Reporting: Two Seminars

Today is a travel day–Jan and I will be home this afternoon after eleven days on the road. Eight of those days were spent in seminars with two Hispanic churches. First, we spent four days with the Iglesia de Cristo–Southside in Lexington, Kentucky. The next four days we spent with the Iglesia de Cristo–Crieve Hall in Nashville, Tennessee.

The seminars strengthen and encourage the churches, building personal faith and commitment and laying foundations for the development of future leaders. The seminars also build healthy relationships between area congregations, because in most cases Christians from multiple congregations come together to study and share fellowship. A personal goal in the seminars I present is to model methods of Bible study as we analyze texts and set them in their biblical and historical contexts. This provides a useful corrective to Bible studies and teaching that simply strings together loosely related texts that seem to speak to a certain subject. I nearly always spend extended time in specific texts as we seek to build faith and committed Christian lives.
On this trip, I taught for 20+ hours with an average attendance of 20-25 in each session, totaling about 500 student hours.