Nairobi Chapel Family Day

On Thursday we had a meeting with all the Nairobi Chapel churches (just the staff). About three years ago, Nairobi Chapel split up into five different churches with the aim of multiplying and planting churches. Now there are eight churches – and more to come. It was amazing to hear about what the other churches are up to and to see all the staff – about 80-90 people! About half of them are interns; that is an average of seven or eight interns per church. Just imagine what you could do in your church with all those interns!

What I do all day...

I am two weeks into the second half of my stay here, and it suddenly seems like time is going to fly. Things have changed at work, partially because Msafara is over and everyone is doing their "normal" job again. We also had an evaluation two weeks ago in which we were given new job descriptions and tasks. When the guys from the worship department came back from Msafara, I was suddenly out of work, as they took over service planning and bulletin work (which I had been involved in) and I had finished baptism class and baptism. With everything being different, I thought I could give you an overview of what I do all day or all week - as that is usually hard to see anyway in ministry.

Just to remind you, I am in the Pastoral Care department which involves pastoral care (weddings, funerals, births, illnesses, visitation etc.), adult education, small groups, visitors, and helping the Worship department with the worship service on Sundays. Here are my tasks:

• organise and co-facilitate discipleship classes
• put together a baptism class manual with the material I developed and with the information I gathered
• organise visitation one week a month ("Amtswoche")
• organise visits for our pastoral care team to the spinal injury clinic, lead our team
• take care of administration for the Pre-Marital Counselling Class, sit in on the class
• develop two study guides for small groups on two sermon series ("burn-out" and "the names of God")
• research on how volunteers at Nairobi Chapel are recruited, trained and appreciated; speak to staff team about possible problems or areas that need strengthening
• interview pastors in other departments about their work to get an overview of what the church does and how it does it

If you are thinking that this is a lot to get done in two more months, then yes, I agree. Especially because I sit in meeting half of the week! The senior pastor and the associate pastors have become very intentional about equipping me as much as possible in these last months, so I now sit in on meetings with the pastoral team. Right now they are discussing their vision and the strategies for getting there, so it is a very interesting discussion to be a part of. However, it also means an additional all-day meeting:
Tuesday: departmental meeting in the morning, service planning in the afternoon
Wednesday: "library day" (which means you can actually get work or research done with out being interrupted)
Thursday: pastoral team meeting
Friday: class in the morning, admin or visitation in the afternoon
Saturday: admin, visitation or service preparation as necessary
Sunday: discipleship class, service, pre-marital counselling class (Sunday is my longest day!)
Monday: off-day!

Intern Commissioning

Today is my day off, which I spent going for a swim and hanging out with Njeri (fellow intern and service manager). This is also when I get to catch up on blog-writing, because I still have not written about the historical event of intern commissioning on March 17th!
Last Sunday but one (as Kenyans say), the interns were officially introduced and commissioned (“eingesetzt”) in church. There are 23 interns, 18 Kenyans, one Indian-Ethiopian, one Armenian, two Germans and one Swiss (two of the interns were missing on Sunday). Dressed in black pants or skirts and with a Kanga (Kenyan piece of fabric used as clothing by coastal tribes) around our shoulders, we walked up on stage – barefoot! The bare feet were in order that we could receive African sandals as a symbol of those who go out to bring good news (“How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’” Isaiah 52:7). In that sense we are now sent and enabled to do our work for the church and for God.
I was happy to receive new sandals (the ones I bought in 2005 broke shortly after I got here), but I have only worn them twice for a very short time. They are still very hard and stiff, not like my comfortable old ones, and after the first ten minutes of wearing them I already had a blister. I have worn them once since the first day, trying to break them in slowly (“einlaufen”). I guess it is the same with the internship and the work I am doing here. I am still in the process of being broken in, getting used to the culture, the expectations and the kind of work I am doing.
You can take a look at the pictures from the commissioning as soon as I put the link up on the right. I have also gotten some pictures from the German couple of our relief work in January which you might want to take a look at.


