One of the most important values the nation of Vietnam has is education.  They are working hard to improve the entire education system from top to bottom.  One of the ways that we are partnering with them in this is to bring specialists in to teach at the University of Hanoi.  I’m just a bit proud to say that my wife, Bonnie, is particularly qualified to help here, having just earned her Master’s in Education Administration.  She currently serves as a Curriculum Resource Instructor in a local school and will be teaching education concepts and techniques for two days in their Dept. of Education – both teachers and students will attend.

The picture above is from last year’s trip where two Social workers from Northwood Church taught a two day seminar in their expertise.

One of the things we will be doing in Vietnam next week is working at two orphanages.  The picture above was taken by me last year and you can see that there is not much for an abandoned child to hope for.  These babies are in a crib on cardboard just as a babysitting tool so that they do not have to be watched, since there is not enough help to go around.

We are going to work on some basic improvements at both orphanages and possibly even make room for a vegatable garden at one place.  Anything we can do to make their lives better, no matter how basic, is a vast improvement.

Friday, March 13, Skelly will send a team of 10 Servant Messengers to Vietnam.  I’ll be sharing some of what we intend to do while serving the people of Vietnam.  If you would like to read about our trip to Vietnam from last year go to the Vietnam page to find the links.

Also, you can look at pictures in my Photoblog of Vietnam March 2008 or Flickr set of the same pics.

The answer from William Carey, the “founder” of the modern protestant mission movement (italics are my emphasis):

It has been objected that there are multitudes in our own nation, and within our immediate spheres of action, who are as ignorant as the South-Sea savages, and that therefore we have enough work at home, without going into other countries.  That there are thousands in our own land as far from God as possible, I readily grant, and that this ought to excite us to ten-fold diligence to our work, and in attempts to spread divine knowledge among them is a certain fact; but that it ought to supersede all attempts to spread the gospel in foreign parts seems to want proof.  Our own countrymen have the means of grace, and may attend on the word preached if they choose it.  They have means of knowing the truth, and faithful ministers are placed in every part of the land, whose spheres of action might be much extended if their congregations were but more hearty and active in the cause; but with them the case is widely different, who have no Bible, no written language (which many of them have not), no ministers, no good civil government, nor any of those advantages which we have.  Pity therefore, humanity, and much more Christianity, call loudly for every possible exertion to introduce the gospel amongst them.

Concerning those who are content simply to pray for the lost without going:

Many can do nothing but pray, and prayer is perhaps the only thing in which Christians of all denominations can cordially, and unreservedly unite; but in this we may all be one, and in this the strictest unanimity ought to prevail.

We must not be contented however with praying, without exerting ourselves in the use of means for the obtaining of those things we pray for.  Were the children of light but as wise in their generation as the children of this world they would stretch every nerve to gain so glorious a prize, nor ever imagine that it was to be obtained in any other way.

From his seminal work, An Enquiry into the Obligation of Christians to use means for the Conversion of the Heathens, 1792.

Now let me ask this:  Do you think Carey would agree that contributing to a denominational structure that parses out pennies on the contributed dollar to the actual “Mission Field” is the same as a church taking the responsibility itself to go where the doors are open?  Even if it is far?  Even if the economy is dire?  Even if the cost prohibits some from making the journey?

As we seek to be Missional, our responsibility is to engage people in every arena, whether near or far, to which God gives us access.  God has opened a door for us to be such in Vietnam.  Here are a vew of my favorite pics.

You can see these and more at my photoblog or flickr account.

[Show as slideshow]

click on logo for IVM page

[Please note:  I know this article is even longer than its predecessor.  If you don't want to read it all, I completely understand, but if you would skip to the concluding 1/3 of the article, you will find the overall point laid out there.  Obviously, the groundwork is important in my mind, but having become a skimmer of blogs I understand that you may not care to go that far.  If you are a member of Skelly Drive Baptist Church, particularly if you are in leadership or on a Search Committee, please try to wade through it all.  Thanks!]

I’ve decided to work through some more prolegomena* before running through the structural descriptions and illustrations.  I think this background will help with the overall picture as we progress.

