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Utumishi wa Neno launches!

Praise God for a good day with 80 vicars and evangelists from the ACK Diocese of Nairobi - the first of three and a half days together. All of us on the staff team were very much in fear and trembling but soon reassured and encouraged by a warm welcome (we were hosted wonderfully well) and by the privilege of sharing quality time in the Word with brothers and sisters who call with us on the same Lord Jesus Christ.
Bishop Joel Waweru welcomed and reminded us from 1 Kings of the importance of setting ourselves to build the kingdom.
Then we were into 1 Corinthians - a letter we'll be looking at through the next few days in the morning expositions. We were all struck by how bitingly relevant and 'close to the bone' the Corinthian context is to ours. There was some lively debate later about the language of "dragging Christ into the brothel" (cf. 1 Cor. 6:15-20). The main thing that came out of chapter 1 was that elevating leaders gives you a divided church; elevating Christ crucified gives you a united church.
Harrison gave us an overview of preaching in Kenya today noting that preachers are, paradoxically, both honoured and dishonoured in our context. We face temptations to adapt to the desires of our age for novelty and pragmatic solutions and the verbal equivalent of junk food. With the result that the church becomes just another human organisation, competing with other organisations; and the sheep end up malnourished or wandering away.
From Matthew 13 we were struck not only that it is 'The Word that does the Work' but also that it is the Lord's work to open hearts to the message: we can't do that with music or oratory or our 'anointing'. We are just driven to the Word and Prayer.
Through the next few days we'll be particularly focussing on OT narrative and it was good to spend a bit of time in Genesis 1 - seeing particularly that we have a speaking God and that he speaks before we do. We hear the Word even before we come to prayer.
Sammy finished the day for us with a call form Genesis 3, Isaiah 66 and Acts 17 to be servants of the Word. It is not about "my message"; it is about "God's message".

Please pray for tomorrow:
  • James preaching from 1 Corinthians 1:18-2:5
  • Andy teaching on 'Preaching Christ from OT narrative' and 'Getting to the heart of the story'
  • Fidel teaching on 'Spirit-filled preaching'
  • And for our first two major group work sessions - pray that we would really enjoy getting stuck into a passage from Genesis and work hard at reading and listening humbly to the text.

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