In Eldoret is an unusual school with a 20+ year history. It exists to address the reality that the Church tends to do a fine job of preparing vocational Christian workers for the pastorate (wing one) but in so doing, it often fails to provide parallel training for missional engagement, especially cross cultural missional engagement (wing two). And this tends to be especially true in non-western settings. So here in Eldoret, a mile high up in Central Western Kenyan, lies the African Inland Church Missionary College.

Here students take theology and missions courses taught by Africans and Westerners. The students come from many places in Kenya and Tanzania. There are many laudable aspects of the vision and the curricula and the faculty. But the thing I like best is the dorm arrangements. There are two small circular villages of homes. Each home has a main room and a bedroom. The back door and porch faces into a central grassy space.  The porch includes a cement fireplace and shelf that makes up the cooking kitchen. There are shared village bathing and lav facilities also included as part of the circle. The homes are occupied by student families in missions preparation. They are integrated (tribally) and so this common space and close proximity also causes them to continually be in cross cultural communication. It is home for 2 – 3 years and it is hard. For most they have never had to practice cultural sensitivity much less culture curiosity. Here it is forced upon them in the context of their formal education 

What would it look like for us to live without walls with our neighbors? In my case it would be cross cultural on two fronts: Hong Kongers to the north and Taiwanese to the west. What if my kitchen wall was removed and that of my Taiwanese neighbor’s? We would see each other whenever a meal was prepared; we would smell each other’s cooking; we would see how our family’s interacted in and around the kitchen…and sometimes even observe the unkind word or two that slips out in that place as we live out the routine daily activities of life…

The old African proverb is that “it takes a village to raise a child.” In Eldoret, I saw that it takes a village to raze assumptions, stereotypes and prejudices.  It means struglling to listen to languages not understood, or words not yet in one’s vocabulary; it means discovering new courtesies to practice, or else learn about social ostracism as a child would; it means learning others around you are sometimes wiser or more experienced and we should listen to them; it means acknowledging we have some growing to do and that if we each pursue such growing interdependently, than maybe, just maybe, we can be a village of growing child-like learners moving toward an as of yet unachieved maturity or maybe… the Church, on a shared Mission, interdependent individually and corporately moving toward a yet unachieved day of mature Kingdom life, action and witness.