Today, the subject is culture.  I think the word “culture” is often problematic because because it is accurately used in such divergent ways.  I hear and read traditionalists often use the word to refer to what the Apostle John called “the world” when he wrote:

15 Do not love the world or the things that belong to the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in him. Because everything that belongs to the world— 16 the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride in one’s lifestyle—is not from the Father, but is from the world. 17 And the world with its lust is passing away, but the one who does God’s will remains forever.   – 1 John 2:15-17 (HCSB)

Which is different from the way he uses it earlier in the chapter:

1 My little children, I am writing you these things so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ the righteous One. 2 He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not only for ours, but also for those of the whole world.    – 1 John 2:1-2 (HCSB)

Again, the use of the word “culture” in this way is not “wrong,” but it is a limited scope of the use that I will make of it.  So let me explain what culture is for our discussion.

I confess that the term was mostly abstract to me until this year.  When talking about culture, I thought of traditions and ways of doing things that are different from me.  Which is correct, but shallow.  For the greater part, I viewed culture as a matter of perspective.  You just see things a little differently than I do.  Also correct.  Kind of.

Perspective is actually more a result of culture, rather than the essence of culture.  You see things the way you do as a result of the culture into which you are immersed.  It is not the culture itself.

I didn’t really understand culture until February of this year.  In fact, unless you have had a similar experience, my description of this transformational moment may fail to help you grasp what I finally caught standing on the street in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Hanoi, like many places around the world, has a unique traffic … er … situation.  You see, the traffic in Hanoi has very little regulation.  The entirety of the city, at a population of 6.2 million (including outlying metro areas after an official merger in just a couple of weeks, which will double the official city population, according to wikipedia), has only a handful of stoplights, which have only recently been installed and to which only the majority of the population adheres, most of whom do so from the back of a scooter.  In other words, stoplights in Hanoi are just a suggestion to many, when they exist at all.

The entire flow of traffic is governed by a chaos theory that seems also to govern the flight of flocks of birds and schools of small fish that flow and turn together as both individuals and collective.  Well, it might help you to better see it in action, so here is a little YouTube video to help you get a sense of it.

I’ll follow this up with a couple of pictures I’ve produced here before of the exact same intersection:

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Now I know that you are already thinking about my last post concerning the individual and are speculating about how I am going to say that the Missional Church needs to act in a similar fashion with the individuals in fluid motion inside the whole – all moving together to accomplish the goal.  Great thinking!

But, no.

The revelatory experience as I observed the traffic in Hanoi was about the saturating nature of culture within society.  How do you learn to drive in such an environment?  You are immersed in it.  Everyone teaches you through trial and error (hopefully not critical error) and you learn.

Here’s the big point:  Culture is something that everyone in the society agrees upon as commonly accepted behavior.  You learn it as you go because everyone in the entire society teaches it to you.  No matter where you are, if you break the boundaries of what is commonly accepted, you will be corrected by those around you.  That correction may be verbal, hostile, kind, a gesture or something else.  It may come from relative, friend or stranger.  Nevertheless, everyone in society holds everyone else accountable for their cultural standards.

The results of which are key.

It is incredibly difficult, once something is ingrained in a culture, to remove it.  Look at tobacco in America.  There has never been such a targeted campaign to rid a culture of anything that has been sustained and fueled like the campaign to rid America of tobacco.  You could count prohibition, but I would argue that the majority of influential society was not actually on board with that campaign like the support the anti-tobacco campaign has.

Nevertheless, tobacco still survives the crippling lawsuits and picks up new converts daily.

Another result of the saturation of culture, is that churches have a culture of their own, and that culture has some specific elements to the local church, but also participates in concentric and overlapping circles of culture that radiate out through the local context, denominational influences and even the churched society of America inclusive of all denominations over the last 50, 100, 350 years.  As a matter of fact, most of the “decline of the American culture” emails, rants, sermons… even songs, that I pick up on are really decrying the fact that American culture doesn’t reflect the church culture the way it once did.  It is not that American culture is dead.  We still have national values.  Those values just don’t reflect the values of the people in church.

