New Creation and a New “We”

Rebecca with Pastor Acher, our pastor in Burundi, who
served as one of the translators for the Institute.

Last week, as Paul posted this blog, I had already left the family in Bujumbura and was busy at work in Uganda. He and my mom had a fairly uneventful week in Bujumbura. Of course, they both worked hard, especially my mom, making the most of her time to volunteer at Hope Africa University library. Still, there wasn’t much new to report. So, Paul said that I should be the one to write the blog this week.

I had been invited to facilitate worship at a weeklong gathering of Christian leaders, seeking a way forward for reconciliation in the African Great Lakes Region. For more details on this “movement of restless leaders” you can visit their website. www.dukereconciliation.com But rather than giving you a professional summary, I want to try and describe the experience of being part of this week, on a journey through lament, pilgrimage and towards a new creation.

The Assignment: Getting Started

I arrived in the afternoon on Friday, in Entebbe on the shores of Lake Victoria. As I came out of my room I was stunned at the sight of giant kingfishers over the wall, and a flash of vivid red and black gliding down from a tree (a bird I’m still waiting to identify) – someone neglected to tell me that I would be longing for my binoculars in Uganda! The bird life was immediately striking, and I had time, so I took a walk down to a botanical garden nearby. It was beautiful, right on the lake, filled with majestic trees of every variety – and also filled with people getting started on their (loud) Friday night parties. It was refreshing to be able to take a walk in a fascinating natural setting and not be an object of fascination myself. That evening, I was able to meet informally with many of the leadership team members of GLI, and also have some time to prepare myself with prayer. I was thankful for that opportunity for a few hours of solitude and rest.

On Saturday morning, the leadership team headed out to Ggaba Seminary outside of Kampala, the site of the Great Lakes Initiative (GLI) Institute. Again, I had a little time to explore the spaces there and contemplate again the particular challenges of facilitating worship for this event. First of all, this Institute is intentionally inter-confessional. I needed to be ready to help Anglicans, Pentecostals, Catholics, Quakers, Methodists and “confused people” like myself all enter the presence of God in worship. Second, the Institute is international, and, for example, worship in the new nation of South Sudan takes on quite different forms than it does in Tanzania. Third, the region and thus the participants, are multi-lingual. We used English and French to communicate during the Institute, but neither one is the heart language of most Africans from the region. I felt a special burden to be sure francophones felt included and valued in what could be an exclusively English setting. As I prayed and planned for this responsibility, I was repeatedly grateful for my experience with Donna Dinsmore in the Chapel Planning Group at Regent College, where we planned weekly worship, dealing with the same challenges.

Oh, did I mention another challenge? I couldn’t help but feel insecure about being a westerner, asked to facilitate worship for Africans. Do you get what I’m saying? What do I have to bring to people who really know how to worship with enthusiasm and devotion?  I think there may have been something important about having an “impartial” facilitator. I insisted on asking the Planners for a co-facilitator who was from the region, and they found a very capable and willing young man named Liberty. But he was quite sick with malaria by the time I arrived in Uganda. So during the time we might have had to get to know each other and practice together on Saturday, he was resting, trying to recover enough to join me on Sunday. Thus, I practiced alone in the beautiful octagonal chapel, marveling at the light coming in from all sides and the amazing acoustics, and also wondering at the images of 22 African saints carved into a set of windows. And then I also spent the afternoon as part of a planning meeting of all the partners of the GLI.

Worship in the Ggaba SeminaryChapel

On Sunday morning we had a very simple and powerful prayer time for the GLI, led by one of the faculty wives. And then each of us was off and running on our tasks. Participants started arriving. Arriving faculty needed to be briefed. My co-facilitator Liberty finally arrived, but we were not able to really start planning for the evening worship until 5 pm. And then we had to tackle a whole host of technical problems with the newly installed sound system and PowerPoint—no big surprise to anyone who has ever dealt with those things before. As a result, Liberty and I found ourselves starting to lead the worship time with very little idea of what would happen musically.

