The ups and downs of academic mission ...

So ... last year we reported in a post here that Cornerstone Institute in Salt River abandoned their (already much reduced) mission courses altogether.  Martin was grateful for the continued opportunity to teach (also much reduced) mission courses at Bible Institute in Kalk Bay.
At the end of November Martin got an email from Bible Institute saying that they no longer require his services.  They are "integrating mission into their other courses" ...
At the beginning of December Martin go an email from Cornerstone Institute asking if he would develop an online mission course for their new program.  WOW.  God's timing, right?
Well December and January have been flat-out busy for Martin as he has developed the course, learned the platform.  Many hours a day, every day.
(Except for a brief hiatus while he attended and presented at a Missiology conference - see a previous post.)
He has signed up for a course in online teaching.  His mother (what an amazing woman at 87) has been reading the course material with fascination, questions and corrections (she was an English teacher).

Martin and his mom on a break: going round the botanical garden on an electric cart tour.  (Tuesdays free for pensioners!)

Yesterday he popped in to see the program convenor just to check on some platform issues and protocol.
NOT ONE STUDENT has selected the mission course option.
Three days before it is ready to roll ... he has been told he will not be running it.
How does one let go of all that pent up energy?  What does one do with all that sense of having things to pass on?  Yesterday evening Martin is wrestling with the disappointment.  What about God's timing?

Today he has gone to the board meeting for the tiny entity "Discipling Nations".  They are planning for the year of grassroots mission teaching.  Does God have plans here?

Adventure into the Bible

This is what I call inductive Bible Study.
Every time I am asked to train people in facilitating this sort of group Bible Study I try to improve the way I present it.  This is my latest diagram of the process:

Those who know this method will see that I have renamed most of the steps.  I also added a concrete action step a number of years ago.  I also try to impress on people that, although it must be done in an order, it is non-linear in the sense that everything refers back to the passage.

I am feeling happy with the new words!

Why this iteration now?  Last week Wednesday I was doing a seminar for a group of new small group leaders at out church - Claremont Methodist.  This week I will be workshoping with the same group.  It is quite difficult to help people get enough of an idea of how it works in a total of 2 hours, but ... I do my best.

Reorientating ... which way now?

So ... with most of his formal college teaching off the agenda, what will Martin do instead?

For a number of years now he has been working with a group of people helping to found "Discipling Nations", the brain-child of a good friend, Willem Conradie.

They offer a suite of franchised courses (plus some offerings of their own) for people to study in their churches.  Their key vision is to offer quality missions and missiology courses at a grassroots level.  They want training to be available to people who can't afford college, or who don't have enough formal education to qualify for entrance.

As they work with groups in churches they hope to train not only people to go, but people who will send.  They hope to inspire people to reach across barriers where they are as well as to get involved in other places where they are needed.

In 2014 Martin piloted a Discipling Nations "home-grown" course which he developed to fill a need that they identified.  He has also slowly been collecting the lectures that various members of the team give, and creating the visual packages which will make them more effective and enable others to teach them.  This work has been stalled for a year.

Part of the vision for this year is that he will have time to make this happen in 2016.

You can check Disciplining Nations out here: http://www.disciplingnations.org.za

Discipling Nations

Martin has been working several awesome people since Willem Conradie started an organisation several years ago.  It is called "Discipling Nations" and the aim is to offer training in cross-cultural missions at a grassroots level.  People who can't afford training in churches that can't afford big-time sending meet together weekly for a few months.  At the end of the course there is a weekend conference - often with several groups together.










These conferences are lots of fun and totally exhausting.  They are held on a beautiful apple farm in the mountains.  The owners have built a special mini conference centre for Christian groups to use.

What they are doing in the training is gradually evolving.  They have been using some material from franchised courses. But they also give their own lectures.  These are gradually developing as the cover more topics.  Martin often get the job of sorting out other people's PowerPoint presentations because he does really good ones.

Now they are at the place where they want to take the next step in development of the unique "Discipling Nations" material.  It is our winter break for colleges so there are no courses at the moment.  Martin is spending this time tasked with organising the material into a more harmonised form, and producing a work book for the weekend conferences.  From there they hope to begin to be less dependent on the franchised course.

Right through the BIble

... in about 75 minutes!  

Trying to help everyone make sense of each bit as they read it.

a post about posters

Long ago, academics gave learned lectures to small groups of like-minded people.  Then they also started publishing the lectures as collections of 'papers' in journals.  They began to have large conferences, which were like live journals.  Then they realised that there is too much going on for it all to be presented to huge plenary sessions at the conferences, so they started having elective sessions, where everyone divided up for smaller presentations.  Now, they also have 'posters': one A1 with pictures, headings and a small amount of text with 5 minutes of talking. 

So, one project in the Theology of Mission course is a poster on a significant figure in the history of mission.  The list they have to choose from contains the names of about 50 men and women who lived and sorked all over the world during the last two millenia.  These are people like Ulfalas who re-evangelised the pagan Italians, or Matteus Ricci who wrote one of the classic Chinese essays.

 These people form nodes in the time-space matrix (vs time-line) of Christian history.  The class becomes excited as they hear the stories from each other.

Martin's Crazy Days

Martin has just finished a marathon of marking exam papers and essays.  BI courses complete!
He collects his final CI essays this afternoon.
He has been preparing a course for BI for next semester ... 'Evangelism'.  He is amped to teach it, but starting a course you have never taught before is a major undertaking.  He has found some fun stuff on how not to do it; up YouTube!

He is just busy finalising his prep for running his street-art-and-talking workshop - happening for the third time over the mountain pass in Villiersdorp.  Tomorrow morning will see five paintings happening on the village main road.

Then he will drive post haste back to the Cape Flats to run a seminar on 'Becoming a Life-Long-Learner' for the lay preachers in our group of churches ... tomorrow afternoon.  He will finish off that preparation tonight at bed-time.

Meantime, we are hoping to leave on Sunday for a long-desired holiday.  Martin was really tired before last week, so you can imagine that he will be a basket case by Sunday!  Also that some prayer for all this would be essential.

moonlighting for a good cause

Martin, as part of his busy week, has been finishing off seventy-two illustrations.

These are a fascinating and challenging variety of pen drawings of people doing all sorts of activities.  He has loved the disciplined exercise of his skill, but it has definitely added to the tricky squeeze in the last few weeks.

These pictures enhance the effectiveness of a workshop manual.  The workshops are run by an NPO called Khululeka which trains and mentors adults working with children who are grieving.

imagine how much better this will be with the pictures

We love what this group does.  Martin enjoys being part of creating the services people need to live more fully in a society where so many people don't have access to resources.  It also helps the exchequer as he gets paid for it!