Sermon Transcript — December 16, 2006
You know when the Apostle Paul used to go on long trips as he did, he made three or four very long what are sometimes called evangelistic voyages and when he would come back, one of the things that the bible record shows that he would gather his home church together and he would explain the things that had been accomplished; what God had done on this long trip, sometimes his lasted many, many months. In fact in Acts chapter 14, verse 26 as Paul was coming in from one of his trips it said:
Acts 14:26 From there they sailed to Antioch where they had been commended to the grace of God for the work which they had completed.
Verse 27: And when they had come and gathered the church together, they reported all that God had done with them and that He had opened the door of faith to the Gentiles.
So Paul obviously felt that the congregation that was supporting that work and backing it was really a part of what was going on and we can assume that the members were very excited there at Antioch to hear about the wonderful news of what had been accomplished.
Well I'm certainly not comparing myself to Paul but I do travel on behalf of the church quite a bit and I thought it would be useful for you also today to be able to have a glimpse of one of the trips that we made.
As you probably know, I'm a pastor for French speaking areas in the world. We have over three hundred people attending in French now at various places in the world. The problem is that they're scattered through about twelve or fifteen different countries. So trying to get around and see them all can be quite a challenge. I travel between four and six, and sometimes even more than six months, out of the year outside the United States. I also have the privilege right now to be one of the international members of our council of elders and that's because my work is all directed outside the United States. We're expected to help keep the council connected with what's happening in international areas of the work and so we are allotted (the international members) travel budgets to encourage us to go and make church visits and keep that connection strong.
Usually when I travel I travel by myself because of expense and frankly because we don't have too many French speaking elders in fact two of the three of us are in the hall right now; Mr. Hongerloot who I think you know now has been very ably helping full time with editorial matters, has helped me on a trip to Africa, does really a great amount of work but there aren't enough of us to be able to just go around two by two all the time so because of that I usually travel by myself.
That's a challenge for me sometimes—to be alone as I travel. And it certainly is a challenge for my family, and I give them a lot of credit for being willing to let me go for long periods of time to do the work. They certainly back me up about that, but we try to keep that to a minimum. And every once in a while, we've saved up enough air miles and enough money to be able to take our daughters with us on a trip. Our daughters normally travel at our expense when we go, aside from the Feast. We get some help for that but we cover their air fare, cover their expenses out of our pocket. This summer, since we just sold our house prior to the summer, we had the money to be able to take them along with us on a long trip that I needed to make. I've been working in French Africa now for ten years and this was the first time that my wife had ever gone with me—and obviously the first time our daughters had gone as well. But in addition to making visits to the areas where I directly serve in Africa, we also added visits to Asia where there were going to be some leadership training seminars held and I was asked to participate in those and then we also made courtesy visits to Australia and New Zealand before coming back
So I prepared for you today to give you a glimpse of what this long trip would have been like this summer, a home-made video, this is not an official production of the church, just something that I kind of cobbled together myself so the quality is not professional by any means but hopefully it will help you get a glimpse of what's going on in the lives of some of your brethren in many other parts of the world. I hope that you will find it encouraging to see that this is truly an international work, that you are all a part of something much bigger than yourselves or this local area here in Cincinnati. God has brought people to the United Church of God from immense quantity of nations and cultures. We do have the privilege of being a part of something much bigger than ourselves and that should be very encouraging to us.
So I'm going to play a video now, it lasts about a half an hour and I will do voice-over commentary as it plays and then after that we'll bring the lights up and I'll have some thoughts that I'd like to share with you at the end. I will just mention a word of warning, if you have small children, I've never had any complaints about this, but I would like to mention non-the-less, life in Africa is not always pretty and you see confronted with a lot of gritty scenes sometimes and there will be some things that are pretty stern I guess you would say, so if you're concerned about your children being shocked by some of those images you might want to distract them when we get to specifically Cameroon and Rwanda, that's where there are some rather unpleasant images but I feel it's necessary for you to get an idea of what life is like for our brethren in those areas. O.K. if we can dim the lights now we will roll this video. This was a trip we made this summer and it ended up finally taking us all around the world.
We started off; you can see Tatiana's already thrilled. It was about five o'clock in the morning when we got to the airport and we had to transit through London on our way down to Ghana in West Africa which was our first stop. The way the airline travel went, it was less expensive to fly into Ghana and then drive across the border to the countries we would visit. It's still possible to find patches of virgin rain forest in some places but they are shrinking in West Africa now.
