Esalas in Mission

Check out our new website

2007-09-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

Check out our new blog format on our website www.esalas.org
I hope this way to be able to maintain our site and our blog at the same time rather than working on one and letting the other unmaintained.
Nathan

The dirt road less traveled

2007-09-03T12:11:00.000-07:00

On Saturday evening of September 1 we arrived in Burkina Faso, the country directly north of Ghana taking the dirt road less traveled. We wrote in a previous letter that we were short of rains in northern Ghana and there was a drought. Well from Burkina Faso to Northern Ghana we have seen so much rain, many areas are flooded. Unfortunately, houses the clay/mud based houses are falling down. Even the Nasuan chief's house has been rendered unsafe. Most walls have either fallen or are in danger of falling.

Well now to get to the story about the dirt road less traveled. We left the house at about 8:30 am and stopped by the Baptist Medical Center to travel with the Hewitts. Everything went well until we arrived in Burkina Faso to find myriads of trucks lined up on the road facing north towards Ouagadougou and nothing coming south into Ghana. In turns out that the trucks were lined up for 30 km. I drove up to the 'gendarme' or police. I noticed a vehicle with Ghana plates that looked like a special government vehicle. I guessed they might be Burkinabes who were ambassadors or something. I walked up to them and asked in my terrible French if they spoke English. They did and explained that the main bridge going into Ouaga had been washed out and was six feet under water. The gendarme sent a vehicle to go see if the ambassador could cross. It turns out that they could not and it was recommended to them to take a by pass around that was long and over some rough road. I quickly decided to just follow behind these people who knew what they were doing and spoke English.

We made it for about two hours following behind them and then they stopped for a bathroom break. So we did the same, but we were slow and they got on ahead of us and we lost them. All we knew was we were going to a village called Manga and then back to to the main road to get to Ouagadougou. So we kept driving..and driving..and driving..and stopping to ask if this was the road to Manga and the answer was always yes, keep going. So we did. Along the way we saw more trucks stuck in the mud, overturned trucks. We crossed other bridges that were still standing and not underwater. Thankfully it had not been raining for a couple of days or it would have been a lot worse. Or if it had started raining during our drive, we would have found it much more difficult to ask people if we were on the road to Manga.

It was well after dark when we finally arrived to Manga and I asked someone in my bad French again, "Is it 20 kilometers to Ouaga?" He laughed and said "go, go." So we did. It took about 20 - 30 kilometers to get to the main north south road that we would have been on the whole time if the bridge had not been washed out. Then it was another 70 km to get to Ouaga. We arrived at the guesthouse about 9:30 PM after 13 hours of traveling. We felt like we had been on an international flight. We were so strung out, but thankful to have arrived safely. We thank God for his protection and the kind people who we trailed for the first two hours and who gave us the necessary information to arrive in Ouaga. Had we not seen them, we would have turned around and gone back to Ghana and perhaps just not come to FES this time.

So now we are here in Ouagadougou for the FES (Field Education Service) for Karissa to play with other home schooled children and to get a classroom experience for three weeks. Please pray for health and good learning and mostly fun interaction with peers for the children. Another piece of good news is that the Fluegges LCMS missionaries from Togo have also been accepted into the FES program and are here in Ouaga!

Also Christina Riddle who is planning to come help us as a volunteer homeschool teacher is in need of more financial support so she can come and help us. Pray for all needed funds and travel arrangements to be completed.

Komba Chiefs Meeting

2007-09-01T12:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday August 24, our Komba language team planned to have a large meeting of all the Komba chiefs to explain to them what our Komba language project is about and how we need their support and interest to make the project run. We also experienced our largest rain of the year beginning Thursday night in some places and very heavy on Friday morning. It finally began to let up around 11 am. I sent a message to Elisha Yajim who is our vice chairman for the Komba language project asking if we should still go or not. He sent me back a message saying some vehicles had already passed and some people had already gone.

Well we went and the road was terrible. There were several places where there was only water covering the road and you never know what is underneath or where the large potholes (sinkholes) are. Still we arrived safely with three chiefs in tow. I have to say, if the rain had not been so heavy we would have had a very good turn out, but even with the rain the turn out was admirable. The speakers at the meeting were all respected people who encouraged the chiefs to support the project and to show interest in it by sending representatives to language committee meetings.

I was very happy to see their interest and verbal commitment. My prayer is that the project will be able to stand with the interest and energy of our leading people.

