Professor-X

Earlier in the week, my friend Mark told me that Kent, a teacher at ACU and good friend of Mark's (my friend, too), asked if I wanted to be part of what the missions class he teaches was doing on Friday. They had been talking about prayer walking, and I had told Kent about some of my experiences doing that, so I assumed he wanted me to share a little with the class or something. A couple days later, Mark informed me that Kent would be out of own, and in fact, we would be teaching the class... the graduate-level missions class. I thought this was pretty funny considering I not only don't have an undergraduate Bible degree, but I'm not in grad school either. All I've got is that little 'ol business degree. Our duties for the class were to facilitate discussion and to send the students out to prayer walk. Thankfully, I didn't have to prepare a lecture.

We met the class at Monk's (local coffee shop), grabbed drinks and prepared to head out into "downtown" Abilene. We went out in 2's and 3's and, being that Mark and I were the "teachers", we ended up together for the hour of prayer walking. Nothing totally amazing happened, but I could definitely see God joining us (or rather us joining God) in our meanderings. After walking a couple minutes, I felt like we should go up on the roof of the Wooten, an old hotel that has recently been converted into apartments. I told Mark and he informed me you had to have a card to get in. We went for it anyways. As we were approaching the front door, a resident walked out and held the door for us. We went for the elevators where a sign informed us we had to have a card to operate them. So we headed up the stairs, passing by the maintenance guy who told us we couldn't get onto any of the floors, because of locked doors, and eventually ended up looking out a 16th floor window in the stairwell. We gave up getting to the roof and had some sweet prayer time for the city while looking at the rooftops. On the way back down, the maintenance guy asked how far we went up and then without us saying anything about the roof, offered to personally take us up on the roof. He took us up the elevator, through a maintenance closet, up a rickety spiral staircase and through a 3x3 door onto the roof. It was awesome to see and pray for the entire city from 18 stories up.

On the way down, we "coincidentally" ran into Mark's friend, who I vaguely knew, who lives on the 17th floor of the Wooten. She took us to see her business, In Focus, which is located on the bottom floor of the same building. After that, time was up and we headed back to Monk's to debrief with the class. Each group shared what they had experienced and then we had a great discussion about how we can authentically express the hope we have to a dying world. To finish things off, I shared one of my experiences prayer walking which had been absolutely miraculous. All in all, I'd say my first shot at teaching a graduate-level missions class was a success.