Church Planting 1 (CP1) is finished! We’re 1/3 of the way to being trained church-planters…well, it doesn’t feel like we’ve even made a dent in the immensity of that task, but we are progressing, albeit slowly.
Payton enjoyed that all of the classes seemed to fit together into one big picture.
Learning Styles – appreciating other’s ways of looking at life and problem-solving, giving you a fuller perspective in any situation
Teamwork – understanding the strengths and challenges of working on a team
Worldview – understanding why people do what they do
Communication Skills – in particular, learning how to ask good questions
Foundational Bible Teaching – how to communicate and story-tell in a way that gets down into the deep parts of people’s hearts and puts them inside the story.
What’s neat is that in our outreach we got to apply all of these things, not only in working with a team of 6, but also in clearly communicating with the guys.
These are just a few of the 13 classes we took, but they are foundational to the rest of our training. One of our biggest challenges on the field, one that will take us out of the game the fastest is…ourselves. Yep, we really will be our own worst enemy out there—selfishness of all sorts, not wanting to get along with co-workers, and choosing to be discontent. A lot of these first semester classes had to do with inter-personal relationships–how to get along with people!
We also loved Phonetics! Follow this link to find our favorite sounds on the phonetics chart and hear what they sound like!
Payton : [ɮ] [ɬ] [ʀ]
Grace: [x], [ɣ] [β]
We wrote a Phonetics Research Paper on a national language of a country where we might go. Payton wrote an essay on Central Thai and I did one on Swahili. And then, I read a paper about the customs of Thailand and have since had multiple dreams about making major faux pas involving bowing and walking in front of people!
We’re still working on narrowing down our options of fields over the break, so hopefully, we’ll have some news in the next few weeks of where we might be heading.
Merry Christmas!
gɹeis ɛlɪsəbɛθ daunɪŋ (my name spelled phonetically)
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