Mozambique Blog 5

What was Africa like before plastic chairs? I’m writing this up in a room where about a dozen of them are piled up in the corner – and there must be many more scattered over the whole Khovo (Church HQ) site. Plastic chairs featured prominently among gifts made to a retiring Youth Worker at Synod last week, and to a Pastor’s farewell service I attended at Tlhavna parish the previous Sunday.

Once answer I’ve received to my question is that they have made an immense and invaluable difference. They are to be found even in the most remote places, helping people to gather and communicate with one another. Schools, clinics, consultations, and all sorts of services function so much better simply because people can easily sit down together. I guess some of the church elders could offer a contrary case based on the comfort they also provide patrons of dubious drinking dens and the like, but generally they add to the richness of the shared life of Africa’s peoples.

And churches, of course, are full of the things. Not that everyone wants to use them: at Tlhavana I watched an elderly woman walk through the door on two crutches – the kind of person we would certainly offer a lift to, while half expecting that they make the decision that they were now too bad to come to church anymore. However, this feisty woman made her way to the front and on to the platform, where she unrolled a mat and slowly sat herself down on the floor,  disengaging the crutches and leaning back against the wall for the next three hours.

Most people, however, were happy to be sitting in a more western fashion. There were a few benches at the back, certainly well occupied, but not nearly enough to fill the church or provide for the needs of the growing congregation. I imagine benches cost a fair bit of money – and they must get in the way of serious singing and dancing. So a good half of the congregation were on plastic chairs. Sometimes the block of chairs stretched up to and even onto the platform. But then when the women’s group or the youth group or some other group came out to sing; or when the leaving pastor and her family were up on the platform and people were bringing gifts like a double bed and corrugated iron sheets to build a shelter, as well as those chairs….  well, then you moved the rows of chairs out the way, and cleared the space you needed for the next few minutes.

The plastic chair and the mobile phone must have changed the face of a continent between them. Pastors and others who can now keep in touch with the world and with one another will certainly give the prize to the mobile phone – but I reckon the plastic chair is a close runner up!

Mozambique Blog 4

Wednesday July 20

I suspect there’s a north/south divide in Mozambique very much like our own – except for the fact that the warmer weather is in the north. It’s the depth of winter here, of course, with maximum temperatures frequently below 20°, which people keep assuring us is very cold. So what it would feel  like for a synod delegate travelling down from Cabo Delgado Province you can hardly imagine. But don’t worry, because no one actually came from there.

So far as the Presbyterian Church is concerned, part of the reason for the division is history: the Portuguese authorities did not allow the Swiss Mission to operate beyond the three southernmost provinces. But once independence  was gained, the Church determined to have congregations in all eleven provinces, and for all the chaos of the time quite quickly succeeded. However, this has not destroyed the impression of its being a southern-based church.

Last week’s synod was mostly conducted in Portuguese – but apparently that is quite a new departure. Previously proceedings have been in the local languages of Shangana and Ronga, which although widely spoken will not be understood by most people in the north. Much of the worship and singing last week was in those local languages, even including the sermon on Sunday morning. I wonder how included that makes the delegate feel who has taken a 24 hour bus journey to get to Synod?

And when the Synod moves pastors around, as it does every five years, it’s more than likely that those who can be persuaded to go north (and I understand that there is some consultation in what seems like a pretty authoritarian process) won’t even be given language training. So they are left to speaking Portuguese, which only the middle class in the towns will be fluent in, or going round with an interpreter all the time. Hardly the best circumstances to operate in an area where evangelisation has been a declared priority!

Yesterday morning I had a long conversation with one of the five Pastors who are stationed in the four northern provinces which make up nearly half the land area of Mozambique. (I haven’t the means at hand to look up how many Wales’s or Belgiums that makes, but it must be a pretty fair number.) As President of the Northern Presbytery (those same provinces again) he reckons that journeys between churches vary from 100 to 700Kms. And the one car is barely in working order…..  It’s very hard for people from these parts not to launch into The Week’s Good Cause mode before they’ve finished the introductions. The lack of resources is so overwhelming that you’d try anyone to help you on a bit.

But I’m left wondering what the IPM itself is doing, and whether the strong Maputo base makes it hard for people to understand what life is like there. Of course it’s hard for them to go and see for themselves, and the expense of regular visits from the Centre could hardly be justified. But having made that facile comparison with our own north/south divide, I have to admit that it only takes a three hour comfortable train journey to get me to those meetings in the capital where all the important decisions are taken. A very different experience from Mozambique.

