Confessions of a Pittsburgh Missionary: A Cultural Experience

Confessions of a Pittsburgh Missionary: A Cultural Experience

Week 9: July 12-19, 2014

I realize this weekly update is coming three days into the week after, but it’s been kind of busy lately for CEF Greater Pittsburgh.  The week started off with the blessing of getting to see a girl, who’s not so little anymore, get baptized. This was special to me because she shared in her testimony right before that she came to know Christ for the first time after praying for salvation with me at a VBS at our church in 2010. It was a huge blessing to get to see someone I had the opportunity of leading to Christ make the decision to publically proclaim that through baptism.

The rest of the week continued and I had lots of helpers! My friend Nikki who I met at CEF Training School in 2008, came for a week to help. She was a huge blessing to me and she actually gave up a week of vacation to come to Pittsburgh and help. She is also the one who recruited Chloe for the summer, so she has been a huge help to CEF Pittsburgh. I am blessed to have a friend like her who has such a servant’s heart, has truly stuck with me through lows and highs of life, and goes out of her way to be a help to me. I also had a girl from church tag along a couple days as a helper. She is thirteen and able to do CEF next year. So I offered to let her tag along a couple times and be helper so she could see what it was like to decide for sure. So Chloe, AJ, Nikki, Sophia, and I all set out for ministry in the Pittsburgh area.

We were originally supposed to have three clubs but I am quickly learning to be flexible. One club, due to lack of advertising needed to be pushed to another week. And the remaining two clubs had to be shortened to four days instead of five days. But we proceeded and made the most of it regardless. It was kind of nice to have Monday off. I took Nikki into Pittsburgh and we did some tourist stuff since she was giving up her vacation to come help me. Our two clubs were in Elizabeth and Braddock. These are vastly different areas and so the clubs were also very different. But we experienced different cultures as we went to both. 

The first culture we experienced was apartment culture in Elizabeth. We quickly discovered at the apartments in Elizabeth that these kids had a hard time listening and following rules. The first day was chaos as we tried to maintain control! But we lost them. We piled into the car after it was finally over and debriefed and came up with ways to make the next day better. Our hostess explained that a lot of apartment parents leave for work and let their kids sleep in as long as they want and stay up late as well. Then most of them go swimming all day and the lifeguard is basically the babysitter. This proved to make the group of apartment kids rather challenging to control since they were not used to much discipline outside of a school setting. We came back the next day with coloring sheets and moved games to the middle and found that it was much easier for the kids to pay attention. And praise God, we saw at least one salvation decision come as a result of that club.

The second culture we experienced was inner city or urban culture in Braddock. Most of the kids that were at the next club were tough, street, city kids. It was a little intimidating at first, but we eventually found that they actually were better behaved than our apartment kids. This was especially a cultural experience for Sophia. Sophia has been all over the world and seen many different cultures, but this was a culture she was not used to. I was reminded of how different of cultures we were with on the first day when a little boy I was sitting next to pointed at Nikki’s converse shoes, crinkled his nose, and asked, “What’s wrong with her shoes?” He couldn’t understand why someone would wear scuffed up shoes like that. I was reminded again of the different culture a couple days later when counseling some boys that wanted prayer. One of the boy’s requests was for his family because his uncle had just been shot. I was reminded that these boys had probably seen more hurt and pain than me even in the short 5-12 years they’d lived. And they definitely needed to hear that Jesus was always with them and would never leave even if people do.

This week was a good reminder to me that you can experience many different cultures without even leaving your city. You can even experience different cultures with people of the same ethnicity. But Jesus loved across cultural lines, so people going into ministry better be prepared to minister and love across cultural lines as well. 

Be willing to get out of your comfort zone, keep an open mind to other’s backgrounds, and learn to be flexible.

AJ enthusiastically sharing the missionary story at our club in Elizabeth.

Nikki teaching the memory verse at our club in Braddock.