The first thing that you're confronted with when you go to sub-Saharan in Africa is just the grinding poverty of people. If you do any research you'll find that most people in sub-Sahara Africa live on a dollar a day or less and so you have people just out there hustling, doing anything they can trying to sell small items so that they can eat that day and these people work all day long selling bags of water, selling fruit, selling almost anything and hopefully they'll make their dollar that day.
This is a typical market place. A lot of our church brethren; the ladies will have some sort of stall in a market, that's a common thing for women to do and the men will try and have some other job that might actually have a real salary although that's very rare and the women will tend to do some kind of commerce in a place very much like this.
You see amazing things on the road. These are dug out canoes stuck in the back of a truck. You never know what you're going to see.
The first person that we met with was Paul Tia, he's one of our new brethren in Ivory Coast. He had to make quite an exhausting trip of twenty-four hours in bush taxi's to come and meet us. I didn't feel it was safe for us to go to Cote d'Ivoire, there's a civil war going on there right now. But these are scenes of six baptisms that I did there in Ivory Coast last year; Cote d'Ivoire as it's also known. This is their split bamboo church building; no electricity, so when we have bible studies there in the evening it has to be by lantern light. But there is a core group, essentially agriculture workers and very committed to the church and so we were able to have breakfast with Paul, get caught up on everything and then he turned around and went back because he had to get back again.
These are four of the pastors in what used to be the Remnant Church of God, now the United Church of God. We worked with them extensively before.
Tatiana had forgotten what Ghana food tasted like and she wasn't too impressed. We actually were all there as a family in 2000 and so they were quite surprised to see how the girls had grown.
The next stop, crossing the border takes about four hours including a difficult border crossing. Thankfully God was merciful and we didn't get taken advantage of on this border crossing. There are lots of thieves and con men but we managed to make it. The roads are not very good on the way to Togo but there are still toll booths. We still had to pay to use the road even though they're full of pot holes. Of course that's true here too isn't it?
Here we are arriving now at Lome′ and Togo. Togo is under the heel of a very brutal dictatorship right now. There was blood in the streets last year when elections were stolen in fact and the economy is just getting harder and harder. It's very difficult for our brethren here to make ends meet. This is driving; many of the roads are not paved, there are a few arteries that are paved, the rest is just dirt. This is the home of our deacon there, Mr. Kossie Fiaboe′ and he rents part of the building, part of the facade of his house as a pharmacy and the other room he keeps for the use of the church. This is Mr. Fiaboe′ leading hymns.
The people in the Lome′ congregation speak French so services are conducted in French, hymns are sung in French although that's not actually their first language. We might sometimes be tempted to think of people in the third world as not being as educated as we are and in some ways that's true but many of those speak three or four languages and there aren't too many of us, I don't and I don't think you do either. Mr. Fiaboe′ has been a real pillar in the church, a very good example. This was special music that they actually translated into their own local language which is called Ewe. It has a little bit more meaning when you hear it in your native language I think and it is very beautiful.
Notice the ladies holding spoons here; we brought with us. We divided up a bunch of wooden spoons and we spread them out among our suitcases. We wanted to have a little gift to give them, something that would be useful, profitable, not too expensive and not too breakable. It turns out it's very difficult for them to get good quality wooden spoons and ladies use them almost daily in cooking so we were able to give every wife and mother a spoon every place that we went in Africa and they were very, very excited by something as simple as that; something that they can't get very easily.
We did make a visit out also one day to a second congregation in Togo. This is called Mome′ Hagou and as you can see these are mud brick huts. It took about two hours to get out there, we visited some of the members in their homes, chatted with them and just tried to find out what life was like for them and then we had kind of a Q&A bible study. This is their normal little room where they have services and these folks have only seen I believe two elders in all the time that they've been in the church. There was my predecessor in our former association and myself. There may have been another one but I don't think so and other than that they just see what's in their little country there and they have a church visit about twice a year if I manage to make it that.
Mr. Fiaboe′ on the way back wanted the girls to taste some local refreshment. The thing you run into quickly in Africa though is its very dirty everywhere. You don't feel like eating or drinking anything until you get back to your hotel. Fiona is a sharing person anyway so she was very eager to share. This is the shop run by one of our church members there, he just runs it, it belongs to his brother and that's how he makes his living. You notice there were two main things there, beauty supplies and alcohol. That's what people will always pay for apparently. Those were the main sellers in the shop.
