God makes all things possible. Baptists had suggested a feasible approach: tell Bible stories to teach the gospel. Two workshops were devoted to teaching 120 stories from the Old and New Testaments. WELS teachers  demonstrated ways to tell the stories effectively and help the students internalize them. The next three workshops taught Luther’s Catechism featuring a Bible story and a teaching chart from the catechism for each lesson.

There is nothing new about the concept. WELS schools have used Bible history and the catechism for generations to teach children. Indeed, Luther wrote the enchiridion to enable illiterate and semiliterate parents to teach the basic truths of Scripture to their households. We simply adapted tried and true methods to teach adults. The catechism, with its detailed explanation exemplified by the charts, does something much  greater than teach the central truths of Scripture. It emphasizes and clarifies its central message—the gospel. It has also given us a way to demonstrate in a simple way how leaders can teach others, especially when that teaching needs to be done in an oral form.

Under the capable leadership of the church leaders and pastor-farmers, the attendance at the workshops welled from around forty to one hundred, while outreach efforts in the Himalayas stretched from six congregations in two districts to forty congregations and fifty more Scripture-learning groups in twenty districts. WELS pastors and teachers at the workshops rejoiced in the way the students responded to the teaching and practiced telling the same lessons to the each other. Sermons heard during worship services became messages that shared law and gospel rather than mere exhortations to live as Christians. Nine of the leaders have been interviewed and identified as prospects for a seminary program that, God-willing, is planned to start next fall.

Paul Hartman

This article is taken from the Multi-Language Publications website.  Continue reading the rest of the newsletter.