November 2, 2014

I know that most of you realise that Bangladesh and Turkey are not new to me, but the last two months introduced a lot of new insight to me that I would not have known if the trips I took were not as comprehensive as they were.

Let’s start with TurkeyThe trip to Turkey was eventful in many ways. I had time to stay with my friend Rev Fikret Bocek just outside of Izmir and preached once at his church in the city overlooking the bay. What was new however was that we hopped in his small car (good since gas was around $8/gallon) and visited churches in two other parts of the country. Already familiar with the church situation in Istanbul and Izmir, Fikret and I travelled to Ankara, the capital city far to the east and then down to Antalya on the Mediterranean coast.

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Two road trips to Bangladesh, one to Turkey and one to

Pennsylvania.

Bill & Cheryl’s NewsOn the road nearly all of September and October

Privilege: What it means to attend the baptism of several Muslim background Turks at the beach

November 2, 2014

The Reformed churches in Turkey are small congregations. The one in Ankara has the most experienced pastor, Yavus. He, with his wife and son have served there since 2001. Thy have a contemporary building that they own thanks to supporters. Yavus is also mentoring one young man who seems to me as having a sound Christian life

Antalya is far, far away from Ankara, right on the Meditarranean coast. There Kerem, his wife and son pastor a congregation of under 50. He is younger than the other men and less experienced but well educated in Canada. His challenge is to build a colic church in what has become a vacation paradise. It was more than a treat to attend a beachfront baptism there. Ayub preached and Kerem did the baptising. Since it was at the beach you can assume that sprinkling and pouring were not involved. It was a great time followed by a party by all of the believers. I was encouraged not to photograph the event since the pictures might get on the web and Turkey can be a very sticky place at times.

Please pray for the Turks. The country is in some turmoil and the political situation places the church in a particularly difficult place. Pray to for these young pastors. They each started their work independent of one another and they have the very difficult task of learning how to grow up into one church and not just many. Turks have a very strong, assertive style of leadership with each man strong in his own way. This makes initiative common but collaboration tricky. As for me, I see myself ready to help them in that joining process as they need me.

On to BangladeshI had two dramatically different trips to Bangladesh within a month’s time. I took one in September with my buddy Phil Dehart. We had not been on the road together for some time and the three amigos (Ayub, Phil and Bill) undertook several days of bone-jarring exhausting travel to visit four or five (I forget) congregations of the Presbyterian Church of Bangladesh

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Ayub enjoying his own home in the quiet of the afternoon with everything growing and birds singing.

November 2, 2014

(PCB). We took Ayub’s van, stayed at local travel hotels and tried to find places to eat on the road.

The PCB is a young church with young leaders that really have to learn as they go. They also have a few older guys that have to unlearn as they go. We wanted to assess the church plants together in order to see how healthy they were, how well the teams of church planters were getting on together, and to spotlight problems that need attention. I would say we managed all three tasks pretty well. In a few cases, we could see how some of the guys lacked basic understanding or training. A general perspective we got was that the church plants lagged behind in one core activity, discipleship. Here is the point: Bangladeshi Christians make superb evangelists. They have the right makeup to take the gospel to their families and neighbours. What they have not done as effectively is follow up professions and baptisms with a continuity of teaching and mentoring that successfully grow new converts. Well, we all concluded that something had to be done.

That takes us to my second trip to Bangladesh. It is the first trip to that country in 10 years where I did not see anything other than Ayub’s home and the Gospel Reformation Centre there. I went for only two reasons: to prep Ayub for our Bangladesh partnership meeting in Pennsylvania later in October and to develop a comprehensive discipleship curriculum for the PCB that fused Bible knowledge and simple doctrine with practical living and doing, all within a distinctively Muslim Bengali context.

I was and am thrilled to be part of it. We worked six hours a day for almost 10 days on it. Ayub still has until the end of 2015 to complete the content. We worked out in out time the areas to be covered, learning objectives etc. The plan is to launch the whole thing in January 2016 with two intense weeks of training at the centre for the church planters and other disciples (to include extensive role playing) followed by taking everything to the church plants in the various parts of the country and starting the training for new believers there (and I assume everybody else).

To be honest, I was pretty proud of what we got done. I was amazed to see how well tailor the work will be for Bangladeshis

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November 2, 2014

and for the Muslim context. Every area of learning and mentoring reflects the need to take the gospel to specific people in a specific place. This is called biblical contextualisation.

Pennsylvania partnership meetingThis was just plain fun (and some hard work). We met in a PCA partner church in Mechanicsburg, Pa. for a few days of meetings. The prep work in Bangladesh really paid off. This is largely what I do, so I might as well expand on it a bit. I sit between national churches and their leadership on one hand and American churches on the other. All are committed to seeing the gospel taken to people in the nations, but doing that together is more than a challenge. Sometimes it looks more like a nightmare. The thing is, the Bangladesh partnership is not similar to any other church to church collaboration I have ever been part of. There is a much greater sense of participation in the ministry of national Christians than I have seen before.

Their is a greater degree of transparency and mutually accountability too. To say the least then, this is not easy to achieve when one church body represents what we call a coping, or survival culture and the other a planning one. One culture excels at thriving on little and making snap decisions. The other culture excels in building and permanency. My job is often to help each culture understand and accept the other.

We had a lot of things to work through. We had to preview the whole discipleship strategy for the PCB, not simply the curriculum. We had a ton of money issues to work through. Ayub had to help new church partners begin to understand his vision for the future. Partners had to begin to grasp the context within which the PCB works, namely current and impending persecution. Ministry includes both successes and failures. We have to consider each and then work together for a better future.

I thought we did that better than I have ever seen in 10 years. Ayub himself noted the high level of trust and understanding that is developing. Good.

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