Asking, begging or manipulating?

I, and I am sure most of you reading here, regularly receive newsletters from missionaries or missionary organisations. Almost universal in all these letters is a paragraph where an appeal is made for funds. OK, I still have to find a missionary or a mission organisation not in need of money. More funds enable them to do more work! A few years ago, after reading George Müller’s biography, I personally made the decision that I, as far as humanly possible, will not ask for money from people to support our ministry. I’m not saying that I will never ever do it. Especially with our AIDS ministry, it may become necessary to submit proposals to large organisations who want to support such projects, which in a certain sense boils down to asking and which I am still not always sure how to handle. But I trust that God will give me wisdom if and when I have to do this.
Yesterday I received a newsletter starting as follows: We are on our way to ****** for an indefinite time and will be leaving within 3 weeks. ****** may not be the easiest place to go to but we are prompted by the Holy Spirit to go there. Please agree with us in prayer that our financial needs will be met regarding the airfares, our stay, and outreaches…. We desire to fulfill the call of Mark 16:15 to “Go onto the entire world and preach the Gospel” and we also desire for you to fulfill that call as well. Your donation will aid us as we preach the Gospel in remote and unreached areas, impact others who will in turn impact others who will impact all generations worldwide with the truth and power of the Gospel. All gifts, great or small, will be appreciated.
Is this asking, begging or manipulating? I remember another occasion when I just got downright angry after receiving a letter from someone who felt led by the Lord to go to another country as missionary. In this letter the person wrote: If you do not respond to this letter by sending me a financial contribution, then you are being disobedient to God, because God wants me to go! Unnecessary to say, this letter ended in my “Outbox” – the one beneath my desk!
A few months ago I heard about a couple who had felt led by the Lord to move up into Africa to do missionary work throughout Africa and was going around asking / begging / manipulating people to support them. This led to great anger amongst some Christians I know, especially when it came out that they had told the people from whom they had asked funds that they were going for a year (what can you do in a year’s time in Africa????) and then returned after only a couple of weeks. People felt that they had sponsored them to go on a nice adventure holiday. Little wonder that people are reluctant to support missions when things like this happen.
I become increasingly uncomfortable when reading newsletters from missionaries and getting the idea that the letters are written mainly to manipulate their readers in donating money for their cause. And obviously, this forces me to look at my own motives when I send out my monthly newsletter. Am I perhaps doing the same thing, possibly without even realising it?
What are your experiences about missionaries asking / begging / manipulating others to get money?