Intern Work
The last week I have been very busy, often working until six in the evenings and continuing at home. I now have specific jobs: being in the service planning team, being service manager (I am still a bit fuzzy on what exactly this entails), putting together the bulletin (“Mitteilungsblatt”) and teaching baptism class. I started baptism class last Sunday and will be doing that every Sunday until Easter. There are only five people in the class (in a church of 1200 people), but I have enjoyed preparing the material and teaching last Sunday. I am getting a slow start on the bulletin because there were special bulletins last Sunday and the coming Sunday, so I only had to do an insert with the announcements. In the future, putting together the bulletin will also mean ghost-writing the main article for the pastors!
This week, some of us are able to go to a seminar on counseling for rape victims. I am looking forward to it, even though it will mean catching up on all the work on Thursday and getting up very early tomorrow morning (latest by 5:30am) to get through the traffic and across town by 8am.

Survival Tactics for Interns

I am back. After having been very quiet the last two weeks, I am trying to catch up with blogging. Part of the reason why I have not written any blog entries is because I have been very busy. I have now gotten the responsibility together with Njeri, another intern, of becoming “service managers”. This means that we are in charge of everything happening in the Sunday service. We oversee everything from cleanliness to the décor to lighting/sound to making sure the pastors have everything they need for the service. On Sunday, I got the first taste of what this might look like and set up the following guidelines for myself (to be taken a grain of salt (= nicht ganz ernst nehmen)):

• Never ask about anything that is not your responsibility – it might become yours.

• Do not show too much interest or empathy for someone with an administrative or organisational problem – you might be asked to be part of the solution (or even worse, it might become your problem).

• When having made the mistake of taking on extra responsibility, be sure to delegate the job to someone else.

• When being asked to solve someone else’s problem (e.g. “Please go look for XY and tell her to come to here”), have a good reason at hand why you are not available right now. – Look busy at all times!

• When faced with a problem, the best solution is not necessarily to ask your supervisor. Ask someone who you know will give you a clear answer, an immediate solution or realistic options. Ask someone you know will get things done!

• Do not give the impression of being reliable or trustworthy or you will be given more work than you already have. Other option: Make sure to delegate your work to others, but make sure they are trustworthy, otherwise it will all come back to you!

Not Business as Usual

A week ago I thought that the internship was starting to become clearer and more organized, but on Friday, everything changed.

The first few weeks in January, everyone was focused on the political situation and the violence that had taken place. Churches were trying to help those who had suffered from violence and were speaking out publicly for peace. As things quietened down, people tried to return to their normal lives, expecting the situation to be resolved soon. Now it has been more than a month, and the situation has not really gotten better, even though here in Nairobi one can live one's life almost as if nothing had happened. While the mediation talks are going on, there is still violence and the number of internally displaced persons (IDP) is increasing. I have heard stories where the message was passed around a town or neighbourhood, warning the members of a certain tribe to get out before the end of the next day unless they wanted to be killed. The people concerned do not wait to find out whether the threat is true but leave their homes behind and seek refuge in a police station or church. This ethnically motivated violence has continued and will not be stopped through the resolution of the political situation. On the other hand I have heard reports of an area close to Nairobi where the pastors in the area reacted to the threats of ethnic cleansing by going out and speaking to people one-on-one and in groups, convincing them that this was not the right path to pursue. In that way, violence in that neighbourhood could be avoided.

Last week, the pastors of my church, Nairobi Chapel, decided that they could not continue business as usual. It is not business as usual for those people living in camps fearing that their attackers will come to attack their camp, neither should it be business as usual for us. The situation is not resolved yet and we believe the church should be part of the process towards peace and reconciliation. Therefore the church has decided to release a part of the pastors and staff to work in the following areas: opening the church ground up to displaced people (especially since the Jamhuri camp close to Nairobi Chapel is closing down and sending people back home - not all of them can return home), being a media presence to tell stories of hope instead of violence and destruction, setting up a "caravan of hope" (500 pastors who will visit the affected areas), and networking with community leaders in Kibera and Dagoretti (the area around the church) to convince them to use their influence among the populuation for peace.

