Bonus Post: We don't go to Nigeria (but we would if we could)

Wheelchairs for Nigeria
Someone recently told me she didn’t want to give her children vaccines because she didn’t think they did any good, and might instead cause harm. She said, “I don’t see how putting a disease in someone can prevent a disease.”

Sadly, she’s not alone these days. There seem to be a growing number of people who believe what a friend of a friend, a former Playboy centerfold, or a leading comic from the '90s have to say about the topic rather than decades of scientific research. It’s sort of depressing.

So here’s some good news: polio has almost been eradicated. Last year there were only 22 reported new cases in the world. Thirty years ago, thousands of people contracted the disease every year in Nigeria, but around that time, Rotary International took an interest in providing vaccines to the nation. In time, the Gates Foundation took up the cause. Is it just a coincidence that the dramatic decline in polio occurred when the vaccines were distributed?

Dr. Ron Rice, a retired Presbyterian pastor, presented this good news to a Sunday School class at West Side Presbyterian Church last Sunday. but there was bad news to go with the good. Though a great deal of charitable giving has been directed toward preventing new cases, little has been done for the crippled victims of the disease. For that matter, little has been done to help Nigerians living with the effects of birth defects, other diseases, and maiming accidents. Wheelchairs for Nigeria, through Beautiful Gate, is doing that very thing. 

The name “Beautiful Gate” comes from the passage in Acts 3 where God used Peter to heal a lame man who waited by a temple gate called “Beautiful.” With a factory employing 65 Nigerians (some of them physically disabled), the ministry manufactures wheelchairs for distribution throughout the country. These wheelchairs are quite different from what you’re probably picturing. They’re more like adult-sized tricycles adapted for pedaling and steering by hand (instead of feet).

Ron and his wife Sharon recently returned from a three-week wheelchair distribution trip to Plateau State in Nigeria. From a base in Jos, the Rices and Ayuba Gufwan, their Nigerian partner, drove to communities up to three hours away to distribute wheelchairs. Ayuba, himself a polio survivor who uses a wheelchair, was honored with presentations in several communities, while Ron, who was made an honorary chief on a recent trip, was able to meet -- in appropriate turban and robes -- with an emir to discuss the project. While at the emir’s palace, Beautiful Gate gave away 50 wheelchairs to members of the community. Many of the local leaders he meets are Muslim. Nigeria (the most populous African nation) is a majority Islamic nation, though a few Nigerian states have a Christian majority.

When Ron meets with Muslim leaders, he doesn't hide his faith in Christ or that most of the money for the wheelchairs comes from churches in the United States. He is respectful of the people he meets with, acknowledging that Islam also calls for concern for the poor and weak. Muslim leaders, he said, are often surprised that Christians are concerned for poor Muslims.

On this trip, Ron and Sharon were also able to visit a state school for the deaf and two different ministries for the blind. At the University of Jos, the 85 blind students in residence were offered a folding white cane or an audio recorder they could use for lectures. Every stop on their trip provided an opportunity to remind people of God’s love for them and His special care for the poor. The main emphasis of their ministry, though, is polio victims. Beautiful Gate distributed 360 chairs in eight different presentations. In every community, more chairs than they could accommodate were needed.

Could you help fill this need? One chair manufactured by Beautiful Gate’s factory costs $150. As you consider charitable giving this Christmas season (and before year’s end), this is certainly a worthy ministry. Click here to learn more.

We go to three churches at the same time

Eastridge Church, Seattle, Washington
For most of the almost four years we’ve been blogging about churches, we’ve been one-time visitors -- and visitors only. We’ve mostly gone to churches with no intention of returning on a regular basis. We started slowly in 2014 by visiting just a few local churches near our home in Sonoma County, California. In 2015, we visited churches throughout California (by theme, as some of you may recall). We spent 2016 traveling from state to state, visiting at least one church in each. When that trip was over, we moved to Fresno, California, early in 2017. We felt we already had a home church  at The Bridge, though we still visited other churches most weeks.

