Harry's Last Session Day!

Hi. This is Shohei. I'm an intern from Japan.

Thank you always for your prayer and support for us!

Today we successfully finished the final class of the mission theology by Bishop Harry Goodhew! So now we are ready to go to Bali for OJT!

So today things went as follows:

1.Called and Accountability(our daily devotional book)

Today's portion talked about God's developing our characters in relationship with Him. Mary Ann shared her story who God shaped her character through her job, which she first wondered why she had to do this job for God's glory.

2.Group Prayer

In the group prayer, my group specifically prayed about the newly converted who we evangelized through EE yesterday so that they will keep being encouraged and stay in relationship with Christ as they believed, and also we prayed for our Bali trip hearing that spiritual warfare in Bali is fairly strong, rooted in their culture and religion.

3.Harry's Theology Class

Our last class was about the mission of church. We learned there are five objectives of church to accomplish in her mission: 

To glorify God. To live the life of the kingdom as sons and daughters of God being salt and light. To make disciples. To be the renewed and expanded Israel and fulfill Israel's mission in the world. To use God's gifts and be witnesses.

I was personally fascinated when Harry mentioned the Greek used in the famous Great Commission in Matthew 28 that there is the only main verb which is not even 'go' but 'make disciples' and the rest verb-looking words are just particles following the main verb. So it's clear that God expects us not merely to go into the world but to make disciples!

At the end of the class, Harry offered us a question time, so some of us asked him a couple of questions, which as interns all of us probably were dying to know. First was how we can differentiate witnesses and evangelists. Since the Bible doesn't give clear-cut definitions to both, this might have seemed tough to answer even for Harry. But he gave the definitions from his biblical and experiential knowledge. All Christians are expected to be a witness to some degree, probably through their job or at home or at school where evangelists are fully committed to evangelism and they sometimes evangelize cross-culturally, beyond borders, going into the fields that no one has never been to, and also their fruits are recognizably abundant. Second question of ours was what is the will of God and how you know His will. Harry, without hesitation in a split second answered it's to love your God with all your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself. He concluded that even if the will of God is unclear and so we make a mistake, God will bless us and work everything out as long as we love Him. The bottom line is our motives. He advised us that if we have to chose one of two choices, then we should chose the one we think would be an easier reason to give to God when we stand before God in the Judgement when He ask us why we chose the way.   

After all, Harry is a very knowledgable man with Christ's heart and His humiliation. We are very blessed to have his sessions. 

4.Bible School

After lunch, we visited a Bible school called Seminari Alktab Asia Tenggara. The principal guided us through the school facilities, explaining there are about 260 students mainly from Indonesia and China, and they take about 50 students a year with free of charge of their tuitions!  I thought this was an amazing story, but I guess God would make it happen whatever it is when our motives are right with Him. Besides, we saw a lot of interesting things in the school.

5. Shopping Mall

We just purely enjoyed it. This time by the grace of God, no none got lost. I guess now we are a bit smarter.

6. Restaurant

We enjoyed Indonesian food, nasi goren, ox tail, etc. We had a small farewall party for Harry and his wife and gave them a traditional Indonesian shirt, Batik and a message card from every intern!

Well, thank you very much for reading our blog. I hope you feel the same atmosphere and excitement we have here.

In Him,

Shohei