Central Area Church Connection – June 2005


CBInternational has become WorldVenture! On the 11th of this month, the change became official. (Visit the new website at www.WorldVenture.com and take a few minutes to explore the latest news, stories, opportunities, and resources available!) The look of some things around here has already changed or will be changing soon—that includes our newsletter! We ask for grace in the new few months as we work to build a new and improved newsletter that will embrace our new name and vision, continue to bring you the content you’ve come to appreciate, and grow in new directions to better serve you, our missionaries. Thank you for taking this venture with us! – Suzanne

 IN THIS ISSUE
Alumni Greeting – Grace Pittman
Devotional
In Other Words
Update on the American Church
Book Reviews – Blink, Blood Brothers
Prayer & Praise

 Alumnus Greeting: A Word from Grace Pittman
I've always loved the Old Testament stories about ordinary people whom God used to get His work done. Now that I am 1) old; 2) retired (whatever that means); and 3) a widow, I especially love the stories of those whom God used in the 4th quarter, the final innings of their lives. When my husband Sam died 4 years ago, I wondered what God had in store for me. Little did I realize how much He had in store.

In January and February of this year, I had the privilege of going ST to CBI's new field of South Africa to work with Mark and Kathy Schaaf. It was a great experience and I am so thankful I got to go. The highlight was being able to help a team of South African young people involved in a ministry called Silver Ring Thing (SRT). This is a U.S.-based ministry designed to promote abstinence, which is so desperately needed in South Africa. The 9 young people on this team are giving one year of their lives to SRT. They visit churches, schools, and community centers all over Southern Africa, presenting drama and music emphasizing the need for abstinence as the only way to deal with the terrible AIDS problem; in addition, they deliver a clear Gospel message and challenge young people to make a commitment to remain sexually pure for marriage. Those who make the commitment receive a lovely silver ring with I Thes. 4:7 engraved on it. It was great to have a part in this as well as other ministries in South Africa.

I came home for 3 weeks, then spent 3 weeks in China with my daughter who works there with ELIC. The time there was so wonderful as I was able to see again that God is mightily at work in China. My daughter attends a large Chinese church where Christ is clearly preached and where God is doing miracles. Most gratifying was to realize that the work of Christian English teachers is bearing much fruit and that the churches are full of young people who have been introduced to Christ through godly English teachers.

I thank God for my wonderful little church here in Minnesota, and for a good young pastor who preaches expository sermons. I am still very much involved in the Ministries Department at Northwestern College, where there is a strong missions interest. It is a special joy to see so many of the young people going on short-term mission trips, coming back to finish their education, and then returning to the field.

So, although I'm in the 4th quarter, I thank God for good health, a wonderful physical and church family, and for opportunities to serve Him.  - Grace Pittman

Devotional
Moss Hart was a comedian a number of years ago. In his autobiography he tells about the struggling times in which he grew up on the upper east side of New York City. Let me share with you a segment from his book in which he remembers Christmas shopping with his father.

My father and I hurried on. Our heads bent against the wind. The cluster of lights ahead were those of 149th street and Westchester Ave. And those lights seemed to me to be the brightest I’d ever seen. Tugging at my father’s coat, I started down the line of push carts. I would merely pause before a push cart to say with as much control as I could muster, “Look at the chemistry set,” or “There’s a printing press,” or “Look at the stamp album,” and each time my father would pause. He would ask the push cart man the price and then without a word, he would move on to the next push cart. Once or twice he would pick up a toy of some kind and look at it and then at me as if to suggest that this might be something that I would like. But I was just a ten year-old kid and my heart was set on a chemistry set or a printing press. There they were, on every push cart, but the price was always the same and soon I looked up and saw that we were nearing the end of the line. Only two or three push carts remained. My father looked up too and I heard him jingle some coins in his pocket and in a flash I understood it all.

My father had managed to get about 75 cents together to buy me a Christmas present and he hadn’t dared say so in case there was nothing to be had for so small a sum. As I looked up at him, I saw a look of despair and disappointment in his eyes that brought me closer to him than I had ever been in my life. I wanted to throw my arms around him and say, “It doesn’t matter. I understand! This is better than a printing press. I love you!” But instead we stood shivering beside each other for a moment and then we turned away from the last two push carts and we started silently back home. I didn’t even take his hand on the way home nor did he take mine. We were not on that basis. Nor did I ever tell him how close I felt to him that night and that for a little while the concrete wall between a father and a son had crumbled away and I knew that we were two lonely people struggling to reach each other.