For evidence of this, look at the recent move toward conservationism and the typical response of the evangelical community.  America values “eco-friendly” lifestyles, but the church doesn’t.  In broad terms, anyway.  Read this article on the Eco-Justice Blog for a brief example.

Now, as it relates to Missional and Institutional Church structures, there are a few consequences of church culture.  Of course, it means that the church has to work to understand the culture it is trying to reach – Breaking the Missional Code – so to speak.  That’s the easy part.  Or, at least, the point most obvious to those interested in Missionality.

The more difficult part is deciphering your own church culture, or at even getting the church to realize that it has its own culture.

Because culture is saturation, most people assume that the way they think is “normal.”  It is, for their context, but what they don’t realize is that they are a part of a commonly agreed upon system of values that has them convinced that those values are “RIGHT” and violation of those values is “WRONG.”

For those saturated in the church culture, it means that certain songs, worship styles, modes of dress, lingo and even the evaluation of staff (“working” in the office during office hours, as opposed to being in the community, for instance) becomes something that is “right” because it is what they have always seen and done.  This is most humorously and sadly seen in the comment, “We’ve never done it that way before…” in response to a desire to make a change in any process of the church.

For the individuals and the church as a whole to accept the fact that the things that they have learned from each other and held as valuable are not necessarily right but just what they are used to doing is probably the most significant yet overlooked step in getting a church and its individuals mobilized in the community.

The failure to identify church culture is a de-motivator as well as a barrier to missional engagement.  It sucks away motivation because individuals look at those outside the church as living “wrongly” and their solution is to simply tell them that they need to get into the church and live “rightly.”  This mires the church and the individual into an attractional mode, at best, and can trend to move the church and individual into a judgmental attitude.  This creates an almost impenetrable barrier between the church and its internal culture and the unchurched and their culture, with very little national or local culture to act as a common bond between them and no motivation by either to break through that barrier.

Thus, the best, first thing that a church can do is identify and then evaluate its own internal culture and see what things might need to be excised from itself.  As I mentioned with the tobacco issue in America, simply identifying the ingrained value as needing to be gone is not enough.  It takes time, teaching and will sometimes take the absence of those unwilling to see beyond their raising before the culture becomes able to embrace a new system of values.  We see this taking place in the Exodus as the adults of Israel, despite the plagues, despite the pillar of smoke/fire (glory of God’s personal presence), the protection against the armies of Egypt by the separation of the two by the pillar/presence of God still complained that they would rather be slaves.  After the Red Sea and the destruction of the Egyptian armies, they still refused to take the promised land even with God as their head, and so, ultimately, God had to allow those who were saturated with the slave culture to die off and raise up a generation who were saturated with a culture that depended daily on Him for their very provision, via manna, quail, water, etc.

Sadly, churches in transition may well have to experience similar absence of those who can not introspectively evaluate their own church culture.

Still, the first major undertaking is personal self evaluation and the comparison of that which is demanded of God to that which is normative for us as dictated by that in which we were raised.

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*prolegomena – For Vicki and Tiffany, this word means “stuff you have to talk about so that the stuff you are going to talk about later makes sense.”  By defining the individual previously and culture now, it will be easier to understand the conversation about transitioning between structures later.

Who knew Systematic Theology would pay off? ;)

I arrived at my front door step at about 4:00 am Tulsa Time, which is about 32 hours after we left for the airport in Hanoi. If you take into account the night train from Lao Cai Province the night before, it turns into about 45 hours of planes, trains and automobiles, during which I got about 6 hours of sleep – mostly on the train.

I woke up my wife, then later the kids and gave out presents, then went to sleep while they got ready for school. I woke up for the bathroom about 11:30 am and tried to watch a little tv and wake up. It was to no avail. Bonnie called me from school, but I barely remember it. She woke me up when she got home and forced me out of bed to get me started on the long road of recovery from jet lag.

Apparently, the rumors about jet lag are for real.

I appreciate the prayers and positive comments. In the coming days and weeks, I’ll post some of the thoughts and things I learned from the trip as well as some of the funniest moments.

