Facebook Question #2

A while back I asked on facebook for questions for us to try to answer regarding Filipino culture. This, that's right, is one of those posts. This one right here, as you can tell by the title, is to answer question ang numerong duha (that's number two!)!

This comes from Judy Russell. She asks if we feel secluded due to our language differences.

This is a fantastic question, and the answer will take us about eight months back, all the way to February...

When we started taking language classes way back then we knew very little Cebuano, and I mean basically one or two phrases. And we later found out that we were using them horribly incorrect. We went through the course of material that our awesome teacher patiently guided us through in about 7 months, while the course is intended to take closer to a year or year and a half, if you really pace yourself (imagine a fire-hose attached to a hydrant, now rip the hose off and drink straight from the hydrant). We did learn quite a bit and are now going through the process of relearning more of the fine points that we may have missed in those whirlwind months of study.

I would say that with the level of language that we now have we can communicate fairly okay with people here. We're not as good as we need to be, no way near, but we have had times where we have been able to lead Bible Studies and share the Gospel in full-blown Cebuano, or have normal-ish conversations. Sometimes it feels like we are clicking and everything is firing on all cylinders and other times we have to sit and think and write out what we are going to say before we say it. It's really like when you are in line to order some food and you know what you want and you rehearse it five times in your head before you get up to the counter to actually order.

Yeah...it's like that.

But now, after all of the language classes that we have had, would I say that we feel secluded because of our language differences? In a way, of course! No matter how long we live here and get more and more proficient in speaking the language, we will always be missing out on idioms or figures of speech that native Filipinos will use. Or the speed in which some people speak will just be too quick for us.

A tip when speaking with someone who is learning English: Slow down, don't get loud! They aren't deaf, they just can't catch all you are saying because you are talking so fast.

I would also say that, in another way, we don't feel as isolated as we maybe once did. We are able to communicate on days when we have our thinking caps on. When we don't have a rough switch from thinking in English to thinking in Cebuano then it's usually (sometimes) fairly straightforward to communicate with everyday folk we run into. Even if we have to ask them to slow down and repeat themselves we have had a few decent conversations with some locals who barely speak any English.

But there is actually so much more complexity to this situation than I am able to write here. The type of linguistic knowledge we are going after goes farther than scraping by through high school Spanish classes. It also goes farther than just survival-level language (you know, like being able to ask where the bathroom is and things like that). We are trying to be conversant enough that when we are able to pick up on social cues we can share the Gospel with our tricycle driver over the roar of his motorbike engine. It's being able to preach basically on demand whenever we visit a church for the first time. It's being able to prepare a Bible Study not using Google translate because we need more nuance and less literal, rigid translation. It's then being able to answer random questions that we haven't had time to sit and think through in Cebuano because someone is spouting off something crazy or has a real difficult question or they are in a spiritual crisis. These situations require much more than simply survival Cebuano.

But why not use a translator? We do have one, our parter Rudy (why not go ahead and befriend him on facebook and tell him you're praying for him!) is awesome and really helpful, but he can't be expected to literally be with us 24/7/365, he has a family and ministry responsibilities of his own. So if we really want to be efficient and helpful and if we really want to try to make any sort of impact while we live and work here, then we need to continue to study and practice and push ourselves to be better Cebuano speakers.

If you are interested in learning a little more about what we are planning to do with our vast mental stores of Cebuano language learning, check out this post.

On a related note: Most of you guys know that we have some new missionary friends that have recently arrived here in Butuan. They are here doing medical mission work and have recently began language study with Ate Mimi, our teacher. Pray for them that they have understanding and patience with themselves as they will be taking classes for the next year.

Atong Trabaho (Our Work)

Let's talk about work, everybody loves work right, ooh, and geography, everybody is a fan of that too, right?

This is a picture of Tubajon, the municipality that we are working in on Dinagat Island, which is north of Surigao Del Norte (at the bottom of the map), which is on the current island that we live on, Mindanao (that was a mouthful).

The area is divided into 9 baranagays. These 9 barangays are spread out through the whole of the red area on the map, with most of them actually being along the coast inside the sideways v looking bay on the left side of the island. For our purposes, we are basically calling them villages that all answer to one mayor, even though each of them have a barangay captain that is responsible to the mayor for the administration of that area.