Our Experience of Culture Shock

We have three teams from OM (Operation Mobilization) in Swaziland at the moment. They do their practical training in outreaches in rural areas in Swaziland which is a great honour for us, as we feel that we can really make a lasting impact on these people’s lives by exposing them to families in Swaziland. The group joined us for a church service on Sunday and I was pleasantly surprised to find one of the team members who had done her training in Swaziland a year ago also present. She had volunteered to return to Swaziland after her training and is presently helping at an orphanage. She wanted to come and meet the new team at church.
After the service I spent some time with her to hear how she is experiencing the work in Swaziland and it became clear that she is still reeling from the effects of culture shock. In 1985, when my wife and I went to Swaziland, very few people spoke about culture shock. It was more or less a matter of: You chose to come – jump in and do the work! I have mentioned before that God had given me two wonderful mentors in Swaziland. Without them, I’m not sure that we would have coped.
However, some years ago my wife and I were discussing our first few years in Swaziland. In the meantime the words Culture Shock had become more common and we were trying to analyse to what extent we had experienced it and how well we had handled it. What surprised us that we couldn’t really remember negative things that had happened between ourselves and the Swazi people that we could specifically link to culture shock. Of course not everything had been positive. Will I ever forget the day I had to appear in a traditional court! I’m making notes and will post a few stories about some things that happened to us that we laugh about today.
But I think we experienced culture shock in a totally different way. I’ve mentioned often that my wife and I grew up in Apartheid South Africa. When I received the invitation to come to Swaziland, we were worshipping at a white Afrikaans-speaking congregation in South Africa. I had two weeks in which I had to pray about this invitation before giving my answer. Within that time the pastor’s wife asked my wife what I was planning to do about the invitation. Diplomatically my wife answered: He’s not sure yet. He’s still praying about it. And then this woman answered: Come on! Stop joking! Don’t tell me that he is seriously considering going to Swaziland! (I think the biggest lesson we learnt that day was that a missionary is no big hero!) That, we realised afterwards, was our first culture shock – we were not always going to be supported by the people who should have been the closest to us.
Well, we moved to Swaziland and were surprised to find a number of white, Afrikaans-speaking farmers living in Swaziland, from the same denomination that we come from. These were “our” people (or so we thought) and we were in “their” country and we realised that we would really need their support. And then our next big culture shock came when we realised that these people were not interested at all in the work we were doing. Some of them openly rejected us – not for whom we are but for what we are doing. Some of them had long and hard arguments with us trying to prove to us that it was impossible for black people to be Christians (I’m not joking!) Increasingly we felt that we were being alienated from “our” people. Our worst culture shock was when we realised that “our” people who were supposedly living so close to God – Reformed, Calvinistic Christians – didn’t care a hoot what happened to the Swazi people! One old man came to me shortly after we arrived in Swaziland and said: Dominee, (Afrikaans for Reverend), I respect your position as minister, but I don’t want anything to do with you or your work! (Can you imagine how it feels when you hear this in a foreign country where you had just started as missionary?) All the glory to God – that man eventually became our greatest supporter in the work that we did. God changed him completely!
The positive that came from all of this was that we moved closer to the Swazi people. They became our true friends. They accepted us as we are. Perhaps this is one reason why we did not experience acute culture shock in our relationship with the Swazi people.
Have things changed regarding the white people’s attitude towards the Swazis? Fortunately, to a certain extent, they have. Its not universal yet. Some of them will never accept us fully, except if God does a miracle in their lives. In some cases God has done such a miracle. But my original realisation still stands: Missionaries are no big heroes!

Starting afresh with God

“Wes” recently made a comment on how amazing it is that God continues to work through us and even through our mistakes. Instead of just replying him, I thought that I would like to share what I preached about this past Sunday. (OK, not the whole sermon, just an idea that I shared which I picked up in a book I was reading). I was preaching on Genesis 13, the story where Abram and Lot seperated. But to understand this story, one has to go back to Genesis 12, first of all where Abram was called by God to be a blessing to all the nations. Then the story where Abram and his wife Sarai went to Egypt and Abram told a lie to the Pharaoh that Saria was his sister in order to save his own skin. Eventually the truth came out when God struck the house of Pharaoh with all kinds of diseases and Abram and Sarai were chased out of Egypt. The irony in this story is that Abram, instead of bringing blessing to this nation, brought a curse upon them!
Now we come to Genesis 13 and we read these remarkable words in verses 3 & 4: From the Negev he went from place to place until he came to Bethel, to the place between Bethel and Ai where his tent had been earlier and where he had first built an altar. There Abram called on the name of the LORD.
What is remarkable about these verses is that it seems as if God is taking Abram back to the roots of their relationship, almost as if He is saying to Abram: Let’s start all over again and see if you can do it right this time! And isn’t that what God does with us as well. Instead of punishing us or breaking the relationship, (which He has all the right to do), He starts all over again to enable us to do things right. God wants to re-establish our relationship with Him. Therefore, when I make a mistake or even a serious blunder, God can (and wants to) start afresh and re-establish our relationship with Him so that we can start all over – almost as if the mistake never happened!
I thought that this was really so awesome.

Is “Tentmaking” a workable solution in Missions?

