What I do all day...

I am two weeks into the second half of my stay here, and it suddenly seems like time is going to fly. Things have changed at work, partially because Msafara is over and everyone is doing their "normal" job again. We also had an evaluation two weeks ago in which we were given new job descriptions and tasks. When the guys from the worship department came back from Msafara, I was suddenly out of work, as they took over service planning and bulletin work (which I had been involved in) and I had finished baptism class and baptism. With everything being different, I thought I could give you an overview of what I do all day or all week - as that is usually hard to see anyway in ministry.

Just to remind you, I am in the Pastoral Care department which involves pastoral care (weddings, funerals, births, illnesses, visitation etc.), adult education, small groups, visitors, and helping the Worship department with the worship service on Sundays. Here are my tasks:

• organise and co-facilitate discipleship classes
• put together a baptism class manual with the material I developed and with the information I gathered
• organise visitation one week a month ("Amtswoche")
• organise visits for our pastoral care team to the spinal injury clinic, lead our team
• take care of administration for the Pre-Marital Counselling Class, sit in on the class
• develop two study guides for small groups on two sermon series ("burn-out" and "the names of God")
• research on how volunteers at Nairobi Chapel are recruited, trained and appreciated; speak to staff team about possible problems or areas that need strengthening
• interview pastors in other departments about their work to get an overview of what the church does and how it does it

If you are thinking that this is a lot to get done in two more months, then yes, I agree. Especially because I sit in meeting half of the week! The senior pastor and the associate pastors have become very intentional about equipping me as much as possible in these last months, so I now sit in on meetings with the pastoral team. Right now they are discussing their vision and the strategies for getting there, so it is a very interesting discussion to be a part of. However, it also means an additional all-day meeting:
Tuesday: departmental meeting in the morning, service planning in the afternoon
Wednesday: "library day" (which means you can actually get work or research done with out being interrupted)
Thursday: pastoral team meeting
Friday: class in the morning, admin or visitation in the afternoon
Saturday: admin, visitation or service preparation as necessary
Sunday: discipleship class, service, pre-marital counselling class (Sunday is my longest day!)
Monday: off-day!