The Preschool

Imagine you live in a city of 100,000 people and when you walk out the front door of your church, this is what you see.

That is where we were tonight. This is the minaret of the mosque that was directly next door.

For the past five years, this church of only 12 baptized members (maybe 25 total) has had no pastor. They would occasionally have someone come and preach, but otherwise they would come and pray and sing together. Four months ago, the Lord moved in the heart of a deacon and called him from that role to this church’s dynamic pastor whose heart is on fire.

He surveyed this city and found that there were 300 “Christians.” These are folks who simply are not another religion. Among those 300, he found 77 followers of Christ. Armed with this data, he prayed with his congregation and sought counsel from our national leader and now has a strategy in place.

Beginning with the 300 who have some semblance of Christian background, he is going out to them with the gospel and Navigator discipleship materials. He realized that in his city, the people want a traditional church, so he’s remodeling theirs. It smelled of chemicals and was in some disarray when we were there because of the construction. After five years with no pastor and so few believers, he’s approaching the situation like a new church planting.

There second outreach approach was extremely cool. They converted the parsonage into a preschool. They’ve opened it to Christians and muslims and have 28 students, half of which are muslim. But then he threw in the kicker, he showed us the curriculum. It was some of the best, no it was the best, children’s spiritual foundation curriculum I’ve ever seen. I joked that we could use it for adults in Sunday School. And I was only half joking. But then it got even better. They put on a Christmas presentation with the children as actors and actresses. It was a full gospel presentation via drama and all the parents came to watch. What a great example of meeting a need and using creativity. Sorry for the flash glare, but if you look close, you'll see the kids and the Christmas presentation.

Notes:

Unexpected blessings – The Lord put another group of Americans in our hotel. There are a busload (I don’t know how many, but the require a bus to get around) of women associated with Campus Crusade. As you might imagine, the word Crusade is a bit loaded in this part of the world. So here, it’s called something else. They have come because they are significant financial supporters for Crusade and to pray intercessory prayer.

We’ve gotten to know them and they listened to our purpose from our American Middle East Coordinator then laid hands on him and prayed. They’re praying for our conference while we teach. What an unexpected blessing to get in the elevator with another American who asks how they can pray for you that day in this part of the world.

Two covered women.

Thanks for praying for me to teach. I taught my section today, Making Disciples. To stand in the Middle East and teach seminary trained pastors is daunting. I mean, really, who am I to them? What is my faith to what they face? But God is faithful, and I had an absolute blast doing it. In our curriculum there can be long passages of scripture to read. So while we read some verbatim, I told a few of the others as stories. It’s funny how God works. I sat back down in the pew after teaching and it suddenly occurred to me that the Lord has used Alexa (4 years old) to help me. If I just read bible stories to her directly from scripture, even The Message, she would pay attention for about a total of 25 seconds. So at night, or at the dinner table, I’ll tell her stories from the bible. In her room at bedtime, I’ll occasionally act them out. She laughs hysterically when I fall down as Goliath. That practice was enormously helpful today.