As we
have mentioned previously (especially in our Vision
for Kwong Ministry on the this site), the failure of the present generation to pass on
the good news to the next generation is he Achilles heal of the Kwong
church. Failure on our part to develop within the Kwong a church a tradition
of teaching their children both at home and in ecclesiastical contacts is to
potentially see our efforts in this generation come to naught in the next.
There are in fact tribes in Chad where precisely this has happened.
We do not have anything like a natural affinity for children's ministry - and greatly admire those who do. But be that as it may, we have for the past few months feeling our way through this unfamiliar territory. The key to our effort is one of the elders in the church named Jonas who besides an possessing an immensely engaging personality and considerable respect (he is a village chief), is a story-teller par-excellence. Give Jonas a yarn to spin, and he'll catch even a corpse's interest.
It
works like this. Mark prepares a cassette with the Bible story in question on it
- Daniel in the Lions Den, Joseph or whatever. Mark tells the story in Kwong
with a suitable introduction, conclusion, and such embellishments as will make
the story more interesting and coherent. Jonas comes over to our house on
Saturday afternoon and we listen to the cassette and talk about the story, and
Jonas takes the cassette home where he works some more on internalizing the
story. (You must understand that neither Jonas nor virtually any of the adults
of the Kwong church know these stories - which is one reason the otherwise
wonderful, Biblical notion of parents teaching their kids is, for the
time being, impractical in Kwong land.)
Sunday
morning is show-time. Clement, one of the young chaps from the village leads the
kids in some raucous (there is no other word) singing with drums and then Jonas
stands up and lets rip. By this time he has internalized the story quite well
and the kids are very shortly spell-bound - something amazing to see given that
their attention-span is only a fraction of your average American kid's already
stunted attention-span. Even so, he does occasionally miss a bit of the story,
so Mark, who stands next to him through the story as a kind of dumb sidekick,
pretends he doesn't quite "get" something, to which Jonas dutifully
corrects the story, usually without skipping a beat.
The
end result is a very, very "Kwong" rendering of the story which is
vastly superior in diction and idiom to anything either of us could possibly
concoct - good as our knowledge of Kwong is. And it is a mostly dead-on true
rendering of the story. Once the story is over, Mark asks the kids questions
about what they heard, and frequently one or another of them will retell a huge
section of the story in every detail.
Such a performance would be a pity to waste, and as we mentioned, none of the adults know these stories either, so we record each of them (hence the microphone in the pictures - no we do not have a sound system in the church at Chageen!) Diane then does her digital wizardry on the recordings, taking out Mark's feigned confusion and rearranging those parts of the story that may have gotten mixed up. The result is a high-quality recording which we hope will sometime later this year form the basis of a Kwong kids' program on the radio. And good as these stories are, we expect not a few adults will be listening too!
There
is much more that could, and should be done. The possibilities are limited only
by the time which we have at our disposition and the capable people (like Jonas)
who we can mobilize to the task. Our next step will probably be to introduce
sort of a Sesame Street "Letter of the day" feature (as in ABC's).
Many of the kids attend school, but only a few actually learn to read. Also,
Diane would love to be able to influence the girls as they reach puberty, and
some of them have been approaching her about it - as sure a good sign as
anything that the Lord is leading.
