August 19, 2015
I used my three flights to Porto Alegre to finish three books, view a documentary on Mars and watch the movie TomorrowLand. Unfortunately my longest flight from Chicago to Sao Paulo had a guy with really bad BO in the seat in front of me. I kept catching whiffs of it and sometimes had to sit with my shirt over my nose. I made it to my destination with about two hours of sleep and so I crashed as soon as I got into my hotel room.
On Monday, our missionary Lyndell Requia took me around downtown Porto Alegre to see some of the different streets, shops and the largest Catholic Cathedral in the city. At one corner two guys had a laugh as they tried to hand me a piece of paper. When Lyndell translated she told me they were handing out coupons for haircuts at a loyal solon. I then got their joke and was able to laugh along with them. The atmosphere on the streets and the people remind me a lot of Europe and, like Africa, I enjoy the constant chatter, crowds, and open markets more than our cold environment on the streets back home.
On Wednesday I will be heading to Chain-of-Love where I will get to see my sponsor child Bruna as well as Jim Paris. Jim is a man I had the chance to lead to Christ at Greenfield (my previous church). Since that time he has gone on to seminary and now works fulltime for Chain-of-Love.
My classes are each week night from 7-10 and I’ve taught two so far. Almost all of the students work other jobs all day and so they have most of their classes in the evening The translation has not been as much of a hindrance as I was expecting, as my translators of been excellent and the class seems to flow well. I will also be preaching at one of the local Baptist churches on Sunday and doing a three hour morning workshop for pastors next Wednesday.
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| Pastor Stef's sponsor child Bruna, from Chain of Love |
Saturday, Aug. 22
My first week of teaching was great. On Saturday I took a break and went with three of the missionaries to two different places where they make wine. These were two of the most famous wine making places in Brazil. One of them even had an experimental vineyard with different grapes from all over the world. The places were huge. Each wine vat was two stories tall and one of the places produces 2400 bottles an hour - 40% of the wine in Brazil. Both places gave us a tour, followed by a wine tasting. They taught us how to properly hold our glass, examine the wine, smell it, twirl it and then taste it. In total, we each got to taste five different wines and two different champions. Since I hardly drink wine I couldn’t really tell the difference. One of the wines we tasted was what they served both Pope Francis and Pope Benedict when they were both last in Brazil. We also went cheese and sausage tasting, which was great - better than the wine!
Sunday, Aug. 23
On Sunday I went to a BBQ lunch, complete with a cowboy (gaucho) show with dancing, swords and whips. Waiters come around and cut meat for you right off of a skewer. There were about fifteen different styles of beef, chicken, pork and chicken hearts (which I didn’t eat). The meat was very fresh, tasty and salty. Each afternoon we’ve been having a 5:30pm coffee. I’ve become a coffee drinker, which is something I will have to break when I get back to Canada.
The church services in Brazil are in the evenings. I preached (with a translator) at a Baptist church at 7pm on “Jesus Calming the Storm” in Mark 4. The services are about two hours long – that’s one less hour than the Cameroonian services!
Sunday came to a shocking end when I got back to my hotel. A couple of days earlier I went to the front desk and asked where I could get my laundry done and was told that if I left it on the bed they would take care of it. So that’s what I did. When I went to pay my bill I discovered they charged me A HUNDRED DOLLARS for only one load of laundry, not even ironed. I told them that my clothes were not even worth that much. I still haven’t paid them and they said they would look into it. I was on the internet later than evening and noticed that one of my favorite bands, Stryper, is coming out with a new album in October, but I might not be able to afford it because I washed my clothes!
Monday, Aug. 24
I went to visit some of the slums today where many of the kids from Chain-of-Love come from, very dire conditions. I also got back to teaching my classes. Some of the students are quite conservative. When I talked about using different translations to study a passage one of them asked why. I discovered that there is a “perfect” Portuguese translation and all the others are bad – just like a few think about the King James in English. So much education still needs to be done!
I read my first “Father Brown” (by G.K. Chesterton) story before I went to bed tonight. They are detective stories about an Anglican Priest. This one was called “The Blue Cross”. I loved how the story concluded. A man was pretending to be a priest to try and trick Father Brown so that he could steal a cross. Early in the story Father Brown engages him in a conversation about the universe which seems to have little relevance at the time. Later, when the false priest is about to steal the cross, he discovers that Father Brown is one step ahead of him and has everything arranged so that he can’t pull off his crime. When the thief asks Father Brown how he knew what he was up to and how he knew he wasn’t really a priest, Father Brown responds by saying (and here is that great last line):
"A part of my trade made me sure you weren’t a priest.”
“What?” asked the thief, almost gasping.
“You attacked reason,” said Father Brown. “It’s bad theology.”
Tuesday, Aug. 25
I had an extremely stimulating lunch conversation today. It was with the founder of the Baptist Seminary I am teaching at. He has also been the pastor of Central Baptist church here in Porto Alegre for the past 25 years. He retired two years ago, around the time his wife died. He speaks English and is quite a theologian. He was part of the Brazilian liberation theology movement back in the 70’s and he was sponsored by the World Council of Churches to be part of their ecumenical conversations in Europe around the same time. He also received full scholarships to study theology at both Oxford and Bristol. He chose Bristol because it is where John Wesley was from. He also studied at Geneva, where John Calvin set up his school of theology. He also got to personally know the German theologian Jurgen Moltmann, having theological conversations with him till 3am. Moltmann invited him, on a full scholarship, to study under him at Tubingen in Germany. He never took up the offer because he ended up getting married and starting his position at Central Baptist. Throughout all of this he remained a solid (but broad minded) evangelical and a tremendous mentor and influencer to the Baptist pastors here. He did spend a little time lamenting what he sees as the anti-intellectualism (and even suspicion of theological study) that has recently been increasing in the Baptist churches. He said the “deepest” things many pastors are now reading go no further than the devotional writings of Swindoll and Lucado and that the laity aren’t reading at all. He attributes a lot of it to the emotionally music driven charismatic (and often prosperity gospel) churches (with sermons only loosely based on the Bible) rather than churches driven by strong biblical and theological preaching. He said he was glad I was out here teaching in this area as it is desperately needed in Brazil (as it is around the world).
I’ve got a number of hours of teaching ahead of me. I teach another class tonight from 7-10pm and then teach an advanced preaching class for the pastors in the area tomorrow morning from 9-12pm.
By the way, while talking with this pastor at lunch and eating my black bean stew, Lyndell told me that there were pig ears and pig tails in it. I kept eating and remembered Ron Hiller’s (an elder at Bethany who also served for some years in Cameroon) missionary motto: “Where he leads me, I will follow. What he feeds me, I will swallow.” And I did!
Discuss: Have you even lived or traveled to a Latin American country? What do you love about Latin American culture?
