A Few Exciting Things!

Recently we have gone through quite a few exciting modules. I’ll give you just a brief insight into a few of these – just one paragraph, or one picture. Make sure you check out the last one for a special announcement about what I’ll be doing the coming two weeks!

In the last blog, I spoke about practising with studying culture by looking at the Yurok people. This week we put into practice what we had learned there. The task was for each of us to prepare a twenty-minute Bible lesson as though teaching within Yurok culture. We were assigned key lessons from a set of chronological lessons. I got to teach on Abraham & Isaac, and on the death of Jesus. It was a really valuable learning experience, as it really drove home the amount of work required to do a full set of foundational Bible lessons within a tribal culture.

Having finished up the module on foundational Bible teaching, we also had a module on teaching the infant church. Where foundational Bible teaching focuses on building up to the Gospel, teaching the infant church has everything to do with helping new believers grow. The days of hauling a pipe-organ into the jungle are long gone (yes, this did happen in the past), but you do want to help people set up church meetings in an orderly fashion.

One module which not everyone might find as exciting as me is phonemics. The preceding module, phonetics, was about recognising and producing sounds in speech. Phonemics follows up on this by looking into the way that these sounds are perceived by the speaker. This then leads into the construction of an alphabet. For example, the phonetic transcription [dʒæm], phonemically becomes /d͡ʒam/, and is written as ” jam”.

And finally, the thing you have been waiting for, my plans for the coming two weeks: today I am leaving for a mission exposure trip to Senegal. The goal will be first-most to see in practice what we have been learning in class. Furthermore, it is also an opportunity to get to know the people that work with the mission on the West-African field – and for them to get to know me! Please pray along that this may be a valuable experience.