God has been working the past 2 months, and I would like to share specifically about our time at youth camp this year. Lyndhurst Baptist Church youth traveled 7 hours to Kimberly, South Africa for the Southern Africa Baptist Union Camp. We took about 40 youth to the camp; many other churches were also represented. We experienced much spiritual warfare from the time we got on the buses until we arrived back in Johannesburg beginning with vehicle troubles. The bus broke down several times, and we lost a tire on the way back; the other vehicles in the caravan also experienced car troubles. What should have been a 7 hour trip took 10 hours going and 11 hours coming back. Needless to say, the devil did not want us to go to camp. God moved in many of the youth’s lives while we were there especially in one of the breakout sessions and night services which dealt with sin and transparency. The campers were also given an opportunity to go out into the community and have a time of ministry in one of the nearby townships where they could interact with people and share Christ’s love through sports. This camp will not be remembered by our youth for the “spiritual high” that camps are usually remembered for but for the intense attacks of the devil to discourage and distract. One of our youth was taken to the hospital in a stretcher for a neck injury acquired on the waterslide, and another had an asthma attack.
However the most devastating and biggest attack that the enemy tried to use was deep routed prejudice. Our youth group is made up of black urban youth and the camp leadership was majority white; as you can imagine this made the week interesting and at times very intense as our youth were treated differently. This experience although very disheartening to everyone was a time of learning and sparked a flame in our youth to use their voices for change. The youth learned how to appropriately react to authority and how to go about handling grievances while not reacting violently or out of anger; this was not an easy lesson to learn especially in the heat of the moment. Each of us, youth and leaders at LBC, also began to look at our own views of people who are different than us and allow God to open our hearts to our own personal prejudices.
We are all called to be one body; however even in the churches (and sometimes especially in the church) we claim to be one body, but we are actually several bodies – the white one, the black one, the Indian one, the Chinese one. Granted worship styles may be different, the level of comfort might not suit us, but whatever excuse we might be using or trying to hide behind, I challenge us to look inside our own hearts. We can’t begin to ask others to change their views and prejudices until we have dealt honestly with our own. This isn’t an easy topic to address here in South Africa as racial segregation only ended in 1994; it is a struggle for South African Christians, black and white, to live surrendering deep racial views to Christ allowing Him to shape and chip away all that He disdains while having grown up learning contrary views rooted in culture and perpetuated in families. These views are also prevalent in our own American Christian culture although they might be masked and even so accepted that they are glossed over. What goes through our mind when a group of young black guys who don’t quite dress like us come into our churches? How do we choose the schools where our children attend? Is the “level of education” a mask for separating your children from those who might need the light of Christ that your child and family could portray? How many blessings have we missed out on because we chose to surround ourselves with friends and acquatnances who look, act, talk, and live exactly as we do? I pray that we as the body of Christ live out equality and open our lives up to whoever Christ puts in our path. Can the world see Christ in how we relate to others or are our churches and homes to this day still more segregated than even the world?
Galatians 3:28
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
1 Corinthians 12:12
“The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ.”
Serving With You in South Africa,
Sarah Maddox