Many years ago a good friend of mine (J J Kritzinger) who was also a professor in missiology in South Africa, wrote a book in which he argued that churches in poorer areas (the areas which are traditionally seen as the “mission field”) should make use of “tentmakers” rather than full-time pastors. The term “tentmaker” comes from the Biblical example of the apostle Paul who, according to Acts 18:3 was a tentmaker by profession and in such a way earned his own money. After I had read the book, I felt that this was really an answer for the church and felt that we should implement it in the church in answer to the constant lack of funds which we had to cope with. (The book was written in Afrikaans and is out of print as far as I could gather, but a summary of his ideas can be found here.)
At present I am really split in two about the effectiveness of this practice. I have seen it work very well but I have also experienced many problems associated with this which I think one should be aware of. In my own congregation I have one extremely effective “tentmaker”. He is a qualified teacher who later went back to the University of Swaziland to do his Bachelor’s degree in Education and was immediately afterwards appointed as principal of a high school. On most Sundays he will preach at one of the branches of our congregations where we have services and he is also chairman of our church council. Furthermore he helps with the catechumens as well as doing other odd tasks which may come his way. All in all he is truly a blessing for our church. He receives no salary from the church, except for travelling costs when we ask him to help us in places far from his home.
Where “tentmaking” seems to fail is when someone wants to work full-time in the church, but because of the lack of funds, such a person starts with another job to supplement his income. What seems to be the inevitable result of this choice is that the second “secular” job provides the greater part of the monthly income and therefore the greater part of the pastor’s time is spent doing this work. The time spent effectively working in the church starts to dwindle and in the end the “full-time” pastor is also only preaching on Sundays (unless of course if that person has to work on a particular Sunday) and perhaps conducting a Bible Study or two during the rest of the week. However, because the church had appointed the person previously with an agreed salary, it becomes very difficult to stop paying that salary and in the end the church finds itself paying for services not rendered.
Personally I’m not as strongly opposed against full-time pastors as my professor friend and many other authors seem to be. I do believe they have an important place in the church. There is more than enough work to keep someone busy every day of the week. But I also believe that tentmakers have an extremely important role to play in the church. However, mixing these two, can result in many problems. Therefore, every time I hear of a full-time pastor who starts on some project (chicken-farming, back-yard mechanic, etc) to supplement his or her salary, my heart skips a beat, wondering how long it will be before the trouble starts.
I think it can work, but then only if the pastor and the congregation come to a mutual agreement beforehand. One way which I think can work is to allow a full-time pastor to take up a secular job but then to stop his salary at the church so that he really becomes a tentmaker in the full sense of the word. (If he is going to earn a guaranteed salary, this could be done immediately or if he wants to start his own business, his salary at the church could be phased out over a period of months). Obviously, there should also be some kind of restriction on what secular work the person may do. If he wants to open a bar (not so strange – it does happen!) then I for one would definitely not allow him to continue as tentmaker within the church.
But having said all this, I still wonder whether it was God’s intention that certain churches seem to be “predestined” to forever struggle financially. Is the practice of using tentmakers an emergency measure to get us out of an immediate problem or was this God’s intention of how the church should work? There was a time when I believed that this was God’s intention. Having a lot of contact with missionaries all over the world, some of them physically ill because they worry month by month where their money will come from, I’m starting to have my doubts. I’m still not convinced one way or the other. What do you think?

