Bible teaching in beautiful Busokelo

Things didn’t exactly get off to the best start. I was going somewhere I had never been before, accompanied by a young man who I had only met for five minutes a couple of days earlier, in order to provide three days of Bible teaching to a group without a single familiar face among them to encourage me. And then on the way there, less than an hour from home, my car decided to overheat.

I had prayed before the journey for protection and no problems with the car. Didn’t God hear me? Of course he did, and even in the midst of this inauspicious start, I could see God’s care. The problem with the car was spotted when we stopped to buy tomatoes and onions from roadside stalls a little way out of town. Ahead of us were lots of hills – if the lady selling tomatoes hadn’t told us that water was leaking from under the engine we would have carried on and encountered a much more serious problem half way up a hill a long way from any help. Although my usual car mechanic wasn’t available, an office colleague who lived in the area and drives a car was able to come with a mechanic, identify the problem, and guide us to a garage to get it fixed.

The car shenanigans meant we were somewhat late arriving and I was pretty tired after my early start and then driving along a rough, dusty road for about an hour and half, but I needed to jump straight in and start teaching as everyone was there waiting for us. Once again, I had reason to give thanks as I thought it would be uncomfortably hot, but the church turned out to be an open sided, grass roofed building that stayed pleasantly cool. And when we finally got lunch after 3pm, they had kindly prepared food without onions for me to eat, so I could enjoy my plate of rice and pork in a tomato sauce without worrying.

I wasn’t quite sure what my sleeping arrangements would be, though I had been in communication with a local pastor about all the practical arrangements and knew I would be staying in someone’s home. It turned out I had the house to myself as it is owned by an elderly couple who had left a few days previously for medical check-ups, which was a nice surprise as it meant I felt freer in what I did. The pastor also proved game to take me on a good walk all around the village – we climbed up to where Lutheran missionaries had built a hospital about 50 years ago (the views were amazing, looking particularly beautiful in the soft evening light as the sun set), down to a few small shops and along trails between fields of banana trees before ending up at his home.

The pastor’s home is under construction. It was hard to believe anyone could live there, as it looked like most of the rooms didn’t have roofs yet! However, with true Tanzanian spirit and the heart of a servant of Christ, he and his family had moved into the house before it was completed so as to avoid the cost of renting rooms as they planted a church nearby. By the time I got back to my house, it was dark and I was tired! I had a wash, a light tea (I had brought my own food for this) and headed to bed. After lying there for a while, I heard scuffles. What was it? Mice? I thought I’d better check that my food was secure. Coming out of my bedroom I saw large cockroaches scuttle away as my solar light shined on them. That’s what the sound was – their pattering feet and the sound of them eating the polystyrene insulation of an old hot pot! (Hot pots are insulated food pots, so that you can cook food and keep it warm for some time, which is really useful when you only have one stove to cook over – it means you can cook one thing and keep it warm while you cook the next, and they’re also useful when guests turn up late.)

The church was on the opposite side of the road to where I parked my car. In reality it was more of a dust bath than a road! Not only did this mean that my feet were constantly dusty, but also everything else was covered in a thin film of dust because every time a vehicle went through it kicked up all the dust and it landed gently on everything within a few metres of the road. Blow the dust off my teaching resources one minute and a few minutes later they would be coated once again. So I was worried about showing the Jesus Film (in the Nyakyusa language) on the evening of the second day – concerned that the projector and my laptop would get dust inside them. However, we had planned to show the film in an open area with a few shops around the edge, and this area was covered in grass, the nearby road was less dusty and the breeze had dropped, so it was fine. I don’t know how many times I have watched the Jesus Film now – although I sat there with everyone else, I was listening to a podcast! There weren’t as many people there as I would have hoped for considering the central location, but there were still a good number (including children) who stayed from start to finish, despite the chilly night air.

Cooking station

Going back to lunchtime of day two – I experienced one of those cultural things that always makes me feel very uncomfortable. They brought me a plate of chipsi mayai (chip omelette), while everyone else had rice. It is their generous hospitality and their desire to honour guests that causes them to do this; my remonstrations with the pastor the previous day that I would eat what everyone else ate fell like water on a duck’s back. Almost everywhere I go to teach, I end up eating in a separate room with the pastors and we are often given ‘better’ (in their eyes) food than everyone else has. While I appreciate their hospitality and the respect that they show to their leaders and guests, it grates with me, partly because of my cultural background in which egalitarianism is valued (sometimes at the expense of a healthy respect for others) and partly because of Jesus’ teachings around servant leadership.

On day three I tried something I haven’t done before. Normally I do the Bible overview seminar in two days, but as I had three, I was able to take more time over it and add in an extra exercise. In order to help the participants see how understanding the Bible’s story helps us interpret different parts of the Bible, I chose an Old Testament (OT) passage for them to discuss in groups, thinking about how it points to or is fulfilled in Christ and how it applies today. I chose Deuteronomy 28, which is about blessings for the Israelites if they obey God’s voice. I wasn’t surprised to find that they still jumped to applying it directly to today, without thinking about how we are not Israelites about to enter Canaan! But this then gave me the opportunity to talk them through how I would handle the passage, in light of its context in the grand narrative of the Bible, and to draw their attention to verses like Galatians 3:14* and Ephesians 1:3*. At the end, when I asked what new things they had learnt through the seminar, one of them said, “We shouldn’t just take the Old Testament as it is.” It was great to see that some of them had got the point about needing to read the OT in the light of the whole story of the Bible, while others said they had learnt how important it is to read the OT and not just the New Testament (NT). Someone else said they found the different methods I used for teaching helpful (I even got them doing actions) and another said it was like being at college. This feedback was encouraging, and the door is open for me to return. As always, I was struck by the huge need for good Bible teaching. And for Bibles! Some people didn’t come with Bibles while for a couple of people I noticed that the only Bible they had was a children’s NT (the ones that are given out for free by Operation Christmas Child)! A few people had Nyakyusa NTs – they said they read them at home when they don’t understand their Swahili Bibles; it was good to hear the local language NTs are helping people understand God’s Word better. I was also able to put the audio version of the Nyakyusa NT on a couple of people’s flash drives for them to listen to at home.

