Wednesday, February 5, 2014: We have been in South India
for 3 days and are enjoying the warm, almost hot weather. What a contrast
to the Midwest! We found our students enthusiastic and well prepared as
usual. This is really a special bunch of guys. We have grown to
love them so much, and we all talk about how we are "family" now. They are so much fun to work with and are making such strides in grasping
the study methods we are teaching them.
Today one of the men said at lunch,
"This training has made such a huge difference in all our lives and the
way we do ministry. We used to just look at a random passage and see some
concept in it that we understood and then preached on that. Now we all
are spending a lot of time reading and rereading the text and carefully studying
it. We want to understand what the author meant to say and to preach that
to our people." I could not have asked for more. Yet I get even more excited to see how they are so enthusiastic about passing the training on to all the
pastors in this region of India and beyond. Another pastor said today,
"I used to read a lot of other books, but now I am so busy studying the
Bible and training others that I do not have time to read a lot of other
books."
Tomorrow we will talk strategy with them and try to set them
up to train hundreds, and possibly thousands, of other pastors. I cannot
imagine the transformation that will take place in these churches in the coming
decades.
Al
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