Election Day

Greta and I stood in line about 30 minutes this AM to vote. I saw people walk away when they saw the line was so long. Government is a gift from God, to vote is a civic duty and sacred privilege. Our brothers and sisters have died on battle fields all over the world to gain and preserve this right and privilege, so it is too valuable to lose for the sake of a few minutes time. If you have not done so, GET OUT AND VOTE TODAY.

TRAINS

It has been a long time since I took a train trip in the US. The last one I remember was a trip to Chicago, IL back in the late 1960s. The earliest train ride I remember was a trip with my grandfather who worked for the Southern Railroad. The Southern was still using steam engines in those days, so it was a rather romantic trip to Papa's work site in somewhere in Tennessee.
During our trip to Europe in September we used the train between Hungary and Romania. Last year we used the train to get to the airport in Hungary and three years ago I used the train to travel back and forth across Italy to visit our friends there.
In most of Europe trains are relatively inexpensive, clean, safe, dependable and quick. With gas prices so high and air travel getting more and more expensive, I would like to see someone try to bring our US railroad passenger system back.

To Steve

Last Wednesday I received a shocking phone call from our friend and former teammate in Cote d'Ivoire, Andy Rayner. Andy lives and works in Prince Edward Island, Canada and was part of our team for several years in Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast).
Andy called to tell me about Steve Rehn. Steve was killed in a bicycle-car accident somewhere in northeastern Nigeria on September 26. He had been part of our team in Cote d'Ivoire for over 2 years. Steve was, to put it mildly, an avid biker and he loved riding in Africa. He had been in Burkina Faso to help some Bible translators and after finishing his project there, decided to take a "vacation" and ride across Burkina Faso, part of Niger, through northeastern Nigeria into Cameroon, a daunting trip anywhere but both challenging and obviously dangerous in Africa. He had covered well perhaps 1500 miles of his trip and sometime during his second day in Nigeria, a speeding car came around a turn, lost control and hit Steve on his bike. He was killed instantly. The sad part is that the family did not learn what happened for 11 days. The Nigerian police in that area had no phone and did not use personal phones to call the Embassy or even notify anyone. The family finally started a "Mission Persons Abroad" inquiry through the Canadian Embassy which quickly found out what happened.
We first met Steve as an intern in Cote d'Ivoire. We soon learned that he "marched to the beat of his own drum." He loved Africa, he love biking and he wanted to see Africa up close and personal. We often cautioned him about his adventurous bike rides, but he had the "bug" and couldn't resist. He was adventurous. He loved Africa. He was fearless.
After his internship, he returned to his home in Canada where he met the love of his life, Nicki. They met (no surprise here) on a transcontinental bike ride across Canada. After they married, they returned to Cote d'Ivoire to work with the team in Abengourou and chose to live in the village among the people. The only transportation they owned was their bikes.
After their service in Cote d'Ivoire, they moved to Cameroon where they worked for two years before moving back to Canada. Nicki taught in a Christian school and Steve drove a truck for a construction company and continued his mission work, often making mission trips to help wherever he could.
Steve died as he had lived, out on the edge, serving the Lord and riding his bike through Africa. If you would like to follow his adventures up to the moment, take a look at his blog. http://justaboutcrazy.blogspot.com/ I did. You will find his last entry from somewhere near a town name Madawa, Nigeria. He had spent the night with a Muslim mechanic for the French medidal group called Doctors Without Borders. Steve talks about breaking the fast with the family who were celebrating Ramadan and watching the people pray and pondered the question, "What if we Christians took 15 minutes to pray faithfully five times a day?" Good question Steve.
There will be a memorial service for Steve Saturday, Oct. 18 at the Oak Park Church of Christ, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Please pray for his wife Nicki and his parents, Rick and Linn Rehn during this sad and trying time.

More of Europe

We are back in Dublin again after visiting four other countries: Italy, Kosova, Hungary and Romania. We found our co-workers doing well and having good success in their work. We were able to worship with the team in Ancona, visit the new American High school in Kovova, preach in a Sunday morning service in Hungary and visit a school for Gypsie children in Oradia, Romania.
We only had one travel problem worth mention. We missed a flight in Rome because of a connecting flight delay and a mix-up in the airport largely caused by an airline workers strike that threatened to shut down the Rome airport. We were able go get a flight the next day, but have heard the Ilatalia, the national airline is in danger of failing somewhat because of the strike.
Tonight I will go out with our team here to do street evangelism in downtown Dublin. Some think that type of thing is of the past, but it has been so successful here, (see the previous entry) that dozens have been baptized and a new church has started from the results of the John 3:7 group and their work. Our co-worker, Philip Thompson is leading the effort to disciple the new believers and establish the church.
Pictures: Above left is sign carriers on Grafton street. Right is the infant church meeting in a home. Philip (brown shirt, center right) is leading the Bible study.
Monday we will be heading home after a total of 26 days, five countries, and a total of 12 take-offs and landings. We appreciate all those who have prayed for our safety.

