Today was an incredible day in Kumasi, Ghana.

1. First of all, I am a fool for not recording the session taught by our special guest, Vincent Asamoah, this morning. It was powerful and emotional time Vincent and the coaches who worked with him before Jim died. Vincent told his story of how everything he believed about ministry leadership changed through his friendship with Jim Moye. For example, In 2002, he and a few other African coaches traveled to a northern town during a very hot time of the year. They all knew that sleeping without A/C would be nearly impossible. Since the only A/C room had been booked for Jim, he invited all of the coaches to sleep in his room and told Vincent to sleep in the bed with him. Sounds like a middle school lock-in!

Vincent also said that after meeting all of our coaches and trainees this week, that he has never felt so excited about the future of YLI. He is looking forward to moving back to Kumasi and beginning to work again with us.

2. I did record a conversation with Albert Churcher and Adam Brown from Tamale. They told me how after the YLI conference there last month they took the left over food to some hungry men sitting outside of a mosque who were very thankful and excited to receive it. Adam told me how just 10 years ago a muslim in Tamale would never accept food from a Christian; but now, as they have continued to demonstrate love to them, muslim men and women are allowing Christians to care for their needs. Adam’s primary calling is to disciple young men and women as they travel together to show love in very practical and powerful ways to the muslim community. Many are coming to see who Jesus really is.

3. We mapped out our entire ministry calendar for 2009; and let me tell you, I got fired up. YLI is hitting new ground this year and responding to “Macedonia calls” from some other corners of Ghana that have heard about our message and want us to come. Hopefully some of you back in the US will make a short journey with me to be a part of some of these gatherings.

4. We had groundnut soup with rice balls and chicken tonight (with extra hot pepper) which can make any day good!

I’ve never recovered from jet lag so fast, which is good because after our overnight flight we drove immediately the five hours to Kumasi.  The drive was significantly more brutal than the 12 hour flight, mostly because I didn’t allow us any recovery time in Accra.  The reason was I planned to begin the conference a mere seven hours after we landed (for those of you thinking about joining me on a future trip, know that I’ve learned my lesson!).

The first day of our coaches’ summits are only for the existing coaches.  We have made this first day a focus on spiritual formation, discernment and vision so we continue to respond God’s voice and leading for our ministry in Ghana.  Its a collaborative and discussion oriented time with space for prayer and listening.  

The primary topics of the day were:

1.  living as mission, embodying mission in the same way that Jesus was a living mission among the hurting and lost.  The life and mission of Christ, expressed through us, is our most powerful teaching and training tool.

2.  discovering one’s platform for the lost, asking the question, “have we created lives so busy with ‘Christian work’ that we have no platform for building relationships with people who need Jesus?”  We discussed what a platform to the lost could look to reach poor farmers, village children, drug addicts or village chiefs, and other groups of hurting people in Ghana.  Yes, even chiefs have great struggles!  

3.  discipleship in the context of mission, looking at Jesus’ life (we discussed Jim Moye as a secondary example) and seeing great multiplication because they discipled people not in a closed room, but within the context of a mission that was then transferred to them.

Got to run… tomorrow I’ll upload photos.

Ash asked me to post this update due to a poor internet connection in Kumasi.  He and Vincent have arrived safely in Ghana and want to thank you for your prayers and support.  He will try to post an update tomorrow. 

Rhonda

It’s hard to believe that its been three months since our family returned from Ghana.  Since the end of last October we have been praying, planning and discerning; looking to see how God is continuing to lead us as a family and ministry.  Exciting things happen when we ask God to show us what he wants.  Out of the ordinary ideas, opportunities and usually some problems seem to arise; and it becomes clear that God is up to something.   

This afternoon I am hopping Delta over to Ghana for our first coaches’ summit of 2009.  Vincent Asamoah is joining me.  Vincent was one of the original guys that Jim identified and began to pour his life into in Ghana, even before starting YLI.  He has now just finished his MDiv at Baylor, and along with his family is moving back to Kumasi in May.  Vincent has been sensing along with our team and the coaches that God may be leading him into a leadership role with YLI.  This is an idea that none of us had even thought about just 3 months ago, and it is exciting because of his history with Jim Moye and the imprint that Jim left on his life.  

