Courseware for SOM-11 (Term-2)

Thanks for your interest and expressing your concern. It is a curation issue that becomes more important the longer you stay with us. I am putting together a visual graphic culled from about 8 years of work that is a synthesis from a multi-location project in after-care solutions toggled between our Geylang base and Newport sanctuary in the Philippines.

This imagery will show the intersections between upstream cause and downstream effects in the unfolding drama of Christ’s redemptive purpose for us within the wider community of equals of which HealthServe, YWAM, Tamar, etc are part of. I do not have data regards what others are doing other than social media news feeds and through official channels, but a similar map could be created based on the nodes and info signatures left behind by a trail of client, volunteer, associated movements both within the organization and among its partners locally and also internationally.

What I hope to achieve in the mapping, is that volunteer contribution within the next 6 months will have a strong association with and connection to the previous 8 years since we got the keys to our Lor-3 offices and similar correspondence with earlier prototype school developed over 33 years walking with Jesus.

From this schematic, you will notice that the synergies have both intensified as well as diversified over the years accelerated by (1) the birth of my local church, The Oikos Fellowship, of which I remain the Senior pastor, since 21 years ago (Nov 3, 1992) as a Singapore registered charity and then again in 2003 when we (2) established a working partnership with our Filipino brethren at the genesis of our freedom business, O. A. Trust House (OATH, for short) as a Manila-registered civil society order under SEC governance.

To answer your question about what went into the development of Term-1 under our School of Ministry, we use an external public repository online 24-hrs and accessible in a collaborative platform that is still being tested. I can imagine however, the utter confusion of new interns trying to grapple with over 6 laptops-worth of information spread over 2 decades of informal mail, project and product launches in a dizzying palette of colors that paint a different picture for difference audiences depending on where you are coming from, eg as a researcher, a sponsor, a donor or a individual partner or as business unit.

So to simplify matters, we try to begin each school with a blank sheet of paper which also makes sense since each of the various students represent an entire universe of ideas, available technologies and design biases. See the School of Ministry as a deserted landing strip at a rear support base in a military context. You have ministry pilots each wearing different uniforms, responding to different call signs, bringing with them separate experience (battle scars) to the ops room. Compound that with the fact that we have situation reports arriving in real-time from the various multi-locations.

I don’t think new SOM interns will have much time to plough through previous historical data (dating back now 11 batches of students! ) as the demands of new ground situations are always conspiring to challenge us in bespoke solutions in matters arising and requiring new knowledge and alternate solutions and where textbook solutions are bound to be inadequate to meet the demands of the harvests.

Of course we can learn from mistakes in the past and we are continuing this conversation whenever we host subject matter experts to tell their stories. For example, tonight during Shabbat we are listening to the CEO of Xndo sharing lessons of his walk with Jesus in a 2-hour program that I invite you to participate if able (see brochure below). But the bulk of the training is a hands-on investigation of the social fabric both resistant to and yet also remarkably compliant with our prayers in Jesus’ name.

Of course, I will forward reading material relevant to courseware but I do want to see first in which direction Term-2 will proceed and what the shape will be as schedules, events, outreaches, product launches interact over the next 3 -6 months.