One of the most exciting elements of my ministry this year is that of training lay preachers. In South Africa many rural churches share a pastor who alternates visiting churches under his leadership and so sees each once a month (and sometimes less frequently than that). As a palliative measure (which has turned out to be permanent), lay people generally preach on the Sundays the pastor is away. The lay preachers often have very limited biblical literacy and so depend more heavily on their abilities as public speakers. It is, therefore, an enormous need and an enormous opportunity to train people to whom the preaching of God's word is entrusted most weeks of the month.

I am covering Bible Handling skills and in the first lesson I presented, I included the following diagram which may be useful to others doing exegesis or hermeneutics courses in Zulu so I thought I'd put it online.

Each step involves looking somewhere:

1. Up: Prayer
2. Down: Studying the words
3. Back: looking at the text's Biblical Theological context
4. Forward: Looking to where it points
5. Here: Applying the text to the present day

I hope it's useful to someone out there.