Out of the nine that are in this area, there are four barangays (that we know of) that have absolutely no evangelical church anywhere within their administrative areas. These four areas are going to be our objective for church planting. With the contacts that we have within one of the barangays we will seek to do some training for some local church planters who will be able to get into these areas much easier than we ever could and work on planting a church through door to door evangelism and Bible Studies. We will help with teaching and leading as we need to and as we are able, but we will hope that these men will be planted there to start and lead a healthy gospel centered church.

I, Jeff, personally have big dreams about this work and this area. I hope that we can get in there and help see some revitalization of one of our partner churches and that the pastor, along with our main national parter Rudy (go send him a friend request on facebook and let him know your praying for him!) and I can start a sort of training center for pastors that can be a big help to other pastors in the area as far as theological and leadership development go. I want to have conferences that are encouraging and challenging and helpful to the leaders. I want to see solid, evangelical, gospel centered, Word and sacrament (or ordinance) churches that preach the Gospel and rightly administer the Lord's Supper and baptism.

When we go to Tubajon we are both encouraged and discouraged at the same time. We are encouraged that there are people there who want to serve the Lord and seek to do so as much as they are taught to by their churches and leaders. We are encouraged by them being so welcoming and loving towards us, which is amazing because rural areas here tend to feel like they are more suspicious of us than anything else. But we are also discouraged because people are still lost there. Hopelessly lost and trapped in sin and enslaved to dead ritualism that they are told will save them. There are people there who are not being taught the Gospel of our God but false and twisted doctrines that don't do anything for their spiritual state. We are discouraged because of the evangelical churches that are there, they are weak and discipleship and fellowship and the Bible is not really a priority that is being taught all the time and lived out by the leaders within their community. Our hearts break for these people not because we have the answers and can fix them, but because we have had the answer preached to us and we have had the truth told to us and shown to us. The answer will not come from us, but we will still tell them about Him. So pray with us, pray for Dinagat. Pray for Tubajon and the government there, and the people there and the churches that are there. Pray for the churches that are not yet. Pray for the Christians that are not yet. Pray for us, that we would teach not what we see fit, but what God sees best through His Word.

Review of Katharina & Martin Luther

Since it is Reformation month I thought that I would read and try to write a quick review of a book on the man who began the Protestant Reformation in force. Michelle DeRusha wrote this nice little book on the marriage of the Reformer, something which is often overlooked in most Reformation history. We tend to focus on the theology and the upheaval of the Reformation, because that is important. But DeRusha does an amazing job at showing why Luther's marriage to a runaway nun was so groundbreaking at that time. This focus shows how Luther's theology is fleshed out in everyday life, and it is a great reminder that our theology (because every Christian is a theologian) needs to be fleshed out and connected with the everyday and mundane of life.

With only 8 letters of Katharina (von Bora) Luther that has come down to historians there is a hard time to figuring out important things about her early life and the day to day of their marriage. There are copious amounts of letters from Martin (and correspondence among his friends) though, and a piecing together of their lives is possible and I believe that DeRusha does a fantastic job weaving their narrative together while showing little peeks at Luther's theology as it is developing along side some very important and interesting historical bits and bobs that shed even more light on what their lives might have been like. Things like late medieval pregnancy and delivery books to how the lives of women in convents was often very socially mobile really give a glimpse into something past the big theological and political climate that we are used to reading when we read Reformation history.

They say when doing something like this to list a positive, then a negative, then a positive. Here is my "negative". I really wish that it read a bit more like a narrative. It is a fantastic book that is filled with narrative sprinkled with historical asides that are fascinating and eye opening. But when I think of narrative-style history books I think of something that reads and feels like you are  instead of looking in from the outside. I think DeRusha tries to invite you into the Black Cloister (the Luther home, awesome name isn't it?) but I think that you are left in the parlour instead of welcomed in to sit at the table to experience a dinner with Martin Luther and all of the students and politicians and theologians eating and conversing with him.

Aside from that one thing, I think this is a fantastic book that also has the potential to show all of these major players at the beginning of the Reformation in a much more human light. They were groundbreaking theologians that were working on reforming the Church and taking her back to Scripture, but just like us they faced debt, bills, deaths of children, they had problem family members and went through human problems. They weren't simply theological machines. This book shows us that these major historical and theological players in one of the greatest and most trying moments in history were real people, and in the case of Martin and Katharina Luther, a real--and radical--marriage.

You can pick up your own copy here