Fortunately, I had planned quite carefully for worship the first night, in terms of non-musical things. We were remembering Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, and read a portion of one of his speeches. There was a scripture read as a bi-lingual litany. We had a corporate prayer of confession, and then I offered words of assurance. The songs went fairly well, although I mostly had to lead them myself with guitar. I sat down to listen to the keynote speaker, a Catholic Archbishop from Uganda. And next thing I knew he was talking about how challenging the GLI is, in a positive way: “Here, we are, in a room full of bishops, and who pronounces the absolution? You there, Rebecca, are you even ordained? (“Not yet”) And not only a layperson, but also a woman! And not even a big, tall woman, but a small one! And we bishops, we just sat here and accepted it. This is subversive!” I was just about crawling under my seat at that point, though his point was good-natured. I had completely forgotten another major challenge facing me in this assignment: being a woman in a culture where church leaders are almost exclusively male. There were some other critiques from the leadership team of the worship and opening plenary that night, and I went to bed wondering if I had done the right thing to be in this place.

New Creation

Our seminar group.

During the first full day of the Institute, we tried to get a sense of God’s vision for making all things new. Professor Wilfred Mlay helped us read through scripture and understand that reconciliation is God’s business; he has been making all things new, starting from the first page of scripture when he brought new creation out of chaos, and ending at Revelation, when the new heaven and the new earth will descend and God will come and himself dwell among his people. We heard stories from two amazing peace artisans, demonstrating how this new creation can be glimpsed even here and now. Bishop Tabane from South Sudan spoke of all he survived through decades of war, being called “mad” and “stubborn,” remaining with his people for the entire time of war – his whole religious career – and now remains to encourage a community of peace amongst divided South Sudanese. Sister Rosemary from Northern Uganda blessed us with her story about how her community, through a family-oriented vocational training center, has been able to transform the lives of thousands of young women who had been traumatized after being abducted by the LRA.

Liberty and I were able to begin to find people to help us in worship by bringing their gifts of music, reading scripture and prayer, and right from Day One in worship, things turned around. We began to experience the richness of the possibilities for worship when people from the region were brought together. A group of Tanzanians were willing to bring us a Swahili song the next day, and Mama Faith Mlay said that she was feeling led to pray the next day, so we asked her to lead our prayer of intercession the following evening.

Lament

We were inspired and encouraged as we remembered that reconciliation is God’s business and that things can be done to witness new creation. But still tremendous suffering and evil seem to reign in our region. One of the major challenges for Christians here is to honestly name those truths and lament over them. We were able to have a very contemplative, focused worship time early that morning, praying to the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, God at his most vulnerable, but also God who is on the throne.

Prayer in the plenary session.

Dr. David Kasali from NEGST was charged with helping us understand how to lament—and the Bible is a rich training ground. He spoke on the first chapter of 1 Samuel, leading up to the lament of Hannah in the temple, stressing that before we bring our lament, we need to thoroughly understand the context. I have studied and preached on that passage several times myself, but I never had such a rich and deep view of the contextual problems Hannah was facing. The African social and political and religious context has much in common with the context of ancient Israel. Dr. Kasali was able to discern 10 different problems facing Hannah, both with a theological understanding, but also feeling a visceral commonality with her. It was an incredible teaching and left me mourning the fact that most of our western divinity schools miss out on so much that scripture has to offer because they do not have African biblical scholars on their faculties. Dr. Kasali’s treatment of 1 Samuel opened new doors into the scriptures, but also powerfully illuminated challenges in the region.

We heard from participants from Congo (DRC), South Sudan and Kenya trying to understand their particular contexts in this time and place. Dr. Kasali then asked Faith Mlay to lead us in a corporate prayer of lament for our region, and God had already prepared her for that assignment – it just came earlier in the day than we had planned. It was a powerful experience to be led by someone who is clearly comfortable walking in step with the Spirit and the prayer was not simply emotional, but a very deep time of identifying with those who are suffering and crying out on their behalf.

Later in the day, we had a meeting with all the Institute participants from Burundi. They had truly been struck by the idea of lament as a positive discipline, something they had never considered. Culturally, “men’s tears run from their eyes into their bellies,” i.e. grown men don’t cry. Theologically, the church teaches people to rejoice rather than mourn at the time of death for those that know the Lord. Politically, those who lost loved ones in 1972 and later crises were forbidden to mourn their dead, as it was considered treason. We all had the feeling that there is a great deal of lament in Burundi, bottled up and turning bitter in people’s stomachs. The discipline of open lament and naming what is wrong may be something that this country needs.