My first church council meeting

I have a saying that no company will ever appoint someone directly from university as the CEO of their company. The only exception to this rule, as far as I know, is the church. Not all churches, but at least some of them. And so it happened that I came to Swaziland in 1985, 26 years of age, with hardly any experience, and I became the pastor (more like the CEO) of a congregation. Big mistake! And did I make blunders! Plenty! Fortunately the Swazis are very forgiving people and they tolerated me, (probably hoping and praying – sometimes wishing – that I will acquire some wisdom).
When I arrived in the congregation there was trouble brewing. One of our “evangelists” who was the leader at one of our branches, had decided that he wanted to go on his own, but typically, he wanted to take the entire congregation with him. So here I was, with no experience, no knowledge on how the church in Swaziland functions or how to handle difficult situations, and I was chairman of the church council meeting which had to make a decision about this matter. As chairman, I obviously had a say in how things should be run during the meeting. Each person was allowed one chance to speak. I decided that the discussions will be kept short and if necessary I will call for a vote after which we accept what the majority says. I can’t remember the details of that discussion, but I did what I had decided and after some discussion (probably not more than half an hour) asked that we vote about the matter, after which I ruled that the majority vote (which was also my personal viewpoint) be accepted. And so the matter was closed – or so I thought! (I was very proud of my achievement.)
Coming to the next church council meeting, a few months later, an old man stood up. He had a problem with the decision that we had taken at the previous meeting, because he hadn’t had a chance to speak. Not knowing how to handle this, I looked at the rest of the church council and to my surprise found that they all agreed with him. They wanted the matter to be discussed again. And so, reluctantly, I agreed. About three or four hours later, everyone had said what they wanted to say, they had agreed on their viewpoint and the matter was resolved. (I would, however, be dishonest if I didn’t admit that I was totally frustrated with the way in which things had gone.)
Until I thought about it afterwards. End then I realised that voting was a Western concept. Within the Swazi culture things are not decided according to majority rule. Things are decided by consent. Matters are discussed and debated until all those present come to a mutual agreement. Our church council meetings can last for a whole day. Once my wife sent someone to look for me, convinced that I had been involved in a motorcar accident, only to find out that the meeting had taken longer (MUCH longer) than I had anticipated when I left the house that morning. Nowadays she just smiles when I tell her that I think that the meeting will be short 😉
Some years later we wrote our own Constitution for the church and one of the points included was that, during official meetings of the church, matters will be discussed until consent is reached. The only time when voting will take place is when people need to be chosen to fill certain posts.
When I look back to my first church council meeting, I remember the words of one of my professors who told us that, when a matter is put to the vote, you need to remember that if 51% of those present agree, then you still have 49% who disagree! He advised us (and I think these were extremely wise words) that, if there is not at least a 75% majority vote, that the matter be postponed to the next meeting to be prayed about in the meantime.
Or in our case: don’t make any decision without mutual consent.

Becoming immune to death

Yesterday I felt so hopeless. I was visiting our group of caregivers at Dwaleni. Except for the AIDS home-based caring program, we also have an orphan feeding scheme as well as a creche which is run from our church. The teacher at the creche is, although fairly young, such a wonderful person. As with most pre-school teachers in Swaziland, she only had one year’s training. We have now arranged that she attend in-service training in South Africa next week, during Swaziland’s school break. I had arranged that I will transport her there on Sunday after our church service.
As I left Dwaleni today, I saw her and another young woman next to the road and stopped to give them a lift. Asking where they were going to, they told me that they were on their way to a funeral. Both of them seemed to be in fairly high spirits so I obviously concluded that the deceased would not be a close relative. When I asked the teacher whose funeral she was going to, she answered: “The father of my children.” A shock went through me. I know she has children and I had also realised that she wasn’t married (unfortunately fairly common in Swaziland), but this high-spirited girl was actually telling me that she was on the way to the funeral of her “husband” and it did not even seem as if she was sad! I couldn’t think of anything else to say except for: “I’m sorry to hear that.” He had become sick some time ago. He died in hospital. AIDS? Most probably. Later she mentioned that her children should have accompanied her to the funeral, but she didn’t have enough money to take them along!
I had recognised the other girl. She was the sister of the twenty three year old girl whom I had visited who had TB. See When AIDS becomes a death sentence. I asked her: “How is your sister now?” She answered: “She’s dead.” In disbelief I asked her to repeat what she had said: “She’s dead. She died last Wednesday.”
But what shocked me the most was that I hardly noticed any emotion when they shared this news with me. The one had lost a the father of her children, the other a sister. And I just wondered whether these people are becoming so immune to death, that it doesn’t seem to bother them anymore.
In a survey that we did last year in the Dwaleni area we found that in 62% of the homesteads someone had died during the course of the year. In one homestead five people had died within twelve months. In another four people had died. If people have to go through a process of mourning every time someone close to them die, then they will surely go out of their minds. But what will the long term effect be of this situation in the lives and minds of these people?

