felt. The chicken stared me straight in the eye for an eternal thirty-seconds before it entered the big sleep.

After killing it, we boiled the chicken in water to loosen the feathers. Then Charlie and I began to pluck it; we grabbed a couple feathers at a time, pulling them cautiously and daintily. In response, Pa (our cook) pushed us aside and began manhandling the chicken, swiping handfuls of feathers in violent, efficient motions. We felt pretty American; it was a poultry effort.

"Sir, you know kung fu?"

2006-11-16T13:54:00.000-08:00

It's been a bit. What's going on? ("Harold, don't you like to know...what's going on?!"--Maude to Harold, in my mom's favorite movie, Harold and Maude.)

Last Sunday, I was given the opportunity to preach at a small local church I attend with Wesley. Charlie recently began attending a small francophone service, led by some students. I was asked to preach the Friday night before that Sunday, so I spent much of Saturday preparing a simple message about the value of service and sacrifice in the Kingdom of God. I worked from Mark 10:42-45 and concluded with two summarizing points--we must be willing to be served by Jesus, and we must follow Christ by serving others. So many sermons here are from the Old Testament and devoid of reference to Christ that I thought a simple message about Christ and Christianity might be encouraging and helpful.

I arrived early at the church to let my interpreter read my manuscript. Half the congregation speaks English; the other half, a local dialect. While I was discussing the sermon with the interpeter (named Theodore), a deacon walked in and asked for the sermon's title, in order that he could write it on a chalkboard at the front of the congregation. "Uhm...'Greatness in God's eyes' would be fine," I answered. Ten minutes later, Theodore and I met with the pastor of the church in his office. The deacon entered and asked for the title once more. I repeated, "Greatness in God's eyes." The pastor seemed to correct me--"'Greatness in God's sight' would be fine. Very fine." I guess there was room for improvement with my title, but the evolution was not yet complete. I sat at the front of the church the whole service, facing the congregation, so I wasn't able to read the chalkboard. After the service, I found out from Wes the final product presented to the congregation: "Greatness in God's Side." Just about what I intended, I guess.

It felt a bit awkward preaching with an interpreter. I didn't feel like I could build up any momentum or enthusiasm because of the consistent long pauses. Nevertheless, I was thankful for the opportunity and experience. People were appreciative afterwards; I hope it was edifying for the congregation. I caught many of them got a kick out of seeing the white preacher dance up front during the offering. (Everyone was dancing, so I wasn't getting too charismatic on them.)

It can be difficult to transform Sunday services here into worshipful experiences. As said earlier, many sermons are not only moralistic, grace-less, and Christ-less, but they're loooong, too. Coupled with almost interminable announcements, the 90-degree wooden pews begin to change the curvature of your spine. Without printed bulletins, email, or telephones for communication, and without any other venue for more-general community announcements, all church-related and community-related news must be given on Sunday mornings. That includes Sunday school attendance and lesson reports. Add to this dedications of choir uniforms or other segments, and the rice and stew waiting for you at home can become a filet mignon smothered in steak sauce.

With that said, I have grown in appreciation for the church I attend (named Calvary Baptist), and Sundays are becoming more enjoyable and worshipful. I've become familiar with the services and recognize people every week, which allows me to better focus on why I'm gathering with these people. Every Sunday, I'm reminded of the work of Christ in creating and gathering a people for Himself, resulting in my traveling around the world to a completely different culture to find a community of people I can join and with whom I can identify.

One more newsworthy item. This has been a difficult week at the seminary. Students were expected to pay off remaining tuition dues, and many were not able. Some did not have any plan for paying their tution off; they were praying for God to provide. Others came with plans, only to find them once again submitted to the unreliability of Africa. Wesley was able to help a student who has had recent serious medical problems that created massive debts. Charlie and I were able to help a student who's financial stability was destroyed by a monkey in the garden (literally--that's not an African expression).

Thanks you all who are enabling us to give to these students. Without your support, they would not be able to finish the last month of the semester to receive credit. We hope we're being good stewards of your resources, thoughts, and prayers.

--Tommy

PS. Just so I don't lose my youthful edge--two days ago, I told a student to say to Charlie in the middle of class, "Sir, does your black belt in karate help you with our class, Research Methods?" Surrouding students raised their eyes and began chattering softly about kung fu and Jackie Chan. Charlie felt embarassed. When he recounted the tale to me, I, on the other hand, felt triumphant. That's what he gets for trapping me in my room.

A visit to the Fon's Palace

2006-11-09T07:37:00.000-08:00

One of the things that's interesting about Cameroon (among other African countries) is that there are at least two different government structures. For example, the village of Ndu is located in the Donga/Mantung division of the Northwest Province. And instead of having a mayor or governor for this division, there is a man---actually we've gotten to know him and his family, since his son attends CBTS and is in our classes---called the Divisional Officer who is an official of the government in Yaounde stationed here as a kind of cross between a mayor and a sheriff or police chief. But there are also "traditional rulers"---tribal chiefs. These chiefs are called "fons." They have dynasties and also lots of clout with the "real" government when it comes to influencing what happens with the various villages and ethnic groups that live here.

Apparently, once a year, the whole faculty and staff of CBTS pays a visit to the fon of Ndu, to let him meet any new faculty and also simply to greet him and pray for him. Yesterday was the day of the visit to the "fon's palace," and it was quite an experience for we three Westerners.

About 3:30 yesterday afternoon, we all met near the library on campus and piled into four or five vehicles and drove about 10 minutes to the palace. We had already heard a few things about the fon before we met him: he was formerly Muslim, he is now a Christian (in fact, we've worshiped with him several times at Calvary Baptist Church, a tiny fellowship in the quarter of Njimtop about a half hour walk from campus), and he has recently experienced some vandalism (of some sort) from Muslims who live near him. We were told not to speak to him when we arrived at the palace unless spoken to first. We were also told not to give him the traditional "salute"---three claps and a bow with both hands clasped together close to our mouths---unless we had also brought one live chicken and a jug of palm wine as a gift.

When we arrived at the palace, we had to pass underneath a big wooden gate that was decorated with traditional masks and simple paintings of different scenes with people (hunting, etc.) There was a large courtyard with a mosque bordering one side of it. Several of the men who came with us started unloading the gifts we had brought for the fon (bottles of soda, a fake animal skin, among other things). After several minutes of waiting, we went inside to the "throne room"---a musty, dingy, dim room with a concrete platform in one corner and a small wicker chair on it where the fon sat. There were statues or idols of some sort on either side of the throne. The walls were covered with yellowing photographs, awards, carvings, and other memorabilia. We filed in silently and sat on wooden benches. Dr. Fon---not to be confused with the fon---greeted the fon as "your royal highness." One of the teachers at CBTS brought a brief devotional, and we prayed, and then the fon left the room, we all started drinking sodas, and the three of us were left wondering, "What just happened?!"

Before leaving the palace, we wanted to greet the "royal wives." Meandering out of the throne room, we went out into another, smaller courtyard where dozens of barefooted children were playing in the dust and staring up at us with wide, wondering eyes. We all ducked into one of the mud-brick houses, into a room even darker than the throne room had been with a fire pit in the middle of the floor. The "royal wives" were all sitting against one wall. The fon has many wives---some of them Muslim, some of them Christian, and some of them feeling, I think, more or less coerced into being royal wives---not all of whom were there at the palace yesterday. I counted around a dozen who were in the room. One of them I recognized as a very friendly woman with a wonderful smile who sometimes leads worship at Calvary Baptist Church. She translated for us as we gave greetings to the wives and also as they greeted us in Wimbum, a tribal dialect that many people speak around Ndu and CBTS. We sang a few Christian choruses, and then said goodbye and were on our way.

I think the three of us left yesterday feeling like we had just experienced one of the most unusual and memorable events of our time here. Personally, I felt again the huge gulf between my rich American upbringing and the life of the royal family that lives by such different cultural rules and experiences such poverty, even as one of the better-off families here. I also left thinking again about what I read in Phillip Jenkins' book The Next Christendom last summer---that these Christian women who are trying to be faithful to Jesus while living and bearing children as the fon's royal wives in dusty mud-brick houses blackened by fire pits, these women are "average" or "typical" Christians in our world today. That's an amazing thought, and, in a roundabout way, encourages me to keep giving it my all in the classroom at CBTS, as I help train pastors who will go out and shepherd Christians like these.

-Wes, for the team

Fake Words, Big Trucks, and Near-Death Experiences: These Are a Few of Our Favorite Things

2006-11-06T14:25:00.000-08:00

Ten minutes ago Tommy and I bid adieu to two of our new friends at CBTS—Samuel (13) and Leonard (15). The former is the son of a student of mine, the latter the son of a faculty member here. I was surprised a few weeks back when they asked us to meet with them weekly to be “prayer partners” (Tommy with Leonard, and me with Samuel). Here’s why. They are 13 and 15 years old. We spend most of our days teaching and interacting with people twice our age (nay, some thrice), so when these two asked us to meet with them weekly to pray, I wasn’t really sure that I knew how to pray with a 13 year-old. Besides, oughtn’t I to spend time with those students that I came to teach? My time should be devoted to smart people, deep people, and people with a direction in life. Then I opened my eyes to see that this 13-year old Samuel came at his own initiative to ask me to pray with him once a week. I decided to really invest in this relationship, and I am so glad that that decision was made. In our prayer partners, God brings a voice of Cameroon to our house every Saturday at 2:00. I have sat speechless, even cried over some of the things that Samuel and Leonard have shared with us, and as a result my heart has been softened and moved to pray for this region of this country more and more. So many aspects of life in the NW Province need to be redeemed.

That is the introduction. So, after praying today, Tommy and I played “Speed Scrabble” with the two boys (a frantic race to make as many words as possible with your allotted letters). The last game ended when Samuel announced that he had finished. We all turned to look at his words. I’m not sure that any of them were real words. In fact, I know that they weren’t. Two examples: first, “tevisubi.” “What’s tevisubi?” Tommy asks. “It’s what the Muslims yell,” replies Samuel. Right. What the Muslims yell. Second word: “zib.” Upon being asked what this means, Samuel starts moving his hand up and down in front of his shirt, “You know, a zibber. You zib a zibber on a coat.” Apparently ‘Hooked on Phonics’ has made its way to West Africa. That’s how the game ended. Tommy was laughing, I was brooding. I could have won.

Yesterday was a big day for CBTS. Many readers of the blog will know what I am talking about when I say that the container sent by Bethlehem Baptist to the Seminary arrived, with all of the contents inside. The eagle, O Bethlehem, has landed. A large green truck made its way in front of Dr. Fon’s house, where the container was opened, and many students in green uniforms with softball helmets handed the items to others who carried them throughout the campus. For nearly two hours the eager students and faculty (with Dr. Fon leading the pack) unloaded all the boxes, couches, bikes, sewing machines, generators, computers, etc. The school shut down for this event—Tommy and I both had to cancel class because our students were preoccupied with carrying things on their heads. Tommy attempted to give a student his hermeneutics quiz orally, while he was helping to unload, but the student protested. I can’t imagine why. Again, this was a very large day for CBTS. A large thank you to those who contributed to the container—your gifts will go further than you can imagine. Things like this are like a shot in the arm—I mean “shot” in the good, healthy, life-giving sense. Not how Tommy thinks about shots.

