Thursday will be an historic day for CMF.  Every year CMF has a furlough retreat for our personnel who are on furlough, or as some call it, “home assignment.”  Furlough is a time for retooling, reconnecting with supporters and prayer partners, relaxing, renewal and reassessment.  The furlough retreats are held in Indianapolis.

This year we have a lot of furloughing missionaries!  It is great to have them around for a few days.  There are so many young children running around having a blast with one another, and a few older children too.  I didn’t do an official count, but I heard there were 50 people, which meant 15 couples/individuals. CMF staff are in and out as well.

On Thursday the entire group will be going down to Nashville, Indiana.  They will be joining the annual Globalscope Celebration.  The Celebration is an event where all of our campus ministers from around the world come together for a few days of fellowship, renewal, strategic planning, and meeting with the Globalscope Steering Committee.  There are about 40 Globalscope missionaries in Nashville, so when the two groups of missionaries get together, history for CMF will be made.

Because, never in our 61 years have we had so many missionaries together in one place at the same time.

In CMF we love what we do, and we also like getting together.

Last week the North American Christian Convention was held in Indianapolis, and we were privileged to be there.  CMF’s own Mary Kamau from Kenya was featured in the Wednesday evening service at which Dick Alexander preached following a wonderful worship service.  Dick interviewed Mary, who received a standing ovation for her transformational ministry in the Mathare Valley slum of Nairobi, Kenya.  Her holistic ministry program includes the establishment of schools for children who have no hope for attending school; a ministry to those suffering from HIV/AIDS; child sponsorship; evangelism and church planting; CHE (community health evangelism); microfinance (some 670 people have received loans with a payback rate of 95%); construction; and the list could go on and on.

Then on Friday morning of the convention speaker Gene Appel again highlighted this ministry with a wonderful eight minute dvd showing his own involvement with the ministry as well as the involvement of his church in southern California.  That church, Eastside Christian Church, recently held a child sponsorship emphasis and some 1000 kids from Mathare Valley have new sponsors.

Mary Kamau was interviewed in the weekend services of East 91st. Street Chrisian Church, where she once again received standing ovations.  The dvd they used to introduce Mary is worth watching.

After being in the CMF prayer time yesterday, Mary left for the airport so that she could return home from this very busy two week time in the U.S.

mary interview from rhett owen on Vimeo.

Last week I had the opportunity of bring four evening messages at the Oregon Christian Convention.  This was the 158th year of the convention.  I’ve been to the convention many times in my life; it is part of who I am.  It was an honor to be asked to speak.

My title was Unfinished Agenda: His Commissions, Our Commission.  I spoke on Creation Care, poverty, prayer, and the Great Commission.  My aim was to show the our Lord gave many commissions, not just one (Mt. 28:18-20).  The title for the final message was “The Greater Commission,” and my conclusion was to say that mission is all about relationships: our relationship with God, our relationship with others; and our relationship with Creation.

Robyn joined me for several days, and it was great to have time with my Oregon family: Mom and Dad, my two sisters and their husband, my aunt and uncle and cousin who hosted me.

I’ve been fortunate to have done a bit of traveling, so I thought I would share my top ten rocks, in no special order. 

1-3  I heard that the three largest ’stand alone’ rocks in the world are the Rock of Gibraltar, Haystack Rock on the Oregon coast, and Beacon Rock on the Washington side of the Columbia River.  I’ve been to each of these locations.  In 1966 we took a ship to Ethiopia, and passed by the Rock of Gibraltar.  In 2007 I made a special birding trip to Haystack Rock, though I had seen it before.  Lifers at the time were the Black oystercatcher, the Harlequin duck, and the Tufted puffin.  In 2002 I drove (paved road and freeway) from St. Louis to Astoria, Oregon, following the Lewis and Clark trail.  They stopped at Beacon Rock.  Last week I visited Beacon Rock again.  There is a path to the top, and someday I will walk that path.

4.  Petra, Jordan.  A fantastic place to visit.  You go through a narrow path between two cliffs of rock, and when you arrive at the main area, you see wonderful buildings carved out of rock.  The visit was also in 1966 on the way to Ethiopia.

5.  Mt. Kilimanjaro, Tanzania.  Africa’s tallest mountain, and I climbed to Gilsen’s Peak, 18,595 ft., with my good friend Greg Johnson, in 1983. 

6.  Rift Valley, Kenya.  One of the largest fissures in the earth, stretching from the southern part of Africa all the way up into Israel.  Outside of Nairobi you reach the escarpment, a gorgeous view of the valley.  Then you drive down the escarpment to get to the valley.  Spectacular.

7.  Pompei’s Peak, Montana.  Not a large rock, but famous because William Clark (of Lewis and Clark) carved his name on the rock, and it is still visible two hundred years later.  The sign says that this is the only place along the entire trail where such documentation occurs (and remains).  They stopped lots of places, like Beacon Rock, but only here is the evidence that they were really there.

8.  Big Bend National Park.  Lots of rocks here.  The scenery is fabulous, probably to me because I’ve not spent that much time in this sort of desert.  Wonderful plants all over the park, and great birds too, including the Colima warbler, which took a long walk.

9.  Yosemite.  What is there to say.  You’ve seen the photos.  Beautiful, and John Muir too.

10.  Diamond Peak, Oregon.  I have to put this one down for sentimental reasons.  Robyn and I climbed this mountain when we were engaged, and no, I did not propose when we got there.  We had not gone a mile before Robyn developed blisters, but she gamely kept walking for many more miles.  The mosquitos were terrible.  We were basically in tennis shoes, and no special clothing.  On the way down we met some “real climbers” (with all the trimmings).  I am sure it ticked them off that we got to the peak before they did, that we were just novices, and that we spoiled their pristine adventure.  Loved it!

