The first couple of weeks back in Colombia involve getting settled in and fixing things that are broken and paying bills. Yet at the same time, I try to make certain I get back to work quickly, as that is what I am here to do. So even though I have been busy with many more mundane things, such as getting our photocopier repaired and working, I have already begun teaching as well.
Within one week of my arrival I was back in the classroom teaching my first class. It is titled “The World to Which We Preach.†It is a basic worldview class that provides an overview of philosophy and culture. We attempt to understand the modern world and how we got here. The idea is to prepare the students to preach a relevant message of salvation in the modern cultural milieu.
We begin back in the ancient world with Hebrew and Greek culture. We study the contribution of each to what we would today call “western culture†as the reality in which we live and work. We study how culture has developed and how it affects our own thinking and the process by which decisions are made here in Colombia. With that background, we study the means by which people can be reached with the Gospel and then proceed on to methodologies for discipling them into mature and active Christians.
At the same time, I began developing the curriculum for the second class I will be teaching. I will not start that one until after the work crew has come and gone, so as not to interfere with that program. It is an overview of philosophy. We will look at philosophy as a discipline and cover its development from ancient Greece through modern times. We will deal with modern thought and consider some pertinent literature that has been significant. Finally we will focus on the cultural conceptualizations of Modernism and now Post-modernism.
As with the previous course, this one will be focused on how to preach to and win people in our culture to Jesus Christ. The goal will be to enable the student to preach effectively to the poor of the Colombian working class or the intellectual elite. The motivation for this class is to make the Colombian church both faithful to the ancient Biblical teachings and relevant in a modern society. This is a new class, so I am working to develop that class now and have been busy selecting the readings that we will use for our text.
So with only two weeks back in Colombia, I am busy getting everything up and running and at the same time becoming rapidly involved in the ministry activities that we work together on here in Colombia. I have had several meetings with church leaders, with the deaf ministry team, and with the university administration. I am scheduled to preach this coming Sunday at the Normandia church. I do my best to “make the most of time, because the days are evil†(Ephesians 5:16).