Jul

03

2011

Teaching Synopsis

The following is a brief description of the approach I have previously taken when teaching certain topics on YWAM schools.

Intercession:

Intercession is a fancy-pants word for 'praying for others.' One of the key reasons Christians tend to approach prayer with a degree of apathy is because we secretly don't believe that our prayers will accomplish anything. To address this problem we need to examine how God made the world and how he made humanity. In doing so we will discover that our prayers are necessary for God to do what he desires to do. God is absolutely sovereign and all powerful, but in his sovereignty he has decided to create the world in such a way that he 'requires' cooperation with humanity in order to act. This does not mean God is actually limited by humanity, but he has chosen to limit his actions based on the free decisions of free creatures. Effectivly, "God's hands are tied when we fail to pray."

Hearing God:

The key point we must learn is that an intimate relationship with God is available for every believer! Each of us desires to hear from God, but for a number of reasons many of us spend much of our walk with God feeling like we are somehow deaf to his voice. One chief problem that keeps us from hearing him is that we super-spiritualize the whole thing - our desire is for you to discover that hearing God is as natural as breathing because God created us to walk with him!

Cultural Issues:

We are all aware that different cultures do things differently, but are often unaware of how deep these differences really are, stretching beyond mere behaviors to our values, beliefs and worldview. Furthermore, a careful understanding of culture is a missional necessity - as Charles Kraft says, we missionaries must study culture in order to protect people in other cultures from ourselves. Missionaries have a bad track record of confusing their culture with the gospel, and have thus often presented a message which was unfortunately irrelivent to other peoples. Our goal is to make ourselves aware of our cultural assumptions to help us 'preach the gospel without any western garb.' It is also deeply fascinating to discover how  people of other cultures think, and especally to discover how they express and articulate their faith.