The Seminar is over. After the joyful and very Peruvian closing celebration last Thursday night (April 8), many of the participants started traveling back to their homes. I travel back to Portland later tonight (Sunday, April 11).
Endings are always busy times. There were final projects to review, interviews with students, preparations for the admissions process into the MA program. There were goodbye parties and all of the details of the closing program (music, certificates, entrances and seating arrangements, invitations to guests. . . ). But all of that is now behind us – successfully, and pleasantly behind us.
What have we done? It is one thing to talk about the activities (“we taught these topics, and completed the following objectives. . . .” ), but over the last couple of days I have been looking for a different way to describe what was accomplished. Accomplishment speaks beyond just activity – beyond simply describing what we DO. I would like to use this blog to try describe what fruit, or outcomes, or results, have started to grow as a result of this Seminar.
In the short term - over the last 2 months, we together built four ministry programs – one for each of the four cultural areas of Lima where the students were working.
How did we build those ministry program?
We start with people who know the Lord and His Word. These are not novices – they are already skilled and faithful, mature in ministry.
Then we teach and practice and refine skill in observing - getting to know the people we have been sent to serve. So often, new ministries start with what the leader wants to do, what she or he likes or what is exciting and interesting to him (or her!). But that way of approaching ministry has an inherent weakness – it is built on what the one ministering likes, not necessarily on a deep understanding of the heart of the people. It will always sound like good activity, but the real results are often short lived. So we begin by building a deep understanding of the people we are sent to serve.
The Seminar then takes that understanding of a special people down deep - into the core of their culture. We create a “map” of how the people understand their own life. We learn to ask the questions that let us “see the invisible.” We describe life from the point of view of one living in that reality, seeing life through their eyes.
That culture map leads us to reflect on how the Bible interacts with the people and their way of life. God’s Word is true for all peoples of all cultures and in all times. But my people need to struggle with some truths that are not difficult for Peruvians, and in the same way upper class Peruvians need to struggle with some Bible truths that are not problems for those from the mountain villages (and vice versa!) . So we consider the Bible - both specific passages and general flow of Bible teaching, with specific and prayerful focus on the people we are sent to serve.
Finally, as we know the people and refine the focus of God’s Word to touch their hearts, we design ministry so that it fits within the peoples’ normal patterns. For instance, if people normally use printed material to share information and ideas, we can include reading as part of our ministry plan. But if normal patterns don’t use reading, we design ministry around conversations or narrative teaching. That is just one example: the important thing is to know the patterns of the people and use those patterns as wisely as possible to develop our plans for making disciples.
What have we done? We designed four different approaches to ministry, emphasizing four different areas of biblical teachings, making disciples through four different sets of cultural patterns, to bring the Word of God into sharp focus at the heart of four different parts of Lima’s society. Each group of Seminar participants prepared a set of documents about these different elements: in a limited sense, you could say that the notebooks containing those documents represent the outcomes, the results, of this Seminar.
In the long term: And yet, there is more we trust will grow from this. Every step of the process was done as illustration, as example. The real fruit – the long term results – will show up as we see these fourteen participants designing ministry where God has sent them; and as we see them teaching others to design ministry this way, too. They cannot do it all – they can only faithfully serve: but we ask the Lord of the Harvest to produce fruit that abides – to His glory, and for their joy – as these fourteen use the skills learned these last two months to design ministries in the harvest fields where the Lord has sent them.