Then another road trip after the Sabbath onto to Benin the next country over. Again about a three hour trip. The border crossing is easier here and we arrived in Cotonou which is the main city, it's not actually the capital but the commercial capital of Benin. Benin is an interesting country, it's where voodoo began, its also where many of the Africans who were brought to the Western Hemisphere as slaves originally came from this stretch of coastline along here.
This is a fishing village right at the edge of Cotonou and people here live the same way that they've been living for three hundred or four hundred years. The nets are the same, they may be made of nylon but the designs the same; everything is very much the same. Occasionally you'll see an outboard motor but it's very rare.
We went out one day just to the lagoon which is on the edge of Cotonou to visit a village called Ganvie′ which was featured in one of our festival videos several years ago, six or seven years ago and people fled out into the middle of this lagoon to avoid being captured and sold as slaves. So they rode out in their boats. The other tribe that was attacking them had a superstition that their warriors couldn't cross water so they built this village out in the middle of this lagoon and two hundred plus years later their descendants are still living out there. That's a bathroom and toilet right there in the center. No sewage really so you don't want to fall in the water where you're going through the village but they have now piped in fresh water that people can use which really cuts down on diseases. It is quite a fascinating place to visit. It takes about an hour to get there by boat from Cotonou where we spent a few days.
Then on the way back into Cotonou we passed the Dantokpa market which is one of the largest markets in West Africa and we actually have a number of church ladies who work in this market so we asked one of them (Mrs. Ogoude′le′) the wife of our lead member there if she would show us through and introduce us to some people. This was a Sunday so this was actually a light day; there weren't so many people but you see strange things. This was a voodoo shop; animal skulls, skins. They had the freshly skinned head of a dog for sale for some sort of fetish that someone was putting together. We didn't hang around there very long.
This is what it looks like to go to services when you're in Cotonou There is no road maintenance at all so the roads sort of takes care of itself and can be quite a challenge there at times when I have to walk part of the way in because the car cannot make it. This is where Sabbath services are held, normally in Cotonou at the Ogoude′le′ house on their front porch. It's about 90 degrees, 90 percent humidity and this is our very faithful group there, yours truly giving a sermon and once again the ladies with their spoons. This is the lady on the left and her daughter. The lady on the left is a widow of a deacon who just died within this last year if I recall, no I'm sorry, three years ago.
The video that I'm showing you now I show them similar videos when I go and for people who may not have running water or electricity it's quite a thrill to see themselves on video and also it gives them an overview of what's going on in the French areas.
This is Cameroon now; one of the more dangerous places that I go. Infrastructure is very poor, corruption is terrible. The police are little more than armed robbers, they stop cars and expect a bribe all the time. They don't turn criminals over to the police anymore because they just buy their way out. What they do instead is tie them up and beat them to death, strip the bodies and dump it on the road and it will stay there three or four days. This body I saw I passed four days in a row going to and from the hall where we had services. It's just meant as a warning; don't commit crimes in this neighborhood. It's not the first time I've seen that, this is something that's pretty common. Our brethren see this kind of thing all the time in Cameroon.
These are peanut ladies. Their full time job is roasting peanuts, peeling them by hand, putting them in old whiskey bottles and selling them; that' how they make their living.
Here we are now at the church hall which was funded by the good works project so if you bought a cook book or helped with that you helped make this building available to them which is used also now as our Feast of Tabernacles site. They inscribed Psalm 33 over the main meeting hall. As I said, this is the first time my wife had ever met these folks in the ten years that I've been meeting with them and serving them so it was a joy for everyone and you can see the ladies with their spoons once again. They gave us these typical African outfits also and we had the chance to meet and chat with a lot of them. We had fellowship time, bible studies, had a pot luck, kind of a pot luck together; although they don't have pot lucks the way we do, we actually have to provide the food because they wouldn't be able to come up with very much. It would be more pot then luck I'm afraid.
So here's the little group in Douala and we actually have other members scattered throughout Cameroon but these are the ones in the main commercial city of Port of Douala.
