I am beginning to turn my attention to the upcoming missions trip in April.

First, I need to turn my attention to the fundraising part of things. The goal is to raise a significant part of the cost from friends and family. This serves a couple of purposes. First, we really don’t have the funds for Josh and I to travel overseas sitting in the bank. Second, if people contribute to the trip, they will be more likely to pray for us while we are preparing and traveling, but also will be more interested in our adventures.

Continue Reading »

Yesterday was Christmas. When we opened presents with the family, my youngest told me that her present was at her Grandmother’s house, and that I would have to wait to get it until we got there. She had apparently made it for me the last time that she was there, but forgot to bring it home with her.

When it was present time at her Grandmother’s house, we opened most of the presents. Finally, she remembered that she had not given me her gift. She ran off to the garage to fetch the present. Her grandmother said something to the extent, “Oh, I am so sorry, John.” I was told to close my eyes as she brought the gift in. Moments later, I was holding my very own coat hanger, made with love by my seven year old daughter. The coat hanger is pictured.

Continue Reading »

The last couple of posts have been about the inductive Bible study that our small group is doing. As a starting point, an inductive study is a great tool to help an individual study a passage of Scripture. It is also a tool that can facilitate a small group discussion of a passage. There are several ways that small groups can do studies. Within our church, we have small groups where one person leads the study, with a lot of teaching interspersed with some question and answers. We have also done some videos where the group watches a video and then someone facilitates a discussion of the video. A couple of groups have done studies of particular books. In fact, we have a group in our church that is doing a study of Randy Alcorn’s book, The Treasure Principle.

I think that in some ways, doing an inductive study facilitates even more discussion and participation than most of these other types of studies. Here is why: Continue Reading »

We had the first small group meeting tonight to actually go through the Inductive Bible Study. We had a much smaller group than normal. Only 7 of us were there. Two families were traveling, another had other plans with family.

We are studying 2 Peter. We looked at 2 Pet. 1:1-15. It was probably a little too long to study all at once. We would have done better to just cover up through verse 11. I think that the study went well. I am definitely out of practice at leading this type of study. I will need to brush up on my skills. There is some really good stuff in that passage about maturity, the imporance of pursuing maturity, and the motivation to seek maturity.

I really enjoyed the process of preparing. I hope that preparing to lead will help me be more consistent studying the Bible for myself.