It is exciting to see the church making this kind of a decision, but it also means that a part of our internship program is put on hold for now. A third of the staff will keep the Sunday services running while the others are busy on new projects. As I am on the pastoral care team, we are still more or less working on the same things, but we have also taken on service planning in addition to our regular tasks. The other tasks that I have been given is to set up a canteen (a cafeteria) after church on Sundays to raise money for the interns and to come up with a four-week baptismal class which will be starting in two weeks!

The canteen was successfully started last Sunday, and we made a good profit, though we have to get more efficient on setting up and cleaning up. We hope to sell even more as people get used to the idea of having a snack (samosas, donuts or hamburgers) or a soda after the service.

I do hope, however, that we will be able to continue our readings and discussions which I found very interesting and stimulating. We have been reading two books on leadership and church growth/church management ("Courageous Leadership" by Bill Hybels and "The 7 Practices of Effective Ministry" by A. Stanley, L. Jones and R. Joiner).

Monday (I can't come up with a better title)

People are back to work. I can tell because the internet connection is much slower than last week (we share the wireless with an office building across the road). That means that I am now writing my blog entry in Word and waiting till later to post it.

Yesterday
Yesterday was a nationwide day of prayer. People prayed in church services, prayer meetings and on TV for the political situation, for the displaced people and for the leaders of the country. People of all religions prayed. I do not know whether you heard of it wherever you are, but they even showed spoke about it and showed footage in the evening news.

Today
Today I went to church to help with making care packages for people in Kibera. The beginning of the internship program has been postponed to next week because of the immediate need of the situation. However, communication here does not always seem very clear to me, and I went to church expecting to meet the other interns and the pastors.

Surprise number two (which I should have anticipated) was that there was only one person at the church when I got there at nine as requested. At 9:30 there were six of us waiting for Pastor Faith who was said to be on her way. She arrived at about 10am, and we began dividing all the foodstuff we had received into 200 piles on the ground as people continued to arrive to help. Here’s what most bags contained:

• 2 bags of maize flour (Maismehl) – for “ugali”, something like polenta which you can use to scoop up the other food when eating with your fingers
• 1 bag of beans or lentils (Linsen) – protein
• 1 bag of rice
• 1 bag or can of “mafuta” – oil in solid form, shortening?
• some long-life milk (UHT) or milk powder
• a packet of tea
• a bar of laundry soap

Carrying around all the food, chopping up bars of soap and pouring maize meal into bags is actually hard work! Especially when it is hot (at least we were inside the church tent) and you have nothing to eat or drink for a few hours (I put my bag with my water bottle in someone’s car and she went off to hand out the bags of food with it in her car!). I think people here are more used to waiting for a meal, but I could feel my blood sugar level getting lower by the hour – I miss “Znüni” time (coffee break)!

Caleb
On my way to church I was approached by a guy named Caleb who told me that he had a blind wife and a baby girl at home, that he had no job and no food at home for his family. I took him along to church because I could not give him anything and was not able to discern whether his story was true or not (in a way it does not matter because he was obviously in need, but you first want to help those who are most needy, not the most clever in getting something). I was surprised at how patient he was, waiting for the pastor to come and then helping us prepare bags of food for two or three hours before he received his own bag of food and went off very happy.

The Present Situation
People I have talked to who live in or close to Kibera (the slum area where there was lots of burning and looting) have told me that it has been very quiet there the last few days. However, there is a rally planned for tomorrow in various places and people are worried about what will happen. Everyone who can will be staying at home, so once again your prayers are appreciated for the safety of people and against violence.