By Randal Dick
Superintendent of missions
Your response to my January column "Who Put the W in the WCG" was overwhelming. Thank you. I want to follow up that story because I heard from Ngoyi Kadima, whom I mentioned in that column. What he said has some profound lessons for all of us.
A recap for those not familiar with the story. Several of us were at a conference in January. We met a doctor from the Congo whom I felt moved to reach out to. His return travel arrangements fell through, and he needed help.
We called brethren in New York, who took care of him over a weekend and sent him on his way. As you can see by his letter reproduced on this page, God is working with him.
It is interesting how the WCG finds itself drawn into the scene. Dr. Kadima speaks six languages, and English is not his first.
I left the grammar and syntax as is, but please don't assume that the writer is an unlearned man. The comments in brackets are mine.
Kinshasa, Feb. 2, 1998
Dear Brother Rev. Randal,
I hope this letter will be in your hand. First of all I would like to thank you very, very much for everything. In New York, I had really a family and I was very well treated there. Please thank them and God for me.
My trip to USA was a miracle. I remember many people asking why I had come to a conference like that after in long distance. Believe me, only God knows.
If I did not come to that conference, I could not [have met] Randal [Dick], Ken [Sparks, pastor in Bluefield and Summersville, West Virginia], Jeff [Broadnax, pastor in Westchester and Manhattan, New York] and other people.
But I believe also God has a plan for me. During the meeting and after the conference, I had and still have a lot of questions.
For the first time I asked myself if really God wants me to be a medical doctor and practice the medicine. I had many occasions to be preferred as ministry, but to tell the truth, I did not like that. I did a lot of mistakes in my life, but God still wants me to work for him. And my big question is why, where and how?
So I want you to pray for me. I have two things in mind when I am writing this letter:
Work part time for the Lord and my practice so I can take care of my family.
Have training even short-term and work full-time for the Lord and his will the way to take care of my family.
The question is what he wants me to do. I'm still in Kinshasa for days, and when I get to Mbuji-Mayi where I live and have the small clinic, I will pray more for that. But I believe that I should work for him in the area I am now, but I will need some training before I do that. I know that he wants me to work for him from long time ago, but I have been refusing.
Maybe I am wrong, but I want you to pray for me so I can have training even if one year, in Kenya or USA, and come back and work for the WCG.
Let me know what you think. But I am ready to work for God here or abroad. I still praying to have clear vision from God. I will be grateful for you if you can help me that way. Again, thanks very, very much for everything.
God bless you and yours,
Dr. Ngoyi Kadima
Dr. Kadima's letter is a plea for us to bring him into a relationship with us and to help equip him to serve Christ in his part of the world.
I don't know about you, but I have conflicting feelings. I don't feel competent to train anybody--I have enough trouble with myself!
Yet there is a certain sense of responsibility to God to respond to one of his children who asks us to help him learn to serve our Lord.
This leads me to raise the question--does Christ have an elect today?
Does Jesus still call (as in summons) people to put aside their priorities and adopt his priorities as their own?
Everyone would agree that Jesus called his disciples, but does he still give specific people specific assignments?
You bet he does! But Christ does not call us to exclusivity. We have had to repent of the idea that election gives us privileged status with God.
Being part of the elect in Christ (and there is no other election) means that we have been incorporated into his mission, have been commissioned to share in his sufferings, to lay down our lives for him, our time, our money, our energy, so that others might be saved.
The late bishop Leslie Newbigin wrote: "There is, there can be, no private salvation, no salvation which does not involve us with one another. God ... does not come through the skylight....
"In order to receive God's saving revelation we have to open the door to the neighbor whom he sends as his appointed messenger, and--moreover--to receive that messenger not as a temporary teacher or guide whom we can dispense with when we ourselves have learned what is needed, but as one who will permanently share our home.
"There is no salvation except one in which we are saved together through the one whom God sends to be the bearer of his salvation."
Just because we, as a fellowship, have been humbled and are having to relearn much of what we thought we knew, does not diminish the awesome opportunity we have to participate with Christ and his work. That remains.
If anything we are better equipped to make a difference for the kingdom, spiritually, where it counts, than ever before.
It is exciting to see the awesome work of God in the farflung disadvantaged places. The movement of the Father to draw the multiple thousands began without our help.
In February I sat among a Bible study group in Thailand of young, intelligent, thoughtful, lifelong Buddhists.
The man doing the teaching, one of our fellowship, was not ordained, nor was he experienced--yet I watched as he was giving the words of life in a way that had meaning to these people who think so differently than most of us.
It was an incredibly moving moment when one of the young men turned to me and asked in broken English: "How can I talk with God? Will he hear me?"
I think we must face the facts of election. The Holy Spirit shapes us as God wills. We don't actually set our own vision.
To be effective servants, we must respond to the vision of Christ for us, and then cast the regional, local and most importantly of all, the individual version of that vision.
There is a critical need at this time in our fellowship to make our election sure. We have been through a time that has caused many of us to grow weary or anxious.
It is vital for each one of us to examine ourselves.
One of the traps Satan lays for us is that of complacency. There is a confidence that leads to complacency.
My read of current financial statistics is that there is about a one in four chance that you are in such a state.
There is also an anxiety that leads to selfishness, which focuses exclusively on self, to the exclusion of the things of God. This is the main lesson of the book of Haggai.
God asks Israel why, when he had been so good to them, were they seeking their own and leaving his priorities to languish?
I think that some of us are mired in that ditch. There is room for both a godly confidence and a godly fear.
If I know that God has elected me to be his agent to others, my trust in him must not exclude the possibility that I might betray his trust in me.
That awareness should drive us all closer to him, on our knees.
That brings me back to Dr. Kadima. What are we, collectively, going to tell him?
Actually, he is symbolic of the increasing number of people who are coming to us, seeking to be discipled--mostly from the most miserable parts of the earth.
I'll leave you, till next month, with the words of Eddie Gibbs, professor of Church Growth at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, who gave an outstanding sermon to our Pasadena congregation Feb. 28.
Dr. Gibbs spoke of how different denominations are all intended to contribute to the edification of the overall body of Christ.
Near his conclusion of his sermon he said--forcefully--"I believe the greatest days of the WCG are yet ahead...
"In your name you have the `W&W'--which stands for Worldwide and We.
"Whatever you do, do not allow them to turn upside down and become the `M&M'--Me and Mine."
These, I believe are prophetic words.
April WN, pages 12 and 13
| WCG Home | Issues | Contents |
Copyright © Worldwide Church of God,1998