Then we went on to Rwanda, also a very troubled history. You probably remember that in 1994 there was a genocide that occurred here and between eight hundred thousand and a million people were murdered, mostly in the space of four weeks. So there were just bodies everywhere. One tribe attempted to wipe out another tribe and our brethren were caught in the middle of it. Our elder there and his wife are educators. They actually hid children in their house to try to save them from the murderers that came. Some of them were found, dragged out of the house and murdered just outside their home. So our brethren saw this type of thing. They eventually had to flee the country as did hundreds of thousands of people. They took to the roads with whatever they could carry to try to get away from the mass murder. They went to Goma, just across the border in Congo and that's where our brethren ended up as well. They tried to stay together as many of them as could. There were disease outbreaks, cholera and what have you in the refugee camps, it was absolutely atrocious. Many, many orphans left, almost everybody lost a family member or knew somebody that was involved and that leaves psychological scars obviously. People don't tend to laugh or smile very much in the country so it's always a joy when I can bring a smile or some laughter to our brethren there and you'll see we did that.
These are actually our church brethren, Mr. Mundeli there by the door with his family and other brethren. They're kept together and none of our Rwanda brethren were killed. One young man drowned on the way to the refugee camp but some of our brethren who were Congolese living in Rwanda, we don't know what happened to them, we hope they made it back to their country but we just never heard from them again.
The churches had been considered safe because they were holy ground, you know the world looks at it so no violence had been committed there in the past, so lots of people went to hide in churches thinking they'd be safe but of course they weren't this time so the churches became some of the biggest killing fields; thousands and thousands and thousands of people were killed with machetes, grenades, bows and arrows, and clubs in churches. They have preserved some of the bones, the remains of the people who were killed to prove that it really did happen. There are people that deny this just the way there are people who deny the Jewish holocaust of World War II. Ten thousand people have been killed at that other site; this is just a few miles away, probably five miles. Five thousand people were killed here; it just gives you an idea of the magnitude of it. Rwanda is a very small country and to kill a million people in such a small country, it was just everywhere.
In this place, in Remera they actually left the remains on the floor so to visit this church you step on these small pews as you move forward. If you step off it you'll actually be breaking people's bones, they just left them all over the floor. These are the back bones. I've actually talked to some survivors. You may remember an article that appeared in the Good News some years ago. I interviewed some of the survivors and tried to draw some conclusions from it. But they've actually just set up temporary shelters to house all the bones that they found and remains are still being unearthed, they're still finding people. This is clothing they hung from the ceiling of some of those that they took off the bodies that were found after all of the madness stopped. Our brethren went through all that, they saw those things, and their children saw all that with their own eyes, and every time I go through there it makes me think about some things that are prophesied for the future.
On a happier note, we spent a Sabbath with them up in Giti. Every little stream you cross ends up in the Nile so I can say I jumped crossed across the Nile River. A two hour drive on bad roads, you can see the fatigue level was rising a little bit here. We were keeping a pretty tight schedule on the travel. Rwanda's a beautiful country, very verdant, good rains, very fertile soil. This is another hall that was built using funds from the good works project so again, you may have a hand in that, if you did thank you very much, they really, really appreciate it. They're singing in their local language here which is Kinyarwanda you'll recognize the melody but not the words. This is Mr. Sibobugingo the deacon, first name John the Baptist, how's that for a name? John the Baptist Sibobugingo. There's me giving some announcements and a sermon. We need to get them a bigger lectern. Theirs is about the size of a cereal box.
They have a very formal society so whenever a new guest comes that they're not had before they receive sort of a ceremony, almost gifts, and these were things woven out of banana leaves, very nicely done. So since things had to be done with a ceremony we made a little ceremony out of presenting the spoons as well. Even something as simple as a wooden spoon merits a ceremony and the ladies were very, very happy. I think my wife and daughters were a little embarrassed to be at the front of the ceremony but that's the way that Mr. Mundeli wanted to do it.
I set up my little laptop and showed them videos of my visits to Africa and when they see themselves (these are people with no electricity, no running water, they don't see a television, there is no television in their village) this is something out of a science fiction movie when they see themselves on a screen. To me I have the most pleasure in Africa when I see the Rwandans smile or laugh because there's not a lot of that that goes on. So here we had the chance for young people to meet with other young people in the church which is very rare for them to have visitors come in from outside and there's the group waving at you and thanking you for your help with the good works project.
Mr. and Mrs. Mundeli are educators as I said and we were invited to come to their schools. They're singing their song and asking Fiona and Tatiana questions about America because they've never seen foreign children before. We also toured the high school and some of the high school students performed some dances, sort of cultural welcome dances for us after our visit and really it was very nice. They provided the music and the dancing was very beautiful. Some of them didn't do quite as well at the dancing, you'll see that in a moment but these girls here were doing really very well. This is just a harvest dance I believe. The ones who needed more work were over here on the right, didn't quite have it down yet but they were good sports about it though.
