Missions Training - Rondebos to Bloekombos

I spent the day on Saturday with my friend Willem Conradie training Mission-trainers in Bloekombos. 

Bloekombos? Think Kuilsrivier, then go further East along the N1 and turn into a maze of brickbuilt-and-shack communities with little shops doing dreads and traditional healers and five-piece shack kits, the Ikea of the Cape Flats.

At a Korean Mission church, where the children come in and kneel at the front of the church with their hands raised, praying before they play in the yard. I got horribly confused getting there and was an hour late - an extra traffic circle had been added since the last google maps update.

We were training facilitators to lead the Kairos Course, a franchise mission training course we use as part of our Discipling Nations missions empowerment of churches. Teaching the tricky skills of using a powerpoint, keeping to time, and facilitating small group discussion. All very basic.

Which made it acutely embarrassing to have to run Siegfried Ngubane through the mill - a deeply experienced and highly qualified missiologist and missions leader. Still, he stoically and gracefully went along with the process like all the others and in the end we were able to pronounce him ready to teach missions - or at any rate, technically qualified to use the Kairos material. Cringeworthy. But everybody who was there will now be able to present the basic ideas of mission and the Bible, mission history, and mission strategy, and the course is a reasonably effectively structured one. 

For lunch we had amagwenya (aka vetkoek), dripping with oil from the deep frying and packed with either a beef hamburger patty or a tomato-onion chakalaka sauce and a suspicious processed sausage. I love this sort of work in this sort of environment!