An ESBS graduate doing awesome stuff!

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Sarah Murphy, ESBS 2009-10:  missionary in South Africa

I thought it would be fun to catch up with Sarah Murphy, who is currently doing amazing things with YWAM South Africa.  She's out there making disciples, training the church, and having a huge impact.  Here is an update from her recent newsletter:

Eastern Cape Outreach I spent July and August leading an outreach team from the School of Biblical Studies in the Eastern Cape (a province of South Africa).  We were a small team of 2 staff and 4 students teaching in various churches. Five of us squeezed into my little Toyota to drive 2 days up to Lusikisiki to our outreach location.  Our aim was to help people to see that the Word of God is accessible to them and that they can study for themselves without needing a pastor or serious study guides. We taught a Biblical Overview showing God’s plan of redemption from Genesis to Revelation in many different churches and also taught seminars on how to study through smaller books of the bible like Philemon, Titus and Ephesians.  We had a great response to our teaching with people seeing how they can study the Bible for themselves and giving testimonies such as “this is the first time I have really understood my Bible!” It is a wonderful privilege to see people getting to know God through his Word and realising that God is knowable.  Teaching the bible is an awesome blessing in my own life as I realise the truths about who God is continue to become more and more established and deeply rooted in my own life and heart. I was also greatly touched by the hospitality of the Xhosa and Zulu people.  We stayed in peoples homes and it was a great blessing to be so warmly accepted into these families and churches.  Yes we came to teach but I left with my heart deeply touched by peoples love, care and generosity.

School of Biblical Foundations and Leadership For years our mobile bible teaching team has been dreaming about offering more in-depth biblical training to Pastors and church members in the Cape Town area.  This dream is finally being realised as we are pioneering our first intensive bible seminar - School of Biblical Foundations and Leadership.  Normally we teach in churches across Cape Town however for this seminar we have invited Pastors and key leaders from churches we work with to join us for this five week seminar in Muizenberg. We have 10 participants who are coming Wednesday and Friday evenings and all day Saturdays. We are introducing our participants to the Inductive Bible Study Method we use in our Biblical Training Schools and teaching these principles through the books of Titus, 2 Timothy, James, Ephesians and Mark.  As we go step by step through these books we are looking deeper into the context, understanding the historical background and implementing application in all our lives.                         Sarah's full update and contact info

A few thoughts from an ESBS graduate

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Carli Cannon, ESBS 2012-13

“Carli Cannon here, a student from the 2012-2013 year of awesomeness. Just wanted to give you a little picture of what life, or at least mine, looks like 6 months after graduating from ESBS.

First a little background on me: I’m a 19 year-old from just south of Nashville, TN. And no, I unfortunately don’t have a southern accent.J I absolutely LOVE travel and mission work. I have a passion for kids with special needs in underprivileged countries, and I spend a good chunk of my time watching children in one way or another. I sing, so there’s a little bit of Nashville that’s gotten into me. I graduated a year early from high school and took a year to attend a Discipleship Training School with Youth With a Mission that took place in Charlotte, NC and India! It turned my life around 120%, being the knucklehead high school punk that I was. While I was in this school God made it clear in a supernatural way that my next step was to go through an SBS school. So, a year and a half, a lot of grace, and about a million pages of reading later, here I am.

The common denominator every student shares from my year at ESBS is that we now have a gold mine of knowledge about God’s word.  A surface level understanding has been replaced with a deep knowledge. As ESBS graduates, we’re privileged to know a depth of historical context behind the passages we study in church (which makes the meaning of the passage SO much richer), and passages that once seems insignificant are now VITAL to understand life and walking with God!

That said, coming home from ESBS was difficult for me.  When I first came home I had this subconscious notion that I now knew nearly EVERYTHING that there was to know about God and the Bible. I wouldn’t admit that to anyone, myself included. But now I realize that pride was festering in almost every thought that popped into my mind spiritually.  The thing that I am realizing now is that God is SO much bigger than ANYTHING I could fit into my teeny tiny brain. He doesn’t fit into a box. Even in the Bible God scarcely worked in the same way twice! I mean, hello, Carli?! Yes, ESBS was a solid foundation on knowing His character and the Holy Spirit continues to lead me to help discern what is of Him and what isn’t.  In humility Im now learning to quiet myself and continue to receive as a learner, rather than have explosive historical diarrhea on anyone around me.

I am continuing to learn SO much since I’ve been back home, and a lot of which has come from people who don’t know Jack Squat about the Roman Empire, historical facts, etc...  Don’t get me wrong, I think the Bible is the biggest way that God reveals Himself to us and it is of our benefit to marinate in all of its goodness, both inductively and in meditation.  ESBS is an amazing way to do that, AND I am realizing that God has many tools of sharing pictures of Himself, whether that be the Bible, nature, other people, what have you. He works in more ways than any of us could imagine, and that’s the beautiful thing about Him: He is not contained. And even in just the Bible, who am I to think I’ve discovered it all in those zillion some odd words He provided for me to feast on for my entire life? Pride is a sneaky little monster.

