Chris, my wife, went monthly shopping today while I attended my Young Women's Auxiliary allocations meeting. We met at one of our favourite Cape Town coffee shops on completion of our respective tasks and reflected on the itinerant ministry.
Why? Because this will be our last monthly shopping Cape Town. Why? Because we are moving to Johannesburg. Why? Because we are (and have been for 17 years) itinerants.
Looking up itinerant on dictionary.com and Wikipedia.com yields the following results:
"itinerant
–adjective
1. traveling from place to place, esp. on a circuit, as a minister, judge, or sales representative; itinerating; journeying.
2. characterized by such traveling: itinerant preaching.
3. working in one place for a comparatively short time and then moving on to work in another place, usually as a physical or outdoor laborer; characterized by alternating periods of working and wandering: an itinerant farm hand.
–noun
4. a person who alternates between working and wandering.
5. a person who travels from place to place, esp. for duty or business.
—Synonyms
wandering, nomadic, migratory, unsettled, roving, roaming; peripatetic.
—Antonyms
settled.
An itinerant is a person who travels from place to place with no fixed home.
Types of itinerants: Drifters (wanderers with no residence, no common means of support, and no obvious goal), Hunter-gatherers, Nomads, including gypsies, Perpetual travelers, including illegal aliens, Rogues, Vagabonds, Vagrants, Bums, Derelicts, Hobos, Squatters, Tramps, Displaced persons and refugees, Street people (street children, paupers, waifs, schnorrers, gutter punks)."
When, after 10 years of private dental practice, we entered full-time ministry in the Methodist Church of Southern Africa, our category of ministry was that of itinerant, meaning……. well, you get the picture from the above! We move around. The discipline we submit to is that we, as itinerant Methodist ministers, will go where we are sent by the Conference. The MCSA combines a measure of call into the stationing of its ministers in that we can, hopefully under God's guidance, respond to invitations which in turn ask the Conference to send. Ultimately, the Conference decides. We have never been let down by this system, but have been blessed in that this coming move will be only our third. After three years in Welkom (central South Africa) our first move was to Ballito (east coast of South Africa) and after 10 years there, our second move was to Cape Town (almost southern tip of South Africa and African continent). Now, after four years, we prepare for our third move, to Johannesburg to the Alberton Methodist Church. [http://www.amc.org.za/ and http://www.amcare.org.za/]
Wherever we have been, our Lord has blessed us ‘out of our socks’! Our move to Johannesburg is in fact a return to Johannesburg, where Chris and I met as students (dental and nursing) in 1980, fell in love, married (Civic Centre Methodist Church) in 1981 and started our family in 1983.
Whether there is a more beautiful place in South Africa than Cape Town to minister, I doubt. From our home we look at Table Mountain, Cape Town harbour and the city bowl. We see and feel the weather and the seasons arriving on the African continent.
Now we prepare to move, with summer, to the hinterland, hence our last monthly shop and our reflection on itinerancy.
The call and subsequent sending to Alberton Methodist Church excites us. We are going to be stretched as never before but also sense that our whole life up to now has been to prepare and equip us for God's mission in place. And so we prepare to itinerate and I will be blogging over the next few months on what that means in our lives, in our ministry, in the life of our societies (Parow Wesley Methodist Church and Alberton Methodist Church) and so on. My next post will be ‘Itinerant Ministry and Ridiculously Colourful Bishops’.
The Lord has given us a theme song for this season-“Where You Go I Go”-by Brian and Jenn Johnson [ Integrity's Hosanna! Music 2008 CCLI#4562670]. I'll post the full lyrics later, but here is the chorus:
Where You go I go
What You say I say
And what You pray I pray
And what You pray I pray.
PS What on earth is a schnorrer
CPAesthetics @Faces&Smiles and @77 Newmarket Road Norwich: Moving away from simply correcting the signs of ageing to the management of the entire ageing process
