QUECHUA CHURCH LEADERS BECOME "GUINEA PIGS"
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| Cam teaching the first morning. |
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August 13, 2009
by David Bell
After two years of dreaming, planning and preparing materials, missionaries Cam and Mary Hurst were able to see the first fruits of their labors last weekend as they tested their work for an itinerant Quechua Bible school with a group of "guinea pigs."
Cam and Mary traveled with three staff members from the radio station in Bolivia to meet with a group of Quechua church leaders for a two-day trial run of their materials.
Most Quechua churches in outlying areas are led by local men who try to teach as best they can. The missionaries want to offer courses that will help them learn to feed themselves from the Word and then be able to teach others, and they want the training to take place where the people live.
"Over the last year we’ve had four different planning and brainstorming sessions with a mixed group of different missionaries and Quechua believers to determine what we should teach, and how to go about teaching it," the Hursts wrote.
"In our planning sessions it was decided that the most pressing need was for the church leaders to learn how to study their Bibles. Most of the men are poor readers at best and have never studied anything past elementary school."
Cam has been working on materials for months -- a manual for the teacher to use and a workbook for the students. The radio team reviewed the material and offered suggestions and corrections. It then got reworked, reviewed, and reworked again.
The team had a lot of material to try and cover in two days with their first students, "but we figured the only way to see if it was going to work was to try it out in a "guinea pig" session," the Hursts wrote.
They knew they weren’t going to be able to cover all their prepared material but they figured it was "better to go slow and have them get something, than to dump it all on them and have them get nothing."
"Even so," the Hursts wrote, "for them it was sort of like drinking from a fire hose."
"We decided that our goal for this trip would be for them to be able to look at a short passage of Scripture and figure out the main idea of what it’s talking about through the use of questions and answers. Who wrote this? Who is he talking to? What is he talking about?"
On Sunday afternoon the students broke into two groups to work together on two different passages of Scripture. They then had to present their findings to the group.
"They didn’t come up with any deep theological studies, but they were able to give us the main idea of the verses … a huge accomplishment for these folks who have never learned anything through the written word."
One man, who said he didn’t understand much Spanish and had only finished the fourth grade but was now learning to read and write in Quechua, shared, "This is so good for me. This is what I need. I want to keep studying all the books that you bring so I can better understand God’s Word."
Another man shared, "Now we need to teach these things to others so that they can understand too."
Please pray that the missionary team can produce materials that will enable the Quechua church leaders to become true students of God’s Word and able to clearly teach others what they are learning. |
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