So, going to ESBS was one of the most important things I’ve ever done. The ways I think and have relationship with the Lord will NEVER be the same. It is amazing to go back and read journals about how I’ve been sanctified over the past year and the richness of how I read the Bible now. Now 6 months out from graduation God is still working in me through teaching and relearning things I studied… and then some. The Holy Spirit’s revelation plus Biblical knowledge make a pretty awesome baby, just sayin’! God is good, people! In the words of a wise professor of mine, “posture to receive, posture to receive.” And that is precisely what I am learning to do…continue to receive good things from the same good God I learned so much about at ESBS.”

Your sister in our Savior,

Carli Cannon

Chris Lautsbaugh teaches Galatians

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Chris Lautsbaugh teaching Galatians this week

This week we were excited to welcome Chris Lautsbaugh for several days of lecture through the book of Galatians.  Chris is a 15 year veteran of the SBS program within YWAM, and currently heads up the SBS department in Muizenbrug South Africa.

Four years ago Chris felt a challenge from God to become a part of what he recognized as a fresh and growing discussion within Christianity on the subject of grace.  Recently Chris has released a book on the subject, entitled "Death of the Modern Superhero:  How Grace Breaks our Rules."  The book investigates how the radical truth of the gospel of grace turns our western performance based acceptance culture upside-down, showing us that Christianity, at its core, diverges from our culture, and  other major religions, with the radical truth that it is God himself who accomplished the work to make us acceptable to Him:  something we could never have done ourselves.

Check the book out, and investigate Chris' regular blog site on the subject of grace:

cultivating diligence and permanence in a sound-bite world.

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some of the girls going to pirate day at krispy kreme donuts

We are now ending our 5th week of school, and students and staff are settling into the normal SBS rhythm of life, and by that I mean that everyone is now getting used to studying the Bible 8 hours a day...which is "unusual" in a more typical life circumstance to say the least!

If there's one thing I can say about a year at ESBS, it's A-typical.  This program is a drastic departure from the rhythms of normal life in 21'st century America.  In many ways what students enter into and experience here carries undertones of a monastic type of life that we've lost in our culture.  Before the printing press, the i-pad, and the chevrolet, everything took time and lots of it.  Scribes in the ancient eastern world, and monks in the western world would spend months meticulously pouring over books of the Bible as they copied them and re-copied them by hand.

Anyone who has done laundry knows that if you want a stain to stick forever, just leave it there a while.  Let it set in.  It's the same with truth, with the Bible, with discipleship.  Lasting change requires time.  You have to push away the noise and sit under truth for long enough to let it sink in...day after day, week after week, and slowly a permanent and lasting thing takes place.

I think our culture appreciates and even admires permanence and stability, but asks for it in a "microwave" kinda' way....saying things like...  "I want to be changed forever, but I've only got 3 minutes to spend on it, because Im late for a lunch date across town...so hit me with something deep and true in 3 minutes or less and I promise I'll be different forever."  It just doesn't work that way.  Deep, permanent, lasting growth cant be downloaded into your heart like a song on an i-pod.

The parable of the sower and the seed (Luke 8) rings true.  Jesus, in the parable, describes growth in organic terms.  Like cultivating a crop, growth happens slowly, day after monotonous day, as the seed of truth is cared for and cultivated.  Time...it takes time.  The growth happens through the repetitive process of tilling the weeds and caring for the seed with "patient endurance (Luke 8:15)...time..."patient endurance"...difficult concepts to appreciate in a 1080p high speed culture.

So, among other things, Im realizing that this program teaches something valuable about life and discipleship...we are teaching patient endurance, which is a good thing, a necessary thing, and a pathway to real and lasting change.  It's real discipleship and Im thankful to be a part of it, and Im thankful for your involvement and interest in it too!

ESBS 2013-14 has begun

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ESBS staff and students 2013-14

We are off to a great start to ESBS 2013-14.  We are now in our second week of the program, just beginning our 3rd book together this morning (Philemon, Philippians and now Titus).

We have 7 wonderful students, two non-student spouses, 5 staff and 7 kids.  So far the class dynamic has been as fun as I've ever seen it be.  The students have been taking advantage of the afternoon free time during seminar to swim, canoe and hang out together.  The lecture environment has been as casual and comfortable as its ever been, and Im really happy with the way our community is flowing and functioning together so far.

We're looking forward to the best fall lecture schedule we've ever had, with 5 awesome guest lecturers planning to come before Christmas (Ron and Judy Smith...YWAM Montana, teaching 1-2 Tim, Hebrews and James)(Chris Lautsbaugh...YWAM South Africa, teaching Galatians)(Lee Baker...10 year missionary veteran from Nepal coming to teach Acts)(Mark Copus...a dentist from Tennessee/expert in palestine archaeology, coming to give special background and slides pertaining to the gospel of John).

We have 4 great evening events at camp coming up that we're hoping you'll join us for.  They all start at 7pm...see list below:

Sep 3:  background to the NT (free)
Sep 12:  the Cannon of Scripture (free)
Oct 25: Night of Worship with David Walker ($10 tickets...esbsonline.org)
Nov 5:  How will the World end?  4 Christian Views of the End (free)