When Charity destroys Dignity – Glenn Schwartz (2)

What did I learn from Schwartz’s book? A few things stand out. He really understands the danger of dependency. And one of the biggest dangers which he mentions is that the supporting body (be it a missionary council, church or an individual) dictate how the work should be done. They decide who should be appointed as leaders, which projects should be supported, etc. And this means that the local people lose the initiative in the work that needs to be done. Furthermore, a church which is kept dependent upon outside sources do reach a point where they lose their dignity. Also true. I therefore fully support Schwarz in his viewpoint that churches should be assisted to become independent (or at least, less dependent).
I also appreciate that he distinguishes between those who are really poor and those who are just less fortunate than others and that he has a heart for those who are really poor (or living in Absolute Poverty as he describes it). By the time I reached chapter 10 of this book, I doubted that he really cared for people who are dying of hunger, but this chapter made me see a new side of him which I liked.
Another chapter which I appreciated was chapter 18 where he writes about maximising the benefits of short-term outreaches. One of the remarks which he makes which I totally agree with is the importance of proper preparation before going on a short-term outreach. (Not that I think that a team who had not undergone proper training are worthless. Our approach in Swaziland is to ensure that a team like that has much more contact with local leaders to guide them during the time that they are on the outreach. Obviously this puts a lot of extra strain on the local leaders but my argument is that we are investing in the lives of the people coming on the short-term outreach as well and that we will never be able to calculate the dividends of such an outreach in their personal lives.) But proper training is the best option.
Schwartz also shares a number of anecdotes where things went wrong on short-term outreaches and where people came with the wrong attitude and once again I agree with him. Some of the things he shares I had experienced myself. (Looking back, I blame myself for many of the things which went wrong with such teams, mainly because I believed that they had to take responsibility for themselves. Today I would probably do things differently and we rarely have serious problems with short-term outreach teams. But the point is that this book does give an important warning of how things could go wrong.)
In one of the last chapters he writes about the problem of AIDS which obviously drew my attention. While I believe that Schwartz still does not realise the full impact of this killer disease (who of us do?) I did appreciate that he realises that this disease calls for abnormal measures to be implemented if we want to start saving lives. One cannot remain a spectator, looking at thousands of people dying (6000 people per day in sub-Saharan Africa!) while hoping that local churches will become financially independent so that they can care for these people.
Much of what is written in this book can be accessed via the internet. Go the homepage of World Mission Associates and click on the Resources button. Most of the articles published there were written by Glenn Schwartz. Had I known beforehand of this site and with hindsight, after reading the book, I doubt whether I would have bought the book.
A final remark: Loving irony, I noticed, when going to the homepage of World Mission Associates that the very first button is marked “DONATE” through which people can give money to support this ministry financially. I could not help wondering about this…. 😉

When Charity destroys Dignity – Glenn Schwartz (1)