Here at Khovo where I’m based, the last couple of days has seen a gathering of the Pastors from the North, as they visit friends and relations in the big city, and also negotiate the purchase of bus tickets home. Just for these few days they’re at the centre of where it is all happening -  but then it’s going to be back to the parish and those poor roads and appalling distances and unreliable transport. My guess is that when the IPM Synod, like our Synod, starts talking about mission strategies and evangelism priorities, it probably knows that in fact the burden of the work is going to fall on the shoulders of the willing and dedicated few.

John Durell

News of the World

A reflection prepared for a staff meeting, St Andrew’s Dawson Street LEP, Crook - 15^th July 2011

 I spent yesterday having lunch at St Catherine’s Community Centre, Crook. Over a cup of tea I joined in a conversation about who might have won the EuroMillion jackpot of £161m pounds. Well last night it was reported that the lucky ticket holder had come forward. Regardless of their identity, the winning person or syndicate will hold a fortune ranked just below David and Victoria Beckham’s estimated wealth of £165million. But one winner has come forward. Retired couple Fred and Doreen Smith from Washington. They won just under £2.5m share of the Lotto Rollover jackpot drawn last Saturday. Their photograph with fizzy champagne was literally splashed across yesterday’s Journal. Mike Ashley’s big share windfall to staff of Newcastle United was announced yesterday too. Some 2,000 staff will get a share payout worth almost £88m in total. It equates to an average of £40,000 each, but combined with a payout for meeting the previous year's target, their awards are now worth an average £43,860.

Although not a betting man myself I think these are really wonderful, cheerful stories in a week of gloomy news about phone hacking. I remember the day like yesterday, when training for the ministry, a Building Society cheque for £1000 was pushed through my letter box. I heard on the radio last week of a man who took pity on a rather dishevelled and forlorn artist who was going from town to town trying to sell his paintings with no success. Whenever he came to this particular town the man would offer him hospitality, and the artist used to give him a painting as a way of saying thank you. The host put them in the attic and forgot about them. Years later, after both men had died and the house was being cleared, someone looked at the canvases and discovered that the artist was L S Lowry and the paintings were worth a fortune.

But isn’t life like that? I don’t suppose anyone would quite put it the way Cecil Rhodes did in the nineteenth century when he said: “Being born an Englishman is winning the first prize in the lottery of life.” But in one sense life is a chance - it is a lottery – it is unpredictable – as the spectators at the Open Golf Championship at Sandwich are beginning to realise. A lottery because none of us chooses when and where to be born or what postcode we might end up living. A postcode that will give access to education, economic and medical opportunities – or not as the case maybe.

Into the cathedral bookshop on Monday came Amiel Osmaston. I recognised her straightaway. We last met 36 years ago in Kenya and then only briefly for a month; we met at a bible study group run by a couple of CMS Sudan missionaries who had left Juba during the civil war, being temporarily housed in Mombasa. We talked a lot about former times, our faith journeys - Amiel is a Canon of Carlisle Cathedral, diocesan ministry and development officer. We talked about how the face of Sudan is being changed into a new country - the Republic of South Sudan - born out of generations of conflict and suffering;  it is estimated that a million and a half people might have died in the civil war, and now some ten million people are now at risk across East Africa after the worst drought in sixty years.

It matters little how much we are worth in financial terms, with a lottery win, an inheritance, savings, what is stored in the attic. But it does matter to God how we use our wealth, our filthy lucre, our inheritance, for as we say in our prayers – “all things come from you and of your own to we give you.”  We can define our world as we will, shrink it to whatever excites, amuses or keeps us comfortable and exclude images which unsettle us. But as human beings we can also define our world with a leap of imagination and faith, to see the world from a very different perspective. According to the Bible, God offers the potential to discover it as it’s meant to be. He sets out his intention in Jesus, giving himself to make new beginnings possible in the most desperate of situations and for the unlikeliest of people, often with meagre resources. And he invites us as ministers of the kingdom to share in the process; he gives us the resources – sometimes money - to do so.

Those making significant sacrifices and changes to our community and our world are those who give their time and money, for example at St Catherine’s Community Centre across the road, who give small and substantial donations to humanitarian causes. And as often as it is not, it is the hidden legion of men and women of goodwill and peace who work quietly to bring the vision of the kingdom of God into being, like missionaries returning to work in the new country of the Southern Sudan, bringing it into reality, with all its future economic and humanitarian needs. Such efforts don’t usually make much of a tabloid splash. But I think this is the news of the world that really does matter. The building of the kingdom of God is the News of the World.