At the coaches summit Vincent and I will be teaching a lot about mission and vision as our team continues plan our 2009 ministry calendar.  We know a few things for sure:  

• God is calling us to go deeper relationally in the towns where we train leaders.  We are to take the risk of going deep.
• God wants us to shine a brighter light on YLI’s missional nature, living as the good news among the lost and hurting.
• God is leading us in the deepening of the community of our coaches.    

I have been asked to give a short update to this blog over each of the next 10 days of our trip to let you all know what we are up to and how you can be praying for us.  So, pray for my technology, and check back again starting tomorrow night.  Thanks for providing support and encouragement to us in so many ways.

Please pray for Carrie, Katie and John Mark; and for Vincent’s wife Doreen, daughters Ama and Afia and son Kwame who are staying behind in Waco. 

Time to go.

It has been a lot of fun and very encouraging for us to see how many people have followed our time in west Africa last year on this blog.  What we experienced and witnessed has helped us deepen our understanding of what God has called YLI to be in the world.   In other words, our small, but specific part of his Big Picture.

Preparing for our trip last spring I thought that the hard part of taking our family to Africa would be having our family in Africa.  The pre-trip fears started with malaria, heat, food issues, safety on African roads, 24 hours of air travel with small kids, and then grew from there.  I lost some sleep.  You get the idea.  On the other hand I thought that the ministry aspect of the trip would be relatively easy and relaxed.   Now looking back I see that our actual experience was the opposite of our expectations!

Our entire family (especially Carrie and the kids) did exceptionally well.  Katie and John Mark have taken more sick visits to the doctor since we returned than during our entire stay in Ghana!  They slept well, had lots of friends and were never in danger.  Even the air travel wasn’t so bad (or maybe we benefited from some fatigue-induced memory failure!).  Of course, being married to my particular wife made the whole process so much easier.  Living in Ghana was some of the best family time we have ever had.

The ministry experience was very good as well, but at times much harder!  There were some decisions and changes that God led us to make in our mentoring and conference activity, and in our leadership structure in Ghana.  Leading through change is always hard.  Although the need for adjustments was clear, we needed a lot of faith.  The right decisions became clear, but the future was not immediately visible.  It reminded me of how Jesus asked the disciples to leave everything they knew,  without telling them where they were going, what to expect, or what was going to happen.  He only asked that they follow him.

Looking back over the last year we see that God was strengthening the foundation for the ministry.  In October we began a 12 month process of holding the entire ministry along side of the values that Jim Moye modeled and taught:  listening to God, living incarnationally in the world and taking the risk of going deep with a few.   Through this process we are being reminded that only as a relational ministry can we engage fundamental brokenness in the different and varied cultures of Ghana and other african cultures.  

Of course, as we grow it will not be effective to franchise an identical ministry into different cultures, which is why our focus must continue to be local; investing deeply in carefully selected, catalytic young men and women, who will be also faithful to entrust that which they have heard into the lives of others.

There are some very exciting specifics that I am looking forward to sharing with you all over the next few weeks.  Thanks for your friendship, prayer and financial support!

Pray for poor John Mark.  He’s had a tough week.  He has two big knots on his head from collisions with the tile floor and furniture.  And on top of that, it looks like our perfect health record has been broken (I am actually surprised it lasted this long).  We think he has the Giardia parasite – maybe contracted while swimming in Lake Bosumtwe on Sunday.  He seems to be doing better today but we need to get it treated and be very careful so it doesn’t spread to the rest of us.

Last week up in the northern region city of Tamale, Ash and some of the coaches held a conference with about 25 young men and women of which most are former Muslims.  They have decided to not move away from their families after leaving Islam (despite threats and attempts on their lives by the same family members).  It was an honor to be with these folks and hear their stories.   After the conference they asked us to commit to coming back to continue to mentor, train and help them.  It was humbling to hear about the sacrifices that mark their lives.

