Created for Life! Course

ARZA's Twelfth Created for Life! Course, What Participants had to Say

"I have been challenged. I need to read more about the context of different parts of the Bible. I would like to hold the Bible Story more together."

"I learnt a lot from the last part, Revelation 21 and 22 about how all of God's creation is reconciled. It taught me that God's plan isn't all about man only."

"Reading about the reflection of the image of God through the relationship between men and women challenged my view of how we interact, and the importance of good godly interaction."

"It has shown me the value of extended times of quiet and the peace that it brings. God has given me rest."

"I have grown to such an extent, to be reminded of how work and rest is linked to God's creation."

"I was reminded of how my purpose is to help others engage and protect, to understand their role as custodians."

"To be out in the bush with God is a challenge of some sort because one has to face his/her fears, and it has been very helpful."

"I have learnt that in addition to calling out to God, we must make time for Him to talk to us."

"I saw that I was literally destroying nature and distancing myself from it. I now realise that I have missed a lot. I was not having life at its fullest."

Created for Life! Crossing the "Three Way Intersection" at Bains Kloof

In January 2011 ARZA's Created for Life! Outdoor Leadership course ran for the tenth time, in the Western Cape. Eight staff members from Scripture Union South Africa and the Students' Christian Organization were guided by outdoor specialist Ron Clark and ARZA team member Allen Goddard. Four days of group Bible engagement, kloofing, walking, abseiling and solo time in the Fynbos explored the Bible themes of creation and new creation, and trained the young adults to facilitate outdoor learning. Basic skills in facililtating learning through interpretation of the veld were also discovered. Integrated into the course was lots of time for solitude as participants discovered that encounter with God in creation enriches and deepens a vocation to lead others into caring for the environment. Structured times for telling and hearing parts of one another's stories was the way this course crosses the three-way intersection between God's, creation's and our unfolding stories.

This year's first course hosted staff workers from two youth organizations. Essential to the course is the challenge it presents young adults to venture beyond their previous experience in the wilderness, such as learning to swim under rocks, to reach a partially submerged rock cave.

Discovering the connections between God, the creation, and human destiny place the Bible, veld interpretation and shared personal stories at the centre of the learning in this course. There is ample time for pondering Scripture, learning about plants and animals, and for learning to listen well to the stories others tell. A personal and group response to God's purpose for creation, past, present and eternal is what this course facilitates.

Trust and the peace that results from trust are the rare gifts that sustain the path of creation, every personal story and every nation's history, as Psalm 104 and 105 illustrate. Learning to discern the extent of trust that underpins the web of relationships unfolding in the present, and working towards discovering the sustaining Trustee of creation, in contemporary South Africa, is one of the course aims.

The science of climate change and the rapidly diminishing opportunity that the world has to transform the unjust and unequal design of its global economy, in the face of collapsing food security and increasing greed, is a moment of invitation for Christians. The course invites delegates to follow Jesus environmentally by living and celebrating creatureliness more simply, and finding ways to help others simply live.

The Creator, the creatures and human createdness now and forever is the subject that brings the participants together. When it is time to part, more often than not, they walk on into their stories, with new understanding of the South African veld, new skills and confidence to facilitate learning, new friends, new depth in prayer and a transformed relationship with God, wholly changed.

More pictures of this course can be found on the A Rocha South Africa Facebook Page.

Created for Life! Outdoor Leadership Course on Mount Mulanje

In September ARZA's Created for Life! Course was presented in the central African Miombo forest wilderness of the Mulanje massif in southeastern Malawi. Noluvuyo Mshumpela and Allen Goddard of the ARZA team and thirteen young adults from all over Malawi were hosted by Tiwonge Mzimara of BirdLife Malawi, based at Likubula House near Mount Mulanje. The course explores the question Why does God choose the wilderness to form future leaders? Reading the Bible story while being in a wilderness area of Africa helps young African youth leaders to discover who they are created to be, and why conservation and creation care are integral to every young leader's future. Created for Life! has been presented previously in the Blinkwater Mountains of KZN, the Elandsriviersberg Mountains of the Eastern Cape and the BainsKloof fold mountains of the Western Cape. This year's course included men and women from four Malawian denominations. Climbing to Mount Mulanje's 2000m Chambe plateau was at the heart of the course curriculum. Read more below.

Created for Life! in Malawi - September 2010

Photos and Text by Allen Goddard

Tiwonge Mzimara welcomed us to Likubula House, our base on the slopes of Mount Mulanje for the five day course. She is a programme director for the centre which is run by the Presbyterian Church of Central Africa. As one of two registered ornithologists in Malawi, and a Malawian national, she is well qualified to introduce the natural history of the centre and its location in the Miombo Brachystegia forests of souteastern Malawi. More than 40% of Zambia and Tanzania are still covered with this unique woodland, but in Malawi it is increasingly under threat for its hard wood which is sold as charcoal, and its wildlife which is trapped for food.