Here is a link to a Youtube video about the John 3:7 group.

http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=DDULbxbaYnE&feature=rel

Europe Trip

Greta and I are in the second stage of a five country trip to Europe. We spend just two days in Dublin, Ireland with our co-workers, Philip and Shirley Thompson. They are members of Team Expansion and are involved in a new church plant venture in Dublin. They work with a group of street evangelists called John 3:7. Most Bible readers will remember this passage as the one that says, "You must be born again." Like the folk who manage to hold up the John 3:16 signs in sports events in the States, this group has done the same with the John 3:7 signs for over 25 years. Everyone in Ireland has seen the signs and many are curious about it. Now the group is out on the streets of Dublin on Friday nights holding up the John 3:7 signs. People coming out of bars, night clubs and sports events will walk up to them and ask about the sign. In the last two years enough people have listened to the testimonies of the street evangelists to make a public commitment to Jesus Christ and many have been baptized. The John 3:7 group has asked Philip to lead a church plant in Dublin from to disciple the people who come to the lord in this way. Greta and I went with the Thompsons to see the possible meeting site.
Leaving Dublin on Friday we flew to Ancona, Italy and are visitin the Team Expansion church plant team here. We spent much of today, Sunday, recovering from the long day yesterday. We were up at 3 AM to get to the airport in time to catch our 6:30 AM flight. This evening we will attend church with the Caseys and the team here in Ancona. The new church here is only a few months old but has finally begun to grow. I have been taking pictures and will add them as I am able to do so.

Photoserver | photo 7 of 97 | Meece 50th Anniversary

Some folk are having trouble reaching the links. Try this one for our 50th celebration.

http://photoserver.zenfolio.com/p67913169/slideshow

Fifty Years Together

Sunday afternoon, July 20, Greta and I, along with family and friends, celebrated our 50th Wedding Anniversary. The actual date is July 18, but we had the party Sunday.
It all began like this (left) in Greta's home church in Pine Flats, Pennsylvania on July 18, 1958. We were both 20 years old, needing our parents permission to get married. At the time we were both students at Kentucky Christian College in Grayson, Kentucky. The school allowed wives of students to attend the college tuition free, so it was to our advantage to be married during school. I was the preacher for two small churches near Owingsville, Kentucky.
During our 50 years together we have three children and five grandchildren. Only Jackie Ralston, our oldest granddaughter was not able to attend the celebration as she and her husband Micah had only recently returned from their Honeymoon and were getting settled into married life. It was great to have the rest of our family (below) with us Sunday.
We have served churches in Kentucky, Illinois and Missouri and worked as missionaries for 23 years in Liberia and Ivory Coast, West Africa. After retiring from the mission field, we joined Team Expansion, a mission sending agency in Louisville, KY and serve as Field Coordinators and Member Care providers for mission teams in Europe and Africa.
In addition to our own immediate family, we were joined by Greta's brothers, sisters and nieces from Pennsylvania and Alabama and several of my extended family from around Kentucky.
I have put together the pictures that Mark took during the celebration. You can view the "slideshow" at this link.

http://photoserver.zenfolio.com/p67913169/slideshow

Pictures of Africa Trip

It has taken longer than I would like to arrange the pictures we took on our Africa trip so that people could view them. We would love for our friends to enjoy them. Click on the following link or copy and paste (the safest way) the link into your internet browser and enjoy. Click on the "slideshow link" and let your mouse pointer hover over the little dialogue box on the lower right to see the captions.

