PHILIPPINES 2018 TRIP REVIEW - CANADIAN STUDENTS

PRAY WITH ME FOR AFRICA: This week we begin a prayer focus on the country of Tanzania, one of the more populated countries on the continent of Africa with 55 1/2 million people and growing more quickly than other African countries. Swahili and English are the two official languages. TLI is teaching courses in Tanzania. This is a very poor country but has a stable democratic government. Find Tanzania on a map and pray for the growth of the church in Tanzania.

One of the great privileges and a great joy on my last few trips has been to connect with Calvary Christian School in St Catharines, where my grandkids attend, and to share emails and videos with a particular class, and for the class to interact with my TLI students. Here are a couple of videos from my trip to the Philippines. The last video is the video the class sent to Liberia in December.

Video from my class in the Philippines to class in St Catharines. (click on link)
My Philippines class really enjoyed this interaction.

Video from St Catharines to Philippine class.

My Philippines class responded with a long video to answer their questions and I learned a few things myself about the Philippine culture.

Video from St Catharines to Liberia December 2017.

 The snow amazed my students in Liberia.
I am praying that through these videos some of these students will have a heart for worldwide missions.

Good articles this week:
US Christian Baker wins Supreme Court case

Yemen war: Saudi-backed forces begin threatened attack on key port of Hodeidah

  

Some thoughts from a missionary friend who has served in the middle east for over 25 years

Hi Ron,

Thanks for the fellowship. I enjoyed your insights on your blog. (June 12). The tragedy of Africa where so many call themselves Christians and yet there is so much obvious bondage to Satan and his ways. This has challenged me a lot over the past few years.

I think it is somewhat the mistake of missionaries who sought to see tribal leaders come to Christ as a way to lead whole tribes to Christ. The end result is Christian tribes who are not transformed by Jesus. I don’t want to do the same thing in the Arabic Muslim world. No discipleship probably is a contributing factor.

I asked one African church leader and he said that we foreigners who brought the gospel didn’t understand the culture when we discipled them. He said that Africans were oral and that all the discipleship material was written; with written Biblical truths and then questions to be answered. He says the nationals learned the correct answers to the questions but never understood the truths because they didn’t have an oral story to illustrate the truth from their own context.

The disaster for missions in Africa I don’t think is being taken into consideration as we teach the new generation of missionaries how to reach new communities with the Gospel. Maybe the closed countries will have a more authentic church than Africa which was wide open to missionary involvement.

The stranglehold of tribalism on people’s lives was never broken in Africa. People never entered the tribe of Jesus because missionaries never told them that Jesus had a tribe. (Jesus introducing His Kingdom in the Gospels indicates that Jesus was talking tribal truths to people living in a tribal culture.)

Thanks again Ron for being a faithful brother