Back ‘Home’ in the UK for 9 months we face many changes while colleagues in Nigeria help the Ashɛ and Wachi and other teams prepare for a crucial training event in September.

We’ve spent the last 6 months nearly managing to finish writing a newsletter, and then getting delayed with bits and pieces of work or technical difficulties so that then what we had written seems not so fresh any more. So, I’m laying all that aside and we’ll do something of a catchup and review of the last 3.5 years in Nigeria later on, but here’s an update about what’s going on now.

We’re now in the UK! 

That hopefully isn’t too much of a surprise to many, but given our lack of communication you would be forgiven for losing track that we’ve been in Nigeria since March 2016 except for the occasional brief trip back. So we are due a furlough or ‘home assignment’ and wanted to time it so that the big 3 girls can slot into school at the start of a school year. They have just entered P7, P5 and P3 in Glasgow. Rebekah was shocked as she realised that little Abigail is now a big Primary 3 — just what she was in when she left Shawlands Primary school. 

In the mid-19th century, the renowned French/Russian entomologist Jean-Marie Syccof discovered and described the behaviour of an intriguing group of ants native to Algeria.

These days everyone knows how fiercely ants will defend their queen, but before Syccof’s time understanding of the social behaviour of ants was less clear. The queen herself hides deep in the anthill or nest producing offspring and she relies entirely on worker ants bringing food to her, since she can’t go to forage for herself. She can’t even defend herself while she’s producing more workers and so soldier ants defend her from enemy ants or other predators. You don’t want to get in the way of soldier ants, I can tell you!

On some rare occasions a queen will go rogue and will start consuming her offspring or other worker ants. This is clearly not good for the colony, but Syccof found that in certain ant colonies the soldier (defensive worker) ants will rise to defend the queen even when she is doing this. It doesn’t make sense for the colony (workers can sometimes start laying eggs if the queen dies), but Syccof theorised that the soldier ants became so used to backing and defending their queen from any and every attack that they would even help the queen fight and kill their own workers before eating them. In their unthinking defence of the queen therefore, Syccof’s soldier ants were in fact accelerating the demise of the colony. At some point distressed worker ants would disperse and attach themselves to another colony or a group would leave and a new queen would start laying. While what was good for the queen was normally good for the colony, that principle could badly backfire.

Perhaps there are lessons today even for humans. Go to the ant!

An intriguing tweet

Mission ceases to be biblical when it is focused more on what humans get out of it (salvation) than on what God gets out of it (glory)… the former is anthropology the later is theology and if you do not properly order these your missiology will constantly go astray.

— Andy Herbek (@andyherbek) April 22, 2019

caught my attention. At first I thought I maybe liked it… and then maybe it was just the (MBTI) INTP in me talking, but I felt less satisfied with it. OK, I know Twitter isn’t the place for nuance, but there are a few problems I’m afraid I would bring up. I don’t know Andy Herbek and maybe he would like to interact a little more, but here’s my first try. Continue reading Should Mission focus on Salvation of People or on God’s Glory? →

You’ve heard of town twinning, maybe even of toilet twinning, but have you ever heard of ‘ethnotwinning’?

Did you know that every language in the world has a 3 letter ISO639 code? So, as long as you’ve got 3 initials, you can find your own ethnotwin.

My initials are DJR and my ethnotwin is a language in Australia called Djambarrpuyngu. My wife Julie ends up as a Macrolanguage in Nigeria — a cluster of languages that used to be considered one language but which has been split up now.

Abstract: ‘witness’ in the Bible tends to mean telling people about something rather than seeing it. This is not normal English.

The following definitions hopefully explain the senses given by the Greek word martys and martureo, and the word they’re often translated by in English.

μαρτυς noun 1. one who testifies in legal matters, 2. one who affirms or attests, 3. one who witnesses [tells something] at cost of life

μαρτυρέω verb 1. to confirm or attest someth. on the basis of personal knowledge or belief, bear witness, be a witness.
   a. to offer testimony
   b. to confirm bear witness to, declare, confirm,
   c. to support one’s testimony with total selfgiving, eccl. usage w. regard to martyrdom bear witness, testify, be a witness (unto death), be martyred,
2. to affirm in a supportive manner, testify favorably, speak well (of), approve

(BDAG)

witness noun 1. a person who sees an event, 2. evidence, proof
verb 1. see (an event) happen, 2. have knowledge of a development from observation or experience.

(OED 3 ed, via Apple)

How do we know how many tenses English has? Well, we’ve been taught it. What were you taught?

I think normally the basic answer is past, present and future: “I came; I come; I will come.”

Then someone (probably someone who did some Latin) will chime in with perfect or pluperfect: “I have come; I had come.”