• Adam, a YLI training coach travels to the villages around Tamale to love and care for Muslim children.  He tries to take whatever is needed including clothes, books, medicine and food.  He has also raised money for necessary surgeries.  Caring for the children has given him credibility as he lives the Gospel before preaching it.
• Moses told us how after becoming a Christian his father attempted to kill him.  He fled to Accra to go to a Bible school, but then afterward heard God tell him to return to Tamale.  He is now pastoring a church in Tamale and building friendships with those who rejected him.
• Samual is a young man who first was exposed to YLI in 2003.  He told me how he learned to show love and serve those God put in his path, and ‘invest deeply in a few’.  As an anatomy teacher at nursing training colleges he has been given a platform to counsel and disciple many other young people.  He also uses his car to transport Muslim children to and from school.  He told me how much they love him because he tunes his car radio to the station that recites the Koran.
• Mohammed is the only bread winner for his whole family, so he told me that when he became a Christian they couldn’t kick him out.  He lives in rejection and many times he is forced to eat alone in the house.  He could use your prayers!

A couple of months ago I read 12 Who Changed the World, a book about Jesus’ disciples written by Morris Inch. It was “ok”…(I don’t want to make this a book review), but there is one point he made about the 12 that I’ve returned to. Jesus seemed to surround himself not with people who he needed to motivate, but with people who, because of their excessive passion and exuberance, often needed to be restrained or channeled into a productive direction. If you read the gospels without sunday school glasses you see that the disciples didn’t always set the bar very high in terms of common sense and obedience! They boldy made many mistakes which Jesus turned them into learning experiences – for them and us.

Last week I wrote about Pastor Bossman, another man with baffling amounts of passion and exuberance for Jesus and YLI. He called me two Friday’s ago to tell me that he was going to organize two YLI meetings on Sunday afternoon, invite 50 people to come, and he didn’t want anything from me except my prayers. I was slightly concerned about him organizing an event using the YLI name. Bossman hasn’t gone through any official YLI training and we don’t encourage people to organize “YLI meetings” anyway. But, I felt like I needed to just pray for him and let God take care of it, and reluctantly that is what I did.

But on Saturday, my concerned grew. I thought that maybe I should call him to tell him that its ok to hold his meeting, but please don’t use the YLI name. However, I prayed for him instead.

Then, Sunday morning I got a call from our coach Naomi. She told me that she was unexpectedly back in Sunyani and was preparing for church. I told her about Bossman’s plans and my concerns to which she said, “Don’t worry Ash, I’ll go over to help support him”. Immediately I felt relieved and thankful that I chose to pray for Bossman rather than discourage him.

After the meeting Naomi and Bossman called me. And they were very excited. Naomi helped lead Bossman’s new small discipleship groups, teaching them about what it means to love people like Jesus and grow as disciples. A couple of people who weren’t Christians also showed up, but left as new creations, knowing full well who Jesus is! The groups are going to continue meeting regularly under Naomi and Bossman’s leadership.

Bossman, I think, is a disciple in the mold of the 12 – the kind of person Jesus chose to fulfill the most important mission in the world.

After the past three weeks of grueling travel throughout northern, western and southern Ghana, and before Ash’s conference and exploratory trip to Liberia next week, we have been enjoying a week together at home in Kumasi. 

It was one of our hopes for our time in Ghana is that we would spend more time together as a family (not an uncommon desire of American families!), and it has really been a good thing.  The late youth ministry pioneer and guru, Mike Yacconelli, said that “efficiency is the grease of non-relationship”.  It really is true how in our culture of convenience in the US, the casuality is often our relationships.

But in Ghana, we have found that the “lack of efficiency” has strengthened relationship.

As mentioned before, it takes a lot of time to just do the basics of living here:  going to the market at least once a day to buy food and stuff for the house, managing the steady stream of neighborhood children that run through our home, the needed car maintenance, Katie’s reading lessons, trying to keep up with communication with everyone in the US, and planning and discerning YLI’s direction for 2009… whew.  The basic tasks of living just take much more time here, and if you only look at the number of completed tasks each day…well, on the surface its hard to understand how we could all be so tired at the end of the day! 

But what makes it enjoyable is the fact that there are few daily tasks that we can complete alone, so we need to work together.  Instead of getting in the car and running errands for three hours by ourselves as often happens in Atlanta; Ash and Churcher will get in the car to get some parts to fix a ceiling light, and Carrie will walk with Abraham to buy some tomatoes and limes from the produce lady along the road, and Rose or Maame Jane will take Katie and John Mark for an afternoon walk.

Let the reminder of today’s anniversary help us remember what is really important.

