So instead I’ll share some pictures with you from the trip and leave the rest of the news until I get up in the morning.

1 – Asking the wrong questions.

On Sunday I asked about church, what people think about it, what the concerns are and how they viewed the service. But, here, in Burkina Faso, these are non-questions. People that go to church aren’t concerned with the volume of the music, whether they sit in chairs or on pews, or how long the minister speaks for. Standing outside the church you aren’t met with a barrage of opinion in the same way you would be outside a church in the West. Church is much more about the life of the community than personal opinion.

In many ways this is a regular feature of life in Africa. The kinds of things we would see as problems in the West just aren’t relevant here, and we’re not going to discover the real issues until we learn what the questions are that we should be asking.

2 – The medium is the message, and this applies to language too.

There are three levels of language in Burkina Faso. French, the national language, used for national trade, politics and by tourists buying African shirts (yes, I’ve just got one).

Then there are two national languages which would be used by nationals for trade. These languages would be used at the markets and when travelling around the country. They mean that, even those individuals that don’t have a high level of education, are able to travel and work within communities.

Finally, there’s the language of the community. What’s spoken in the village and in the home.

In somewhere like Burkina Faso the Bible is already available in French and the two national languages. The educated can read and understand French and many nationals can work in one of the two national languages. But, the unwritten message associated with this is (French) you have to be educated to know God, or (two national languages) a relationship with God is based around trade.

It’s the language of the home that deals with feelings and emotions, how you conduct your life and how you relate to people. That’s why it’s so important that the Bible is available in the languages of these communities. Knowing God is about being in a relationship with him, not about being educated in the right things or conducting some kind of business meeting, to express this fully it’s essential to do it in the language that is used by people for these kinds of conversations.

As a bit of a footnote I’ve just read some comments from Onesimus Online (HT: Mark) who illustrates the differences in African and Western cultures when it comes to issues of faith and belief.

So thorough is the westernization of my African students that they don’t seem to notice that all of their education, all of their theology, all of their assumptions, can be traced to the efforts of well-meaning western missionaries. These missionaries came (and sometimes still come) with an assumed posture of superiority, namely that they are here to ‘help’ these Africans escape their darkness and get saved like us. Salvation too often means getting Africans to accept that our problems are their problems and that our solutions must be their solutions. For example, most Western missionaries assume that Christ has come to save us from our legal problem before a holy God; namely, that our sin makes us guilty before God and deserving of his condemnation and wrath. Christ resolves our problem by becoming our sin on the cross, bearing our punishment and thus freeing us from the penalty of the law. We are no longer under condemnation, but are accepted into fellowship with God, with the end result that we will go to heaven and not to hell.

This is standard fare for Western Evangelicals and their predecessors. And while a solid case may be made from the New Testament that this is indeed an aspect of our salvation, our polemical stance against the perceived ‘works righteousness’ of Roman Catholics has meant that this becomes increasingly, by over-emphasis, the only aspect of our salvation, or certainly the most important, and certainly what is preached from Sunday to Sunday.

The problem is that Africans on their own don’t perceive that their main problem before God is their compromised legal status. So in order to get them to understand ‘the gospel’ – or at least our Western understanding of the gospel – we missionaries must first teach them about God’s law and what sin is and what Christ has done to satisfy God’s law. Once they understand these things, then they are in a position to ‘accept Christ as their personal Savior’ and be forgiven. To this end, evangelists urge congregations to respond to the ‘free’ grace of God in Christ so that their sins may be forgiven and they be reconciled to God.

Again, this sounds so normal to our Western Evangelical ears that we may be immediately suspicious of anyone that seems to have a problem with it. But as mentioned above, most of my African friends don’t first and foremost worry about their legal standing before God. Rather, they are far more concerned about demons which seem to afflict every aspect of their lives, they are concerned about people who manipulate spiritual power for good and ill in other people’s lives, they are concerned about sicknesses and barrenness, for which there seems to be no cure, they are concerned about capricious weather that makes their crops fail and their cattle die and causes them to go hungry, and they are concerned about death. The tremendous irony that I observe is that our Western gospel has come full force into Kenya (and many other African countries) through the ministries of thousands of Western missionaries, resulting in the majority of people here and in a number of other countries professing faith in Christ and testifying to having been born again. And yet this gospel does not touch those aspects of their lives that reflect their deepest needs and most profound concerns.

