August 2013

Welcome to my August blog post,

The purpose of these posts are to keep our partners aware of what we are up to and perhaps to rub off whatever God wills for your lives.  

We are already three weeks into the new term and we are enjoying the Gateway program a lot. (For more on the Gateway course please check out July's post).  

The first week can be summarized by one word - heresy.  We studied church history and it is shocking to see the amount of in fighting and heresy that arose in the early church.  Guys who are heralded as heroes in the faith such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen and Augustine of Hippo and many other were involved in all sorts of heresy and the application of that to our modern situation is clear: 

"Be humble in your theology and always be able to receive instruction and guidance as foolish rigidness is pride and we all know what the Bible says about that"

The second week as mentioned in the newsletter was a time of member care lead by Barnabas International. The purpose of this subject was to ensure we are not part of the statistic that one out of every fourteen missionaries leave the field every year. Still not sure what I am talking about: 

"Member Care is a combination of both pastoral care and personal development. It is the ongoing investment of resources by churches and agencies for the nurture and development of missionary personnel done over the course of the cross-cultural workers lifespan" (definition from their site).  

We were guided into refining our self awareness, honing our self care capabilities, defining a theology of suffering and finding some freedom to be "you" within the Kingdom of God.  

Our last subject during July was children's ministry.  This subject was facilitated by Petra Institute and was a tough course but our focus on what children's ministry is suppose to look like was adjusted to say the least.

It is getting warmer (weather) here (White River) and I can honestly say that worst of the winter is behind us. We are looking forward to a wonderful spring time and pray you are all doing well too.

A short video to say thank you to all of YOU!!

 

Yours faithfully

Johan