Finishing Up

Friday, February 6, 2009

Today we finished up classes.  The last three messages were preached and the guys did a pretty good job.  Jairus hit a home run with his and pulled himself up to an A- So I ended up with two A’s one A-, a B+ and two B-.  Not bad and I think it was a fair reflection of their work.  I met with each of the three students and had a good exit interview with each of them.  

Part of my coming here was to see if this is something I could do and would like to do in the future.  The answer is,a yes.  I gained confidence as I gained experience and really enjoyed being with the students and learning more about this place. Jeff is talking about seeing if I can come back to do it  again and I looked at the curriculum for the Church History and Spiritual formation classes.  I could also teach a Bible class without too much difficulty.  

I spent tea time with Nathaniel Sulis who is the national outreach director.  They do preaching in the markets sometimes and are talking about doing a revival where the speaker would go from place to place and have a special program.  Another opportunity for experience here, although I am more of an encourager than and evangelist.  We shared several different ways of doing outreach and I explained servant evangelism to him.  I also took him into the library and we went over the better books in it.  Most of them are pretty old: Master Plan of Evangelism and Out of the Salt Shaker were newer books.  I’m going to pick up a copy of Servant Evangelism and send it over for him and one of the Library.  

In the afternoon I finished scoring the grades, took a brief nap and then spent a bit over an hour with the interviews.  After that I went to help Jonathan with the door and table he was building.  Because he was working on those things, I did some of the rough prep for dinner - peeling kaukau and getting onions ready.  I also made a pot of coffee with the last of our store.  I’m looking forward to a good cup when I get back to NZ.

After dinner we went up to the classroom for a final meeting, took some photos and ran the videos of the guy’s preaching.  Several giggles, as they watched each other.   

Our final entertainment was watching “Glory Road”.  It was much more meaningful to Jeff and I since it was set in the US in the mid 60's.  A sad but glorious movie.  Jeff had never seen it and was very impressed.  One of my favorites.