South America

There were frustrations with this trip as well.  Limited translation hampered our being able to talk with kids we met at Channel to Brazil for Christ’s school.  The safety factor limited our ability to wander through the streets meeting people.  And our video camera died on Day 2, which was really hard for Brady since part of the reason I brought him was so he could get footage to make some videos for me.  Homesickness also got pretty hard for Brady towards the end of the trip.

 

There were also some of those random events that make trips memorable.

·         We had to use mosquito netting at night.  The first night, Brady slept with his knee up against the net.  In the morning he had 33 mosquito bites on his right knee cap where they got him through the mesh.

·         I did not know it was possible to run, cut, dribble and kick a soccer ball at 100 mph in flip flops.  And this was the eight year olds.

·         Brady has groupies.  He helped with a children’s crusade the last few days we were there by running the powerpoints.  The first night when the program was over, a group of Brazilian boys ran up to him and thought he was really cool because of the computer.  Then they took him over to a group of girls, who giggled.  The next night, the girls crowded around him after the crusade.  And again on the last night.  Brady just sort of looked at me with a “Dad…what do I do?” look on his face.

·         Our last couple days were spent down the coastline with some friends.  They live on a coconut farm where monkeys come to the porch to eat bananas, but in their attic they are producing a series of twenty-five minute movies of chronological Bible story teaching (www.lightinaction.org).  Their vision is to put this online in the major global languages.  We had the chance to talk with them about how different ways that movies can connect with oral cultures and how stories as a follow-up can help reproduce the lessons people take from the movies.  I would encourage you to keep an eye on their films to show international students or to use as a small group with faith seekers.

 

We drove through the night on a bus between Natal and Fortaleza.  Brady at least got some sleep, but sleep eluded me as violently as the bus driver was swerving the bus to avoid pot holes.  When we got picked up, we expected to go back to CBC to spend time until our 11 p.m. flight to the US, but our host asked if we’d like to visit an interior village.  That was a no-brainer.

 

We didn’t get to share any stories while there, but the experience was one that I’m glad Brady got to have.

 

An hour an a half outside the city, we drove into a town that seemed to be an afterthought.  Houses were made of woven sticks with mud slapped on top.  Mosquitoes bred within the crumbling walls.  Nobody seemed to be working, which we found to be true.  There wasn’t anywhere to work.  The crops had been destroyed by the rainy season this year and so people were just passing time until next season.  A village of 7,000 people did pretty much nothing all day.

 

We walked into a church in town and met the pastor and his wife.  They opened up their home, made us lunch while we got a flat tire fixed.  They killed one of their chickens and even bought us a two liter Coke, a meal which I told Brady cost them more than they could afford. 

 

In one of the homes we stopped in, we met a 74 year old man who had ten children.  His wife had left him recently, taking the five oldest.  His seventeen year old daughter was visiting.  She had stopped going to school in third grade and had recently married a man she barely knew from the city.  It is a marriage of hope only, a hope that being in the city she can find a job.  His other children living with him were all under the age of twelve.  Brady got to meet his nine year old son, who couldn’t count to ten.  I asked our translator what would happen to the young kids if their father dies this year.  “The government will take them to an orphanage in the city, but most kids leave those and go to the favelas.  The eight year old girl could be a prostitute within six months.  And the boy will likely be into drugs…”

 

While we were only in this village a few hours, seeing it and hearing people’s stories gave both Brady and I another snap shot of what a hard to reach place looks like.  Our prayer is that God will open up ways for His Story to be taken to these sorts of places, seeing churches born and lives reborn with hope.

(Brazilian kids)  Three times we were able to do some introduction to Bible storying with a group of teenagers leading in ministry.  This group of thirty teens are all kids who grew up in the favelas.  Most of the guys had been into drug activity as young kids.  Many of the girls were told they should pursue prostitution if they wanted to ever make any money. 

 

But in the middle of the favela is a ministry committed to community transformation.  One of the main things Channel to Brazil for Christ (www.thechannel.org) does is run a school that adds a half-day of quality education enhancement to the half-day public school the favela kids have.  There are 350 children who are able to be enrolled and over 400 waiting for an opening to get in.

 

All of the youth leaders we met had come to know Christ through CBC and are now leading CBC ministry groups and discipling children in the favelas.  Many of them go on bus mission trips to interior villages where they do two-day evangelistic crusades.  Some have been awarded scholarships to study at universities.  Some want to go overseas a missionaries.

 

On the last training time, I divided the men and women up and we let them “have church”.  They shared a story, talked about it (women are women all over the world…I had to encourage them to stop sharing so much and keep movin!), and retold the story.  Afterwards a few of the older folks came up and said they could see how this would be so effective in the favelas.  That was what we hoped to hear.  We are hopeful that CBC and these kids will seek ways to weave reproducible storying into their relationships and ministry.