I have uploaded new pictures to the photoblog before we left, if you haven’t check it in a few days. I am probably going to delete the last couple of uploads and then reload them with other pictures that I didn’t upload because I didn’t have time. There are a couple of train pictures that were too large and I didn’t have time to edit them. I’d like to put them in, but they would be out of sequence if I just add them now. If you get to checking and find a lot gone, then you’ll know what is going on.

Thanks again. I’m going back to bed soon. See you soon.

One of the real benefits of our assessment meeting was that there was a group from another church (Forefront, from Virginia) that was here working in the Ta Phin school. One of the nice surprises here has been that the Vietnam government has taken education very seriously. In the remote village we found a well built school with several classrooms and teachers. The forefront church had been there during the week and worked on several projects at the school.

Easiest to accomplish was the computer lab they set up. For about $1,500, they bought two computers and a printer from a local retailer. GVI and Sherman set it up. The computers were Windows based and in English, which is the way they wanted them. They did have some software that helped with some translation and programming issues that was pre-loaded by the local retailer.

Next, they had some ladies teaching English as a Second Language while they were there for the week. Everyone enjoyed this opportunity to interact, as they did during the playtime. The Forefront group also bought or brought some soccer balls, basket balls and a basketball rim. The created a makeshift basketball goal that the kids were amazed to see. It was evident that they had never seen one before, because when Brian (their group leader) through the ball to the kids, they scattered.

Of most impact was the water filtration and storage system that Forefront installed. This was a $5,000 project that included two storage tanks and a UV filtration system. It surprised many of us to learn that the people here did not drink the water, either. We were under the false impression that they were used to the bacteria here and that it was safe for them, but not for us. Apparently, the water isn’t safe for anyone to drink – but it is at Ta Phin School. They now have potable water on tap, thanks to the Forefront church.

While we were in Sapa, we toured various areas trying to understand the ethnic minorities that lived in the northern mountain regions. The most visible in the town are Hmong and Red Dao (spelled with a “D” but pronounced “Zao”) who sell their handmade wares from person to person. If you buy from one, expect to be swarmed by everyone else who will want you to buy from them as well.

We took a ride up to the Red Dao Village of Ta Phin that had become a bit of a tourist stop, unlike most other villages. The Government of Viet Nam put in a wide sidewalk to make it easier on the tourists, thus encouraging them to stop in.

When you pull up, the ladies jump and run from wherever they are to the van, where you will be swarmed with offers to buy their wares, from handbags, to scarves, to earrings, to blankets or wall coverings. Before the doors opened, Sherman gave us the warning that if you buy early, you will be incessantly hounded by everyone to buy the entirety of your time there, so if you buy, do so at the end.

As we sat in the van listening to Sherman, the ladies outside were pointing at us and chattering. I felt a bit like a monkey in the zoo, something that would come back to me at the end of my tour.

Each of us had a few ladies that followed us up the path, where we stopped at a stone carver’s shop first. We moved on to a local watering hole with a beautiful garden. Finally, we stopped at the home of one of the women, who agreed to let us come inside. I stayed outside and talked with one of the Red Dao ladies that had been following me with her baby on her back. Dennis came out and said, “Art, get in here and bring your camera. There is something you will never see again in your life in here.”

I entered the low door to what turned out to be a really spacious home, albeit one with a dirt floor and a fire pit just inside the door where a man was sitting. They led me to the back of the house where some meat was hanging from low rafters and something on a suspended platform that I couldn’t quite make out.

Dennis reminded me that they had just been through a very hard winter and many of their crops were suffering while quite a few of their livestock had died. Then he told me what was on the platform. One of their water buffalo had died in the winter, so they drug it up to the house and cured it with the other meat and ate it all winter long. You could still make out the horns and some of the other pieces left, though there was not much.

After we started back, the lady with whom I had been talking (who also asked me the BIG question: Why are you here?) began to work a hard sell on me to buy some of here wares. I had already bought all I needed and was watching my money, so I told her pretty early that I wasn’t buying. That didn’t seem to dissuade her at all. The only pause I got was when I told her that she had picked the wrong person. I had no idea why that made an impact, though I would soon find out.
As we got closer to the van, she was really pressing, though she had only one real sales pitch and she stuck to the same questions, “You buy from me?” “No.” “Why you no buy from me?” “I don’t have money to buy.” Slight pause. “You buy from me?”