We had about a day, a little over a day, layover in Nairobi on our way down to South Africa. It was a day and half or two days now that I think about it. So we stayed mostly around the Nairobi area, got together with some of the church brethren there. We did take a moment to go to a famous animal orphanage which is right on the outskirts of Nairobi and these are the animals that are found next to dead mothers, either rhino's or elephants and by going to see them the price of admission helps keep the whole thing going. The little elephants are just adorable. They like to play just like humans, you can imagine human kids doing the same thing; give them a mud hole and an inner tube, they're going to have fun. These are endangered giraffes also and they've got this set up where you can actually feed them and they'll let you feed them and touch them as long as you keep feeding them. If the food stops then you get a head butt so just keep feeding.
This is the Gichuru family, he is one of our deacons in the Nairobi area, we've known for many years. I used to work in this area as well so they're old friends and it was a pleasure to get together for a meal with them and hear all the exciting things about the growth that's happening in East Africa.
The next stop was South Africa. I also used to make occasional visits in this area before they had a pastor in Johannesburg so it was nice to be back there and see lots of old friends again I hadn't seen for years. Bill Jahns is serving there right now with his wife Cheryl. They'll be coming back to the states probably within another year or so. So obviously Fiona and Tatiana got together with some of their old friends. Morgan and Jolene Kreideman; Mr. Kreideman was just credentialed recently and he'll be taking over as pastor in Johannesburg at some point. Nobody could believe how much all the kids had grown on both sides.
The next stop was the island of Mauritius which is off the coast of Madagascar, a couple thousand miles off the tip of South Africa. We have now a dozen people in the church there. For the first time this year we are to actually have a Feast site. They've just been kind of on their own with CD's or tapes up to now but we actually organized a site this time for the first time in United. This is where the dodo bird came from. We were reading about the dodo bird that went extinct. This is the only island in the world where the dodo bird existed but since it had no natural predators when the hungry sailors got there, they could just knock them on the head with a rock. That's how they went the way of the dodo.
This was services in the home of Mr. Surendra Proag one of our members there, a long time church member. I'm not sure what my wife is doing; I think she's actually reading the menu for lunch, something like that. I know she was translating it. They also always enjoy watching a video to get an overview, find out what's happening with their brethren in other parts of the world and this was the group that was there for services minus my wife who took the photo. Of the two lighter skin folks in the middle there are actually Americans who were working in Mauritius right now.
This is France Chamary a long time church member, only speaks French. It was the first time he'd ever had a minister come to his house so he was thrilled. These are the Rodrigue brothers, one of them lives in Mauritius and one in neighboring Island of Reunion which is part of France. But they were able to get together during our visit also. We did have a church picnic while we were there; we tried to spend as much time with the church members as we could. So we had kind of a pot luck picnic in the botanical gardens. If you find these giant tortoises in the area; they are so big you can actually sit on them. Even someone my size can sit on one and it doesn't hurt them so they drag you around the yard.
Here we are after lunch with some of our brethren in the Island of Mauritius out in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
The next destination originally was to be the Philippines but the way the flights went we had to transit through Hong Kong, a thirteen hour flight. So we decided to visit the one church family, we actually have one Chinese church family in Hong Kong. Occasionally there are Filipinos that come and work in Hong Kong but there's just one family; Ma has been a member, he and his wife Mary for years and years and years; twenty, probably thirty years now and they're all by themselves, there's never been other people who have come in the church in Hong Kong and yet they're faithful all these years later. To my knowledge there's never been anyone else.
Hong Kong's a strange mixture of old and new. You get the old idolatry of Buddhism and Taoism and all the rest of it and then you have these things that look like something out of the future. It's really a very dynamic, quite an amazing place. You feel both very foreign and very at home, the western part of the culture that's there. These are sampans that navigate around some of the big ports; obviously there are lots of big ports in Hong Kong. This is the Ma Ming Tak family with which we spent a Sabbath; the five of them there, they actually had another nephew staying with them also. But these young people never see other young people in the church. Joseph the oldest managed to go to a camp in the states one time; I think he was helped to do that. But other than that, they don't see other church kids, it's just their family, that's all it is, year in and year out, even at Feast time usually they don't so it was a bit of a new experience for them also to have another family there and just be able to fellowship and talk about things.