Lastly, I need to share a near-death experience with you. I will be brief, and I will take all the blame. I locked Tommy in his room. Really—I shut his door, heard a strange click, then I couldn’t open it. Tommy was trying to open his door from within; I was trying from without. To no avail. After we convinced each other that the other really was being serious, Tommy told Wes to get on the computer and do some “live” blogging. We unscrewed the handle and pulled it off, yet it still wouldn’t open. Tommy was planning to have his classes come to his window, where he could lecture ex cathedra. Then we realized that we couldn’t get to the hinges to take the door off. So I tried to communicate with Tommy under his door. First, a peace offering of a sour gummyworm. Second, an agreement to give me his i-Pod if he died before we got the door open. The reality of the situation was that we were separated by a sheet of balsa wood (the kind of wood you make those little flimsy airplanes out of). Nevertheless, it was serious. The situation sent me on a run throughout the campus—to the Kome’s house, to the Fon’s House, to Amos Nchuoji, to Milton, and finally to Fambfu. Fambfu showed up to help with a pair of pliers. Oh phew—a pair of pliers has arrived, everyone. Yet surprisingly, the pliers worked. They were jammed around the handle and hit with a big rock from outside. Wood splintered, sweat beaded, grunts sounded, and embraces followed. The door opened and Tommy emerged—looking as one who had made peace with whatever his lot was to be. He was alive, and still has his i-Pod to this day.

-Charlie, for the team

Grasshoppers for lunch

2006-10-30T06:51:00.000-08:00

Well, it's back to classes on Monday the 30th. This past week was mid-term break (we stayed in Ndu for the most part; Charlie and I joined our friend Ally from the Peace Corps for a trip to the larger village of Kumbo to pick up some food supplies, etc., on Wednesday, but other than that little excursion, we were around the seminary campus), and the week before that we gave mid-term exams. So, starting Monday, we'll begin again with the typical routine of lectures, meeting with students, going to chapel, and grading papers. It will be good to have things back to "normal"!

One of the responsibilities we've been given most recently is supervising theses that the graduating Bachelor of Theology students will write this year. Tommy, Charlie, and I are each supervising at least one thesis, and it will take a substantial investment of time to do a good job. Each thesis will be 60 double-spaced pages (around 15,000 words), and as readers, we are expected to give input on the content, structure, grammar and syntax, formatting of citations, style, and readability, as well help the students find good resources and read them well. Once we start back full-force with the fall semester this week, this new task will consume a lot of our time and effort. Pray for us in this regard, that we'll guide and direct our students well, that our input and feedback will be helpful. (Some of the topics students are writing on are, for example: "Christianity and the Problem of Pain"; "The Gospel as the Power of God for Salvation: An Exegesis of Romans 1:16-17"; "The Church-Plating Methods of the Apostle Paul.")

On a lighter note, yesterday for lunch the three of us ate fried grasshoppers. Here's how I described the experience in an email to my dad, mom, brother, and sister:

"I tried my first grasshopper. In fact, I tried three. For the next two weeks or so, big, fat, bright green grasshoppers will be everywhere outside, like one of the plagues in Exodus, and adults and kids here love catching them and stuffing them into large plastic bottles. If you give a bottle full of grasshoppers to an elder Cameroonian, it's a great honor. … So a kid named Samuel helped us catch a few last night (they congregate around fluorescent lights on campus), and today Pa, our cook, fried them up for us in a pan (no need to add oil---when they fry, they kind of secrete their own oil), and then showed us how to pull off their legs and wings. I'll be honest, when I held the first one and looked at its small, black, beady eyes, I gulped, not wanting to stick that thing into my mouth. But when I tried it, I was really surprised by how much I liked it. Grasshoppers are kind of chewy and kind of crunchy, I discovered. And the aftertaste reminds me of shrimp (Linda Yong disagrees---she says bacon). I had three in all, Charlie videoed it and snapped a few pictures, and it was a lot of fun. Hopefully we'll post some of the shots on the blog soon."

-Wes

True fans ignore location

2006-10-23T13:30:00.000-07:00

Serendipitously, the Seakhawks and the Colts’ playing the late-afternoon slot last Sunday coincided with fall break being this week. Here Charlie is at midnight yesterday, hoping against hope that the Seahawks would pull out a victory against the Vikings (which unfortunately remained just that, hope). The power was out (contrary to the picture’s look from the flash), a storm was raging outside, and Charlie and I huddled around a computer. ESPN.com’s NFL scoreboard promised to automatically reload, but no true fan could resist hitting refresh over and over. (If you don’t think this is fitting for missionaries, don’t worry—we prayed together during half-time. That’s a joke, but we really did.) I think the reality of defeat had begun to set in at the time of the picture: Charlie began to drift off sometime in the 4th quarter.

I, on the other hand, was able to retire with the euphoria of victory. The Colts became the ninth team in NFL history to be 6-0 for two consecutive seasons. (The Chicago Bears? Who? ) Now if I can only find a venue to watch the play-offs…

[Editorial insert: As the publisher of this post, I must interject and say that the Colts will crumble in the playoffs as Belichick and the Patriots' defense once more gets into Peyton's head. Sorry Tommy, but winless starts in the regular season don't translate into playoff success. Just ask the Colts about last year.]

--tg

Another friend...

2006-10-23T13:26:00.000-07:00

Here is a picture of Wesley and me with a good friend of ours, Randolph. This picture is coming on the heels of a long and strenuous game of scrabble between Wes and Randolph, so if the former looks a little tuckered out, that’s why. Randolph is amazing. His reputation certainly preceded him at our first game, but none of us thought that a Cameroonian would beat an American. We were wrong. In his last game against Wesley, he did use the word “Equire” (verb: to sort things into sets of 24). Final score: 424 to 259. Wow. We have thoroughly enjoyed having him in class (I have him for Hebrew, Wes has him for Missions and NT Intro.). He is a very thoughtful, very sharp student with a big heart, which makes him similar to many of the acquaintances we have made here.

We miss you all, and do pray for you often,

-Charlie (making a rare appearance for the team)

A typical evening view

2006-10-23T13:18:00.000-07:00

We are very fortunate in that our house faces west, thus framing the sunset by our front window. Here is a taste of what we see nearly every evening (sometimes even brighter!).

Home Sweet Home!

2006-10-23T13:01:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of shots of our humble abode. We really are quite blessed to be living in this house. Somehow, by God’s grace I’m sure, we have learned to call these cement walls and mossy walkways “home” (at least for this year). With every experience within and without these walls (both good and bad), this house is becoming a place filled with memories. Come this June I suspect that it will be a very hard place to leave.

Iron Kung Fu, a.k.a. MacPhil

2006-10-23T12:55:00.000-07:00

Wesley mentioned this little man a few posts back. This is a good picture, isn’t it? MacPhil drops by the house occasionally, usually with a devious look in his eyes. He has been affectionately named “Iron Kung Fu,” since his favorite movie (or is it a TV show?) bears that very name. Today I walked past him, stopped, made blades out of my hands, and slowly turned the blades into ‘iron’ fists. He responded with a giggle, which I took as an open mockery of my ability to do Kung Fu. I let it slide. Be the bigger man, Charlie, be the bigger man. I am planning on seeing him in the next couple of days, at which time we will pick up where we left off, promptly.

Mmm...

2006-10-19T06:40:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday, Pa helped us cook "country chop" over the fire in our living room: that's roasted plaintains, "soya" (=meat on a stick, which was the best we've had so far here--tender and juicy!), and of course (not in the picture) fufu and njamanjama! Fufu is a staple of everyone's diet here; most Cameroonians we know eat it every day. It's a thick, pasty substance made from corn or rice. You roll it with your hands and use it to pick up the "njamanjama," which is huckleberry leaves that have been cooked with oil and (often) the juice from a pepper known as "pepe."

John Stott on missions and Southern-hemisphere Christianity

2006-10-17T09:53:00.000-07:00

John Stott was recently interviewed in Christianity Today. Here’s an excerpt that struck me:

[Stott:] [The] enormous growth [of the church worldwide] is a fulfillment of God's promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:1-4. God promised Abraham not only to bless him, not only to bless his family or his posterity, but through his posterity to bless all the families of the earth. Whenever we look at a multiethnic congregation, we are seeing a fulfillment of that amazing promise of God. A promise made by God to Abraham 4,000 years ago is being fulfilled right before our very eyes today.

[Interviewer:] You know this growing church probably as well as any Westerner does. I wonder how you evaluate it.
[Stott:] The answer is "growth without depth." None of us wants to dispute the extraordinary growth of the church. But it has been largely numerical and statistical growth. And there has not been sufficient growth in discipleship that is comparable to the growth in numbers.

[Interviewer:] How can the Western church, which surely has problems of its own, fruitfully interact with the non-Western? Right now many churches are sending mission teams all over the world.
[Stott:] I certainly want to be positive about short-term mission trips, and I think on the whole they are a good thing. They do give Westerners an awfully good opportunity to taste Southern Christianity and to be challenged by it, especially by its exuberant vitality. But I think the leaders of such mission trips would be wise to warn their members that this is only a very limited experience of cross-cultural mission.
True mission that is based on the example of Jesus involves entering another world, the world of another culture. Incarnational cross-cultural mission is and can be very costly. I want to say, please realize that if God calls you to be a cross-cultural missionary, it will take you 10 years to learn the language and to learn the culture in such a way that you are accepted more or less as a national.

[Interviewer:] So there's really no replacing the long-term missionary.
[Stott:] I think not, except of course for indigenous Christians.

Reading this was a good reminder of why Tommy, Charlie, and I are here at CBTS---as well as of the limitations we face in being here.

We’re here for discipleship, for training and equipping indigenous Christian leaders who will be involved in deepening, not just widening, the Church. Pray that we’ll remember this in the crunch of preparing lectures, grading papers, and meeting with students.

--Wes, for the team

A Couple Pictures

2006-10-16T15:09:00.000-07:00

Here are some pictures to go with Wesley’s post. It’s from our visit to see the newly delivered baby. You’ll notice that we all look quite festive, wearing shirts made here. And though there’s no proof of it in the picture, you can trust us that there’s a couple-week-old baby girl wrapped up in the blanket.

--tg, for team

Thank you

2006-10-13T07:05:00.000-07:00

For those of you praying for our chapel messages, thank you. I spoke yesterday and Charlie spoke today, and for both of us, it was comforting and relieving to rest on your prayers. Charlie did a great job today, preaching on the need for and practice of continual transformation in the Christian life. Today in class, I had a student tell me that she very much liked my sermon, but that one thing I did was improper. "During your sermon, you said, 'I'm sorry; I must find my place,' as you flipped through your notes. Sir, I do not think that is proper." As is usual, this was met with a chorus of different responses--some outbursts of disagreement, some laughter. A student in front of me jumped to my defense: "It is because he knows he is not God speaking! He knows he is only human!" I found it all humorous.

We couldn't do this without you--thank you for praying!

--tg

Learning the culture, bit by bit

2006-10-11T08:04:00.000-07:00

Life here is full of ups and downs, hilarious and heartbreaking things, as anyone's life is, no matter where you are. But sometimes here, the ups feel higher and the downs feel lower to us simply because we're Americans trying hard to enjoy and fit into this strangely, wonderfully different entity called Cameroonian culture.

Here's some of what the journey has looked like so far for us…

On Sunday, our friend Emmanuel ("Emma") the tailor came over to the house. He wanted to take us to greet his sister, Marie, who just had a baby. "She's been delivered," Emma said happily, leaving us to wonder at first if he was talking about a power encounter!

As we left the house to go into the village to Marie and her husband's house, Emma and I stopped on our front porch. A couple of nights before, Tommy had put a bucket just outside the waist-high concrete barrier of the porch to collect rainwater. Now the sun was reflecting off the pool of water and onto the corrugated tin roof of the porch. Emma and I both noticed the bright, dancing reflection. With a glint in his eye, Emma pointed and asked, "Wesley, what is that?" I hesitated for a second, wondering what exactly he was asking. "Emma, that's the sun reflecting off the water in Tommy's bucket," I said. Emma immediately started laughing---loudly and for a long time. "Oh, Wesley, I was hoping to trick you. I thought you wouldn't know what it was! But now I can see you know it's the reflection." Now it was my turn to laugh. Do Cameroonians really think we Americans are that incompetent? :) Ahh, the journey of learning and laughing goes on…!

