A Lutheran In Senegal

Old School Missionary Can-do!

Give us some power tools, transformers, duct tape and cable tie-downs, and we, like the mythical missionaries who have gone before us, can rig up all sorts of things!

In this case, Sarah gets help from Dirk Stadtlander (ELCA pastor serving in Linguere) with the much-used (and therefore falling apart) “Around the World” cookbook. Borrowing a page from another can-do book “How to Make Your Volkswagen Last Forever,” by John Muir, and more specifically its appendix called “How to make this book last forever,” they used a sheet of loose leaf paper as a guide and then drilled holes through the pages of the book. When it wouldn’t fit into the binder we had in mind, no problem. We have cable tie-downs--useful for locking Action Packers and a host of other missionary-specific activities.

In a line of work in which one can’t always see the fruit of one’s labor, it’s great to have some tasks just to get done. The cookbook is no longer falling apart.  Check it off the list.

Now on to Fulani Evangelism, Sustainable Community Development, and Forming Christian Leaders in a Muslim Context. We might need more duct tape...

With gospel foolishness,
Peter

Senegalese Church Ordains a New Generation of Pastors

 

On the second Sunday in February, L’Église Luthérienne du Sénégal (ELS or the Lutheran Church in Senegal) gathered for its annual Harvest Festival in Fatick. As they have done for the last fifteen years, members of the ELS’ 12 parishes and 2 evangelism zones presented their yearly offerings for church-wide work. What was different this year—and what turned the typically three-hour service into a five-hour (!) celebration—was the ordination of three young men into the ministry of Word and Sacrament. Pierre Adama Faye, Michel Alouane Ndiaye, and François Serigne Thiam became, respectively, the 15th, 16th, and 17th pastors ordained in the ELS since its emergence in 1987. 

This ordination marked a generational change in the life of the Lutheran Church of Senegal. Not only have François, Alouane and Adama been active in the ELS as children and youth, for the first time in the history of this young church all three of these new pastors had been baptized by Senegalese pastors. They received their theological training at the Protestant University of West Africa, in Porto Novo, Benin, supplemented with a year of Lutheran studies here in Senegal. For the time being, they will continue to serve their internship parishes--at least Alouane and Adama will, as François just received a Lutheran World Federation scholarship to complete his masters' degree. The ELS expects to issue a number of new calls, and not just to these new pastors, probably in June or July of this year.

Dirk Stadtlander (far left) and I join other pastors after the service, led by François Thiam (3rd from right) Alouane Ndiaye (2nd right) and Adama Faye (facing away, far right).

There are lots of challenges for this new generation of leaders in the ELS--particularly as they come with advanced degrees and many new ideas into a system that up until now has mostly valued age and seniority for its leadership and decision making. They enter the leadership of a church experiencing lots of growing pains, as it becomes more and more autonomous while still struggling with issues of dependency on accompaning churches in Finland, France and the US.

Still, Sunday was a hopeful, joyful, future-looking celebration. To borrow a line from the ELCA's former Presiding Bishop, H. George Anderson, it's a good time to be the Church here in Senegal. I look forward to learning from these new colleagues and helping them find their voice among us in the old guard.

Grace and Peace,
Peter