AN UPDATE FROM MYLES SUTHERLAND

I was lucky enough to participate in a “Context Training: Course run by Global Interaction (GiA) in February. To do this course I was able to travel to Melbourne and was billeted out to stay with another young guy doing this course as well.

“What’s Context Training?” Some of you may be wondering…The Context Training Course is a course that all GiA cross-cultural workers (missionaries) complete before going out on to the field. It is a course that looks at how we as Australian-white-Baptist missionaries can communicate the gospel to other cultures, as to not try to reshape their beliefs in order to create more Australian-white-Baptist Christians but to enable them to be unique Christians to their own culture. The course was a week long, intensive and looked in depth at indigenous spirituality (Ivan Jordan spoke of this) Buddhism (two missionaries who were home on deputation ran this) and Islam (Walter White who was in Bangladesh for 20 odd years ran this)

The course also looked at theological aspects of contextualisation, which was harder for me to follow having never done any theological training previously. After returning from the course I have been challenged to not only think about what may lie ahead for me in international mission, but to also think about how we as a Church and as Christians can be active in local mission opportunities.