Mission – Jerry Lout ⚬ Writer ⚬ Speaker ⚬ Mobilizer

April 11, 2024April 10, 2024

Stated Intent

A brilliant and beloved Southern California professor was fond of urging his fellow believers to live life on purpose, employing principles which he dubbed VIM.

Those lives that bear the marks of wholeness and flourishing for the good, Dallas Willard contended, tend to stem from persons who have firmly embraced Vision (the first letter of the acronym).

Alongside Vision come Intention and Means. Our infant ministry on the Tulsa campus – testing its wobbly legs with gangly stops and starts that are common to the very young – had started hammering out our Intention piece.

Just what were we sensing that God actually wanted? What would bring a ready smile to his magnificent countenance?

Jim Garton and I set out to give it our best in crafting a mission statement. It was clear that International Student Ministries needed one.

What shall we count as ISM’s Intention (the aim or aims that could be counted on to mark us and keep us grounded and focused through coming years). While we understood that a mission purpose can be tweaked and that often the best of aims can meet with course corrections, we felt daily the gravity of this assignment. It weighed on us.

At long last, with a lot of needed grace from above, we landed the plane.

The stated purpose carried two crucial features, neither of which could be realized apart from the other. Students needed to be able to enjoy the assurance that they are genuinely welcomed and cared about. Relationship must be key, with Christ’s tangible love and presence the heartbeat of it all.

The team’s next newsletter to be rolled out would herald our reason for being. Our Intention:

International Community Outreach exists to glorify God by meeting practical and spiritual needs of international students, through acts of service and through the proclamation of the gospel of Christ.

With our stated mission now in place, all that remained was to live it out!

This was to take some doing.

January 11, 2024

Sharp Turn

Impressive structures that weather the elements of time owe their long resilience to sound foundations. Moving about the Tulsa campus lying along the famed Route 66 corridor, I was garnering insights about T.U.’s own foundations. Not those to do with brick and mortar but of held convictions, beliefs and values – elements that gave rise to the university’s birth back in the nineteenth century.

Along the way I reflected how the many streams of higher education in America had sprung forth and flowed directly from the headwaters of Christian faith and practice.

The first colleges in America were founded by Christians and approximately 106 out of the 108 first colleges were Christian colleges. Harvard University, which is considered one of the leading universities in America and the world was founded by Christians. One of the original precepts of the then Harvard College stated that students should be instructed in knowing God and that Christ is the only foundation of all “sound knowledge and learning*.

The more I drank in of T.U.’s legacy the more I felt a grateful kinship. I paused at the courtyard of Sharp Chapel. Bedrock elements like truth and compassion, mercy and justice – qualities embodied in the person of Jesus himself – had birthed this place. These and other such virtues, all featured front and center at the school’s inception.

The University of Tulsa arose out of Presbyterian Mission roots by way of Kendall College. Even now the ‘vital signs’ of the Christian faith bore evidence of active life. Via several streams of campus expression. From Presbyterian to Baptist to Methodist to Catholic, alongside a range of parachurch ministries.

Buoyed in part by my recent ‘until they know that you care’ moment, I rallied my courage.

Entering through large ornate doors of Sharp Chapel I followed a stairway up to the Chaplain’s office.

Would my request be approved? I wondered. Would International Student Ministries be endorsed as a formally sanctioned presence. To offer, through the Lord’s grace, a witness to the life and hope resident in the person of Jesus? Particularly, among scholars and students even now making their way to this place from across the world.

September 8, 2017

In A Manner Of Speaking

“La!”

The roundish, baldish, gruffish language tutor prided himself in his home area’s version of the Swahili language. After all, his was the Coast Swahili variety. Only Kenya’s neighbor to the south, Tanzania, could compete with the gold standard Swahili spoken along the teacher’s Indian Ocean region. His voice was raspy, making him seem harsher than he really was. His sudden “La!” (No!) was instantly followed by a terse scold, “Up-country Swahili!” With little patience for poorly-spoken words, the aging gent spat out the phrase as if evicting a live wasp from his mouth.

It was through this mwalimu mzee (elder instructor) I first caught the need to communicate well in another culture. This was further driven home once our stay in the Capital ended. Through a much-loved missionary headmistress whose wrinkle-teased eyes constantly twinkled and whose tongue offered up wisdom and wit by the kilo. . . “I believe I understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure that what I said is what you thought I meant.” A sampling of Elizabeth Ridenour’s way of making the point.

Some places are not the best for a native English-speaker to learn the Swahili language. Nairobi was one of them. A recommended, though challenging way, to master a new language is through a method called immersion learning. Learning by immersion happens when everybody around the student understands and speaks the desired language, but do not speak the student’s language. A sink or swim approach.

By the time most Nairobi kids reached adolescence they were fluent in two or more languages. And with English the nation’s official language – in government-sponsored places like post office, secondary schools and parliament – young people thirsted to know English. During my language school months, the moment I tried bumbling through half a sentence of Swahili in the company of a teenager, the youngster was already responding in crisp, fluent English.

Meaningful practice of the African dialect outside the classroom was rare.

I was dead set on communicating well – as Mwalimu Mzee insisted. With proper ‘textbook grammar’, exact pronunciation. . . Coast–like. That was my aim. And I must not yield to the great linguistic sin – any use of upcountry Swahili.