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been busy reading Schwartz’s book When Charity destroys Dignity: Overcoming Unhealthy Dependency in the Christian Movement. One of the reasons why I read the book was because of a post by Glenn Penner on the relevance of the Three-Selves formula (a topic which I will come back to at a later stage). I then reacted to that post (you can read it and other reactions in that post’s comments) after which Glenn told me to read this book. I promised to do so and I also promised that I would give my impressions on the book after I had read it. I’ll do so in two parts: Today I’ll give the negative remarks and tomorrow I will give the positive remarks.
To be very honest, I struggled through this book. The reason is that the first part of this book actually contains an adaptation of sixteen lectures which Schwartz presents on overcoming dependency. My personal opinion is that the book would have been much better if he had started from scratch. After the third chapter I felt that I now knew more or less everything that he wanted to say and then I struggled through the rest of the book (with the exception of a few chapters to which I will come back tomorrow.) Schwartz makes a really strong point of the importance for churches to overcome dependency and it is clear that he is passionate about this. He makes this point over and over and over again, each time mentioning how important it is for a church “to stand on its own two feet”.
But what worried me was that I felt that Schwartz sees only two main problems in the church: dependency and lack of the Spirit. (OK, it’s not as simple as that, but that is how it feels while reading the book.) If missionaries had spent more time on ensuring that the new converts were Spirit-filled instead of just converting them, then these new Christians would have been more willing to become independent and then the church would have grown much faster, Bibles would have been distributed on a larger scale (!) and – so it seems – most problems associated with missions would have been avoided. In my opinion these remarks are just too simplistic. Obviously I agree that churches should become less dependent on outside sources for their existence. But with my experience in the missions I cannot see that the solution is as simple as he tries to make it. His remark that independent churches started because church leaders had reached their ceiling and wanted to become financially independent is also just too difficult to believe. One needs to read the books by people like Bengt Sundkler to get a better understanding of the dynamics behind these, literally thousands of independent churches.
One of the “selling points” of the book is the anecdotes included (which makes good reading) – except when you start reading the same anecdote for the third or fourth time, probably also caused by the fact that this book wasn’t planned from scratch. The impression is given that he only has a few stories to share to prove his point.
One thing which irritated me was his remark that 2 Corinthians 9:7, where Paul says for God loves a cheerful giver actually indicates that we should give hilariously. This is because the Greek word used in that verse is hilaron, which Schwartz then links directly to our English word hilarious! One doesn’t need an extensive knowledge of Greek to know that this is not how one works with the Greek. Cheerful or happy are strong enough words to translate the verse! This verse has got nothing to do with giving hilariously!
The author was a missionary in Zimbabwe for two years from 1961. Then from 1965 he was a missionary in Zambia for just over five years. It seems that he still visits Africa occasionally to lecture, but I really wondered if he had kept track of changes in the missions setup in Africa. He mentions time and again how missionaries come from America and other Western countries and expect the people amongst whom they work to speak English, to have English church services, to use Western hymn books, etc. I have fairly wide contact with missionaries all over Africa, and I really doubt whether this is the norm. Most long-term missionaries are very sensitive to the culture and language of the people where they are working.
The one place where I experienced something of what Schwartz describes was at a theological school at Lilongwe in Malawi, run by the Presbyterian Church of America where I expected at any moment to hear the Malawian students break out and sing the Star Spangled Banner! But on the other hand, this school was started within a specific context of giving excellent theological training to a selected group of students which would enable them to further their studies even up to PhD level and in such a way become theologians within their own country. And the reality is that, should they wish to further their studies in the USA or UK or any other Western country (even South Africa), then a good knowledge of English is essential.
OK, these remarks are sufficient on the negative side. Tomorrow then some positive remarks on what I believe one can learn from this book.
By the way, I have another book which I am starting on now, which has a contrasting view to what Schwartz propagates. This is the book by Rowell: To Give or Not to Give. I’m mentioning this, because after Schwartz had written his book (including the preface), he wrote a Postscript to the Preface in which he expresses his concern about Rowell’s book. So, I will be reading that book as well and will give my critical remarks about it once I’ve finished and then hopefully we can once again share some in depth thoughts about Giving without creating Dependency.

