Fusion Foundations Training- recap

I've been a Christian for 21 years. I've been through all sorts of teaching, training, classes, studies, sermons and books. I've been on many international mission-trips and ministered full-time at a large church for over 6 years. I don't claim to know it all and everyday I'm reminded of how little I know about anything (I think that's called getting older?), but I thought I had a grasp of what I believed and why. Despite all the Christian learning I've been honored to sit with, I found this past week to be one of the most challenging, thought provoking, inspective, faith-building week I've ever spent!

Fusion (http://fusioninternational.org/) an organization founded in Australia, put on this week of training. Living Hope has a relationship with Fusion and told us about this opportunity. Meagan and I were privileged to attend because we're looking toward 2011 and getting ideas on how to effectively reach and train community leaders and churches- and Meagan and I seem to be in the batter's box for this task.

Each day at Fusion camp, we ate breakfast at 8am, began training at 9am and only stopped briefly for short tea breaks and meals... and worked all the way to 9:30pm. The days were full but really awesome. We studied 3 tracts: God, Others, Self. The whole idea was based on the fact that God created us with purpose, we were designed for 'community' and living with others, and we are created to live with Him and tap into all He created us to be. A big chunk of the study was about our concept of God. One of our teachers would ask a question like, "What's eternal life?" or "What is the Holy Spirit?" ... we'd answer with the knowledge we came with and then were blown away when we actually looked into Scripture- digging and looking at lots of references - seeing that what we thought we knew/what we natural verbalized wasn't actually the whole picture. This was a week of diving deep into the Word of God and seeing who He is and who He says we are!

I'm sure more thoughts and mullings from my lessons learned will be verbalized on this blog in days to come. I just wanted you to know that God is moving IN ME in South Africa! I'm thankful to be right here, right now.

Manyano Retreat Center: an old school turned into a camp!

Community Festival (Saturday practical community training). I was face-painting queen!

I got to spend the whole week with my best friend, Meagan!

I'd ask that you continue to pray for Meagan and me as we process all we learned this week and put it into practice at Living Hope. 2011 is going to be a big year - with new ministry, new challenges. Looking forward to what God has in store!