Where Am I Going For Outreach?

First things first: I am going to Nigeria and Tanzania!

Now that that's out of the way, here's everything else that's been going on.

The past month has been jam packed with Biblical knowledge and spiritual goodness. After our week on hermeneutics, we dove in to Genesis for a week, which was the longest we've spent on a book since then. Job, Exodus, and Leviticus were the next week (Job is thought to have lived at the time of Abraham, which is why we did that one so out of order), and after was a week on Numbers and Deuteronomy.  We then did Joshua, Judges, Ruth, and First and Second Samuel. That's right, we did a book a day (kind of: Ruth we did in one class period because of time constraints). And this past week was spent all on 1 and 2 Kings.

On our own we've also read through Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Isaiah, and most of Psalms. We read through each book ahead of the time we study it in class so we have time to figure out what we don't understand about the book and are ready to ask questions and be engaged in class.

A big part of how we do our studying is with our reading groups. We all have groups of four students that read through our daily Bible assignments together. There's usually an hour and a half to two hours worth of reading. We have these cool Bibles that have God's text in red, the narrator in black, the main character of each story in green, and all the supporting characters in blue. So we each pick a part and read it as a narrative, instead of a wall of text. It's been fascinating, especially for the more story oriented books like Joshua, Judges, or 1 and 2 Samuel. We try to have fun and do interesting voices (we tried to rap a couple of the Psalms as well), and we often get sidetracked talking about the motivations of the characters. It makes it feel so much more real and understandable when you do it like this, and I'm enjoying it immensely.

My daily schedule goes like this. Shower, breakfast, class, break, class, lunch, class, reading group, homework, dinner, dinner cleanup, finish homework, and if I have time I socialize a bit before going to bed. So the only reason I am having time to post this update is because I have a long weekend and I am sitting in a coffee shop. I actually started writing this update almost 3 weeks ago, but I kept getting sidetracked.

So...Africa! Long story short is they revealed a few weeks ago that for outreach we'd be splitting in to 4 teams. They would all be going to different places in Tanzania for the second half of outreach, but there were 3 different countries and 4 different locations for the first half. Two teams would be going to two different villages in The Democratic Republic of Congo - DRC - and doing teaching seminars. 1 team would be going to Swaziland to do a different seminar. And then the last team would be going to Nigeria.

Nigeria instantly stood out to me. For one, they speak English there. Another thing is that our ministry will mostly be in big cities (I have had a heart for city ministry since my DTS in San Francisco). There was lots of other things that seemed cool, but the last one I'll mention here is that we'll be heading a revival (at the time I just knew we were participating, but I recently found out we'll be the main speakers). After much prayer, and some trusted individuals confirming to me that Nigeria would be an excellent fit, I declared to my leaders that I would be going to Nigeria.

So that's exciting.

The estimated cost for the outreach is looking like four to five thousand dollars. It isn't finalized yet because the teams were just decided a few weeks ago, but I will try to keep everyone updated on here or at least on Facebook.

I want to express my immense gratitude to everyone who has supported me thus far with money or with prayer. I've been having an amazing time, and I wouldn't be able to be here without you.

Thank you, and God's Blessings

Chris