An evening walk with the host pastor to a
nearby crater lake. Livingstone Mountains
in the background.

Day four, Thursday, I headed back to Mbeya (with the same young man for company, the pastor’s son, who is at high school in Mbeya and who proved to be pleasant company). On the way we stopped at a Baptist Bible college for me to speak to the students. I understood I would have all afternoon to talk with them, but they thought I was just getting half an hour! We compromised, and I had an hour to talk about language use in ministry. They were enthusiastic listeners and several of them bought New Testaments in their local language.

I returned home tired, once again thankful for the opportunity to teach but humbled by it too. Who am I that I should be teaching God’s Word to these church leaders? I still have so much to learn myself. And my life is so comfortable compared to theirs. It’s easy for me to find time and space to be quiet before God and meditate on his Word and I can listen to endless excellent Bible podcasts, while some of them barely have a roof over their head, have many mouths to feed, a farm to tend and can barely afford a Bible. A Bible seminar gives them a chance to take time to stop and learn, something that is hard to do in the noise and busyness of daily life. Oh Lord, help me to faithfully handle your Word and to not grow weary of helping others to discover its richness.

*Galatians 3:14 – “…in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith."

*Ephesians 1:3 – “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places…”

 

A warm welcome (from the people and the weather)!

Halungu, Unyiha. The landscape is very different from Umalila (see my previous blog). Instead of layers of hills covered with a patchwork of small fields, it’s flat and covered with large open fields. It’s a coffee growing region – some fields are filled with mature coffee bushes, while in others neat rows of young coffee plants, interspersed with banana trees, are starting to grow. Other fields are completely bare, ready for planting maize. The bigger fields allow for the use of cows to plough the earth, so those who can afford it will hire cows to do the work.

Morning mist

When we arrived in Halungu not long after 10am on Friday morning it was already very warm. The church where we held the seminar is currently just a shell, with a tarpaulin strung up between poles to give shelter. Thankfully it clouded over in the afternoon and got cooler, otherwise I think everyone would have fallen asleep from the heat. What surprised me, though, was how cold it got at night. We were staying in the pastor’s home, where I had a room to myself, with a mattress on the floor for my bed. They’d provided a blanket, but in the night I found I had to put on my cardigan and wrap myself in a couple of kangas* to try and keep warm. However, when morning came and the sun rose in the sky it quickly warmed up and the dawn mist over the fields started to evaporate.

The church

(*A kanga is a piece of patterned cloth with a proverb or saying of some kind printed near the bottom. They are wonderfully versatile – they can be wrapped around as a skirt, worn as a shawl, provide a sheet at night, twisted into a ring to go on the head for you to then carry a bucket of water or a pile of firewood, used as a towel etc. They are common gifts, especially at weddings and funerals, with the kanga being chosen carefully according to the words printed on it.)

I was there to teach another two day Bible overview seminar (Friday to Saturday), working through the Old Testament and how it points to Jesus. The two pastors who were there really appreciated the teaching, commenting on how there is very little good teaching like this and how much it is needed. Over lunch I was saddened to hear of more examples of wrong teaching in churches – one said how some people pray in the name of their pastor rather than in the name of Jesus and another said he heard someone preach that pastors are like angels and we should listen to and treat them as such, as direct messengers from God. They also talked a lot about the issue of denominationalism, and how often the particular perspective of a denomination is proclaimed more than the Word of God itself. Questions asked during the seminar revealed other areas of misunderstanding – like people talking about churches as being ‘God’s tent’ because they haven’t understood the role of the tabernacle in the Old Testament and how Christ opened the way for us to enter into God’s presence, or people thinking they still have to pay some kind of price for their sins and to gain their salvation, without understanding that Christ’s sacrifice paid the full price for sin.

My car parked in the shade by the pastor's
home (the edge of which you can see on the
left) and the bathroom is the little brick hut to
the left of the car.

 The host pastor and his wife kept apologising for their poor hospitality because of the village environment they live in. Poor hospitality?! They provided us with everything we needed! They cooked me food without onions, prepared hot water for bathing, gave us a place to sleep and were good company. I think they felt they needed to apologise because we always had ugali to eat (rather than rice, which is what is usually served to guests) and we didn’t always have meat, but the food was tasty and there was fresh avocado with each meal and lots of greens, which I much prefer to lots of tough, greasy meat! Every day we would break at 1pm for a two hour lunch break so that people could go home and cook and eat before we carried on. We got lunch about 2.40pm each day – it takes a long time to cook over wood stoves.

Drawing water from
their well

I returned home exhausted but thankful for another opportunity to teach. Exhausted because I’d been teaching all day in the heat (and not drunk enough) and then had to drive home (about 2.5 hours), calling in quickly at the office to unload boxes of books together with the projector and speakers we’d used for showing the Jesus Film in the Nyiha language on Friday evening. Thankful because it feels like a huge responsibility and great privilege to explore the Scriptures with people, and I was encouraged by comments from the pastors, such as that they wished people from other churches had come and had the chance to learn and that I should open a Bible college! May God continue to open doors for his Word to be taught and may he help me to teach – I’m definitely a clay pot, but I pray he may yet be able to use me to help people know him better through his Word.

With the seminar participants: the pastor is on the far left and
his wife is on the far right