14 Dec Turkey: A Good Place to Start

Jeff Bleijerveld, Director of Global Ministries

In early October, I traveled to  Turkey with Kurt Uhen, a member of the Global Ministries Leadership Team who is from Emmanuel UB in Fort Wayne, Ind. We were looking at opportunities for United Brethren ministry.

We have been talking for several years about ministering in the Muslim world.

• The United Brethren denomination has ministries in Latin America, which is traditionally Catholic or post-Catholic.
• We have ministry in Thailand, which is primarily Buddhist, as well as in other Asian countries with a large Buddhist constituency.
• We have churches in India, which is predominantly Hindu.

But we’ve not had any kind of work in a Muslim country. We’re not trying to add ministry in the Muslim world just to say we have a full set. But an increasing number of people in UB churches have a heart for the Muslim world and want to be involved in reaching Muslims. Are we going to get involved, or just send people to other organizations which work in Muslim countries?

As a newbie to Muslim ministry, where should we start? We wouldn’t want to head into Saudi Arabia, a strict Islamic state with sharia law. But Turkey offers some good possibilities. Though Turkey is predominantly Muslim, it is a secular state, westernized in many ways, wants to become a member of the European Union, and provides certain freedoms of religion. It might be a good place to get our feet wet.

13 Dec Notes from Cape Town: Nurturing Future Missions Leaders

L-r: Jeff Bleijerveld, Doug Birdsall, and Brian Birdsall

Jeff Bleijerveld, Director of Global Ministries

Doug Birdsall spearheaded Cape Town 2010 as executive director of the Lausanne Committee. Doug grew up in the United Brethren church, the son of Dr. S. Roger and Mary Lou Birdsall, a long-time minister in the denomination. His brother Brian, a Global Ministries endorsed staff who heads up the Campus Crusade work in Ukraine, also came as a delegate.

Doug did phenomenal job. He was on the go morning, noon, and night. As I left at the end of the day’s events to head back to the hotel to chill out, he was making the rounds of various receptions throughout the evening.

I think Doug and some of the people who worked with him really had a vision for making the congress more than just missions thinkers getting together and hammering out these issues. Their vision was to open this up to the entire church.

One of their goals was to nurture future missions leaders. With that in mind, they focused on inviting people 50 years or younger. I’m 49, so I barely squeezed in. They really weighted their decisions toward getting younger people who might emerge in the future as missions leaders.

Many people were invited to apply for an invitation to the conference, but then they went through a selection process. Each country had its own selection team to determine who would represent that country. About 4000 persons from America applied, and only 400 were invited; I was privileged to make the cut. In Canada, 6000 people applied for only 60 spots. So the selection teams had a difficult job.

11 Dec Our Mexico Churches: Living in Fear of Violence

Bishop Denis Casco (front) prays over a victim of violence in Mexico.

Denis Casco, Bishop, Mexico Conference

Violence, crime, poverty, and immorality, are striking the cities of Mexico without compassion. The dangers we confront go beyond what you see in Chicago gangster movies and those of robbery, death, and corruption in the old American West.

Missionaries and pastors today in Mexico live with pain, frustration, and great insecurity, and they must pay protection money to drug cartels and kidnappers.

Our leaders at churches in Ciudad Juarez (across the border from El Paso, Texas) and Michoacán (the central-west region) are in great danger of death, kidnapping, and extreme poverty.

Recently, I was in Ciudad Juarez to see our churches. During that Saturday night, 24 people were assassinated about 400 meters from the United Brethren church where Rev. Carlos Chaves is the senior pastor.

In that shooting one of our members was assassinated. The next week, the niece of Pastor Chaves was abused sexually and killed.

The main entrances to our churches are being watched. Church members are only letting members and well-known people into the church, because they fear that somebody could be assassinated inside.

Ciudad Juarez is the most dangerous city in the world, a city without law. We have an number of United Brethren churches here. Some are closing because our people are terrified.

The people only go out for an emergency. The children do not attend school regularly. It is like a ghost city. The US Department of State warns American citizens not to visit Ciudad Juarez, unless they have something very important to do there.

In the last three years, more than 27,000 people in Mexico have died. Some deaths were related to organized crime, and others were innocent victims in the wrong place at the wrong time. These are the challenges we face as we work for the Kingdom of God in Mexico.

It is estimated that 50,000 children in Mexico have lost their parents during the past three yeas, having been assassinating by organized crime. The number of orphaned children will increase, as will the amount of youth deliquency, robbery, and drug addiction.

Please pray for us.

10 Dec Poland: A Story of First Fruits

Baptism candidates in Kutno, Poland.

Michal and his family.

Donna and Arek Delik
Global Ministries endorsed staff in Kutno, Poland

We were surprised to see Michal in our first Sunday service after our 6-month furlough in Hong Kong. We were even more surprised when he told us that he was now a believer.

Michal was my student for 3 years and attended our English camp with his brother for the last 5 years. He was a quiet guy and didn’t seem to be interested in the gospel.