This is the jumbo floating restaurant, one of the more famous restaurants in Hong Kong, real touristy; it appeared in a James Bond movie one time. This is us learning or trying to learn to eat with chop sticks. Unfortunately some of the noodles that Tatiana ate here did not agree with her and she could not look at another noodle for the rest of the trip.
Here we are at services, Fiona playing the piano and singing hymns. Their children are accomplished musicians as well. I gave a power point presentation, especially for the young people and we were able to spend Saturday night, we had dinner together. Sunday we got together and they took us around some market places and then invited us out for dinner Sunday night. So visits are few and far between for them so they really I believe appreciated the time, I know we certainly appreciated being able to spend the two days with them. You might remember the Ma Ming Tak family in your prayers. It's pretty lonely in some ways for them.
Then we connected through Manila on the way to Davao city in the Philippines which is where we had the Asian leadership conferences. They were held for three days. My family and I attended for the last two and I made several of the presentations.
This Filipino looks really familiar, doesn't he? They say everybody has a double somewhere in the world I guess. It sounds like Mr. Pinelli doesn't it? Mr. Welty was there also. Men with a lot of experience who made some very, very fine presentations that were very helpful. The men attending these seminars came from the Philippines, from Indonesia which is actually a Muslim country, the most populous Muslim country in the world. We have church members there living as Christians in this huge Muslim country which is a real challenge for them and then we had one fellow from Singapore, down at the tip of the Malaysia peninsula who attended also.
This was the meal we had all together on the last evening.
Mr. Rey Evasco is the pastor of the Manila church, a very educated man, is a civil servant and also an accomplished musician as you can hear. Some scenes.
David Baker was there also for Asia, Mr. Jeff Caudle was there for New Zealand; he also works in Singapore and before everybody went their separate ways we had a group photo taken. These are men who are pillars in their congregations, many are deacons, some are elders and they are living and serving in areas that you and I probably would have a hard time finding on the map and yet even in those far flung areas the Church of God is there, God's people are there and they're being served by the work of the church through efforts and education and support that United is able to make available for them.
Before we left the Philippines we did want to make a visit over to Corrigador Island. Those of you who are interested in military history remember that was the last hold out point when the Japanese were fighting America in 1941, early 1942 and it was the scene of incredible combat, great suffering and also incredible heroism. The American soldiers held out here for days and months actually with antiquated equipment and they just wouldn't give up, they just hung on. They destroyed the big cannons before they surrendered to the Japanese. There are eighteen thousand American servicemen and women buried in the Manila cemetery. So this was a site of some horrendous fighting. The reason that I'm telling you that is because I was so moved to see the inscription on the memorial there and that's why I'm showing you this whole segment. I think you will find it moving and encouraging as I did. I think former generations understood the bible better than our current generation does. Even if they didn't fully understand it, they at least knew what it said. Here's what it said: "Sleep my sons, you duty done for freedom's life has come. Sleep in the silent depths of the sea; you're in your bed of hollowed sod until you hear at dawn the low clear revelry of God." They understood about the Resurrection and that's what they put on this monument and what a time the Resurrection's going to be for the men and women who are here at that time. So if you're ever in that neighborhood I really recommend a visit there, it's very touching and very thought provoking.
Mr. Welty and Mr. Pinelli headed home. We still had a few more visits to make. We had another overnight flight coming into Sydney. We had just time between flights to zoom into town, have a quick look at the famous Sydney Opera and have a nap also. We were pretty tired by this time; starting to get sick occasionally, this kept us moving.
This is Brisbane, I'm sorry Melbourne, and I'm going to get in trouble. Melbourne is where Mr. and Mrs. Bill Eddington, this is their home church area; the Eddington's are here with us today. Very delightful, just a beautiful city, I think it's named one of the nicest cities in the industrialized world in which to live. This is the south coast. I believe about one hundred attend. Is that correct Mr. Eddington? A hundred, a hundred and ten. So I was graciously invited to give the sermon and made a video presentation also and I just really enjoyed meeting with everyone and making this courtesy visit. You would feel very much at home there.
Before we left Australia we wanted to have a visit at the church office. You remember hearing about Burleigh Heads back in the old days, it's on the Gold Coast; well it's still where the office is. But now it is the United Church of God. Gold Coast is famous for its beautiful beaches, surfers; kind of a combination of Las Vegas and the California coast and Hawaii all rolled into one.