Each day followed the rhythm of the solar hours, rising at 4:40 and returning to evening rest soon after sundown, at 19:30. Cell phones, watches and computer technology were handed in for the week so that participants could become attuned to the created rhythms of each day. Mornings began before breakfast with manuscript-method Bible studies about Moses, David, Elijah and Jesus, who discovered more of God's purpose for their life directions, in the wilderness. Evenings rounded off each day in Life Group hours where delegates drew and then presented parts of their life stories to their small group.

The outdoor leadership component of Created for Life! was led by Noluvuyo Mshumpela who trained the delegates to use a whole toolbox of team building, trust building and adventure games, for youth groups and sunday schools. The training ranged from simple ice breaker games to hour long adventure initiatives, with opportunities for learning how to facilitate a reflective learning discussion. The emphasis in the games training was on adapting the programmes to any and every kind of environment, so creating opportunities for young people to interact and learn out of doors.

The Bible themes explored in the mornings included the topics of God the Creator, Humankind as Creature, and New Creation, with additional discussions and film input about climate change, environmental issues facing the African churches today, and creation care project ideas. Our Bible discussions were very portable, going with us into different locations as we moved up 1300 metres into the Mulanje Mountain biosphere. We got into the rhythm of language too as the whole week was simultaneously or alternately translated into Chichewa, Malawi's lingua franca among more than 20 national languages.

Cedit: Paul, our Mountain Guide.

Tiwonge introduced us to the close up wonders of Afromontane birds, with her mistnets and bird ringing gear. Crimson Wings, Olive Breasted Bulbuls, Livingston's Turacos and the Yellow Throated Apalis, Malawi's endemic bird, were all lifers for me. Here is the little male Yellow Throated Apalis, which we caught twice.

A key component of the course is solitude, meeting God in the silence of the wilderness, and having time and space to hear him speak and reflect on where God's Story and our stories meet. What better place for this kind of wilderness experience than Mt. Mulanje's plateau! After many such wilderness encounters Moses himself reflected:
Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the earth and the world,
from everlasting to everlasting you are God. Psalm 90:2
Whether under starry night skies or during solo time in the forest, wilderness encounter with God is new for every young leader at some point in their lives. For most participants on this course, this was their first time in the mountains, and their first solo time in the wild.

Abseiling and Ziplining are the most physically demanding parts of the Created for Life! course, requiring young adults to extend themselves, usually beyond their previous imagining. Men and women who are 20 something rise to this kind of challenge to match the tough life questions and new directions that they are exploring. There were many stories to tell after our Malawian mountaineering facilitators, Moses Mwale and his colleagues, put us through our paces under the high wire, and on the rock face.

People care to the degree that we love, and we love to the degree that we have been loved and cared for. Being enveloped in Africa's majestic Miombo wilderness is like being enfolded in God's loving, everlasting arms. The Created for Life! Course enables young adults to experience this selfless provision of God in the wilderness, to discover Christ present in creation.

The peace and tranquility of these woodlands returned to us all only a long while after we came across a group of hunters with their dogs, attempting to chase one of the last baboons found this low down on Mount Mulanje, into a gin trap. Our mixed reactions were reflected on later, as we discussed the need for transformation in Southern Africa's regional economic design, to urgently create alternative economic opportunities that can save our forests and their creatures, and sustain our livelihoods. Exchanging the selfish designs we have created in our domestic, local, national and global economies for new ways of doing economics in God's household, is just one aspect of Created for Life!'s invitation to young leaders. Christ's call to the whole of our present generation, to transform injustice and let the hope of his newness, reconciliation and restoration happen in our world's last truly wild places, will involve us and especially young Christian leaders for the rest of our lives.

Created for Life - August 2008

Group picture

A Rocha's 7th Creation Stewardship and Outdoor Leadership Course was enjoyed by young adults from the Netherlands, Scotland and South Africa.

Eleven young adults including engineers, computer analysts, a youth worker and a Scripture Union adventure centre director joined the course this August for five days in Karkloof, KZN. Geoff Gould, Noluvuyo Mshumpela and Allen Goddard presented the course's mix of outdoor learning, Bible teaching and environmental interpretation.

Trust games open the outdoor initiative programme, which ends with a 20 meter abseil into a mountain pool

Life Groups explore the overlap between participants' personal narratives and the Bible epic.

Making pizza, stick bread, banana boats, stir fry and morning pancakes on the braai grill is part of meal time enjoyment.

Introducing Afromontane forest biodiversity

Putting it all together in solitude - times of contemplation as a group in a hillside studio or alone in a bush solo for four hours is integral to the course

97% of the Afromontane Mist belt Grasslands of South Africa have been transformed through agriculture, forestry and development. The course takes place in a protected area of the 3% that remains

Exploring the interface between human creatureliness and the promise of the new creation in a South African wilderness is what participants have found most beneficial