Dinner with an Archbishop

On Saturday night, I had the amazing opportunity to sit next to an Archbishop and Primate of the Anglican church, Donald Mtetemela of Tanzania, for dinner. Our church hosted him while he is on a trip to encourage the American church and our minister invited the church staff. I have to say that it was breathtaking to hear this man explain the ministries that he leads and pioneers in his country. Clint and I knew embarassingly little about the country of Tanzania, within minutes of meeting the Abp an atlas came out of our host's bookshelf for a geography lesson. He explained to us humbly what the terrain of his country was, a huge country. I felt embarassed that I had not thought to do some more homework.

I did come with a few questions for "his grace," as I later learned I'm "supposed" to call him, chiefly questions regarding the recent tumult in the Anglican church. I learned so much from the time. More than anything else I learned just by listening to and watching a man who is clearly serving God and feeding God's sheep with his whole heart. His heart lies in ministries that bring the gospel into the everyday physical and spiritual lives of his people. So he has a passion for Christian education, for making sure that students at Anglican schools have a meal everyday, that students orphaned by AIDS can pay their school fees. He himself grew up in a small villiage and had to run 5 miles each way to school, without breakfast. He later moved into town to live with his uncle, but had to work weekends and evenings to pay for his school fees. He said he now looks back on that as a rough childhood, but at the time it was what everyone did. So now, so many years later, he rebuilds the Christian schools that the socialist government took away in the 60's and 70's to build up the public school system.

He also tells a story about how one day he was reading Psalm 113, which talks about how God is "exalted over all the nations" yet he "raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap and seats them with princes." He said that after reading that he walked by people looking for food in the trash heap and wondered how God could use him to bring them up. So he found a woman who was selling bananas and talked with her about her situation. She said that every day she went to the market and the seller would give her bananas. Then at the end of the day she brought back her profits and had to share with the seller her profits. So he offered to give her $20 to use to buy the bananas so she wouldn't have to share the profits. He wanted to see if he could trust her. At first she was skeptical, he was a man she didn't know, but after a while, she took the money, and in a little more than a week she offered to pay back the $20. He told her to keep it and gave her $20 more dollars. She used it wisely to pay her children's school fees and move out of her sister's into her own place. The third time he offered the money as a loan, the principal she needed to keep buying bananas. He opened up a bank account for her to begin storing her profits, so she lives on half her income. Then he asked her to bring 5 friends who could be trustworthy to do the same thing. He has now registered this microfinance system with the government, naming it after the first woman, and it has 500 clients. He said his major concern was women with children and that the church teaches and equips these clients to use their money wisely, mostly with the principles from the gospels, the parable of the talents and so forth. But as opposed to microfinance organizations that are in it for the money, taking as much a 90% interest on loans, this one is only in it for the witness of the gospel.

I was so moved by this example. This is exactly the kind of thing that the church ought to be doing in the downcast neighborhoods of our City. Our culture is vastly different in some ways, it is chewed up with a materialism that destroys those who live in poverty, but more than anything else what struck me was this man's simple and powerful faith in the gospel to transform lives. Do you know that his church planting scheme is for every current church to plant 5 others this year!? That in the past three years his diocese planted 53 new churches!? Ask him what the gospel is and he doesn't go into theologial speculation, it is Jesus Christ.

And this doesn't even touch on the Anglican turmoil. Except to perhaps underline the fact that this man is doing something very right that ought to speak volumes to our situation.

On Learning

Recently I've been thinking a lot about the process of learning, which is quite a luxurious thing for a frazzled urban middle school teacher to do. What got me started was my friend Nigel's post on praise choruses and worship music in the church. He is putting together a songbook for the youth group at his church and was searching for songs (old and new) that had meaningful theology in their lyrics. He mentioned how easy it is to remember the songs we sing regularly in church, so we ought to take them seriously.

It is an interesting point, because around the same time I attended a professional development for work about using songs in the Foreign Language classroom. I learned Spanish with songs, but as I attended a Christian school, we sang popular praise choruses translated into Spanish. This was especially useful because we had a general idea what they meant in English. But I didn't know where to find "secular" Spanish songs when I started teaching here in the public school. After the PD, I very randomly ran into a young lady who had been in the same session and was headed to the Instituto Cervantes, a Spanish cultural foundation in the city. She told me about the library that they had there, and I asked if I could come along. I found this great book that came with a tape of traditional Spanish language children's songs (I happen to have a good old fashioned tape player at school, thanks to the teacher before me who left it when she retired).

Singing has completely re-charged my classroom. I am having more fun. My students are having more fun. They sing in Spanish. They complain that their friends sing the songs at home without knowing the words. They do the motions and learn vocabulary (yay for kinetic learning). Their parents are amazed to hear them "speaking" some Spanish. Just when I had begun to despair that they would ever be able to memorize vocabulary. It's a beautiful thing!

But what is most interesting to me is that the first time I teach them a song, it is usually a disaster. They complain that they can't learn the words. They fumble everything up. I hear strange phrases repeated from kids who insist they are saying what I just said. They complain that they don't know what the song is talking about. But the second day, it's more familiar. By the third day they're requesting the song. It is the good, old fashioned repetition that cements the song in their minds and helps them to become better Spanish speakers.

I'm also in a Sunday school class right now about Worship and the Prayer Book led by our minister, and it has made me think about how important repetition can be during a worship service as a teaching tool. The prayers and creeds we say weekly as a part of our liturgy teach us to think a certain way about prayer and faith. They, like the songs we sing, are good training. They are what we will really remember.

Of course, this does not automatically mean that we will know how to apply the truths we memorize. If my students thought they were "speaking Spanish" to someone just by singing their songs, a native speaker might laugh at them, or maybe recognize the song and join in. But too many people have rejected the educational value of this "rote" memorization. It is a good, necessary and enjoyable jumping off point. A solid ground to grow in.

Thank you, Thomas Cranmer. :)

P. S. From a NYT article on recent Math education research:

"[T]he report found it is important for students to master their basic math facts well enough that their recall becomes automatic, stored in their long-term memory, leaving room in their working memory to take in new math processes.
'For all content areas, practice allows students to achieve automaticity of basic skills — the fast, accurate and effortless processing of content information — which frees up working memory for more complex aspects of problem solving,' the report said. "