June 2011
The idea is to
serve there as a full-time Kairos Gapper.
Here is a short
explanation.
GAP? Never heard of it…
“The practical and spiritual lessons of
this past year will be of use for a lifetime.”
Kairos GAP is more than a year out. It is a year of your
life invested in service, training and mentoring.
Service
The gappers
typically spend around six hours a day in some kind of Christian volunteer
service capacity.
This could be serving the desperately poor
living on the rubbish dumps of Manila or
speaking to college students in Minnesota
about Jesus Christ.
It could be helping with a youth outreach in
Latin America or running a street mission in inner city Dublin.
Training
Over the course of the year, the average gapper spends around 400 hours exploring training from
life skill topics such as self-management and intercultural awareness to more
discipleship topics such as service and scripture.
Given that a normal college class can take around
40 hours of your time, the GAP year is a bit like 10 classes over a
year.
The high training input that goes on in the year
is the reason why many gappers point to their GAP
year as a foundational year of service and learning impacting the rest of their
lives.
Indeed one of the most valued aspects of the
year is the space to develop and think about longer term vision for life.
More specific GAP in Londen:
My service will mostly be in Koinonia. This is a mission which reaches university
students in London.
(Similar to Pharos here in Leuven.)
Less than 1% of London’s university students attend a
Church once a month. London was identified in
a recent study as being one of the loneliest places in the UK. There is a desperate need for
Christian community to be built amongst students. (According to the GAP-director in London)
Most of my work will be reaching out to students in London to tell them
about Christ.
Alongside the evangelism I will be involved with
some administrative tasks for Koinonia, helping out
with some youth work in community (Antioch)
and a few other service opportunities.
The training consists of:
- Evangelisation
- Scripture study
- project management
- Local mission – improving as a mission worker
Contact
If you have any questions, please ask!
Sincerely,
Marie-Sophie Vanderstuyft
|
November 2011
Gapping is a
full time job, I’m telling you…
Here is a long
explanation.
Gap? Yes, I heard of it in june…
I feel like I
have been learning a lot in the last 3 months. And I know for fact that this
will be of good use later on.
It is such a great experience to be able to serve,
get some training, help to build God’s dream without having to worry about
anything else like studies or other obligations.
Service
We typically
spend 24 hours a day working for Koinonia (the local
Pharos) and the Antioch community.
I really enjoy
the work with students. Most of this time is meeting up with new people,
doing coffee stalls, preparing our Thursday nights, having students over for housedinners, cooking meals for our social events,
meeting up with the gap-ers, etc.
In Antioch I am helping
out with the youthgirls from 11-13 year old. They
are fantastic!
Training
This year London started a new project called Mission
school. We are the guinea-pigs.
This means that
we get a lot of training. Four mornings a week are spent in mission training.
We focus on
general evangelism, Scripture, our local mission and project management
skills.
General
evangelism covers books like
‘Searching
issues’- Nicky Gumbel
‘Questioning
evangelism’ – Randy Newman
Scripture studies are
mostly the Psalms course. Where we look at different characters of God
through the psalms.
Our local
mission handles questions like How and why do we do coffee stalls?, how do we work as a team? Etc.
Project
management skills train us to lead a more effective life. I am now an
expert in google calendars, google
documents and making mindmaps. Well… I should be.
Next to that
we’re involved in the ‘underway-group’ of the community which is called TPC.
So we are
getting a lot of those teachings too J
Very intense,
but very instructive.
à true
à It is
incredible how open people here are to ‘start a friendship’. London really is a
lonely city.
I feel like Koinonia has seen some very explicit things happen
already. A few people clearly gave their lives to the Lord and a lot of
people were open to meet up with us over coffees.
We started a new
project where we asked the students if they wanted to commit for a year to Koinonia. Thinking that it would be nice to have a small
core group of people where we can count on. God did the unexpected. Except
for 2 people all the other students said they wanted to do the commitment. So
for now we have at least 11 students committed to Koinonia
and more are coming up. It really is an answered prayer!
à I’m not involved in the administration, more in pastoral care and leading a household
à yep!
Contact
Please stay in
contact if you have any questions or if you want to give me an update on your
lives. I would love to get these!
And you can
always check my blog:
www.msgoeslondon.blogspot.com
Marie-Sophie
|
The following week was more festive with the Koinonia Christmas party -->