http://photoserver.zenfolio.com/p101537956/

Back To Africa

Friday, May 23, Greta and I returned from a three week trip back to West Africa. It was Greta's first trip back since we left in 2002 and my 4th. Our trip was divided into 3 parts.
First we actually drove in a pick-up truck with no AC from Accra, Ghana to Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire - 12 hours and about 600 kms. The drive was long, hot and challenging, but we drove by some beautiful country. In some areas, the road is along the coast with beautiful views of the Atlantic Ocean. Other parts of the road are less attractive and crowded with truck and "Tro-Tro" (busses) traffic. We found that the things have not changed much since we lived there except that there are a lot more people and many more vehicles on the roads. In Ghana, much of the road has actually been repaved and/or improved a lot since the last time we made this trip. If I remember correctly, we have made the same trip at least a dozen times over the past 10 to 12 years.
Abidjan has changed a lot. Since we left there has been a war and the country is still largely divided between the Muslim north and the Christian/Anamist (African religions) in the south. The French army, in conjunction with the United Nations has been keeping the peace. Most of the missionaries we knew have left the country and many others havemoved away as well. We visited our co-workers there, missionaries from Liberia, Roujee and Juliet Morris. Roujee actually continues to oversee the mission work Greta and I were doing during our 13 years in Côte d'Ivoire.
One day we visited church leadership training classes on the Island of Vridi. The island is in the harbor area and requires a 15 minute boat ride through the harbor. There are several churches and three leadership training classes on Vridi and another island, Boulay, which is near by. We were encouraged to see the churches still functioning well on their own and the leadership training classes still going on under local leadership. We were able to visit with the leaders and some students on Vridi. We did find that one of the pastors of the church on Vridi was very ill and had gone to Ghana to get medical treatment. Most of the people living on the islands are fishermen who come over from Ghana to fish the seas around Abidjan. Ivorian fishermen are afraid to go to sea, so they have a have made a mutually beneficially agreement - Ivorians fish the lagoons and the Ghanians go out to sea. The pastor's name is Baidoe and he would appreciate your prayers as he tries to deal with high blood pressure where medical treatment is less than the best to say the least.

Pictures:
Top left - The "Gold Coast of West Africa"
Center right - The Morrises and Meeces: Roujee, Juliet, Greta, Easton and Wayne
Center left - A fishing boat - made of a hollowed out log with boards added to the sides. The boats are usually powered by outboard motors mounted on the side.
Bottom right - Church leaders and students with Roujee Morris at the right

How much do you know about world missions?

I ran across these facts in a letter from the International Bulletin of Mission Research and through people might be interested in these not so trivial facts.

1. There is a total of 37,000 different church denominations worldwide.
2. Of the 6.6 million people currently living in the world about 31.4 % or 2.2 billion people call themselves "Christian".
3. About 44% of Christians are "white" and 56% are "non-white".
4. There are about 259 million evangelical Christians.
5. Some portion of the Bible has been translated into 2,238 of the worlds languages.
6. There are 4.4 million women in full-time Christian ministry serving around the world.
7. There 443,000 foreign Christian missionaries from 4340 agencies serving around the world.
8. The countries that receive the greatest number of foreign missionaries are: U.S.A. - 35,100, Brazil - 26,400, Russian - 20,100, France - 16,900, Britain - 15,800, D.R Congo - 15,800.
9. There are almost 19,000 Africans serving as foreign missionaries on other continents.

Most people think of the church being centered in Europe and America, but in reality there are more now Christians in Africa, India and Asia than Europe and America. As an example of how Christianity is growing in Africa, I recently received a report from Ghana that more that 1200 people attended the Easter Convention of the Fellowship of Christian Churches of Ghana in Salaga, Ghana, a small town in the north-eastern region of Ghana. It is so remote that many people traveled more than 16 hours to reach the site of the convention. Great things are happening in the church throughout the world.

An Era Passes in Liberia

This week I received the news of the passing of James W. Morgan in Buchanan, Liberia. James was one of the founding members of our mission to Liberia when Greta and I first went there in 1971. He was a co-founder of Liberia Christian High School, The Christian Education Foundation of Liberia and later one of the main leaders of the Christian Churches of Liberia. He came to the States in the late 1970s to study at Milligan College in Tennessee and returned to Liberia to continue his life work. He was one of the founders of the Liberia Evangelistic mission and has led in the start of several new churches as well as continued to work in Christian Education at many levels. During the Liberian civil war he became a target for attack and persecution by a group of rebels. He was held prisoner for some time and made to work as a slave on a rebel controlled farm. By God's grace he was set free and spent several months as a refugee in Ivory Coast.
James was also a member of the board of the Christian Leadership Training Institute, headquartered in Accra, Ghana. The Institute has Christian leadership training classes currently running in Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Nigeria. James was one of the Liberia representatives on the board. The picture above was taken in Accra, Ghana during an Institute meeting in 2005. It is the last time I saw him in person. James is standing between two of his daughters who were living in Ghana at the time. Danny Buegar is next to me and Freeman Wesseh on the right.
James was a true pioneer and faithful preacher of the gospel, but his heart was in teaching. He taught English and Math in Liberia Christian High School for almost 40 years. Before coming to Buchanan, he had been the principal of the school in his home village of Zondo, Grand Bassa County, Liberia. He liked to say, "I am a numbers man." But that was not totally true. He was a man of The Book. He loved to preach, and he had preached in the Buchanan Christian Church Sunday morning the day before he died suddenly on Monday, March 3, 2008. James did not know his true birthday or exactly how old he was. He told me that he had taken the day of his baptism into Christ as his birth date. From what I remember of what he told me, I believe he was about 75 years old.
James was also a good friend and a wise adviser for Greta and me as we worked in Liberia as young, green missionaries. We have lost a good friend and the people of Liberia have lost a great Christian leader. The following verse comes to mind, and for Liberia it is certainly true.
"Do you not realize that a prince and a great man has fallen in Israel this day?" 2 Samuel 3:38