As Emma led the three of us, plus our student friend Edith who "dry cleans" (=washes our floors with soap and water) for us, into Ndu and towards Marie's house, we passed a house with a huge crowd---maybe 40 people---outside. All of them were wailing loudly, and there was a mound of fresh dirt just beyond the door. The pastor of Ndu's First Baptist Church saw us and came over to explain: "This family has just been bereaved, and family and friends have come to mourn." I immediately thought of the scene in Mark's Gospel of Jairus' daughter and the mourners whom Jesus sent out of the house. Death in this culture seems to hold a place very similar to the one it held in Jesus' time---and the one it holds in all Third World cultures of today.

On Monday our friend MacPhil came over to the house. Charlie was napping, and Tommy was meeting with a student, so I got to hang out with MacPhil by myself for a bit. MacPhil---sometimes we call him "Mac"---is the six-year-old son of the VP of the seminary. He's really cute and really funny. Tommy's given him the nickname "Iron Kung Fu" because that's one of Mac's favorite movies, and Mac has returned the favor by giving each of us nicknames: I'm "Wessy," Charlie is "Chilly," and Tommy is "Tubby." When he got to our house on Monday and I opened the door, he threw his arms around my neck as I picked him up off the ground. I gave him a sugar cube as a treat, and we sat in the living room and talked about school (how he likes to skip whenever he can make up a good excuse) and what he's been playing with his older brother Jim lately. As he walked back up the trail from our house, I watched him karate-chopping some of the flowers on our front walkway. Yep, the nickname fits. Iron Kung Fu is one of our favorite kids on campus.

Yesterday I had my first meeting with my new prayer partner---I'll call him "Isaac." He's 24 years old and is in my Systematic Theology class. Since 2000, Isaac has wrestled with a serious, debilitating health condition that could eventually lead to liver failure. (I'm being intentionally a bit vague here for the sake of Isaac's privacy.) But with the help of doctors at Banso Baptist Hospital, he's doing better now and is back in class. As we met yesterday in my office, Isaac told me his story. He is from a nearby village in the Northwest province, one of seven children. His father is a farmer. Isaac's older sister shared the "Four Spiritual Laws" with him when he was about 14, and he consciously trusted Christ for the first time then. He is here at CBTS because he wants to be a teacher and a pastor.

Interestingly---here's another instance of the vast cultural difference between us and our students---Isaac's main prayer request yesterday was for his relationship to his father. Isaac's dad really wants him to consult a sorcerer and use traditional African religious methods to deal with his illness. Isaac feels that as a Christian, to consult a sorcerer would be to compromise his faith. Wow, I thought as we prayed together, what a dramatic illustration of how the gospel confronts drastically different things in different cultures! Where following Christ might lead to a conflict with materialism in the U.S., here it is more likely to lead to a conflict with traditional magic and sorcery.

Well, I'm going to end this post and head up to the playing fields to watch a game of "Handball"---it's kind of a cross between soccer and basketball, and all three of us are considering joining one of the seminary teams.

Thanks for reading this. And thanks for leaving comments, too. It's always encouraging to hear from you, our family, friends, and supporters.

Much love,

Wes

Child Friends

2006-10-05T07:03:00.000-07:00

During college at Taylor, it was a future lineman named Jaxson. In Minneapolis, an architect and swinger named Anders, and a firecracker, Taylor Beth. The past four to five years, I've enjoyed friendships with infants and toddlers. Here are some friends I've made here in Cameroon:

(1) One of my Greek students, Mbotto, and his wife, Vivian (a French teacher) have an adorable one-year-old named Jonetta. She's full of life, often squirming around in her mom's lap, and apparently shy around, maybe frightened of, young white men. We often sit by Vivian and Jonetta in chapel. Sometimes, Jonetta will tear up a napkin, giving me each little bit or stashing the pieces in her ear and neck. Other mornings, she'll clap with the beat or sing the worship song in a private tongue.

(2) Behind the seminary, there's a path I run a couple times a week, through villages and by people carrying produce on their heads. In the past week or two, I've become acquainted with a five or six-year-old girl named Promise. She saw me running one day and squealed with laughter. It was really high-pitched. She ran from the field onto the path, and started running a distance behind me. I asked if she wanted to "do sport" with me, and as I jogged in place, she mimicced me. It sounds cute, but she was definitely making fun of me, finding the white man a hilarious spectacle. Now, whenever I'm on a run, she inevitable spots me, shreiks, and runs behind me (always at a safe distance) with a constant, shrill laugh.

(3) A staff-member here has a nephew named Zeal (pronounced "Zee-elle," with strong emphasis on "Zee"). He's a a year and a half old, I'd guess. I see him a couple times a week, often while he's waiting outside of his school in the morning. The toddlers and young children wait outside of their school by themselves every morning until it opens. They'll often walk to school on their own, too. I don't think I was allowed to be anywhere by myself until I was ten. Zeal's mother died a couple months ago from sickness. Because autopsies are uncommon, the cause of death is often unknown. Occasionally, Zeal is bubbling with vigor, laughing heartily and playfully. But usually, he greets the world with a blank stare. He recognizes me, and will wave at me sometimes. I caught his attention one day by making a loud whistle out of a blade of grass. And we have a shared connection of patting our bellies whenever we see each other. But for the most part, he's fairly stoic, rarely smiling, expressing only sadness in his eyes. Mercy, his aunt, said that he often asks for his mother; he expects her to return. In my experience thus far, I've often found Cameroonians to be less self-conscious than Americans. For example, at the start of some classes, I'll ask someone to lead us in song, and most students are willing to lead the group. In the states, I bet only those with a musical background and a bold spirit would be so courageous. I've wondered if this relative freedom from the opinion of one's peers is due to the reality of sickness and death here. A deceased mother or father, sister or brother is not uncommon, and trivial matters never ascend beyond triviality. Just a thought. Pray for Zeal if you think of it.

It's pouring down rain now as we eat hamburgers and macaroni and cheese for dinner. If you will, please pray for our chapel messages next week. I speak next Thursday, Charlie Friday, and Wesley Monday. I think we'll be working with the theme "Transformation," preaching on regeneration, sanctification, and glorification respectively. We hope God uses it to edify students. Thank you for reading! It's humbling and a bit unbelievable that you read about our experiences, reflections, and needs. Eat some candy for me (preferably Good and Plenty). Power just went out.

--tg

Preaching in chapel

2006-09-30T00:18:00.000-07:00

One of the things we get to do here at CBTS is preach in chapel. Chapel here is five mornings a week, Mon-Fri, 7:30-8:00 AM, and is required for all students, faculty, and staff, which means there are usually well over 300 people there. Most days we sing simple worship songs and then hear a short sermon.

On Thursday, I got to preach. I was given the theme of “Self-Examination: Taking the Log Out of Your Own Eye,” and I chose Galatians 6:1-5 as my text (“Brothers and sisters, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you spiritual ones should restore such a person in the Spirit of gentleness, keeping watch on yourselves, lest you also be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens and in this way fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let each one test his own work; then he will keep his boast to himself and not direct it to his neighbor. For each one will have to bear his own load”). At the end of the sermon, I made the following applications to our CBTS community:

1. We should recognize that every member of this community, by virtue of
their faith in Christ, is indwelt by the same Holy Spirit. No one should
feel that they have been catapulted to a higher spiritual plane than anyone else
here at CBTS. The one Spirit has come to each one of us. Let’s
recognize this and celebrate it!
2. With regard to those among us who
fall into some sin and feel their need for God’s grace, we should restore them
through the gentleness that the one Spirit gives us. We should be gentle
in dealing with a struggling brother or sister because we ourselves are open to
the same kinds of temptation. Let’s be humble and gentle in our spiritual
rescue operations.
3. We should look to Christ’s self-giving love—the
love that he demonstrated on the cross (Gal 2:20)—as the pattern of our own
burden-bearing love for one another. We are called to be imitators of the
one who loved beyond all measure. Let’s look to Christ.
4. We
should have the spiritual maturity to realize that we are not “something
special,” that we do not need to promote ourselves and our good works in front
of other people. If we are confident through the Spirit that God will
commend us, we do not need to look for the public praise of others. Let’s
keep quiet about our good deeds in patient expectation of the judgment
day.
5. Finally, we should be confident in the work of the one Spirit
in our lives. We should rejoice and boast to ourselves about the good
fruit the Spirit has enabled us to bear. We should be confident that we
will stand approved before God. Let’s bear the load of our spiritual fruit
joyfully.

In about three weeks from now, Tommy, Charlie, and I will each have a chance to preach in chapel. They’ve given us three days back-to-back, and Tommy has suggested that we all three preach on the same theme. We’ve talked about a couple of themes as possibilities: “The Love of Christ” (my thought) or “Performing the Scriptures” (Tommy’s suggestion). We’re excited about this. Pray for our preparation, and we’ll let you know how it goes.

-Wes, for the team

Our New Neighbors…

2006-09-28T07:08:00.001-07:00

So we have had some interesting visits as of late…and they are not by students. Wesley posted a few times back about cows that had been visiting us. Well, they continue to do so to this day, and when I nearly stepped in a “pie” at the bottom of our walkway, I decided that they had worn out their welcome. Yes guys (and gals), it is time to be going. So I walked outside again, mustered all my courage, clapped my hands, and raised my voice somewhat. Nothing happened. One of them (whom I believe is the ringleader) gave me a look of positive defiance, and made clear by his three slow chews that neither he, nor his posse, were going anywhere anytime soon. So I muttered a few threats under my breath, and went back inside. Now you must understand, their horns are excessively large (what on earth do they need them for?!). They are a bit frightening for those of us who have never really stood this close to such creatures. For some of them, think of Pharaoh’s dream in Genesis 41:1-4. For others, think dinosaurs. Or maybe the behemoth in Job. Really. To ensure our safety we have tried to improve some of the relations, but to no avail. The skeletons and the dinosaurs, as of now, are not our friends. So to explain the picture: Pa left us this afternoon (as is his usual practice), but did not leave dinner behind. So what are we to do? Well, what would any reasonable person do whose house was surrounded by Rib-eye, T-Bone and New York Strip? The picture speaks for itself. In case it is unclear, that is our machete in my hand.

-Charlie for the Team

And the Sky, is a Hazy Shade of…Wet Season.

2006-09-27T12:40:00.000-07:00

We were hoping to get a picture featuring the beautiful African scenery with the three of us in the foreground and our house in the distant background. However, as is often the case here, the afternoon sky was covered with clouds and filled with rain. There’s no hot water for a shower to provide relief; the water has been out since this morning, and the power’s been out since last night. Candles are a nice effect, though, and I’ve learned that you can live dirty.

Anyway, because of the sudden showers, our umbrellas have become indispensable. They go with us nearly everywhere. Charlie’s already broken one, and I’ve nearly lost mine multiple occasions.

Dinner’s on the table—potatoes, rolls, carrots, and cabbage. It’s actually more than I expected. For some reason, whenever we have hamburgers for lunch, our cook makes extra rolls and deems them a sufficient dinner. Having side dishes with the rolls is a bonus. (This is an anomaly—we’ve been eating great.)

