Time Concentrate

Packed week. I’ve been trying to catch up on my characters study – I missed a couple weeks of class, and the class moves at a good pace – about forty or so new characters a class, twice a week. There’s only so fast you can do that kind of work, so I’ve been trying to knock out a couple dozen a day. That’s really an impossible pace, though, for character learning. If you don’t follow it up with consistent review and reading, the characters you “learned” will soon look as foreign as the ones you’ve never seen. Overall, though, the character thing isn’t as terrible as you might think…

Ashley, a student working with us here this summer, got here about two weeks ago and has plunged right into the work. She’s started a couple English classes each week. Their first class was Thursday, and they had about fifteen students come that have no previous connection to the church. She’s going to have another two classes tomorrow with different students (she’s trying to get each university’s students to come to a separate class) We don’t do any of the “learn about Jesus while you learn English” stuff. Little different strategy – we’re trying to give them a straight-up, legit, challenging English course, making friends, and inviting them in a little more straightforward way to come to church. Will report on results… Happy to see a good number of students ask questions about the church and stay to hang out for quite a while after the class the other night.

Started our hermeneutics class tonight. That was some tough Chinese! It always is when you don’t know what half the words mean in English! I’m not sure what they thought about it, but we had our highest number yet for this Bible-institute-ish class that we do. It’s considerably more complex than the Old Testament Survey class that we just finished, so we’ll see who comes back next week. For the people that are really interested in more challenging study, I think it’s a good fit. One of my favorite things about hermeneutics is that it reveals a little of the immense scrutiny that the Bible will hold up under. If the study whizzes over their heads, they’ll at least know that there’s something more to Christianity besides stories, superstition, and blind faith.