This last month has been a very exciting one. For starters, we finished the ceiling project I spoke of last time. After it was all completed, we had a small dedication and prayer time for the classroom. The base leader here, Markus, told us a bit of the back story of the room. As you may already know, YWAM Lausanne was the very first YWAM base ever. Back in 1969, the main chalet building was purchased and retrofitted from its previous life as a hotel into a base. The classroom we installed the new ceiling in was the only classroom back then. Markus showed us how the class was laid out, including the area where there was video equipment installed for creating video teachings way back in the 1970s. In effect, we renovated the very first YWAM classroom ever. I found the significance of this quite exciting to be a part of.
Once the ceiling was completed, the entire media team here started in on a large project, a huge online course with roughly 10-12 hours of video content. Due to the travel situation globally right now, we are creating a way for our DTS students to start online and come up to a month late and not lag behind the other students. The course covers topics like biblical overview, Christian world view, cross-cultural communications, and a plethora of other foundational faith topics. This course is going to be widely used by a whole bunch of other bases as well. About half of the course is being filmed here in Switzerland and the rest is being filmed with other teachers around the world. We have some really unbelievable teachers contributing to the project including, Loren and Darleen Cunningham, Lynn Green, David Hamilton, and Maureen Menard. The whole course is being edited and produced by the 4 of us on the media team here. I can’t overstate how exciting a project like this is! It is a really sizable undertaking especially for a team as small as this one. With the deadline at the end of June looming over us, we have been firing on all cylinders. We put up a large set to film on in the same classroom we had just finished installing the ceiling in. I find this quite special because we get to film in the same place some of the first YWAM teachings were recorded in! I will be sure to share the course once it is up for the public! We could also very much use prayer for this project. We are breaking new ground into this new format of sharing teachings and ministering. I am asking you to join me in prayer for both the creation of the course and for a special anointing over the course that it would be effective and a blessing to all who come in contact with it.
On the COVID-19 front, as of the 15th of June, all the borders in Europe reopened again after being closed for nearly 3 months. This is huge news for us here. We had several people in neighboring countries waiting for the opening to come. Switzerland, and all of Europe for that matter, are slowly but surely emerging from the lockdown. Practically, day to day life is much the same, we wear masks when going out, use what feels like gallons of hand-sanitizer, and still practice strict social distancing but change is slowly coming.
Recently, I have been reading a very fascinating book called “Ministering in Honor-Shame Cultures” by Jayson Georges and Mark Baker. In North American and the majority of the western world, our society is based on a guilt-innocence paradigm that views the world, and even the gospel very individualistically. Here at the base, we have a lot of Korean students who come from a culture rooted in the more corporately minded paradigm of honor-shame. It has been enlightening to gain a deeper understanding of how to communicate and work cross-culturally with many fewer miscommunications or misunderstandings. The biggest difference between the two views is whether the group or the individual is placed as of higher importance. It has been so helpful to gain a better understanding of how other cultures view and prioritize things. It has been so helpful to be able to see things from their perspective and proactively learn how to work with all of the amazing people here from other cultures.
As always, thank you for coming along with me in this adventure of faith,
Ben