When we were almost to the van, Margie bought a scarf from one of the ladies, and Gail admired it. I turned to my shadow and asked her if she had something like that to sell to Gail, because she wanted one. She turned and looked at Gail and then told me she had one but couldn’t sell it to her. I asked her why not and she said that the ladies that had been following Gail would be mad if Gail bought from her.

That’s what the pointing was about. They were picking who they were going follow. Once you’ve locked on to someone, it’s like sales people working the floor of a store in the US. You don’t poach someone else’s customer.

When we got on the van, my saleswoman got very animated. She started saying, “Hey, man! Crazy man! Why you no buy from me? I let you talk to my baby! Crazy man! Crazy Monkey!”

Apparently we were monkeys in the zoo. Or at least I was.

I need to pick up where I left off, but just a couple of hours before we pick up and go home. We rode the night train back last night and had a better experience back than up. Since daylight savings time occured in the US, we are now exactly 12 hours difference from Tulsa Time.

The internet was very spotty in Sapa. They had some internet cafe’s, but it was down when I went to check on it. I gave up.

Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll post the article I wrote upon arriving in Sapa, and then I will post some follow up articles decribing Sapa when I get home. I’ll also upload a selection of pictures.

Here’s the first article…

Sapa: City in the Clouds

We got off of the night train while it was still dark this morning (Monday) and loaded up in a hired van that was prearranged by Glocal Ventures, Inc., our hosts and partners. It takes about an hour to go up appx. 3,000 feet from Lao Cai City, the capitol city of Lao Cai Province, to Sapa. I wanted to take pictures of the terraced hills that were cut into the almost vertical mountainside and the houses that were hanging out over the edge of what seemed like infinity – or at the very least a long way down. Unfortunately it was too early in the morning and I couldn’t get good pictures while moving in the van in the low light. If I could have been still, I would have had some of the better shots of the whole trip.

We ate breakfast at the place where we are staying. It is staffed by some of the kids that have come from the orphanages and trained at the cooking school. They have pastries here that look phenomenal. No. I have not yet tried them, but I doubt that will last the afternoon.

We went to the town center today and walked through the market. The handicrafts are amazing, representing a tremendous personal effort and skill. The ethnic minorities are plentiful here. The Hmong and Red Zao women walk the streets with their wares trying to sell them. If they see that you have bought from one of them, they seem to think that you will buy from all of them. I have at several times found myself surrounded by women with their hand woven tapestries, clothes and small pillow covers.

The food there actually smelled pretty good, but I only partook of some sticky rice that Sherman bought and some root tea with sweet grass. They had bottles stacked and filled with what looked like animals preserved in formaldehyde that I used to see in the science lab storage room in High School. I later discovered that it is liquor fermented from various dead animals and insects, from enormous bees to scorpions.

I’m sticking to bottled water.

After the market I came back to the room to get some rest. I had not slept well on the train and took a nap for an hour and a half and it seemed that I had just closed my eyes, when Sherman knocked on my door. The others had gone to walked to town to eat and we went to join them there.

There is another group here working with Glocal Ventures. They are from Virginia and came straight to Sapa to work on a water filtration project at a school here. They were at lunch and we got to visit with them a bit. They are about one step ahead of us in this and I have had some good conversations about how to organize a larger group.

We all went different ways and I came to the room for a much needed shower. When I got back to the room, it dawned on me why they call Sapa “The City in the Clouds.” Though the sun had broken through in the morning, the mist had rolled back in. We ate outside for lunch and had been quite cold. When I got back in my room (which has an amazing view of the mountains and the mist) I could see my breath. I found the space heater and plugged it in. It is slowly warming up.

Good news has just arrived. Gail, the lady from Northwood that was with us, had lost her Passport and everyone was in scramble mode. There was a contingent about to leave for Hanoi to try and get her a replacement, but the call came that it had been found and the celebration went up in the hall.

I am typing this in the room and will copy it to a flash drive. Hopefully I will be able to upload it to blog at an internet café in town. I am afraid that the pictures, though amazing here, will not be so easy. I’ll try to select just a few and upload them as well.