Over the past month, life has changed for us. Last week, we moved to Seattle, Washington, and we’re looking for a new church home. When we visit churches now, we’ll usually be thinking, is this where we want to stay? Even if we find the perfect (for us) church in the next few weeks, we plan to keep visiting churches through the end of this year. But we need a home base. If you’re a praying person, please pray for our search for a church home.

Don’t expect these posts to change a lot, though. We don’t expect to announce either, “Eureka! We’ve found our church!” or “Yuck! We won’t be be coming back here!” This blog is about first visits, and we always want to be kind. If we don’t want to return to a church, it wouldn’t be kind to announce it to the world, and if we really like a church on a first visit, we’re unlikely to decide to stay until we’ve visited several times --- and we don’t plan to write about those visits.

So enough preliminares. This week we visited the West Seattle campus of Eastridge Church, a multi-site church. The much larger Eastridge campus is in Issaquah (about a half an hour’s drive away). The church’s third campus is in Addis, Ethiopia (yup, the one in Africa). We were delighted that we’d visited on a Sunday when we got to hear a lot about that third campus.

The teaching time, televised from the Issaquah campus, was Pastor Steve Jamison’s interview of Doug and Tasha Myers (who lead the Addis congregation). Doug and Steve have a long relationship.

When Doug was 12 years old, he felt the call to missions while listening to one of Jamison’s sermons. Years later, Doug went on to work as a youth pastor under Jamison. During that time, the church leadership asked Doug where he thought he should be, and he said Africa. They asked what was keeping him from Africa and he said school debts. So the church made a commitment to pay off those debts.

Doug and Tasha have served years in Africa. As missionaries with the Assemblies of God, at first they followed traditional methods of ministering in rural areas. The emphasis had been on training local pastors for ministry, all in native languages, but they had a vision for a different kind of ministry.

Addis, Ethiopia is the headquarters for the African Union, a 55-nation organization that deals with economic issues, treaties, health concerns, etc. Representatives from all over the world, from the Americas, Europe, and Asia, to work with the Union, and the official working language for the African Union is English. So Doug and Tasha have begun an English language international congregation in Addis. The ministry is growing, so Pastor Jamison challenged the two congregations to raise $50,000 for the congregation in Addis.

We enjoyed worshipping with the people of the West Seattle campus. During the singing time, people were encouraged to come forward with prayer requests, for physical healing, work, financial needs, decision making.

After announcements, people were encouraged to chat over coffee, strawberries, melons, bagels, donuts and other treats before returning to the sanctuary for the message. John introduced himself, though he was a visitor as well. He is here from India to visit his daughter.

I met Andy and asked him why he attended this church. He said his wife wanted to go to a community church. I asked how long he’d been attending there, and he nodded at his daughter, who was 12, and said they’d been attending since she was little.

After the service ended, we were able to spend a little more time chatting with people. Mindy chatted with Heather, who’s Pastor Jamison’s executive assistant, while I talked with her husband, Brian. I asked what he liked about the church.

He noted that the West Seattle campus had the advantages of a small church, so you can get to know people. (Craig, the campus pastor, said during the service, “It’s good to have a critical mass in the room.”) Brian said they also benefit from the large campus in Issaquah. (For instance, the kids from West Seattle will be bussed over to the Issaquah campus to share their Vacation Bible School.)

We loved being in one place, West Seattle, and yet feeling a part of the church a half hour and half a world away. That's how the Church Universal works.

Dean goes to a missions conference

Valley Bible Church, Clovis, California

Mindy loves missionary slide shows. When she was growing up and missionaries came to her church (as they often did), she enjoyed hearing their stories from the farthest parts of the earth, from Africa or Asia or South America.

Sadly, she had to work the night I went to the opening event for the Valley Bible Church’s missions. She could have heard from a missionary all the way from San Francisco, California.