Many of us we have had parallel experiences, times where we wanted to or tried to connect with someone but it just didn’t happen. We have also seen this played out over and over again in our ministries: husband and wife sit before us in the same room but are worlds apart, or parents and their son or daughter gaze at each other as if strangers. The combinations go on and on and the words ring only too true in our lives: “We were not on that basis.” 

Our Lord Jesus Christ made a promise to us about peace. He said to us in the Thursday night discourse: “In the world you have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” He also says there: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you, not as the world gives, do I give it to you. Let not your hearts be troubled.”

Could it be that this peace also applies to those “distant” relationships where we simply are “not on that basis” when we so desperately need to be? Does the peace of Christ, found at the cross of Calvary and in the indwelling of God’s spirit within us, extend to the moments of disharmony or aloneness where we want to reach out and grab someone’s hand and say all the words that were in Moss Hart’s heart that day?

The simple answer is yes! The complex answer involves our willingness to believe that the peace of Christ is operative in our beings and to take actions that will bring about this level of peace and community. It is to believe that the Christ of peace, who has called us to peace, will send the peace of Calvary through us into every situation we enter. You may say, “But it takes two to create peace.” You are correct, but one person going 60% of the distance, with the power of the Holy Spirit motivating the actions of this individual, can create situations where miracles do happen and walls fall down.

In Other Words
“Whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst.” John 4:14a

“Pastor and author John Piper was reading this verse one Monday morning and cried out, ‘What do you mean? I am so thirsty! My church is thirsty! The pastors whom I pray with are thirsty! Oh Jesus, what did You mean?’ As he meditated on the text, the illumination that seemed to come from the Lord upon His word was perceived by Piper this way:

“When you drink my water, your thirst is not destroyed forever. If it did that, would you feel any need of my water afterward? That is not my goal. I do not want self-sufficient saints. When you drink my water, it makes a spring in you. A spring satisfies thirst, not by removing the need you have for water, but by being there to give you water whenever you get thirsty. Again and again and again. Like this morning. So drink, John, drink.”  - Excerpt from 10 Questions to Diagnose Your Spiritual Health, by Donald S. Whitney

Update on the American Church
You all know that the term “missional church” is being widely used today as we talk about the church and its purpose. It seems the “healthy church” mentality has been replaced with that of the “missional church.” What is a missional church? Very simply, it is a church moving from the position of sending others to a recognition that we are all “being sent.” It is a move from the mentality that it’s all about “you” to a place where the church is saying that it’s about “us.” We read in The Missional Church (ed. by Guder, 1998): “We have come to see that mission is not merely an activity of the church. Rather, mission is the result of God’s initiative, rooted in God’s purpose to restore and heal creation. …We have learned to speak of God as a missionary God. Thus we have learned to understand the church as a ‘sent people.’”

The authors continue: “One need only to visit North American congregations to find that the church-centered approach to mission is alive and well. Congregations still tend to view missions as one of several programs of the church. Evangelism, when present, is usually defined as member recruitment at the local level and as church planting at the regional level. The sending-receiving mentality is still strong as churches collect funds and send them off to genuine mission enterprises elsewhere. Indeed, the main business of many mission committees is to determine how to spend the mission budget rather than view the entire congregational budget as an exercise in mission.”

The last few words are crucial because they describe the direction of some churches today. It may sound at first blush like the traditional missionary is left out of this new equation, but upon closer examination it’s one in which the missionary is thrust into every phase of the ministry of the church. The move is to relocate mission from being a separate and solitary congregational focus to an all-inclusive congregational passion. The missionary now has the opportunity to assist the church in thinking about what it would look like if every member were considered a missionary (a sent one). 

The church in American today needs answers to questions such as the following: How do we reach our neighbors when our neighbors come from another culture (cross-cultural ministry)? How do I begin to have an impact on my community? How do I break into the non-church groupings of people in my neighborhood? (You see, many Christians have just lived in-house and have not ventured out relationally into the “real world.”) The list goes on, but they are issues you deal with every day. 

I think this may be a new day for the church and a new opportunity for missionaries to speak into the church at a different level.

