Double Bible Study Begins

So tonight was the first night of an experiment.  Well, all right – just about everything about being a missionary feels like an experiment!  But – this was one of them.

We’re trying to put together a sequence of studies that people can take, and tonight we restarted one we’d done before (the Chronological Bible Study) and started a new one (Discovering Life).  There are a number of experimenty things about it all, but one is that we’re having two studies at one time.

That means that, as people come in, they have to be sent to one study or another.  We started about 20 minutes late, but most people arrived after that – so you can imagine how it went.

Also, this basically cuts our numbers in half.  Which in some ways is good, but it’s just very different.

Ismael taught the first Chronological Bible Study.  He said it went well, but that there was a lot to cover.  That will vary from week to week.

I taught the first study of Discovering Life, all about (some of) the attributes of God.

It went well – some of it was quite basic, other parts a little more challenging.

The last question of the night was – Which attribute of God is it most difficult for people you know to accept, and why?

The first answer caught me by surprise.  The answer was His Aseity (that God is self-existent and doesn’t need anything or anybody else).  Why was it hard for people to accept?  Because they believe that there are many other gods, not just one!

I admit, that wasn’t the first thing I would have thought of, thinking of the average person on the street in Mexico, but that’s why I asked – I need to keep learning what people actually think.

The most popular answer was Love – people have a hard time accepting that God really is love, or that God could love them.

We briefly got into some other interesting discussions as well.  For example, here’s one for you – when Jesus was a baby in a manger in Bethlehem – was He omnipresent?

Anyway, it went well.  I have in mind a few changes to make, but it’s a new study, so that’s to be expected.  Next week will be quite different, so we’ll see how that goes!