April 2021

Hey friends,

  It has been a year since the Australian boarders closed and we went into lockdown, we have had a year of urban missions. I have enjoyed the different pace, the evangelism with people who speak English, being in peoples homes building relationship- but I do miss being in other nations!

 

  So far it has been a great start to the year for our base, which has been thoroughly enjoying the January quarter, we had our first discipleship training school in over a year. Usually we have 600-700 people going through the base doing the discipleship training schools every year, but because of Covid-19 we haven’t had all the fresh faces we usually have. Beginning of January we had 13 students come for our discipleship training school, and we’ll have another running starting April 11 (and every quarter like usual).

 

  As I’ve mentioned in other newsletters, we have continued to offer further accredited training online. It has been amazing to have so many people from the nation's able to do training they might not have been able to do in Australia, but have been able to do because it is online!

  Exciting news we will be having the Primary Health Care School online. That’s the school I did in 2019, and staffed last year, and will be staffing this time in July as well. I love that we’ll be having this school available online- for anyone and everyone! What I love about this school is how practical and needed it is everywhere in the world. Whether you’re at home taking care of your children who have a fever, or in Indonesia teaching water purification, or in Malawi doing wound care. I love the skills, learning to teach, and ability to be everything to everyone.

 

Practically in this season it means getting ready for the school to run online means I’ll be helping make and film teaching videos for the lectures and for the practical skills. It’s really exciting seeing the various teaching styles and creative ways to teach hands on practical skills through videos.

 

  In my Ministry development school (the staff school I do for ministry skills and a visa) we have gone through different topics. In January, my homework consisted of looking at topics that are current issues, coming to a biblical conclusion about the issue from bible verses, looking at what the church has done in the past about the issue, what other worldviews believe, and then talked about the issue to people who believe something different from me. I had some really wonderful conversations about abortion, abuse, and educational discrimination. Some of these conversation have been with believers that believe different things from me, 15 year olds, and people who have just finished high school.

 

I had a wonderful opportunity to be in invited to help learn and teach basic water coloring as part of a community outreach opportunity. One of our ministries has been doing creative skills and discipleship topics with a women’s recovery/safe house. We asked God about what he wanted to say to the women and youth- God spoke about  Psalm 139:17-18 God has many precious thoughts towards each person and they out count the sand. For a final project we got for them to paint an olive branch, because to produce fruit the seed has to get planted, be a sprout, a young tree, get pruned, fertilized, survive storms and draughts, and takes year to produce fruit. Whatever part of the process it isn’t shameful or bad to be a seedling, or be growing but not producing fruit yet. And it was really cool seeing everyone’s different paintings and even them engage and get so excited about creating stuff when they thought they weren’t creative. It was a precious time and it was my highlight of the month. 

Thank you for praying for me, continuing to pursue me, and supporting me! I have been blown away by how well I have been supported while I’ve been in Perth. Please let me know how you're doing and how I can be praying for you and your family in this season. I would love to connect with you.

 

Love y’all,

Joannah Zimmerman