Summer Camp 2023

In the first week of December, just after all the schools close, Youth for Christ (YFC) in Namibia hosts their annual summer camp. The theme for camp was "But God..." from Psalm 73:26, "My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever." I volunteered to help as the photographer / videographer and as a host for the Bible quiz "game show."

This year we had over 220 young people ages 15-25 come from all over the country. They were split into four different teams to compete in various sports and games, team spirit, as well as the Bible quiz. Each morning and evening we had sessions with messages following the theme. One morning we split up the guys and the girls for sessions related to their more unique issues. We even surprised them with a color party which only the leaders knew about in advance! Check out the video below to see what camp is like.

American Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a time of year that I get to share a little bit of my home culture with my Namibian friends. They have often seen it depicted in movies, but they've often never experienced it. So on the following Saturday (since the Thursday is not a holiday here), I invite a bunch of people to come over for a potluck dinner. They all go online and try their hand at some American recipes for classic Thanksgiving dishes. Overall people are generally excited to try new foods, although they tend to be disappointed that there is not more meat (a Namibian staple at any big event)! Then we always take some time to go around and share what it is we are grateful for. It makes for a nice year-end function as most people then disappear to their villages or vacations for the holidays over December.

I have to get 2 turkeys because they are so small.

Not a bad spread!

Dishing up

"What is this one?"

Sharing our thanksgivings

The whole Thanksgiving crew

NETS Gospel Show

Each year NETS (Namibia Evangelical Theological Seminary) hosts a Gospel Show, inviting the community on campus to enjoy some worship music and get to know our school a bit. Performers or choirs from various churches in the community are invited to share their talents. One student was supposed to have a young adult meeting at his church, but loaded them all on a bus and brought them to attend! Check out the video below to listen along.

Missions Conference

European missionaries first brought the gospel to Namibia back in the mid-1800s. Conversion rates took off so that Christianity has become widely imbedded in traditional life. Today we regularly hear statistics boasting that Namibia is considered 90% Christian (although JoshuaProject.net suggests only about 12.5% of those are Bible-believing, followers of Christ). Regardless of the accuracy of those statistics, the reality is that Namibia is strategically positioned to become a key source for sending out future mission workers.

Therefore, SIM Namibia recently helped host a National Missions Conference to inspire and promote a missional mindset among local church pastors and leaders. We invited the president of a Ghanaian mission board to come as our main speaker, and had workshops by the regional directors for SIM and AIM. We also had a panel of local Namibian mission workers who shared about their experiences and challenges. Some of the main themes included how Namibians can be mobilized to be part of God's mission force, how we can financially support mission from Namibia, and how we can encourage the local church to be involved in missions. Overall we gathered about 55 attendees over two-day conference, some traveling as far as 8-hrs away to attend. The feedback was very positive and all those who attended were very encouraged and suggested we make this an annual event!

The diversity in the audience helped show
how we need to all work together in mission.

A huge prayer circle to close off the conference

All our conference attendees

Teen Mission Namibia 2023

Teen Mission Namibia (TMN) was designed to help impassion and equip young people to get involved in God's mission in Namibia and the world. Our first trip back in Dec 2021 (see posts here) was a great success, so we followed that up with another trip this July. We took 6 young people and 4 staff volunteers out to the town of Outjo for ten days to train them for mission and then give them practical opportunities to apply what they were learning. (FYI - July is our winter, hence the reason why in the photos we were often bundled up while sitting in the sun. 😅)

Training session at Boot Camp

Mission Boot Camp - Our trip started out with two days of training sessions on topics like what is the gospel, how to share the gospel with others, how to share your testimony, the global need for mission, etc. During a reflection time, one young lady said she had always had the question of why God had His Son killed, and she had never been given a satisfying answer. But in our session on the gospel she heard about the great exchange, that God put our sin on him and gave us his righteousness, and that finally gave her a satisfying answer for why Jesus had to die for our sins. This is exactly why we start our training with that session, because many people have grown up in church and never actually heard the true gospel.

Practicing sharing the gospel with each other

Each morning we gave them a dedicated 30-minutes and a mission-related devotional to have a personal devotion time with God. Some of them were used to an occasional, sporadic Bible-reading or prayer time, but taking a whole 30-minutes and doing it every day for the whole trip was a new habit that many expressed they would like to continue when they go home.

The campground where we stayed had a pen
with some porcupines who came out at night!

Kid's Club Outreach - For the next 4 days, we partnered with two different community centers to organize and run kid's clubs at each location. (Since it was during the winter break, kids were not in school.) Our team organized games, songs, Bible lessons, dramas, and memory verses that all fed into the main theme for the day. They did all the teaching and the leading themselves. While there were certainly some growing pains and learning opportunities, by the end of the week they had it down and were doing a great job.