More on Filling the gap

2007-03-29T08:43:00.000-07:00

I have been discussing this filling the gap idea with the Komba translation and literacy volunteers. Pastor Emmanuel stressed the importance of individual church members expressing their desire for a Christian funeral or burial before it happens. Otherwise, it may not be easy for the elders to agree to the church performing a funeral or doing a rite to replace a tradtional rite. He said often, they may allow the church to do it, but still do their own ritual later.

Emmanuel is calling people to fly their Christian banner publicly by clearly confessing their faith. This is crucial in the instance of a woman who is married to a non Christian traditional believer or a young man and woman who may have children, but who are still living in the father's house and under his authority.

He is also courageously addressing the challenge of syncretism. Syncretism is a real danger and is the objection most of us have as we think about replacing a traditional practice with a Christian one. However, if we avoid the traditional practices completely or don't try to replace it at all we may also fail in our missiological task. Let's not forget Christmas and Easter replaced traditional pagan festivals. I'm sure there was a period of syncretism and if we are honest, we still struggle with syncretism of another sort (consumerism, warm fuzzies that replace the true gospel) during those festivals.

Filling the gap in African traditional religious practices

2007-01-20T13:49:00.000-08:00

Pastor Samuel and I wrote the following Mission observer ...See below for bibliography.
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In northern Ghana church members routinely face confessional crises as they are confronted with traditional religious practices- especially at the time of death, suffering, or catastrophe- that can compromise their faith in Christ alone.

African traditional religion mandates that when ‘bad’ events occur, there is often some purification that needs to take place in the family and sometimes the community. To use Old Testament language, something ‘unclean’ is still present in a Christian and in his larger family when these things happen. However the solution that traditional religion provides is often not suitable for a Christian as it often involves a blood sacrifice or somekind of reverence to a god/s in addition to the one true God. When a church member does not participate in the traditional ritual, the extended family (many of whom are often not Christian) and the believer may feel that something is missing, some uncleaness still exists, and something needs to be done to fill the gap and to purify the uncleaness. If the believer does participate, in many cases he is breaking the first commandment and publically compromising his faith in Christ.

A Lutheran woman from a village called Gbongbik in northern Ghana lost her husband, who was not a believer. The religious tradition prescribes that the elders had to give her some special water to drink and to make her confess any previous unfaithfulness to her husband. But she refused to drink it. If a woman does not drink it, the community may assume that she has been unfaithful to her husband and is refusing to confess her unfaithfulness. But apparently because this woman was so old no one forced her to take the drink. Soon after there came a time when the widows (since the man had multiple wives) and the children were to be purified through a ritual of shaving their heads and wearing white robes. All of the other family members were purified through the ritual, but the Christians were left unpurified. In such a situation, the popular perception is that if the Christians are not purified their uncleaness will remain in the family, which may cause future problems. Also the Christians themselves may feel a strong sense of the law that they indeed are unclean and need to be cleaned. If the church says, this kind of thinking is nonsense or superstitious and does not ‘fill the gap’ left by traditional religion, it is likely the woman will look outside of the church and be purified in the traditional way even though it goes against her conscience.

In this instance the church leaders and pastors came to the funeral house on the purification day and they composed a liturgy of readings, gave a short sermon, and celebrated a communion liturgy for the woman and those family members who were confirmed. Non believers observed. This communion practice, though not practiced as such in the West, freed the woman’s conscience from the threats of the law and gave her a solution from inside the Christian church. The traditional believers also accepted this solution that she was no longer unclean and no longer made them unclean either. Hence she was freed from the crisis of being forced to do the non Christian practice and made a confession that the church has the true remedy inside its gates for the communal experience of death.

Many African Lutherans are experiencing similar confessional crises in their traditional cultural practices. Lutheran pastors and churches need to come together to carefully develop (and use!) faithful Lutheran rites and rituals that apply to the African believers’ experience of the law in a multi-religious family setting, in order to turn our members toward faith in the one true gospel and to make a clear confession of the same to non-believers.

Konlaan, Samuel and Esala, Nathan. (2006). Missio Apostolica. Volume XIV No. 2 Issue 28: 122-123.
www.lsfmissiology.org

Return to Ghana! by Sarah Esala

2007-01-19T13:54:00.000-08:00

We arrived Wednesday evening in Ghana after a long but manageable journey. The girls did amazingly well. Annaka even decided to sleep a few hours on the plane (that’s better than last time). Everything in the airport went smoothly and we were happy to receive every one of our bags unharmed and make it out of the airport and into cars uneventfully. I even knew what to say to shed a few of the guys at the airport who insisted upon “helping.”