If you think to pray, pray for our spirits. We feel plenty busy now, and we’ll be adding more responsibilities soon. The computer technician is leaving next month, and we’ll be assuming responsibilities of keeping up the computer lab. With short nights and sometimes long classes, we’d appreciate your prayers. It’s a blessing and honor to be here, and we want to serve with zeal, setting our mind on things above. Thank you!

--tg

PS. Sorry the picture quality is poor. We hope to put more up soon. We’ll be sure Charlie’s in some authentic Cameroonian garb.

"A day in the life"

2006-09-22T10:12:00.000-07:00

For those of you who have been wondering what a “typical day” here at CBTS looks like, here’s one answer (Wesley’s). (Hopefully Tommy and Charlie will follow this up with their own installments soon.)

5:15 AM My alarm goes off, and I hit the snooze button. It's a bad habit, but waking up early, for someone who has never been a morning person, is something you have to ease into, I think. :)

5:50 AM By now, I’ve showered and shaved and am at my desk in my room. It’s still dark outside, and the house is quiet and very cold. I’ve started trying to read 2 Samuel in Hebrew for the past few mornings, partly in order to keep my Hebrew fresh. My Holladay lexicon is out in front of me, and I’m reading by candlelight because I still haven’t gotten used to the harsh fluorescent lamp on my ceiling (fluorescent is the only kind of electric light we have in our house). Today I make it from verse 13 through verse 18. I’ve also been trying to read something theological before breakfast, and today it was a little of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (which I’ve never read till now). Barth writes like a preacher!

6:50 AM I sit down with Charlie and Tommy to a breakfast of French toast. When we say grace this morning, we pray for Bethlehem Baptist and All Nations Christian Fellowship.

7:20 AM We’re turning the keys to lock the metal-barred door to our house (Ndu and CBTS’ campus have been known to have their share of robberies, so better safe than sorry) and hitting the trail to chapel. From where we live at the edge of campus, it’s about a ten-minute slightly-uphill walk to chapel. The dirt path slopes up past other faculty houses and corn fields. We take care to avoid the cow patties---livestock range freely on campus, sometimes a little too freely as when, earlier this week, we faced some longhorns grazing next to the woodshed between the dirt path and our house and staring at us as we walked carefully past them, brandishing long sticks we picked up on the way.
This morning, on our walk, the sun was shining---a welcome change from all the gray weather we’ve been having during this monsoon season (dry season is just around the corner; we’re bracing ourselves for the clouds of red dust!). It slanted through tall trees on the far edge of campus and fell on the hedges of the gardens next to the corn fields where several women were stooped, weeding. We passed goats eating grass and said “Morning” to several students as we walked past the women’s dormitory and into the main part of campus.

7:30 AM Chapel today was a time of testimonies. Divine, one of my students in his second year of the Diploma program, gave one of the most moving. For the past two years, he has battled Hepatitus B and probably needs a liver transplant but that, sadly, isn’t likely to happen. Divine stood on the chapel stage while the VP of CBTS read his testimony. Divine’s voice is still too weak to read---he’s just recovering from a recent severe bout with bad symptoms. But, thankfully, he is feeling better and is back in class. He’s been doing quite well in my Theology class. His testimony this morning was full of God-centered reflections on the meaning of suffering in the lives of Christians.

8:20 AM Between chapel and my first class, I have a small window of time, so I came back to our house to do some last-minute prep and grab a cup of coffee.

9:10 AM My first class of the day starts now. It’s a course on the book of Acts, for students in the second year of the Certificate in Theology program. Today they---all 50 of them---handed in their first paper. I assigned a one-pager that was supposed to be half summary of Acts chapters 1-4, half personal reflections. After collecting the assignments, I lectured on the opening of Acts 8 and how this represents a hinge moment in the book, when Jesus’ promise in 1:8 that his followers would testify to him beyond Jerusalem---in Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth---begins to be fulfilled as the church is scattered through persecution. Students, as always, were full of questions, and it was a good class.

10:00 AM I joined the faculty and staff in the faculty lounge for a cup of tea. This daily ritual is a good place to connect and hear the latest campus news. This week, the main conversation topic is that the “Dorcas Sisters”---a group of faculty wives---are selling one of their cows. They’ll take it to a butcher in the village who will slaughter it, and faculty will be able to buy beef at discount prices! As I left teatime, I ran into Ngi David, a graduate of CBTS and new pastor in the village of Kakar. Charlie and I met David last summer, and it was wonderful to see him again today and hear an update on how things are going.

10:25 AM I arrive at the main academic building for my second class of the day, Systematic Theology. Today there’s no lecture. I give them a quiz on the attributes of God and give them a reading assignment in preparation for Monday’s lecture when we’ll start looking at the doctrine of the Trinity.

11:20 AM I walk off campus and into the village to the post office to mail a letter home. (Hope you receive it okay, David and Tamara!) Letters par avion usually take 2-3 weeks to reach the States from here.

11:45 AM I’m back at our house starting to grade the stack of papers I picked up in Acts class today. Some of them are disappointing. It looks like a good number of my students have just collected a lot of verses from Acts and reproduced them verbatim for me. Groan! Some of their personal reflections are good, though. Eventually I’m interrupted by the doorbell. My student Randolph pokes his head in and asks if I’d be willing to look over the outline for an exegesis paper he has to submit for Dr. Yong’s Pauline Theology class. I say yes, and he thanks me and invites me to watch the volleyball match students and faculty will be playing in at 4 o’clock today.

12:35 AM Charlie, Tommy, and I sit down for lunch. It’s a salad made from cabbage, orange slices, and mayo with shepherd’s pie---or as Tommy thinks they call it in England, “mash and bangers”---as the main course. Yum! Our cook is so good.

1:20 PM Back to grading papers. I mark them for a while, and then, since it’s Friday and I’m done with classes for the day, I decide to do some pleasure reading. I’ve just started Philip Hallie’s Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There.

2:30 PM I spend most of the rest of the afternoon writing emails to family and friends. When we were in the town of Bamenda a few weeks back (about a six-hour drive from Ndu), we got a cellphone and a USB cable, and we’re able to get online with it. For now, it’s free(!!!), but we’re told that could change without warning, so we’re keeping our ears to the ground for news.

4:10 PM I leave the house, and it’s still beautiful outside. Dry season must be coming quickly. The sky is blue, the sun is shining, and for once, I don’t take an umbrella with me. I roll up my sleeves and enjoy the warm weather as I walk up to our office. When I get there, I see Charlie who’s been there for a while meeting with his Hebrew students to help them with their assignments. I hear him explaining how you make masculine Hebrew words plural to his student Jonathan. I record some grades in my Systematic Theology grade book, grab some textbooks I’ll need for class prep over the weekend, and head down to the volleyball courts to watch the match.

4:35 PM I talk for a while with Paul, the CBTS student body president, while I watch the game. Paul is 46 years old and has three kids. He’s served as a pastor in the Cameroon Baptist Convention for many years and has come back to school for theological training. He’s a sharp guy, and he tells me he spoke with Charlie earlier this week to invite the three of us over to his house for dinner this coming Tuesday night---a dinner of “country chop” (=Cameroonian food), as they say in pidgin.

5:00 PM I head home and meet up with Charlie back at the house. Tommy is up at the Yongs’ hanging out with Sam.

6:00 PM Our friend Emmanuel the tailor stops by. He has brought the shirts that I asked him to make for me. Last Sunday, Charlie and I went with him to the “big market” in the village where I picked out some very African-looking fabric and asked Emma to make me a long-sleeve and short-sleeve shirt. He gets here on Friday, I try the shirts on, and they look great. “I’ll stop by on Sunday,” Emma says as he leaves. He likes coming over once a week to visit us, and we’re glad to have him.
Soon we’ll make dinner and then maybe watch a movie. Another week---our fourth here at CBTS---has come and gone. The weekend will be a nice break. We’ll probably grade papers, play with the Yong kids, have students over to visit, and go to church on Sunday. Then it will be time to start all over on Monday. It’s a good life here. Thanks for reading this. More from Tommy and Shep soon, I hope!

-Wes

Rooster--it's what's for dinner

2006-09-19T09:39:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, we bid adieu to our chicken. The event was a bit anti-climactic; no wild squawking or headless running. As you can see, Charlie did a great job of holding the talons down while Pa, our cook, delivered the coup de grace. Living with a rooster for a week was worth it: his room smells awful, but the meal was delicious (as I hope you can tell from the picture). (We discovered that natural, non-genetically enhanced chickens have far less meat on their bones than what you find in the States.)

--tg

A really good night!

2006-09-14T12:31:00.001-07:00

Well, the best night of my time here in Cameroon so far is coming to an end, so I thought I should blog about it. Let me start at about 3:30 in the afternoon…

After a nice lunch at the Yongs’ house (Linda wants to have each of us over for a meal to get to know us individually, to prove to us, she said, that she doesn’t think we’re triplets!), I decided to go up to the office the three of us share at the campus’s main academic building. I needed to prepare for tomorrow’s (Friday’s) classes, Acts and Systematic Theology, and also for tonight’s class. Yep, I now have a night class. Because my New Testament Introduction students are in two separate programs---the Diploma program and the Bachelor of Theology degree program---their schedules are difficult to coordinate. We talked again about it earlier this week and decided the only times we could all be together are Tuesdays at 1:30 pm and Thursday evenings from 5 to 7 pm. So tonight was our first night class.

I got to the office around 3:45, and at 4:00 there was a soft knock on my door. It was my student Patrick (not his real name). He had come not to talk about assignments but instead just to share more about his life with me, which made me happy. I started asking about his family and found out he’s married and has eight kids. I wanted to laugh and cry all at once when he said, “I haven’t talked to my wife in a long time. She lives just past the village of Ndop [about two and a half to three hours from Ndu and CBTS], and I haven’t called her in a while because, honestly, I know that when I talk to her, she will start complaining. She always complains. She’ll start telling me about all the problems at home with our compound [that’s what Cameroonians call the multiple houses that are near each other and belong to the extended family].” I asked him if his wife is a believer, and he replied, “Yes, she was in Christ before me.” And that started his testimony…

Now you need to know that Patrick is one of my best students. He sits in the back of the classroom for both of my classes that he’s in (Missions and NT Intro). His brow is always furrowed in intense concentration. He’s always jotting notes. And he usually asks perceptive, interesting questions. He’s also very gentle; in the few one on one interactions I’ve had with him, he’s never failed to be kind, gracious, deferential.

So I was surprised when he told me about how bad of a husband he was for years and years. It turns out that he was baptized in 1969, but he now knows he was not genuinely converted at the time. He told me today that from 1969 to 2000, he lived like a pagan. His wife, he said, used to sleep with her back facing towards him because he would come into their house at all hours of the night smelling like wine and cigarette smoke. He was a chain smoker and an alcoholic. Serially unfaithful to his wife, he loved all the sex, booze, and cigarettes he could get his hands on, he told me… until one day when a Christian (now pursuing a Masters degree in Nigeria) shared the gospel with him. It was at that point that his life started to change.

Patrick vividly remembers waking up early one morning and sitting in a chair next to the front door of his house preparing to go to the bar he always frequented early in the morning. “I would go there without taking food [Cameroonians refer to ‘taking’ food or drink, instead of ‘eating,’ a lot of the time], and I knew a secret way to unlock the front door without the owner knowing about it so I could drink all the wine I wanted before the day even started.” But Patrick said this particular morning, he felt glued to his chair. He kept thinking about what that Christian had shared with him. “I feel now,” he said to me, “that it was the power of the Holy Spirit that kept me in that chair and didn’t let me go out that morning to the bar. Instead, I just picked up a Bible that that Christian had given me, and I started reading. I don’t remember what I read, but it changed my life. I became a believer, and I haven’t committed adultery or gone back to the bottle since that time.” Praise the Lord! His wife, he said, noticed the change and asked him what had happened. Their marriage hasn’t been perfect since then (obviously!), but he said they are both so glad that they share the same faith now. (Patrick did admit to me, though, that it took some arguing with his wife for her to finally, begrudgingly let him go to seminary. He felt God calling him to CBTS when he took a summer course in 2001 with Tom Steller and Travis and Susan Myers from Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis.)

