Scriptorium Daily
I am in Nairobi, Kenya, right now, and I have been in this country for a little over a week. This is my first trip to Sub-Saharan Africa, and I am here to do ministry, to do research for an Intercultural Studies class I’m teaching this Fall, and to plan a potential Torrey Kenya trip in the future. It’s mostly been good, with some frustrations thrown in. We have had the privilege of seeing a lot of wildlife (everything from elephants to giraffes to flamingos), preaching in various churches, visiting Christian schools, hanging out with a Biola missions team composed of ten undergrads, eating crocodile and ostrich, and seeing different parts of Kenya like the coastal city of Mombasa. The frustrations mostly came from dealing with people who were trying to rip us off. This is not the first country I’ve experienced this in (even the U.S. has plenty of con-artists!) but because we don’t have a local guide, we’ve been scammed a couple of times already. Mostly they are things such as the taxi charging us double what we should actually pay, but nothing serious—it’s not like we’ve been mugged or gotten violently ill or lost our passports or anything. So for that, we should be grateful. But I still couldn’t help getting frustrated every time we got scammed. It seems like, because we are Americans, any interaction with the locals somehow comes around to the topic of money. It got to the point where I wanted to say to people around me, “Hey! I’m a person, I’m not an ATM machine, all right?!”
I want to recount what happened today which really opened my eyes and helped to reorient my attitude. I’m here with two Biola University professors, Tim Stranske and Fred Ramirez, and my good friend Sean Doyle who is a professor at Geneva College. We met up with Benjamin Musyoka, a native Kenyan and a wonderful man of God who had done his Ph.D. in education at Biola about twelve years ago. He was a member of Grace EV Free Church during his time there. Tim Stranske also happens to be a member of that church currently.
Benjamin and his wife Judith took us four professors to his church plant “out in the bush.” I’m not kidding you, from Nairobi it took us five hours each way to get there. I think it’s the second-most remote place I’ve ever been to (the first was when I was up in a tiny rural village on a mountain in southwestern China). We traveled three hours east to where the road ends on the map, then we went offroading for two extra hours, to the point where we were just covered in fine red dust, and then ended up in the middle of nowhere! At least that’s how it felt. The journey itself was exhausting to say the least, but when I saw the plight of the people there, I felt even more burdened. Imagine: no electricity, no food (they have to rely on emergency relief supplies to come in to feed them once a week!), corrupt officials, and no hope. All my indignation at having been scammed $20 by the taxi driver the previous day (I was thinking, “There goes my meal money for the next day!”) melted away. There is no rain out there, no way to grow crops, and people have no jobs. I asked Benjamin, “Why don’t people leave this place and go to the cities?” and he said, “Some of them do—and they just end up in slums, the girls get pregnant, they discard their babies in an orphanage, and there is no more hope for them in the cities than out here in the bush.” Wow. Makes my $20 seem so trivial—I’m going to go back home after this, and that $20 won’t matter so much in the grand scheme of things. I’ll go back to a nice home, plenty of food to eat, and a wonderful job. Talk about injustice! Seeing it firsthand was sobering.
There are some bright spots, however: this church plant (Makongo Community Church) had a wonderful church building. I wondered how they could have built such a thing, given the poverty that was rampant all around them. Benjamin explained that it was Grace EV Free Church in La Mirada, California, who had contributed $12,000 to build this building. Although that is not the church that I attend, a lot of Biola people go there, and I could not be more proud of them!! It was amazing to see firsthand the fruits of their financial contribution, and to see the ripple effects from that—basically, once people started attending this church, local businesses saw that there were a lot of people congregating so they moved into the area, and it has become a revitalized economic region (relatively speaking)!
When the church service began, a couple of church members came up and gave their testimonies. Despite the utter destitution of the area, one of the ladies in the church talked about how faithful God has been to her. I was dumbfounded—how can she have such great faith amidst so little? But I realized it’s precisely because she has so little that her faith can abound. How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven! All my education, my money, my privileges, just seemed so inconsequential at that moment. Then Benjamin stood up and said, much to my surprise, “Dr. Allen will now bring us the Word of God!” I was definitely caught off guard—but having done missions in India (where they also frequently spring this kind of thing onto Western visitors!), this wasn’t the first time this had happened to me. I quickly thought of a Bible passage I could preach on (I remembered Benjamin’s advice: these people are uneducated, so preach on stories rather than abstract theological concepts). So I chose the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Meanwhile, I was thinking, I would so much rather have heard their pastor preaching! They think I have so much to offer them, when in reality, in their context, I have so little.
As I preached, I realized that in the African context, the Parable of the Prodigal Son was not just about the sinful squandering of the younger son and the Pharisaism of the older son; it was also about the haves and have-nots. Those whose lack is obvious, like the younger son, can easily run to the Father. Those whose lack is inward rather than outward, like the older son, have the hardest time coming to God. No wonder that these Kenyans, who have so few possessions, seemed to love God so much more than Americans, who have so much materially!
Lord, help me to be grateful for what I have. Our love for God should flow out of gratitude, not duty. It is ironic, though, that those who have the least are often the most grateful. What a way to put life in perspective—and how humbling it is.