The baptism of Michal

During the 2009 English camp he became acquainted with the couple who led the American team. The wife encouraged him to join the exchange program of the high school where she worked. She even offered a place for him to stay while he was in America.

Michal said, “This year in America was the turning point for me, because I encountered God there.”

Since June, Michal has been coming regularly, and joined our youth group and teenager English Bible study. We have seen a strong desire of God in him and are encouraged by the transformation in his life.

November 27 was Arek’s 45th birthday. What a special way to celebrate it with the baptism of Michal. We were very glad to see Michal’s family there, even his father, who claimed to be an atheist. Michal’s greatest wish is that his whole family will get to know this Jesus who has changed his life.

When we started our English teaching ministry in 2000, our main target was teenagers. Though this ministry opened many new doors, at certain stages we did question its value, as we hadn’t seen much long-lasting fruit.

Michal is the first fruit from the English camp ministry. We pray that this first fruit is just a taste of lies ahead.

10 Dec Sierra Leone Conference Underway

Sierra Leone conference is going well. We convened yesterday and began greetings from representatives from the Wesleyan, Assemblies of God, Baptist, United Methodist, and other denominations and organizations, including the Evangelical Association of Sierra Leone.

The theme this year is “Sowing Seeds for a Bountiful Harvest,” using Matthew 13:23. Visitors from afar include Rev. Joe Abu, pastor of Mt. Zion United African Church in Philadelphia, Rev. Peter Mansaray of the UB church in Berlin, and Rev. Dr. John Jusu of the African International University in Nairobi.

This is a historic conference in which the Sierra Leone conference is becoming fully nationalized after 155 years as a missions conference. Rev John Pessima was elected yesterday as the new bishop and will assume his duties in January.

Conference continues until December 12, when we will hold an all-conference worship service at the Moriba Town Bo United Brethren Church, which is pastored by Rev. Emmanuel Farma.

Presently, the conference has 73 churches and 15 preaching points. It also has 54 schools with a total enrollment of just over 10,000 students and 376 teachers. There is one theological college and one hospital.

Rev. Pessima currently serves the Kissy United Brethren Church in Freetown, where an induction service will be held in early January. The bishop, his wife Nancy, and four children will be moving to Bo where the denominational offices are located.

09 Dec Blue Dots, and the Missing Chinese

The opening of the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization

I was among the 4000 people who attended Cape Town 2010, the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, held in October in South Africa. It opened on Sunday, October 17, and closed a week later. This was my first trip to South Africa.

I’ve attended many missions gatherings. But I’ve never attended a missions conference where, as you walk through the convention center, the vast majority of people are not North American. Usually it’s predominantly a bunch of North Americans getting together to talk about missions, with a few internationals who are part of the discussions. But this time, 90 percent were from beyond North America. That was fascinating.

We all wore name tags, with our name and country. But a lot of people had a blue dot on their nametag, with only their first name and no country. The blue dot meant, “Don’t take a photo of this person.” These persons came from security-sensitive countries, and didn’t want their photo splashed on websites, because it could be harmful to them. There were a lot of blue dots.

We couldn’t avoid noticing the absence of 200 house church Chinese pastors. The Lausanne Congress had invited 200 Chinese people, but the Chinese government didn’t let them go. In fact, the government confiscated their passports and even put some under house arrest so that they couldn’t leave for the conference.

The Lausanne organizers explained some of this the first night of the conference, and we had a chance to pray for the “empty chairs.” All of the delegates were divided into groups of six persons; we had an empty chair at our table, which meant it was intended for someone from a house church in China.

That was disappointing. They could have benefits from the encouragement and insight of others from around the world.

In the end, the Lausanne Congress offered an apology to the Chinese government for not consulting with them first before offering the invitation to their people. The Chinese government basically said, “If you wanted to invite 200 of our people, you should have checked with our government first.” They said that’s the reason they weren’t allowed to go.

08 Dec The Plight of Iraqi Christians

Iraqi Christian refugees holding a service in Turkey.

Jeff Bleijerveld, Director of Global Ministries

While visiting recently in Turkey, we had the opportunity to meet, on two occasions, with Iraqi Christians who are now refugees. These Iraqis have fled their homeland since the fall of Saddam Hussein, an event which many believed would bring hope to Iraq. But wars bring unintended consequences. The resulting lack of control unleashed religious violence against the Christian community, including the recent bombing of St. George’s Cathedral in the heart of Baghdad.

Strangely enough, the Assyrian Orthodox, who make up the largest number of Christians in Iraq, were provided a certain degree of freedom and protection under Saddam. In fact, Saddam’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, is a Chaldean Christian. Under Saddam, Christians had rights. Saddam saw them as having a historic right to be present in the country.

But no more. Now that the dictator is no longer defending them, it has become very dangerous to be a Christian in Iraq. Today these Christians are fleeing their homeland in search of asylum in neighboring Syria, Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. However, asylum is temporary, and many are working to gain refugee status in Europe and North America.