prayer
Cheers God: church is great. It's really good. People are passionate about serving and knowing God, and it's just an exciting place to be.
Thanks for holidays! It's been a busy term, and tomorrow I'm heading up to Limpopo (a northern province) to hang out with one of my co-workers, followed by a short trip to the Free State to hang out with one of the students from Focus. Pray for refreshment and safety on the roads.
Pray for Thembalethu. I've really got to know the boys a lot better, and often Thembalethu is just like hanging out with friends. But it's also quite emotionally (and financially) exhausting. Pray that I'll be able to deal well with the many needs: financial, emotional and spiritual here.
Pray for campus ministry. Varsity's just gone on holidays, so we're gearing up for a big second term, as well as a mission trip to Durban in June. Pray that we'll continue to grow, in numbers, unity and maturity.
Keeping praying for South Africa. There are so many challenges and problems here to be faced and overcome, but many people devote their lives instead to earning as much as they can, and setting themselves up in a gated community far from trouble. Complacency is still easy here, especially if you are well-off.
contact
Skype's still in the pipeline, but feel free to email me.andrew.robinson -at- swac.org.au
Drop me a line if you'd like to chat via MSN!
Or call my cellphone: +27 76 141 3342. But remember the time difference if you want to call! SA is 9 hours behind Australia. (12 noon here = 9pm in Australia.)
April 2007
So, what have I been doing?
Well, I'm sorry if it's a little tardy but here it is: the March prayer letter!
The end of my second month in South Africa has just ticked over: I'm amazed how fast it's gone.
It's been a challenging month: making sense of the incredibly diverse cultures here and dealing with the poverty.
What is 'normal' is completely different here: I'm shocked by students dropping out of university for lack of funds, and even more shocked to find that they're still some of the most privileged people in society.
One student I know walks about 6km to university each day through Jo'burg's most dangerous suburbs because he can't afford the $2 minibus taxi fare.
Sometimes I find the needs quite overwhelming: it's very cold at night here, especially as summer turns into autumn, and as I shiver in my bed I can't sleep as I think of the homeless guys I work with lying under plastic sheets round the corner. They say they can't get to sleep unless they're drunk: the alcohol numbs the cold.*
So what do I do here?
Well, my days are taken up by a few things . The first is Johannesburg Bible College. I spend my mornings from Monday to Wednesday studying Biblical interpretation , apologetics, preaching, and systematic theology, amongst other things.
Bible College is an incredible place. It's seriously diverse: everyone is there from Sudanese and Congolese refugees to middle-class mums from Jo'burg's wealthiest suburbs.
After college on Mondays I head on campus at the University of Johannesburg.
Campus ministry is exciting: Focus, the student organisation I work with, has seen some exciting times this year. With the extra staff (that's including me and Kylie, another Australian doing MAP here) we've been able to run extra Bible studies, and the group at the Kingsway campus is starting to reflect the actual demographics of the university.
After a fair bit of experience as a student in the EU (Sydney University Evangelical Union) in Australia, I've been surprised to find that much is the same about student ministry: sex and materialism seem to be the big struggles here, and if you're well dressed and have a nice car - or any kind of car - you wield a lot of power at varsity.
But there's some big differences: we just had our end-of-term camp this weekend, and after examining traditional African views of life and death, we had a question time.
One of the big sticking points for Christians here is exactly what to do with the rituals and customs surrounding death: should they be discarded? But questions about how the gospel should look in an African context are not just theoretical.
One student told how his extended family blame d him and his mother for the death of an infant cousin because they had not been present at the necessary cleansing ritual. Or, another student asked, how do I react when I hear my ancestors speaking through a sangoma, and find myself faced with a spiritual world that seems far more real that what I read in the Bible?
They're good questions. Luckily I'm only a trainee!
The other way I spend my time here is with Melville Union Church's homeless ministry, ThembaLethu. (It's isiZulu for "place of hope".) We meet three times a week, out the back of my house actually, for food and skills training. On Sundays , we meet for church and eat lunch together.
It's quite challenging working with these guys: sometimes their problems just seem insurmountable. Two weeks ago, one of the guys we work with was suffering from a drug-induced psychosis. He'd actually lost his mind. And in the same week as Mark Grieve (another Australian working here with Melville) tried to get him into a men tal hospital, a homeless woman and her boyfriend arrived. And she was nine months pregnant. Mark managed to sort out a place for her in a shelter, and a week after meeting us, she gave birth . A week!
Each guy has a different story, and each will break your heart. One guy I was speaking to the other day is 2 0, but left school in about year 6. I asked him why, and he explained that both his parents passed away, and eventually he was just too ashamed to go to school because his clothes were worn a nd tattered, and all the other kids teased him. So he's been on the streets now for eight years.
Death is everywhere he re: in just the two months I've been here, one of my good friend s has lost both his father and aunt to AIDS. Every weekend, the cemeteries across the city are packed with throngs of people: occasionally you run into a funeral procession in the streets. Bla ck funerals are an incredible affair, I'm talking busloads and busloads of people, often with a police escort because of the traffic disruption. I'm told the city's cemeteries are filling up so fast that there may be a shortage of burial plots.
The re's so much more to say about life here: please keep reading my blog at myearlylife.org, and please keep praying for South Africa and the work at Melville Union Church.
grace and peace,
Andrew Robinson
*P.S. I've got a plan for getting some blankets for the Thembalethu boys. It's just a tricky one to solve because last time we bought them some they were all stolen within days!
March 28, 2007. Type too small? Just change the font size on your browser.