Teaching Mission

I have started term three at Cornerstone Institute - teaching a Theology of Mission class (first year) and a Homiletics (second year).  The Theology of Mission class is particularly difficult.  It is compulsory, and many students struggle to see why they should have to study what has always been presesented to them as a marginal and irrelevant subject.

Nowhere do I see how marginal Missional thinking is in the church than in these sometimes hostile students, fuming and fretting at being forced to spend time on what they consider to be an irrelevance.

Not all the students are like this at all!  Some are extremely positive and motivated!  But my usual failure rate of about 20% tells its own sad story.  I dream of one year having a 100% pass rate.  I feel humiliated and incompetent, and also irritated at my powerlessness to inspire acceptance of the central role of God's Mission in all of life.  "We are not here for ourselves" is a hard concept to persuade people to accept. 

That's what I feel...but I know that this battle to communicate the importance of the world of strangers is simply part of the territory, part of the calling.  Please pray for us as we constantly encounter resistance on the part of Christians towards noticing and loving strangers, outsiders, the lost and weak and neglected and avoided.  It is a great privilege to be allowed to teach a course like this...and perhaps inspire at least a few future leaders to lead their people out into God's world!


The College finances are still precarious, so I would appreciate prayer for that.  Firstly, that the college will be able to survive.  And secondly, that they will be able to pay me this term, and perhaps even pay for last term's work.  I love the students, I appreciate the opportunity to lead people into mission...but the finances are stressful!  I have agreed to teach my homiletics class for free this term - it's either that or else these young leaders will go out into their churches with no input at all on preaching...and I can't bear that that should happen!