South Africa III

I started working on this one on a word document a few days ago, so it's totally out of date, and my thinking has been modified by what has occurred subsequently, as it continues to do as I've been reflecting some more. This was my thinking on the Friday night:
I think I should probably relate a day if that helps at all to try to start to frame the discourse that has been going on. Why the Friday? Frankly, the first bit of the Congress seems so long ago now it’s hard to remember details - the long days, the numbers of people, the amount of mind-blowing is hard to detail. It seems, in many ways, that I have been here a very long time and have changed profoundly in many ways just from these few days away.
Friday, we started with Bible study, exposition and discussion from Ephesians, done by a fairly conservative guy, but his exposition was actually quite good and impactful.
However, this was followed up with an aggressive, urgent demand to individually commit to a UPG. Irrespective of what one’s agency focuses on, based on little knowledge of the individual UPGs, and only given four minutes to fill out the commitment form, it felt very rushed and aggressive.
This was followed by a lunch debrief with some Canadian friends on the delegation because of other issues that have come up over the course of the Congress. Solid guys. It was really good in sitting with them and talking about our uncomfortableness and our dis-ease with the nature of the discourse going on here. It was encouraging to sit with men who agreed that there are discourses and frames here that aren’t ringing true, that verge on unrighteous and narrow in their scope. I couldn’t bring myself to attend another unsatisfying multiplex and deal with sessions that would just tear my hair out, so God rescued me from that by having me bump into one of our young aboriginal leaders who was on his way to meet with a Latin American leader that I had planned to have supper with anyways. So off we went to find her, where she was in a car with a South African activist, when they told us to hop into the car for an “alternative Congress”. We hop into the car, thinking we were just going to hang out in a café and discuss theology and kingdom. Instead, off we went to the townships, seeing how the church is there as well, how poverty and spirituality and weakness and beauty all collide uncomfortably in the metal shacks of black South Africa. It was just about what I needed at this point in the Congress.
Back to supper, where talking with a Latin American about her struggles to see how this Congress has been relevant to her national discourse and to mine. That was also helpful to see how we wanted to push the boundaries of the discourse beyond the narrow worldview of traditional conservative American evangelicalism. Afterwards, another friend related how he had gone to a session that was dealing with the global trends facing the church over the next decade, listing items such as pornography in the top ten. He had asked at the end of the presentation why issues such as global poverty and economic inequity were not counted amongst the top ten issues facing the church today, yet pornography managed to make the list, with which he was completely dismissed and didn’t even have his comment acknowledged as a point to be made.
Encouragingly, the evening session was a celebratory service, focusing on Africa; it’s hard for it not to be celebratory if the African continent is involved.