Dispatch Africa 2012:

Just a quick update.  I am currently in Botswana Africa leading courses for the Bible Institute.  Traveling with me is Dr. Pat Knowlton of Creede Baptist Church in Colorado.  He is teaching Biblical Interpretation (Hermeneutics) and I am teaching Expository Preaching.  The students (24 of them) are soaking it up.  The Q&A times are the most fun.  They are a lively bunch with insightful questions, and we are having a great time getting to know them and training them in these important disciplines.  They have a deep love for their countrymen and want to see them come to Christ.  These men and a few women desperately need this training.  They are surrounded on all sides by witchcraft, ancestral worship, post modernism (the relativity of truth), and prosperity doctrine.  False prophets abound here.  We are teaching them how to interpret the Bible and how to preach it for life change.  If we teach them nothing else, this will get them far ahead of the evil one and his work.

On Thursday afternoon, when we complete the coursework here in Gaborone, we will travel across the border into northwestern South Africa to the city of Mafikeng, which is the capital of the province.  We have a meeting scheduled there on the campus of North-West University on Friday morning with a group of Dutch Reformed pastors who are interested in establishing a Bible Institute campus in Mafikeng.  We hope to meet with leaders and students to finalize the arrangements for a new campus.  It will be the first campus we have established in South Africa, and is only about two hours away from Gaborone, Botswana.  Gaborone begins with the “H” sound and rhymes with “macaroni.”  It is our hope that the Gaborone and Mafikeng campuses will be a “circuit” for which we can deliver courses using the same U.S. instructors to teach in both locations on a single trip.  This will save considerable funds and will be the best use of our faculty resources.  Most of our faculty would prefer to get the best bang for their travel buck.  Getting the opportunity to teach two groups of students in two locations in different countries so close together is appealing.  Moreover, given the nature of scheduling the coursework for such a circuit, the instructors would also get the opportunity to preach in local churches on the intervening Sunday morning.  This is also appealing.

Please pray for the students we are training that they will learn and apply what we are teaching them.  Also, please pray for our safety as we travel, and that we are successful in establishing a campus for the Institute in Mafikeng.

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