Here are a few more photos of our family and extended YLI community…

Over the past six days the team and I have logged an average of six hours each day in the car traveling from Kumasi to Sunyani, Kumasi to Essem, Essem to Kumasi, Kumasi to Accra.  Being the rainy season we have dealt with some very bad roads and have made some very out of the way detours.  The Essem follow-up conference was nearly cancelled when the road to Essem was blocked by two trucks and one car that were stuck in three feet of mud thus blocking the entire road.

In Sunyani we met with Pastor Bossman who is being discipled by our coach Naomi Wuni.  Bossman is enthusiastically living the truths that he has learned from Naomi and YLI conferences.  It has been a year since I have seen him and it was a fun reunion. He shared with us a story that I think will shine some light on the world in which our YLI coaches are ministering. 

On a Friday night in May of this year, Bossman sent his 12 year old daughter to a shop to buy candles for church and she didn’t return.  They searched and prayed for her that night, and the following morning had a radio broadcast issued of her disappearance.  They prayed more.  No one in Sunyani responded.  Sunday passed and she still didn’t return and everyone kept praying.  Finally, on Monday they got a call from her.  She was in Techiman which is a three hour drive away.  She was tired and hadn’t eaten in three days.  When Bossman picked her up the story unfolded. 

She had been chloroformed and abducted that Friday night and driven a long distance where she was kept in captivity.  She learned that she had been kidnapped in order to be given to a witch doctor and was to be used in a sacrifice of some sort.  However, when they presented her to the witch doctor she was rejected as unusable.  The reason?  The witch doctor said that there were many people praying for her and she was unfit.  Her abductors took her away and left her along side of the road near Techiman.

It is hard to write stories like this because it sounds like a movie…not an experience of one of our leaders in Ghana.  The life challenges that are faced here are so different than what we face; sometimes almost unbelievably different, and I want to say “Oh, come on… that can’t be true” (I sometimes have an embarrassing amount of skepticism).   But no matter how different the culture and context, the “answer” is the same:  the love of God in them, expressed as an offering to others through Christ.  What we teach here is eagerly accepted and integrated into their world; and then it then becomes their ministry and it is expressed in their world.  

Young Leaders International is a US based ministry, but in Ghana YLI is becoming very Ghanaian.  God is working, meeting them “where they are”, and doing His work through them and their world.

Last Thursday (21st August) I traveled to Wa in the Upper West Region to visit Albert Jatoe for part of the onsite YLI training experience for Roland Martin (Liberia) and Eric Awinaba (Ghana).  Since the guys had our car so they could get around in Wa, I traveled from Kumasi on a public bus driven by a very young man with apparent Formula 1 aspirations.  The ride was nearly eight hours long over partially completed roads; and my seat was basically on top of the transmission, which gave me good view of all of the sheep, taxis, and pedestrians who panicked and scrambled to get out of our way.  I learned one of the few traffic rules of Ghana:  “Size determines right of way”!

 

Once in Wa, almost every night we drove an hour on dirt roads to remote villages where we witnessed the young men who Jatoe is discipling teach, minister and pray for their people.  Since those who live in villages are farming nearly every moment of daylight this time of year we always met them at night.  There is no electricity in the villages, so we sat outside in circles, sharing flashlights or a lantern to read our Bibles.  One night we sat on benches next to a pile of rocks which Jatoe explained was one of the gods of that village.

 

Many people came each night, and after meeting we would stay to pray for individuals and families for hours, sometimes until midnight.  One man brought his twin boy and girl to us for prayer for their protection.  In the villages most people believe that twins are from the gods, and he has been under tremendous pressure from the Sazie village elders and community to visit a fetish (traditional idol worship) priest in order to establish a new god in Sazie.  They believe a new god would improve their crop harvest and keep their children safe from disease and evil spirits, among other things.  A western comparison is if I had a potential cure for cancer but refused to share it.  I am still filled with admiration for this man.  Please pray for him.

 

At least three people came to Christ during these times of prayer, but all of us were strengthened and encouraged by what we saw God doing through Jatoe’s solid ministry protégés.  As Eric shared with me later, “Although they have no teaching materials but the Bible, these people are truly sincere and minister to each other, and God is really working.” 

 

And, in a symbolic coincidence, on the way home that night from Sazie we drove over a six foot puff adder (at least 4 times) that was sleeping on the road!