That evening, we had something of an adventure, as one of Burundi team members got more and more sick. I had noticed that he looked pretty ill in the morning, put him in contact with a doctor in our midst and urged him to use the malaria test kit I’d brought with me. It was positive, so I also had treatment to give him, but he was actually too sick to take it. By evening it was clear we needed to take him to a hospital. The one car/driver on campus hadn’t yet arrived back from errands. So as a last resort, we asked a high level Ugandan person on the leadership team to please be his chauffeur. When the patient got in the car, the driver said, “Hey, is that you??” Apparently the two of them knew each other fairly well, and the patient had even eaten in the driver’s house several times in the past. The driver had phone numbers for good doctors, and took the patient straight to a private clinic where he got swift and effective care, even at 10 pm. So God was really at work on Tuesday, doing things in his time. All day, Plan B or C turned out to be far and away a better Plan than the Plan A that I had been hoping for.

Pilgrimage

We rose early and boarded busses on Wednesday morning to drive to the shrines established for the Ugandan Martyrs—the saints carved in the chapel windows I had noticed earlier. Their story is remarkable. In 1886, less than 10 years after the first Anglican and Catholic missionaries arrived in Uganda, a new king came to power. He felt threatened by the new Christian religion, particularly since the pages and slaves in his palace were among those who were the most promising new converts. Apparently, these young men were truly inspired by Jesus, but also by their new identity as human beings with value; when they returned from worship and catechism to the royal court, they were once again treated as slaves. Over several months, tension rose; the king grew more and more uneasy as he heard them praying “Our Father in heaven, hallowed by your name. YOUR KINGDOM COME…” Whose kingdom? What threat was this? The king finally demanded all those in his household to declare themselves: renounce Christianity or die. A large group of thirty young men, Protestants and Catholics together, decided that they could not chose loyalty to the king over loyalty to Christ.

Artistic rendering of the execution site at the
Anglican Martyr's Shrine

They were led on a long march to the execution site for commoners. Along the way, the executioners stopped several times to kill one of the young men in an exceptionally cruel way, hoping to scare the others into renouncing their faith. Limbs were hacked off, men were fed alive to dogs, others were burned from the feet to the head, but the group of young men continued to hold fast to their faith. Upon reaching the execution site, the men were sent out to collect the firewood with which they would be burned. Over several days, they were tortured. The chief executioner’s 14-year-old son was among these Christians, and he took the boy to his mother to see if she could convince him to escape and live. But he refused to renounce his faith by fleeing: “Mama, I’m going to heaven. Don’t try to stop me!” he said. Finally, the executioners gave up trying to break the men, and resolved to kill the 25 who still lived on June 3^rd. They were rolled up in reed mats and stacked on top of firewood as the radiuses of a large circle. The fire was started at the center, where their feet all came together – to give them time to reconsider. But rather than crying out in fear, the men continued to sing and encourage one another until they died. Later, even the executioners regretted that they had killed men of such courage. The king who had ordered their death was himself eventually baptized.

The testimony of these martyrs was a powerful catalyst for the growth of the Christian church from that time onward. The missionaries fled, but local leaders continued to teach and train younger people and the church flourished. Eventually, in 1967 the Ugandan martyrs were beatified and a lovely church was built in their honor in the midst of a large park. Every year, a million people come on pilgrimage to celebrate mass there on June 3 and remember the courage of those men who died for their faith. Their testimony continues to impact people who come by foot from as far as Tanzania and Congo. Our group visited the Anglican shrine as well, built at the site were the men were actually burned. It is a more humble establishment, but houses a seminary. We were blessed to share spontaneously in their morning worship service at the end of our visit.

Altar art at the Catholic Uganda
Martyr's Shrine

Personally, I am still grappling with the challenge of the martyrs, their commitment, their willingness to sacrifice, their endurance of horrific physical pain, their sense of unity, their legacy. How does one know the right moment for sacrifice? How much sacrifice? When we pray, “thy kingdom come,” we need to realize that other kinds will be threatened.  “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it can bear no fruit.” What a gift those men gave to Uganda and the Kingdom of God. We all deeply considered what it means to become a “new we,” finding unity as Christians and humans in spite of what divides us.