Read more here

This morning we visited the Assemblies of God church in Ouagadougou with a colleague from the centre here. It was everything you would expect from a large, active, African church. Brightly coloured outfits on men and women, hardly a grey suit in sight, with lots of singing, clapping and swaying. The choir made a great sound, but then so did the congregation – how they managed to decide who should be in and who should stay out is beyond me… maybe they just take it in turns.

I guess the service was what I was expecting, passionate, musical and full. What I didn’t expect was the band – no African drums here, it was full on 1970′s guitar rock, with drums and a keyboard; the PA system – loud enough to annoy members of any British church; and the split of men to one side and women to the other. Apparently, the church was quite progressive by allowing one column of pews for men and women to sit together in the middle.

There was no PowerPoint or overhead projection, but most people seemed to know the words of the song off by heart. What was familiar was the notices ‘thou shalt have no service without them’ and the sermon, the minister had three points.

The service was in French, so Eddie translated the sermon for me from Mark 9. He preached on,

1. Having faith in God
2. Faith results in prayer
3. And also leads to fasting

We had permission from the pastor to do some filming and take some photographs, so that’s all going to appear at some point, I’ll just need to do an editing job first.

For me, though, this trip is a bit of a new experience. For all my travelling, this is my first stop anywhere on the African continent and everything is new. I guess, for anyone my age, our view of Africa has been clouded by the images of the Ethiopian famine in the 1980′s. What we expect is starving children and swarms of flies. While it would be wrong to suggest that life isn’t tough in Burkina Faso, it would be equally wrong to paint it with the same brush as that of famine and drought. We’re in the middle of the dry season right now, but there is water and people are able to grow food.

On the road trip we passed many communities where ‘cottage garden’ schemes were producing some crops and piles of cotton waiting for collection. There were also plenty of roadside stalls selling onions, carrots and peanuts… Eddie’s suggestion is that if you stop in the right place you can quite easily get everything you’d need for a decent stew.

The two lane, main road, we travelled along runs from Ouagadougou to Bobo-Dioulasso (the country’s second city) and it regularly used by trucks, coaches and cars, as well as motos, push bikes, donkeys with carts and children on their way to school. Most of the vehicles aren’t roadworthy and thanks to their age, and damage from the road, most chassis are twisted making longer vehicles to look like they are driving sideways as much as forwards. The road itself is sealed and pretty good in places. The patches that weren’t so good left pot-holes big enough to house a family plus a few close relatives. There were lots of signs of vehicles that had come to grief through not spotting one of these in time. It’s a miracle that there wasn’t more carnage.

Motos are interesting. Basically they are small scooters, 80 or 100cc, which you don’t need formal training or a licence to ride, it’s the standard way to get around. The popular alternative is the push bike, which seems to have caught on everywhere.

The pictures will come when I get home. Internet connection has been frustrating and my computer is starting to show its age, so I’m borrowing Eddie’s laptop while he relaxes with a good book.

This time of year seems to be perfect for a visit. The days are hot, well above 30C, but the nights are cool and there is a pretty good breeze. There isn’t the plague of flies and mosquitoes that I expected and I’ve yet to run across an insect that looks capable of doing me damage. The food’s been quite good too. Last night we were eating chicken cooked outside on a grill, there’s been lots of bread and fresh fruit, cleaned in bleach first, but then most stuff has to get the bleach treatment at some point.

I’ll save some of the interesting stories for when I get back.

Tomorrow lunchtime Eddie and I are flying off to Burkina Faso in West Africa for 10 days. We’re doing some research, trying to identify Bible translation projects which could be supported through the Biblefresh initiative in 2011.

On so many levels this is going to be a very interesting trip. I’ve not had the pleasure of visiting an African country before, so the experience is going to be very new.

I’m being very careful to tell people that I’m going to Burkina Faso, not to Africa. Why? Well, it’s stupid if you think about it. Africa is a huge continent. In the north there are countries like Morocco, Algeria, Tunisa and Egypt – in the south there’s South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia; all of which are completely different.

Also, I am almost completely ignorant about the country. Everything I know I learnt last night reading the country’s Wikipedia entry. So I can tell you that BF is about the same size as the UK (different shape but similar land area) but where the population of the UK is around 61 million, BF is around 15 million. While financially poor, even by African standards, the country is recognised to be one of the friendliest.

Hopefully there will be some time to blog while I’m away, but most updates will appear through Twitter where you can follow both Eddie and myself.