I have just got back from a week in Dubuque, Iowa on a conference organised by Emmaus Bible College and Tilsley College, Motherwell about setting up and running small scale training centres.
Emmaus are probably best known in the UK and the rest of the world for their correspondence courses, the head office being on the site of the college. The college itself has about 250 students who study a range of subjects but with an emphasis on Biblical Studies.
There were about 60 of us at the conference, from countries as far apart as Zambia, Peru and Papua New Guinea; to say nothing of the Czech Republic!
It was an excellent time. The people at Emmaus were wonderfully hospitable, running the conference for free for all participants. The campus was built in the 1950s by the Catholics as a seminary but sold to Emmaus in the 1980s. This means that the main building has at its heart a large, marble-clad church with stained glass windows of various saints!! Not quite what you expect from a Brethren-based college!
I expect for anyone not involved in training and equipping Christians for service, most of the week would have seemed remarkably tiresome with workshops and papers on curriculum development, accreditation of courses and funding of centres. However, I found it not only interesting but also very helpful for the situation we find ourselves in here. Most of the participants are further along the line in setting up and running their centres than we are so it was good to be able to hear of their experiences and - hopefully! - learn from their mistakes. Perhaps the most exciting - because it has been running only a few years but seen real growth in that time - is the GLO centre in Zambia. There is a video here which gives some idea of what they are doing - made even more interesting for us as a couple of Faroese girls are on it.
Please continue to pray that we will be given the wisdom we need as we seek to plan and then start our first residential course in September 2011.
Dorit and I have been on holiday this past week and went one day to Terezin (perhaps better known as Theresienstadt). This is just an hour's bus ride north of Prague and was used by the Nazis during WW2 as a ghetto for Jews from throughout Europe. The vast majority of them were later transferred to Auschwitz. The town was originally built as a garrison town and prison in the late 18th century and is laid out in straight streets and regimented blocks. (More details can be found on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresienstadt_concentration_camp.)
We went on a coldish but clear day to find the town almost deserted of visitors which gave everything a slightly surreal feel. Visiting the museum and other buildings was very sobering, especially the section where drawings by some of the children in the ghetto of life before and during their time at Terezin. Reading the detailed lists of names, home towns, ages, destinations of the people who went through this camp was almost overwhelming. Over and over again, the question kept coming back "Why?". Why so much detail? Why the need to know everything? Why record all this? And yet, in the midst of the horror of the camp, there were moments where something of the human spirit of the people came through. The drawings by the children; the newssheets produced on typewriters and distributed in very few (sometimes solitary) copies; the music and drama performances and the self-sacrificial care given by nurses and doctors to the sick and the dying.
Perhaps it was all the more poignant a visit as it came just a few days after we celebrated the resurrection. Here was evidence, if ever it was needed, of the reason for the cross. Humanity's innate capacity for hatred and evil, exemplified by the cross and the holocaust, never ceases to astound. But perhaps it should also warn. The people who ran the camps, who logged the arrivals and the departures were human just like us. And if we are encouraged by the strength of the humanity shown in the drama and music of the camp we need also to be challenged by the fact that the inhumanity shown is something that we are as capable of as anyone. Evil will be overcome only through the work of Jesus on the cross. It is only through the cross that we can cry, in the face of horror, "Death, where is your victory?"