We’re adjusting to a different time (It’s 5 hours ahead from CST) but may almost be set. Today was tough in that regard but we took small naps and fought the urge to crash. The night we arrived was quite interesting. Annaka woke up around 1am and then Aili woke up. Neither was interested in going to sleep. After about 20 minutes of trying to “make” them sleep, I surrendered and left the bedroom of the guest house we were all sleeping in. I was about to turn on lights in the living room area when I noticed that the door to the other bedroom where Karissa and Deb (my mother-in-law) were sleeping was open. I was a bit surprised to see Karissa’s restless legs sticking up in the air and the curtains wide open to allow the outside light inside. Apparently Karissa couldn’t sleep either. We had a little party until 2:40am when I gave them a 2^nd bedtime snack, read a story and sent them to bed again. I myself was a bit groggy so I hung out this time, thinking about writing this little update and learning how to operate Karissa’s Giga pet that she received for Christmas (for those who know what I’m talking about and have any idea how to feed it enough so it won’t be hungry, let me know; I clean up after it, feed it, pet it, walk it…but it’s still unhappy).

Our first day we unpacked a few things and then headed over to our colleague Alvina Federwitz’s house for lunch and a planning session with Paul and Ali. We’re helping with some of their orientation to Ghana (I’m so glad it’s them and not us; I can’t tell you how nice it is not too be learning everything for the first time). Then today Nate met with Paul and in the afternoon we all rendezvoused at the headquarters of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ghana (ELCG) for greetings and introductions. Once again, we weren’t overwhelmed by all the people we met and could just renew established relationships. Keep us and them (especially them) in your prayers through this whole process that in reality will probably take a good year (and probably more) for them to get their bearings in various venues and cultural situations that are commonly encountered. And, of course, there will always be plenty more to learn beyond those basics.

Thank you so much for your prayers during this past month. We’ve had amazing health despite exposure to lots of icky bugs and safety as we traveled many, many, many miles back to Ghana. Our family seems to be adjusting well to temps, a different culture, time changes, travel stress…Karissa and I started back with schooling again today. Keep praying that this will move forward during this crazy time of travel and transition. We won’t be to our home in Nasuan for another 2 ½ weeks.

Things that we appreciate about Ghana:

Convenience—Today I could have easily bought apples, pineapple, plantain chips (which we did! Yum!), a dog leash, a car jack, hanky, gum, candy, bread, TP or even a toilet seat from the comfort of my car. At stop lights vendors sell an amazing assortment of goods—and what a good use of time in traffic.

Courteous drivers (most of the time)—Most People from the U.S. are amazed at how traffic merges occur. You can’t really wait for a break to go because there just won’t be one on the busy roads so cars just started edging out and drivers actually slow down or even stop so the car can join the line of Ghana traffic.

Creative advertising and entertaining names of businesses/products—It is not uncommon to see a place called Jesus Loves You Car Repair or Blood of Jesus perfume oil. I saw a billboard today for Canon printers that said “choose wisely.” Can you guess what the picture was? How ‘bout a headless man in a store full of heads just about to reach out and choose one.

So with those tidbits and a sigh of relief to be back in Ghana, Let me leave you with this: Have A Nice Hair! (a slogan for a shampoo).

In Christ,

Sarah for the Esala family

P.S. It has been soooooooooooo wonderful to have the assistance of my mother-in-law. Glad she came.

7 year old baseball wisdom

2006-10-30T07:32:00.000-08:00

My daughter teaches me how to not get (overly) sucked in to our cultural myths.

My daughter and I are Cardinals fans. She started going out to the car with me in the morning in Ghana to listen last year (2005) if the Cardinals had beaten the Astros in the National League Championship. We would hear about a two sentence summary of the game. They finally lost that series. In the process I created a little baseball fan and bonded with my daughter. We went to two games in 2006 and watched the Cardinals go deep into the post season.

During the world series a couple days ago, she had gone to bed before the game was over. In the morning we went online to watch some of the big plays of the Cardinals win the night before. We watched for several minutes and I continued clicking around after we had exhausted the highlights and she looked at me and said, "Dad, you can read about it all day and all night but it is not going to make a difference."

