Incorporating a Missions Perspective

You know if teachers could have that perspective of just seeing their students as workers in God’s kingdom in the future… Every Christian is called to be a missionary, whether it’s here or in some foreign land. Why not raise up the whole crew of little people to come after you?

Just some things that I do here to try to incorporate that missions mindset in my students are things like ethnic group day where we all dress up in costumes of people from different countries and just focus on learning about those countries that day. Also we do prayer groups once a week for the missionaries and I read them missionary updates to keep them involved and know what’s going on in the foreign field. I love sharing stories about my experience in Africa with them and they love hearing them. If I would have taught school here before going to Ghana it would have been very different. With having that experience I’ve been able to put more of a world view perspective in what I teach—to just get them beyond themselves and just the “me” focus and to help them realize that there’s a whole other world out there of people that have needs and who don’t have the privileges that we have. Like in reading class—there are so many rural villages in other countries that would love to know how to read and especially they would love to know how to read the Bible and they just can’t. Like one village I was in in Ghana that I would meet with the ladies there and share with them Bible stories and they were sad when I left because they don’t know how to read the Bible and there was no church in their village so how can they really learn more?

Even like in math—learning the metric system. When I was in school, I never really found value in knowing the metric system. Why? And going to another country made me realize that the metric system is used in many other countries around the world and so there is value in it and just all those little things. The importance of learning another language. So this year we’re learning sign language and last year we learned Spanish. Even like geography—the value of knowing your geography. I didn’t really see much value in it when I was in school and so I didn’t know my geography very well. But just realizing that God actually has a heart for these people. There are people living in these countries. It’s not just the name of the country and its shape and a couple facts. There’s actually people that are living there today with real needs. And Bible class too—just God’s promise to Abraham that He’s going to bless him and then through him all the nations of the earth will be blessed and how that was fulfilled in Jesus Christ. I didn’t really know that before and so now teaching Bible class, I’m able to share that with my students and help them to see the big picture of God’s redemption for the world. So it helped me to just see value in helping them to have that world view or expand their minds and like I said, get the focus off of themselves and on to, “What are people like in the rest of the world?”