Bet you're not up to it

Instead of doing Bible study one evening, just pray. 'Course you can read a bit of Bible first.

Bible colleges in poor countries

Some wisdom gleaned from a missionary lady:

• Often the people best suited to be pastors can't be trained because they can't afford it. The people that end up doing it are those who can - regardless of their appropriateness.
• People who have ongoing low-grade hunger or health problems aren't able to learn as well as people in the West. This includes the longterm effects of malnutrition experienced in infancy.
• It's hard for colleges to subscribe to journals containing cutting edge theology because to do so they have to commit to ongoing financial output. Additionally those journals may not be written in an accessible language.

Change

I've been told that (rapid) change is not appreciated or appropriate in country ministry. One reason is that people are just struggling to survive economically, and the church is the one thing in their life that is predictable and stable, so to change the way things are run is actually unkind. Better to plug on preaching the Word, and leave it up to people to change at God's directing and at their own pace.

Dirty Don Does Cross and Culture

At some Moore College lectures I attended last year, Don Carson mentioned that the Bible's authors had much less opportunity to be involved in government than we do today. I think he was saying that 'praying for the city' and 'respecting the authorities' translate as a responsibility to get politically involved today.

Oral learners

Oral learners learn by hearing a story. I'm told that explaining it only confuses them - they have already understood the story and grasped its message/moral. And I think that literate leaners are to some extent able to glean a story's abstract themes and principles by themselves . . .

So maybe we should stop teaching in a literate way that only caters for the literates, and instead teach in a more story-telling way that caters for both. Perhaps the only explanation needed is of broader application and themes/principles that people mightn't work out on their own. Then again, any explanation will just confuse the oral learners . . . Maybe you do have to be specific afterall . . . ?

Camel Tracks

Camel Tracks is a resource used to present the gospel to Muslims. Apparently, Muslim-background Christian believers would typically sit the person down after they had read through it and give them a whole Gospel sermon. Apparently they go hard.

However I think the booklet presents itself as a complete 'Gospel' presentation, rather than a starting point, which has the potential to be very dangerous. I think that perhaps a good rule of thumb is to be careful of using any material that needs qualification, that you wouldn't be happy to just leave lying around.

What church can do for a soul

Very often when I left the place of worship the first impression I had of the 'outside world' was how small it was - how puny its politics, paltry its appetites, squinteyed its interests. I had just spent an hour or so with friends reorienting myself in the realities of the world - the huge sweep of salvation and the minute particularities of holiness - and would blink my eyes in disbelief that so many are willing to live in such reduced and cramped conditions. But after a few hours or days, I found myself getting used to and going along with its assumptions since most of the politicians and journalists, artists and entertainers, stockbrokers and shoppers seem to assume that that was the real world. And then Sunday would come around again, and some pastor would call me back to reality, 'Let us worship God.' And I would get it straight
again, see it whole.

E.H. Peterson, The Wisdom of Each Other