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The Bible School is going very well. We’ve rounded out our class to a perfect sustainable size, and the content of our meetings is very encouraging and fruitful. Many of the students are being challenged and stretched at each meeting and the way they’re digging into new material and thinking through the ramifications of continuing church life at the status quo is palpable.
We’re midway through our 2nd term and we’ve been covering the book of Acts. The first session was an exercise on the work of interpretation and hermeneutics; specifically in dealing with the narrative genre. One key principle that we stressed was the need to watch for the author’s intent when working towards correct Biblical interpretation. Acts as narrative literature is not as convenient for a universal application as are say the epistles, and you have to be especially careful to not make something descriptive as prescriptive. Meaning, just because we see an instance of an occasion in the story, we ought to be careful in prescribing this as dogma or normative for universal church life.
The students gave considerable time to evaluating the role of para-church organizations and mission agencies as they relate to the missionary mandate for reading the Great Commission in light of a local church responsibility. We learned that these outreach and ministry minded endeavors are valuable only in so far as they strengthen, support or plant local churches. Too many ministries have began in the church only to be “farmed-out” to the para-church organization where they lose touch, some even to the degree of fading from their original gospel mandate to simply serving as humanitarian or social support institutions.
The cooperate nature of the world easily infects the church, and in too many cases it stagnates the life and responsibly of the individual believer to “make disciples.” Our students recognize that someone needs to be reaching the lost, and that someone isn’t “the church” as a nebulous faceless entity, but its “me!”
We are currently working through defining the Pauline strategy in planting churches and contrasting that through our current paradigms of ministry and missionary work. Please keep our students in your prayers. They are my dear friends and we have sweet fellowship as we meet together each week, pray together, break bread together, and yield ourselves to the guidance of the Holy Spirit as we open the Word to study.