A few minutes after hearing this testimony, I walked into my first NT Intro night class. There seemed to be some excitement in the air, probably because this was new and fresh---getting to have a two-hour class at night. I started lecturing on the Gospel of Mark (we spent Tuesday talking about Mark, and we’ll wrap up our discussion of it next Tuesday), and I’m not sure what happened, but everyone, including me, just got really, really excited about it. I told them about how Jesus’ partial healing of the blind man from Bethsaida (Mark 8:22-26) was a picture of the disciples’ lack of understanding---their partial seeing (8:27-30; cf. 6:51-52; 8:14-21)---and then from there we talked about Jesus’ threefold prediction of his suffering (8:31; 9:30-32; 10:32-34) and about how we, all of us in the classroom tonight, seriously misunderstand Jesus’ call to discipleship, as the twelve did, if we treat it as anything less than a call to suffer with Jesus on the road that leads to the cross. I can’t explain it, but as I was lecturing, I felt an unusual joy and spiritual energy and passion and anointing from God. At one point, my class started roaring with laughter, and I shouted at them, smiling, pretending to be annoyed, “What??!!!” They responded, also smiling, “We need to have an altar call!!”

All night long their questions were penetrating, theologically profound, exegetically sensitive, and spiritually rigorous. I loved every minute of it. By the time 7:00 rolled around, we were all ready to keep going. As soon as I dismissed them, one student who’s become a close friend and is near the top of the class jumped up and grabbed my hand. “This is the best class I’ve had in my seminary experience so far,” he said gratefully, beaming at me.

Now, I know that not every class can be this way. I’m sure that by next week, I could be posting a much more somber report. But I am grateful for how God worked tonight and how he used this large group of eager, inquisitive, thoughtful students to increase my passion for teaching the Word and to assure me that, yes, this decision to be involved with Third World theological education this year is one that is bearing fruit. I’m glad God doesn’t hide all the fruit of our ministries from us. It is good when he lets us taste some of it.

-Wes

A Saturday in Cameroon

2006-09-09T14:16:00.001-07:00

Contrary to the suspicions of some, I am here at CBTS, teaching with Wes and Shep. There’s much to write about my past month in Cameroon (a month already—incredibly), but I’m hoping a glimpse into a day here will be more enjoyable.

Usually, I wake up between four and five, but being Saturday, I slept in until six. After finally resolving to leave the warmth of my bed, I slipped on my iPod, made my usual morning cup of tea, and returned to my room to read. A bit later, I slipped on my tennis shoes and crept out the door for a run. It was drizzling outside—almost an enveloping mist—and the sky was gray. I’ve found that the farther I run from the campus, the wider the eyes of the village’s children as I run through. Some smile and return my wave, some stare blankly, and some laugh while running away, as if from a foreign monster.

On my way back home, I stopped to help three young boys, around ten years old. They were pushing a cart loaded with sacks of beans to the weekly “big market.” The path was muddy, rocky, and at a significant decline, and the cart probably weighed more than the three of them combined. I helped them down the hill and helped them the rest of the way to market. I had no idea it would become the town’s morning spectacle. I might as well have been nude: when we dropped a couple bags off with one of the boy’s aunt, the porch was immediately filled with the woman’s family and friends, watching the white man lug the fifty-pound sacks in and out of the house. As they joked and laughed at me while I hauled the cart away with the boys, I tried to join the comedic circle by saying, “I’m Cameroonian with white skin!” They laughed, but who knows if it’s because they understood. (The language difficulties have been all too apparent in the classroom.) Then, when we entered the market, the embankment above the path filled with people hooting and hollering. I was a little embarrassed but also enjoyed stepping out of the American stereotype. Maybe it was culturally inappropriate…I saw one of my students on the way to the market, and he seemed to appreciate it!

As I walked back to campus, I passed by the village health center and saw one of my students. He was there with his cousin, also a student of mine. I entered the ward, which well-deserved the cold, sterile title "ward." It was a small, depressing room that looked of the 1950's. Ten beds altogether, I think, each separated by only a couple feet. When I entered, there was an old, fragile looking man on my left being fed by a sister, daughter, or friend. The student was lying in bed, suffering from gastro-intestinal problems. He had been there since Thursday, and may be able to leave on Monday. I spoke briefly with him and his supporters (the other student, his cousin, and his sister, another student of mine). As I left, a classmate of his was entering to encourage him. It all was sobering yet encouraging--the conditions were bleak, but the body of Christ was bearing and supporting a weaker member. A room of sickness, an ambience of hopelessness, yet a remnant filled with hope that reaches beyond death.

I better shorten this post: it’s 9:30pm, past my bedtime.

-After the health center visit, I returned home for breakfast. Hardboiled eggs, bananas, and cinnamon toast. It was our third or fourth breakfast with hardboiled eggs, and today was the first in which I ate the yolks. They were gross, but I was hungry.

-The shower water was lukewarm. I’m not sure why. It wasn’t bad—better than cold.

-For lunch, we went to a “restaurant” at the health center. By “restaurant,” I mean a small room with one table, a stove two-feet beside the table where the food is cooked, and a maternity ward located next door. We ate with two children of a professor (Sam and Anna Yong) and our American friend who works for the peace corps, Ally. Rice with stew over it and fish. Charlie gave me a fish head that found its best use at the end of the meal when it, Fred the fish, had a conversation with the fish head found on Charlie’s plate. There’s just not much meat in the fish head, and, as Anna said, it’s gross to push on the eyeball.

-Charlie and I went to big market in the afternoon. We bought a radio and clock for our cook in the kitchen; 30-40 guavas, later discovered to be far from ripe; fabric for pants (here called trousers) for Wes and two shirts for Charlie; some mambo chocolate bars; and kerosene for our fireplace. Our Cameroonian friend who accompanies us to the market informed me at one point that some people were gleefully identifying me as the white man they saw earlier. It’s nice to have a reputation.

-Late evening, Charlie, Wes, and Ally watched the movie Garden State while I read in my room. For dinner, we had a pasta dish similar to ziti. Wes did the dishes while Charlie and I worked on the fire. To conclude the night, Charlie and Wes read by the fire while I worked on this post.

Saturdays are a warmly welcomed relief from the busy week of school. Much of tomorrow will be spent in preparation for the week’s classes. Thank you all for your prayers—hearing that you are interceding for us is noticeable encouragement and comfort. I’ll try to write again in the next couple days about how teaching has been. Post any questions you have for us. Oh, and we have a rooster living with us. He’s staying in a back room for a week until he’s slaughtered by our cook, an event for which we’ve already made reservations.

What do we do in our free time?

2006-09-05T07:29:00.000-07:00

We've been on several walks and jogs. There's a loop of trails that goes through a couple of neighboring villages, though they're pretty steep in places and very muddy and slippery. Tommy played volleyball at 7:30 on Saturday morning with students and faculty. A couple of nights ago we had a candlelight dinner (because the power was out) at a faculty member's house. His name is Joke (pronounced "JOE-kay") Robert, and he's single and 26 years old. A couple of our students, Ephraim and Greg, showed up too, and we talked for a long time about their wanting to get married, about university life in Cameroon, about Christian culture in the U.S. and how it does and does not compare to Cameroon's.

We've also been doing some pleasure reading in our free time. In addition to studying German, Charlie has started Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and the (difficult!) intro to Gadamer's Truth and Method. Wes finished The Drama of Doctrine by Kevin Vanhoozer that he had started over the summer, read his friend Todd Wilson's doctoral dissertation, and has now been going through The End of Poverty by Jeff Sachs. Tommy brought a book of "personal essays" by everyone from Montaigne to Annie Dillard; he's been reading that before bed, along with Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul by Richard Hays and a book the BGC field coordinator gave us to read called African Friends and Money Matters by David Maranz.

We also pop in on the Yongs every few days, or they come down to our place with some friendly advice. Their two kids who are still in Ndu (their oldest, Benjamin, is at boarding school in Yaounde), Sam and Anna, enjoy coming over. They took Wes exploring in the woods a few days ago to show him the tree forts they've built, and we all three played Uno with them last weekend. One of the nice things about going up the Yongs is that we can watch the news or sports (Philemon had basketball on the other night, U.S. vs. Greece) or movies on their TV, which can be a nice way to unwind sometimes.

Thanks for keeping up with the blog.

If any of you feel a burning desire to encourage us, one great way would be to snail mail some pictures to us so we can decorate the bare walls of our house and keep up with what's happening at home.

We are praying and thinking of you; please keep praying for us.

Charlie, Tommy, and Wesley---the "Ndu Crew," as our field coordinator calls us

What is our living situation on campus like?

2006-09-05T07:27:00.000-07:00

We told a lot of you before that we have our own house: three bedrooms, a decent-sized kitchen, a fireplace, one bathroom, a screened-in back porch that has a clothesline. Our floors are brown-colored concrete that get really cold in the mornings. We have a lot of windows, though all them--and the front porch--have bars over them because a couple of years ago our house was broken into. We're careful to always keep our doors and windows locked. The hot water heater for our shower is pretty small, so we all take "army showers" to conserve hot water for the next guy. Sometimes we won't have running water for a couple of days at a time, and we're not quite sure why. The power goes off occasionally. In order to run our laptops and laser printer, we plug a voltage regulator into the outlet in the wall, to try to keep the voltage at a stable 220. There are electrical spikes that the regulator sometimes doesn't catch, though, so we plug a surge suppressor into the regulator and then our laptops into the surge suppressor.

We just found out that a pregnant cat is living in our attic. Tommy has no affinity for felines, which made last night's near-breach of last line of defense (a bolted back door) especially traumatic. She woke us up purring, asking us to feed her. It sounded like she was in our bedrooms, and we're guessing that's because she was prowling around between our ceilings and our sloped roof.

We have a cook who makes three meals a day for us, six days a week. His name is Zacchieus, and we call him "Pa." Charlie and Wes ate his cooking last summer at Travis and Susan Myers' house on campus, so we knew a little about him before we came. There were many legends that had grown up around him: we thought he traveled with the Peace Corps, lived in Germany for several years, and learned to cook there. We've gradually demythologized Pa! Actually, he's lived here in Ndu all his life and worked some with the Peace Corps here. He is a father of seven, and although we don't think he's a believer, he is extremely kind and very proud of his work. Whenever we thank him for his delicious meals, he flashes us a big grin and gives us two thumbs up. He's an amazing cook. Sometimes he makes Cameroonian food for us, but mainly he cooks more American-style foods. He even made burgers one day, with home-made, from-scratch buns and cheese, lettuce, tomato, mayo, and ketchup.

What's it like living in Cameroon?

2006-09-05T07:26:00.000-07:00

We'll be talking about this on the blog all year, but for now just a few highlights. We live with:
- a slower pace of life--"African time"!
- a very hospitable culture, where formal greetings and house visits are really important
- dirt roads (the few paved ones are in terrible shape)
- three hour church services (with lots of dancing)
- a daily awareness of poverty

The poverty in Cameroon is not technically "extreme" (which is when households are unable to meet basic survival needs---when people are living with $1 per day per person or less). But it is definitely all around us. Malaria---the result of as well as a contributing factor towards poverty---is all too common. Most of our students have had it or will have it at some point. Cameroon is much better off than many other African countries, but this week when Wes read the following in Jeff Sachs' The End of Poverty, it hit close to home: "The unsolved challenge for development economists is to understand why economic development in Africa has been so hard to achieve, not just in modern times but for centuries, and not in some places but in virtually all of tropical Africa (not including the five countries of North Africa or South Africa)" (194).

