Well, maybe it’s not a dance floor…it’s really a church and a pulpit.
Same thing if you’re in Africa.
Rwanda turned out to be more than just a land of hills, tea, and coffee. It turned out to be more than I could have bargained for. Our ministry last month was simple: preach. Wake up in the morning, go into people’s homes, receive a word from the Lord, and preach. When the clock strikes twelve at the Post Office Fellowship, preach. When evening service rolls around at church, preach.
Who knew that coming up with something to say for 30 minutes would be challenging. I definitely developed a new respect for the pastors of my church back home. The amount of prayer, time, and reading of the Bible it takes to put together a short sermon was a surprise to me. I mean, I’m pretty good at talking, especially if I get to talk about myself or my family, but relying on God to guide me in what I needed to say for half an hour was a little more daunting and challenging than I first thought.
I don’t like standing up in front of crowds and speaking, it’s probably one of my least favorite things to do. I didn’t really enjoy drama as a kid, didn’t really enjoy band or choir where I was on stage, even at university I really didn’t like giving presentations. However, a short while into our month of preaching in Rwanda I realized that there was something different in me, in the people I was talking to, and in the way the words I spoke were received. At home I am acutely aware that what I am saying is being weighed against the facts that everyone listening holds in their minds and hearts, that my words will be held against a standard of knowledge and experience; I am not a preacher and I am not a teacher, my lack of theological and theoretical knowledge are, I feel, blatantly apparent back home. I have never been to seminary, I’m not very good at keeping up on podcasts, blogs, or books written by Christian apologetics and theologians. But in Rwanda the people don’t care about your degree, they don’t care about how deep your knowledge of Greek or Hebrew words go, they don’t care about the solid evidence you can lay down, they don’t even really mind if what you’re saying is a little disorganized – they just want to hear the Word of the Lord. They want to hear your passion for God in what you say, they want to hear your story, they want to feel their spirit’s respond to the simple yet elegant truth that exists in the person of Jesus Christ. They want to feel the fire of the Holy Spirit burning up their hearts.
Our ministry contact last month was a man by the name of Moses. He is a husband, a father, and a pastor. He is a man with a deep understanding of God’s love, a man who cherishes scripture, and a man who welcomed us into his home as if we were his own daughters. His challenge and supplication to us was simple:
“Who is going to bring the fire?”
Day after day he would ask us, “Who is going to bring the fire today?” At first, I understood it as a simple question, who is going to preach today, who is going to give the word? But it was more than that. He was imploring us to not just speak from a place of knowledge, but to speak from a place of understanding. He had faith that the things we had to say were of value, he wouldn’t have forgone preaching at his own church for the time we were there if he didn’t feel that way. He believed in our calling and saw our anointings. Each and every day he would ask us, “Who is going to bring the fire?”, entreating us to not just open our mouths and speak, but to tap into what Holy Spirit was saying, to be like Jeremiah and have the Lord put His words in our mouths. He desired the gifts that God has given us to be translated into blessings for the people he loved.
In a culture where what we say needs to have proof and be quantifiable on some level, where the eloquence of what you’re saying influences how it is received, it is easy for us to forget that God’s truth is uncomplicated and undemanding and that He does not require us to give moving speeches full of complex words or laced with a familiarity of biblical history – He just wants what we say to His people to come from the heart, from His heart as much as from our hearts. He just wants us to bring the fire, bring it on like a wildfire and watch the flames consume his people like a forest alight.