Prayer

I received a note today from one of our missionaries in Ancona, Italy. The team is planning a two day (48 hour) prayer event where the team invites the local community (churches, missionaries, and even “irreligious” Catholics) to come to a prayer room for one hour during this 48 hour period give an hour of their cluttered lives to prayer. Josh admits that like many of us, that prayer to him is an “awkward” thing.

The thing that is awkward to us is accepting the Biblical doctrine of prayer. The Bible clearly teaches that there are things that God cannot/will not do unless we pray. As Jesus said, “You have not because you ask not.” Some of us think that in prayer we align ourselves with the will of God, “Thy will be done”. In other words we think that prayer changes us, not so much that prayer changes things.

However, in prayer, like in many other things, God is asking us to join Him as partners in his purposes. God,for example, offers salvation to the world and asks us to be partners with him in the “Ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:18) and has sent us into the world to preach the gospel to every creature (Matt. 28:19).

E. Stanley Jones wrote, “For in prayer you align yourself to the purposes and power of God, and He is able to do things that though you He couldn’t otherwise do. For this is an open universe, where some things are left open, contingent upon our doing them. If we do not do them, they will never be done. So God has left certain things to prayer—things which will never be done except we pray.”

The Church

Since Greta and I came home from Africa 6 years ago, we have been struggling with how we Americans are “doing church” these days. The American church culture – across the board – has changed more in the past 10 years than it has in the last 100 years. Sitting in church today we often feel more out of place and out of our comfort zone than we ever did in the more than 20 years we lived and worshiped with churches in Africa. During those years we often sat in church for two to three hours while everything was done in a language we did not understand except the few Biblical references that were used. But we did understand that we were there to worship and praise God. Today we sometimes sit in church where we can understand every word but the noise is often so loud we cannot hear them and we more often feel we are watching a show, sitting as observers on the sidelines of a worship program that someone else is doing. How did it get to this?

For years the church has been saying “y’all come” rather than “let’s all go.” It seems to me that much of the currently popular “seeker friendly” church service is just the latest edition of the “y’all come” program. I remember reading recently. “If we want to win the world to Christ, we must be willing to sit in the smoking section.” That is where the lost are sitting. I learned some of that many years ago from one of our Liberian families. One day I went to visit a neighbor. They were all in their “kitchen” or cook house, a dirt floored, thatch roofed shelter where they cooked over a wood fire. I sat there, using a log for a chiar, and talked for some time as the lady of the house prepared food. As I realized that it was soon to be meal time, I made as to leave, but they said, “Won’t you stay and eat with us?” I agreed and stayed to share their simple meal. Years later, this same family was in our home, and as we shared our meal with them, the lady recounted the story of how I had come to talk with them in their kitchen. She then told me that no missionary had ever done that before and how much it had meant to them.

The heart of the Christian message to the world is that God didn’t expect us to come to Him in heaven. He came to us. Jesus, the king of heaven, was born in a dirty, stinking stable and lived in one of the world’s most backward countries as a poor carpenter. He “became flesh and lived among us and we beheld his glory.” (John 1:14) The church was sent into the world (Matthew 28:19-20) to be His hands, feet, eyes and mouth so that the world could continue to see His glory. It is time for the church to return to its roots; to be born in the places where it is most needed; to get out in the real world and get its hands dirty; to sit in the cook house and eat with its neighbors.

Putting Away Christmas

There are still some decorations and Christmas cards hanging around our living room. The tree is down and the lights taken down from the front of the house and all put away, but some things are still hanging around. It is just difficult to put away Christmas. It's so much fun. Great food, wonderful music, the family together, gifts, beautiful decorations and good will everywhere. So I guess it is no wonder that it is difficult to let it go.
Eventually it will all be put away and the New Year will move on. We will get used to writing 2008 on our checks and Christmas will become a distant memory or a more distant yearning for next year.
We had a great Christmas this year. Much of our family were together and we had some good times and, as usual, Mom outdid herself in the kitchen. Now my trousers have shrunk or something and I am looking for some way to drop the pounds I put on for the Holidays.
So, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, a little late, to everyone.