MOST Training

I had a meeting with Jethro the other day. Both of us are ministering cross culturally here in Thailand. He is leading an NGO that focus on agriculture and community development.  He has an extensive experience training the church and the community about the importance of holistic ministry. He trained church and village leaders how to farm and hence help to support themselves.

My involvement with community development is very little. However, I have enough church leadership and theological education experience. Basically, these are kind of work I have been doing since we came to Thailand five years ago. It is true enough to say that God had used me in starting two Bible training centers. (Continuing to work though is a different story).

Between Jethro and I we have more than 10 years experience in doing training in our respective field in this region. We decided to work together. We will start a training center for church and community leaders. The training will be done within three months with 10-12 people. The projection is that we will have three (3-month) training a year. The venue will be the NGO's agricultural training site since they have dorms, training hall, kitchen and other facilities.

We formulate our goals, mission and vision. Along side this, we create a curriculum that we best think would meet the need of the people we addressed to train. The annual budget will cost U$6,000 a year.  Please help us to pray about this project.

History
Mae Sai Out of School Training (MOST) started from the vision of Christian workers ministering in Northern Thailand and Myanmar.  MOSt also stands for Mae Sai Outreach School of Theology. They see the needs of the churches and community in both sides of the border. The School is designed to meet these needs by training people who will become competent leaders in both the church and community. It is a joint program of Asia Rural Life Development Foundation (ARLDF) and Philippine Baptist Theological Seminary Education by Extension (PBTS-SEE).

Goal
To assist and facilitate church planting activities in a community where there is no existing church.

Objectives
To train 10-12 church leaders from 5 churches and partners entity annually.
To enable the students to demonstrate and mentor other on what they learn.
To assist at least 10 churches in ministry development.

Mission
To train and equip God-called people to be Christ-like leaders in their church and community.

Vision
Under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit, we envision seeing Christ-like leaders in the church and community.


Subjects

• Knowing the Bible (Introduction to the Bible)
• How to Understand the Bible (Interpretation)
• Teach the Bible Through Story (Chronological Bible Storying)
• How to Share the Gospel (Evangelism)
• How to Disciple (Follow  Jesus Training)
• How the Gospel Spread (Condensed World Mission Course)
• How to pray (Devotion and prayer)
• How to lead like Jesus (Leadership)
• How to share the gospel (Evangelism)
• How to preach (Homiletics)
• How to plant a church (CPM)
• How to be a true worshipper (Leading praise and worship)
• How to do village farming (ARLDF)
• How to do community development (Church and Community Development-CCD)

Any suggestions and help will be highly appreciated.

Theological training

In three weeks we will start our Mission Training School. Our goal is to train seven people who are called by God to be church leader or church planter. We hope and pray that after nine months they will return to their respective tribal villages equipped to share the gospel, plant a church and shepherd the flocks.

Together with other missionaries and a local pastor, we form a team of teachers that would facilitate the training. We struggle initially with the curriculum. Our questions are, what courses should be included or excluded? What are the needs and how are we going to meet the needs? Is consultation among local theological educators and pastors needed to come up with a curriculum that would be useful in the particular context?

We have copies of curriculum from different Bible school and seminaries. These are good guide in developing our own curriculum. However, as we study these we found out that most of the courses would be irrelevant to tribal context. It is agreed that intellectualization of Christianity, its theological abstraction is not essential. How would Augustine, Calvin and Barth fit in the picture? Do they need to know the debate about inerrancy of the Scriptures or the different theories of atonement? For a while, we think that it is better if we would not bring them in the picture.

So we came up with an agreement that we should start it focusing on the Bible. All theological reflections and articulation should start from the Bible. Perhaps this is the peril of many theologians. They attempt to do theology apart from the Bible and this could not be done.

The work of the missionaries or development workers is not only to feed people of knowledge but to give them skills to take charge of their own live and theological articulation. Through deep study of the Scripture we are providing them a theological discipline that empowers them to be the people of God. Our goal should be to enable them to read and obey Scripture for themselves. Theologies have their own relevance only from particular context that they have been developed. Outside of it, they may contribute to learning but for the most part making them relevant to a different culture and context is difficult if not impossible. And this is most especially true with Western theology.

As Christian, we should have the conviction that the Gospel has inherent power to be understood across cultures. It is God’s power for salvation. It is the means of delivering people from all kinds of bondage and leading them to enjoy the freedom appropriate for his children.

Because of this, we are not copying any curriculum at all. We (together with the locals) will be developing our own as we go on. Bible first then we will allow them to tell their own stories, to tell us what they need and we will proceed from there. By telling their stories they have a voice and it is the first step not only in Christian growth but in more conscious theological reflection.