By Adrienne Ashby
In Cape Town, South Africa one midwife named Mitzy is fighting for a new, more organic way of caring for premature babies. Years of being the Matron nurse at the main public hospital in Cape Town finally paid off and the big cats up top allowed her five beds in the maternity ward. The difference between the mothers in Mitzys five beds and the mothers in the hundreds of county beds is a matter of skin and plastic. Mitzys mothers keep skin-to-skin contact with their premature infants 
by strapping them to their chests with blankets, taking them off only for feedings, diapering, check-ups and showers.
The county mothers part with their premature infants after delivery only to see them hours and sometimes days later and between the plastic of an incubator. What health care workers are quickly noticing in South Africa is that this form of Kangaroo mother care, this unconventional method of using the mother as the incubator, actually fosters quicker growth in the infant than the traditional use of the incubator. But more than growth, it protects the essential bonding that takes place in the first hours and days of an infants birth. Mitzy believes this is how well change the world.
With the invention of the incubator in the 1950s western societies lost the importance of mother-to-child bonding. Now even healthy babies stay separated from their mothers unnecessarily. And for what? To give the mothers a rest? Probably its more restful for the mother to have the little thing lie on her than to have it in some mysterious room of bright lights and machinery. It seems like such a subtle thing but Im wondering at the scope of real bonding. If real mother-to-child bonding takes place and is even protected, perhaps there will be more honoring of parents and, All will go well and more people will live, Long lives. Itll be what God intended when He gave Moses the fifth commandment on Mount Sinai. The implications are huge.
A week in the Cape with Mitzy caused me to reflect on the modern church. The church where Ive most come alive takes place in a living room with a fluctuating group of about fifteen people. Reason? Its not because the living room happens to be in Africa, it could just as well be in Montana. Its because Jesus runs the show. We just show up to watch him work. No flashy programs, power-point sermons, sophisticated lighting for professional worship bands. Just Jesus. And the small group of believers that meet are just as organic and natural as the living room in which they meet. Full of flaws and scars and battle wounds, but they are unashamedly transparent. Ive not seen one pretty, Sunday morning church face, only an intense longing for the living God who hasnt been manipulated by mans technology. The only tears Ive seen have been in the silent pauses that come when we arent trying to fill our own agendas.
In the same way Ive been thinking about incubators. The incubator Ive grown to favor is the one on mothers chest. See, a mothers skin adjusts and regulates to her childs temperature in more sophisticated ways than an incubator, cooling when the baby becomes too hot and warming when the child becomes too cold. Its nature, its mom. Its all the infant needs. Just like all the church needs is Christ. Forget the high-tech plastic cage full of beepings and lights, forget the church building project and mood music; we must not lose sight of the simple and pure. Its the pure in heart that will see God, after all.
Being back in the States for only a short time I am reminded of how easy it is to accept the American church as status quo. However, when I recall the image I had while in the Capethe image of the modern church as a giant incubatorI find it impossible to just go on as before. Every believer makes up a part of the body of God and, as the body, it is our responsibility to challenge peoples faith. If we sterilize faith and make it safe like an incubator we only foster dependence on the things of God and not God Himself. We shouldnt only worship God when the music on stage is right and lights are so dim no one can see us. Let us be bold next time to continue worshiping outside the church. In the parking lot perhaps, or our homes. Let us climb back onto our Fathers chest. That is where we are meant to be all along.
Adrienne Ashby just finished a discipleship training school (DTS) with YWAM in Argentina and has been spending the last few months in Swaziland and South Africa, ministering to AIDS victims.