Book Reviews
 Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
2005 Little, Brown & Company  288 pages, reviewed by David Korb

Malcom Gladwell has followed up his bestseller The Tipping Point with this very interesting book about “how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant—in the blink of an eye—that really aren’t as simple as they seem.” 

Gladwell opens with a story about the J. Paul Getty Museum in CA and a very intriguing kouros (ancient Greek statue). The statue was presented to the museum, who took it on loan while they investigated its authenticity. Myriad tests were run, research done, and various people consulted; fourteen months later the Getty accepted the statue as authentic and agreed to buy it. Others who happened to see the statue, however, knew the instant the drape was removed with a swish that the statue was forged. Asked to explain how he knew, one of the experts could pinpoint nothing more than an “intuitive repulsion.” Gladwell writes, “In the first two seconds of looking—in a single glance—they [a number of experts in Greek art and archeology] were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at the Getty was able to understand after 14 months. Blink is a book about those first two seconds.”  

Gladwell’s point is that judgments are (or at least can be) made very quickly, within the first few seconds. The burden of this book is to study those first impressions, the decisions that come to us very quickly and often very accurately. Gladwell piles one study upon another as he walks the reader through the extraordinary world of the subconscious. Studies show that our subconscious computer begins to affect our anxiety level before our conscious is aware that we are feeling a particular way about a certain situation or object.

Gladwell proposes that “great decision makers aren’t those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of ‘thin-slicing’—filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables.” His  bottom line is that we need to take charge of those first two seconds if we want to capitalize on this power that comes from the subconscious at it pours into the conscious. This is a fascinating book. I recommend it to the person who would like to think about how decisions are made. 

Blood Brothers by Elias Chacour, with David Hazard
1984, 2003 Chosen Books  240 pages, reviewed by Suzanne Johnson

This book was submitted to my round-robin book club by Pam, who grew up as an MK in Jordan. She wrote inside the cover, “This book gave me compassion for ‘the other side.’ May it do the same for you.”

As I set out to read this book, I had to confess I didn’t really understand what the two sides in question were, or on which side I fell, whether by choice or by default.  About a week later as I read the Epilogue and Afterward and closed the book, one refrain and one question kept running through my head: “I had no idea” and “Why did I never learn about this in high school or college or church?”

Blood Brothers tells the story of Elias Chacour, a Palestinian Christian from the village of Biram in Galilee. The account begins in 1947, when Elias was just a boy and events decades in the making began to topple the simple and safe world he knew. The narrative follows Elias from childhood to adolescence and through to adulthood; Elias’ story—and indeed his calling to be a peacemaker between Israelis and Palestinians—is so tied up with the land of his birth that the narrative also reveals a very raw and tragic side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—the side about which I knew so very little. 

Educated in Paris and with a degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, able to speak 11 languages, Chacour is an internationally sought after speaker and advocate for peace in the Middle East, has been nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize, and is the founder of Mar Elias Educational Institutions, a small complex of six schools and the only campus in Israel that welcomes Christians, Muslims, Druze, and Jews to study side by side, building peace through education and providing hope of a future for the children of Israel. Known simply as “Abuna,” an Arabic term of affection and respect, Father Chacour, a Melkite priest, continues his ministry of peace and reconciliation from the Galilean village of Ibillin.   

Engaging and very readable, Chacour’s autobiography is every bit as educational as it is moving. It gives a glimpse into why the conflict in the Middle East is so intense, examines what Bible prophecy has to say about rights to the land, and gives a voice to our Palestinian brothers and sisters—a voice that is so seldom heard here in the U.S.

Prayer & Praise
1. Praise God for His miraculous healing of Tom Ward (England). Continue to pray for his complete recovery.

2. June, July, and August are especially busy months for missionaries traveling between their fields and the US. Pray for safety and protection of missionary families and belongings in transit.

3. Pray for a pastor and his wife who is living with pain and facing difficult health problems.

4. Pray for encouragement, health, and diligence for missionaries currently engaged in language study – Tim & Jessica Brubaker, Brian & Renee Davis, Caleb & Shannon Campbell, Nathan & Becky Kendall.

5. We extend our prayers and sympathy to Joel & Carolyn McElreath (Near East) in the home-going of Carolyn’s father, Howard Reed, on June 14th.