Duhok, 31 March 2020
Dear Friends,
Lockdown has given me the opportunity to blog some biblical meditations about preaching and preachers. Like the apostle Paul in prison, I am prevented from seeing people face to face but I have more opportunity to write.
This opportunity comes at an exciting time. Here in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Kurdish people have been coming to faith in Jesus as the Good Shepherd, the Saviour, and I have been trying to train them to faithfully teach the Bible for themselves, rather than be dependent on Westerners to be their teachers.
I remember vividly how this training material came into being. A couple of Kurdish believers came over to visit us at Christmas time 2018 and, sitting down on doushaks, we looked together at a series of verses I had hastily chalked up on a Google doc. They came to my mind from all over the Bible. But they came to have a certain shape to them and so I now give them the title ‘Feed My Lambs’. This, I will argue, is the commission Christ has given to teachers in his church.
I hope to somehow make this material available to the Arabic and Kurdish speakers in the churches here in Kurdistan, but I will try first to write up my thoughts in English- any feedback you can provide might sharpen my thinking and so make it more of a blessing to the fledgling churches in Kurdistan.
Praise God: a movement has gathered momentum to train people in this region how to do expository preaching. These are valuable skills and I was delighted to be able to attend the Simeon Trust workshops in Dubai. However, we need not just skills in exegesis, but we need to understand the bigger picture of why we give ourselves to preaching. And we need to be ourselves changed if we are to be fruitful preachers. As is sometimes said, it's not so much about examining the Bible; we need to let the Bible examine us.
If the church in Iraq can in this way somehow be a blessing to sister churches in the West, that would be sweet. As I so often say, we must not believe the narrative that the BBC and many secularist media outlets put out that the church in Iraq is gradually dying. To the contrary, the living church in Iraq is growing and people who had not heard of Christ are now hearing his wondrous good news announced to them in their own languages.
She who is in Babylon, we might say, greets you (see 1 Pet 5:13).
Lockdown has given me the opportunity to blog some biblical meditations about preaching and preachers. Like the apostle Paul in prison, I am prevented from seeing people face to face but I have more opportunity to write.
This opportunity comes at an exciting time. Here in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Kurdish people have been coming to faith in Jesus as the Good Shepherd, the Saviour, and I have been trying to train them to faithfully teach the Bible for themselves, rather than be dependent on Westerners to be their teachers.
I remember vividly how this training material came into being. A couple of Kurdish believers came over to visit us at Christmas time 2018 and, sitting down on doushaks, we looked together at a series of verses I had hastily chalked up on a Google doc. They came to my mind from all over the Bible. But they came to have a certain shape to them and so I now give them the title ‘Feed My Lambs’. This, I will argue, is the commission Christ has given to teachers in his church.
I hope to somehow make this material available to the Arabic and Kurdish speakers in the churches here in Kurdistan, but I will try first to write up my thoughts in English- any feedback you can provide might sharpen my thinking and so make it more of a blessing to the fledgling churches in Kurdistan.
Praise God: a movement has gathered momentum to train people in this region how to do expository preaching. These are valuable skills and I was delighted to be able to attend the Simeon Trust workshops in Dubai. However, we need not just skills in exegesis, but we need to understand the bigger picture of why we give ourselves to preaching. And we need to be ourselves changed if we are to be fruitful preachers. As is sometimes said, it's not so much about examining the Bible; we need to let the Bible examine us.
If the church in Iraq can in this way somehow be a blessing to sister churches in the West, that would be sweet. As I so often say, we must not believe the narrative that the BBC and many secularist media outlets put out that the church in Iraq is gradually dying. To the contrary, the living church in Iraq is growing and people who had not heard of Christ are now hearing his wondrous good news announced to them in their own languages.
She who is in Babylon, we might say, greets you (see 1 Pet 5:13).
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