The church holds a mission conference every year, and the Friday evening event I attended was billed as a family night. Guest speaker (and missionary) Alan Bond of Jews for Jesus, a parachurch ministry, spoke about the Gospel in the Feasts of Israel. The next night, his topic was “The Yeshua Message,” preceded by a dinner for junior high through college students. The conference would continue during the Sunday morning worship service with “The Messiah and the Jewish People” as the topic, and the entire event would culminate with a potluck meal after the worship service.

Friday evening's portion of the conference began with a dessert potluck. Mindy had made some chocolate cookies for the event, which was held in the church’s fellowship hall.

One wall of the room displayed the different missionaries the church supports. Some of those ministries were in distant locations, like Africa and Europe, but there also were displays of local ministries such as Valley Mission Jail Ministry. One table was full of pamphlets from Jews for Jesus’ ministry.

Jews for Jesus was founded in 1973 by Moishe Rosen to introduce Jewish people to Jesus as their long-awaited Messiah. The ministry began in San Francisco but now does work throughout North America and in Australia, England, Russia, and other parts of the world, including Israel. But -- as I mentioned earlier -- the conference’s speaker works more locally, from the original San Francisco office.

While enjoying dessert at one of the round tables in the fellowship hall before the lecture, I chatted with folks. I learned that Valley Bible Church was now a combined ministry of three local churches that had merged over the last decade. As one man put it, “Our building had outgrown the congregation.” At first, the three pastors of the three churches served together, but that proved impractical over the long run, and the church now has one head pastor, Del Foote. People around the table spoke admiringly of Pastor Foote, and a couple of people said he was the reason they attended the church.

Richard said he’d grown up Catholic. “They have Jesus, but the Scripture isn’t as important to them. They don’t bring a Bible to church.” I mentioned that Catholic churches do have four scripture readings as part of the mass, but he said, “They don’t have a fifty-minute sermon like we have here.” He lamented the lack of young people in the church (I’d guess that besides the younger Pastor Foote, attendees that evening seemed to be in their sixties and older).

Pastor Foote introduced Alan Bond, whose message focussed on the feasts of Leviticus 23. He drew parallels to the life of Jesus from the seven festivals in that passage, including Passover with its images of sacrifice. He connected Paul’s discussion of Jesus as the First Fruit of new life (in First Corinthians 15) with the Feast of the Firstfruits in the Leviticus passage.

At the conclusion of his talk, Bond invited questions. I asked whether the many secular Jews of the Bay Area still celebrated the feasts. He said many Jews only go to Temple for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the equivalent of “Christmas and Easter Christians.” Pastor Foote closed the evening in prayer and urged all of us to leave a love offering for Bond’s ministry at the door as we left.

As I stepped outside, I noticed a woman arranging herself in her wheelchair and pulling out a flashlight for her journey home. She said she didn’t need assistance; it was only a few blocks from her home. I was impressed with the efforts she made to be at this event and wondered how many missions conferences she had attended over the years. Sometimes the most difficult, and essential, mission we have is local.

We Go to Church for the Food

Gleanings for the Hungry, Dinuba, California
“You cook from your soul; you make people happy!” This is a quote from a woman in a video about a woman who was there in person, Florlisa, at Gleanings’ worship service last Thursday evening. Food is central to Florlisa’s ministry; it’s even more central to the ministry of Gleanings.

Gleanings for the Hungry began in 1982, with founder Wally Wenge's vision of putting to use the millions of tons of California fruit thrown away every year. That first summer they processed 15,000 pounds of donated fruit, and they were able to send sun-dried peaches and nectarines to feed survivors of hurricanes and floods in Guatemala. A ministry of YWAM (Youth with a Mission), for the next six years sent food food to Cambodian refugees in Thailand via YWAM’s medical ships. Since then, they’ve been sending food throughout the world.

