Sunday 20 January 2008
IBTS Prague
Dear Friends and Family,
Our first full week back has left us with not much to tell except that we have had a few struggles with jet lag – Roger awakes in the night and I becoming a zombie everyday at 3:30. It has been a bit of a struggle, but we’ve settled into the routine once again, and it’s the relationship with students and fellow teachers that makes our stay here so worthwhile.
Roger’s Greek reading classes started at 8 a.m. on Tuesday. He went to breakfast a little after seven. That was early for a guy who didn’t get to sleep until after 2 a.m. Oh dear! But the class went fine, and the students are enthusiastic about the early class. We often had classes at 7:30 and 8:00 in Malaysia and Singapore, but then, of course, the sun had been up for quite a while.
Tuesday was also the day we welcomed Kami (Camellia) from Bulgaria. She is a dear old friend, a former church member with us at Sofia Baptist Church, and a young woman of whom we are very proud. Kami is a lawyer. She was recently accepted over twelve other applicants for a PhD candidacy in the Orthodox Theological Faculty at Sofia University. It was a great surprise because all the other applicants were Orthodox. She was the only Evangelical. It is a real blessing that she has a place where she will exert influence as an Evangelical, and she will in the process bring the concept of Evangelicalism out of the corner where it has been thrust as a “sect” all these years. Kami will write her dissertation on the place of human rights in Canon Law of the Orthodox Church. She’s here at IBTS to consult with Parush (a fellow Bulgarian and the dean of our seminary) and to do some reading in our library. She told me that Parush expects her to finish her project proposal in the three weeks she is here! For me it is a great pleasure to help her in her English reading. Most of the material she will need to use for her research is in English, and she finds herself trying to learn about fifty new vocabulary words a day! Long ago, I was her first English teacher. And now she has come such a long way. Kami is married and has two children, an eleven-year-old and a seven-year-old. We were at their dedications as babies!
I’m also helping the Polish girl, Anna, prepare for the Cambridge First Certificate Exam that she will take in March. She mainly needs to write. Her speaking and listening skills are fine. I suppose that’s because she enjoys American films and music.
Roger taught his three hours on “The Spirituality of Jesus,” and I got lots of good feedback from that. The students appreciate his passion and enthusiasm for the subject and think that he is a challenging teacher. He’ll be teaching these three hours next Wednesday and the following Wednesday after that.
The Wednesday 4 p.m. seminar was led by our rector, Keith Jones, who spoke on the concept of the “Porous” church, a church small enough to have meals together, a church with a committed core of believers who are ready to serve in many ways, but a church that is also prepared to receive newcomers at any time and bring them into the fellowship. He insists that this is the pattern we see in the early Biblical churches. In other words, Keith says he doesn’t find the programs and ministries of today’s “mega-church” in the New Testament. Of course that was controversial, and, if I’m not wrong, Keith planned it that way.
We should have started our Thursday Bible study this week, but the meeting was not properly promoted, so there was poor attendance. After we come back next week from our trip to Dresden for acquiring our visa, we’ll do a bit better advertising, and the group will meet. This will be a gathering primarily for the community members of our church rather than the seminary folks.
On Saturday we greeted Bill and Nancy Lively from the U.S. They are volunteers who have been here several times before, so they know many of the seminary community, and they certainly live up to their name. Although they were held up for two days in London because of the crash landing there last week, and should have arrived on Thursday morning, on Saturday they were full of good spirits and ready to get busy with their library work. Both of them are retired librarians. We will travel on the train with them to Germany next week for the visa trip.
Our friend Tima (of the saxophone fame) preached for us this morning using as his text the passage from Isa. 49. He talked about the problem of our “waiting” after the Lord has so clearly shown Himself in our lives, and then some time passes when we wonder what keeps us from moving ahead with Him. We wait with faith and hope, and we trust our God to lead us along in His own time and in His power.
May this passage bless you as well. Have a wonderful week.