Not long ago I posted an entry under the title of May I Rant a Bit in which I raised some questions about the ‘unreached people groups’ paradigm in missions.  Today I came across an article, “Metrics of Missions: Measuring Faithfulness and Fruitfulness” by Justin Long (The Mission Exchange 2010:3:4-5).  The following quotes are related to how we set our priorities in mission, and come under the heading “Measuring Obedience” in the article.

“Yes, the whole church is to bring the whole gospel to the whole world, as effectively as possible. Yet no organization can do this on its own, and we shouldn’t expect them to. Every organization has some level of specialization: a specific task or calling. I call this an organization’s “plausible promise,” and no statistic, no piece of research, no factoid will tell you what it should be.

What makes orphans any more worthy of ministry than seniors? or atheists in Europe any less deserving than Muslims in North Africa? I argue people in Europe have more opportunity to hear, but that shouldn’t determine the plausible promise of a specific ministry.  It can only be determined by listening for God’s voice and obeying it.”

For more on this subject, see the last issue of Mission Frontiers.  The entire issue focuses on the current validty of the ’unreached people groups’ concept, partly in reaction to some questions raised by the late Paul Hiebert.  (As an aside, I was fortunate to have Dr. Hiebert on my doctoral dissertation committee more than twenty years ago).

We have a ministry in an urban poor area of Mexico City, and we recently received the following report.  Community transformation happens when people get together for a common purpose, when it is their vision, and importantly, if they can see a spiritual value to what they are doing.  Hope is a strong motivator.

That is what happened last Saturday in the Eagles neighborhood. The community center sponsored a street cleaning event for the residents living along the Eagles Avenue and part of Halcones (Hawk Street). At one point there were nearly 80 people out sweeping the street and visiting together. Many of them were children with mom in tow. Later we had a meal for everyone and shared with them briefly about the Community Center’s vision to help bring the community together through service projects. Although the numbers were down for the meal we praise the Lord for this small beginning to what we hope and pray will have a large impact on the neighborhood in the future.

We have just released a brand new book in time for this year’s North American Christian Convention at which  missionary Mary Kamau will be featured.  Mary is the Director of the Hope Partnership project in Nairobi, Kenya. The Birth of Hope is a coffee-table book with great photographs and a compelling fictional account of a boy from Mathare Valley named Peter. The author is Carrie Lassiter, daughter of long time Kenya missionaries Garry and Linda B.  The book’s subtitle is “CMF International Ministry in the Slums.”

The initial idea for the book was mine (my thought was a regular book with a few photos), but my very wise colleagues fortunately overruled me, and the end result is much better.  That is one of the many benefits of working with a team.

You can order the book through the CMF website:  www:cmfi.org. Incidentally, our child sponsorship program for this part of Kenya now includes 4000 children, and is soon expected to be 5000.  All of these children are from the Mathare Valley and all are in school where previously they were not.  Many of these are AIDS orphans. But that is a story to be told another time.

Here is what I learned from the book, Ordinary Man, Extrordinary Mission: The Life and Work of E. Stanley Jones, by Stephen A. Graham (2005).  I was totally unaware of this, and perhaps it will be news to you too.  E. Stanley Jones was a missionary in India for many years.  He had a strong friendship with Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi.  Everybody knows about Gandhi’s stands on non-violence and peaceful resistance, and how these were instrumental in the waning days of colonialism.

In 1948 Jones published a book about Gandhi.  He is what Graham writes:  “I would be remiss if I did not emphasize what an enormous debt the American civil rights movement owes to  E. Stanley Jones.  Almost entirely unknown today is the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. learned about Gandhi’s theory and practice of nonviolent civil disobedience from Jones. ”  Jones writes in one of his later books, “When I saw Dr. Martin Luther King, he said, ‘It was your book on Gandhi that gave me my first inkling of nonviolent noncooperation.  Here, I said to myself, is the way for the Negro to achieve his freedom.  We will turn this whole movement from violence to nonviolence.  We will match our capacity to suffer against his physical force; and we will wear our opponents down with goodwill.’ ” (p. 373).

In a footnote Graham goes on to add:  “King’s acknowledging his reliance on Jones’s Mahatma Gandhi: An Interpretation is confirmed by an exhibit in the Martin Luther King Museum in Atlanta.  An upstairs display shows King’s copy of Jones’s book, which is marked in King’s handwriting.”  (p. 423).

It is only people who are uninformed who unilaterally lament the work of missionaries.

Our long time family friend, Sarah Sykes, is graduating from the School of Leadership and Development, Eastern University.  Her MBA is in International Economic Development.  Sarah has helped Christian Missionary Fellowship by producing the movie, One in a Million, and by serving as an Associate Board Member for the past two years.  Sarah and Brian will be moving to New York City where Brian will be starting his new role as the worship leader for the Apostles Church.  Sarah hopes to be an intern with the United Nations doing international advocacy and policy work.

Sarah represents a new kind of evangelical — one who is socially conscious, one who loves the Lord deeply, one who is not afraid to speak out against injustice, one who is doing something about poverty while being a great witness, and one with a global vision.

Congratulations Sarah!  You go girl!

Environmental Missions Consultation –
Ed of Care of Creation and Lowell of Restoring Eden would like to invite you to spend five days with them in Manhattan KS this summer discussing the concept of Environmental Missions.  Among the questions to be considered are: What is it? What are appropriate theological and biblical foundations? How can we integrate evangelism, discipleship and church planting into creation care projects? The dates are July 12-15 –  Agenda

Contact Ed   ed@careofcreation.org or,  Lowell  lowell@edenvigil.org for information or an invitation.