These are the five people who work in the church office in Gold Coast and they were most gracious; gave us a tour. Alan Hambelton is the office manager and gave us a tour and snap shot of how things are going in this part of the world. There are lots of really encouraging things that are going on; encouraging trends. This is Ruth Root who also gave us a tour. She's involved in lots of different things; as I suppose they all are with a relatively restricted staff but it was very clean, looked very efficient. We came away very impressed and encouraged by what we saw.
Just a stones throw from the office there was a nature reserve and we couldn't leave Australia without trying to cuddle a koala. If Fiona looks a little nervous there it's because the fellow that held the koala before her got a hand full, more than he had bargained for. So she's being very careful there and in case you didn't know, koalas are not always cuddly and kind. This is the Currumbin Game, or what they call the Nature Preserve. You can also see kangaroos of various sizes. Did you ever have a scratch, an itch you just can't scratch? Everybody needs a hand once in a while. I think kangaroos are a bit like dogs, they can be real friendly and cuddly or some of them can be kind of mean too if they're in a bad mood so you have to figure out which kind you're dealing with.
The last stop was New Zealand. We came into Auckland, the main city on the north island. Jeff and Lisa Caudle are Americans who have been serving down there for I believe six years now, if memory serves; five or six and it's a bit of a lonely posting for them to be really on the other side of the world. They don't get a lot of visitors that come through other than perhaps Feast time. It's a beautiful country.
You may recognize this; if any of you have seen any of the Lord of the Rings movies, this is Hobbiton, this is where the Hobbits live. So this is Fiona and Tatiana in Bilbo's house here.
This was actually right on the way or almost on the way, a slight detour to get up to the region of Taupo, we wanted to see the Feast site there. Obviously it is very volcanic. Right around Rotorua you have farms to demonstrate the sheep industry because there are more sheep in New Zealand than there are people. This is giving a demonstration of shearing the sheep.
You saw some scenes of this I believe in the Festival video this year; famous for the Maori culture as well, these were Polynesian people around the island as the whites arrived also. They actually were very friendly; we had dinner with them afterwards.
Sabbath we had, this is the last Sabbath on the road in Auckland and again about there were I believe sixty or seventy people there, the Sabbath that we were there, some had come in from a ways out. They may have as many as eighty; the exact figure slips my mind now. There's Mr. Caudle acting as pastor in the area doing a really great job and again this is really the other side of the world but you would feel absolutely at home, the accent is a little different but these are God's people pursuing the same goals as you and me in the other side of the world.
Again I had a chance to make a video presentation and fellowship and just get to know and try and meet as many of the brethren here as we could with the time we had with them.
The kiwis like to travel; we've actually had several of them over in France for the Feast so we knew some of them from the past. That was a very nice way to close a long trip. We came home tired and a little amazed at all of the things that we had seen; the fact that God's work is really begun. God is calling people from all sorts of different cultures and languages all around the world. With the dateline, we actually when we took off arrived in the U.S. before we left because we crossed the dateline. If you want to extend your life just make a trip like that.
If we can have the lights up I will just like to share a couple of thoughts with you here. Turn with me if you will to Acts 28, verse 15. Paul was being taken at this time to Rome where he was under arrest, he was going to face trial and in verse 15 of Acts 28 they're getting right close to Rome; it's been a tough trip for Paul, all sorts of things happen on those trips and it says:
Acts 28:15 And from there, when the brethren heard about us, they came to meet us as far as Appii Forum and Three Inns (that's sort of on the outskirts of Rome now). When Paul saw them, he thanked God and took courage.
I think we should all take courage from the fact that God is working all around the world, not necessarily with millions of people but there are people that He is calling all over the world in places that you and I would have a hard time identifying on the map. When you go and have a chance to talk with those people and meet with them as I did and thankfully I'm very thankful to have been able to go with my family this time, exceptionally, you find that you have so much in common with them. You talk about the same kind of things, the same spiritual things interest you, the same longing for the Kingdom of God, the same looking forward for what we know is promised to come and I hope that all of us will take courage from things like this; just knowing that what we're going through in our lives day by day, others are doing the same in Africa, in Asia, in South America, in Australia, in New Zealand and islands in all the seas. We are a part of something bigger than ourselves. They're going about their Christian duties and their Christian lives and many of them in many different and difficult circumstances than what we have to face. It is harder to be a Christian anywhere outside of the United States, there's just no place that has as much freedom, as much acceptance at whatever you want to do, there's not really a lot of pressure from society. We sometimes feel that there is a little bit and in some ways there's a secular stream in society but if you say you're Christians, nobody thinks worse of you and it's just not that way.
