(reading time 2 minutes)
From Urk, groups of young people have already made several trips to Botswana to help refurbish churches. We from mission have found out how they always raise the funds for this: they have one of the pastors dangle from a pair of jeans, and build a mission market around it.
Workshops
On Saturday, 26 May, the Youth Wanting to Travel organised a mission market to raise funds for their upcoming trip to Botswana. There - at the request of the church's pastor, Rev Rethabile Sibeko - they want to help refurbish the church in the village of Qabo.
At that mission market, a few mission workers from the congregation were present to tell about their work. Wilma de Vries had specially come over from Albania to tell about her work in two workshops.
Making choices
Hessel and Coby Visser-Wiegel were on leave, and gave a fascinating workshop on what is involved in Bible translation work. During the workshop, the participants found out that there is still some work to be done worldwide: of the seven thousand languages worldwide, only ten per cent have a complete Bible translation, and in addition, over twenty per cent have a New Testament translation.
Hessel and Coby took workshop members through the whole process. We learned about the choice you have to make: do you first spend two years studying language, or do you start translating right away? Who do you take from the local population to help you with the work: a believer who only has primary school, or a churchgoer with secondary education, but a walk of life not in line with the gospel? And what do you do if the government offers to provide free education to the whole population in English, or another language, in which many translations are already available? Do you then go ahead with your translation project?
Besides the missionary workers telling about their experiences, Pastor Korving and Rev Polinder had been asked to give a workshop on the blessings of missionary work and whether God might also have a calling for everyone.
That was a full programme, but they have more vicars in Urk. So for Reverend Capellen, they had thought of having him and his son do a competition of hanging on to jeans - and it was on! Reverend Capellen won over his son, but he didn't win the whole contest: there were Urkers who hung on to those jeans even longer than he did. But: it did make for some nice pictures.
