Recently, I have been provided with several opportunities to teach some of the children here in Kamea Land. It has been a great blessing, and I thought I’d share with you a little of what I’ve been doing so that you can pray for both wisdom for me and spiritual growth in the lives of the children.
First, while one of my co-workers has been back in the States taking care of paperwork, I have been able to fill in this last month teaching the Religious Instruction (R.I.) class at our village school. One of our church ladies assists me with this class. It is held every Friday morning for an hour to an hour and a half. The attendance ranges between 30 and 35 students. We pray, sing songs, review the lesson and memory verses from the previous week, and teach a new Bible lesson. Since we started the class we have gone through Creation, the Fall, Cain and Abel, Enoch, and are now halfway through the life of Noah. One of the main prayer requests for this ministry is just the simple fact that school will actually be open so that we can hold the class. This week was our third consecutive week to hold classes, and that is a record for this school year. Often the teachers come and go at will, and it doesn’t take much for the school to be closed.
Second, I have been able to teach Jr. Church quite often lately here at Kotidanga Baptist Church. Generally, the children have their own Sunday School class, but then stay in with the adults for the next two services. But we’re running into a “problem” – often there is not room for both the children and the adults in the church building. So we hold a Jr. Church. This month the children have been learning Psalm 119:9 for their Bible verse – “Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed thereto according to thy word.” I have been trying to share Bible stories with them of children in the Bible who chose to heed God’s Word. Next month, I plan to have the theme of godly friends. We also attempt to pass the missionary vision on to them by telling a missionary story every week. It was a blessing to have one of the boys come to my house this past week and ask me to show him the verse again that they are memorizing in Jr. Church.
I am so thankful for these open doors of opportunity, and do not take them lightly, or view them as “just teaching kids”. I hope you will pray as fervently for the salvation and training of these young people as you do for the work of the Bible translation or any of our other ministries. In many ways the Kamea church is now living their book of Acts and these young people will become the Timothy’s and Rhoda’s of the church.