Hello again, Goer blog readers!
Wow, it's been a while since my last update- nearly a year. It's incredible to think of all of the things that have happened here in East Asia since my last blog post.
I'm now leading two Bible studies every week- one among college students at the local university, and one for some older locals at the local church, where I also lead a youth group. These have all been great opportunities- and no two of them are the same, which keeps them very interesting for me as a leader as well. In the college group, most of those who attend have never had any exposure to the Bible before, and so we began from Genesis and studied specific stories in an outline that has been presenting the outline of the Gospel- we're currently doing an in-depth look at the life of Jesus. In the older group, most of those who attend have some background in Christianity, and so we study the Epistles together to grow in our "depth" of knowledge. At the Youth Group, we do some studying in Apologetics to prepare the students for the kind of scientific questions they'll encounter in the secular education of this country (this is one of my favorite things to teach).
We're also making great progress with the team's orphan ministry! Every week, I tutor one of the boys in the foster program in learning some basic English, and we've just started doing a monthly event where all of the foster families can come together in prayer and community while our team (and volunteer students from the Bible studies- a great opportunity for hands-on discipleship!) take care of the kids- many of whom have some form of disability- and do various art projects with them. These events are particularly special for me because they represent a marriage between our two ministries- the campus outreach and the orphan care- that has long been a vision of ours. Students from the campuses are hearing the teachings of Jesus for the first time, and immediately getting the chance to put these teachings into practice through ministry- exactly the manner in which Jesus taught his first disciples.
I hope to talk more about these awesome ministries in greater detail in the coming months, so stay tuned for more regular updates in the future!
-Christopher