Carrying each other’s burdens

In our Caring for the Caregiver program, my psychologist friend tried to illustrate to the caregivers how important it is that we learn to carry each other’s burdens. One has to realise that the caregivers are not professional nurses. They have a very basic knowledge on what to do and have to learn through experience and through continued training. Furthermore, they bond with the patients whom they are caring for and each time when a patient dies, they literally go through the trauma of losing a beloved. And to put this in context: at Dwaleni, the place where we started with our Home-Based Caring project and where we have 45 caregivers working, three of the group’s patients died last week. This was not exceptional. This is the rule! It happens every week. Playing around with statistics, it would mean that at least 150 patients will die during the course of the year which means that each of these caregivers are going to go through the trauma of loss through death at least three to four times this year!
To illustrate how we have to carry each other’s burdens, she asked three of the caregivers to come and stand in front of the group. She then asked them to raise their arms until they were horizontal and to keep them there. She then asked the centre person whether she would be willing to take an empty cup in each hand, which she agreed to do. After a few seconds she asked whether she could put a lightweight jacket on her arm, to which she agreed. The psychologist kept on adding these light items to her arms. It wasn’t long before the caregiver started to groan. Although the weight of each individual item was so small that it was fairly easy to keep her arms up, the combined weight started showing on her face. But the illustration went further, because the other two people, although they had no added weight on their arms, also became tired and their arms started dropping. When the centre woman was asked if another item could be added, she bluntly refused! At that moment the other two women were told to move in right next to her, as close as possible, and by putting their arms on each others shoulders, they were able to support each other – with the emphasis on each other, because not only was the burden of the centre woman spread over the combination of three people, but the burden of the two women on the outside was now also being shared by the one in the centre and they were able to stand like this for a long time without suffering too much.
Could it mean then, when Paul tells us in Galatians 6:2 to carry each other’s burdens, that not only will the burden of the person carrying the heaviest load be lightened, but that the relative light burden which I may have will also be lightened, when I opt to help carry that person’s heavy burden?

Caring for the Caregiver (2)

Today we continued the process of helping a part of our group of caregivers to verbalise the emotions which they go through as they reach out to those who are infected with and affected by HIV/AIDS. With the two sessions that we have had up to now (with two different groups) a few interesting things came out. The one is that the Swazi language which is used in Swaziland, or siSwati as it is officially known, seems to lack the vocabulary to accurately describe certain emotions. What we did was to encourage them to draw a “map” of their journey with the Home-Based Caring group, almost like a footpath, on which they indicate the positive things as well as the negative things which they had experienced. This was then discussed in small groups of five or six and eventually each of the groups appointed someone to give feedback to the larger group. The word which they continually used to describe negative emotions is translated as “depressed”. They were depressed when they saw the terrible need but could not do anything about it. They were depressed because sometimes there is friction within the group. They were depressed because sometimes people would gossip. Not angry or frustrated or sad – always depressed. In English and in Afrikaans we have such a vast vocabulary with which we can express our innermost feelings. This is definitely much more difficult to do in siSwati.
My psychologist friend who went with me again today made a very interesting remark. When the people spoke about their negative feelings, nobody ever mentioned that they were “depressed” because they are not getting any money for the work they are doing. The closest that anyone came to speak about money is that a woman remarked that she becomes depressed when she enters a home where people are extremely poor and she so much wants to help them, but is unable to because she herself is so poor that she cannot do anything for them, except to be there, to pray for them and to help them with certain tasks in the home.
This project is not the average ministry that one would find in most Western countries (although I can see no reason why not and in fact I believe that every congregation should have a similar ministry where they reach out to the poor and destitute within that specific community in a way that will bring Christ into the hearts of those people). But as we were driving back I thought to myself that most churches neglect their most important asset in the congregation, namely the people. I have seen so many wonderful church members reach a point where they cannot go on with whatever ministry they are involved in (youth, missions, children, etc). And I wondered to myself how many of those people would have continued if the church leadership had really focussed on them, ensuring that their most basic needs within the ministry are met and that obstacles are removed, so that they can continue to do the work which God had called them to do.