Months passed. Classes ended. The Mission assigned us to a remote station hundreds of miles further inland from the Coast. How would my textbook Swahili do. . . there in the place we were to live and serve?

Upcountry.

September 14, 2017

Sensibilities

Green – Naïve – Novice – Ignorant. String them together and you had my name tag.

The rambling house that my wife, myself and our bundle of Julie settled into had been built by missionaries who pioneered the work three decades ahead of our coming. The pioneers had fashioned the dwelling from local soil – rust-tinted bricks fired in a home-built kiln.

A day or two after our Bukuria arrival, a chorus of male voices took us by surprise. Not a musical chorus but a mix of busy voices growing loud, fading back, then loud again.

Are they angry. . . enthused. . . something other. . .which? Their language was neither English nor Swahili. Kikuria, no doubt. Unsure of their disposition and ignorant of who they were, I touched the screen door. And moved to the open veranda where the dozen or so African men had assembled.

I was twenty-seven, my wife twenty-three. It was clear most of the men out-seasoned me – their skin weathered from years beneath an equatorial sun.

The group of strangers – all male – coming unannounced, still left me uneasy.

Do we invite them in? If so, what do we do next?

Are these gents all friendly to the Mission. . . We have a six-month-old girl.

Whatever else Ann and I knew, one thing was certain. We were out of our element. These were waters we’d never swum.

One of the older men – their spokesman? – moved closer. His English was broken, his accent challenging but I could make it out easily enough.

“We come to greet. We come to welcome you here to this place.”

I drew near.

“Hello”, nodding. “Hello”, smiling. “Hello”, I greeted, shaking each extended hand one by one. Though I felt more at ease and was touched by their welcoming us to Kuria-land, I was still conflicted how to respond. Only to offer repeatedly. “Thank you, Thank you, sir. Thank you . .”

I searched awkwardly for some cultural bridge to temper the situation. Answers eluded me. The visitors glanced toward one another, voiced some quiet, mysterious words. And eventually, slowly, went their way.

It was months before I learned I had made a marked impression that awkward day. By then word had got around. It took a while to redeem our name. . . “They did not even welcome us in for tea.”

The new resident-missionary – come to live and serve among the Wakuria people – successfully offended a welcoming delegation of church elders.

Like the snaking road leading past the Mission, another bend in the way lay clearly ahead – our Taranganya learning curve.

December 4, 2018

A New Coach

The apprentices did not tire of their hardships in the company of the carpenter-turned-rabbi. Roughing it with Jesus deepened them somehow. And, while his parables and assignments at times perplexed them, they were never at risk of getting bored.

As he labored at offering up truth and clarifying it where needed, Jesus remained always-present to them. His favorite moments seemed to be found engaging these clearly flawed but hungering men. The rabbi taught with warmth and wit and they would catch the occasional upturned smile in the flicker of a crackling night fire. At other times his voice was marked by a distressful tone. This would not often pass unnoticed, their searching eyes exploring his troubled features. Clearly he knew things – deep, disturbing, wonderful things – not yet ripe for sharing.

While they at times tracked his sayings with clear-eyed understanding, the recruited apprentices weren’t always the keenest of trainees.

He could leave them feeling uneasy by his prescriptions for living life. Sometimes they were utterly baffled over a point he seemed bent on making. In these times, to his credit, he never demeaned them. Rather, the rabbi gently drew them in. . . to reflecting, to pondering, in ways the best educators through history have commonly done.

Jesus’s first team of trainees numbered just twelve. The wildly-diverse company of personalities with their contrasted backgrounds walked with Jesus, under his tutelage a good three years and more.

Partly because of his awful and glorious final acts – yielding up himself as a young man in his prime to a voluntary death, then shockingly emerging fully alive three days later from his garden tomb – the rabbi’s handful of followers came to embrace him fully. And, considering their remarkable Holy Spirit-empowering afterward, how could his company of trainee-disciples possibly remain few!

Being fully divine, Jesus remained entirely man. Human, subject to weariness, to pain, pleasure, hope. Yet he stayed blameless, flawless-of-character, good.

While Jesus was surely qualified to mentor craftsmen in the skills of carpentry and construction, he knew well that his mission lay elsewhere. It was a mission spanning eternity and with all tribes of the human family in view. It was a call of cosmic dimension, an assignment in transforming communities out of all earth’s cultures and languages, into persons remarkably like himself.

While the word apprentice hasn’t always sprung readily to mind when reaching for a label to tag a “Jesus-follower”, it may come as close as any to best portray this mentor-mentee relationship.

Jesus was a master teacher. Beyond this, Jesus supplies not only knowledge for learning but the power needed to effectively apply life-altering truths to raw, in-the-trenches daily living. Bringing his disciples forward into a life as his own, he leads as friend.

A few years back I happened onto the writings of a gentleman in whom the term “apprentice to Jesus” had found a welcome home. He referenced it often. The apprentice word fits Dallas Willard like a favorite pair of gym shoes fits an athlete.

We can likely learn some things from a seasoned Christ-follower apprentice – who, on entering the process, found an entirely new life emerge.

“Follow me as I follow Christ” – Paul, the apostle