Like Anthony, I also had the opportunity to teach a class for IBS (Inservice Bible School) in Amuria. My class was an introduction to the Bible in which I was supposed to cover the whole Bible in only three days! Too much to condense into that short time. In the past, I have taught Old Testament survey as an entire semester class at Bible colleges, as well as New Testament survey. It was very painful for me to have to cut out topics and discussion on entire books of the Bible in order to get the material down to 21 hours of teaching time. Not to mention the need to do translation into Ateso to help some of the students who struggle with English (my friend Betty, who is an excellent translator, came along to assist with this). Nevertheless, I hope I was able to make it focused enough for the students to get a good foundation for further study and reading the Bible.
On the first day of class, I wanted to get an idea of where these pastors were in their Bible knowledge, so I asked how many of them had read one of the books of the Bible. Out of the ten students, only three of them had read one whole book. Of those three, one of them had read the whole New Testament and most of the Old Testament. I hope this class helped them develop a greater love and appreciation for God's word and to inspire them to read it more.
The students were fun to teach because they were so interested in the material and had lots of questions. Biblical knowledge is very applicable to real situations which they experience in their churches and communities. For example, they wanted to know whether a temple is necessary as a place for Christians to come and pray, if it's okay to go to church the day after having sex with your wife, whether artists should be allowed to paint pictures of Jesus, and if you need to be baptized to be saved.
In preparing these lessons and teaching, I loved being reminded myself of what I have learned about and studied in the Bible. Things such as how the whole Old Testament points us to and teaches us about Jesus (Jesus explains to the disciples on the road to Emmaus how to understand Moses and the prophets speaking about him; anytime the New Testament teaches Christians about the inspiration and importance of Scripture, the original readers would have understood that to mean the Old Testament; etc.), the way we can have hope in suffering since God is in control of all situations and has a good plan he will complete, and the clever way Paul structured his letters to get some of his points across.
The students had heard that I taught different skills to people and asked if I could include one of those lessons in my time with them. Since we had very limited time for the Bible survey class, which they had come for, I was only able to squeeze in the fireless cooker lesson. In the evening of the second day, we soaked the beans in water and the next morning, boiled them for 10 minutes and put them into the fireless cooker to keep cooking while we had class. We all enjoyed tasty beans for lunch that afternoon.
Collecting some firewood and kindling:
The cook adding some tomato, onion, and seasonings:
The fully cooked beans:
One student went home that following weekend and made one for his wife, then cooked her beans using it. She was very excited it worked and they called me on the phone to let me know about their success!
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