 

(Brady)  The day after leading the house church, Brady said he wanted to share the story I did that night with me.  He did an amazing job without me retelling it.  Then he did another story that I had told him earlier that day.  Then he did a third story, which I shared once.  He had a huge grin on his face and said, “This is fun.  I like doing this!  I can see why you like doing this with people.”  That was great to hear!

The sun had set a couple hours earlier and people were standing in their doorways, many with a glaze on their eyes that detached them from the world around them, watching our group of five walking down their streets.  This was one of the few times we had been out of our compound during the week in the favelas (slums).  Our host hadn’t had anything happen to any of his guests over the past twenty-three years and was very cautious about protecting us.  Squatter homes housed drug dealers and prostitutes.  The occasional stabbing or killing went unreported and often unnoticed.  The houses we passed were clay bricks where mosquito colonies thrived within the walls.  The streets we walked down had an odor that you couldn’t ignore but didn’t want to ponder the source of either.  We saw many children running around, most who would stop school before third grade. 

 

We crossed some land used as a makeshift soccer field and approached the backside of a row of squatter homes.  A single light bulb lit the yard.  In a circle were 28 women, a handful of children sitting on the ground, and a lone man.  We were going to have church in the favelas.

 

That night was one of the highlights for me on our trip to Brazil.  For two hours we shared life stories, shared a Bible story, and talked about it.  Most of these folks were new believers.  Four were leading house churches of their own.  We got to pray over many of them afterwards.  The fact that I got to do this with my son was tremendous.  Here Brady was watching people who would never own more than the flip flops on their feet passionately praying for the salvation of their drug dealing husbands, healing of conditions they couldn’t afford medical care for, and the Holy Spirit to bring revival to a place most people would avoid.

 

In several ways, this is how I envision the Church looked or the way that Jesus did ministry, minus the Portuguese.

• Literacy in Israel at the time of Jesus was around 5%.  People shared their own stories and the teachings of Jesus by talking about how they blended together.
• Most people lived a day-to-day existence with few creature comforts.  The average street probably smelled like the ones we walked down.
• Believers’ communities knew that the transformation of lives would only come by a work of God.

After we shared the story of the paralytic being lowered through the roof, I asked one young lady share the story back to the group.  She flew through it near flawlessly.  Here’s what I saw.  A mid-twenties year old woman with a third grade education who has been a believer for four months heard a Bible story she had never heard before twice and was able to repeat it back to a circle of friends and say she wanted to share it with her family and neighbors.  That is also something I envision was a reality of the early Church, too – God’s story being naturally reproduced by those whose lives have been transformed by it.

 

The city of Fortaleza has a population of nearly three million, one-third of who live in the favelas like this lady does.  It might be through stories like these that God might reach another drug dealer, another teenage prostitute, another begger woman, another man sitting in a squatter’s doorway.

Really sorry that we weren’t able to post blogs during the recent trip to Brazil.  Brady and I had a frustrating time trying to find access to the internet.  This setback aside, the trip was good for us to do together.  Brady definitely was exposed to the overseas mantra “Be flexible” more times than he probably wanted to hear in his entire life!

 

We got home last weekend wrapping up our trip with a 36 hour “all-night bus ride, visit an outlying village, followed by an all-night plane ride to the States” sleep deprived excursion.  The first thing that Brady wanted to do when we landed?  Get hotcakes at McDonald’s.

 

During this trip we saw several ministry opportunities where Bible storying could be a tremendous help in reaching the people of the favelas (slums) of Fortaleza.  What I’d like to do is post several retro-blogs about different things we experienced during our two week trip.

 

Brazil is the fifth most populated country in the world.  The Church, especially in the southern part near Sao Paulo and Rio, is experiencing tremendous growth.  Eighty percent of foreign missionary work takes place in this region and thousands of Brazilians have begun working in full-time ministries.  Brazil is anticipated by global missiologists to be one of the top three missionary sending countries by the middle of this century.  Closer to the equator, the indigenous people of the northwestern Amazon region are protected by the government and many missionary projects – often involving medical care, education, and community improvement – have been successful in efforts to counter the negative impact of encroachment by development exploiters. 

 

But the northeast section of the country is considered the “unreached part” of Brazil. Little missionary work occurs on the coast or interior villages.  Here Europeans are buying up large sections of coastline in cities and turning them into attractive tourist areas.  But these seaside condo landscapes are a façade for the slums and squatter homes that make up large portions of the cities.

 

This is where we were.  These blogs aren’t meant to be tooting the horn of chronological Bible storying.  They are meant to paint pictures of where we’re seeing God open doors to help people do ministry much the same way that Jesus did it, by sharing truth in memorable, connectable, and reproducible ways.