I first visited Gleanings nearly twenty years ago when I was a youth pastor at Felton Bible Church, bringing a group of students process peaches on an assembly line one week during a hot Central Valley summer. We sorted out bad fruit, cut the good fruit, and laid it on wooden racks to dry in the sun. It was hard, dirty work. Kids came out of the week saying it was one of the best in their lives.

Several years later, while we were at Healdsburg Community Church, our daughters served for a week during another hot, miserable, Central Valley summer. They also had very good experience.

But Mindy had never been to Gleanings, so we were happy when Chris, a friend from Felton Bible Church days who’s now on staff, invited us to visit for dinner and the weekly evening worship service.

Before we went inside, he gave us a tour of the grounds. In October, peach season is over, but Gleanings is a year-round operation. When fruit season ends, soup season starts. Donations from farmers and manufacturers are blended into a soup mix by folks on staff at Gleanings and by volunteers from churches and other organizations.

After seeing the warehouse, the soup-packing setup, the field where fruit was dried, and the assembly fruit processing facility, we went inside for dinner with the Gleanings staff and volunteers. We sat at a table with Tiffany, Alex, and Katie, and I decided to ask Tiffany her life story. She said she was born in Switzerland, but while she was still a young girl, her father believed God called him to two things. He was called to serve at Gleanings as Director, and he was called to no longer “work.” I use quotation marks because her father does work very hard, but he doesn’t do so as a job. He trusts God to provide for his needs and those of his family.

After dinner, Chris was on cleanup duty in the kitchen. Mindy and I took a look at the silent auction items offered to raise support for DTS students (YWAM’s Discipleship Training School -- they do love their acronyms.) We bid on homemade bread, strawberry jam, and raspberry jam. We lost out on the first two but won on the third (Mindy’s favorite flavor).

Back at our tables, the worship service opened with several songs led by Tiffany and her mom, then Florlisa was introduced as the speaker. Born in Italy, as a child in the Catholic Church she dreamed of being a missionary, but she moved to America and eventually had a very successful career as an accountant. Then, at the age of 36, she became a Christian, and God called her to the mission field. She served on YWAM ships, using her accounting skills and her skills as a cook. “I like food, it is part of my culture.” She just recently came to Gleanings.

When the worship service was over, people were able to spend a few more minutes bidding on silent auction items, and I had an opportunity to chat with Fritz (the director of Gleanings for the Hungry and Tiffany’s father). I asked him what he thought was special about the place.

He said, "people who came to Gleanings felt the presence of the Lord,” and that there are many places people can go to get “head knowledge,” but when people do practical work at Gleanings with an opportunity to feed others, “they have a unique experience of the Lord.”

In Matthew 25, Jesus tells the parable of dividing sheep and goats. He places great emphasis on whether people were fed in His name. There is no doubt which group the folks at Gleanings would join.

Living in the USA

When she lived in a small, closed community with a shared purpose, Bonnie Nystrom says, "It was easier."

Until a few years ago, Bonnie (Mindy's friend since their first semester at Taylor University) and her family lived and worked in a fairly remote village or in a closely knit international community in Papua New Guinea. About every four years or so, they'd be in the United States for about a year, usually doing a lot of traveling around in order to visit churches and people who financially supported them. Now, their kids are grown. Family responsibilities have brought Bonnie and her husband, John, more or less permanently back to the US, and Bonnie's life is very different than it was in PNG. "Everybody's got ministries they're part of, so it's hard -- awkward" to form deep relationships.

In the past, she moved pretty easily between life in the village and life in Ukarumpa. Creating deep, meaningful relationships was easy. She'd established processes over the years so that, even though the family moved between the two communities, their lives in the two locations moved in parallel. Within an hour after moving from Ukarumpa to Arop, she could reach (almost without thinking) for whatever she needed to bake bread, hardly needing the recipe. Even when she came back to the village after a year away, it was the same. 