Psalm 125: Mark 12:13-17

Ray Anglesea is a self supporting minister working in St Andrew’s Dawson Street LEP, Crook and in the wider West Durham Methodist Circuit

Mozambique Blog (3)

Sunday July 17th

“Is our Synod like your own?” is the question people kept asking me. “What are the differences from your own?”  “Are our ways different from yours?”

The four-day Synod of the Presbyterian Church of Mozambique came to an end earlier today, with much singing and dancing by an open-air congregation that must have totalled around 2,000. It is of course the Synod meeting of the whole Church, and so is really to be compared with our General Assembly, although in size it is only a little larger than our own Northern Synod meeting. But like General Assembly, people come from all over the country, and there is lots of enthusiastic meeting up of people who may not have seen each other since last Synod, or even longer.

But how to answer the question? After a day or so I quite forgot to say anything about the singing and dancing (which I think is probably what was expected of me). Yes of course that is different – but it quickly goes without saying. No one comes up to present a report without singing the first line of a song which everyone will immediately join in; and we know that there will be two or three occasions in each session when everyone will be up on their feet and swaying. It’s hardly worth noting that the main difference from our meetings is that this one happens to be run by African Christians in Africa.

So I found myself saying that in fact we have quite a lot in common. We both worry about resources, and seem not to have enough to do the things that we want (or that we think God wants us) to do. And maybe we’re both mistaken there. And I heard voices crying out for real  evangelism in which Christians really look outside the church instead of sheltering inside it. Familiar or not? And I suppose the opening procession bore some resemblance to our traditional Parade of the Moderators at General Assembly, though here it’s all the Pastors who process, and in Genevan gowns and tabs – though I imagine the hodgepodge of styles might disturb those of our brethren and sisters who like that sort of thing.

But dare I speak openly of the differences? I did with some who seemed to want me to be honest. Debating at great length trivial matters like the style of the delegates’ registration card (which has to last five years) seemed a terrible waste of Synod’s time: surely a committee could have processed that? And nearly the last item of business, deciding where the one-day autumn synod should be held, was taken absolutely cold, and as one delegate pointed out, it seemed that those who shouted loudest were the winners. So there were times when you felt the need for a Mozambican James Breslin to see that business was executed briskly, and without doubt or ambiguity. But generally this Church is getting its act together. Some of the troubles of recent years are being ironed out by a Verification Committee which has responsibility to see that decisions made by Synod are in accord with the new Church constitution and also the law of the land. Serious stuff – but it was clearly needed, and now it is happening it seems to be well received.

But for all the serious stuff and hard work, being at the Synod was a great experience and great fun! The general hospitality of the host parish was magnificent: cooked meals (served under canvas) at lunch and in the evening, and special and sometimes embarrassing care for their guests from outside the country. I enjoyed the game of trying not to get forced to use the special guests’ loo (which involved disturbing women who were busy in the kitchen) – but it was hard not get shouted at as you made your way to the perfectly clean and adequate “common” facilities. At meal times we were invariably pushed to the front of the queue, and given seats of honour.  More important, we non-Portuguese speakers were provided with translators throughout the sessions, who not only helped us to understand what was going on, but also were able to share opinions and give us a broader sense of opinion within the Church.

It’s been a great time too for meeting up with people again. Armando arrived from Chimoio yesterday; and this morning I was saved from making a fool of myself in the offertory procession by Ignatio from Xai-Xai, who’d heard us greeted and came to the front to greet me personally. Lazaro, and Naftal from Ricatla, have been two of our faithful and efficient translators; and Amos Zita (like me now retired, but more deserving I suspect) did one session too. I’ve enjoyed conversations with people like Jonas Ngomane, and Pastor Carlos from Zobue, as well as individuals I’d already met up with again over the past ten days in and around Khovo – and a good number of people I met at Synod for the first time, but I hope not the last. And I should mention that Matthew has been faithfully sitting through every session, not meeting any young people as was vaguely promised, but looking forward now to a trip with a parish youth group going north in the next couple of days.

I had five minutes or so Friday morning to speak and bring greetings from everyone in Northern Synod, and assure them that this Partnership has real meaning to us all. I just hope it does – and I realise that it’s up to those of us who are enthused by it to try and enthuse others and get everyone involved. I hope that the rest of the time I have here may give me some opportunities to explore with IPM people ways in which we can try to do this.

But first of all, after four days of early rising and long day sessions – time for what I feel is a well-deserved sleep.

John Durell