So how did the first week of teaching go?

2006-09-05T07:23:00.000-07:00

Overall, really well. We started last Tuesday, and for the first class period we had our students introduce themselves to us. They told us their names--which of course we had trouble pronouncing, which they thought was hilarious. We heard the stories of which tribes and villages they come from and how they got to CBTS, and we heard where they want to end up in ministry--the pastorate, the chaplaincy, the mission field, the classroom. It feels so thrilling and absolutely nerve-wracking at the same time to stand at the front of a room, with a chalkboard behind you, some notes scribbled or typed on a page in your hand, and 30 or more hungry faces in front of you, anticipating that they will learn something significant in the next 50 minutes.

Here are a few of things that happened:
- Tommy shared John Piper's article "Bitzer was a Banker" (the story of how a banker decided he needed to know the biblical languages and taught himself how to read them--it's probably available online, if you want to read it, at www.desiringgod.org) in his Greek class, and they loved it.
- Wes started trying to explain the various quests for the "historical Jesus" in his NT class and was shocked when his students started asking about The Da Vinci Code. In response, he asked them to raise their hands if they had heard of the Gospel of Thomas. Nearly every hand in the classroom went up. Welcome to the world of globalization.
- Charlie's Hebrew class erupted in protest when he told them they had to know the Hebrew alphabet by the third class period. As he's met various students walking around campus, though, he's seen them carrying slips of paper with the alphabet. They always laugh and tell him they're trying.
- One of Wes and Charlie's students came to our office (yep, we have one now---we all three share it, on the second floor of the newer academic building) on Thursday, and as we talked, we realized he had eaten little if anything since Monday. Getting enough food to eat for themselves and their families is a constant issue for our students.

Tommy will post more about classes later this week, hopefully. He'll talk more about some of the hard things. It's definitely been hard.

Classes start tomorrow!

2006-08-29T07:20:00.000-07:00

Well, we just finished dinner at our house and are settling in by the fire in our fireplace (yep, rainy season is still here in full force, which keeps things wet and chilly, especially the asphalt floors in our house) to do some last-minute class preparations. Tomorrow's the official big day. We're all a mix of anxiety and eagerness. All are syllabi and schedules are printed out and copied, sitting in stacks on our desks. We've met a lot of our students already too, since Friday was orientation and today was "Spiritual Formation Day," both of which all new and returning students are required to attend. So all that's left to do is teach!

Life here this week has been slow and easygoing, as Charlie described our first week in the last post. We've been on long walks and a couple of jogs around some backwoods paths around our house that wind their way through nearby thatched-roof villages that overlook some of the most spectacular views you're likely to see anywhere in Cameroon (so we're told).

We've spent quite a bit of time with the Yongs, learning more about the quirks---some of them endearing and some not so much---of CBTS culture (such as lengthy faculty-meeting disputes over the finer details of tea and coffee breaks each day for the faculty and staff---nope, not kidding!). They've been very hospitable and helpful as we continue to settle in.

We also met a Peace Corps volunteer this week who has become a new friend. She's 23 years old, from Colorado, and now lives just across the valley from CBTS' campus (about a 5-7 minute walk from our front door). She hangs out with the Yongs quite a bit and has another 15 months here in Cameroon, so I'm sure we'll be seeing more of each other.

Some other news: We're still not able to email. Hopefully (and I know every post has said the same thing for the last couple of weeks) we'll have it up and running within the next few days. The hold-up has to do with the Baptist center in Bamenda needing to coordinate with an office in Douala (one of the major coastal cities in Cameroon) in getting us set up with a Cameroon Baptist Convention corporate phone account. We have been able to call our families though, so that's been a blessing that has tided us over until we have a more reliable communication system.

Our fridge broke down---twice. Our cook, Zaccheus (we call him "Pa," a name Cameroonians use as an affectionate title of respect for older men), has taught us how to make do without one, but---again, hopefully this week---we'll get it fixed. :)

And, maybe the best news of all this week, we got to meet up with our friend from last summer, Tamfu Dieudonne, who's now a pastor in Limbe, another coastal city in Cameroon. Some of you will know that he applied to The Bethlehem Institute and got accepted. He's hoping to attend next fall and enroll at Bethel Seminary for an MDiv as well. It was so cool for Charlie and I to see him again, and Tommy enjoyed meeting him for the first time. He is doing great, leading a men's discipleship group (going through, I think, Paul's letter to the Ephesians), and preaching Christ-centered sermons to his growing, mainly-newly-converted flock. We got to hear him preach at Ndu's First Baptist Church on Sunday. His text was Matthew 5:13-16, and he made the point that Christian's being the light of the world and a "city set on a hill" is not owing to some natural light of our own. No, he said, we are a light only because Christ has invaded our lives and shared HIS light with us. It was a powerful sermon (in the middle of our a three-hour[!!!] service), and we all three came away encouraged.

Well, I think that's all for now. Obviously, we'd covet your prayers for tomorrow. I think the classes we're most nervous about are Exodus (Tommy's), Research Methods (Charlie's), and Acts (mine), so please pray especially for those. We want Jesus and the gospel to become more precious and exciting to us and those of our students who already know him, and for those of our students who perhaps have not yet come alive to the wonderful reality of grace, we want Jesus and the gospel to stun them irresistibly for the first time. So please keep praying with us that God will do amazing things through these classes.

THANKS to all of you who have been leaving comments. We haven't read a lot of them (yet!), because we're sending our blog posts to our friend Alex Kirk via email and not logging onto the blog ourselves, but when we get our email set up, he'll forward the comments to us so we can see them. So keep 'em comin'!!

Much love to all of you.

grace+peace,

wes, for the team

Life at CBTS so far

2006-08-22T11:04:00.000-07:00

Hello from Ndu! Here is an excerpt from an e-mail that I sent to my family earlier today:

So, life is a little different here. We flew into Yaounde on Saturday the 12th, and on the 13th we left at 6:30 am to drive cross-country all the way to Ndu. When we arrived, there was a large crowd gathered to welcome the president and his wife back (they had been on sabbatical in Minneapolis), and to welcome the "three new missionaries" (a title I would happily jettison had I the chance).
So, from then until now, well, we have been doing odds and ends. We had a fridge shipped to our house, then it broke. We bought a bunch of power adapters, then they didn't work. Our water has stopped twice now for a couple of days. Etc., etc. But life is at least progressing in a routine manner: we eat three meals a day (all very large), and go to bed around 9:00 each night, and wake up about 6:30.
My body isn't really sure what's going on, but I think it is pleased with the new schedule--sleep, not too much coffee, good food.

We have shaken more hands than I could hope to remember, and nearly everyone here goes by their "Christian name," like Emmanuel, Divine, Grace, Mercy, Hope, Godwill, Godwin, Spinoza, Goodness, Patience, etc.
One of my students this year is named Corinthians. Dead Serious. I have also met an Ephesians. I thought about making up a Christian name for myself like 2 Chronicles, but then I realized that I already had one! It has been pointed out to me on more than one occasion that my last name is Shepherd, usually said in an informative manner ( i.e., "In case you didn't know it, your last name is Shepherd"). Yep.
Yep it is.

One thing I have thought about a bit this trip has been the health of the Church in Africa. I know that a lot of people say that the Church in the third world is flourishing amidst her poverty exponentially faster than the Church in the West amidst her affluence (see our May 6 post). Christ's power is really displayed and seen here, while it is somewhat removed in western churches. Well, so the argument goes. I think I like it, but I always wondered how CBTS fit into this. We don't see anyone here being raised from the dead or anything, and no one really speaks in tongues or prophecies too much. So is CBTS the exception to those sweeping statements about Africa? And then last night we were out chopping wood (or learning how to...) and another young Cameroonian teacher came to our house with his wife--Joshua and Patience (!) Webdna. They walked all the way across the muddy campus of CBTS to pray with us and to encourage us. And man, were they encouraging. After their visit I couldn't help but reflect on the number of people that we had/have met of this caliber. It really is amazing. Christ is central in the lives of these students and teachers in a way that I have not previously known. For them, Christ is everything. He is everything. He defines the world they live in, and defines them amidst this world. I know, we have only met a small sliver of people here, but that seems only all the more telling. So maybe CBTS isn't such an anomaly after all to those generalizations about the growth of the Church here. Maybe we are actually in the midst of it. I think I could certainly say that along with the roads, food, smells and culture, the health of the church here is something I hadn't seen before (well, I guess that's not entirely true...right Blake?).

Well, I have heard from some missionaries here that we are in the "honeymoon" phase, and soon enough frustration will set it. Maybe.
But we'll enjoy it while we can!!

Charlie, for the team

Safely Arrived

2006-08-18T09:30:00.000-07:00

Hey friends!

Sorry it's been a while. We still don't have a cellphone (though we're buying one in Bamenda tomorrow, Lord willing), so we can't send or receive emails, which means no blog posts. :(

We've made it to Ndu; we're all settled into our house. We're healthy, we're eating well, and we're still pumped about teaching. Everyone has been so welcoming and hospitable. We already have tons of stories for the blog, but they'll have to wait until we get our house outfitted for internet.

Thanks for praying---keep it up!

We'll be in touch soon.

From cold, rainy, muddy Ndutown,

Wesley, for the whole team

The Adventure of the Airports

2006-08-11T10:42:00.000-07:00

We're in Brussels, Belgium! It's almost 8 pm Central European Time, and all three of us are together at an internet cafe downtown. We had numerous delays State-side, as you probably guessed. In addition to the tight security that made for lengthy lines at the airports, we had to sit on our planes on the runways for several hours because of severe weather. Charlie ended up meeting Tommy and me in Brussels, not in NYC as originally planned. "In his heart a man plans his course, but the LORD determines his steps" (Proverbs 16:9). And we all three missed our flight to Yaounde! American Airlines, though, quickly and helpfully worked it out for us to catch a 10 am flight to Zurich tomorrow morning (the 12th) and then a 12:15 flight to Yaounde. So please pray we make that connection! In the meantime, they booked us a room at a Holiday Inn here in Brussels, so we've spent the afternoon and evening enjoying the city and catching up with each other.

All in all, we feel safe and sound, though tired and exhausted. God has been very good so far, and we're trusting him for "more grace" (James 4:6).

Greetings especially to our families! Hopefully the next time you hear from us, we'll be in Cameroon!

--Wesley, for the team

P.S. Charlie wants the world to know he had bouillabaisse for dinner tonight.

P.P.S. Tommy had to be taught by the busboy (to the amusement of the family sitting next to us) how to eat escargot.

Countdown

2006-08-09T10:21:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow's the big day!

Travel schedule

2006-08-08T07:30:00.000-07:00

FYI, here's a more detailed outline of our travel plans:

Tommy and Wesley will fly together to New York from Chicago at 11:47 a.m CST. We'll arrive in NY at 3:02 p.m. EST. Charlie will meet us there at 4:32 p.m. Then the three us will leave for Brussels at 6:05 p.m. EST and arrive in Brussels 7:35 a.m. Central European Time on August 11. Lord willing, we'll meet up with the Fons and fly to Yaounde at 10:40 a.m., arriving there at 4:25 p.m. (UTC+1).

That evening, as we mentioned, we'll stay overnight at a rest house in Yaounde. From there, on August 12, we'll take a van or bus to Bamenda in the Northwest province of Cameroon (you can find it on most maps of Cameroon) where we'll stay at a Cameroon Baptist Convention center. Then it's on to Ndu!