Well said. Wisdom. Enough is enough.

Sports is certainly part of cultural metaphor. Walter Wink and then Paul Hiebert have claimed our fascination with sports in part is a replaying of Indo-European 'myth' or paradigm for our world view. Life is based on competition and battle. I wonder how often our big stories out of our Indo-European cultural heritage unknowingly enter into our mission. Our mission (also our church life, politics etc.) can take on story lines and themes from the cultural governing story (read myth) rather than that of the biblical story. See Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Fortress, 1992). Paul Hiebert, Anthropological Reflections on Missiological Issues (Baker, 1994).

Created to be dependent - blessings discovered on a short term trip "overseas"

2006-10-03T20:21:00.000-07:00

I heard a lady at a mission meeting say that after being in Haiti for one week she got on the plane to come home and it felt like she was leaving the real world to go back home to our pretend world. Why is it that short term trips or being in another culture open us up like this? I certainly had this experience on two short term overseas trips in my youth.

Martin Luther in his introduction to the Lord's Prayer from the Large Catechism puts his finger on our problem of indepedence. "For we all have enough that we lack, but the great problem is that we do not see it or feel it. God wishes you to lament and express your needs and wants, not because he is unaware, but to kindle your heart to stronger and greater desires and to spread your cloak wide to receive many things" (paragraph 27).

We are created to be dependent on God to open our arms up wide to receive from him. In this culture, we are very independent and insulated planning and striving to be set for the future. We know what to expect. By going overseas to another culture or to a foreign culture inside our own country(and staying there), we can no longer depend on ourselves. We can't easily escape to our idols of familiar self support.

I wonder if that is partly why being immersed in a non-Western culture opens us up to God. We finally realize we are created to be dependent and (at least for a time) we realize that is real and less artificial than the typical independent Western 'ideal' life. The challenge for me is that after some time overseas we set up the old independent supports, relying on ourselves, perceiving ourselves as big fish and capable swimmers in foreign ponds. All of which is very dangerous - I need to continue to open up my cloak wide to receive many things from God through his other creatures and creation.

In a play without a script

2006-10-02T11:03:00.000-07:00

What is it like to live in another culture 24 hours a day 7 days a week? Well here is my analogy. Imagine you have a major role in a play. You come to what you think is the first practice but for some reason you have never got a script sent to you in the mail so you figure you'll pick one up when you arrive. As you get there, you discover that this is no rehearsal, this is the first performance and you are supposed to have your script memorized. But you never got a script. It's too late now. You are ushered out on stage.

Imagine yourself in the play, with other actors and actresses. All of them have their lines and have speaking parts. You know you must too, only you don't know when they come or what they are. You watch the other characters around you and you imagine what your character might say. Once in a while you say something and then look at the other characters for a response. Did you do it right? No response. You don't know. So you negotiate and in time you find yourself showing up in familiar scenes. Scenes that keep repeating themselves. Do you do the same thing as you did last time or do you adapt and change it up?

Sometimes you get clear negative messages from people that what you are doing is not good so in those cases you change it up. But ironically sometimes its the times you think you are at your best that you get those comments.

The funny thing is that the play just keeps going on. You can hardly get off stage. At times you duck aside and talk to your family members who lo and behold have parts in the play too. But then you find other actors/actresses are still watching. Sometimes its seems the audience finds out what you said off stage - how did they know that?

Eventually, things get more familiar and the play is recognizable as life, but I'll tell you what - after every day you become grateful that God invented sleep! I have never rested better than I do in Africa!

Mission as giving and receiving

2006-08-31T07:46:00.000-07:00

Theologian Miroslav Volf from Yale University has written a book I want to read: Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace. I am especially interested in the focus on giving and receiving gifts in ways that honor God. He says gift giving is a triangular exchange between God, the giver and the receiver.

As a missionary I am a middleman who brokers the gifts given to those in Africa where I live who receive some of those gifts. It is my responsibility to watch how the gifts are used. It is my responsibility not to siphon off the gifts for my own benefit. It is also my job to help the receivers to receive the gift responsibly. It is also my job to speak to the givers.