Our brethren in Africa are facing some of them threats of civil war, threats of tribal violence as you saw, there is just a violence that happens, violent crime in society, there's grinding poverty that they're born with and that they'll die with. There are corruptive dictatorial governments and I could go on, so on and so forth and yet even in conditions like that they are praying every day, Thy Kingdom come, they're trying to raise their children in the fear of the Lord. They're trying to do all the same things that we are doing.
Let me ask you to read another scripture with me. This will be the last scripture we will read and I will just comment on a little bit; I Timothy, chapter 6. I don't know if you've ever thought of yourself when you've read this scripture but I'm going to try to connect it to you here. Paul told Timothy:
I Timothy 6:17 Command those who are rich in this present age (because being rich in this present age doesn't mean we're going to be rich in the next and vice versa) not to be haughty, not to be proud, not to think themselves superior, nor to trust in uncertain riches but in the living God, who gives us richly all things to enjoy.
Verse 18: Let them do good, that they be rich in good works, ready to give, willing to share,
Verse 19: storing up for themselves a good foundation for the time to come, that they may lay hold on eternal life.
Now when you read command those who are rich you're probably thinking, well that lets me off the hook. But perhaps when you see some images of what life is like for our African brethren you can realize that compared to most of the people in the world we are rich; even if we live very modestly by American standards, we're richer than 98 or 99 percent of the world's population.
What I just want to tell you and I hope you will find this encouraging is that by your participation in the work of the United Church of God, you are going a long way toward fulfilling what these verses say because we work together by our faithful participation in the work of the church, a lot of good giving is being done to our brethren in other parts of the world. We make pastoral trips available to them, we help them get church halls, we provide literature for them, we provide teaching for them and the only way that we can do that is because we all work together.
We sent postcards to many of you. We tried to get as many as we could. We apologize if you didn't get one. We didn't have all the addresses, that's why not everybody got one but we did that because we feel like you're a part of what we do, we know you're a part of it. We wouldn't be able to travel; those of us who travel, those of us who serve brethren in other parts of the world if we weren't all in this together and the little postcard was the small thing we could do to say thank you for doing your part, for being faithful members of the Church of God and for backing up the work that needs to be done. You are a part of something bigger than yourselves and we certainly appreciate your faithful participation.
Please remember also brethren at the same time, by the same token, that there is more riding on our unity as a church. There is more riding on our working together than just our own individual lives. Sometimes we can get frustrated with, we don't like this or we don't like that, and many of our brethren who were part of the Church of God and perhaps still are in God's eyes (He knows that, we don't necessarily) have decided I'm had it with organized religion, I'm just going to sit in my living room and take care of myself. There's more riding on us working together than just our own salvation and our own lives. There are people in other parts of the world who are depending on us to work together so that they can have the help and support and service that they need.
God has really blessed this nation more than any that I've ever seen in the world and there's a responsibility that comes along with that. He's given us so much and God has decided in His wisdom that He's going to finance much of the work of the church; not all of it by any means, but much of it through what comes out of this nation so it is very important for us to work together.
If we're ever tempted to get frustrated with some local situation or because we think this or that should be done differently by the church centrally, I hope we'll remember that others are depending on us to find a way to make it work so that we can work together. There's more riding on it than just our own individual lives.
I plan to make another long pastoral trip, God willing, in January and February. I should be going as I said, God willing, to Mauritius, Madagascar, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Benin where we've going to be holding some leadership training sessions and also I'll make a couple stops in France and Belgium and as always, I and others who travel on behalf of the church would certainly appreciate your prayers for our Father in Heaven's guidance and for His protection. I could tell you stories; I don't have the time right now but often times when you're traveling in a third world you face a situation where it could either go well or badly and many times I've seen something that looks like it was going to go a wrong direction, just suddenly turn over and go in a right direction. In my mind, I'm absolutely convinced that's due to the prayers of God's people. So if you do have a moment to think of those of us who travel, as well as just thinking of our brethren who live over there all the time, it's difficult for them as well.
So I guess I'll just sum it up by saying thank you very much for your faithful support. I hope you feel a part of what you just saw because you're helping to make it happen. Your brethren in Africa and Asia and many other areas of the world thank you also. So let's keep up the good work as we participate in our Father's International Work.