Empowering Shepards for the Kingdom!

In my last month of ministry, I have been partnering with the Adventures in Missions (AIM) base in Manzini, Eswatini. AIM’s focus here are carepoints! Carepoints are bright green (or peach) buildings in the community that provides a safe space for children. Preschool classes are housed there. Also, it is a place where school-aged children can come after school to eat a healthy meal, play games and receive lessons from a shepard. Shepards are men and women who are responsible for empowering and discipling the youth at the carepoints. The shepards are able to empower and disciple because of an extensive leadership training that they receive through the Swazi Leadership Academy. During orientation on my first day of ministry, I found out how much thought and care goes into the lessons shepards give to the children. The children gets the chance to receive grief support lessons, and follow a curriculum that teaches them the love of God, how to love themselves and how to love their neighbors (Luke 10:27). What is also cool is that community members, like parents and the cooks from the carepoints can receive emotional support training from experienced facilitators with AIM.

The Swazi Leadership Academy (SLA) is where I spent the majority of my time here in Eswatini. 3 or 4 days each week, I would go there with 2 other people from my squad. As soon as we get there, we would have devotion and prayer with our 3 leaders who also work at the office. Then we would spend the rest of the day preparing lesson plans that the shepards receive as part of their leadership training. The types of lesson plans that we create comes from a variety of topics dealing with “character” and how to live “Christ-like”. For the 4 weeks being here, we have written the following lesson plans…right living, celebration, creativity, transparency, patience with self and others, hope, purity, self-control, fasting, faithfulness with your gifts, humility, discipleship, and spiritual gifts. For each lesson, my teammates and I worked really well together to come up with learning objectives, teaching points, how the topic connects to the Bible, expected outcomes, lesson activities, reflection, and assessment questions. I enjoyed writing these lesson plans so much. Knowing that these lessons will be used to teach and empower the shepards makes my heart so happy.  Below are example lesson plans.

My teammates and I had the amazing opportunity to teach a couple of lesson plans to the shepards before they started work at the carepoints. One Wednesday, we taught on evangelism and the following Tuesday we taught on holiness. Teaching on evangelism was so good! Jack (teammate) and I tag teamed to teach. We taught a total of 9 shepards who were in their 4th year of leadership training. We started off asking them a question of what makes sharing the gospel complicated. They responded by saying things like feeling self doubt, unworthy, fear, not being fit to share the gospel, and thinking that unbelievers won’t take them seriously. Throughout our time teaching, Jack and I shared the truth behind sharing the gospel and different types and methods of evangelism. I felt from the Lord to share about power evangelism and how it works. The students were listening intently and taking notes. Jack and I modeled power evangelism to show the students an example. Afterwards, I gave each person a character to act out and told them to get with a partner to practice approaching someone, asking for a miracle that they could pray right then, praying with command and authority and then follow up with sharing the gospel. We didn’t have time for them to switch partners, but overall it went well. It was cool seeing the groups trying their best with this new method. We debriefed the session and only one person said it was difficult. Everyone else said that they thought power evangelism was a good and simple way to love others and share the gospel. Yay God! 

Jack and I taught the holiness lesson to 9 3rd-year shepards. Most of these shepards were the ones who actually led carepoints that the rest of my squad spent time in. It was cool finding out which shepard belonged to a particular set of teammates. When preparing the lesson, I decided to expand the teaching points with some notes I took from the Gospel In Ten Words (by Paul Ellis). I’m glad I did. The points in that book was a good addition to the already created lesson plan. Throughout the lesson, the shepards wrote the extra notes in their journal and they seemed so interested. As Jack and I shared, the shepards answered guided questions that we gave with some really amazing  responses and they asked great follow-up questions. We ended up having a wonderful discussion. It was so good, that I didn’t have time to write their responses, except for the last question. I asked the shepards “How does the holiness of God create change in our lives to live holy?” The responses they said include knowing the source of holiness makes it easy to live our lives, we get to admire God’s holiness which will help us understand Him more, his holiness inspires us to be like Him and motivates us to look like Jesus, we are no longer living in sin because the Holy Spirit lives in us, it makes us understand God better than what we understood him before, Jesus saved my life and now knowing him I can find joy and peace, God’s holiness enables us to not want to sin, and finally being aware of God’s holiness allows us to change and transform our lives. Which we finished, one of the shepards came up to us said “Thank you so much for teaching the lesson. The words you shared were so powerful.” I had a really great time teaching the shepards. Hearing their thoughts and what was on their hearts was so cool. I am so honored to have been given the opportunity to teach. It was such a joy to empower and equip the shepards! 

My 2nd blog is all about my experiences at the different carepoints that I had the privilege to attend!