As I've now been in Bundibugyo for almost 5 days now, I thought I share a couple of the more interesting things I've noticed about life here.
In American domestic life, the squirrell is the greatest form of nuisance. It will steal your bird-food, drive your dog crazy, and even occaisonally scurry into your house. Basically they're our largest form of vermin. The lizard is the Ugandan squirrell, except like most of nature in Africa, it's magnified more than anything you deal with in America. Lizards are all over the place here. There's many varieties. They vary in size from an inch-long gecko to a foot-long minature iguana. Lizards outside are not too much worse than squirrels. However they differ from squirrels in two key issues.
It takes an extremely bold squirrel to come in your house. However, as far as I can tell, lizards would rather be in your house than anywhere else in the whole entire world. Not only do the love to crawl on my walls, they find the white plaster to be the ideal surface to deposit their excrement. I really hate them.
On Sunday I went to the mission church. It was interesting, the church has an attendance of over 100 people, which consists of many of the people in the immediate community. However, they don't have a pastor, and apparently they're better for it. Let me explain.
In the backwoods district of Bundibugyo there are two ways to make big money. The first is to start a school. You start a school enroll a couple dozen kids, charge them all school fees, run the school with as little overhead as possible, and you are bringing in the big bucks. Schools can be really profitable here because no one expects you to provide textbooks. So all you really need to run a school is a building and as few teachers as you can get away with. Needless to say, the perception among the Ugandans, that schools are a big dollar industry, has been hard for our school to overcome.
The other way to make money in BGO is to start a church. Here the pastor is unapoligetically the CEO. The offering pays his salary and or his building, which can be his home. So when New Life Bunfimulinga goes without a pastor, it's to rise above the ills of the area. While it is good to see a church run by it's elders, I think that the quality of teaching can suffer without official clergy.
However, here it seems like the elusive quality of unity in the church body as Paul talks about it, is being realized in a way not seen in the states. In a sense it seems like it's easier to really be one body without the office of priest. The whole priest class seems to run directly against the idea of one-ness unity. However on the other hand Paul clearly sets apart elders and deacons/deaconesses from the body. The idea of having the clergy is so deeply ingrained in my head I can't really imagine the church without them, however at the same time, I wonder what a church could look like if many were qualified to preach, and the role of pastoring didn't fall onto the shoulders of a particular, official, person.
Posted by matt at September 6, 2004 2:42 PM | TrackBack