Playing "Telephone" at game time at the kid's club

A game similar to "duck-duck-goose"

Helping the small kids with games

Working on a memory verse at kid's club

Sharing a Bible story about Jesus

Teaching through a drama

Small groups afterward to help solidify learning

Small group with the youngest kids

Street Evangelism - In the afternoons, we would split up into smaller groups and go walk down the neighborhood streets. If we met people walking, or they were sitting outside at their homes, we would start conversations to share the gospel with them. (This idea may sound old-fashioned in a Western context, but it is not unusual to have spontaneous conversations with strangers in this more communal context.) One of our team members expressed how at first she was afraid of evangelism because she didn't know how people would respond, but that our training sessions gave her more confidence in what to say. She ended up being one of the most bold people as we went out, never letting someone pass on the street without making sure we talked to them! Personally, I was encouraged because many of the older people we met struggled in English, so I wasn't much use except to pray in the background. Meanwhile, the team was much more natural and fluid sharing in their own local languages! It was another reminder to me of exactly why we are training them to be missional.

Debrief - The last day of our trip was spent reflecting on our experiences and preparing them to go home. We talked about highlights, hardships, God-sightings, and how they can take what they've learned back home with them. One participant expressed how they learned the harvest really is plentiful, but "us laborers are busy with other things" sitting in our comfort zones. Another expressed that she learned fearfulness is actually not trusting God, and how she needs to have more confidence in God rather than in herself. One of the evenings we had watched a documentary called "Beyond Gates of Splendor" about some missionaries to Ecuador who were martyred trying to share the gospel with a dangerous, unreached tribe. Quite a few of our team were challenged by their refusal to fight back saying, "They are not ready for heaven, but we are."

Some debrief conversations while dinner is cooking

Relaxing a bit during our debrief time

After ten days of living on mission together with others who are encouraging us toward mission, now it was time to send them back home to go live out the mission in their own communities. Please pray for them as they go back home, that they would take what they learned from this week and apply it to their lives, that they would make missional living a priority, and that they would become advocates for mission in their churches and communities.

African Mobilization Consultation

A long time ago I wrote in my journal, "May I never pursue a vision so small that it can be fully accomplished in my own power." At the time, I didn't really know what that vision would be. It started with a vision for training Namibian youth workers. But over the past few years, I think I've been gradually shifting toward something a bit bigger.

Gathering of African mission leaders

There have been a few monumental shifts that have helped shape the history of missions. You could start right in the NT with the gospel going to the Gentiles, or more recently, the advent of mission agencies and the modern mission movement, and the focus toward unreached peoples. The latest shift happening within our generation is the mission force changing from "the West to the rest" to "from anywhere to everywhere." What that means is that places which have traditionally received missionaries are now sending missionaries.

Since 2018, there are more people who profess Christianity in Africa than on any other continent in the world. By 2050, they project there will be more Christians in Africa than on the next two most prevalent continents (Europe & Latin America) combined! So that means the future of the mission force in the next generations could be predominately African! But what we need now are Christian leaders and strategies that will help facilitate this shift.

Discussing challenges of mission

This past week I've been at a consultation of mission leaders from across the continent discussing how we can mobilize Africans and African churches for involvement in global missions. There is no shortage of challenges that need to be addressed, but we heard some encouraging stories of how it's already working (AfriGO magazine is trying to capture some of these stories). I don't think it's an understatement to say this moment in history that we're living can have a monumental impact on the future of missions for generations to come. And I'm excited to be in such a strategic place to be part of that by helping figure out how to send out Namibian missionaries to the least reached places of the world. That's definitely a God-sized vision! 😄

God told Habakkuk, "Look among the nations, and see; wonder and be astounded. For I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe even if you were told" (Hab 1:5). Something similar could be said of our day. God's word is going out to the nations, and He's using Africans to take it!

Lüderitz Mission Trip

At Namibia Evangelical Theological Seminary (NETS), we want to give our students practical opportunities to put into practice what they are learning in the classroom. So, each year we organize domestic mission trips where our student body breaks up into smaller teams, travels to different towns across the country, and partners with local churches to advance God's kingdom in those communities. This year I went with the group to the southern coastal town of Lüderitz. We did some street evangelism, ministered at an assisted living home, hosted a gospel worship night, and students preached at various local churches on the Sunday morning. We even had a few spontaneous opportunities like praying with a police group raising funds to search for a missing colleague, and giving a 'wedding blessing' for a couple who had just been married at court that morning. Then we also squeezed in some team fellowship time at the beach, and even found some of the famous desert 'wild' horses. Check out the video below to see what our trip was like!