Meeting with the Missionary Community

Meeting with the missionary community is another new experience. We meet on Sunday night in the Maradi compound at a gathering of some 31 people, including children. This is roughly the size of congregation I ministered to in Newry for many years. Australian, American, Irish, English and Canadian they come together as English speaking white people in a foreign culture. This is a meeting of Aliens each with their visa or residence permit granting them permission to reside in this poverty stricken country. Nationality matters as much to the Nigerian Government as it does to these people gathered here. It is hard to see why anyone would choose to live in this place and yet all the formalities of entrance visas and conditions have to be met, such is the reality and distinction of race and place.

Our worship is informal, low key, consisting of some songs followed by my preaching interspersed by a few prayers. We think about Jeremiah's complaint - the silence and the struggle. Would their churches understand them if they shared all the experiences they have had to cope with over the years? Would their churches still accept them, will they be able to once they return, changed and marked in some way or another by the experience of living out their Christian lives in Niger? One thing is clear and that is, be it by necessity or grace or some combination of the two, they accept one another with an uncomplicated acceptance generally missing in our Western church life.

As I sit here 2,860 miles from Belfast, and talk to Malcolm who was born in Derry but raised in the US about his cousin Sam Carson (one of our Irish Baptist pastors) and talk to Peter, an Australian, as he recalls his one and only visit to NI during which time he was influenced greatly by Ethel White, herself a member of Windsor at that time, I am staggered by how this world works in God's good providence.

To next part.
To journal from Niger.