THE THIRD TERM OF THE YEAR IS FINISHED!
The third term is finally completed and in the books! We had another outstanding term at the Bible Institute of Raiwaqa. This term, I was able to teach three courses: Old Testament History 2, Hebrews, and Biblical Foundation of Ethics. I truly enjoyed teaching all three of these courses! The students seemed to relate well to all of them. In the Old Testament History course, we survey the books 2 Samuel through Esther. Much of this material is completely new to the students, because many of them have only had a very basic introduction to the study of the Old Testament books. Since teaching the course, several of our students have preached lessons from these great Old Testament books! My favorite book of the Bible to teach, however, is the book of Hebrews. I love teaching it especially because most of my students have never really studied from this book. One of the students told me after the course, “Brother Jason, before I took your class, I was not really looking forward to studying the book of Hebrews. I did not think it was relevant to us today. Now, it is one of my favorite books to study!” He confided in me that the biggest reason he was not interested in it is because he had never really been able to understand it. Since taking the course, this same student has now preached a couple of excellent lessons from the book of Hebrews.
The Ethics class is one of the most challenging courses for me to teach. This is primarily because we have so little time for it. Rather than focusing on a bunch of specific moral issues, I choose to approach the class in a more general way by giving them a better understanding of things that shape our values and understanding of morality, teaching them why we look to God as the source of our ethics, and helping them to understand the Bible’s role in teaching us ethics. In the class, students are then given a specific moral dilemma to study. They have to research the topic and write a short paper on it. Then, at the end of the course, they have to sit down with me for three minutes and try to convince me to do the proper moral thing in their assigned scenario. The students will often tell me that three minutes with me seems like an hour! But they all did an outstanding job with their assigned topics.
In addition to my three courses, Dad taught two courses this term: Paul’s Epistles and Scheme of Redemption. Brother Emosi taught a course on Denominational Doctrines. All of these classes were well received. I am truly blessed to work alongside of both of these great men!
STUDENT CAMPAIGN TO NADI
Each term, we do our best to schedule some kind of evangelistic campaign to give our students some practical experience with ministry and evangelism. This term, we were invited to host a campaign with the Nadi Church of Christ. The Nadi congregation is a smaller congregation who has recently been going through some struggles. We wanted to do something to encourage them while helping them to reach out into the community.
To encourage the local members, we decided to have a series of short lessons just with the students and the members of the Nadi congregation on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights. These lessons were all taught by our students. On Wednesday and Thursday nights, we actually split up into men’s and women’s classes, so that our female students could get experience teaching a ladies’ class. Afterwards, we would all spend time having tea together and fellowshipping with the members to encourage them.
To help with evangelism, we spent Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday out making visits and door-knocking. Most of the group went door-knocking in various neighborhoods to hand out tracts. I worked with brother Jone (pronounced Johnny) Koro, who does most of the preaching for the Nadi congregation. We took a couple of students with us each day and went to visit members who had become unfaithful, were new converts, were shut-in, or were study contacts made from previous outreach efforts. Many of those visits proved to be very fruitful.
Our big evangelistic effort was to host an outreach seminar on Friday night and all day on Saturday. We handed out fliers to invite people to come to our seminar which was on the topic of the family and the home. When out visiting, we would ask people if we could pray for them. Nearly all of them asked for the same thing – please pray for my family. So, the topic we had chosen was one that we knew would be meaningful to them. All of the lessons were delivered by our students or faculty, who did an outstanding job. We had one visitor from another congregation in the area to observe, “I have been a Christian for 30 years, and this is the first time I can remember having lessons that are specifically on the topic of the home. We need more of this!” All in all, we were very pleased with the turn-out for the seminar.
One of the great things about a local evangelistic campaign is that we are close enough to help do follow-up work. One of the things that our students have been doing is going back to Nadi a couple of times each month to spend a weekend helping with the work. The students will go up on Friday, spend Saturday with some of the local members making visits, and then the male students will help with teaching and preaching at the Sunday morning worship services. A couple of weeks ago, I was in Nadi and stopped in to visit for Sunday worship. Two of our students were there. They had been out all day on Saturday making visits. On Sunday morning, one of them got up early and went to the local prison to deliver a message and study with some of the prisoners. The other student preached the morning’s sermon. The congregation also asked me to teach the Bible class. Please pray for our students as they continue to make efforts to encourage the Nadi congregation.