Jonathan Training 2012

“The training more than met my expectations”, “It was better than I expected”, “It exceeded my expectations”…  These were some of the comments on the evaluations for the latest Jonathan Training held in Phnom Penh in January.  Clearly, all the hard work that went into teaching the course paid off.  The team of 5 core facilitators and other guest presenters did a wonderful job of making the training experience interactive, varied, challenging and even transformational.

This was the first time we had particpants from countries outside of Cambodia, with 6 of the 19 participants from restricted-access countries around Asia (which might help explain the blurred faces on the group photo).  There was a great variety of people in the training, from those who have been on the field for over 10 years to those newly arrived and still in language learning.  Those who are new to the field have the advantage of learning how to spark Church Multiplication Movements from the beginning of their ministry and avoid many of the hidden pitfals, but the disadvantage of being limited in developing an actual strategic plan, since they may not yet know exactly where they will be working.  Those who have been on the field for many years have the advantage of knowing their ministry situation very well, but the disadvantage of it being difficult or sometimes even impossible to turn something that was begun on addition strategies into a multiplication strategy.

We are continuing to follow up all who participated, to encourage them to pursue the vision of ‘viral’ Christianity that produces an exponential multiplication of disciples making disciples and churches planting churches until all of our people groups are reached.

What we began last year with attempting to make the training concrete and interactive, we pushed even further this year with very few straight lecture sessions and lots of activities involving small group discussions, drawing, poster-making, lego, chocolate, hand signals, video clips and story telling.

Steve Parlato was our ‘outside expert’ for part of the training, who has successfully helped to spark movements in a closed Asian country.  We greatly appreciated his experience and insight.

After spending more than 2 weeks together in the intense learning and sharing atmosphere from 8 am to 5 pm, with homework and preparation in the evenings, one of the facilitators owned to waking up after it was over with a certain lost feeling of “what am I to do today?”

What we do today is put it into practice, making ourselves partners in God’s vision for these unreached peoples to stand before his throne in eternity.