Now, though she's living in the same community where she grew up, she says she'd certainly need the recipe. "It'd be the same challenge if we'd always lived here and moved to Papua New

Guinea."  Finding an appropriate new routine is proving a challenge, but she says, "I'm a process analyst. I'm always tripping on bad processes" and finding better ways to do things. As an example, she and John are in the process of remodeling the house next door for her parents to move into, possibly before John leaves to help his mom manage his family's summer business, and she also redesigned much of the house where they live now to make it a more comfortable and hospitable place. 

Otherwise, John's role now is much the same as it was in 1997, though technology has changed the processes.*  Moving back to the States hasn't changed much in his actual work routine. In Papua New Guinea, when they weren't living in their village house, he could work with the translation team in the village via radio. Now, though he misses the face-to-face camaraderie, he's still able to work with them via Skype. He finds different distractions working in the US; in PNG, meetings and reports got in the way of translation work. In Florida, family business interferes (both John and Bonnie have responsibilities for their aging parents, and John's family has a summer business that's his responsibility).

During the years they lived in PNG, Bonnie's work responsibilities varied. When their kids were in school (and living on the school's campus much of the year), she served in a variety of positions, particularly enjoying and feeling satisfied with her work as a board member.  Now, most of what she did in PNG can't be done from Florida. "I was never as involved in the [translation] project. I was an advisor on various projects as needed." Board meetings filled her desire for community conversation, for working together in search of a common solution. A board's job is talking through polarizing issues, she says. Whenever something started to become an issue, "just enough of a possibility shows up. God saying it's okay." 

She's working to be more comfortable with limbo. Much of her time now  "When I've thought about what life will look like...God comes along and gives me a look at something," allowing her to move ahead with whatever's at hand. For now, the task at hand is finishing her parents' house and helping them move in. Once that's done, she's pretty sure God be along with another possibility.

*When Bonnie and John had been working in Papua New Guinea for about ten years, a devastating tsunami destroyed Arop village. As part of the rebuilding process and as a result of technological advances, Bible translation is changing throughout the world. Their book, Sleeping Coconuts, tells more about that story as well as providing a vivid picture of life in PNG. This recent article also summarizes the translation process well.

First Baptist Church, Long Beach, MS

In the "Twenty-something" Sunday School class, Daniel told us about the oak tree that used to be in the center of the courtyard of the old church. You can still see the oak tree; it stands. The church that surrounded it was utterly destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. From the reports I heard while talking to people at First Baptist in Long Beach, Mississippi, a new church was built after the old one came down -- and by a new church they didn't just mean the building.

In 1909, twenty-one charter members of the first First Baptist Church of Long Beach met together in a school, and a year later they were meeting in a church building. In 2005, after their church building was destroyed by the storm, the congregation of First Baptist Long Beach was again meeting in a school. That first Sunday service after the storm was a joyous reunion; discovering who had survived the storm and who was still in town.

The congregation moved from school to school after the hurricane. Food and clothing were also distributed from several of the same locations. Most everyone in the congregation was involved in the process of distributing goods to those in need, cleaning debris and rebuilding structures.

At one point the congregation was meeting in a building with a roof but no walls. The senior pastor, Dr. LaRue Stephens, told the congregation that it must continue on like that, as though there were no walls between the church and the community, reaching out to those in need. I talked to an usher named John who said about Dr. Stephens, "I love that man. He took on so much after Katrina in the rebuilding process. I'd lay down my life for that man."

After the storm, many people came to help. Natives were amazed to see truck after truck arrive bearing goods, with no payment expected for the goods or the drivers. Rick and Lynn, a couple who lived in Baltimore, Maryland, read about the devastation on the Gulf Coast and felt called to move to Long Beach. Rick brought his construction skills to Alabama to lead work teams, and Lynn soon followed. The couple had to live month after month in a trailer until they finally moved into a house. Once they had a house, they used it to shelter teams of workers on short term mission trips.*

Pastor John Jones came to the church after Katrina, but he believes the overflowing generosity shown to the church led to a spirit of generosity in the church. In the years following the storm, many in the congregation served the needs of the community. Among other things, the church has run Beach Club, an after school club for children.

