Today we started our lecture series on the Holy Spirit, learnt more about evangelism, and celebrated another Holmsted Manor Birthday.
After Quite Time we had our usual Monday morning sung worship session with the rest of the base, and then started the first lecture on the Holy Spirit. I think this will be another really good week. I've learnt quite a bit about the Holy Spirit before, but I still have some questions, and it is good to get our understanding in a coherent order. We studied appearances of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament, and started looking at the New Testament appearances too. It is good to see how the Holy Spirit is very clearly in both sections of the Bible. He spoke, and what He said was recorded in the books. I had the thought that the Holy Spirit has been subject to similar prejudice as racism in some churches. Generally as humans, we fear the unknown. We can know God the Father as we all have fathers (good or bad), we know what the Son is like through what we see of Jesus in the Bible, but when it comes to God the Holy Spirit, we could shy away from His presence, as we do not know what to expect. This is a shame, as there is nothing to fear with God.
After lunch we performed our usual Community Care tasks, then we had another seminar on Evangelism. The speaker shared some very interesting thoughts about how to reach people in today's culture. The idea now is that instead of going out to try to get people to come in to Church buildings - to get them "going to church", we should instead form communities where people already are. We should be changing workplaces/schools/hospitals etc with the transforming power of Jesus, and helping people understand and get to know Him there, rather than coercing them to go to a particular building. The speaker finished his seminar with an amazing story about when he went on an outreach to rural Africa. The story revolved around a meeting with a group of witch doctors. The witch doctors tried to set up an attack on the speaker and his friends to kill them. God's power was stronger than those influencing the witch doctors. The witch doctors could not harm the group of missionaries. A photographer hired by the witch doctors to document their attack became a Christian, and published his photos of God's victory in a Ugandan national newspaper! It was a fascinating story, and demonstrated how open to the spiritual world developing countries are.
After dinner we had a party for another student who's Birthday it was today. We watched the remake of The Itallian Job, and ate party food.
This week is looking like another great one. I hope yours is too. Feel free to add a comment to this, or any other blog entry.