I love Sheldon Vanauken's phrase "under the Mercy." I'm glad we'll be traveling "under the Mercy" of a loving heavenly Father.

--Wes again, for the team

Prayer for our travel

2006-08-08T07:12:00.000-07:00

"Brothers and sisters, pray for us that the message of the Lord may spread rapidly and be honored, just as it was with you" (2 Thessalonians 3:1). We ask you "by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit to join [us] in [our] struggle by praying to God for [us]" (Romans 15:30). The three of us feel gratefully dependent on your prayers for us this week. "The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective" (James 5:16). God is able to make all grace abound to us through the prayers of you, his saints.

So here are some specific ways you could be lifting us up in the next few days. And we want you to know that we appreciate it so much.

-For good fellowship with the Lord and with each other as we meet up here in the States and fly to Belgium, then Cameroon, together

-For smooth transitions at the airports: that we would make our connections

-For health, (some!) rest, and safety on the planes and vans/buses we'll be riding on

-For all our luggage to arrive at the airport in Yaounde (especially the luggage containing the textbooks we'll use)

Leaving on Thursday!

2006-08-07T07:23:00.000-07:00

Friends,

Sorry for the long silence on the blog! I've had several of you this week ask me when there will be a new post, so here it is!

This is the big week. I think I speak for all three of us when I say I've been feeling a jittery combination of nervousness, excitement, inadequacy, fear, faith, hope, and anticipation. Isn't it great that one of the things people who go to the mission field can know for SURE is that He is with us (Matthew 28:19-20)?

So here's the schedule. We fly out from the States on Thursday of this week. Tommy and I will meet up first in Chicago (I'll be coming from Little Rock, he from Evansville). Then we'll meet Charlie in New York and all three fly together to Belgium where we'll meet Wilfred and Angelica Fon. Then it's on to Cameroon! Once we land in the capital city of Yaounde, we'll stay in a "rest house" (kind of sounds like something out of a spy movie, doesn't it?) for a night, then take an all-day bus trip to Ndu and CBTS!

Please keep us in your prayers this week especially. We'll post some specific requests in the next few hours.

What an encouragement you all are to us. We appreciate so much the partnership we share in the Gospel of Jesus who was crucified and raised from the dead for sinners!

Wesley, for the team

Packing!

2006-07-24T08:29:00.000-07:00

Packing for ten months in Africa is a big job, we're discovering. In additon to personal items, including things like a Katadyn water filter, there are also things like a laser printer and textbooks that we need to bring. Each of us is allowed two 50-pound bags whose total dimensions (height + width + length) cannot exceed 62 inches. If we want to bring more than that, we have to pay extra.

So, here's the question of the day: How do you make good use of every square inch of a Rubbermaid "Action Packer" and still keep the weight under 50 pounds?

Classes for both semesters

2006-07-24T08:24:00.000-07:00

Here's the break-down of the classes each of us will be teaching both semesters (and of course it's subject to change!).

First semester:

Charlie:
Hebrew Language (BTH)
NT Intro (BTH)
Church History (BTH)
Genesis (D)

Tommy:
Greek 1 (BTH)
Hermeneutics (D)
OT Intro (BTH)
Exodus (CTH)

Wesley:
Missions (BTH)
Acts (CTH)
NT Intro (D)
Systematic Theology (D)

Second semester:

Charlie:
Church History (B.th.)
Hebrew (B.th.)
OT Book (B.th.)
NT Introduction (C.th.

Tommy:
NT Book (Dip.)
Greek II (B.th.)
Jeremiah (C.th.)
Hermeneutics (Dip.)

Wesley:
Missions (B.th.)
Systematic Theology (B.th.)
NT Introduction (B.th.)
Old Testament Survey (C.th.)

Worth a Shot?

2006-07-14T21:14:00.000-07:00

Here's a glimpse at what my preparation for Cameroon currently looks like:

From my expression, I think the shot had a stupefying side-effect.

To date, I've received five shots, along with taking one oral vaccine. This leaves me with only three to four more left to endure. I'm also having a mole removed on Monday. I think I took a couple ibuprofins a couple of weeks ago, too.

--Tommy

PS. Our departure is coming up quickly! It's just about time to begin packing.

Students are coming in

2006-07-13T09:25:00.000-07:00

In a couple of days, incoming students will be having their entrance interviews and over the following days and weeks will be transitioning--some with and some without their spouses and children--to a new life as a student on campus at CBTS. This is a picture of the housing some of them will be living in. Please pray with us that God will do a great work in the hearts and minds and lives of the new students at CBTS, most of whom feel that the Lord is calling them into pastoral ministry or missionary service.

Prayer request

2006-07-13T09:22:00.000-07:00

Pray for incoming CBTS students taking entrance examinations and having interviews with CBTS faculty and staff on July 15. Many of these incoming students will be in our classes.

New CBTS website

2006-07-13T09:06:00.000-07:00

The CBTS website is finally up and running. This is a direct answer to prayer. When the short-term team from Bethlehem Baptist was at CBTS last summer, the vision for this website was brand new. Jessica Johnson, one of the team members, invested a lot of time and effort into the site, and it's now on the web! It will hopefully be a great resource for networking with prospective students and other schools in Cameroon and other neighboring African countries. Praise the Lord!

An "intro to CBTS"

2006-07-13T09:02:00.000-07:00

The president of Cameroon Baptist Theological Seminary, Wilfred Fon, has a new blog. His first post is a short "intro to CBTS":

"The Cameroon Baptist Theological Seminary is a small school by the world’s standards. However, by Cameroon standards we know no seminary with that high a population. We have a student body of 380 this academic year. We have on the faculty three earned doctorates, two doctoral candidates, 7 masters degree holders, 2 masters degree candidates, 3 bachelors degree holders and some diploma and certificate holders. We have an eleven man staff. Together CBTS employs about 33 men and women to carry out her daily functions. Of these 33 only 4 are missionaries.

"The levels for training rage from Child Care and nursery school given to 0-5 years, adult grade school given to women who never had the privilege of going through grade seven school but are now feeling a call to serve the church or are students’ wives, 5 year certificate of theology for those with grade seven certificate who are called into the pastoral ministry, 3 year diploma for those with GCE ordinary level called into pastoral ministry, 3 year B. Th. for those with GCE Advanced Level called into ministry to perform other functions in addition to the pastoral ministry, and 2 to 3 year MA for those with a first degree from a recognized institution.

"CBTS has been in the business of training pastors for over 50 years. As an institution of higher learning she was upgraded in 1984 to be a degree granting institution."

Courses we'll be teaching

2006-07-10T09:07:00.000-07:00

Well, after a lot of praying and talking back and forth with Dr. Fon, CBTS' president, and Dr. Amos Nchuoji, CBTS' academic dean, we now have a tentative list of courses the three of us will be teaching this coming fall semester:

Greek 1 (BTH)

Old Testament Intro (BTH)

Research Methods (BTH)

Missions (BTH)

New Testament Intro (BTH)

Hebrew Language (BTH)

Church History (BTH)

Hermeneutics (D)

Systematic Theology (D)

OT Intro (D)

NT Intro (D)

Acts (CTH)

Exodus (CTH)

The letters after each course refer to the degree programs each course is listed in; the "D" refers to the Diploma program, the "CTh" to the "Certificate of Theology" program, and the "BTh" to the "Bachelor of Theology."

More soon on more of the details. Please be in prayer for our preparations. We'll let you know ASAP which courses specifically each of us will be taking.

"Our" house

2006-06-21T15:24:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of the house (the one farthest right) the three of us will be living in. It was taken last summer from a road that runs a loop from the seminary campus around a few houses and a small Cameroon Baptist Convention college.

News...and more from Andrew Walls

2006-06-21T15:15:00.000-07:00

Well, we've finally found out which specific courses we'll be teaching at CBTS. I'll try to post the titles in the next couple of days. Pray that we'll have some good, productive prep time in the six weeks or so we have left before we leave. (Still can't believe how soon it will be!)

Also, pray for (what seems like) thousands of details that have to be taken care of by then. We just got an email today from the Baptist General Conference detailing all the stuff for visas, health insurance, travel plans, etc., that we need to iron out. Our contact with the BGC is hoping to have all our visa apps and insurance forms turned in by the first week of July. So pray for that too, when you think of us.

I'll leave you with another provocative quote from Andrew Walls, the missiologist I've been enjoying so much recently. I'm still really excited by his thoughts on how the African church so closely resembles second-century Christianity. Here are his words:

"Our knowledge of the early church prior to the Council of Nicaea in 325 is fragmentary, but the fragments reveal many of the concerns African churches have today, from distinguishing between true and false prophets to deciding what should happen to church members who behave badly. Even the literary forms are often similar.... Reading the pre-Nicene literature and the literature of the European conversion period in the light of modern African experience cast floods of light. African and Asian Christians can vastly illuminate 'our' church history." (quoted in Jenkins, The Next Christendom, 135)

Pretty cool, huh?

More soon.

-Wes, for the guys

Insights from a former missionary to West Africa

2006-06-12T15:44:00.000-07:00

I’m reading Andrew Walls’ The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Orbis, 1996) right now. Walls is a Scottish missiologist who spent several years teaching church history in Sierra Leone, became a student of African Christian history while he was there, and has thought deeply about the process of communicating the gospel cross-culturally. He’s been helping me as I think about some of the challenges the three of us will face next year in the classroom, chapel, and church sanctuary in Cameroon.

One of Walls’ main points, reiterated throughout the book, is that African Christianity finds itself at a similar point as the largely Gentile Christian church did in the second century A.D. as it parted ways with---and eventually eclipsed---Jewish Christianity. This is an amazing and very stimulating thought for me! If Walls is right, then being part of the church in Cameroon for a year will place Tommy, Charlie, and me in an environment much the same as that of some of the earliest forms of Christianity, when questions of faith and practice were being worked out for the first time in a cultural context different from that of the original Christian communities.

Here are some provocative quotes from Walls. Be stimulated!

--Wesley, for the team

I still remember the force with which one day [while I was in Sierra Leone] the realization struck me that I, while happily pontificating on that patchwork quilt of diverse fragments that constitutes second-century Christian literature, was actually living in a second-century church. The life, worship and understanding of a community in its second century of Christian allegiance was going on all around me [in African churches]. (xiii)

The exponential growth of the Christian in the African continent in the past century or so seems to me to raise the question whether this massive encounter with a new body of thought and network of relationships may not be as determinative of the future shape of Christianity as was the [initial early Christian] encounter with the Greek world. (xviii)

[In the second century, the Greek] system of thought apparently so assured and final, had to go to school again with Christ. The process altered the expression of the Christian faith completely; for the word of Christ had now to be introduced into areas of thinking, and brought to bear upon ideas that Peter and John and James the Just never dreamed of and that Paul himself barely glimpsed.
It was impossible either to ignore the previous system of ideas, or to abandon it, or to leave it as it was. It had to be penetrated, invaded, brought into relation with the word about Christ and the Scriptures which contained it. The process meant a new agenda for Christianity. Matters which had never troubled the heads of the apostles and elders of Jerusalem became matters of life and death as the word about Christ encountered the established metaphysic of the Hellenistic world, while many things which were vital to the first generation of Christians in Jerusalem just dropped out of sight….
In our own day there are signs that African theologians are at a similar point in the application of the word about Christ to another vast complex of thought, action, and relationships to that which Greek Christian thinkers reached when they faced the problems posed by their cultural identity. Christian Africa is now having to grapple with the meaning of the African past, and with what God was doing in it…. (53)

While some of the features of the evangelical religion that originated the missionary movement---certainly the high place given to Scripture and the recognition of immediacy in personal experience---have been regular features of African Christianity, it is important to note that the fruit of the work of evangelical missionaries has not simply been a replication of Western evangelicalism. The Christian message that they set loose in Africa has its own dynamic, as it comes into creative and critical encounter with African life with its needs and its hurts…. Africans have responded to the gospel from where they were, not from where the missionaries were; they have responded to the Christian message as they heard it, not to the missionaries’ experience of the message. (100-101)

Together for graduation

2006-06-10T14:28:00.000-07:00

Two weekends ago the three of us graduated from The Bethlehem Institute, which most of you know is a two-year leadership development program at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis. Our families came for the graduation. It was a great chance for our parents and siblings to meet and get to know the other guys who will be spending a year with their sons in Cameroon! Here's a picture of us all together.

