Teaching

My wife Kelli and I are both certified school teachers. She's an elementary teacher and I am certified in high school social studies. Because of this we have always used education as a gateway into the community here. We teach English, History, Religion, or whatever as a service to the people here. My ministry, here in Jerusalem, has always revolved around students and schools. We now have a team of interns here at the church and so I, naturally, have them doing a lot of work in local schools.

Mondays and Wednesdays are our long days. On Mondays and Wednesdays we leave the house at seven and drive an hour to a little West Bank village called Aboud. Aboud is one of the few remaining villages here that is largely Christian. The Church of God has a school there. (I detailed their struggles in a previous post.) We are there for three hours, from 8-11, teaching English. We leave there and go to Jerusalem school where we teach Bible classes and aid teachers for three more hours. When that is over, I send the interns to Ramallah to teach another English class, this time to University students. I stay in Jerusalem and coach basketball. The Ramallah classes end at six and the interns get home a seven, just in time on Wednesday for Bible study.

It sounds, from reading this, like I'm a slave driver. And, honestly running full-speed from seven to seven can be taxing, but it's worth it because we encounter a different segment of the population at each stop. In the village, we are trying to be a blessing to village dwelling Christian Arabs. At Jerusalem School, we are working with secularized, Westernized, wealthy Arabs. And, at Ramallah we are working with a more "normal" segment of the population. I guess you would call them city Muslims.

Educationally, I think that it's important to understand that the Arab world is not homogeneous. There are great variations between different regions and people groups. My students are exposed to this by interacting with some of the different segments of the society. I also think that it's important for ministry. By getting to know all of these different people, we get a chance to be witnesses to them. All of this work is paying off. Thursday night, we had about thirty people here for our youth might. The vast majority of them were kids we know from Jerusalem school.

I would ask you to pray for us on Mondays and Wednesdays. They are long hard days, but they are also when we do most of our relationship building. Pray that God will put the right people in front of us and that He will give us the right words to say to them. We don't want to work just to do something. We want to impact the land and society here for the Kingdom of God.