Part of our evening worship was led by the team of 10 from South Sudan. Since the South’s independence last July, life for Christians in the North has become increasingly difficult, and martyrdom is a very real and present possibility for them. It was good and sobering to realize that all the above questions apply right here and now in a personal way for Sudanese.

Leadership

The concept of servant leadership is very counter-cultural in Southern Africa, as we have discussed many times in this blog already. So it was appropriate to spend a day on this topic, and try to understand also what it would mean for us to be discerning as leaders, knowing what our nations need to do as we read the signs of the times. Christian leaders need to struggle daily to be both humble and effective, but when they are able to lead following Jesus’ example they have a powerful impact. Dr. Celestin Musekura helped us interact with one another to identify the opportunities and challenges in leadership.

Participants in our seminar group.

One aspect of the week I hadn’t yet mentioned is that most afternoons we were divided up into small groups to meet with a seminar leader on a particular topic. I chose to take the seminar on “Self-Care for Caregivers.” Our teacher was Violette Nyirarukundo, a Rwandese woman we have known since we arrived in 2008. She has been a valuable advisor to MCC, and is a trained Biblically based counselor. I selected that seminar partly just because I wanted to be around Violette and learn from her, and I will admit that it was simply refreshing to go in that room and sit in her calm, gentle – yet spunky – presence. She is a grandmother, full of wisdom, having lived through great trials and yet always laughing. I also felt it would be good to have some more insight into how to care for ourselves in the midst of draining work, and how to help our partners cope as they pour themselves out on behalf of others.

Spirituality

One of the challenges of coping with all these burdens of lament, pilgrimage and leadership is developing spirituality for the long haul. How do we not burn out along the way, or become disillusioned with our fellow travellers when they seem to fall short? We listened to some good teaching on this subject from Chris Rice and Faith Mlay and heard some even more powerful testimonies from people who have been walking in their callings with perseverance for years. One impressive woman is a Tanzanian who was born an albino. In her culture, most albinos are killed at a young age because of fear, hatred, or else for profit (the body parts of albinos have high value in traditional witchcraft). Somehow, she survived physically into her 20s but struggled with utter lack of care from her family and the reality of constant threat and isolation. She attempted to take her own life numerous times and didn’t succeed, but finally heard a clear assurance of God’s love for her. That carried her through school, Bible training and into ordained ministry as an evangelist in her church. She goes into communities and tells people, “bad things happened to people like me in the past, but I’ve forgiven you. So let me tell you about Jesus.”

We ended the day with a special worship service, including another community prayer time and then an opportunity for individual prayer and blessing. I asked the Kenyans to lead us musically to begin with, and they did a suburb job of helping us dance and sing and praise the Lord. By the end of the week, we had added several more very adaptable musicians to our team, and a rotating group of people kept stepping forward to play the chapel’s drums. The theme song for the week, “He Shall Reign,” was written by Tom Wuest, a fellow Regent grad. (See http://brasstrumpetpublishing.com/ for more on his work and to download songs). We had to Africanize the rhythm, include a French translation of the verses, and even change the chorus – at the urging of one of our speakers – to include both the future tense (He shall reign) and the present tense (Yes! He reigns) and remember the tension between already—not yet. I’m not sure Tom would quite have recognized the song by the end of the week, but it was certainly a celebratory closing as people danced out of the chapel…

…And then, I had to run, throw my stuff into a suitcase and jump into a taxi for the airport. It was a shame to leave so abruptly and not savor the end of a wonderful week with new and old friends over a celebration dinner. That was indeed one of the biggest blessings – the encouragement of being with so many motivated, exceptional people.

The return journey was not ideal: my flight left at midnight and I had the prospect of staying the night in the Kigali airport, waiting for an early morning connection to Bujumbura. But I did have the blessing of sharing the cab and the first leg of the journey with Violette, my seminar leader. I was thankful for more time with her, and things went smoothly. I even found a decent couch in Bourbon Coffee shop to lie down on for a few hours. Paul and the kids met me at the airport and it was awesome to see their smiling faces. I thoroughly enjoyed yoga after travelling all night. And that evening some friends invited us to come share ice cream with them. It was a good homecoming, and just enough time to catch a little breath with Paul before he left for Kigali today. More on his adventures next week!

Bonus photo: Moms serving kids at our Saturday ice cream social.