We are in the middle of the 1st week of the new semester. With over 70 students, registration and orientation was wild. I think we have everyone settled in now. At last count we had 68 resident and about 15 commuting full time students. Last night we held the first ever Guam Campus ministry fair. Different ministries and community service organizations presented what they were doing to our students and the students were able to sign up with the ones that interested them. I am especially pleased that PIBC students can meet a real need on Guam for Micronesian language speakers who can mentor young (High School and Junior High age) Micronesians.
This semester I will be teaching two classes - Introduction to Cults and Prophets 1. The Cults class will be a hybrid distance education-classroom class with students from both the Guam campus and the Palau Teaching Facility. I am already beginning to receive the emailed homework and replies to my threaded discussion posts. The first chat will be tomorrow. The Prophets class will be a traditional style class. I have 17 signed up for it including Joyce. She must like the teacher since she keeps taking my classes!
This is a 2 1/2 hour once a week class which will start tonight. We will be taking care of all the "housekeeping" issues and then I will do an overview of the prophetic books with a section on how to interpret the different types of prophetic literature in the Bible. Next week we will start into Joel and Obadiah.The Cults class will begin with a discussion of the definition and characteristics of a cult. As we discuss the theological, sociological and practical characteristics of cults I am hoping the students will begin to get an idea of what a real biblical church should look like and be able to discern where they become "cultish" in their own life. We will also be discussing the "doctrinal hierarchy." In other words we will be discussing which doctrines that we hold are essential and which are negotiable. Should be interesting. I just read an interesting article "My Take on Inerrancy" about this by one of my old profs at Dallas, Dan Wallace, at www.bible.org. I would appreciate your prayers for my class tonight and the Cults class discussion tomorrow.