Volf is quoted in an article I read, “We who are affluent often don’t know how to be good givers- we give but for all the wrong reasons.” Why do we give? To puff ourselves up? To atone for transgressions? God desires that we give for the right reasons. The idea that came to me is that in all of our mission work are we focusing on the heart attitudes of givers and receivers that God may be honored? Perhaps in so doing we are also growing his church. We may (or may not visibly) see the gifts multiplied as all of our hearts are changed to give and receive in response to the free gift and love of Jesus death on the cross for us. Giving and receiving in freedom not under compulsion!

Development and Mud huts

2006-08-29T13:39:00.000-07:00

Development is great. Church aid organizations often help build orphanages and other homes for underprivileged people. My problem with Western development is the ignorance of culture and tradition.

Who or which culture sets the standard for development? Here is one example. Is a mud hut by definition a substandard home? What does it say if that is how your people have been living for thousands of years? Does it mean that their traditional homes are inferior to those of concrete? I never realized how cool a mud hut home is compared to a cement structure until I stayed in one. I never realized how well they keep water out with only grass roofs and how much cooler they are compared to metal zinc roofs (which is the main alternative in Ghana at least.)

If mud huts are well maintained – worked on every year, they are very accommodating homes. They are cool and comfortable. They are affordable and within the price range of nearly every Ghanaian at least in rural areas. They are easy to maintain and not so costly as more Western style homes. The people already possess much of the expertise to build and maintain them.

I grant that cities can be a different animal since people are living right on top of each other in ways that are not accommodating to traditional African ways of life. Any thoughts? Any thoughts on the millenium goals? http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ Check em out.

Is Christianity's ethos more rural than urban?

2006-06-16T13:35:00.000-07:00

Dr. Lamin Sanneh of Yale (also a West African by birth and cultural roots) suggests that perhaps Christianity’s ethos is more rural than urban. One of the reasons he suggests this tendency is the statistics bear it out in India and Africa today. In those places Christianity has had more success in the rural locales. Secondly, the calendar of the church has been solar and it is in harmony with the cycle of the agrarian season. I have noticed this living in a subsistence farming community in northern Ghana that the lectionary series needs to harmonize with the cycle of the year. In fact historically it does very nicely. The solar calendar of the church deals in agrarian symbols and rhythms. Islam is lunar, and Sanneh argues, that it is more urban and less connected with the harvest cycle. Because of that the native celebrations become separated from Islam since the native festivals follow along the lines of the planting and harvesting cycles. The Islamic calendar strips native celebrations of their meaning and replaces it with Islamicized meaning. Christianity in Africa has more often become enmeshed in local festivals.

I find this statement about the two calendar systems to be extraordinarily accurate in rural West African life. The changing nature of the lunar calendar where holidays are always shifting to different times of the year in the harvest season is very contrary to the natural agrarian flows of life. For instance when Ramadan hits during the planting season, it is very tough to keep the festival. I never thought about the stripping effect Islam has for the traditional festivals. The strength of Islam is that it can then fill its own meaning into those festivals. At the same time, I must say I have not seen Christianity become as enmeshed with local festivals. However, he is citing Yoruba and Akan cultures that have been Christianized for more than a century as compared to Komba who have only been exposed to Christianity for a decade.

Some may say that this suggests that Christianity is more syncretistic in its approach. That may or may not be. I would suggest, following Sanneh, that syncretism occurs when the traditional native religion and Christianity are combined in facile, surface, and false ways rather than deep, honest and faithful ways.

Whose Golden Rule?

2006-05-09T19:01:00.000-07:00

I read an article called "Be Humble Learn Another Language" by Jon P. Kirby SVD. Part of the thesis was that Loving your neighbor as you love yourself has been the paradigm for the church in mission in recent years. The Golden Rule...The problem is that in crossing cultures, whose cultural basis for love will we use? Normally we love others as ourselves from a monocultural perspective. For instance Americans on the fourth of July love apple pie and ice cream and hot dogs on the grill. So when we want to love an African as ourself we might give him that same apple pie when all the while they would prefer fufu or red red.

Jesus did not even seem to subscribe to the Golden Rule. Paul summarizes Christ's attitude in Philipians 2. He humbled himself and became like us taking on human nature, not considering equality with God something to be grasped though he was in very nature God. Before writing this, Paul precludes the whole thing, by saying, "You should consider others better than yourselves. Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus." So it is not love your neighbor as yourself. Christ's model is what he did for us. He loved us better than he loved himself and became obedient even to death on a cross! Be humble love your neighbor better than yourself. Why not learn his language? It is better than your own.