Africa Bound

In just a few weeks I'll be heading to Liberia to work with a group of pastors to write Sunday School curriculum. The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) is funding the travel expenses and I'm going as a representative of that organization. Some of you are probably asking a few basic questions:

• What is CBF? [It's a Christian organization that is still trying to figure out who they are other than folk who used to be the sane ones among the Southern Baptists]
• What's Sunday School curriculum? [It's a lesson plan to help ordinary people teach the Bible to other ordinary people]
• Where is Liberia? [West Africa, on the coast]
• Is that the place NATO is currently bombing? [no, that's Libya. Seriously? You just asked me that?]

I'm excited about the opportunity to help shape the spiritual formation of Christians throughout Liberia. I'm also a little anxious.

First, there's a whole boat load of meds I'm supposed to take and my doc's office is moving a little slowly in tracking them all down. Yellow fever, malaria, hepatitis, and typhoid top this list of illnesses the CDC tells me I should worry about.

Then, there's the training I'm going to lead. Exactly how did I became qualified to teach leaders from a totally different culture how to write Bible lessons for their people? Perhaps no one else was willing or able to go? I don't fully understand the culture or needs of the people I'll be serving, and even on a good day I'm not sure I understand enough Scripture to offer a helpful word.

But there's something else that's worrying me. It's a little hold-over from the first time I set foot on the continent in 1996. As a 25 year old seminarian I experienced African culture by way of a 22 day stint in Zimbabwe. It was a total immersion. If it had been water I would've drowned. Virtually alienated from everything I found familiar in my heretofore Southern rural upbringing, I heard a word from God as clearly as I've ever heard from the Mysterium Tremendum. Want to know what I heard?

"Get out."

Ok, I joke, it wasn't exactly those words. It was more like, "You're not supposed to be a missionary." It was there that I saw myself as the time oriented Westerner with a taste for comfort, cable, cell phones, and a day planner. Prior to that, our family had seriously contemplated serving God in some missionary capacity, but after that trip it was clear to me that the sacrifice I'd admired in countless other "sent ones" was too much for me. I was, frankly, ashamed. After all, shouldn't I be willing to go where ever God sent me? In theory, yes. But my well-fed flesh was weak.

Since that time I've matured at least a little bit and along the way became the pastor of an extremely diverse congregation. I'm still not sure how that happened, but it is so. Our congregation membership is about 35% of West African origin and I've learned a lot about their culture by being their pastor. Working with multiple cultures in one congregation is, in many ways, like being a missionary. But still, I worry that I'm not prepared to serve these folk, and deeper still, I'm worried about what I may hear from God on this go-round to Africa. Maybe God won't say anything more than "Go, teach, get home." There's a subtle stirring in me, however, that says I should be listening closely for something else.