One of the most impressive ministries of the church is their overseas missions trips. A couple of years after Pastor John arrived at Long Beach, he helped plan a missions trip to Peru. Since then, the church, which has about five hundred members, has sponsored trips to Guatemala, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, China, and, soon, a trip to India. Every six months the church sends a group to Haiti, rotating ministry and medical teams. John said about a hundred church members have been on mission trips, but Sandy Stephens, the senior pastor's wife, put the number closer to one hundred and fifty. Either of those numbers makes for an impressive percentage of the congregation involved in missions.

The youth group has taken mission trips to Vieux Carre Baptist, the church we visited in the French Quarter of New Orleans. This coming summer, there will be a youth trip to Chicago. Mindy and I had the opportunity to visit the Wednesday night youth group and talk about our church visiting adventure this year. John wants to expose kids to great variety of churches in different settings and cultures.

On Wednesday night, we met Rachel, who volunteers in the youth group (she's the one who invited us to the Twenty-somethings Sunday School class). She's only been attending the church for a year and a half, but she was attracted by the missions focus of the church. She believes that a church that doesn't have such an outward focus will be a struggling church. Rachel said there were other factors that attracted her to the church: she wanted to sing in a choir, which the church has. She was drawn to Bill and Beth, the leaders of her Sunday School class, who demonstrated great care for her. She also said that the church has helped her grow in her devotional and prayer life.

We heard story after story of God's care for the people of the church after Katrina and how that led to a spirit of giving to others. I couldn't help but think of these words of Paul from the first chapter of Second Corinthians: "He comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any kind of affliction, through the comfort we ourselves receive from God."

God has taken the people of Long Beach Baptist through the storm and they have taken up the responsibility of doing the same for others.

*A sidebar about Rick and Lynn and how we came to stay with them, illustrating the kind of thing that keeps happening on this journey: In Santa Fe, New Mexico, we stayed with an old friend and visited her church. At that church, a member of the worship team gave us the name of a pastor in New Orleans, leading us to stay there. While helping with a project at the church in New Orleans, new friends put us in touch with John Jones, the Student Ministries pastor at First Baptist, Long Beach. John called Rick and Lynn, confident they would house us sight unseen. His confidence in their hospitality proved well founded.

Statistics

Service Length: 1 hour 13 minutes

Sermon Length: 34 minutes

Visitor Treatment: a number of people said hello as we entered the building (one man was stationed outside to greet people as they came in, and a few others were inside or at the door to the worship center). The welcome center is highly visible when entering, as are the check-in locations for nursery and preschool children. The greeting time in worship was warm, and visitors were encouraged to fill out registration forms (we saw one version at the welcome center and another during the worship service. Either way, visitors were encouraged to place them in the offering plates as they left).

Followup by Tuesday Morning: none (but we had lunch with several members of the church on Sunday, and were in touch via FaceBook with a couple others).We also got an email from the church's Minister of Education on Tuesday.

Our Rough Count: 350

Probable Ushers' Count: 415

Snacks: vending machines in cafe area; homemade biscuits with butter and jam, coffee and water in the Twenty-somethings Sunday School class

Musicians: Young Musicians Choir: 8 girls and 9 boys, singing two songs with music track

Adult Choir: 11 men, 15 women

additional: organ (woman), piano (woman), electric guitar (man), electric bass (man), director (man)

Songs: "Family of God"

"He keeps me singing"

"This is amazing grace" (Young Musicians)

"Amazing grace/my chains are gone" (Young Musicians)

"Down at the cross"

"Grace alone"

"His grace will lead us through" (Adult Choir)

"Just as I am"

Miles to church: 2

Miles from start: 7,865

Total 2016 Miles: 7,820

Church website: www.fbclb.com