Learning about Cameroon-ians

2006-06-05T14:53:00.000-07:00

Having been to Cameroon last summer, Charlie and Wes are a bit more knowledgeable than me about the country and the people, and sometimes they've had to graciously correct my mistakes.

Here's an excerpt from an email exchange between Charlie and me a couple months ago. In preparation for an upcoming presentation about our trip, I suggested an outline over email. I wrote:

....Then, Wes, you could transition to present the theological ground for our trip. You could repeat the same thing you said as you prayed for Cameroon and our trip yesterday. God is calling a people to Himself around the globe. You could mention how many Cameroonies (sp?) who come to the school have been touched by the Holy Spirit and have a zeal for God, but cannot even explain the gospel. This can be brief but bold.

To this, Charlie replied:

Suggestion/modification:

Wes: I would subtly suggest that you NOT call residents of Cameroon "Cameroonies," but maybe something more like "Cameroonians." Otherwise they sound like small candies, perhaps even with chewy centers. Chewy marshmallow centers. mmmm...

-c

I'm sure some Cameroonians have accidentally called us "Americanies" before, so I don't feel too bad.

--tg, for himself, obviously

Good News!

2006-05-31T23:38:00.000-07:00

Recently, we were alerted by our sending agency that all of our support has come in! We were stunned--all three of us had expected to be raising support through much of the summer. Now that we've met our financial goal, some have told us that they didn't expect us to reach it--they had half-expected only one or two of us to be financially able to go. We know that this large sum of money bears testimony not to our fund-raising abilities (hardly!), but to God's grace, manifested in the Christ-exalting, nations-seeking generosity of His Church.

Any extra money that is given will be used as a contingency fund and for extra ministry expenses (to bless students and their families) during our time in Cameroon. We hope to continue to raise prayer-support for our trip. The supplying of our finances doesn't change our need for God's help.

Thank you all for your prayers and your support. We pray that we are found faithful stewards.

--tg, for team

(As a side note--to be specific, all of the funds for our trip have been gathered or pledged, but not all of the pledged money has come in.)

Pray for the students at CBTS

2006-05-16T13:39:00.000-07:00

Last night, the three of us attended a meeting of Philemon and Linda Yong's supporters from Bethlehem Baptist Church. (The Yongs are missionaries at CBTS. Philemon is a professor there, and Linda, in addition to homeschooling two of their kids, helps with AIDS awareness and prevention classes at the seminary. You can read more about them and their ministry here.) Wilfred and Angelica Fon were at the meeting (Wilfred is the president of CBTS and is currently in Minnesota on a sabbatical), and they shared with us that the Cameroon Baptist Convention and CBTS are currently facing major financial difficulties. One of the results is that many current students and their families at CBTS do not have enough food to eat.

Several of us at Bethlehem Baptist are currently exploring possible ways to provide rice and milk for the remainder of the month of May and part of June. The spring term at CBTS ends in June. Would you please pray with us about this need? Pray for the students as they struggle to finish final projects and exams at the seminary in the midst of difficult living conditions.

Christianity in Africa

2006-05-06T07:39:00.000-07:00

"Over the past century... the center of gravity in the Christian world has shifted inexorably southward to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Already today the largest Christian communities on the planet are to be found in Africa and Latin America. If we want to visualize a 'typical' contemporary Christian, we should think of a woman living in a village in Nigeria or in a Brazilian favela. As Kenyan scholar John Mbiti has observed, 'the centers of the church's universality [are] no longer in Geneva, Rome, Athens, Paris, London, New York, but in Kinshasa, Buenos Aires, Addis Ababa and Manila. Whatever Europeans or North Americans may believe, Christianity is doing very well indeed in the global South--not just surviving, but expanding."*

*Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 2.

Financial update

2006-05-02T19:29:00.000-07:00

As of today, God has supplied $29,668. Keep praying with us that he will bring in the remaining $49,332 that we need.

We're so grateful to all of you who are supporting us.

Getting into students' lives

2006-04-30T20:48:00.000-07:00

Here's another picture from last summer: Charlie's talking with Tamfu Dieudonne, a CBTS student who became a good friend. Getting to know students in more informal ways, through talking after class and sharing meals together in our on-campus house, will be a big part of our time at CBTS next year, we hope.

Some reasons we're excited to go!

2006-04-30T20:41:00.000-07:00

Last week I (Wes) read an essay by Christopher J. H. Wright called “Mission as a Matrix for Hermeneutics and Biblical Theology.” It was so helpful for me because it reminded me of the reasons we’re excited to serve at Cameroon Baptist Theological Seminary next year.

Wright taught Old Testament as a missionary in India from 1983-88. He said this about his teaching experience:

“It is the common witness of those, including myself, who have lived and worked in cultures other than their own, that reading and studying the Bible through the eyes of others is a challenging, mind-blowing and immensely instructive privilege.”

In light of this, our team can be sure that we’ll be learning way more than we’ll be teaching next year! Our reading and studying the Bible through the eyes of our Cameroonian students will certainly be our privilege.

Here’s another quote:

“‘Mission studies should remind biblical scholars that many of the writings that we study (often in painstaking and even painful detail) came to be because of the reality of mission. An awareness of, and a concern with, the key issues of mission studies may well help biblical studies find foci that will bring deeper appreciation of the meaning of the Bible.’”

In other words, the documents that make up the New Testament were originally missionary documents. They were written in the context of missions, evangelism, church planting, and discipleship in real human communities. So, by serving in the mission context of CBTS, Charlie, Tommy, and I may gain all kinds of fresh insights into the Bible. That’s definitely our hope!

Ultimately, Wright’s essay makes clear that missions is a matter of God the Father sending God the Son into the world, and then the Father and the Son together sending the Holy Spirit. It is God's activity before it is ours. The amazing thing is that we get to play a role:

“Mission, from the point of view of our human endeavor, means the committed participation of God’s people in the purposes of God for the redemption of the whole creation. The mission is God’s. The marvel is that God invites us to join in.”*

*Christopher J. H. Wright, "Mission as a Matrix for Hermeneutics and Biblical Theology" in Out of Egypt, ed. Craig Bartholomew (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 114, 121n28, 137.

A glimpse of campus

2006-04-30T19:39:00.000-07:00

Married student housing at CBTS.

CBTS classroom

2006-04-30T19:32:00.000-07:00

Here's a picture from last summer when Charlie and Wes went to Cameroon with a BBC team. This is a typical classroom at CBTS--the kind we'll be spending a lot of time in next year, Lord willing!

Missionary Nurture Program retreat

2006-04-30T19:28:00.000-07:00

Tommy, Charlie, and I just returned from Bethlehem Baptist Church’s missionary Nurture Program retreat. Thanks so much to those of you who prayed for us. We spent the weekend at a small retreat center in a quiet, rural area of Wisconsin (about an hour and a half from Minneapolis) together with about 30-40 other missionary candidates hoping to be sent out to various parts of the globe from Bethlehem. The theme of the retreat was conflict—and how to resolve it. We talked about conflict from several different angles and reflected on the various types—interpersonal, cross-cultural, and spiritual—that we are all sure to face on the mission field. Erik Hyatt, BBC’s missions pastor; Mike Jacobsen, a missionary with Arab World Ministries; and Tom Eckblad, BBC’s soul care pastor, led us, and it was a rich weekend, full of great conversation, warm fellowship, good “church camp” food(!), lots of games and laughter, and encouraging, challenging teaching sessions. (Kudos to Tom and Julie Varno for wonderful stories and encouragements from their 7-year missions experience in Uganda and for holding this whole retreat together!)

--Wesley, for the team

"Doing the Kingdom" in Africa

2006-04-25T10:21:00.000-07:00

Recently, I read an interview with Anglican Bishop Tom Wright. Here's the portion of the transcript that caught my attention:

------------------------------------------

"Jesus was going around 'doing the kingdom', healing the sick, cleansing lepers, feeding the hungry, he was celebrating at a party with all the wrong people, transforming people's lives and saying cryptic things such as: 'Let me tell you what the kingdom of God is like'," Wright says.

"The church has it the other way around. It has tended to say: 'We must say it, say it, say it as clearly as possible and if there is any energy left over, we'll do a bit of it as well."'

Wright was delighted when one of his theology students returned from a summer in Zambia and told the provost of his university that he was planning to do development work in the Third World. On being quizzed about why he wasn't studying politics and economics, he replied: "Because theology's so much more relevant."

Wright says: "He had seen that what was happening in these African villages was they were worshipping Jesus exuberantly and then going out and 'doing' it, then coming back and worshipping, and then going out, and they were making a real, transformative difference."

"That's why churches are full in Africa."

-------------------------------------------------

Wright's closing statements resonate with our desire to go to Africa. We want to teach future pastors in Cameroon about the Kingdom of God, so that they can be sent out to teach and lead churches to "do the Kingdom." The gospel transforms individuals to image forth a transformed community, in which the reign of Jesus supplants the reign of deceit and anger. As Jesus prayed, may the Kingdom come and God's will be done on earth, in Africa, in Cameroon, as it is done in Heaven (Mt. 6:10).

--tg

Another financial update

2006-04-17T14:15:00.000-07:00

We just heard from the Baptist General Conference today that we've raised $16,250.00 so far.

Please keep praying earnestly with us for God to bring in the remaining $62,971.00 that we need.

We're encouraged in the process of support raising. Last week Tommy and I sent out prayer letters to about 15 churches, and we are also talking with several Christian foundations/ministries who may be in a position to contribute as well.

One more prayer request: Over the weekend of April 28-30, Charlie, Tommy, and I will be on a retreat as part of Bethlehem Baptist Church's Missionary Nurture Program. Pray that it will be an encouraging, fruitful time for us as a team as well as for the other missionary candidates who will be there.

Thanks for reading the blog!

The Lord is risen!

--Wesley, for the team

Computers for the seminary

2006-04-11T16:53:00.000-07:00

One of the things we're doing as we get ready to leave in August is collecting as many laptop computers as we can. Last summer, the team from Bethlehem Baptist brought several computers to CBTS for faculty (including Dr. Fon, the seminary's president) and students to use. We're hoping to do the same thing when we go over this time. So far, one church member from Bethlehem has donated a laptop, and we think we've found another one we can take too.

So, if you or someone you know has an old laptop they're not using any more, let us know!

Small Group Meeting

2006-04-05T12:26:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, we presented the details of our trip to a Bethlehem small group--our motivation for going, what we'll be doing, and how they could help. It was a great blessing! We left encouraged, both by the group's interest in us and by their heart for missions, to see God glorified throughout the earth. As we speak with more people about next year, we're consistently humbled and amazed by the love of the body of Christ.

--tg

Clarification

2006-04-01T12:27:00.000-08:00

In case of confusion...

The total amount we need in order to be in Cameroon for ten months is $79,221.00.

The amount we have raised so far is $9,741.71.

So, the amount we have left to raise is $69,479.29.