Teaching Mission to Honours Students

Serving Strangers puts on an academic hat on Tuesdays!

There are few situations which require either Lesley or Martin to draw as fully on their academic missiological training as Martin's Honours class at the Bible Institute of South Africa. A small tutor group of three bright students meet once a week to discuss a challenging week of reading on the subject of Mission.

The class has just finished working through Chris Wright's The Mission of God (which I predict will become a classic on reading the Bible through the eyes of a Missional God!), and has started with a close reading of David Bosch's Transforming Mission (Which has already become a classic text world wide for students of missiology). Many more books are still coming up!

This 14 week course is just one module in the BI honours degree program - I see this as a great way to pass on some of my own enthusiasm for the biblical science of the love of strangers (aka missiology), and to help the students develop their skills in critical thinking - I was very proud of them taking a three-step model suggested by Bosch and improving it to a much more comprehensive and useful five step model through our discussion last Tuesday. All their own work with just a tiny bit of prompting from me!

These students are NOT "strangers"...but with an experienced missionary and two trainee pastors in the class, I am aware that by studying mission together we are preparing, through their future ministries, for many strangers to the grace of God to find their true home